Margaret Leonard’s journalism career began in the 1960s as a reporter for the Chattanooga Times, where, she said, she was limited to reporting mainly on daytime social events because women “should not go out at night” to report hard news. Throughout the 1970s, Leonard reported for the Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times, and, in the 1980s through the 1990s, she was a Tallahassee Democrat government reporter and editor. In 2003, she retired as editor of the Florida State Times. Leonard’s history-making accomplishments began in 1960 as a teenager. Described in “Freedom Riders” as “the first unmistakably Southern white student to participate in the Mississippi Freedom Rides,” Leonard risked her life to register black citizens as voters in the South. She was arrested and jailed repeatedly in prisons, including Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Prison.
As a student at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, Leonard’s fight for justice bloomed, but after she invited a black friend to join her on campus in 1961, upset college officials sent her to study at the Sorbonne in Paris. She graduated from Newcomb in 1963 and was honored as an Outstanding Newcomb Alumna in 2013. “We’ve come a long way, but we ain’t through,“ Leonard noted in 2012, in an article recognizing her work in “The Movement” as a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Despite her public advocacy and career, Leonard had an aversion to the limelight, which she reinforced by asking before she died that her obituary not begin with her role as a Freedom Rider. On the job and among friends, Leonard was a master of unvarnished candor, and, although her comments were often a double-edged sword, she managed to soften them with her “Southernisms.“ She often would begin her critiques by saying “I love it,” in her lilting Macon, Georgia accent, but invariably follow her opener with an ego-crushing “but.” Her editing, although blunt, taught reporters lessons that made her a prized mentor. Journalism and battling racial and gender inequality were in Leonard’s genes from childhood. Both parents, Howard and Margaret Long Leonard, were reporters and writers, and Leonard’s mother achieved acclaim as the first white woman in Macon, Ga., to join the NAACP. Through her mother’s advocacy in Atlanta, Leonard, as a teenager, met civil-rights legends Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, who inspired her commitment to racial justice.
Leonard’s adult life, like many single mothers’, was dominated by fulltime work while rearing two children, even when she dealt with serious health problems. In 1991, Leonard underwent a mastectomy for breast cancer, yet, after altering her eating habits and lifestyle, except for maintaining long hours at the newspaper, the cancer became history. A few years later, Leonard suffered a brain aneurysm, and, after surgery, carried a dictionary to help her reprogram her brain with words she needed to keep her job. Within months, Leonard was able to leave the dictionary at home.
