Covering St. Augustine

It is almost an axiom of the integration struggle in the South: wherever a city's newspapers have pitched in to help, wherever editors and publishers have worked to stretch the limits of local tolerance, there has been a minimum of violence. In St. Augustine, Fla., the Record is a modest little daily (circ. 7,000) with more modest ambitions. It has tried to ignore the South's biggest story, on the hopeful assumption that if nobody pays any attention, the race problem just might go away.

After a fashion, this policy worked for years. St. Augustine had no race trouble to speak of, and when it did, the Record barely spoke of it: last October, when the first lunch counters were integrated in St. Johns County, of which St. Augustine is the seat, the Record gave the incident 1 1/2 in. on an inside page. But last April the South's biggest story also became the biggest story in St. Augustine. That was the month that the civil rights movement enveloped the city.

Leaning Backward. Demonstrations, riots and violence have been the order of the day ever since. But "for a long time we didn't even mention the situation," says Record Editor Harvey Lopez. This posture proved unworkable, especially after one of the arrested picketers turned out to be Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, mother of the Governor of Massachusetts (TIME, April 10). The news flashed out of St. Augustine on all the national wires, and reluctantly the Record played the story on Page One--but beneath a studiously uninformative headline: MORE ARRESTS

MADE AS DEMONSTRATIONS CONTINUE HERE.

That headline symbolizes the Record's dilemma. As a newspaper, it has begun at last to give St. Augustine's civil rights movement the news prominence it deserves. Record accounts of local violence now appear where they belong: on the front page. But as a newspaper with segregationist sympathies, the Record bends over backward to accommodate what it considers the right side.

Negroes are generally referred to as "Negro demonstrators"; the St. Augus-tinians who swing clubs against them are called "white citizens." Mayor Joseph Shelley's press conferences are covered in full: the press conferences of

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., leader of the demonstrators, are not reported at all. After whites and Negroes fought bloodily with clubs and fists in a local motel pool, the Record dusted off the same headline that it had used on the arrest of Mrs. Peabody: MORE ARRESTS

MADE AS DEMONSTRATIONS CONTINUE.

Keeping Silence. "Rumors are persistent," the paper reported recently, "that local Negro citizens and leaders do not approve of racial demonstrations here." After a Florida Beverage Department official had the temerity to beat up a white man who was beating up a Negro, and then got away before infuriated rednecks identified him, the Record obligingly printed his badge number. State police, fearing reprisals, hustled the man out of town.

To preserve neutrality, the paper has embargoed such coverage as action photographs ("showing pictures of violence just adds fuel to the fire") and does not run copy that is considered inflammatory. Says A. H. ("Hoop") Tebault Jr., 29, who took over the paper after his father's death last year: "We are in favor of local problems being solved locally."

Editorially, the Record has hammered on this theme: that trouble would subside if only the agitators would get out of town. "We have no intention of taking an active hand in the situation," Tebault says. "First, because there is no single solution. Second, because for a paper to become committed, it would have to take a stand that could be interpreted as favoring one side over another." Adds Editor Lopez: "The only way this thing can be settled is for Dr. King to withdraw and let us work it out among ourselves."

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