Iris Turner Kelso
Iris Turner Kelso (1926–2003)
With a journalistic career spanning almost fifty years, Iris Turner Kelso was a trusted voice for political news and an outspoken advocate for civil rights and women’s equality. Kelso was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi. After she graduated from college, she began her career in journalism at the Hattiesburg American, covering small-town news. In 1951 she moved to New Orleans and began working for the New Orleans States, for which she covered City Hall beginning in 1954.
The early 1960s were a pivotal time in Kelso’s life. Three events in particular deeply affected her: the integration of New Orleans public schools, the murder of three civil rights workers in her hometown, and the exclusion of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party from the 1964 Democratic National Convention. In 1965 she left journalism to work for Total Community Action (TCA), a local agency created with funds from the federal government’s War on Poverty. When TCA opened a Head Start program in New Orleans in 1965, Kelso was the director. She found this work fulfilling yet challenging and after three years returned to reporting.
In addition to hosting Saturday Politics, a weekly political commentary program on WDSU, she also wrote for Figaro and later the Times-Picayune. In 1969 she won a Peabody award for her investigative reporting series for WDSU, City in Crisis, which documented the city’s financial difficulties. She retired in 1996.