(2 of 3)
Such papers as Sullens' Daily News now run more Negro crime news under bigger headlines than ever before—even when it means going as far afield as Chicago. They spike occasional wire stories that show integration working, e.g., a recent A.P. dispatch about the acceptance of three Negroes at the University of North Carolina. They print and reprint testimonials by Negroes who say that they prefer segregation and ignore Negro leaders on the other side, except to quote them out of context to make them sound like wild radicals.
Against this strident tone a new Jackson daily, the State Times (TIME, March 7), tried to sound a more moderate note on racial issues. When the paper started about a year ago, Editor Norman Bradley, an alumnus of the liberal Chattanooga Times, played desegregation news calmly, sometimes chided the state for abuses and injustices committed in the name of segregation. But the paper's directors opposed his policy, and he quit in December to return to the Chattanooga Times as its executive editor. Since he left, the State Times has been tugging almost as hard as Sullens to hold back the hands of the clock.
The Southern Case. More dignified than the extremists is another group of stalwart prosegregation papers typified by the Charleston, S.C. News & Courier (circ. 53,286). It occasionally offends rabid racists by printing constructive news of the Negro community, and its editor, Thomas R. Waring, appeared in Harper's Magazine gently pleading "The Southern Case Against Desegregation."
But Editor Waring makes the case for his own readers with harsher strokes. He plays up news of muggings in Harlem and race riots in Chicago to support a recurrent editorial theme: look what happens where you have integration. In his editorial last week calling the Lucy uproar the result of "appeasement of colored people," his strongest word for the rioters was "impolite."
But the Southern press, up against tough and delicate problems, also has its shining examples of courage and fairness in handling its No. 1 story. In Tuscaloosa, from offices less than two miles from the University of Alabama, Editor Buford Boone of the News (circ. 15,681) topped off thorough coverage of the Lucy story with a hard-hitting editorial: "The university administration and trustees have knuckled under to the pressures and desires of a mob . . . We have a breakdown of law and order and abject surrender to what is expedient ..." The Montgomery, Ala. Advertiser (circ. 60,144), which sees no integration possible in the Deep South in the foreseeable future, nonetheless has given full coverage to the Negro boycott of Montgomery buses (TIME, Jan. 16). It has devoted columns to interviews with leaders of the boycott, also ran a story showing that the first-come, first-seated policy demanded by the Negroes was already working in many Southern cities, including some in Alabama.