Newspapers: Moderation in Dixie

In January 1961, Montgomery's rabidly segregationist Alabama Journal editorialized: "The federal courts are now running the public schools. The courts are gummed up with hundreds of cases as the South tries to resist herding incompetent and inexperienced voters to the polls and race mixing in the school rooms." Last week, in the wake of violence at Selma, Ala., the Journal had a far different message: "By dumb, cruel and vastly excessive force, we have made new civil rights legislation almost a dead certainty; we have stained the state and put the lie to its claims of peace and...

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