by John Egerton
Two years later, while still insisting that he was a progressive, Graves drew a racial line in the sand with this declaration: “The will of the Southern white against racial amalgamation is total. For that he is willing to filibuster, fight, play foul or fair, risk another Civil War. Right or wrong, the South is not going to have race segregation destroyed.” (Graves’s father, as editor of the Atlanta Georgian, had contributed to the outbreak of that city’s worst race riot in 1906 by expressing the same sentiments in a more inflammatory tone.) Such rancor and belligerence made the Age-Herald seem more extreme than its sister paper, the News, whose widely respected general manager was James E. Chappell. The rival Birmingham Post, of the Scripps-Howard chain, also tried to avoid an extremist image.
In Louisville, the Courier-Journal was rapidly gaining a reputation as the South’s most liberal newspaper—and probably its finest. Owner-editor Barry Bingham and publisher Mark Ethridge won praise for a high standard of news reporting and editorial commentary; they were also deeply involved in a wide range of cooperative ventures for Southern improvement. The Nashville Tennessean, under its publisher Silliman Evans, and the St. Petersburg Times, with Nelson Poynter in command, were two more dailies allied with the national (read liberal) Democrats. Coleman A. Harwell, the Tennessean’s executive editor, and Jennings Perry, who ran its editorial page, were typical of a great many Southern editors who wielded considerable clout but kept a low public profile (Perry, however, did take his fight against the poll tax into larger arenas). Editor William R. “Pop” Smith of the Macon News was touted around the region as a “fighting liberal,” and Edgar Ray, editor of the Tampa Times, was active in the highest ranks of the National Urban League.
The Charlotte News had an impressive staff of young editors and reporters and a reputation for scrappiness in the late 1930s—and that was before W. J. Cash gave them all a taste of the limelight with the publication of his celebrated book, The Mind of the South. After Cash’s early, tragic death in 1941, several alumni of the Charlotte paper went on to prominence. Two of them, Harry S. Ashmore and C. A. “Pete” McKnight, would serve brief stints as editor of the News on their way up.
All in all, Southern journalists compared favorably with the nation’s best in the years when depression at home and conflict abroad were the main preoccupations of Americans everywhere. It wasn’t just the big-city editors who acquitted themselves well, either. Numerous small-town dailies and black newspapers made important contributions; female editors and writers were at least as conspicuous and productive as women journalists in other parts of the country; and Southerners white and black who left the region to write for national publications often did exceedingly well.
Some random examples: In the heart of the Deep South, enlightened and responsible journalism was generated by such editors and publishers as Harry M. Ayers of the Anniston (Alabama) Star, O. E. Jones of the Batesville (Arkansas) Guard, George McLean of the Tupelo (Mississippi) Journal, M. R. Ashworth of the Columbus (Georgia) Ledger-Enquirer, and John M. O’Dowd of the Florence (South Carolina) Morning News. These and other papers were consistently and courageously bringing hard news and progressive editorials to their small-city readers at a time when the news was often bad and candid comment reflected poorly on state and local leadership.
The region’s black papers—all weeklies except for C. A. Scott’s Atlanta Daily World—generally had a small advertising base and limited circulation, but their readers looked to them as the only substantial source of news and opinion from or for the minority community, and the best of the papers delivered the goods impressively. The Norfolk Journal & Guide, published by P. B. Young, was known and respected in Virginia and beyond. Prominent among Young’s fellow editors and publishers were Carter Wesley, who put out the Houston Informer and other papers; John H. McCray of the Lighthouse & Informer in Columbia, South Carolina; Frank L. Stanley of the Louisville Defender; Roscoe Dunjee of the Black Dispatch in Oklahoma City; and L. C. and Daisy Bates, publishers of the Arkansas State Press in Little Rock.
White critics who dismissed the black press as radical and irresponsible or marginal and inferior failed to recognize the extent to which it gave voice to the African-American’s unquenchable thirst for the same rights and privileges enjoyed by other citizens. In their newspapers and in numerous national magazine articles, black writers hammered away repeatedly and insistently on the same theme: We want a role—in combat, in the workplace, in the national scheme of things. But too many whites, South and North—even the most well-intentioned—could only counsel polite patience.
Long before the exalted New York Times got around to hiring women across the board in news and editorial positions, people like Nell Battle Lewis of the Raleigh News & Observer, Margaret Dixon of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, Willie Snow Ethridge of the Courier-Journal in Louisville, Nellie Kenyon of the Nashville Tennessean, and Katherine Grantham Rogers of the Charlotte News had made names for themselves as true competitors in the male-dominated world of daily journalism. Other women felt they had to leave the South to write. Helen Fuller of Birmingham, having worked as a lawyer in the New Deal and on the staff of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, opened a Washington bureau for The New Republic in the early 1940s and later became the magazine’s managing editor.
Many aspiring black journalists departed too. Ted Poston got out of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in the mid-1920s and put together a career that embraced the Harlem Renaissance, the New Deal, and a pioneering thirty-five-year reportorial tenure with the New York Post. Others who later found inspiration in his example and took up journalism in the North included Louis E. Lomax of Georgia, Carl Rowan of Tennessee, and Lerone Bennett, Jr., of Mississippi. Among the numerous young white men to follow similar stars were John Fischer, a Texan who became editor of Harper’s magazine; William Bradford Huie of Alabama, who for a decade during and after the war was a writer and then editor and publisher of the American Mercury (once the barbed spear of H. L. Mencken); and Thomas Sancton of New Orleans, who preceded Helen Fuller as managing editor of The New Republic.
Of all the nationally known and respected Southern journalists of the thirties and forties, probably none had more visibility and influence than Richmond editor Virginius Dabney and three others: Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, Hodding Carter of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi, and Jonathan Daniels of the Raleigh News & Observer. These four, all Southern-born between 1898 and 1907, stood symbolically astride the two centuries—and, subsequently, on the bridge between Old South and New, between the painful past and a hopeful future. They approached the prime of their lives and the pinnacle of their profession with a prolific and continuing output of daily columns, national magazine articles, books, speeches, and radio commentaries. Whenever the quartet of editors wrote or spoke about the South, their words were as closely followed and as carefully listened to as those of any other public figures of the time.
Certainly there was a need for perceptive spokesmen. One of the most disturbing consequences of World War II was that it spawned in the South and across the nation the most precipitous deterioration in race relations since the bloody Red Summer of 1919. In some ways, the sudden intensity of the problems seemed worse in the North than in the South, but there was more than enough strife, sorrow, and hostility to go around.
The Southern journalists struggled to understand it all. Before the war started, most white progressives in the region saw themselves as liberals within the context of the prevailing “separate but equal” philosophy. But segregation had consistently failed to bring about any semblance of an equal distribution of resources and opportunities, and in the midst of a global war with heavy racial overtones (even John Temple Graves called Hitler “the greatest race-baiter in history, the Jim Crow of all the ages”), it was harder and harder for blacks to justify risking life and limb in such a fight when Jim Crow and race-baiting were still the daily reality at home. Under the circumstances, it appeared that the old s
tyle of Southern liberalism could no longer be sustained; it would be necessary henceforth for thinkers and opinion leaders to begin turning in the direction of greater equality or risk being left behind to hold the old fort with the defenders of white supremacy.
As the center eroded, Virginius Dabney inched cautiously to the right. He had been the first of his generation to extol the virtues of Southern liberalism, enshrining the philosophy in his 1932 book. In those days he was a genteel Menckenite, a mild-mannered iconoclast; now, a decade later, in a new book called Below the Potomac, he sounded some of the old themes again but seemed a bit more reserved in his liberalism, a bit more defensive of the South. Thinking about race, Dabney repeated his call for tolerance and fairness, but added what was for him a specific new emphasis: the need to maintain equal but completely separate education for whites and blacks, from preschool to post-graduate study.
John Stewart Bryan had bought the Times-Dispatch in 1940, reuniting it and the afternoon News Leader under his family’s banner, as they had been earlier in the century. Both the previous owner and Bryan had given Dabney complete freedom to shape the editorial policy of the Times-Dispatch, but he felt threatened when a new general manager, John D. Wise, a rigid conservative, was brought in during the war. As John Bryan’s health failed and the family awaited a postwar succession to his son, Tennant Bryan, Wise became the de facto publisher and Dabney’s cross to bear.
In 1942 the Times-Dispatch took the lead in a national campaign for leniency in a racially tinged Virginia murder case. The paper argued editorially that a death sentence against a black sharecropper, Odell Waller, convicted on circumstantial evidence of killing a white man, should be commuted to life. Later that year, Dabney endorsed an effort by a group of highly respected Southern black leaders to address the need for improved race relations in the region, and he then joined with a corresponding group of white moderates to find common cause with the black messengers.
But in between those conciliatory gestures, the Richmond editor took a much more negative and visible stance with an article in the January 1943 Atlantic Monthly called “Nearer and Nearer the Precipice.” In it he described what he saw as two opposing camps of irresponsible extremists, one Northern and black (A. Philip Randolph, the NAACP, “the radical colored press”), the other Southern and white (Governor Eugene Talmadge, Congressman John Rankin, the specter of the Ku Klux Klan), and blamed them both for “stirring up interracial hate” and “pushing this country closer and closer to … the worst internal clashes since Reconstruction.”
Dismissing the “white rabble-rousers” as contemptible figures, Dabney concentrated on the “Negro agitators” who were “demanding an overnight revolution in race relations” based on “absolute political and social equality.” If blacks made an all-or-nothing assault on legal segregation of the races, he wrote, “the white leaders in the South who have been responsible for so much of the steady progress of the Negro … will be driven into the opposition camp.” Segregation, he suggested, was a defensible policy, even for liberals; further, the white South couldn’t be pressured into giving it up, and federal authorities would not order its abandonment. Reforms in this sphere, Dabney concluded, “cannot be forced by executive fiat but are the fruit of gradual evolutionary development.” Separate facilities must be made completely equal, he allowed, “but if an attempt is made forcibly to abolish segregation throughout the South, violence and bloodshed will result.”
Dabney thus spelled out his position on segregation in unmistakable terms, and even his most appreciative black acquaintances took exception. P. B. Young, the Norfolk publisher, bluntly compared the message to that of Rankin, Talmadge, and Bilbo, the only difference being that “their language is always coarse and their attitude brutal, while your language is always cultured and your attitude dignified.” Stung by such criticism, Dabney made one more public attempt to demonstrate his goodwill. In November 1943, he offered the editorial suggestion—with John Wise’s consent—that Richmond and the state of Virginia repeal their laws mandating segregation in public transportation. Jim Crow rules on buses and trains were cumbersome, and totally separate conveyances were an obvious impossibility; here, Dabney felt, was an area where a dramatic act of charity by whites would win the respect and confidence of blacks, and perhaps lead in time to further concessions.
Surprisingly, letters from readers, most of them written by whites, ran about two to one in favor of Dabney’s proposal, but local and state officials shunned the idea, and almost no other white newspapers in the South endorsed it (though the NAACP and others did, warmly). The Times-Dispatch itself lost enthusiasm for the idea after John Bryan died in 1944 and John Wise solidified his power. Virginius Dabney had tried to stake out a little patch of middle ground from which charitable whites like him could maintain control of the pace and character of social change—but now, he feared, extremists on the right had made it clear that only hostility and conflict would come of any further desegregation initiatives, and radicals on the left had shown that they would not be satisfied with separate-but-equal remedies. With what could only have been an ambivalent feeling of regret and relief, Dabney quietly retreated to safer ground. He had hurled his last lance for the cause of liberalism.
Ralph McGill was less of a patrician than Dabney, and more a man of colorful words and action, but he too showed signs of writhing under the thumb of a more conservative publisher. Clark Howell, Jr., had made him an editorial-page columnist and editor of the Constitution in 1938 and then editor-in-chief in 1942, with full authority for the paper’s stated positions on issues. From that highly visible perch (his signed column appeared seven days a week on the editorial page), McGill quickly established an emotional bond with the people of the South, and it held through good times and bad for more than twenty-five years. His was not an evangelistic crusade, said his biographer, fellow journalist Harold H. Martin, but “a dialogue … directed at the great massed millions of southerners in the middle.” Looking back from the perspective of the seventies, Martin described McGill as “a man of good and decent instincts and stubborn courage speaking with the voice of reason in a violent time.”
For all his eventual courage, McGill was slow to come to his crucible on the race issue. Even in the late 1940s he was not above citing his publisher’s reactionary nature as an excuse for his own lack of enthusiasm for social activism, much as Virginius Dabney was inclined to throw it off on John Wise. Sometimes McGill declared publicly that the South’s segregationist policies were a fact of life with which he basically agreed. His racial views were ambiguous, changeable, inconsistent; he showed a genuine affection for and empathy with individuals of the most diverse sort, but he could also lapse into stereotyping rigidity in his comments about amorphous groups—blacks, Communists, Republicans, liberals.
McGill was a self-described moderate, not a liberal; in truth, he held views in the thirties and forties that differed little from those of Dabney and numerous other Southerners of liberal or progressive persuasion (the terms remain frustratingly imprecise and ambiguous). He was an avid New Dealer, a war hawk, a combative anti-Nazi, anti-Communist, anti-Klan adversary. He fought lynching and the poll tax aggressively, but did not favor federal solutions to state and regional problems. He was cool to the Southern labor movement (except for Miss Lucy Mason, whom he greatly admired), hostile to the NAACP and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and wary of Northern prescriptions for social reform. He was Gene Talmadge’s nemesis and Ellis Arnall’s confidant and counselor. He was unabashedly sentimental, even chauvinistic, about the South and its people, white and black, and he was a generous friend and mentor to dozens of idealistic young Southerners of both races.
What set Ralph McGill apart from Virginius Dabney and so many other homegrown white liberals, especially as war turned to peace and racial discrimination moved to the forefront of regional and national consciousness, was simply that McGill somehow managed over time to change his mind, alter his views, and grow into
a fuller understanding of what democracy and social justice meant, and what they required of him. A passionate man with a heavy bag of conflicting emotions, he was by turns brooding, humorous, ebullient, angry, engaging, protective, nurturing, pugnacious. He was close to the heart and soul of the common folk, having come up among them, and when he saw his opportunity, as editor of the Constitution, to influence them, to help them change and to change with them, he seized it, took it seriously, made the most of it. It didn’t happen suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, but it did finally happen. Somewhere along the way, Ralph McGill took to heart an old adage: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
Much the same thing apparently happened to Hodding Carter, Jr. He could have settled quietly into the somnolent Mississippi Delta subculture of Greenville, where he had gone at the invitation of William Alexander Percy and others in 1936 to start a new paper. But at the tender age of twenty-nine, he was already a veteran of the Huey Long wars in Louisiana, and like many others of his generation, he idealized the image of the journalist as crusading public defender. From the first he was an avid FDR enthusiast, and he crossed swords with Theodore Bilbo early and James Eastland later on. But Greenville and rural Mississippi were by no means as tolerant as urban Atlanta, and Carter, even though he owned his paper, doubtless had no more secure confidence in speaking freely than did Ralph McGill or Virginius Dabney, who so often claimed to see their publishers’ shadows falling over them.
In any case, Hodding Carter, always ably assisted by Betty Werlein Carter, his wife and editorial associate, made his way through the late thirties and the war years by being a progressive Democrat, a home-standing publisher concentrating on local and state issues, an advocate of tolerance and fair play for the plain people, white and black, and a silent assenter to the governing social and economic realities of segregation and white supremacy. It was his personal lack of attraction to, or sympathy with, left-wing causes, more than his fear of hometown reprisals, that kept him away from the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Even so, he wrote early and often for such national publications as The Nation, The New Republic, The Saturday Evening Post, and the magazine of the New York Times, not so much defending the South with all its many faults as simply trying to explain the root causes and to prod self-righteous Yankees and self-doubting Rebels alike to move forward. For his pains, the Greenville editor, a careful moderate, was often dismissed by smug Northerners as a phony liberal (as were Dabney, McGill, Daniels, and other editors), while at home he was branded a reckless radical—and by Mississippi standards, he probably was.