Ray Jenkins, prizewinning journalist with ‘ringside seat’ to history, dies, 89

During 40 years in journalism, Ray Jenkins helped his Georgia newspaper win the Pulitzer Prize for public service, met privately with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., profiled Alabama Gov. George Wallace as a contributor to the New York Times and spent a decade editing the editorial pages of the Baltimore Evening Sun.

Jenkins, who also worked for two years as the No. 2 press official in the Carter White House, would come to say he had a “ringside seat to the history of our times.” But “the most significant story I ever wrote,” he said after announcing his retirement in 1991, “was a routine story I wrote in 15 minutes and that didn’t even carry a byline.”

The article ran April 5, 1960, on Page 9 of the Alabama Journal – the afternoon counterpart of the Montgomery Advertiser – and detailed a recent full-page advertisement in the Times in which “60 prominent liberals” appealed for legal defense contributions for King. He was 89 when he died Oct. 24 at his home in Baltimore. The cause was complications from congestive heart failure, said his wife, Bettina Jenkins.

A tall, courtly Southerner, Carrell Ray Jenkins was born in Sylvester, Georgia, on Sept. 25, 1930. His mother was a homemaker, and his father sold tractors for International Harvester while growing cotton, corn and tobacco on the family farm. Jenkins seemed destined for an agricultural career himself before coming down with tuberculosis as a boy, leading doctors to fuse the bones in his left knee. While continuing with his daily chores, he also plowed through a set of Charles Dickens novels and focused on writing, encouraged by a teacher.

He became the first in his family to graduate from college, receiving a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Georgia in 1951, and joined Georgia’s Columbus Ledger newspaper that same year. Jenkins was assigned to what was then considered “the dog beat of the paper” – covering Phenix City, Alabama, where GIs from nearby Fort Benning flocked to gambling halls and brothels such as Ma Beachie’s Swing Club and Cliff’s Fish Camp.

“Being young and single,” he later wrote, “I had a singular advantage over the other reporters: I participated in the vice by night and I exposed it by day.”

Jenkins was beaten while covering a 1952 municipal election. Two years later he found himself in the middle of one of the country’s hottest stories, when Albert Patterson, the Democratic nominee for Alabama attorney general, was assassinated in Phenix City after promising to crack down on corruption.