 "Photo: Courtesy of Secrest family.")
Memorial services for Andrew McDowd "Mac" Secrest Jr., will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday, May 22 in the main auditorium of Carolina Meadows Retirement Village at 100 Carolina Meadows, Chapel Hill. Secrest was the founder, in 1976, of N.C.Central University's journalism and mass communication program, in what was then the Department of English.
Secrest died on April 17, 2010 in University of North Carolina Memorial Hospital after a long battle with throat cancer. He is survived by his wife of 62 years, Ann Louis Eastman, and two of his four children, David and Mary Ann.
Secrest was born Sept. 15, 1923 in Monroe, N.C. After graduating from Duke in 1944 and serving as a naval officer in World War II, Secrest became the owner, publisher and editor of a small town paper in South Carolina, The Cheraw Chronicle, in 1953. At the paper, which he ran for 15 years, he took a strong stance in favor of civil rights and civil liberties.
In their Pulitzer Prize winning book, "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation," Hank Klibanoff and Gene Roberts describe Secrest as "a rarity whose courageous editorial voice in the 1950s and 1960s revealed there were cracks in the bulwark of the segregationist South where rational and progressive thinking could survive."
In an e-mail sent to Secrest's son Klibanoff wrote the following:
"Secrest ran a gutsy weekly newspaper … that had 3,000 subscribers who received a paper crowded and cluttered with stories and opinions. Secrest, who put photographs of African-American servicemen on his front page in violation of newspaper norms, editorially challenged segregationist Southern editors who fiercely advocated massive resistance, upheaval and opposition to the law. … When it was easier just to stay silent, Secrest accused his brothers inside the fraternity of southern newspaper editors of failing to meet the standards of professional responsibility, and of risking the protections they were granted by the Constitution."
As a result of his integrationist stand buckshot was fired into the windows of his home and menacing signs were placed in his yard at night.
As a federal mediator in the 1960s, Secrest worked with the Department of Justice and Commerce to support desegregation and the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and 1966.
After earning a Ph.D. at Duke University in history in 1972 and teaching at UNC Chapel Hill for five years, Secrest came to NCCU in 1976 to establish the journalism and mass communication program in the Department of English. He was at NCCU for nine years.
"He was instrumental in getting us the grant that established the first computerized newsroom in a Southeastern university," said Thomas Evans, assistant chair of the Department of English and Mass Communication.
In 2004 he published his memoir, "Curses and Blessings: Life and Evolution in the 20th Century South."
Secrest is the recipient of many prestigious awards including the Hillman Prize for newspaper journalism in 1957 and the Neimen Fellowship at Harvard University in 1960-1961.
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