One summer night in the early 1960s, at a rally in New York City, the great newspaper columnist Murray Kempton admitted to an audience full of battered old Reds that while America had not been kind to them, it was lucky to have had them. My mother turned to me and said, “He’s the only Cold War liberal who’s had the courage to apologize.”

Years later, in 1977, I had occasion to appreciate Kempton’s particular brand of courage anew. I had published an oral history called The Romance of American Communism, which had been mercilessly attacked by intellectual heavyweights to the left and to the right. When a panel was convened to discuss the book, I was fearful of attending the event, but then Kempton called to ask if he could accompany me to it, and my anxiety immediately subsided. As I knew what every newspaper reader in New York City knew—that Murray K. never saw an underdog with whom he did not sympathize—it was a comfort to me in 1977, much as it had been for the old Reds at that ’60s rally, to see myself as Kempton’s newest victim of unfair practices.

All this I am remembering because I have just finished reading Going Around, a new selection of Kempton’s journalistic writings, and the man himself feels alive in the room.

Kempton was born in 1917 in Baltimore, the only child of middle-class self-identified Southerners, who raised him in what he himself called “shabby gentility.” This meant that their clothes might be worn until they were threadbare and there would be miles hiked to save the bus fare, but the morals and manners of a Christian person of honor were to be upheld until the last day of life—a code to which Kempton subscribed throughout his long years.

As a young man, Kempton landed a job as a copy boy for H.L. Mencken, then still writing for the Baltimore Evening Sun, and stumbled on his life’s work. A newspaperman was what he would be; and indeed, within two years of graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1939, he was reporting for the New York Post, where he worked on and off for decades, applying that genteel code of honor to everyone and everything he found worthy of writing about.

In a piece on Mencken written in 1981, Kempton said that the great thing about him was that Mencken “never forgot that society is divided between those who own property and those who work for a living.” From those words, Kempton’s mind and heart reached out to explain and comment on what grieved him sorely: namely, the inequity apparent in almost every human exchange that involved race, sex, religion, point of origin, social status, or material well-being. Over a period of some 50 years, Kempton wrote more than 11,000 articles, essays, or columns that brooded incessantly over the question of unearned privilege allowed to exercise unchecked power.

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It was Kempton’s relation to language that separated him early from the ranks of ordinary reporters. Like most of them, he too was out on the streets hunting down a story nearly every day of his working life, but unlike most of them, it wasn’t that he wanted his readers to know what he knew so much as that he wanted them to feel what he felt.

However, the gift of expressive narration eluded him, so as a prodigious reader, he resorted to stuffing his sentences with an inordinate number of literary references. These made a Kempton sentence glitter, but just as often they made it unreadable. In a New York Times obituary, it was observed that by the end of a Kempton sentence that might refer to “H. L. Mencken, Edmund Burke or Henry James, with allusions to Agamemnon, Marilyn Monroe, and the Earl of Clarendon,” a reader would often be left scratching his head. There was a famous instance in which Kempton was sued for libel but the plaintiff lost the case because the judge could not understand most of Kempton’s sentences, so he couldn’t figure out where the offense lay; what’s more, he didn’t think any normal person could understand these sentences either.

No matter the limitations of his prose, Kempton’s political sympathies were always abundantly apparent. In 1936, at the age of 18, he wrote in an undergraduate editorial: “There are men…who have set their faces against the New Deal…. They are men to whom the eight hour day was a Communistic plot, and to whom any form of social security is a reflection on the individualism and self reliance of the American worker.” These men, the young Murray concludes, are wrong.

In 1941, writing even more directly, he insisted that an end must be made “to the mockery of starvation and unemployment in the richest country in the world. Hitler has no greater ally than the vast impersonal fact of factories idle while millions of Americans need their productions desperately.”

One would think he was heading for the Communist Party, and for a moment in 1936 he was, but only for a moment. Throughout his life, Kempton knew and loved many people who were Communists, and he spent years throughout the ’30s and ’40s eating, drinking, and arguing with them. But the authoritarianism of the party repelled him, not to mention the insulting apologetics for whatever the Soviet Union did. In the end, the Communists got badly under his skin.

Nonetheless, in 1955, Kempton published a book called Part of Our Time, a collection of profiles of Americans who were prominent Communists in the 1930s (Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, Paul Robeson, the Reuther brothers), ostensibly written to rescue these people from the extravagant demonization under which they had long labored. At the time of publication, the book was praised for its even-handed reporting, but if it were published today, I do not believe it would receive such notices. What was called fair-minded at the height of the Cold War today reads like a straight put-down, riddled through as it is with low-level irony and sarcasm. Each of the men profiled comes across as a coldly rational creature cut off from his own emotions, responsive only to the simplicities of Marxist rhetoric, and driven to blindly serve the authority of a utopian myth rather than struggle with the messy contradictions of flesh-and-blood reality.

As for the women in this book, Kempton’s sexism comes as a shock; naked and, I must say, primitive, it is a visceral reminder of the good old bad old days. Three women—Mary Heaton Vorse, Elizabeth Bentley, and Alice Remington—are given a single chapter whose opening sentence refers to one of them as someone who “in all her life” has had “no involvements which did not lie upon the outermost extremities of love.” Sexual deprivation, the fear or the actuality of it, is why each of the women is a Communist. All are analyzed in terms of the men they are erotically connected with or the ones they are longing to connect with. All are referred to, at one moment or another, as either desperate, or a biddy, or very nearly an old maid. This chapter made me ashamed of Kempton and reminded me of the 1970 essay written by his daughter, Sally Kempton, in which she speaks of her father as a man who (as Sally’s New York Times obituarist put it) “considered women incapable of serious thought and was skilled in the art of putting women down.”

In the end, it was American racism—which genuinely pained him—that brought out the distinctive best in Kempton. Writing from the South in the 1940s and ’50s, he achieved true eloquence; the pieces he wrote then are remarkable for the way in which he trusted them to tell their story through spare, novelistic evocation rather than overwritten, rhetorical indignation. For example, here’s a Black woman overheard on a bus: “An’ then Ah went in the white section to get a drink, an’ this big white man says so meanlike ‘Git back on your own side, sister’ and it was dirty and they had a little ole hole to pass the water through.” A white man speaking from his car: “Lissen, mister, I’ve lived in this country thirty eight years an’ if you find an honrable darky, there ain’t nobody better, but you get a mean one, there’s nothing else to do but shoot him.”

Or Kempton describing a Black witness during the Emmett Till trial: “His tongue forced him to the wildest piece of defiance a Delta Negro can accomplish; he stopped saying ‘Sir’ and began answering [the defense attorney’s] every lash with a ‘That’s right’ which was naked at the end,” the man clearly enduring “the hardest half hour of the hardest life possible for an American.”

On the unblinking courage of Autherine Lucy, the Black student chosen in 1956 to integrate the University of Alabama, where she was all but stoned, Kempton writes: “This is what William Faulkner was talking about when he said of the Delta Negro that he endured. Through poverty, shame, and degradation he endured.”

For the most part, Kempton stayed put in Manhattan, where on any given morning he could choose to cover a demonstration at City Hall, a mobster’s funeral on Mulberry Street, an Albanian parade on Fifth Avenue, a dance rehearsal in Harlem, or a gay activist picketing a restaurant in Chelsea. Throughout the week he’d consult the wire services, make a mental list of which events to cover, button up the jacket of his venerable three-piece suit, get on his bike (he never learned to drive), and spend the day “going around.” In the evening, he sat down to write tomorrow’s column, the beating heart of which would be an account of the built-in inequities that thwart fairness and decency at almost every turn.

In 1967, Part of Our Time was reissued, and Kempton was invited to provide an afterword. My copy of the book, published by New York Review Books in 2004, includes that 1967 afterword. When I finished reading Going Around, I turned to it with some trepidation. To my relief, Kempton had his own trepidation. The opening sentences read:

This book is twelve years old and its author twelve years older; and the mixed impulse of gratitude and apology with which he sees it issue forth again is defined in what Melbourne said about Macaulay, which was that he wished he were as sure of anything as that young man was of everything…. What was at that time a flat certainty about judging how people lived their lives is now unsettled by recognizing so many slights to some individuals and kindnesses to others, alike unmerited.

A man of honor to the very end.