Newspapers: Moderation in Dixie

• Share

In January 1961, Montgomery's rabidly segregationist Alabama Journal editorialized: "The federal courts are now running the public schools. The courts are gummed up with hundreds of cases as the South tries to resist herding incompetent and inexperienced voters to the polls and race mixing in the school rooms." Last week, in the wake of violence at Selma, Ala., the Journal had a far different message: "By dumb, cruel and vastly excessive force, we have made new civil rights legislation almost a dead certainty; we have stained the state and put the lie to its claims of peace and harmony; given enough rope, as if they haven't already been supplied it, our strategists will hang the state in vainglorious self-immolation."

As the Journal has changed, so has much of the rest of the Southern press. Massive resistance has given way to moderation in both news coverage and editorial opinion. "There are still islands of obstruction among the press," says a Georgia editor, "but fewer examples of outright resistance."

No Crisis of Conscience. As much as any other Southern institution, the press can be blamed for hamstringing integration and encouraging mob rule in the recent past. To be sure, a handful of Southern papers have been preaching moderation for many years: the Atlanta Constitution, the Arkansas (Little Rock) Gazette, the Charlotte Observer, Greenville, Mississippi's Delta Democrat-Times, the Nashville Tennessean. However, says Atlanta Constitution Publisher Ralph McGill, "the Southern press in general abdicated its responsibility to its own principles. This abandonment of responsibility was one of the massive contributions to violence."

Why have the papers now taken a different tack? Most have simply gone the way of the community. Worried about economic injury from bad publicity, power structures in many cities have pressured papers to tone down their diatribes. "Most of the newspapers have only been a weathervane, not a guide," remarks one Alabama editor. "There is no evidence of a crisis of conscience," says McGill. "The Civil Rights Act did many newspapers a great favor. The diehards can now bow out gracefully by saying it's the law."

Too Late for Segregation. Whether moved by courage or realism, some papers have made surprising changes. Alabama's biggest daily, the Birmingham News, which used to make a practice of parroting the segregationist line, has covered the trouble in Selma fully and fairly and has run some thoughtful analyses of civil rights problems. "Whatever progress this state has made is imperiled when an atmosphere of hatred and fear is allowed to prevail," said the News in an editorial. "That atmosphere is thickened, not dispelled, by intemperate actions of uniformed law officers of the state of Alabama, its counties or its municipalities."