Here's one of the Montgomery Advertiser's stories from Sunday, April 21, 2002:
WRITERS RECOUNT RIGHTS STRUGGLE
By TODD KLEFFMAN Montgomery Advertiser
Pat Harden was a young correspondent in Montgomery for United Press International when the Freedom Riders rode into town and were beaten by an angry mob.
Harden spent the next day trapped inside the First Baptist Church on Ripley Street --one of only two white reporters among 1,200 blacks -- while a white mob of 1,000 hurled in bricks and firebombs and nearly set Ralph Abernathyıs church ablaze. He watched as The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy asking for federal troops to protect them.
For a journalist, Montgomery provided plenty of high-profile news events to cover. But Harden, a native of England, grew to dislike the city itself and what it represented in 1961.
"When I left Montgomery 41 years ago, I promised myself I'd never come back," Harden said. "I thought the city was a dreadful place. I thought it was hopeless."
On Saturday, Harden and 13 other UPI colleagues who covered civil rights in Alabama and around the South returned to Montgomery to a hero's welcome. They had fired off dispatches that were heard around the world, and helped change the course of history.
"You're telling the stories made a great difference," said The Rev. James Webb, pastor of Ward Chapel AME Church in Selma, who was a young organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1965, when he came to Alabama to help blacks register to vote.
"When others heard what was going on in Alabama, they came this way."
The UPI correspondents, or "Unipressers" as they called themselves, were honored at a symposium at the Rosa Parks Library and Museum. The event was sponsored by Troy State University Montgomery, the Montgomery Advertiser and the Gannett Foundation. It was organized by longtime Advertiser reporter Alvin Benn, who started out with UPI in Birmingham in 1964.
Gov. Don Siegelman was at TSUM at 8 a.m. to greet the newsmen, whom he credited with shaping his own political future, as well as Alabama's.
As a high school student in Mobile, Siegelman said, he was fond of arch-conservative Republican Barry Goldwater until he started reading stories about the civil right upheaval and became a fan of Democratic President John F. Kennedy.
Siegelman also credited the news veterans' stories with bringing the eyes and pressure of the world to bear upon Alabama, forcing the state to slowly right its course and head in a better direction.
"The situations you were placed in caused you to risk your own lives for a worthy cause," Siegelman said. "Thank you for being in the arena."
The reporters shared war stories like Harden's ordeal inside First Baptist and Bob Gordon's arrival at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham minutes after a bomb killed four young girls in 1963.
"I watched the bodies come out," Gordon said. "They lifted up one of the sheets, and I made the mistake of looking. What I saw, I didn't even recognize as a human being."
This is the lead paragraph Gordon wrote that Sept. 15 nearly 39 years ago:
"A bomb shattered a crowded Negro church today, killing four girls in their Sunday School classes and triggering a reign of violence and terror that left two more persons dead in the street."
Secretary of State Jim Bennett, himself a young reporter assigned to cover City Hall when Birmingham was known as Bombingham and Bull Connor carried a big stick, likened the journalists who covered civil rights to war correspondents, and even to soldiers themselves.
"This is like an old Army reunion," Bennett said. "We were all in the trenches together, and we all looked out for each other."
TSUM students Shonna and Jermale Ayers attended the symposium to deepen their understanding of the area's rich history and because of an appreciation of the changes the correspondents helped bring about.
"If it wasn't for them telling the stories, we wouldn't be where weıre at today," Jermale Ayers said.
His wife, who is from Tuskegee, added that the state still suffers from the transgressions of those days.
"Alabama has still got that bad rap -- Mississippi, too -- but it's changed a whole lot,² Shonna Ayers said. "It's a whole lot better."
Montgomery Mayor Bobby Bright also talked about the transformation Montgomery and Alabama have undergone. He urged the honorees to keep spreading the word about what's happening in Alabama now, decades after the news events that gave the state such a black eye.
"You made it possible for us to stand here today," Bright said. "Please continue to let the world know that Montgomery and Alabama have changed for the better."