Throughout the South virtually every front page last week told the news of 26-year-old Autherine Lucy's fight to become the first Negro to enter the University of Alabama (see EDUCATION). Yet, like other desegregation news that has crowded its way increasingly into the Southern press since the Supreme Court decision, it got there almost against the will of most editors. Southern newspapers —with scattered exceptions—are doing a patchy, pussyfooting job of covering the region's biggest running story since the end of slavery.
The Other Side. The measure of the Southern press was taken last week by Jere Moore, editor of Georgia's Milledgeville weekly Union Recorder, who once routed the Ku Klux Klan in a local battle. Said Moore: "The newspapers of the South have failed to take the leadership demanded of them in this issue. They have been weak-kneed when they should have been strong. We have not tackled the issue."
Privately, many Southern journalists are far more enlightened than their fellow citizens on the segregation issue, but professionally they are hamstrung by front-office pressure and fear of community wrath. Others are too tied up in their own emotional knots to do justice to the problem. They have struck an uneasy balance between their jobs as newsmen and what they feel is their duty as Southerners.
Most Southern news executives have adopted a buck-passing rule of thumb: When in doubt about a racial story, use the press-association copy. For example, in the Autherine Lucy riots, papers in nearby Birmingham were the only out-of-town dailies in the South to send their own staffers to Tuscaloosa to cover the story. Sometimes papers lean on the wire services for racial news even in their own areas. When one major daily recently got tips of forthcoming antisegregation statements by religious leaders, it passed the word along quietly to a wire service instead of going after the story itself.
The press associations do an even-handed job of straight reporting, but in the rush to meet deadlines with fastbreaking news, they give only bits and pieces of the whole story. Inevitably, they put the accent on spot news of conflict. Without any further effort to see the integration problem whole, so do most Southern papers. Says Editor Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, which does one of the South's best jobs: "Most newspapers seem to have forgotten that there is another side to the story, that Texas is going ahead with integration, that Arkansas is quiet, that North Carolina is quiet, that Tennessee is quiet, that southern Missouri, which is very Southern in attitude, is going with integration."
The Diehards. At its worst, notably in Mississippi, the Southern press is full of slanting, suppression and rabble-rousing against integration. The most violent is the Jackson, Miss. Daily News (circ. 38,813), whose ripsnorting old (78) Editor Fred Sullens incites readers against "mongrelization" under such front-page scare-lines as "YOU ARE FOR US OR AGAINST US." The best that Editor Sullens could say of the Negro was in a sentimental story on the funeral of an 83-year-old onetime janitor at the University of Mississippi; the paper started a scholarship fund in his name, and sang his praises as "a good Negro who knew his place."