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311 Acknowledgments Carol and I have benefited from the support and encouragement of many friends and family members during this daunting venture to turn more than sixty years of reporting into a meaningful and lasting retrospective. It was an effort I could not have undertaken without my wife’s research and writing skills, honed over thirty-plus years as a lawyer in the civil rights and public policy arena, as well as her unflagging support. We are indebted to our neighbor, Neal Gregory, a former newsman and hawk-eyed editor, who encouraged us to write this book, and introduced us to former investigative reporter/TV producer Charlie Thompson, who started us off with his research into my long-forgotten coverage of the murders in the Mississippi Delta in the 1950s. We would not have written this book had it not been for Charlie. Neal, an alumnus of Ole Miss who as a young reporter covered the turbulent admission of James Meredith to the university in 1962, provided hours of astute editorial guidance, and also introduced us to W. Ralph Eubanks, himself the author of two books about growing up in Mississippi during the Freedom Movement. Ralph introduced us to agent Martha Kaplan, and together they helped our book find its publisher. Carol’s brother, Gerard McCabe, library consultant and editor, also provided expert editorial and publishing guidance all along the way, as well as strong encouragement. My cousin Lynn French shared with me some of the family history her late mother, Carolyn French, had so thoughtfully collected over the years. My former JPC Washington Bureau reporter and longtime friend Carolyn Dubose (author of the only biography of Congressman Charles Diggs) helped us fill in memory gaps, and offered the insightful tip that it might be useful to request my FBI file under the Freedom of Information /Privacy Acts. Corinna Zarek an attorney in the Office of Government Information Services, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), helped us immeasurably in obtaining those materials when we ran into roadblocks. Acknowledgments 312 Allen Fisher, archivist at NARA, was very helpful in locating Johnson Administration documents and recordings from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Austin and the Miller Center for Public Policy. Christopher Banks, also of NARA, generously assisted us in obtaining photographs from the Library. Al Lenhart, Youngstown YMCA Historian and archivist, sent us cherished mementos of my father’s tenure there as Secretary of the Negro branch on West Federal St. We also thank Vicky Wilson, archival specialist for Johnson Publishing Co., for fact-checking assistance. Several friends read the manuscript and gave us insightful comments as it matured, and we are grateful to them all. My stalwart secretaries over the decades, especially Pat Washington, Mary Whitehead, Vanessa Fox, and ultimately Barbara Best must be thanked for helping me preserve many treasures in my files, including letters, clippings, documents, and photographs that contributed greatly to our recollection of the events and conversations memorialized in this book. Finally, we acknowledge the generous time and support of University Press of Mississippi director Leila Salisbury, who brought this project to fruition , and associate editor Valerie Jones and the other members of an astute and thoughtful staff who helped guide us through the publishing process. We take full responsibility for any errors in the text, which we’ll blame on age anyway. ...

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