Few white men have better civil-rights credentials. The old newspapermen who had gathered for an informal reunion at the Atlanta airport Holiday Inn on a recent Saturday night had been thrown in jail and chased out of dusty delta towns during the Movement Days of the 1950s and '60s. During a night of strong drink and reminiscence, the old hands from publications like The New York Times and The Washing-ton Post quietly recalled the clarity of the clash between peaceable black demonstrators and the Bull Connors of the then segregated South. "Hell, everything was clearer then," said Claude Sitton, who covered the region for the Times from 1958 to 1964. "Going to the back of the bus, drinking out of separate water fountains, going to segregated schools—those are the kinds of things that just hit you right between the eyes." But in the morning, the aging veterans puzzled over the current state of the civil-rights struggle—the tedious Court battles over formulas and standards. "When it gets down to all of the subtleties and complexities of legal tests, well, that's much harder for the public to understand," said John Popham, a dapper octogenarian who covered the first stirrings of the movement for the Times back in the late 1940s.
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