Jack Bass Papers

Described as a “journalist, Southerner, teacher, scholar and damn good writer” by editor James O’Shea Wade, Jack Bass has displayed many talents throughout his long, varied career. The author of many nonfiction books and articles for major publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post, he has received national recognition for his study of and works on the American South. In addition to teaching courses at the University of South Carolina, South Carolina State University, University of Mississippi, College of Charleston, and The Citadel, Bass is a noted oral historian, interviewing hundreds of notable people across the South, from South Carolina Governor Richard Riley to President Bill Clinton.

Jack Solomon Bass was born in 1934 to Nathan and Esther Bass in North, South Carolina. One of seven children, he was educated in North’s public schools and played high school football. Yet he discovered journalism by means of baseball. As a teenager, his first reporting assignment was to call in the scores of North’s semiprofessional baseball team to The Times and Democrat of Orangeburg. He got the job because he knew how to score ball games, earning $1.00 per game.

Bass attended the University of South Carolina (USC), where his activities included editorship of The Daily Gamecock and membership in the Phi Epsilon Fraternity and the Blue Key Honor Society. He graduated in 1956 with a degree in journalism. After graduation, he joined the U.S. Navy and attended officer’s candidate school in Newport, Rhode Island. Bass was assigned to North Island Naval Station in Coronado, California, and later to the Philippines.

After a three-year stint in the Navy, Bass and his family moved to Charleston, SC, where he began his professional career as a journalist. He and his wife, Carolyn McClung, a fellow editor of The Daily Gamecock, whom he married in 1957, had three children: Kenneth, David, and Elizabeth. He worked for The News and Courier for a year before forming a partnership with friend and fellow journalist Dew James to open a weekly newspaper, The West Ashley Journal, in 1961. Many residents of West Ashley praised Bass and James for their work. However, Bass wrote to a friend in December 1962, “[I]f you know of someone with good character and some knowhow who might be interested in purchasing a part-interest in a struggling suburban weekly with good potential for growth, I would be interested in talking to him.” Bass and James found a buyer, but The West Ashley Journal ran its last story in 1964.

That same year, Bass began working as the governmental affairs editor of The State and moved to Columbia. This position put him in charge of many stories related to race and politics throughout the Southern states. In 1965, he was one of twelve American journalists selected to receive the Nieman Fellowship, an award for mid-career journalists enabling them to study at Harvard University for a year. The Basses moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Bass took courses in history, government, and constitutional law.

Bass served as the Columbia Bureau Chief for The Charlotte Observer, 1966 to 1973. In addition, in 1967, he became a part-time lecturer in journalism at USC. The following year, he was named the South Carolina Journalist of the Year.

On February 8, 1968, tragedy struck the campus of South Carolina State College. During a protest triggered by the segregation policy at an Orangeburg bowling alley, students clashed with the National Guard, leaving three students dead and 27 injured. As he reported on the events of the incident and its aftermath, Bass began to consider writing a book. Jack Nelson, who worked as the Atlanta Bureau Chief for the Los Angeles Times and also covered the tragic affair, had similar ideas. This led to a collaboration between the two reporters.

Their book, The Orangeburg Massacre, offered an almost minute-by-minute account of the shootings, as well as the investigation that followed. After it was published in 1970, accolades streamed in from formal reviewers and individual readers alike. Senator Ernest F. Hollings wrote to Bass in November 1970: “Look, I’ve just scanned this book, but it’s undoubtedly authoritative and so engaging in style you just can’t scan. For months now I have answered on campuses that I don’t know, that I wasn’t there and in a sense I hate to learn. But unless we do, we’re all lost. I congratulate both you and Jack Nelson for turning on the light.” John Bogert, a student injured during the incident, also wrote to Bass: “I thought I would write you also and thank you for not letting my friend Sam Hammond die without ever being heard. It was such a very good work to see after so many years of crying in the wilderness. I just wanted you to know how much I appreciated it and how deeply affected I once again became. The only trouble is that now it all seems like yesterday again.”

Not all reviews of The Orangeburg Massacre were favorable, however. Most notably, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was outraged at Bass and Nelson’s critique of the FBI’s investigation of the incident. Hoover wrote to Bass, “In summary, the book is so biased in its attempt to smear the FBI that it raises serious questions as to the competence and objectivity of the authors.”

Bass did not wait long before beginning work on a new book. In 1972, he wrote Porgy Comes Home: South Carolina after 300 Years. He documented the progress and pitfalls of race relations in the Palmetto State, drawing on his experiences as a native and a reporter. In 1973, Bass began work as a research scholar at Duke University’s Institute of Policy Sciences and Public Affairs. During his time there, he co-authored his third book, The Transformation of Southern Politics, with Walter DeVries, a political scientist and campaign consultant. The book was an update on V. O. Key’s Southern Politics in State and Nation, published in 1949. Bass and DeVries spent two years traveling over 40,000 miles throughout the eleven states of the former Confederacy and conducting over 360 interviews with such prominent figures as governors Jimmy Carter and John West. Bass wrote their publisher at Basic Books in June 1974, “There is no doubt the South has changed. Picture a poolside cocktail party late last Friday afternoon at the Holida[y] Inn at Santee, S.C. for a conference of Southern Black Mayors—with two white bartenders.” Bass was the first writer-in-residence at South Carolina State College, 1975 to 1978, where he taught journalism and conducted research for a book, never completed, about black political leadership. He earned his master’s degree in journalism from USC in 1976.

In a bold move in 1978, Bass took a break from both journalism and academia in an attempt to unseat four-term Republican congressman Floyd Spence. One of his supporters, Fran McCarthy, wrote, “Your campaign seems to be only a natural progression from the compassion and concern that was always evident in your writing… I was inspired by your work and it’s quite heartening to see someone testing heart-felt convictions in public life.” Bass won the Democratic primary, but lost the general election to Spence, receiving 43% of the vote.

In 1979, Bass renewed his relationship with USC through an appointment as a research fellow at the Institute of Legal History. During this time, he worked on his fourth book, Unlikely Heroes, which examined the role of the judges of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in effecting change in the South during the Civil Rights era. After the book was published in 1981, Bass agreed to partner with USC to direct “a five-year project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and additional grants from Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie to produce a fourteen-hour television course” called “The American South Comes of Age.” The course explored the social, political, and economic transformation of the South since World War II. Bass traveled across the South, conducting videotaped interviews with such people as Senator Strom Thurmond and Governor Bill Clinton. In addition, Bass served as editor for a PBS documentary, “A Different Dixie: Portraits of Change,” which was released in 1984.

That same year, Bass and his wife Carolyn divorced and he married poet and author Alice Cabaniss. He returned to teaching in 1987 as a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi, where he spent the next eleven years. In conjunction with teaching, he became director of the William F. Winter Oral History Project to document Winter’s tenure as governor of Mississippi, 1980 to 1984. He also participated in a project to make a documentary about George Wallace, the controversial, four-time governor of Alabama. Bass soon began researching his fifth book, a biography of Alabama Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. His interest in Johnson grew out of earlier interviews with the judge for Unlikely Heroes. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis served as his editor for Taming the Storm: The Life and Times of Frank M. Johnson, Jr. and the South’s Fight Over Civil Rights, 1993. That same year, Bass served as a consultant and expert witness for NAACP, Inc., et al. v. City of Columbia, et al., a case that sought to change election practices for City Council.

Following his divorce from Cabaniss in 1993, Jack married author, chef, and TV personality Nathalie Dupree in 1994. That same year, Taming the Storm won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He spent the next several years teaching, writing articles and reviews, and speaking. In 1998, he began pursuing a doctorate in American studies at Emory University. He decided to write a biography of Strom Thurmond as his dissertation. He partnered with Marilyn W. Thompson, who had conducted several in-depth interviews with Thurmond and key associates over the years. Bass left the University of Mississippi in 1999 to accept a position as a professor of humanities and social sciences at the College of Charleston.

After Thurmond’s death in July 2003, Essie Mae Washington-Williams publicly confirmed that she was the senator’s bi-racial, illegitimate daughter. Bass and Thompson decided to write another book about Thurmond and analyze his life in light of Washington-Williams’s admission. Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond was published in 2005. In response to a critic who did not see much difference between the two books, Bass wrote, “The new book is far more than an update. From beginning to end, the new book fully incorporates the history of their relationship, which spanned more than six decades. In the end neither the father nor daughter found the relationship emotionally satisfying, but it provides an intriguing saga that fully fleshes out Thurmond’s life story.”

After retiring from the College of Charleston in 2008, Bass served as the director of The Citadel World War II Alumni Oral History Project and for two years also taught as a faculty member of The Citadel’s Department of History. Along with co-author Scott Poole, he finished work in 2009 on his eighth book, The Palmetto State: The Making of Modern South Carolina, which focused on the importance of race relations throughout the state’s history. In 2011, he received the South Carolina Governor’s Award in the Humanities.

Currently, Bass continues to lecture and write, most often op-ed pieces, and actively develop his earlier publications. He is working on a ninth book, Justice Abandoned, which focuses on “the Supreme Court’s central role in ending Reconstruction and undermining congressional intent through its interpretation” of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. He and his wife, Nathalie Dupree, live in Charleston.