John N. Herbers (November 4, 1923 – March 17, 2017) was an American journalist, author, editor, World War II veteran, and Pulitzer Prize finalist. Early life After graduating from Brownsville High School in Brownsville, Tennessee in 1941, Herbers served as a combat infantryman in the Pacific during World War II from 1941–1944. After the war, he was studied at Emory University, graduating in 1949. Career Local and Regional Reporting Herbers began his career at Morning Star in Greenwood, Mississippi, (1949–1950) and Daily News in Jackson, Mississippi (1951–1952). In 1951, he submitted news stories from the trial and execution of Willie McGee, an African-American from Laurel, Mississippi, who was accused and convicted of raping a white woman, though McGee claimed that their relationship was consensual. The McGee case drew national attention with numerous national celebrities and civil right activists claiming that McGee was framed. From 1953 to 1963, Herbers reported for the United Press International from Jackson, Mississippi and was bureau chief from 1955–1961. In 1954, he covered the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, and the subsequent trial. The acquittal of the child’s murderers had a profound effect on Herbers, who recalled it vividly even sixty years later. He was interviewed in 2003 about the experience for the Emmy Award-winning PBS documentary The Murder of Emmett Till. Civil Rights Movement Herbers joined the staff of the New York Times in 1963 as a civil rights correspondent in Atlanta, covering demonstrations in Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, and in St. Augustine, Florida. When covering demonstrations in St. Augustine, Herbers, his wife, and their four daughters were threatened in the middle of the night by a white supremacist vigilante group. He covered the murders of four civil rights workers in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964 and the KKK bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that resulted in the death of four children. He interviewed Martin Luther King Jr. and reported on Malcolm X’s Selma visit sixteen days prior to his assassination. Herbers was the third Southerner to cover the South for the New York Times in the modern era. In 1965, he covered the enforcement of civil rights laws from Washington, D.C. Post-Civil Rights From 1966 to 1968, Herbers was stationed in Washington, D.C., and covered Congress as well as presidential campaigns, including that of Robert F. Kennedy. The summer of 1968, he witnessed and reported