Twenty years from now, Leonard Pitts Jr. doesn’t want people who look back on this era to say he did nothing.

“When people are wondering how they allowed x, y and z to happen, I want on the record that I was screaming on the top of my lungs,” he said.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist on Thursday visited Kansas University, where he warned of the erosion of Americans’ civil liberties and America’s changing status in the world.

“I really think this is a turning point for us, and not a good one,” he said.

Since 9/11, under the guise of the war on terror, Americans have stood by and borne witness to the abridgment of their civil liberties, Pitts said.

“I don’t sense even concern from the public,” he said.

He pointed to the assaults on freedom of speech and the right to privacy.

“We find it very easy to tell ourselves, ‘Well, I’m not guilty of anything, so I have nothing to worry about,’ failing to understand that maybe some of the people who are caught up in these matters are not guilty, either,” Pitts said.

Columnist Leonard Pitts Jr., shown in front of Fraser Hall at Kansas University, says that American civil liberties have been eroded by the Bush administration. Pitts spoke to an audience of more than 2,000 Thursday night at the Lied Center.

A syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald, Pitts won the Pulitzer Prize in commentary in 2004. He was a music critic for several years, and now his twice-weekly columns tackle the war on terror, racism and any topic that stirs his emotions. His columns appear in the Journal-World.

Pitts granted an interview and addressed groups on campus Thursday. In the evening, he spoke to a full crowd at the Lied Center, which seats 2,028. Some audience members sat outside the auditorium and listened over a loudspeaker.

He roused a receptive crowd, whose members gave him two standing ovations. Pitts addressed a breadth of topics, including criticizing the news media for not asking tough enough questions leading up to the Iraq war and scrutinizing extremism in political philosophy.

“I don’t believe any political philosophy – liberal, conservative or any shade in between – has a monopoly on truth or intelligence or decency. In fact, I tend to reject political extremes of both sides,” because they tend to be closed-minded and not thoughtful, Pitts said.

William Harris, KU associate professor of English who helped coordinate the visit, said Pitts sets himself apart from other commentators who resort to argument rather than civil debate.

“He is capable of taking really divisive issues and sort of modulating them in this very reasonable voice,” Harris said. “He’s really bringing back a sense of civility in his writing.”

During an afternoon interview, Pitts voiced his frustrations at what he sees as a disregard for the facts.

“People believe what they believe,” he said. “They believe what it says on their bumper stickers. And you can bring up all the facts that you want to show them where they’re wrong. You can arrange your argument as carefully and logically as you want to say ‘You’re mistaken.’ But there’s going to be a certain group of people who are never going to concede that.”

Pitts addressed several topics while he took questions from the audience in his Lied Center speech. He called Fred Phelps, of Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, the most extreme of the extremes. Phelps’ congregation protests funerals to publicize an anti-homosexuality message.

“For (Phelps) it’s about publicity. It’s about getting his name in the paper,” Pitts said.

He also called the crisis in the Darfur region of the Sudan horrific and said President Bush and the American government have not acted to stop it.

“It’s because there’s no oil. The people have brown skin, and they didn’t try to kill his daddy,” Pitts said to an ovation.