William A. Emerson Jr., 86; journalist, editor covered civil rights flashpoints

Mr. Emerson, whose health had declined following a stroke, died Tuesday at his home in Atlanta.

A boisterous, outsize figure in an era of colorful New York magazine editors, Mr. Emerson stood 6 foot 3, and his booming voice took over any room. His gifts as a phrasemaker made him a sought-after speaker for years. Last month, he included hundreds of speeches, on subjects from journalism to religion, with the papers he had donated to Emory University’s archives.

A veteran of the China-Burma-India theater in World War II, Mr. Emerson took up journalism at Collier’s magazine in New York after graduating from Harvard in 1948.

Newsweek appointed him its first bureau chief covering the South in 1953, one year before the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which ordered an end to public school segregation and triggered years of resistance and violence across Mr. Emerson’s native region.

In a memoir, Osborn Elliott, former Newsweek editor and later dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, described Mr. Emerson as “a great, rangy, bodacious man who flapped his arms when he walked and enchanted when he talked’’ and who “launched a tradition of sharp and sensitive Newsweek reporting from the South.’’

Mr. Emerson wrote about Klan cross burnings in the piney woods of Florida and school integration fights from Nashville to New Orleans, giving firsthand descriptions of bomb blasts and the experience of walking a shrieking, spitting gantlet with a mother intent on getting her young daughter to class and home again. In Montgomery, Ala., he covered the historic bus boycott and the emergence of its leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Summing up those heady days and the group of competing reporters, many of them fellow Southerners, who raced from one flare-up to the next, Mr. Emerson told an interviewer in 2006: “We knew we had to just tell the damn truth. The truth may be plenty good or plenty bad, but, believe me, it’s always plenty.’’

Nor was civil rights his only story. For a cover article about author William Faulkner, Mr. Emerson headed to the Nobel laureate’s Mississippi home. Though a sign at the driveway told him to go away, Mr. Emerson knew Faulkner sometimes relented. He relished telling the story from there, in many variations: how he ventured up the gravel driveway anyway, attracting first dogs and then a shirtless Faulkner himself, who grumbled a few words and then calmly told someone to get his shotgun.

Mr. Emerson later held a succession of editing posts in New York at Newsweek and then The Saturday Evening Post, where he was promoted to editor in chief in 1965. When the financially listing magazine finally sank in 1969, he joked that he floated out clinging to the frame of a Norman Rockwell painting that had hung in his office.

His era at the Post was a time of tumult in newsgathering, as well as society.

As the so-called New Journalism was developing, Mr. Emerson worked with such practitioners as Joan Didion. He arranged a first-person article, “My Ordeal in Oxford,’’ by James Meredith, whose enrollment at the University of Mississippi set off riots. It was a scoop in the competitive magazine world, wrote the authors of the Pulitzer prize-winning history, “The Race Beat.’’

William Austin Emerson Jr. was born in Charlotte, N.C. His family later moved to Atlanta, where the Emersons had deep roots.

He was married to Lucy Kiser for 56 years before her death in 2005. They had five children.