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In Texas the only major dailies to take a flat stand for integration and the Supreme Court decision are the locally owned and jointly run San Antonio Express and News (circ. 141,734). Tomme Call, editor of the News editorial page, won first place in the 1955 annual editorial awards of the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors Association for a piece urging complete compliance with the Supreme Court decision. The Express and News have run stories with picture strips on the success of interracial policy in the city's Roman Catholic high schools, also campaigned for integration with front-page cartoons and youth panels.
"It was our feeling [that] any area trying to combat integration would be making trouble for itself and worsening race relations," says Call. "We went into it blind. We had no way of knowing what public reaction would be. We were pleasantly surprised at the almost complete lack of opposition."
Well-played stories of how integration succeeded in local schools have also distinguished the coverage of the Nashville Tennessean-(circ, 113,439) and Banner (circ. 91,262).
Old Habits. Southern editors who try to call their shots as they see them must develop thick skins. Notable example: Hodding Carter, whose Greenville Delta Democrat-Times (circ. 11,980) delivers courageous coverage in the midst of hostile Mississippi. "We print anything about the controversy locally, regionally or nationally that we can get our hands on," says Editor Carter. Mrs. Carter often gets threatening telephone messages for "that damned nigger-lover husband of yours."
Actually, many Southern newsmen took it for granted that their papers would soft-pedal such an emotionally explosive issue. But the surprise is that so many editors are now willing to stick their necks out. It is only about ten years since newspapers in the South began in any numbers to break such old habits as depicting the Negro only as a criminal or a minstrel end man, and learning such new ones as calling him "Mr."—a practice still far from universal. Only in the same short period have Southern papers started to drop the tag "Negro" in stories unless it is pertinent, and to run more news of the Negro engaged in constructive activity. However, such news has been curtailed since the segregation battle flared.
Even where Negro news appears, it is usually lumped together in "Jim Crow" columns, a separate page or edition. Few Southern papers have desegregated their own columns to permit items about Negroes to appear anywhere in the paper.
Against that background even anti-segregation newsmen feel that any great improvement in the coverage of integration will come just as gradually as integration itself. Says Colbert ("Pete") McKnight, editor of the Charlotte, N.C. Observer, one of the region's most conscientious dailies: "Northern editors try to oversimplify our problem. It just cannot be done. It will be at least a decade before many changes take place in Southern journalism."