by John Egerton
The black papers often published news and commentary on racial issues that couldn’t be found in any white publication, but few outside the black neighborhoods paid much attention. Black publishers and editors in the South got little except grief from a mixed bag of critics—liberal and conservative, black and white, North and South. (They were spurned by the white press, too; in 1946 the association of newspaper correspondents in Washington voted to bar the Atlanta Daily World’s representative from the congressional press galleries.) If the papers were at all conciliatory on social issues, they were viewed as timid and Uncle Tom-ish; if they were combative, they were called recklessly radical; if they tried to entertain or amuse or titillate as well as inform, they were dismissed as sensationalist rags. But in their denunciation of segregation and its crippling effects on all Southerners, the black papers were not only first and right but prophetic; the problem was not with them but with the whites who ignored their warnings.
It was also in the 1940s that the New York Times and Time magazine sent reporters to open bureaus in the region. John N. Popham of the Times established a base in Chattanooga and started roaming the South by car in 1947, and before that, William S. Howland set up an office in Atlanta for Time and its sister publication, Life. Meanwhile, transplanted Southerners were making their mark at publications in the North, sometimes writing critical and hard-hitting stories about the South and its problems. Included in that group were Henry Lesesne of Charleston, who wrote for the New York Herald-Tribune and the Christian Science Monitor; Birmingham native Helen Fuller, managing editor of The New Republic; Thomas L. Stokes of Savannah, a nationally syndicated columnist; and Kentuckian Ted Poston, a pioneering black reporter for the New York Post beginning in the late 1930s. George Streator, a Nashvillian and a Fisk alumnus, was the New York Times’s first black general-assignment reporter, beginning in 1945. Rarest of all were the expatriate journalists who returned to the South to write; Thomas Sancton in New Orleans and William Bradford Huie in the little north Alabama town of Hartselle were two of the few.
There were, to be sure, some urban papers in the South, and numerous smaller dailies too, that controlled public opinion on the conservative flank of the mainstream journals. Stahlman’s Nashville Banner, the Hederman papers in Jackson, and the Charleston News & Courier were usually in a reactionary class by themselves. E. M. “Ted” Dealey’s Dallas Morning News, George Healy’s New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Houston Post owned by William and Oveta Culp Hobby, and Jesse Jones’s Houston Chronicle were also staunchly conservative on most economic, political, and social issues. So, too, were the Memphis and Knoxville papers, the Chattanooga News-Free Press, the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, and the State in Columbia, South Carolina.
D. Tennant Bryan, who owned the Richmond papers and the Tampa Tribune, moved them ever closer to the camp of the conservative resistance. Virginius Dabney, in his long tenure as editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch for the Bryan family, had endorsed FDR four times— “with diminishing enthusiasm,” he later explained, adding, “I held my nose and stayed with Truman in 1948.” But the tide was turning fast; soon after that, Bryan named a twenty-nine-year-old conservative reporter and editor, James J. Kilpatrick, a native of Oklahoma, to replace the retiring Douglas Southall Freeman as editor of the News Leader, and in the next five years, Kilpatrick would pull both his paper and Dabney’s Times-Dispatch sharply to the right. (Harry Ashmore had interviewed for Freeman’s job before Kilpatrick; he came away convinced that Bryan and his general manager, John Wise, would fill the job with someone to the right of Dabney.)
Similar signs of change were evident in other states. In Alabama, a moderate-to-liberal tradition had put Hugo Black and then Lister Hill and John Sparkman in the U.S. Senate, and had sent Jim Folsom, a genuine populist, to the governor’s office—all more or less with the blessing of newspapers in Birmingham and Montgomery, papers that fancied themselves as progressive or even liberal. And yet it was to be Alabama, almost as much as Mississippi or South Carolina, that fueled the Dixiecrat revolt, with party bosses and an aroused force of reactionary whites riding roughshod over the senators and governor. They also pressured and punished any newspapers that didn’t swear the new oath of allegiance. By 1950, John Temple Graves would be a defiant ex-Democrat, and the leading daily papers in Alabama would all be tilting sharply to the right.
But such wrenching reactionary changes as these were not particularly noticeable right after the war; the extremist mood came into its own with the Dixiecrats in 1948, and gained momentum after that. The Richmond papers and their management didn’t trumpet a belligerently hostile editorial tune before 1954. In keeping with their carefully tended self-image as Virginia gentlemen and Southern patricians, they were restrained and dignified in their opposition to social change, and they made a weak pass at remaining nominal big-D Democrats. Only the handful of arch-conservatives in Jackson, Charleston, Nashville, and a few other places went to verbal extremes in venting their postwar displeasure with political and economic and social liberalism. The bellicose, saber-rattling posture of defiance that all but a dozen or so Southern papers would eventually strike to one degree or another was the trademark of only a few in the years before 1948. Even the messy Dixiecrat separation and estrangement didn’t cause a majority of the press to start clamoring for a divorce.
What was most surprising about the postwar positioning of Southern publishers, editors, and writers on the liberal-to-conservative spectrum was that the balance continued to weigh in favor of the more moderate and progressive papers all the way to the end of the 1940s, as it had for most of the previous decade or more. Thus a curious and inexplicable anomaly continued: a press more forward-looking, more open-minded and liberal, than its political representatives, its pillar institutions, or the generality of its readers. It bears repeating that the journalists were not integrationists, not left-wing radicals, not revolutionary reformers. But except for a few, they were not right-wing reactionaries either.
“We were saying that the South should live up to the promise of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine,” said Harry Ashmore. “That was as far as we felt we could push. But at the same time, I think most of us knew that there was no way to make separate equal—and so in a sense, we were really forcing the integration issue.”
Newspaper publishers and editors and reporters—the principal dispensers of adult education in the pre-television South—might well have led the region to a quicker, more direct, and more equitable resolution of its racial conflicts had the choice been left to them. Before the Cold War cranked up in 1946; before the President’s Committee on Civil Rights called for the abolition of segregation in 1947, before the Dixiecrats seceded from the Democratic Party in 1948—in other words, before race became a pressing issue on the public agenda of the South and the nation—all but a few of the region’s newspapers fell somewhere on the modern side of the dividing line between Old South white supremacy and whatever the newest New South was going to be.
But then the Dixiecrats forced the issue, and the dividing line became an unbridgeable canyon. “We had to stick with the Democratic Party or take up with the Dixiecrats,” said Ashmore. “The other third party—the Progressives, with Henry Wallace—was not a realistic alternative in the South. They were as far out on the left wing as Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats were out on the right. The way we saw it, the traditional Democratic Party occupied the middle ground. The only real choice the Southern liberals had at that point was to stand and fight as yellow-dog Democrats. Party loyalty was all that saved us.”
I like to look at newspapers as diaries or ledger books, as vast repositories for the daily accumulation of raw material from which history is shaped and made permanent. From that perspective, the ratio of waste to essence is very high—about like gold mining or pearl harvesting. All those pages, all that ink, all that effort, and so much of it expendable, come and gone and forgotten in a matter of hours. But pause and look carefully at everything—the
news and editorials, the photos, the display ads, the classifieds—and a pattern begins to emerge. You learn what people said and did, what they ate, what they wore, what they drove; deeper still, you learn what they thought, what they believed, what they valued.
Reading Southern newspapers from the postwar forties now, you can get an acute sense of a region and a people striving for equilibrium in a time of great uncertainty. After the exhilaration of victory in the summer of 1945, consensus quickly eroded and then evaporated into the magnolia-scented atmosphere. The South was still confused, ambivalent, defensive, still a place divided—against outsiders and against itself. There had to be some sorting out of feelings, attitudes, beliefs, some settling of the air. By the end of 1947 the preliminaries were over, and the real struggle for the future of the South was about to begin.
For two and a half years the newspapers had been full of signs:
They told of PFC Jack Thomas of Albany, Georgia—a black orphan raised by his grandmother—being awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for battlefield heroism in Germany. But he heard little cheering when he came home. The outpouring of public adulation that awaited most war heroes returning to the South died to a whisper when the heroes weren’t white. There were other African-Americans like Jones, including Eugene Jackson of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Frank Steger of Tuscumbia, Alabama—decorated combat veterans who had risked their lives for liberties they weren’t allowed at home. There was George Watson of Birmingham, posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for valor in the South Pacific; his life and death served as a telling indictment of a social system that accepted the courage and sacrifice of blacks who defended freedom—even as it judged them inferior, and thus undeserving of freedom themselves.
The newspapers reported on the efforts of the American Veterans Committee to become an activist organization with a biracial membership and a liberal agenda. In contrast to the more conservative and segregated groups—the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and others—the AVC was determined to right social wrongs at home. Its motto was “Citizens first, veterans second.” Upwards of two dozen chapters were started in the South, primarily in university communities or in big cities like Atlanta. Their appeal was to former officers and enlisted men, to male and female veterans, to whites and blacks—to any veteran who was ready “to work for change in the community,” said Lester Persells, one of the Atlanta organizers. He and a handful of others, including Johnny Glustrum, Robert A. Thompson, Harold Fleming, Odom Fanning, Sylvan Meyer, and Calvin Kytle, formed the nucleus of an activist group that grew to more than 250 members.
Newspaper reports also described each new addition to the lengthening file of civil rights decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower federal courts. With increasing frequency, plaintiffs were mounting challenges against the exclusion of blacks and other minorities from jobs, from juries, from primary elections, from certain kinds of housing and hospitals and schools, from the full services of interstate buses and trains. In response, a clear pattern was emerging: The courts were chipping away at the elaborate legal framework of racial segregation and discrimination, slowly but surely extending and reapplying the equal protection of the law to all citizens.
Newspapers in practically every Southern state were casting a critical eye on the woefully inadequate schools, hospitals, housing projects, and other public facilities to which black citizens were confined under the “separate but equal” doctrine. The papers minced no words: “Indifference bordering on criminal neglect” plagued the schools, said one; another reported that health facilities had not advanced beyond “the kitchen surgery era,” and a third said slum housing “resembled something from a grim chapter of Dickens.” Most Southern dailies supported teacher pay equalization and the hiring of black policemen, and roundly condemned the poll tax and the white primary. Nor did they shrink from showing the South’s disadvantages vis-à-vis the nation after the war: fewer of its citizens in school, more in prison, more rejected by the military for mental or physical disorders, more living in substandard housing, more diseased or illiterate, more unskilled, unemployed, unfulfilled.
In Mississippi, the papers reported, an organization of blacks headed by A. W. Wells of Jackson was telling the governor and legislature that the cost of continued segregation could be measured by whatever it took to bring about complete equality: a nine-month school term for black children, a “free and untrammeled ballot,” an end to the poll tax and the white primary, equal justice in the courts, equal pay for equal work, a redistribution of education funds from nine-to-one in favor of whites to fifty-fifty (matching the racial makeup of the population), and “a full-fledged state university for Negroes equal in all respects to the University of Mississippi.”
The press presented daily evidence that inadequate delivery of medical care was a region-wide social problem made infinitely worse by segregation. The crisis went beyond underdeveloped or nonexistent hospital facilities for African-Americans and a chronic shortage of doctors to serve them. A public-health specialist in Florida concluded that the basic concept of “separate but equal” health services was wasteful and self-defeating; it not only left blacks at a great disadvantage compared to whites, but the South lagging far behind other regions. There was, he said, no such thing as a segregated solution to health problems. “It is impossible to wipe out diseases like tuberculosis and whooping cough and scarlet fever in one race without taking measures to wipe them out in the other.” Calls for a single, unified public-health initiative and a system of national health insurance were being raised in some quarters.
Press reports of lawsuits seeking desegregation of higher education in several states were frequently published. Cases in Texas and Oklahoma were wending their way through the federal courts. In virtually every Southern state, debate was spreading on the issue of black admission to graduate and professional schools—for which hardly any “separate but equal” alternatives existed. In the states bordering the South, a handful of black students had managed to scale the walls of segregation in medicine, law, and other upper-level fields of study, but the ex-Confederate states were utterly unyielding. The political and academic leadership of Southern universities and colleges wouldn’t bend, even though student editorials and opinion polls there showed substantial support for the notion of desegregation and equal educational opportunity.
The newspapers reported on the deliberations of biracial community groups in such widely scattered cities as Chattanooga, Winston-Salem, and Tampa. White and black ministers meeting together also got favorable press treatment, whether in rural Hertford County in eastern North Carolina or in the Georgia-Alabama state-line cities of Columbus and Phenix City. Southern state and local chapters of the YMCA and YWCA, the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Urban League worked openly and actively for tolerance and fairness in race relations. Edgar Ray, editor of the Tampa Times, was president of his city’s Urban League chapter and a frequent speaker at regional and national conferences of the league and other interracial organizations. He was also one of more than a dozen editors on the board of the Southern Regional Council.
Repeatedly in the newspapers of the South after World War II, the voices of individual advocates of social reform were recorded and amplified. In those pages appeared Kentucky attorney Ed Prichard, telling a Charleston civic club audience that the day of all-white elections in the South was over. And North Carolina educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown, saying in a speech to a gathering of New Yorkers that they, too, were being tested, because “the pursuit of justice in America—for blacks, for women, for Southerners—is everyone’s responsibility.” And Glenn W. Rainey, a white English professor at Georgia Tech, declaring that many whites in the South were “on the side of the Negro in the struggle to end segregation and inequality.” And Arthur Shores of Birmingham, taking on the white power structure single-handedly in a class-action lawsuit to open the polls to black c
itizens in Tuskegee.
And Jonathan Daniels, who said in a public forum in Richmond that Virginia, a diehard defender of the poll tax, was “both the cradle and the graveyard of democracy.” And Aubrey Williams, telling an audience of North Carolina educators that the South “brings up the tail end of everything in this country because we are deep in conflict with ourselves.” Before the region could “move out of bondage,” he said, “we must eliminate segregation—hook, line and sinker.”
And finally, against the hope and promise of progressive change, the Southern press also recorded and magnified the strident voices of political demagogues and Klan terrorists and a host of other reactionary extremists. Their views on race and class and democracy were diametrically opposed to those of the progressives. As these forces of reform and resistance came ever closer to open conflict, the narrow demilitarized zone between them was diminishing rapidly, its occupants crossing over to one side or the other, or abandoning the field altogether. Among them were some troubled men and women who believed in fairness and justice, but whose deference to Southern traditions restrained them from advocating the sudden demise of Jim Crow.
Even the most prominent Southern journalists—McGill, Dabney, Carter, Daniels—reacted negatively to the report of President Truman’s civil rights committee, and their consternation underscored the deep and conflicting feelings that divided the South’s progressives and liberals and moderates almost as much from one another as from the majority on the right. (Jonathan Daniels was only mildly disturbed by the report, and he soon came around to its defense, but he stood aside while his eighty-five-year-old father, Josephus, still writing just two months before his death, composed the News & Observer editorial lambasting the committee for prescribing “radical” remedies that “would prove worse than the disease.”)