Dear Dixie

For more than three years, many Southern and Southwestern papers --dailies and weeklies, small-town and big--have printed an editorial slugged "Dear Dixie," purporting to have originated at the conservative Chicago Tribune. It is a mea culpa for the Northern press's coverage of racial incidents in the South. It begins: "Can you possibly find it in your heart to accept our sincere apology?" And it ends: "Perhaps we have not yet learned fully to appreciate what you have been trying to do --but for whatever belated comfort it may be, from our glass house we will not be throwing any more stones at you." The "editorial," as it turns out, is a fake. Savs Tribune Editorial Writer John H. Thompson: "We never wrote it, and we don't know how in hell our name got tacked on to it."

The Tribune has been trying to disavow the tract ever since it first began to circulate. The actual author of the piece is a right-wing radio commentator named Paul Harvey, and in an editorial on Oct. 11, 1966, the Tribune said: "We trust that from now on it will be credited to its proper source." No such luck. Either reassured by its appearance in other papers or convinced by a copy that arrived in the mails, Southern editors have gone ahead and printed it. Meanwhile the Trib has plodded along behind, demanding and usually getting retractions.

Last week the Tribune went a step further. When the white Memphis Citizens' Council bought advertising space for the "editorial" in the Commercial Appeal and the Press-Scimitar, the Tribune asked a federal district court for an injunction barring the use of its name in connection with the piece. Harvey's office says that there were a number of requests for copies of the commentary after it had been read on the air on Aug. 3, 1966; he is also aware that the editorial has been falsely attributed. Says Harvey's secretary: "I've seen a letter the Tribune sent out denying it. I'm surprised they've gotten so distressed about it."

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