Loud Voice in Atlanta

The Atlanta Inquirer, a Negro weekly, is neither a good newspaper nor a financial success. The paper has the same 15,000 circulation that it started with eleven months ago, and a fulltime staff of only three. It is often badly written, amateurish, and narrow in its approach. As far as the Inquirer is concerned, the only important stories are those involving the Negro's aggressive pursuit of equality. But in this electric sector of human endeavor, the Inquirer is giving lessons to newspapers all over the South.

Reverberating Beat. Almost every week, the Inquirer runs stories that are not to be found elsewhere in the Atlanta press, which includes two white dailies (the morning Constitution, circ. 200,913, and the evening Journal, 260,449) and the World (19,500), a Negro daily founded in 1928. Recently, when an eight-year-old Negro child, injured in a traffic accident, was refused admission to Atlanta's Georgia Baptist Hospital, the Inquirer not only scored a clean beat but had the satisfaction of engineering a minor victory in its chosen cause: as a direct result of the Inquirer story, Georgia Baptist now admits emergency patients of any shade.

Another Inquirer exclusive reverberated all the way to Washington. After discovering that Lockheed Aircraft Corp.'s Marietta, Ga., plant provided separate time clocks, dining and rest-room facilities for Negroes and whites in non-compliance with a federal order forbidding discrimination in Government contract work, the paper published the facts and focused White House attention on Marietta. Lockheed in now integrating in Georgia.

In its very militancy, the Inquirer contrasts as sharply with Atlanta's established Negro paper, the World, as does the new Negro generation with the old. Early in 1960, when the first wave of sit-in demonstrations swept the South, the World did not approve. "The unfortunate news coming out of Jacksonville, Florida," editorialized the conservative daily, taking note of a sit-in in that city, "is to be highly regrettable."

Relentless Rights. But the South's impatient young Negroes disagreed. And in Atlanta last year, when J. Lowell Ware, a Negro proprietor of a printing plant, proposed to Negro college students in Atlanta that they start a paper with his facilities, the Inquirer was born. In as editor, after two trial issues, went Carl Holman, 42, professor of English at Atlanta's Negro Clark College.

Inquirer correspondents--Negro college students hired at no pay--swarmed over the paper's chosen beat without any real competition; two of this year's Freedom Riders, for example, were Inquirer newsmen, who sent the paper eyewitness reports of events from bus stops along the route.

If commercial success eludes the Inquirer, it is mainly because Editor Holman and Publisher Ware do not care. The paper accepts ads, but none from downtown Atlanta merchants who have not integrated their stores. The Inquirer is unalterably geared to the relentless campaign of the Southern Negro for equal rights on every score. "When people say a story should be suppressed 'for the good of the community,' " says Carl Holman, "what they usually mean is peace at any price. We just don't believe in that."

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