ATLANTA, Ga. (AP) – William “Bill” Shipp, a reporter whose passion for first-hand stories and sometimes searing criticism of politicians fueled his coverage of Georgia for more than 50 years, died Saturday at age 89.
No cause of death was released.
Shipp, born in Marietta in 1933, first gained public notice in 1953 as editor of the University of Georgia’s student newspaper, The Red and Black, writing articles critical of then-Gov. Herman Talmadge and the regents of the university system, including Augusta political kingpin Roy Harris, to block the admission of black candidate Horace Ward to the university’s law school.
Politicians and administrators tried to cut the paper’s funding, censor its stories, and fire Shipp and fellow editor Walker Lundy. Both resigned, with Shipp entering the US Army.
“They suggested that I should probably leave The Red and Black,” Shipp said in a videotaped interview with the Atlanta Press Club, which he helped found.
Ward later became a state legislator and the first black federal judge appointed to the bench in North Georgia.
Shipp went to work for The Atlanta Constitution in 1956, saying he wanted to work for legendary editor Ralph McGill. He stayed with the Constitution, and later The Atlanta Journal-Constitution until 1987.
During that time, Shipp covered the Civil Rights Movement, became state editor managing a network of 100 correspondents, and became one of the state’s leading political reporters and opinion writers.
“What Bill Shipp had to say about you mattered, and you always wanted to be on his side,” said friend and fellow journalist Maria Saporta, noting that Shipp was a voice of racial moderation in the South.
It was Shipp, for example, who first reported that Jimmy Carter planned to run for president, news that was initially met with disbelief, even in Georgia. Shipp called Carter “a brilliant politician” in one Oral history interview 2013 with the University of Georgia, although he suggested that Carter’s positions against incumbent Carl Sanders in the 1970s gubernatorial race may have been hypocritical, with Carter pretending to be a populist and less of a racial liberal.
Charlie Hayslett, a former journalist and political operative, said Shipp’s weekly column had unparalleled influence.
“He set the state agenda with that column,” Hayslett said. “To a large extent, nobody could ignore it.”
Shipp resigned from the paper in 1987 to start a political newsletter, eventually transitioning “Bill Shipp’s Georgia” into a pioneering online news outlet. Shipp continued to write twice-weekly columns after selling the newsletter and also appeared as a panelist on WAGA-TV’s The Georgia Gang, a weekly program discussing state political affairs.
Shipp wrote two books. The first, in 1981, was “Murder on the Broad River Bridge: The Slaying of Lemuel Penn by Members of the Ku Klux Klan,” an account of Penn’s death in 1964. Shipp also published in 1997 a collection of his work “The Ape-Slayer and Other Snapshots”.
Shipp had a tumultuous relationship with many of the state’s top politicians. Governor Zell Miller once recorded a message for the Atlanta Press Club saying “I hate Bill Shipp” out loud. Then Miller whispered, “I love Bill Shipp.”
Sonny Perdue, Georgia’s first modern Republican governor, was more straightforward, ordering his staff not to talk to Shipp when Perdue took office in 2003.
However, many cheered on Shipp in retirement, with four former governors — Miller, Carl Sanders, Joe Frank Harris and Roy Barnes — appearing at a party for Shipp’s 80th birthday in 2013, along with former US Senator Max Cleland and Georgia Attorney General Sam. Olens and former University of Georgia football coach Vince Dooley.
“Do you think all these people would have shown up if I was still writing my column?” Saporta said Shipp whispered in his ear that day.
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