The real founder of the New Journalism.

• Author: Halberstam, David
• Position: Murray Kempton; includes related article

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The first time I saw Murray Kempton was 39 years ago, in the summer of 1955, when he was covering the Emmett Till trial in Mississippi for the New York Post. I was 21 that summer, working as a reporter in a small town in the northeast part of the state, and I had decided to do a magazine piece for the old Reporter on the way different reporters covered the trial. I had subscribed to about a dozen different papers and clipped them every day, and although I was never able to pull the piece off, there was never any doubt about who was the most brilliant and lyrical writer covering the trial.

Every day it seemed there was one more of his columns in the Post, and they were the work of a master craftsman writing at his best. They were more like small, almost perfect short stories, catching the rage and the fear as well as the curious humanity of Mississippi in that terrifying summer. If there was an inventor of something called the New Journalism, I always thought it was not Tom Wolfe and his colleagues working for a dying Herald Tribune a decade later. Rather it was Murray Kempton, writing those marvelous nonfiction short stories from Sumner, Mississippi, in 1955. Twice on my day off I ventured over to Sumner to watch the national reporters in action, those mighty figures from the great metropolitan dailies whose ranks I one day wanted to join, and though we did not meet that year (I did not have the courage to approach him), I watched Murray carefully from afar. He was a slender figure even then, perfectly dressed in the summer uniform of the national reporter in that pre-air conditioning age: cord jacket, button-down shirt, striped tie, khaki pants.

He had about him a dignity that everyone else covering the trial, save Johnny Popham, the wonderful New York Times reporter, lacked, and he seemed a man at once at the center of the reporters covering the trial, a peer figure of great renown--as the best writer in any group of reporters is always at the top of the pecking order-and yet somehow a man apart, working to his own rhythms and cadence, a man who looked and saw things that others did not see, and listened and heard things that others did not hear.

Jay Milner, who was covering the trial for Hodding Carter's Greenville Delta Democrat, knew the territory, became a kind of bodyguard for Murray in those days, and later became a friend of mine. Jay told me what great fun it was to pal around with Murray, often drinking with him into the very...