GOING AROUND

Writings by a great New York City journalist.

Throughout his career, the Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist and reporter Kempton (1917-1997) stood out among journalists. His approach was critical, and he was, writes editor Holter, “for the downtrodden, instinctively.” Of the guerrillas in 1980s El Salvador, Kempton wrote, “There aren’t all that many human creatures more attractive than some revolutionaries can be, at least until they win.” As regards police violence against civil rights activists: “It is, of course, law and order when everyone who hits anyone else is wearing a uniform.” What mattered to him lay deeper. The Civil Rights March on Washington represented “an acceptance of the revolutionaries into the American establishment” that embodied the white hope “that the Negro revolt will stop where it is.” Holter, an independent historical researcher, has gathered nearly 90 articles and editorials “from every period in Kempton’s career.” Many are outstanding. The first is Kempton’s 1936 defense of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the last outlines his instructions for his funeral. Kempton’s subjects range from labor unions and his FBI file to notables such as A. Philip Randolph, Dwight Eisenhower, and J. Robert Oppenheimer; cultural figures such as the blues singer Bessie Smith; and the less famous such as Odell Waller, a 1940s Black sharecropper who shot his white landlord during a dispute. A voice for the times, he wrote with a grace seldom encountered today. Of the conservative William F. Buckley, he said: “I did not want him to fail, except in the superficial sense of dying an old man without ever seeing the kind of America he thinks he wants.” Describing the future president, in 1989, he concluded: “We are assured that God does not make trash, which thought disposes of the impression that Donald Trump is not altogether a self-made man.”

Reading Kempton reminds us that, no matter the chaos, justice and human dignity are within our reach.