Jack Nelson dies at 80 - Michael Calderone - POLITICO.com: Jack Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter best known for his coverage of the civil rights movement, has died. He was 80.
The Associated Press reports that Nelson died Wednesday at his home in Bethesda, Md. He had been suffering from pancreatic cancer.
Born in Talladega, Ala., Nelson worked in the late '40s and '50s at the Biloxi Daily Herald and Atlanta Journal-Constitution. At the Journal-Constitution,Nelson won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on malpractice at a state mental hospital.
In 1965, he joined the Los Angeles Times, where he spent more than 35 years, before retiring as chief Washington correspondent in 2001. LA Times columnist described Nelson to the AP as a "reporter's reporter."
Nelson wrote about his experience on the civil rights beat in recent years for Nieman Reports:
It was a story where the issue seemed so cut and dry and the injustices so stark that reporters struggled to remain objective, though many found it difficult not to become emotionally involved. Seeing hard-eyed state troopers (always described as hard-eyed—and they were) in Selma slamming their clubs against the skulls of blacks who were demonstrating for the right to vote left reporters feeling there weren’t two sides to this story. And there seemed to be only one side to Jim Crow justice when the only black you could find at a county courthouse would be a defendant or one pushing a broom.
