The Press: Southern Hospitality

• Share

"Does the city desk know where to reach you at all times?" New York Post Editor James Wechsler asked nervously, as he sent his Reporter Ted Poston, a Negro, to Montgomery, Ala. for a series on the plight of the Negro there. But, as Poston's series made plain in the Post last week, there was no cause for alarm. Reporter Poston, 49, who was roughed up while covering the Scottsboro case in 1933, explored the city of the 6½-month-old Negro bus boycott for three weeks and found no danger, little tension—and plenty of help and hospitality from his white colleagues on the Montgomery Advertiser.

Advertiser Editor in Chief Grover C. Hall Jr. welcomed Poston to choose his own desk in the city room, opened the paper's files to him, set up appointments, offered him a staff photographer, and assigned City Editor Joe Azbell to act as guide and chauffeur. Poston hit it off so well with the staff that he told them a story on himself. He had instructions, he said, to phone Editor Wechsler every day with assurance that he had come to no harm. Poston added that he had got lost on Montgomery streets one night, and two white children had taken the trouble to lead him three blocks to a telephone.

Snorted Editor Hall: "Now what kind of reporting has been done on Montgomery that after 5 billion words by reporters from all over the world, a foremost New York editor is so grotesquely ignorant of Montgomery conditions that he wanted daily assurance that his reporter was among the living?"