The City v. the Publisher

Whenever a Negro does something noteworthy in Lynchburg, Va. (pop. 55,000), the city's two newspapers--the News and the Daily Advance--bury the item in a couple of lines. Whenever a Negro commits a crime, the news is sure to make the front page. When a Lynchburg white man got five years for raping a Negro child, the News argued that he had merely seduced her. When a Negro was tried for raping a white woman, the papers called him guilty well before he was sentenced to death.

Such are the policies of the papers' general manager, Carter Glass III, 48, grandson of Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of the Treasury, who fills both his news columns and his editorials with the kind of racism that has disappeared from most Southern dailies. It takes very little to ignite Glass's legendary temper. When one of his photographers scuffled briefly with a Negro high school teacher last year, he was outraged that the police failed to arrest the teacher. When the police and the city manager ignored his demands for an apology, he went on an editorial rampage, denouncing the city fathers along with the police for failing to uphold law and order in Lynchburg.

Last week, with the city's Negroes threatening to stage a mass demonstration against the papers, the whites decided that they had had their fill of Glass. To every household in Lynchburg went an open letter signed by 71 leading white citizens, including the presidents of the Chamber of Commerce, Lynchburg College and Randolph-Macon Woman's College.

Expected Response. "It is the judgment of these citizens," the letter began, "that the Lynchburg newspapers are contributing to frustration and bitterness. To persist in these policies can only be destructive of the general morale as well as the reputation of our community." The citizens asked for only two small changes in the papers' policy: that they stop suppressing all good news about the city's Negro high school and that they start publishing Negro obituaries instead of charging for them as classified advertisements. "We hope," concluded the letter, "that our Negro citizens will be encouraged by the knowledge that there are many thoughtful white citizens in this community who appreciate their continued willingness, in spite of repeated indignities by the newspapers, to help promote a more wholesome climate throughout the city."

Carter Glass III responded as expected. In identical editorials in both papers, he wrote: "Allegedly in the cause of brotherhood, a group of Lynchburg organizations and individuals have issued an open invitation to racial agitators to come into the city of Lynchburg and attack the Lynchburg newspapers as well as other local institutions." As for the obituaries, wrote Glass, it is a well-known fact that Negroes do not want "free" death notices but "integrated" ones. Glass does not intend to desegregate death in Lynchburg.

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