The No. 1 Story

To newspaper readers in the South, the No. 1 story is the result of the Supreme Court's decision banning segregation in the public schools. How are Southern newspapers covering the story? In the opinion of many a Southern newsman, the papers have done a mediocre job to date. With few exceptions, they have confined coverage largely to wire-service stories and the printing of official announcements and speeches on the subject. In Nashville, for example, where the city's two dailies reported that Catholic schools were desegregating completely, neither paper followed up the news to see how well desegregation was working. One reason for the lack of enterprise: feeling about segregation runs so high in the South that no matter what stand a paper takes, it is certain to antagonize large groups of its readers. As a result, some dailies, says Atlanta Constitution Editor Ralph McGill. "have taken the position that the less said about desegregation the better--on the theory that if you don't talk about something you dislike, you'll wake up one morning and find that it's gone away."

The Moderates. With segregation deeply imbedded in tradition, most Southern dailies have opposed trying to end it by "judicial fiat." Even liberal Editor Hodding Carter of the Greenville (Miss.) Delta Democrat-Times, who opposes segregation on "moral grounds," feels that the Supreme Court decision has hurt the gradual progress of desegregation in the South by forcing both segregationists and desegregationists to "extremes." But now that the Supreme Court has struck segregation down, Tuskegee Institute reports that less than one-quarter of Southern dailies surveyed still flatly oppose the court's verdict. "Most papers," says one Louisiana newsman, "take the position that the court's decision is the law and the South will have to make the best of it."

Last week in North Carolina, the biggest paper in the state showed how Southern dailies are making the best of it. The Charlotte Observer (circ. 136,302) opposed a proposal for the state legislature to adopt a "declaration of policy" favoring segregation, saying that debate on such a measure would only "offer a forum . . . for the more importunate voices -a stage and a place in the headlines for opportunists." Most newsmen agree that the biggest newspaper problem is to fight hotheaded extremists on both sides. Such rabble-rousers as Race Agitator Bryant Bowles and Florida Sheriff Willis McCall (TIME, Dec. 13) have been vigorously opposed in the Southern press.

Freedom to Protest. On the other side, newspapers have staunchly defended the right of desegregationists to say what they please. In Jackson (Miss.), a self-styled "Negro emancipator" named Arrington High attacked state officials so savagely in his mimeographed weekly Eagle Eye that he was arrested and fined three times on the charge of "distributing handbills without a permit." The press defended his right to print the weekly, and the county court overturned his last conviction, ruling: "No matter how great the provocation, governmental agencies cannot indulge in indignation . . .The situation [cannot] be helped by an unlawful arrest and conviction."

Actually, many editors admit privately that they favor ending segregation but do not say so in their papers for fear of stirring up diehards and robbing their papers of all editorial influence. For example, in South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi, where the state governments have been empowered to get around the court's decision by making public schools "private," few newspapers have strongly opposed the plan. In Louisiana, where the legislature decided that measures to enforce desegregation would violate the state police power to maintain "peace and good order." hardly a daily attacked the decision. "It would have been like trying to put out a fire by spitting on it," explained one editor. "There wasn't any need to waste ammunition. Everybody knows, even the sponsors, that the amendment never can stand up in court and is just a delaying action." But in Virginia, many papers have sharply criticized rabid segregationists and even blasted Governor Thomas B. Stanley for appointing a desegregation study commission with no Negroes on it.

While most of the papers caution their readers to remain calm in the face of desegregation, many of their readers have been hard to convince. Wrote one letter-writer to the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser: "Put the little blacks and whites in the same schools, they associate freely in the classroom . . . Then, in the course of time, the racial line disappears. What then? This: 'Will you give me a date?' 'Yes.' And then, 'Will you marry me?' 'Yes.' " The minority of papers that have campaigned actively against desegregation are equally outspoken. The Jackson (Miss.) News flatly said in an editorial that "Mississippi will never consent to mixing the races in our public schools."

One big failure of the Southern press in covering desegregation is that most of the news is "crisis news." A riot, strike or attack on a school building makes Page One, as do statements by such extreme segregationists as South Carolina's Governor James Byrnes and Georgia's Herman Talmadge. Thus the roaring voices and dramatic news often drown out the even bigger and more dramatic story of the steady, quiet progress that desegregation is making in the South. One remedy for such spotty coverage is the Southern Education Reporting Service, set up by a Ford Foundation grant. Staffed by working newsmen, the service publishes a monthly factual bulletin that reports state by state the progress of desegregation. The bulletin goes to some 25,000 newsmen, educators and public officials. Recently many private citizens have started subscribing also, to fill in the gap in newspaper coverage.

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