Lauderdale: John Siceloff, child of Beaufort's civil rights era, dies
John Siceloff could easily have taken a bitter view of the world.
He saw its problems soon after he was born in 1953 at Beaufort Memorial Hospital to Elizabeth and Courtney P. Siceloff.
In fact, "Lowcountry Blood" is the name of a memoir he finished shortly before he passed away on March 6 of cancer in New York at age 61.
Siceloff and his sister, Mary, grew up on St. Helena Island, where their dad was director of the Penn Center. They hosted civil rights activists from Martin Luther King Jr. to local foot soldiers like Leroy E. Browne Sr.
For years, things were deathly quiet in the predominantly Gullah community of Frogmore.
"I was in sixth grade when Beaufort County, with great reluctance, embarked on what they called 'Freedom of Choice,' " Siceloff told me last year about the first school integration. "Craig Washington was the only young black student who entered Beaufort Elementary."
A year earlier, King worked on his March on Washington at Penn.
"From that time on, things changed," Siceloff said. "We were viewed as the enemy. I remember getting spit upon in Beaufort one time by an adult white man. I remember going to the barber shop once and the guy said, 'No, we're not going to cut your hair. We're closed. If you want your hair cut, go back across the bridge over there.'
"No one beat me up. No one threw rocks at me. No one put me in jail. But I was definitely ostracized. Mary was as well."
After the 9th grade, Siceloff went away to a Quaker school. He earned degrees from Swarthmore College and Stanford University.
As an adult, he made his mark as an executive producer in public television. He created "Now with Bill Moyers" that became "NOW" with host David Brancaccio. Among his many honors were six Emmys and the Peabody award.
Moyers told Current.org: "In the three years we worked together I found him to be conscientious, inventive and supportive of our efforts to expand the range of stories being covered on public television and to open what had been a narrow range of elite opinion and ideas to a far more diverse dialogue and debate."
Mary Siceloff of Savannah said, "They really tried to go beyond the typical news: 'Here's this terrible thing, good night.' They showed the problems but also, 'Here's a community that solved it in a creative way.' "
A selection of the stories and people he met through that series turned into a book, "Your America: Democracy's Local Heroes."
That evolved into an ETV show, "Fixing the Future."
From that came what Siceloff called "convening events" in 75 cities around the country where people watched the film and then set solutions to local problems in motion.
"He really believed journalism could be more than reporting bad news or reporting happy kitten stories," Mary Siceloff said. "It is also stories of resilience, innovation, the ability to work together -- ordinary people doing extraordinary things."
Siceloff created a production company called JumpStart Global Media for organizations working toward social change, something his parents introduced him to so early.
He established a nonprofit to help at-risk students graduate from college, and he served on the Penn Center board.
Siceloff was diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer two years ago. He had his sister sending emails to Penn on the day he died.
When his father died last year, I asked Siceloff why they never saw the world with bitterness.
"The struggle for a better world is not just for those who have little and want more," he said. "The struggle for a better world is also for those who have gotten a certain amount in life to look around them and think, 'We all have to live together.' "
Follow columnist and senior editor David Lauderdale at twitter.com/ThatsLauderdale and facebook.com/david.lauderdale.16.
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This story was originally published March 12, 2015 at 8:26 PM with the headline "Lauderdale: John Siceloff, child of Beaufort's civil rights era, dies."