Peters, William 1921-2007 (William E. Peters, Jr.)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born June 30, 1921, in San Francisco, CA; died of complications from Alzheimer's disease, May 20, 2007, in Lafayette, CO. Director, producer, journalist, and author. Peters was a Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker most famous for his work reporting on race relations in America. Initially intending to study zoology, he enrolled at Northwestern University. His education was interrupted by World War II, when he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces and became a B-17 pilot. Seeing action in the North Sea, he was shot down at one point and spent hours at sea before being rescued; he earned a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal with two oak leaf clusters. Upon his return home, Peters changed to an English major and graduated in 1947. His first job was as an account executive in public relations with the J. Walter Thompson Company in Chicago. In 1951, he joined the Ladies' Home Journal staff for a year and then was articles editor for the Woman's Home Companion; he became a full-time freelancer in 1953. Increasingly interested in the problems of racial and religious discrimination in America, he wrote on the subject for many years. In 1956 he wrote an article that helped introduce the country to a rising voice in civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr. Continuing to contribute to women's magazines, such as McCall's and Redbook, he reported on segregation and prejudice in the South, as well as other forms of discrimination, such as anti-Semitism. One day, he stumbled on a surprising story. An Iowa teacher had conducted an experiment on her class in which she separated students according to their eye color. She treated the students of one group as superior and the other as inferior, and quickly saw that this affected their educational performance. All the students were white, but if they had blue eyes and were treated as if that made them smarter, they exceeded expectations in their lessons. Peters wrote about the experiment in his A Class Divided (1971), which he also produced as a television documentary titled The Eye of the Storm in 1970 and for the news series Frontline under the original title in 1985, which earned him an Emmy. Peters published a follow-up, A Class Divided: Then and Now, in 1987. After working as a television producer for the Columbia Broadcasting System in New York City from 1962 to 1966, Peters returned to freelance writing, as well as film directing and producing television programs. He then was a director for Yale University Films, in New Haven, Connecticut, from 1982 to 1989. During the 1960s and 1970s, he won four prestigious Peabody Awards, a Golden Gavel Award, a National School Bell Award, and the National Brotherhood Award, the last for his For Us, the Living, a book he wrote with Medgar Evers. Three of the Peabodies were for documentaries he wrote, produced, or coproduced: Storm over the Supreme Court, Parts II and III, Africa (East Africa), and The Eye of the Storm. Other books by Peters include The Southern Temper (1959) and A More Perfect Union (1986).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, May 26, 2007, Section 2, p. 11.

Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2007, p. B12.

New York Times, May 24, 2007, p. C14.

Washington Post, May 28, 2007, p. B8.