This from Derek Willis’ blog The Scoop.
H.G. “Buddy” Davis Jr., the Gainesville Sun’s only Pulitzer Prize winner and a longtime University of Florida journalism professor, died Monday. He was 80 years old.
Buddy was a favorite of my graduate advisor, Bill McKeen, who invited him to address a class I took on coverage of the civil rights movement. Davis won his Pulitzer in 1971 for his editorials on school desegregation and other racial issues.
He was an unflinching, old-school perfectionist who absolutely believed that government, regardless of its partisan affiliation, required a large dose of skepticism, and that it was an essential duty of journalists to point out its failings and hypocrises.
Editorial writing, he advised students over 30 years of hard-nosed instruction, was comparable to the white corpuscle system: “It goes to areas of infection.”
Read Davis’ obit in the Gainesville Sun here.