For Leadership

Little Rock's segregationists called it "that nigger-lovin' paper," and the local Citizens' Council labeled Editor Harry Ashmore "Public Enemy No. 1." But last week the Pulitzer Prize committee gave Little Rock's Arkansas Gazette and Editor Ashmore an unprecedented double prize for the role they played in last fall's crisis of conscience brought on by Governor Orval Faubus' defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court's integration order. Ashmore was cited for his editorials, the Gazette "for demonstrating the highest qualities of civic leadership, journalistic responsibility and moral courage in the face of mounting public tension." Wrote the judges: "The newspaper's fearless and completely objective news coverage, plus its reasoned and moderate policy, did much to restore calmness and order to an overwrought community."

Few men are better qualified to call the South to reason than rumpled, greying Harry Ashmore, 41. Born in South Carolina of a Southern ancestry that stretches back to Colonial times, Ashmore is convinced that the South must change with changing times before change is forced upon it from the outside. He expounded his thesis in an eloquent recent book (An Epitaph for Dixie), urged it upon Presidential Candidate Adlai Stevenson, whom he served as civil-rights adviser in the 1956 campaign. In the high school crisis last fall, Ashmore did not argue the merits of integration v. segregation, simply maintained that the sole question was "the supremacy of the government of the U.S. in all matters of law." Throughout the struggle, Ashmore was sturdily supported by the Gazette's 85-year-old President J. N. Heiskell and Publisher Hugh Patterson.

Backed by Governor Faubus, the White Citizens' Council tried hard to bring the Gazette to heel with a boycott. Last week Publisher Patterson acknowledged that the boycott had reduced daily circulation 10.6% to 88,068 and Sunday circulation 9.7% to 97,449 for the six-month period ending in March. Over the same period, Little Rock's Arkansas Democrat, which carefully avoided taking a stand on Faubus' defiance of federal authorities, gained more than 6,000 readers for both its daily and Sunday editions, now trails the Gazette on weekdays by 2,800 and leads it on Sunday by 3,000.

Despite anonymous letters sent to 1,500 advertisers, threatening a "massive crusade" against stores advertising in the Gazette, the boycott has not cost the Gazette a line of advertising, and the paper's circulation is gradually rising again. Said Editor Ashmore, after winning his Pulitzer: "I am confident that in time the Gazette will regain the circulation it has lost, and will emerge from this ordeal stronger than ever."

Other notable Pulitzer winners:

National Reporting: Associated Press's Relman ("Pat") Morin, 50, winner of a 1951 Pulitzer for his coverage of the Korean war for his reporting on the Little Rock story; Clark Mollenhoff, 37, of the Des Moines Register and Tribune, for stories on labor racketeering so well documented that they were used by Senate investigators as leads in the devastating exposure of Teamsters Jimmy Hoffa and Dave Beck.

Fiction: the late James Agee for the bestselling novel, A Death in the Family (TIME. Nov. 18).

Drama: Hollywood Scriptwriter Ketti Frings, for her adaptation to Broadway of Novelist Thomas Wolfe's sprawling Look Homeward, Angel.

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