The smoke from big black cigars supercharged the sticky heat of the basement cafeteria in Chicago's Wabash Avenue Y.M.C.A. A well-dressed, pipe-smoking Negro rose to address the third annual conference of the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association. His 75 listeners, full of fried chicken and Pepsi-Cola, were still wrought up about the issue of their press and their race.
Pegler. The publishers were smoking mad at ''that archtraitor Westbrook Pegler." In his April 28 column Pegler had damned the two biggest Negro papersthe Pittsburgh Courier (circ. 130,000) and the Chicago Defender (circ. 83,000)for exploiting the war emergency to stir up race issues among Negroes in the services. He called them "reminiscent of Hearst at his worst in their sensationalism, and in their obvious inflammatory bias in the treatment of news." In addition he indicted them for exploiting their own people with sucker ads (Luck's Genuine Magnetic Lodestones, $1, etc.), for scandalous gents' room journalism, for whooping up race antagonism for circulation's sake.
Pegler was branded as the bellwether of fascist "agents of the enemy and traitors to democracy." But when it came resolution time, no anti-Pegler resolution materialized. Cried cocky little Ira Lewis (publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier): "Who is this guy Pegler? I never heard of him."
Powell. One of the speakers at the convention was Marshall Field, backer of Chicago's Sun and New York's PM. He urged the Negro press to go easy on the race issue. The advice was interesting, since he is also the backer of a Negro paper, a four-month-old Harlem tabloid called The People's Voice (to which last week he extended "another $25,000 of credit").
Publisher of The People's Voice is Harlem's big (6 ft. 4), pompous ball of fire, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Not a delegate to the convention, 33-year-old Publisher Powell was more talked about than acclaimed. Some said he was a hot shot who would fizzle out in a year. One Negro executive called him "a new and slightly pinko kid who hasn't got his feet wet yet." He was called "a poor imitation of Ralph Ingersoll." His journalism was described as the kind that "just brings down criticism on the heads of the whole Negro press."
If Marshall Field doesn't like the race issue, Publisher Powell does (see cut). No Harlem upstart, he is pastor of Harlem's 134-year-old Abyssinian Baptist Church (world's biggest Protestant congregation: 14,000). He is New York City's first and only Negro councilman. He has led picket lines, organized campaigns for jobs for Negro clerks and doctors. He is a close friend of Harlem's No. 1 boogie-woogie manager, Charles Buchanan of the Savoy Ballroom. He employs five secretaries and a liveried chauffeur. And he has his eye on Congress.
As an exploiter of the war emergency Publisher Powell has no superior. Lambasting U.S. "pseudo-democracy," he advocates complete world equality of Negroes and whites. "This war," he has declared in his "Soapbox" column, "upon the basis that it is now being waged, is utterly futile."