Howell Raines to be honored as Cason Award Winner at UA

TUSCALOOSA, Ala — Howell Raines, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Alabamian who is now editor of the “The New York Times” editorial page, will receive the 2000 Clarence Cason Writing Award from The University of Alabama’s journalism department at a ceremony in Tuscaloosa.

The banquet honoring Raines is scheduled for Thursday, March 9, at the Sheraton Four Points Hotel. The reception begins at 6 p.m., with the banquet following at 7 p.m. Tickets are available to the public at $35 each, and organizations may reserve tables for up to eight people. A symposium on credibility and the press will follow the next day, also at the Sheraton Four Points Hotel. Tickets for that event, which includes lunch, are $25 or $15 if purchased with a banquet ticket.

Named after the department’s founder, the award annually honors non-fiction writers with Alabama connections who have achieved high distinction within their profession. Raines will give an address during the ceremony.

“Howell Raines writes with the fire of a crusading journalist, but he also has the eloquence of a Southern novelist,” said Dr. Bailey Thomson, UA associate professor and chairman of the events. “We are bringing him home to honor his many achievements as a writer.”

Born and raised in Birmingham, Raines, 56, has become one of the most influential editors in the country through his assertive stewardship of The Times’ commentary. He began his career in 1964 at the “Birmingham Post-Herald.” He also worked for “The Tuscaloosa News” and WBRC-TV in Birmingham before joining “The Atlanta Journal-Constitution” in 1971.

In 1976 he became political editor at “The St. Petersburg Times.” He joined “The New York Times” in 1978 as a national correspondent in Atlanta, and he also worked as a reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., London and New York, before taking over the editorial page in 1993.

Raines earned a bachelor’s degree from Birmingham-Southern College in 1964 and later a master’s in English from The University of Alabama. UA awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1993. He is the author of a novel, “Whiskey Man,” an oral history of the civil rights movement, “My Soul Is Rested,” and a memoir, “Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis.”

His writings have given Raines national recognition, but throughout his career he has also earned much praise for his uncompromising study of Alabama’s promises and disappointments. He has written about his native state in a critical, but loving, style.

“Raines has a long-standing lover’s quarrel with Alabama, born out in published prose,” wrote Sam Hodges of “The Mobile Register.” “He wants his home state to own up to and learn from its troubled history in race relations, to reform its legislature and elect its first New South governor, to require of paper companies and other large absentee land owners a fair property tax that will help pay for better public schools.”

It was a story about Alabama and race that brought Raines the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. “Grady’s Gift,” published in The New York Times Magazine, was his reflection on the plight of blacks in Birmingham through the story of Grady Hutchinson, a woman who cleaned Rainesí home when he was a young boy. Hutchinson wanted to be a nurse, but segregation kept her from attending Alabamaís public colleges.

“Among the victims of segregation, Grady was like a soldier shot on the last day of the war,” Raines wrote. “Only a few years after she relinquished her dream of education, local colleges were opened to blacks, and educators from around the country came to Birmingham looking for the sort of poor black student who could race through high school two years ahead of schedule.”

Like Raines, Cason was one of the South’s most eloquent interpreters. His collection of essays “90 Degrees in the Shade” was first published shortly after his death in 1935, and it remains on college reading lists today. Other recipients of the Cason Award include Gay Talese, one of the nationís top fiction writers, and Dr. Edward O. Wilson, the father of Sociobiology and recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes.

The March 10 symposium on credibility and the press will begin at 9 a.m. with a presentation by media consultant Judy Pace Christie on the findings of a study sponsored by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The study, which surveyed more than 3,000 news consumers and 1,700 journalists, found that the public is weary of newspaper company errors and its lack of knowledge about their communities and subject matter.

A panel will follow at 10 a.m., moderated by Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. A former media and political correspondent for “The Los Angeles Times,” Rosenstiel is also vice chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, a group exploring the civic and political responsibilities of journalism.

Also on the panel: Cole Campbell, editor of “The St. Louis Post Dispatch;” Bill Maxwell, columnist with “The St. Petersburg Times;” Cynthia Tucker, editorial page editor of “The Atlanta Journal-Constitution;” H. Brandt Ayers, publisher and editor of “The Anniston Star;” and Av Westin of The Freedom Forum Media Studies Center.

The symposium concludes with a luncheon featuring Phil Currie, vice president of news for the Gannett Company, Inc., the newspaper giant that publishes “USA Today.”

To attend any of the above mentioned events, make checks payable to The University of Alabama, and send to Dr. Bailey Thomson, Box 870172, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0172. Thomson’s telephone number is 205/ 348-8617.