CORRECTION APPENDED
Ed Bradley's
career and much of his work suggest a journalist at the center of efforts to
bring racial and ethnic diversity to newsrooms and storytelling. Beyond his 19
Emmys, he was honored by the
National Association of Black Journalists and he
was the most prolific winner of a
Columbia Graduate School of Journalism's "Let's Do it Better" prize for
coverage of race and ethnicity. Still, he insisted when praised for his work by
Columbia that his principal focus and
singular goal was to "tell good stories," not to tell stories on race
relations.
Clearly,
though, he was drawn to those stories. He was honored by Columbia in June for
two stories; one about a racial confrontation on the bridge spanning the Mississippi
River from New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina;
the other about the people dying trying to get into the United States illegally
from Mexico. He won his last Emmy for investigating the re-emergence of the
Emmett Till story
–- the case of a black teenager murdered by white men in Mississippi 50 years earlier.
In that
story, like so many of his pieces for "60 Minutes," Bradley not only pursued
the uncomfortable interviews but explored an equally uncomfortable angle. One
memorable moment finds him confronting a hostile man outside the home of
Carolyn Bryant, the white woman Till whistled at before he was murdered. He
also interviewed Henry Lee Loggins, a black man implicated by some for playing
a role in delivering Till to his killers. It was the pursuit of that kind of
angle –- often contrary to the orthodoxy where race and ethnicity are concerned,
that distinguished Bradley's work.
Arlene
Morgan, who runs the Columbia program that honored Bradley four
times since 1999, said Bradley was a big supporter of the workshop.
"My
favorite story is his piece on 'Alice Coles of Bayview,' " said
Morgan, associate dean of programs and prizes at Columbia. "Ed told me it was also
one of his favorites. The story was a profile of Alice Coles, an
African American woman who led her neighbors to get the government
to subsidize a housing complex in Georgia to replace a community with no
running water and made up of nothing more than shacks. Ed used Alice's voice to portray the dignity of the community and
what it took to survive when you are poor and black. Journalism has lost a
major voice in telling those stories."
CORRECTION: The original version of this
article listed an incorrect number of Emmy Awards won by Ed
Bradley.
