Southern political historian Jack Bass, a celebrated Carolinas newspaperman who graduated to academia and became a widely respected author or co-author of 10 books, died Thursday afternoon at age 91 in hospice care, according to son David Bass of Raleigh, N.C.
In 2020, Bass moved from Charleston where he once taught at the College of Charleston to Raleigh with his third wife, legendary cooking personality Nathalie Dupree, to be closer to their family. Dupree died in January 2025 at age 85.
Bass, born in Columbia, S.C, was the youngest of seven children of Esther (Cohen) and Nathan Bass, immigrants from Poland and Lithuania respectively. Jack Bass was the sixth child in the family to attend the University of South Carolina, where he caught the news bug and served as chief editor for the school’s newspaper, The Gamecock.
After graduating in 1956, he worked as a sports intern with The (Charleston) News and Courier and soon married his first wife, Carolyn McClung. He then served more than three years as a naval flight officer, returning to the Charleston newspaper to focus on politics. The next year, he went to work in Columbia for the afternoon Columbia Record and then the morning newspaper, The State. In 1965, he won a prestigious Nieman Fellowship for journalism at Harvard University where he started focusing more on politics, civil rights and the changing South.
The following year, he became Columbia bureau chief for The Charlotte Observer and for seven years covered, among other things, the Orangeburg massacre at S.C. State College in February 1968. Bass called the event in which three Black students died the “most unknown tragedy of the civil rights era.”
While at the Observer, Bass also started teaching journalism part-time at USC, later accepting a visiting research position at Duke University to work on a book on Southern politics. After a three-year stint at S.C. State College in Orangeburg as a writer-in-residence and research scholar while he worked to complete a master’s degree in journalism, he ran for Congress unsuccessfully as a Democrat against Republican U.S. Rep. Floyd Spence.
During his 13-year newspaper career, Bass was named S.C. Journalist of the Year twice by the S.C. Press Association, according to the S.C. Academy of Authors, before his shift to academia. See a video oral history of Bass here.
In 1984, he married his second wife, Alice R. Cabaniss. In 1987, he accepted a position as professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi and married Dupree in 1994. By 1998, he completed a doctorate in American studies from Emory University. In 2000, he and Dupree moved to Charleston where he was a professor of humanities and social science at the College of Charleston for several years.
Bass is survived by three children: Ken Bass (Antoinette) of Wake Forest, N.C.; David Bass (Bonnie) of Raleigh, N.C.; and Liz Broadway (Joel) of Durham, N.C., as well as seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
Bass published major books on civil rights, politics
Throughout his journalism and academic careers, Bass published several books on Southern politics and civil rights that got national attention. They remain major sources today for understanding how the American South shifted in the post-war United States. Among those works are:
The Orangeburg Massacre (1970). Co-written with acclaimed journalist Jack Nelson of The Los Angeles Times, the book is an offspring of news coverage by Bass of the Orangeburg Massacre at S.C. State where 10 law enforcement officers in a racially-charged night opened fire on a crowd of African American students, killing three and injuring 28. Jonathan Yardley of The New Republic magazine wrote in a review that the book helped to set the record straight of what really happened beyond “the smokescreen of official lies and evasions put up to hide” the events of that night. The book stands out for being good reporting, “but also because it is a devastating case history of the misuse of law-enforcement authority and the perversion of justice.”
Transformation of Southern Politics: Social Change and the Political Consequence since 1945 (1976). Co-authored with political consultant Walter De Vries, the book was a followup to a 1941 classic book on Southern politics by academic V.O. Key. Bass and De Vries offered a state-by-state analysis of 11 Southern states on political and societal changes. New Republic contributor Jason Berry noted, “The social message that rises from these pages is that of a region, once steeped in tragedy and guilt, suddenly growing into a sense of self, as a land of shared rootedness and common hopes.”
Unlikely Heroes: The Dramatic Story of the Southern Judges of the Fifth Circuit who Translated the Supreme Court Brown Decision into a Revolution for Equality (1978). This sweeping work looked at how federal judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit did the hard, practical work to implement the end of racially segregated schools in six Southern states as required in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision from 1954. As writer Anthony Lewis of The New York Times wrote, “I think there has been no more heroic episode in American law than the work of Southern federal judges in ending racial discrimination in the South. Jack Bass has brought this recent history to life, telling us much that we had not known.”
Taming the Storm: The Life and Times of Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. and the South’s Fight over Civil Rights (1993). This biography is about an Alabama federal judge whose made landmark rulings for civil rights activists on school integration and voting rights. He also declared segregation unconstitutional to integrate public transit in Montgomery. “For these courageous stands, Johnson saw his mother’s house bombed and earned the scorn of Alabama Gov. George Wallace, a law school friend. Johnson’s life is a true profile in courage, and Bass tells his story with grace and power,” said according to the Robert and Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, which awarded Bass with its major award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
Strom Thurmond books. Bass and co-author Marilyn W. Thompson wrote two biographies on Republican U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. The first, Ol’ Strom: An Unauthorized Biography of Strom Thurmond, came out in 1998 and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The second, Strom: The Complicated Personal and Political Life of Strom Thurmond, was published in 2025.
Writings by Bass published in Statehouse Report
- 2/2/18: 50 years ago: The Orangeburg massacre.
- 1/4/17: Oregon’s election system offers model for S.C.
- 6/26/15: Memorial in Charleston
This is a developing story. Obituary details will be added when available. For more biographical information, please see an extensive piece in the South Carolina Encyclopedia.
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