The world of journalism lost two more pioneers this week with the deaths of Phyllis "Phyl" Garland on November 7th and Ellen Willis on November 9th. Both women succumbed to cancer, according to news reports. (Related story: Ed Bradley, CBS News Reporter, 1941-2006

Garland, 71, a pioneering reporter and editor for the Pittsburgh Courier and Ebony Magazine during the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, also earned distinction as a leading teacher and scholar on the faculty of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She retired from Columbia in May, 2004 after 34 years of service.

Willis, 64, was an iconic figure in the feminist movement, as well as a thought-provoking essayist and highly-respected educator. Her work appeared in a raft of top mainstream and alternative outlets, including the New York Times, the Village Voice, the New Yorker, and the Nation. In 1969, she helped found Redstockings, a radical feminist organization that helped shape ideas about patriarchy and male privilege that remain with us still. At the time of her death, she directed the Cultural Reporting and Criticism concentration at New York University's Graduate School of Journalism, which she founded in 1995.

To fully appreciate what these women meant to journalism, it's best to hear from them.

Garland's editorial work is not online, but the range and humanity of her reporting comes across in some of presentations and interviews she gave. For example, here she recalls the time she spent with Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi sharecropper who
told the world she was "sick and tired of being sick and tired:"

"We sat on the front lawn of her small, modest house. She began to tell me what it was like to grow up as a sharecropper on a plantation in Mississippi. By the time she finished telling me
about how she was so old when she got her first pair of shoes, she could remember the day. And how her mother had had nothing but rags to wear
because once they finished growing their crops and their cotton and the owner took his, there was nothing left for them. They could not even buy food. They would have to go out and scrape and scrap for cotton, trying to pick up what might have been left on depleted fields to get enough for a bale so that they would even have to eat. Sometimes eating – having flour water for dinner. As she said, sometimes you see little kids, six years old, and they already look defeated at that age.

How she wanted so much to change things by registering to vote. She told me about how she studied so that she could pass the test on the Mississippi Constitution, although she hadn’t even known that Mississippi had a constitution before. But she did it. And then, when she did register to vote, she had to flee for her life, staying with friends. Eventually, she was taken, captured by these men, who took her to a prison and put a gun on two black prisoners and told them they had to beat her or die. And they beat her. And beat her, she said, until her body was hard. And they beat her until she was beyond numb. The worst thing is she heard another woman crying, whom they also were beating.

They were talking about taking them someplace way out in the woods where no one would ever find them. By the time Fannie had finished with her story, both of us were in tears. It made me feel, “You had to do something. You had to do something to let people know how these people were suffering.”

Willis had a restless mind that questioned conventional wisdom -- even when it came from her own political allies. In a 50th anniversary essay for the Village Voice excerpted by Laura Conaway, Willis recalled that the male staffers at the alternative weekly:

"[D]id not take kindly to our efforts to raise their consciousness about sexism in the office and in the paper: We might have thought of ourselves as sexy rebels against feminist party lines, but they called us "Stalinist feminists," in a foreshadowing of Rush Limbaugh's "Feminazi" label. We retaliated by dubbing them "the white boys." The fights often spilled over onto the Voice's pages—yet another way the paper was unique in documenting the culture of the left."

Bitch|Lab offers this appreciation of Willis' feminism, along with lots of links to her work:

"I appreciated her work because she was an early and persistent critic of the consumption politics associated with a diluted notion of the phrase,’the personal is political.’ Willis, like CarolHanisch, didn’t think politics was about changing your personal lifestyle, as if your little, lone acts of resistance would amount to a hill of beans. Instead, change came about through collective political action — which would require doing more than shopping your way, or even abstaining from shopping your way, to revolution."

A great discussion follows in the comments section.

UPDATE 11/11/06: Richard Prince, who writes a column on diversity issues for the Maynard Institute, points to this tribute page for Phyl Garland at the Columbia J-School. Among the things that I learned from reading it is that Garland actually died on November 7th, according to J-School dean Nicolas Lemann, not November 8th, as I originally reported. My information came from a newspaper article. I apologize for the error.