Claude Fox Sitton (December 4, 1925 - ) is a retired American newspaper reporter and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. He covered the civil rights movement for The New York Times during the 1950s and 1960s, eventually becoming the paper's national editor. He served as editorial director of Raleigh News and Observer and Raleigh Times in 1968, and as editor of News and Observer and vice-president of News and Observer publishing company from 1970 until retirement in 1990.[1]
Sitton graduated from Emory University in 1949, where he was editor in chief of the student newspaper The Emory Wheel. He returned to Emory to teach from 1991 to 1994, and was a member of Board of Counselors of Emory's Oxford College (1993-2001).
In the Pulitzer Prize-winning history of civil rights journalism The Race Beat, authors Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff describe Sitton as the standard bearer for civil rights journalism in the 1950s. "Sitton's byline would be atop the stories that landed on the desks of three presidents," they write (page 191). "His phone number would be carried protectively in the wallets of the civil rights workers who saw him, and the power of his byline, as their best hope for survival."[2]
In addition to the Pulizer for commentary, which he won in 1983, Sitton has received the George Polk career award (1991) and John Chancellor Award for excellence in journalism (2000). He lives in Oxford, Georgia.
References
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