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Civl Rights Era Editors
By Eugene L. Roberts
University of Maryland
There
may never have been a time in national history when a small group
of editors became as important or as influential as in the South
during the Civil Rights Era.
The region’s political leaders, the vast majority of the South’s governors, senators and U.S. representatives played politics with the Supreme Court school desegregation decision, questioning whether it even had to be obeyed. A handful of Southern editors, probably no more than 20 at peak, placed the national interest above regionalism and argued that if the Supreme Court was not obeyed, anarchy would descend upon the country. Through editorials or columns, these editors spoke out and became voices of sanity in a period of political abdication from national responsibility. They were at odds with most of their readers. They risked advertising and reader boycotts. But they were forceful and often eloquent.
When political leaders like Harry Byrd of Virginia advocated closing schools to avoid school desegregation, Jonathan Daniels of the Raleigh News & Observer reacted with style. He noted that this -- closing schools -- might be worse even than what had befallen the nation during the Civil War. Because closing schools, he said, was something beyond secession from the Union. It was, he said, secession from civilization.
When
the University of Alabama expelled Autherine Lucy, a black student
of the school for only three days, after riots by student and race-hater
groups, Buford Boone of the Tuscaloosa News took on the university
and the mob. “What were Lucy’s crimes?” he asked. Then he answered.
“She was born black and she was moving against Southern custom and
tradition, but with the law right on up to the United States Supreme
Court on her side. What does it mean today at the University of
Alabama and here in Tuscaloosa to have the law on your side? The
answer has to be nothing, that is if a mob disagrees with you and
the courts. “
Some of the others -- Harry Ashmore, the Arkansas Gazette and Ralph McGill and Gene Patterson of the Atlanta Constitution -- became more than Southern leaders. They became national leaders, supporting federal action, troops if necessary, to uphold the law.
Editors like McGill, fearful at times that they were years ahead of their readers, denied that they were integrationists, only believers in the law. But ultimately, McGill said he was for integration, not just because it was the law but because it was the right and just position to take.
The
editors took great risk. Hazel Brannon Smith watched the financial
health of the Lexington Advertiser in Mississippi decline precipitously
after she protested the sheriff’s shooting of a black man for making
too much noise. The boycotts against her increased in intensity
when she editorially attacked the white citizens council.
Ira Harkey, Jr., editor and publisher of the Pascagoula Chronicle in Mississippi became a pariah in his town and, ultimately, felt compelled to sell his newspaper. His offense: he opposed Governor Ross Barnett’s stop-at-nothing approach to preventing the desegregation of the University of Mississippi. A bullet pierced the door of his newspaper; a shotgun blasted out a window of his home; a cross was burned on his lawn, but Harkey said in an editorial, “Ah Autumn. Falling leaves, the smell of burning crosses.”
Humor, even in the toughest of times, kept the editors afloat. Two of the most courageous editors were father and son, Hodding Carter, Jr. and Hodding Carter III of Mississippi’s Delta Democrat Times. They never lost their ability to laugh or their sense of outrage at racial injustice, particularly the organized brand pushed by the white citizens councils.
After
Hodding Carter, Jr. wrote an article for Look magazine detailing
the dangerous menacing spread of a white citizen’s council, the
article was branded on the floor of the Mississippi House of Representatives
as a quote, “Willful lie by a nigger-loving editor.” And the House
then voted to censure Carter. Carter’s reply in a front-page editorial
was a classic. It said, “By vote of 89 to 19, the Mississippi House
of Representatives has resolved the editor of this newspaper into
a liar because of an article I wrote. If this charge were true,
it would make me well qualified to serve in that body. It is not
true. So to even things up, I hereby resolve by vote of one to nothing
that there are 89 liars in the state Legislature. I am hopeful that
this fever,” he wrote, “like Ku Kluxism that arose from the same
kind of infection will run its course before too long a time. Meanwhile,
those 89 character mobbers can go to hell, collectively or singly,
and wait there until I back down. They needn’t plan on returning.”
When it became popular among racists to refer to Ralph McGill as “Rastus Ralph,” McGill fought back. He named his little dog Rastus and trained it to bark whenever a telephone receiver was pointed at it. Thereafter, when he received harassing phone calls at home, McGill would say, “So you want to speak to Rastus?” and point the receiver at the dog and the dog would bark away.
The outcome of the civil rights struggle might have been different, and almost certainly, the South’s resistance might have even been more violent, had the editors not provided leadership at a crucial time.
In addition to the editors I named, there was Lenoir Chambers of the Norfolk Virginian Pilot; Sylvan Meyer of Gainesville Georgia and the Miami News; Coleman Harwell and John Seigenthaler of the Nashville Tennessean; C.A. “Pete” McKnight of the Charlotte Observer, Bill Baggs of the Miami News; Caro Brown of the Alice, Texas Echo; and John L. Harrison and Horance G. Davis, Jr. of the Gainesville Sun in Florida.
And let us remember, too, the editors of black weeklies like Emory Jackson of the Birmingham World in Alabama and Daisy Bates of the Arkansas State Press. They believed the time had come to end segregation in America. And they struggled fearlessly to hasten the end.
Think of the consequences if the Southern editors had not stood up and reached out to the rest of the nation, even at the risk of angering their readers and touching off reader and advertising boycotts. The gulf between the South and the rest of the nation might have grown wider. A stormy period in our nation’s history might have become even more stormy. Instead, segregation came to an end and our nation entered into a period of reconciliation. Thank you.
This was a "leadership moment" presented at the ASNE Convention April 4, 2001, at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Washington, D.C.
ASNE
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