About Howell  Raines

Howell Raines is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and reporter, former Executive Editor of The New York Times, and author of the widely-quoted oral history of the Civil Rights Movement, My Soul is Rested.He is known for his  investigative journalism on Ku Klux Klan activity during their last gasp in the 1960s, particularly related to the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama church bombing. 

 

He won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1993 for his New York Times Magazine article on his friendship with Gradystein Williams Hutchison, a young African American woman who introduced him to the realities of the segregated South, becoming  a lifelong friend in the process. 

 

His latest book,Silent Cavalry, follows in that same pattern of analyzing the dark corners of Southern culture and pushing for truth.  In exploring the origins of the myth of the noble Confederacy, he uncovered a scholarly cabal intended to erase the legacy of  Alabama's Union veterans who led Sherman’s March to the Sea in 1864.