Dilemma in Dixie

Throughout the South virtually every front page last week told the news of 26-year-old Autherine Lucy's fight to become the first Negro to enter the University of Alabama (see EDUCATION). Yet, like other desegregation news that has crowded its way increasingly into the Southern press since the Supreme Court decision, it got there almost against the will of most editors. Southern newspapers --with scattered exceptions--are doing a patchy, pussyfooting job of covering the region's biggest running story since the end of slavery.

The Other Side. The measure of the Southern press was taken last week by Jere Moore, editor of Georgia's Milledgeville weekly Union Recorder, who once routed the Ku Klux Klan in a local battle. Said Moore: "The newspapers of the South have failed to take the leadership demanded of them in this issue. They have been weak-kneed when they should have been strong. We have not tackled the issue."

Privately, many Southern journalists are far more enlightened than their fellow citizens on the segregation issue, but professionally they are hamstrung by front-office pressure and fear of community wrath. Others are too tied up in their own emotional knots to do justice to the problem. They have struck an uneasy balance between their jobs as newsmen and what they feel is their duty as Southerners.

Most Southern news executives have adopted a buck-passing rule of thumb: When in doubt about a racial story, use the press-association copy. For example, in the Autherine Lucy riots, papers in nearby Birmingham were the only out-of-town dailies in the South to send their own staffers to Tuscaloosa to cover the story. Sometimes papers lean on the wire services for racial news even in their own areas. When one major daily recently got tips of forthcoming antisegregation statements by religious leaders, it passed the word along quietly to a wire service instead of going after the story itself.

The press associations do an even-handed job of straight reporting, but in the rush to meet deadlines with fastbreaking news, they give only bits and pieces of the whole story. Inevitably, they put the accent on spot news of conflict. Without any further effort to see the integration problem whole, so do most Southern papers. Says Editor Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, which does one of the South's best jobs: "Most newspapers seem to have forgotten that there is another side to the story, that Texas is going ahead with integration, that Arkansas is quiet, that North Carolina is quiet, that Tennessee is quiet, that southern Missouri, which is very Southern in attitude, is going with integration."

The Diehards. At its worst, notably in Mississippi, the Southern press is full of slanting, suppression and rabble-rousing against integration. The most violent is the Jackson, Miss. Daily News (circ. 38,813), whose ripsnorting old (78) Editor Fred Sullens incites readers against "mongrelization" under such front-page scare-lines as "YOU ARE FOR US OR AGAINST US." The best that Editor Sullens could say of the Negro was in a sentimental story on the funeral of an 83-year-old onetime janitor at the University of Mississippi; the paper started a scholarship fund in his name, and sang his praises as "a good Negro who knew his place."

Such papers as Sullens' Daily News now run more Negro crime news under bigger headlines than ever before--even when it means going as far afield as Chicago. They spike occasional wire stories that show integration working, e.g., a recent A.P. dispatch about the acceptance of three Negroes at the University of North Carolina. They print and reprint testimonials by Negroes who say that they prefer segregation and ignore Negro leaders on the other side, except to quote them out of context to make them sound like wild radicals.

Against this strident tone a new Jackson daily, the State Times (TIME, March 7), tried to sound a more moderate note on racial issues. When the paper started about a year ago, Editor Norman Bradley, an alumnus of the liberal Chattanooga Times, played desegregation news calmly, sometimes chided the state for abuses and injustices committed in the name of segregation. But the paper's directors opposed his policy, and he quit in December to return to the Chattanooga Times as its executive editor. Since he left, the State Times has been tugging almost as hard as Sullens to hold back the hands of the clock.

The Southern Case. More dignified than the extremists is another group of stalwart prosegregation papers typified by the Charleston, S.C. News & Courier (circ. 53,286). It occasionally offends rabid racists by printing constructive news of the Negro community, and its editor, Thomas R. Waring, appeared in Harper's Magazine gently pleading "The Southern Case Against Desegregation."

But Editor Waring makes the case for his own readers with harsher strokes. He plays up news of muggings in Harlem and race riots in Chicago to support a recurrent editorial theme: look what happens where you have integration. In his editorial last week calling the Lucy uproar the result of "appeasement of colored people," his strongest word for the rioters was "impolite."

But the Southern press, up against tough and delicate problems, also has its shining examples of courage and fairness in handling its No. 1 story. In Tuscaloosa, from offices less than two miles from the University of Alabama, Editor Buford Boone of the News (circ. 15,681) topped off thorough coverage of the Lucy story with a hard-hitting editorial: "The university administration and trustees have knuckled under to the pressures and desires of a mob . . . We have a breakdown of law and order and abject surrender to what is expedient ..." The Montgomery, Ala. Advertiser (circ. 60,144), which sees no integration possible in the Deep South in the foreseeable future, nonetheless has given full coverage to the Negro boycott of Montgomery buses (TIME, Jan. 16). It has devoted columns to interviews with leaders of the boycott, also ran a story showing that the first-come, first-seated policy demanded by the Negroes was already working in many Southern cities, including some in Alabama.

In Texas the only major dailies to take a flat stand for integration and the Supreme Court decision are the locally owned and jointly run San Antonio Express and News (circ. 141,734). Tomme Call, editor of the News editorial page, won first place in the 1955 annual editorial awards of the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors Association for a piece urging complete compliance with the Supreme Court decision. The Express and News have run stories with picture strips on the success of interracial policy in the city's Roman Catholic high schools, also campaigned for integration with front-page cartoons and youth panels.

"It was our feeling [that] any area trying to combat integration would be making trouble for itself and worsening race relations," says Call. "We went into it blind. We had no way of knowing what public reaction would be. We were pleasantly surprised at the almost complete lack of opposition."

Well-played stories of how integration succeeded in local schools have also distinguished the coverage of the Nashville Tennessean-(circ, 113,439) and Banner (circ. 91,262).

Old Habits. Southern editors who try to call their shots as they see them must develop thick skins. Notable example: Hodding Carter, whose Greenville Delta Democrat-Times (circ. 11,980) delivers courageous coverage in the midst of hostile Mississippi. "We print anything about the controversy locally, regionally or nationally that we can get our hands on," says Editor Carter. Mrs. Carter often gets threatening telephone messages for "that damned nigger-lover husband of yours."

Actually, many Southern newsmen took it for granted that their papers would soft-pedal such an emotionally explosive issue. But the surprise is that so many editors are now willing to stick their necks out. It is only about ten years since newspapers in the South began in any numbers to break such old habits as depicting the Negro only as a criminal or a minstrel end man, and learning such new ones as calling him "Mr."--a practice still far from universal. Only in the same short period have Southern papers started to drop the tag "Negro" in stories unless it is pertinent, and to run more news of the Negro engaged in constructive activity. However, such news has been curtailed since the segregation battle flared.

Even where Negro news appears, it is usually lumped together in "Jim Crow" columns, a separate page or edition. Few Southern papers have desegregated their own columns to permit items about Negroes to appear anywhere in the paper.

Against that background even anti-segregation newsmen feel that any great improvement in the coverage of integration will come just as gradually as integration itself. Says Colbert ("Pete") McKnight, editor of the Charlotte, N.C. Observer, one of the region's most conscientious dailies: "Northern editors try to oversimplify our problem. It just cannot be done. It will be at least a decade before many changes take place in Southern journalism."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.