Please join CSAS and the N.C. Pro chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists as we present a free screening of The Editor and the Dragon in the Freedom Forum. Produced and directed by Walt Campbell and Martin Clark, this film relates the story of a small-town newspaper editor and his confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan. Following the film screening, we will host a panel discussion featuring Ken Ripley, veteran publisher, owner, and editor of the Spring Hope Enterprise; Cash Michaels, award-winning editor, chief reporter/ photographer and columnist for The Carolinian; and Phoebe Zerwick, prize-winning investigative journalist with the Winston-Salem Journal and O, The Oprah Magazine. The panel discussion will be moderated by Jock Lauterer, a Senior Lecturer in community journalism at UNC.
In 1953, Horace Carter earned a Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service for his reporting on the KKK. Carter persevered in the face of death threats and used the editorial authority of North Carolina’s Tabor City Tribune to protest the Klan’s racist rhetoric and vigilantism. Carter’s bold reporting and the unwavering integrity of his editorials helped lead to the first federal intervention in the South during that era and to the arrest and conviction of nearly 100 klansmen. Narrated by Morgan Freeman, this documentary film relates the story of Carter’s courage and the battle for the soul of a small North Carolina town.