JACKSON - Karl Fleming covered for Newsweek many of the toughest civil rights stories across the South in the 1960s without getting the hell beaten out of him by angry whites.
Then only to be sent to Los Angeles for Newsweek and knocked unconscious by an angry black wielding a 4-by-4 stick of lumber during the 1966 Watts riots.
That ironic twist of fate in the journalistic career of North Carolina native Karl Fleming, you would think, would be the alpha and omega of his lifetime when he sat down to write a personal memoir spanning his 78 years.
But no. There's lots more - some of it heart-rending - in between. He's put it all, in easy flowing prose, in his newly released "Son of the Rough South," subtitled "An Uncivil Memoir," published by Public Affairs, New York.
A good chunk of his Newsweek experiences covering the often-violent civil rights struggle of the '60s brought Fleming to Mississippi, from James Meredith to the triple murders of the civil rights activists in Neshoba County.
Often, I must add, as The New Orleans Times-Picayune's Mississippi correspondent, I worked alongside Fleming covering the same stories and gained great respect for him. In between Karl's sorties back to the state, I served as Newsweek's Mississippi stringer (part-time correspondent), something I had done since 1950.
When Karl uses the word "rough" in the title to his book, he does so with reason.
Certainly being sent by his schizoid mother to live in a bleak, unforgiving Methodist orphanage outside Raleigh at age 8, growing up there, pitch-forking hay and farming food crops, amply qualifies his young life as rough.
That's without saying that his father died six months after Karl's birth in a dirt-poor North Carolina tobacco town, or that a stepfather, somewhat older than Karl's mother, constantly tormented Karl. The man became fatally ill while the family slipped deep into Depression-era poverty.
They wound up in a three-room shack in Vanceboro, and the stepfather was now dead. Craven County welfare authorities declared the family (there was a younger half-sister) destitute, and the already-crowded Methodist Orphanage outside Raleigh agreed to take the two children.
There, Karl would grow tall and gangly and often at odds with orphanage authorities, until after his 17th birthday when his mother signed a release so he could join the Navy, now in the final three months of World War II.
The war was over, and Fleming was out of the Navy. Armed with the G.I. Bill and a scholarship his old coach at the orphanage helped him get, he went to Appalachian State, a small college in the North Carolina mountains.
His stay in college gave Fleming his first leap into journalism when the tiny Wilson Daily Times hired him as a cub reporter. But in college he had started drinking, a problem that would plague his later newsman years.
Put on the police beat, Karl was exposed to the seedy side of the town and saw how local police kept black folks in line by intimidation, raising his conscience for the first time in his life to the civil rights struggle of Southern blacks.
From the Wilson Daily Times, he went on to the Morning Herald in Raleigh writing sports and getting married (the first of two). Then a year or so later a step up the journalist ladder to the Asheville Citizen, moving closer to Atlanta where his career as a courageous civil rights reporter would later take off.
His freelancing for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution landed him a job on the AJC's Sunday magazine and from there to the Newsweek bureau in Atlanta. This being the early 1960s and Fleming eager to show his talents as a hard-driving gutsy reporter, Newsweek tossed him into covering the civil rights movement almost full time.
It was then 1962 and James Meredith edged closer toward his historic showdown to break down the longstanding racial barriers in Mississippi's higher education system. Fleming found himself frequently covering the slightly built black man who many labeled as "crazy" to think he could crack the color line at the state's most prized university, Ole Miss.
Suffice it to say that Fleming was on the campus during the night-long bloody Sept. 30 riot over Meredith's entry that was only put down after hundreds of Army troops arrived.
When the three civil rights workers in June 1964 went missing and their bodies later were found buried in a farm pond dam, Fleming and his colleague, Claude Sitton of the New York Times, virtually took up residence in a flimsy Philadelphia motel where armed Klansmen often sat in cars outside the newsmen's room.
Here and there in his memoir, Fleming gets a name wrong or puts himself in a spot where he wasn't when some major confrontation took place in Mississippi.
So what if Karl did take a few poetic liberties with some details of events that some of us reporters present may remember more precisely? That doesn't diminish the overall impact of the dangers of reporting the turbulent civil rights story which Karl tells very well, with a generous splash of drama to make it more vivid.
