STORY BY ELLEN B. MEACHAM

On an April afternoon in 1967, a young man with a notebook stands just to the side of two men face-to-face, deep in intense discussion.

One of them, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, has come to the Mississippi Delta town of Cleveland to see for himself the scale of the desperate hunger and poverty that pervades the region.

The other man, local newspaper editor, Cliff Langford, a vocal opponent of racial equality, has just confronted Kennedy, angry that this famous man has come to the poorest part of his town and brought the press attention that inevitably followed RFK.

Langford is incensed at the notion that unemployment and hunger are a problem.

Anyone in the Delta who wants to work can get a job, and anyone who wants food can get it, Langford asserts.

As Langford speaks, the young reporter -- clean shaven, buttoned up, wearing a tie – folds his arms.

And though his face remains largely impassive, he shoots a shrewd, sideways glance to a group of children close by. Curtis Wilkie, who retired in December from 18 years of teaching journalism in the School of Journalism and New Media, was that 27- year-old reporter for the Clarksdale Press Register. He knew that Langford’s notion was belied by both the official economic numbers from his own state and, most vividly, the faces of the rail-thin Black children standing in rags a few yards away.

Wilkie’s knowing glance, captured on camera in the background of the confrontation, is a subtle tell, but one that foreshadows his life’s work.

A lifetime as an eyewitness to history as it is made in the U.S and abroad.

A lifetime penetrating the denial, spin, propaganda and pomposity of leaders and politicians, demagogues and dictators, seeking the truth and sharing it with readers.

Four years earlier, Wilkie had arrived at the Press Register for his first full-time reporting job after earning a journalism degree from of the University of Mississippi.

His new position in Clarksdale, put Wilkie at an epicenter of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. During his time at the paper, Wilkie covered boycott and protests by the NAACP, 1964’s Freedom Summer and Mississippi’s violent response; as well as visits to the area by politicians and civil rights leaders, such, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Meredith.

When Robert F. Kennedy toured the Mississippi Delta in 1967, Wilkie was there at each stop. In 1968, when King came to Mississippi to organize the Poor People’s Campaign, Wilkie spent 48 hours with him. Two weeks later, King was dead, slain by an assassin’s bullet.

“I was covering the movement first-hand,” Wilkie said. “And seeing the Clarksdale police behaving the way they did, from then on, I became very sympathetic to the movement.”

But this meant that Wilkie had to confront his feelings about what he was covering and sort out just how to do his job properly. He learned to carefully describe what he saw-- things like school children jailed for parading without a permit for marching with American flags, the police forcing too many people into cells and turning up the heat in the summer, and other brutal and unjust acts.

Oliphant said that Wilkie resisted the role of “explainer of the South” and never played the “professional Southerner” in the press corps. Instead, his life and professional experience in Mississippi was

“Those were the stories that you simply had to just report accurately. All you had to do was just write these things, and make sure you get the damn story accurate and that you’re fair and honest and that you are accountable,” he said.

By 1969, though, as Wilkie wrote in his memoirs, he was “overfed on the Southern experience.” Named to a prestigious Congressional Fellowship, he moved with his young family to Washington, D.C.

“When I left the South, I was repudiating physically, mentally and spiritually everything I had experienced there, the whole government mentality of the state,” he later recalled.

By 1971, Wilkie had moved to Delaware and once again had a reporter’s notebook in his hand, reporting for the Wilmington News Journal.

The paper soon assigned Wilkie, who by this time had let his hair grow long and added a mustache, to cover the 1972 presidential campaign, landing him in the press corps famously profiled by Timothy Crouse, first for Rolling Stone and then in his subsequent book-length critique of political journalism, “The Boys on the Bus.”

Wilkie stood out as a new kind of young reporter, one who eschewed the “pack mindset” and conveyed the color and flavor of a campaign with a sharp, accurate eye for detail, according to Tom Oliphant, a long-time friend, colleague at the Boston Globe and co-author, was another young reporter featured in the book. They caught Crouse’s attention, Oliphant said, as journalists who were beginning to move away from the “buttoned-up, two-dimensional” reporting of previous campaign coverage.

While Wilkie took always took his craft seriously, Oliphant recalled, he maintained an irreverent spirit that meant he didn’t take himself, the press corps or even the candidates too seriously.

“Anyone with their chest puffed up one millimeter is going to get Curtis going,” Oliphant said.

Wilkie’s reporting had more flair than others of the day, Oliphant said. However, he still retained a deep suspicion of too much speculation in print about a candidate or campaign’s motivations.

“Curtis always worked like a dog to get the whole story. His notebooks were always full of reporting, but what he was doing in the 1970s was something that had not been done; he was giving you something of the flavor of a campaign. He could put you right there.”

Veteran journalist Jules Witcover also met Wilkie on that campaign. He remembers Wilkie as a young reporter with an intriguing background -- easy to talk to with a lively curiosity, he said.

“Although he comes from the South, he had broad, universal interests, which made him an interesting person. He is from the South but not really of the South,” Witcover said.