William Peters, 85; writer examined U.S. race relations

Before the historic march and awe-inspiring speech, before the water hoses, church bombings and bullets, William E. Peters Jr. wrote an article for Redbook magazine about a then-27-year-old minister from Atlanta.

Full of candor and insight, the article “Our Weapon Is Love” introduced the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the philosophy -- nonviolent resistance -- that would soon help transform the nation.

“This is a new and striking doctrine to preach in the explosive atmosphere prevailing in the South,” Peters wrote in 1956. “The man who preaches it is a new and striking kind of Negro leader. King’s faith in this principle remains unshaken, and he has managed to impart it to Montgomery’s Negroes,” Peters wrote, referring to the Alabama city where the famous bus boycott took place. “The tranquil yet efficient spirit in which they organized their protest has shaken the common assumption of Southern whites that they understood their Negroes.”

An award-winning journalist, Peters covered civil rights and race relations as if he were a translator -- introducing and explaining and helping the nation learn about itself and its problems.

Peters, whose magazine articles, books and TV documentaries chronicled the face of a changing nation, died May 20 at a hospice in Lafayette, Colo., from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his daughter Jennifer Johnson said. He was 85 and had lived for many years in Guilford, Conn.

Decades after they appeared, his works are part of the historical record. Peters’ article on King is described by scholars at Stanford University, where the civil rights leader’s papers are housed, as “an important source for tracing King’s intellectual development.”

“King explained to Peters, for example, that ‘the spirit of passive resistance came to me from the Bible, from the teachings of Jesus. The techniques came from Gandhi,’ ” according to a note that accompanies a letter King wrote to Peters discussing the article.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, much of Peters’ written work appeared in magazines with a strong female readership. He wrote about interracial marriages for McCall’s and discrimination in private social clubs for Redbook. An article in Good Housekeeping examined the harassment of a Jewish couple in San Francisco by 10 young men.

The events of a classroom in Riceville, Iowa, so amazed Peters that he returned to the topic again and again. Every child in Jane Elliott’s class had been classified as moderately or severely dyslexic. Called the “dummy crew” by other teachers, they were children who were not expected to amount to much, Elliott said.

To teach her class of all white third-graders about discrimination, Elliott divided them into two groups: blue-eyed and brown-eyed. One day students were treated as inferior simply because they were in the brown-eyed group, while students in the blue-eyed group were treated as superior. Another day, the groups switched roles.

The results were a stunning indictment of prejudice and the expectations that accompany labels. Students treated as superior learned in ways that others had not thought possible; when they were labeled inferior their performance failed. After the exercise ended, students continued to excel beyond expectation.

“He really felt that this exercise could seriously impact on attitudes and behavior where racism was concerned,” Elliott said of Peters in a Times interview last week.

With Muriel Neff Peters, his second wife, Peters made a documentary about Elliott’s exercise, “The Eye of the Storm,” for ABC, which aired it in 1970. The next year his book “A Class Divided” was published. In 1985 he made a documentary under the same name for PBS/Frontline, and in 1987 published “A Class Divided: Then and Now,” which continued the story and included a reunion of those third-grade students.

Born in San Francisco on July 30, 1921, Peters attended Northwestern University. In 1942, after two years of study, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces.

Based in England with the 8th Air Force, 351st Bombardment Group, Peters flew B-17s and was shot down over the North Sea. He was stranded at sea for hours and wrote about the ordeal for Ladies’ Home Journal in 1944.

After the war, Peters returned to Northwestern, changed his major from zoology to English and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1947. He married Ann Miller, and the couple had four children before divorcing.

In addition to his daughter Johnson, Peters is survived by daughters Suzanne Payne of Lafayette, Colo., and Gretchen Peters of Nashville; and a son, Geoffrey Peters of Vienna, Va. His second marriage also ended in divorce. His third wife, Helene White Peters, died in 2000.

Peters helped Myrlie Evers, the widow of slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers, write her 1967 book, “For Us, the Living,” while she and her children lived with the Peters family, Johnson said.

Peters’ experience in matters of race relations earned him an opportunity to break into broadcasting. In 1962 when CBS needed an expert for an investigative report on voter registration in the South, the network tapped Peters and sent him to Mississippi.

“Mississippi and the Fifteenth Amendment” aired in 1962, followed by other reports for CBS and later ABC, including documentaries on the making of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, segregation in New Jersey and Black Panther Bobby Seale’s campaign for mayor of Oakland.

In 1963 Peters won the first of many George Foster Peabody Awards for two parts of a three-part series called “Storm Over the Supreme Court, Parts II and III,” which examined prayer in school and Bible reading in schools.

From 1982 until 1989 Peters was director of Yale University Films, where he wrote, produced and directed “A Class Divided,” which won an Emmy Award. It can be viewed at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/.

Though U.S. schools never used the work the way Peters envisioned, the documentary is employed in diversity training all over the world, Elliott said. The experience of having Peters cart cameras and crew to Iowa and to talk to children others viewed as inferior yielded its own positives.

“There’s no way I could have afforded to purchase that kind of experience for those kids,” Elliott said. “It stayed with them to this day, and it stayed with Bill Peters.... He remembered every one of those kids.”

jocelyn.stewart@latimes.com