Staige Davis Blackford (1931-2003) was an American journalist and author who edited the Virginia Quarterly Review for nearly three decades, and worked to end racial segregation and promote racial harmony, particularly in his native Virginia.
Contents
Early and family life
Born on January 3, 1931 in Charlottesville, Virginia to Dr. Staige Davis Blackford (1898–1949) and Lydia Fishburne Blackford, he was raised in the university community. His father, Staige Blackford Sr. (a UVA graduate and Confederate veteran who had fought under Generals Stonewall Jackson and George Pickett, then served in the U.S. Army Ambulance Service in World War I and directed an evacuation hospital during World War II), had taught at the University of Virginia's medical school for decades until his unexpected death in 1949.
Blackford attended Episcopal High School (where his father had once been headmaster, though he failed to finish a required trigonometry course and thus did not graduate), and then the University of Virginia. He participated in the Experiment in International Living in Madrid, living with a former Republican who had fought against Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War and been imprisoned for a decade, and also served as president of the Raven Society. Blackford edited a student newspaper (Cavalier Daily) at UVA and began speaking out against segregation before his graduation (with honors) in 1952, although he was censored by Dean Ivey Lewis. Blackford nonetheless became a Rhodes Scholar, in part as a result of a favorable letter Lewis had written before Blackford began speaking out.
In 1958, he married Bettina Balding (1935-2014) of New York and Kentucky. They lived in many locations throughout the United States, and had two daughters, Linda Balding and Sheila Mason, who survived them (as did many grandchildren.
Career
During his Oxford experience, Blackford learned how students considered the South "backward and benighted." He was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency and became an officer in the United States Air Force. He then noticed the relative lack of prejudice in the military, particularly after President Harry S Truman's desegregation order. Upon hearing of the divisions within Virginia during the Massive Resistance crisis, Blackford ended his government service and resumed his journalistic career. However, the article he published entitled "The South Will Like Integration", about two newly admitted medical students at UVA and their guide around the University, faculty wife, Susan Patton Boyle (whose patrician ancestors had served under Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson) caused a vicious hate mail campaign against Boyle and a cross burned on her front lawn, although others supported her and University President Colgate Darden defused the attempt to fire her husband that Lewis had unleashed.
Blackford also wrote for Time magazine and, later edited the Louisiana State University Press. He also became research director for the Southern Regional Council. In 1964, Blackford relocated to Norfolk, where he took a post as chief political reporter for the Virginian-Pilot, and where he met A. Linwood Holton, for whom the lifelong Democrat would later become press secretary (1970-1974) after Holton became the first Republican elected as Virginia's Governor in many decades.
In 1975, Blackford returned to Charlottesville and became editor of the VQR. Among the writers he discovered at VQR was Robert Olen Butler, whose first short story he published.
Death and legacy
Blackford died in a car accident a week before his scheduled retirement. The funeral was held at St. Paul's Memorial Church, in which the family had long been active. He is buried (as is his father) at the University of Virginia's cemetery; where his wife was also later interred.