Paul W. Valentine, who chronicled the civil rights movement and anti-war protests during his long career as a Washington Post reporter, and who often explored the darker corners of human experience with stories on criminals, malcontents and social misfits, died Oct. 15 at a hospice in Baltimore. He was 90.
The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife Elizabeth Valentine.
After serving in the Army and working at newspapers in the South, Mr. Valentine joined The Post on Aug. 2, 1965. In the elevator, he met another new employee also on his first day on the job: Ben Bradlee, who would become the paper’s executive editor and guiding force for decades.
Mr. Valentine did not have the glamorous assignments of a foreign correspondent or a White House reporter, chatting with presidents and congressional leaders on Capitol Hill. Instead, he chose a grittier path on the Metro desk, reporting from crime scenes, police precincts and jails while illuminating the struggles of the poor and disenfranchised.
In Memphis in April 1968, he covered the aftermath of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. A month later, with tensions high in Washington, he wrote about Resurrection City, an encampment of several thousand people on the National Mall designed to draw attention to the plight of downtrodden Americans.
Mr. Valentine defied police orders to enter the temporary settlement of makeshift shelters, only to be arrested (and later released). He interviewed the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, one of King’s top lieutenants, who organized the campaign.
“Either we move Congress to act through nonviolence, or our cities will burn down,” Abernathy said, adding: “I lead this campaign because I love America, not because I want to tear her down.”
With an acute grasp of street politics and social mood, Mr. Valentine sensed a growing strain of unease and unrest that was not readily apparent to others. According to his longtime colleague Carl Bernstein, who became known for his reporting on the Watergate scandal, Mr. Valentine spurred reluctant editors to pay greater attention to demonstrations led by young people protesting the Vietnam War.
“He was integral to the history and coverage of The Washington Post in a key moment,” Bernstein said in a phone interview. Some editors “were very skeptical of the demonstrations and looked at the demonstrators as hippies and leftists, not understanding the breadth of the movement,” he added. “Paul was very important for the newsroom culture for a very long time, because of the way he led the coverage of the demonstrations.”
On May 3, 1971, near the height of the anti-war movement, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Washington, attempting to stop traffic and shut down government offices. From 6 a.m. until almost midnight, Mr. Valentine reported on the chaotic demonstration, in which protesters dragged wooden and metal barricades into intersections and disabled commuters’ cars. By the end, more than 7,000 people were in custody.
“Troops with fixed bayonets occupied streets where demonstrators had been,” Mr. Valentine wrote, in a comprehensive account that was both vivid and restrained. “Army trucks and jeeps rumbled through the city. Sirens wailed. Acrid tear gas floated through quiet residential streets in Georgetown and seeped into office buildings downtown.”
Over the years, Mr. Valentine covered hundreds of demonstrations of every conceivable kind. Reflecting on the variety of causes that were taken up in the nation’s capital, he began a 1978 article like this:
“They are marching on Washington — pacifists, Nazis, bicyclists, chiropractors, Tibetan-Americans, coal miners, lesbians, bird watchers, Iranian students, blind people — a clangorous new army of protesters and dissenters.”
“This,” he quoted a city official as saying, “is demonstration city.”
Paul West Valentine, the younger of two sons, was born Jan. 7, 1935, in Durham, North Carolina, and grew up in nearby Chapel Hill. His father was a musically inclined engineer, and his mother ran a bookstore.
After graduating from the private Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, Mr. Valentine enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania. In an internal newsroom directory, he wrote that after his adviser warned him “to select a major field or face expulsion,” he picked journalism, “because it had the fewest required courses and the most electives.”
Mr. Valentine graduated in 1959, served in the Army for two years and covered the justice system — “including six executions” — for the Columbia Record in South Carolina. When he was fired for what he later described as “rank insubordination,” he moved to the Atlanta Journal, where he spent more than two years covering the civil rights movement and the violent backlash against it. He also doubled as the paper’s art critic.
While working for The Post in 1974, Mr. Valentine visited a Tennessee prison to interview James Earl Ray, who was serving a 99-year sentence for killing King six years earlier.
“Pallid, sunken-eyed, unshaven and markedly aged,” Mr. Valentine wrote in his chilling portrait, “convicted assassin James Earl Ray lolls in his underwear on the edge of his steel bunk … His pale blue eyes peer restlessly from deep sockets. His mouth is a humorless thin line.”
Ray, who died in prison in 1998, claimed he was not the triggerman. Multiple federal and state investigations concluded otherwise.
Mr. Valentine opened The Post’s Baltimore bureau in 1982. After retiring from the paper in 1999, he wrote dozens of advance obituaries for the paper, many of them about criminals and outcasts such as would-be presidential assassin Sara Jane Moore; convicted Unabomber Ted Kaczynski; disbarred celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey; and Hells Angels founder Sonny Barger, whom he described as “equal parts brawler, bully, braggart, rule breaker and shrewd huckster of his own outlaw mystique.”
Sixteen of his advance obituaries remain to be published.
Survivors include his wife of 65 years, the former Elizabeth de Garay; five children, Rachael and Rebeccah Neill and Sebastian, Catherine and Damian Valentine; seven grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
Outside of journalism, Mr. Valentine wrote songs, played classical guitar and enjoyed canoeing. He also published two well-received crime novels about D.C. police detectives, along with a 2013 novel, “The Road to Goshen Shoals,” set during the civil rights era in the South.
As a writer, he sometimes found his way to more lighthearted subjects outside his focus on crime and deviant behavior. In 1991, he joined a festive birthday dinner with the family of former Washington Senators outfielder Fred Valentine, whose daughter — Valena Valentine — happened to be born on Feb. 14. The main course was spaghetti and meatballs, made with a Louisiana-inspired white sauce described in great detail by Mr. Valentine.
At the bottom of the story was an italicized note: “The reporter, whose byline heads this article, covers fires, crime and other disasters for The Washington Post. He does not write about food, except one day a year.”
Harrison Smith contributed to this report.
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