Joseph Lenoir Chambers (26 December 1891–10 January 1970), editor, writer, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and was the son of Grace Singleton Dewey Chambers and Joseph Lenoir Chambers, an editor for the Charlotte Observer before becoming a manufacturer of machinery. He was educated in the city's public schools and at Woodberry Forest, a preparatory school in Madison County, Virginia, from which he graduated in 1910. Chambers attended the University of North Carolina, where he played varsity sports and for three years edited the campus newspaper. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he graduated third in his class in 1914.
Lenoir Chambers taught English and history and helped coach basketball and football for two years at Woodberry Forest. In 1916 he entered the Columbia University School of Journalism, where he was exposed not only to the metropolitan North but also to a broad diversity of literary and political thought. After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, he collaborated with a faculty member and other Columbia students to found the New Republic News Service in Washington, D.C., but the venture failed. Chambers then attended officers' training camp and was commissioned a first lieutenant in the army. In France with the 52d Infantry of the 6th Division, he briefly commanded a company in trench combat in Alsace. In letters home he recorded his observations of the freedoms that African Americans enjoyed in France and the multiracial nature of the Allied forces. Chambers entered into romantic relationships with Ruth Draper, later one of the nation's most celebrated character actors, and Cornelia "Nell" Battle Lewis, who earned fame in the 1920s as a liberal journalist with the Raleigh News and Observer.
After the war Chambers returned to the University of North Carolina for two years as director of the news bureau. He worked with the future university president Frank Porter Graham and other prominent faculty and administrators to organize an ambitious fund-raising campaign that helped make the university the South's foremost institution of higher education and a bastion of southern liberal thought. Chambers retained lifelong ties to his alma mater. He joined the Greensboro Daily News as a reporter in 1921 and served successively as city editor and associate editor for the independent-minded newspaper. He worked closely with the paper's widely respected editor, Earle Godbey, and with Gerald White Johnson, Chambers's predecessor as associate editor and later a nationally acclaimed commentator on the South. On 15 September 1928 Chambers married Roberta Burwell Strudwick Glenn, formerly society editor of the Daily News, who had a son from a previous marriage. They had one daughter.
Disgusted by a turn in his newspaper's politics and its management's support for mill owners during a bloody strike by textile workers in Marion, North Carolina, Chambers moved to Norfolk in 1929 to become associate editor of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. He worked intimately with Virginia's first Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, Louis Isaac Jaffé, who had earned the award earlier that year for his antilynching editorials and who advocated and achieved distinction for his liberalism. In 1944 Chambers became editor of the city's afternoon newspaper, the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, in which he advanced an editorial philosophy similar to that of the Virginian-Pilot. After Jaffé died in 1950, Chambers became editor of the latter newspaper.
In spite of having grown up with his region's tradition of racial segregation, Chambers nevertheless was one of a handful of southern white editors to urge acceptance of the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education declaring mandatory racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot was the only daily newspaper in Virginia to oppose Massive Resistance, the legislative program of the state's powerful senior senator, Harry Flood Byrd (1887–1966), to prevent desegregation of the public schools. Chambers mounted an editorial campaign that lasted five years and reached a high point in the autumn of 1958 and winter of 1959, after Governor James Lindsay Almond closed Norfolk's white secondary schools, which a federal court had ordered desegregated. In an editorial on 29 September 1958 Chambers demanded that the schools be reopened and exhorted the city council, the school board, the city's members of the General Assembly, parents, and teachers to "take the lead and exert the influence in reversing this unjust and cruel policy that does not and will not accomplish even its own ends." Chambers provided crucial leadership during the crisis and exposed the sham of Massive Resistance. Early in 1959 both state and federal courts ordered the city's schools reopened.
In 1960 Chambers received the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished editorial writing for his numerous and powerful editorials against Massive Resistance. The prize committee specifically cited his editorials "The Year Virginia Closed the Schools," which ran on the first day of 1959, and "The Year Virginia Opened the Schools," which ran on the final day of the same year. In 1959 Chambers also published an admiring two-volume biography of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson. The result of twelve years of reading and research, the work received critical acclaim and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in biography, giving Chambers the unusual distinction of being nominated in two major categories in the same year. The biography of one of the Confederacy's most celebrated commanders demonstrated that Chambers's acceptance of desegregation did not break his links to his southern identity. In 1960 the University of North Carolina awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Despite his retirement at age seventy at the end of 1961, Chambers remained active in civic and journalistic affairs. With Joseph E. Shank he wrote Salt Water and Printer's Ink: Norfolk and Its Newspapers, 1865–1965 (1967). Joseph Lenoir Chambers died of a stroke in Norfolk on 10 January 1970 and was buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in that city.
Sources Consulted:
Alexander Leidholdt, Standing before the Shouting Mob: Lenoir Chambers and Virginia's Massive Resistance to Public-School Integration (1997), several portraits; Lenoir Chambers Papers, Norfolk Public Library (including manuscripts of speeches and Salt Water and Printer's Ink) and Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (including several autobiographical memoranda and letters with birth date); other published works include Chambers, "History as an Avocation," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 76 (1968): 131–135; family information supplied by daughter, Elisabeth Lacy Chambers Burgess (1990); Greensboro Daily News, 16 Sept. 1928; New York Times, 3, 8 May 1960; David Pace, "Lenoir Chambers Opposes Massive Resistance: An Editor against Virginia's Democratic Organization, 1955–1959," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 82 (1974): 415–429; Robert Mason, One of the Neighbors' Children (1987), 147–161, 197–198; Leidholdt, "Virginius Dabney and Lenoir Chambers: Two Southern Liberal Newspaper Editors Face Virginia's Massive Resistance to Public School Integration," American Journalism 15 (fall 1998): 35–68; obituaries in Norfolk Ledger-Star, 10 Jan. 1970, and New York Times, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Washington Post, all 11 Jan. 1970; editorial tributes in Norfolk Ledger-Star and Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, both 12 Jan. 1970, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, 15 Jan. 1970.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Alexander S. Leidholdt.
How to cite this page:
Alexander S. Leidholdt, "Joseph Lenoir Chambers (1891–1970)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2025 ({url}, accessed [today's date]).
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