During the 1950s, being a racial moderate in the South could sometimes be uncomfortable.
For Bill Snider it meant having a cross burned on his lawn and the windows of his Greensboro house smashed while his children slept inside.
But Snider, an unflappable, soft-spoken gentleman, didn't rattle easy. A decade earlier he had been a lieutenant in the India-Burma theater during World War II.
"We had a rather interesting time in those days," Snider would later recall dryly.
Snider, one of the best newsmen of his generation, died the other day at 91.
He could quote Robert Penn Warren at the drop of a hat, write gracefully, and had a deep understanding of North Carolina politics and history.
For decades, I would devour Snider's columns hoping to glean some insights, learn some history, or just pick up a few style points.
You may know him by his books, "Helms & Hunt, the North Carolina Senate Race, 1984'' and "Light on the Hill, a History of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill."
But it was his contribution to daily journalism that made his lasting impact.
A native of Salisbury, he started a neighborhood newspaper as a boy, was educated in Chapel Hill, and began his political education as private secretary to Gov. Gregg Cherry and administrative assistant to Gov. W. Kerr Scott.
He made his bones in Greensboro, a town with a great newspaper tradition that included the likes of Gerald Johnson, Lenoir Chambers, Ed Yoder, Jonathan Yardley, Jerry Bledsoe and later Ned Cline and Jack Betts to name a few. Yoder and Yardley were among his protégés.
"Bill was a very deep and careful thinker and a clear writer," said Jim Exum, the former chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court from Greensboro. "Bill was a gentle giant in his field."
During a time of social revolution - including the lunch counter sit-ins and integration of the school system - Snider was the voice of white moderation. He worked behind the scenes with business and education leaders to ensure that cooler heads prevailed.
He later worked with Reid Sarrat, the editor in Winston-Salem and Pete McKnight, the editor in Charlotte, to simultaneously integrate the schools in North Carolina's three largest cities - if only on a token basis in 1957. It was the same year, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce integration.
North Carolina won early praise for its moderation, although later revisionists questioned whether the state was really foot dragging.
Snider called it "the middle way," and he thought it was about the best that could be done under some difficult circumstances.
Snider, a Southern liberal, always saw North Carolina as a center/right state.
"I think that you'll see a liberal governor will rise occasionally in the state's history," Snider said back in 1979. "But the vast story of North Carolina - particularly in the twentieth century - has been of a rather moderate to conservative state that is independent and stubborn, and has a liberal streak which comes out every now and then."
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