By MAUDE SCHUYLER CLAY • Photos from the personal collection of CURTIS WILKIE
From his third-grade newspaper to The Boston Globe, the circuitous journey that brought Curtis Wilkie home
By Curtis Wilkie’s own admission, he was “not a great student,” but he was always drawn to stories and reportage. That natural inclination turned out to be a lifelong passion, as Wilkie was recently honored with the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.
Wilkie was on the road to his journalistic calling at a very early age: in the third grade, he put out his own one-page newspaper, which he delivered by bicycle, and not too much later, he was regularly publishing his pieces in Summit’s daily newspaper, the Southwest Times. Although Delta-native Wilkie was born in Greenville in 1940, he had eventually moved with his mother to Oxford and then Summit, where she held several positions at Southwest Junior College, including dean of women, a registrar, and teacher of psychology and English. Wilkie’s stepfather was a kind and learned Presbyterian minister named John Leighton Stuart Jr., who had grown up in China after his father was appointed ambassador to China by Harry Truman.
After graduating from high school, he attended Ole Miss for a couple of years before he succumbed to what he calls “Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ syndrome:” he took off for the Wild West, eventually landing in Los Angeles. After hanging out in California for a few months, he was “finally relegated to living on chocolate bars”—i.e., he was broke and starving—when he appealed to his mother and stepfather to send him the train fare home to Summit. Since they were not amenable to his living at home without a job, he went to work at a local quilt factory that summer, his “first and last attempt at manual labor.” In September of 1962, Wilkie decided to re-enroll in school in Oxford, where he partied a lot with his fellow SAE fraternity brothers but nevertheless resigned himself to pursuing a degree in journalism.
This also happened to be the precise time that Ole Miss was being integrated by an African American Air Force veteran named James Meredith. Mississippi’s then-governor Ross Barnett, an avid segregationist, was hell-bent on preventing African American students from integrating and attending the University of Mississippi. U.S. Marshals, as well as the National Guard, were ultimately called to the Ole Miss campus to deal with the clash between the segregationists—some armed with guns but most with clubs and rocks—and a group of preachers (including a young Duncan Gray) and a few peaceful students, teachers, and Oxford citizens who believed that Meredith should be allowed to pursue an education there. Wilkie found himself in the midst of a full-scale riot. Teargassed but unhurt, he was so profoundly affected by the violence and racist vitriol he witnessed in which two people died, and many more were injured that he took his chosen vocation—journalism—to a new dedicated level.
After graduating in 1963, Wilkie landed his first job as a reporter in the Delta at the Clarksdale Press Register. There he vacillated between writing about such small-town events as fires, fairs, and farming and heavier subjects such as the Voting Rights Act, Brown v. Board of Education, and 1964’s Freedom Summer. When Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and Senator Robert Kennedy came to the Delta, Wilkie interviewed and sometimes traveled with them. In 1968, he was with King in Marks, Mississippi, for The Poor People’s Campaign—The Mule Train—just a few days before King was fatally shot in Memphis. Little did the small-town Delta reporter know that, in just a few short years, he would be a respected member of the press corps or “The Boys on the Bus,” as they were affectionately dubbed by writer Timothy Crouse in his 1972 celebrated best seller of the same name.
Wilkie was married and the father of two children by the time he left Mississippi in 1969. Thanks to receiving a Congressional fellowship, he and his family headed north to Washington, D.C., where he worked on Capitol Hill for two years before moving to Delaware, first to be a reporter and eventually a deputy editor of the DuPont-owned News-Journal in Wilmington. But after a time, that job didn’t exactly work out. He was considered to be a member of the so-called “New Journalism,” namely those who had covered Civil Rights and Vietnam, so he left in the midst of a self-described “I quit, you’re fired” scenario over vastly different political views and disagreements over editorial control.
It was time to give some serious thought about where he did want to work. His three choices were The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. The Globe won out, and Wilkie soon established himself in Boston as a tough but fair-minded writer, albeit one who spoke with a funny, almost unintelligible Southern accent. In his unique position as an observant Southerner in the north, he witnessed, while covering Boston’s violent bussing riots, pretty much the same racism that he thought he was escaping in Mississippi. He brought a sense of the menacing absurd to the Irish Mafia Boss Whitey Bolger and his brother, Billy, who was then Massachusetts State Senate President. The Globe was one of Billy Bolger’s frequent targets, but “he always talked to me,” says Wilkie, “because I listened to all his rants, even the ones about his sainted, ‘he-just-got-a-bad-rap,’ brother, Whitey.” (Whitey Bolger was thought to have killed at least twenty people, including his own goddaughter, who he believed had “ratted him out.”)
In 1976, Wilkie told his editors that he wanted to cover the national political beat and was given a kind of joking, “let’s see what he thinks he can do with this nobody guy” assignment: covering fellow Southerner and presidential candidate Jimmy Carter. Wilkie got the last laugh; he covered Carter’s 1976 winning campaign, and for four years, he was the Globe’s correspondent for the White House. Carter’s less successful 1980 campaign for re-election made Wilkie “appreciate even more than ever the underdog.” The next Southern candidate he would cover, twelve years later, would be Bill Clinton.
After initially being sent on assignment to Israel to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the 1980s, Wilkie next established himself as a “war reporter.” He would spend the next decade covering just about every war around the globe for the Globe: the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon, 1982-87; civil war in Lebanon, 1982-87; war in Tripoli, Lebanon, between PLO and insurgent Palestinian factions, 1983; Romanian Revolution, 1989-90; First Gulf War in Israel, 1991; civil war in Somalia, 1993.
Wars and cold weather finally “got to him,” and in the mid-nineties, he moved from Boston to New Orleans, still keeping his job as a correspondent for the Globe. By the year 1999, having one book under his belt, Arkansas Mischief with Jim McDougal, Wilkie wanted to write the one that he thought he really knew a little something about—the Deep South.
He accepted a buyout from the Globe, and the resulting book, published in 2001, was Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South. The book was a heartfelt story told from the point of view of one taking a deep personal look at not only all that had shaped him but how some of those events had played out in the wider world from which he was now “retiring.” Jonathan Yardley, literary critic at the Washington Post, said of Dixie: “Because Wilkie is an honest reporter, he doesn’t make claims for his story that it cannot sustain. He doesn’t represent himself as a hero of the civil rights era, and he’s modest—doubtless too modest—about the stories he wrote while covering it. He is content to present himself as someone who was lucky enough to be at a certain place at a certain time and who took advantage of the opportunities it offered him. His tale ends on a grace note: not merely reconciliation with his native South but a grateful return to it.”
But Wilkie did not “retire” in any sense of the word. He covered the 2000 presidential race for the Globe, and though he kept the house in New Orleans for a long time, he decided it was time to get a place in Mississippi. His “coming home” mission was twofold: teaching journalism at his alma mater, Ole Miss, and being nearer to his daughter, Leighton Wilkie McCool, and her family, who lived in Oxford.
Wilkie’s return to his native Mississippi has guided and shaped countless students who aspired to be journalists. Wilkie retired from the Ole Miss School of Journalism in 2020, and when asked what he thought he had accomplished as a teacher, he said, “I tried to give them the tools for how to write a clear story: putting stories together piece by piece, paragraph by paragraph, word by word. One of the ways I did that was to assign them as many great writers, like Faulkner and Miss Welty and Barry Hannah, and as many well-written journalism pieces (by David Halberstam, Tom Oliphant, Willie Morris—all friends and former colleagues) as I could. And I remembered how college students, like the one I once was, were thrust into the world of being on their own for the first time. I tried to teach them to have a deep respect for knowledge and to treat them with kindness like my stepfather had done for me. I wanted to make them believe their craft was important and that good writing could lead whoever was reading it to know something more than they did before they read it.”
In addition to Curtis Wilkie’s success as a journalist, his humor and gift as a storyteller are qualities greatly treasured by those who know him. He radiates a kind of rare, deep kindness and compassion that permeate his writing. And when asked about why he returned home to Mississippi after his many adventures and successes around the world? He simply answered, “Because people are kinder here.”
