Mississippi Today

Wilson F. “Bill” Minor of Jackson, a muckraking journalist often dubbed “the conscience of Mississippi,” died early Tuesday. He was 93.

Minor covered Mississippi politics since 1947 and earned professional accolades and awards for his gutsy reporting of civil rights violence and political chicanery.

Minor came to Mississippi as the one-man bureau reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

A native of Hammond, La., Minor was a Tulane University journalism graduate and a World War II Navy combat veteran.

He followed Mississippi political and social life for more than seven decades. In doing so, he put himself in harm’s way many times to witness and report his eyewitness to historic events.

Curtis Wilkie, former Boston Globe reporter now a writer in Oxford, said of Minor in 1997, “Bill was a beacon to national reporters who sought him out for help and background guidance. Even Diogenes would have liked him.”