Courage in Clinton

"Is it wrong to believe in the Constitution of the United States?" asked the editorial in Tennessee's Clinton Courier-News last week. "Is it wrong to try to preserve peace in your community, to try to prevent individuals from being led astray by irresponsible rabble-rousers?" From Editor-Publisher Horace Wells these were not rhetorical questions. His weekly paper's remonstrances against the hooligan-led integration riots in Clinton last year (TIME, Sept. 10) have spurred threats against Wells's family, a dynamiting near his home, attempts to get a boycott going against the paper. But the paper has lost only 300 of its 3,845 subscribers, and Newsman Wells, 50, has never weakened in his conviction that the Supreme Court's integration decree must be obeyed, however unwelcome it may be.

Last week, after he had appeared as a Government witness in the contempt trial of White Supremacist John Kasper and 15 Clinton citizens. Editor Wells's questions were resoundingly answered at the National Conference of Weekly Newspaper Editors' annual convention in Car bon'dale, Ill. There Wells received the

Southern Illinois University 1957 Elijah P. Lovejoy Award for "realistic devotion to the principles of law and order" that exposed him to "the scorn and abuse of a large segment of his community." It was Horace Wells's third award this year. The others: a special award from the Tennessee Press Association, a National Editorial Association citation for "courageous personal journalism."