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2014 Resisting the Civil-Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of the Southern White Press Willard T. Edmonds

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

RESISTING THE CIVIL-RIGHTS MOVEMENT:

RACE, COMMUNITY AND THE POWER

OF THE SOUTHERN WHITE PRESS

By

WILLARD T. EDMONDS

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2014 Willard T. Edmonds defended this dissertation on August 21, 2014. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Neil Jumonville Professor Directing Dissertation

Jeffrey Ayala Milligan University Representative

Maxine D. Jones Committee Member

Jennifer L. Koslow Committee Member

Andrew K. Frank Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... iv 1. THE SOUTHERN STYLE ...... 1 2. DRIVEN BY DOGMA ...... 12 3. THE BLIND EYE ...... 52 4. POLICING THE PUBLIC SQUARE ...... 118 5. CONCLUSION ...... 193 REFERENCES ...... 204 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 227

iii ABSTRACT

When conservative politicians captured Washington in the 1980s and 1990s, they brought with them a style of rhetoric rooted in the South of the 1950s and 1960s. The three core elements of this Southern style are clear:

. Strong beliefs — firmly held, loudly proclaimed and adhered to at the risk of becoming

dogmatic.

. Learning not to see — a practiced avoidance of complications or distracting issues, an

ability to turn a blind eye, to deny the obvious.

. Policing of the public square — strict enforcement of the ruling beliefs, at times

becoming a bullying of allies to keep them in line, paired with quick and sharp public

attacks on dissenting opinions.

The Southern style is now an ingrained element of the conservative movement, and it operates with, and relies upon, active cooperation of the conservative press. This, too, has roots in the South. During the decades of civil rights activism, Southern newspapers instilled

Southern ideology and allegiance among white readers, turned a blind eye to injustice and other weaknesses of Jim Crow culture and cleared the public square of dissenting opinions and alternative points of view. This study examines how the Southern style operated in the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the work of journalists in Richmond, Virginia, Tallahassee, Florida, and

Jackson, Mississippi, and on their interactions with political leaders, activists and the public.

iv CHAPTER ONE

THE SOUTHERN STYLE

When on May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against racially segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education, those seeking social change in the South saw in the decision the beginning of the demise of the Jim Crow era. The Supreme Court, they argued, was the defining voice in the decades-long dispute over civil rights and would guide the nation, and especially the South, through a series of social changes. Those hopes, however, met with sour disappointment. Rather than begin to quiet the argument over the sins or virtues of a dual society, the Brown decision triggered a new and vociferous debate over race in the American

South. What followed in Southern politics and in the press was an intense and public exchange of ideas and arguments over the role of the courts and the limits of federal power and, on rare occasions, the morality of segregation.

The debate was shaped by a variety of players: activists for black freedom and equality,

Southern governors and legislators, business leaders, preachers, school board members and others. Prominent among them were the South’s white newspaper editors. The editors, their arguments and their relationships with the South’s political leaders deserve scrutiny. This study looks at how Southern editors worked with the region’s system of one-party politics to restrict access to new ideas of social change, to encourage white citizens to ignore the realities of life under Jim Crow rules and to punish anyone who expressed criticism of the Southern status quo.

This study considers five newspapers and their editors: James J. Kilpatrick of the

Richmond News Leader, during the development of Virginia’s Massive Resistance to Brown in the fall of 1955; the Birmingham News, during the struggle of civil-rights activists challenging the Alabama city’s rigid rules of segregation and the reckless authority of Eugene “Bull” Connor in 1963; Malcolm Johnson of the Tallahassee Democrat, during the lunch counter sit-ins in the spring of 1960, when a once-segregationist governor voiced sympathy for African American protesters; and the editors and opinion writers of the Hederman family’s Clarion-Ledger and

1 the Jackson Daily News, during the integration of the University of Mississippi in the fall of

1962.

The editors and newspapers are chosen for their regional and ideological diversity.

Kilpatrick was a conservative editor from Richmond, the capital of Virginia, where the culture and politics supported segregation but did not easily tolerate the extreme viewpoints heard in the Deep South. The Birmingham newspapers were part of a city power structure that was deeply conservative on race and tolerated violence on the part of the Ku Klux Klan and others to maintain the status quo in Alabama. Johnson worked in Tallahassee, capital of Florida, a state where some leaders in politics and business wanted the state to enjoy the benefits of the

New South dream of business and industrial progress. His editorial arguments, though conservative in nature, were less obsessed with race than were those of many other Southern editors. The Hederman family and its newspapers in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, espoused the harshest Deep South attitudes and expressed maximum resistance to integration and social change.

This selection of newspapers, editors and communities allows consideration of various white conservative viewpoints: one was Upper South, three were Deep South, and one hoped to be part of the New South; one editor tried to attack desegregation while avoiding overtly racists arguments, others employed racist commentary, and one glossed over racial unrest when he could. Together, these viewpoints expressed by individuals, politicians and newspapers, represented the predominant points of view among white Southerners and white Southern editors of the civil-rights era.

This study examines the rhetoric used by these Southern white editors and by their allies in Southern politics, and it looks at how newspaper editors and elected leaders borrowed persuasive arguments from one another and shared in the tactics of managing public opinion.

In this study, the rhetorical tools employed by these white leaders in opinion and politics are termed the Southern style.

The three core elements of this Southern style are clear:

2 . Strong beliefs — firmly held, loudly proclaimed and adhered to at the risk of becoming

dogmatic.

. Learning not to see — a practiced avoidance of complications or distracting issues, an

ability to turn a blind eye, to deny the obvious.

. Policing of the public square — strict enforcement of the ruling beliefs, at times

becoming a bullying of allies to keep them in line, paired with quick and sharp public

attacks on dissenting opinions.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and extending through the 1960s, this style of politics and rhetoric was hitched to the Southern white press, which evangelized the ideology, declined to acknowledge injustices of segregation and swept away dissenting opinions from the public debate. With rare exceptions, editors at newspapers throughout the

South routinely employed this Southern style of rhetoric on their pages, in both news articles and opinion. To great effect, this widespread adoption of the Southern style handicapped the

South and limited its options, especially regarding race, and the politics-and-press partnership was often effective in beating back or weakening challenges to Jim Crow rules of racial discrimination and white superiority. At mid-century, when long efforts by civil-rights activists began to forge social change, this Southern style and its use in politics and the press kept whites looking to the past when they needed to prepare a new future.

Almost uniformly, the immediate response among Southern editors to the 1954 Brown decision was reluctant acceptance of the ruling and its ramifications. Though the editors did not endorse the decision, most advised at least token conformity to the ruling. Some politicians and journalists spoke against the decision, but broad resistance did not emerge immediately.

This hinted at the possibility of a reasonable transition to integrated schools in the South. Such an opportunity had evaporated by the fall of 1955, when a vigorous challenge to Brown was mounted by Kilpatrick of the Richmond News Leader. The young editor borrowed ideas from

Southern leaders of the past — Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John C. Calhoun — to build a platform for resistance.

3 Kilpatrick’s argument played to the aristocratic vanities of Virginia’s political leaders. It did not attack integration or the black race, as others might have done. Instead, it attacked the power of the Supreme Court while elevating that of the states. He argued that in the case of a flawed and irresponsible decision, which is how he characterized Brown, the Southern states had the authority, the responsibility and the duty to interpose their powers between the federal government and the local schools. Drawing on historical arguments from America’s revolutionary past, Kilpatrick attempted to show precedent for such interposition. His ideas proved wildly popular and formed the basis of Virginia’s policy of Massive Resistance. His influence extended far beyond the Old Dominion. Journalists and politicians throughout the

South quoted his arguments, and within years every Southern state considered interposition legislation.

Kilpatrick’s success in pressing a radical response to Brown suggests strongly that newspaper editors can play significant, even crucial, roles in determining a community’s response to crisis and change. It also illustrates the willingness of Southerners to accept extralegal approaches such as interposition to resist integration and to thwart rulings by the

Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. In addition, it points strongly to the need of the white

South to embrace a defense of segregation that doesn’t address the moral aspects of discrimination. Whites had a powerful desire not to see the injustices of the Southern way of life. Kilpatrick’s arguments allowed them to focus their attention elsewhere — on what he and other editors portrayed as an excessive reach of federal power into state and local affairs.

Farther South, business was king in Birmingham, Alabama’s largest city and home of a powerful and profitable steel-making industry. One of the few truly industrial cities of the

South, Birmingham gave great deference to decisions of its business leaders — known as the Big

Mules — and much of the city’s policies were hammered out by the steel company’s executives and their allies in banking and law. The city’s African American population benefited from the many jobs available in the steel mills and in the related enterprises of mining and shipping that fed the fiery beasts, but these same citizens saw their basic needs such as adequate housing ignored by the city’s leaders. As long-simmering tensions and frustrations turned to grass-roots

4 activism for reform, the power brokers used violence and oppressive police actions to intimidate the hopeful and to hold back social change. The Birmingham News practiced the art of not seeing the unfair conditions and the great power imbalance, even when the rest of the nation and the world became witnesses to Birmingham’s shame.

In Florida, Johnson was editor of the Tallahassee Democrat from 1954 until his retirement in 1978. He set a conservative tone for the newspaper throughout the civil-rights era.

Though Johnson was consistently opposed to those seeking social change, particularly those who engaged in public protest, he was not a typical race-obsessed Southern leader. He was a believer in the promise of the New South, and he was an advocate of better roads, airports and schools — the kind of progressive changes that, he believed, would bring business and industry to the Sunshine State. Like many twentieth century Floridians, Johnson was not a native to the state, and he saw his adopted home as close to Eden, a place of beauty and potential. Part of

Johnson’s New South vision, shared by many Southern whites, was that the social unrest seen elsewhere did not plague his near-perfect community. His town, he argued, enjoyed a harmony of the races. This was a common myth in the South, and it was articulated often by Johnson and other white editors. This study explores the power of this belief and how it blinded Johnson and other Southern journalists to what others saw as clear evidence of racial injustice and dissatisfaction. This study argues that this belief in the innate goodness of Southern society and the refusal to recognize any of its flaws, two attitudes reflected in and reinforced by the

Southern press, became a significant barrier to racial progress.

Unlike Johnson, the editors of the Clarion-Ledger, the leading newspaper in Jackson,

Mississippi, and its sister newspaper, the Jackson Daily News, showed no reluctance to address racial issues. The Clarion-Ledger and Daily News demonstrated a lack of restraint in their defense of segregation and in their attacks on any who would criticize the Southern system.

Few newspapers were as aggressively racist. This study focuses on the Clarion-Ledger’s and

Daily News’ commentary during the crisis over the integration of Ole Miss, a cherished institution in the eyes of the state’s political, business and social elites.

5 In 1962, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett borrowed the defiant strategy of Orval

Faubus, the Arkansas governor whose resistance to integration had proved a political success though a social disaster. Barnett vowed not to let James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran, enroll at the University of Mississippi. Barnett’s defiance of court orders was applauded by the

Hederman family, which controlled the Clarion-Ledger, the Daily News and the state’s other leading media. Through angry editorials, bellicose columns and agitated news coverage, the

Jackson newspapers helped whip Mississippi’s whites into rage and wrath over the integration of Ole Miss. The newspapers’ stridency also served to keep the political leadership, primarily

Barnett, hewing to the hard line. No moderate opinions were tolerated by the editors, and as a result the readers of the Clarion-Ledger and the Daily News had few opportunities to consider any opinions or options other than confrontation. The newspapers’ stark depictions of

President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, as tyrants bent on abuse of federal powers, as strident integrationists and as callow defenders of American prestige abroad, demonstrate the inability of the editors to see the opposition as anything other than the enemy, a mindset influenced by Cold War rhetoric of the time.

This prodigious effort by the Hederman press was the driving wheel in Mississippi’s rush toward tragedy that fall at the University of Mississippi, where federal marshals fell under attack by students in a white riot that left two dead and dozens injured. Despite leading the resistance to the courts and the Kennedys, the editors and journalists of the Clarion-Ledger and the Daily News remained unrepentant and never acknowledged their role or expressed regret.

The performance of the Jackson newspapers acts as an example of the radicalism found among the Southern press in the civil-rights era. The Jackson newspapers also demonstrate, as do many other examples in this study, the failure of the press to give voice to any ideas other than those embraced by the status quo, an important part of the Southern style of political rhetoric. In the case of the Clarion-Ledger, the Daily News and the people of Mississippi, this failure had deadly consequences.

Despite the power and influence of Southern newspapers, until recently little attention has been paid to the editors and their arguments. John T. Kneebone’s 1985 study, Southern

6 Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race, 1920-1944, is one of the few books to examine

Southern journalists, but his analysis stops well before the active years after the Brown decision.

John Egerton’s 1994 book, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights

Movement in the South, is similar in scope. It, too, focuses on white Southern liberals, including editors. His book, however, considers conservative arguments only indirectly, and though it sets the stage for the turbulent years of the 1950s and early 1960s, it does not venture into the period. Other works that do examine post-Brown editorial efforts concentrate on individual editors. There are, for example, several biographies of the Atlanta Constitution’s well-known editor, the latest, Ralph McGill, by Barbara Barksdale Clowse, in 1998. The arguments of

Hodding Carter Jr. of the Greenville, Mississippi, Delta Democrat-Times have also been examined, most recently by Ann Waldron, in Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist,

1993. In Standing Before the Shouting Mob: Lenoir Chambers and Virginia’s Massive Resistance to Public School Integration, 1997, Alexander Leidholt studies the work of the Norfolk Virginian

Pilot’s editor.

A more recent work on Southern editors is The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights

Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, 2007. This is a comprehensive study that includes both conservative and liberal-moderate editors, and it lays out events, connections and influences in a meaningful way. It is a good foundation study for what happened in newsrooms during this time.

Though The Race Beat includes conservative editors, there remains an imbalance.

Southern liberal editors such as Chambers, Carter and McGill were few in number but they are well represented in the literature. Far less work has been done on the conservatives, though they represent the typical editor in the South. With that in mind, this history will strive to broaden the knowledge of the important role white newspaper editors played in the civil-rights era by examining conservative voices as well as liberal ones, and by comparing their arguments and weighing their effectiveness in shaping public opinion and policy.

Newspaper editors fill several roles, including the regulation of ideas. This is one of the traditional functions of the press — to decide which ideas are acceptable for debate and

7 discussion and which are too far afield for consideration. In this regard, a newspaper is not free to set its own way — it is bound by the values of the community and expends much of its energy reflecting those values, as the editors and reporters perceive them. This model of the press, as outlined by Daniel C. Hallin in The “Uncensored War”: The Media and Vietnam, is convincing, but it provides little autonomy for the editors. Their range — in politics, in ethics, in what is considered legitimate news — is determined by the tastes of the community. This certainly was a factor for Jim Crow era Southern editors, who operated in an environment of oppressive politics and social control. The white South tolerated little dissent from the sanctioned views on segregation of the races. The editors both enforced this status quo and were themselves trapped by it.

This dynamic raises questions about a study of journalism, particularly an analysis such as this one that examines the roles and influences of individual editors. If Hallin’s model holds true, the editors had a marginal role and wielded little influence. But the Brown decision must be factored into any consideration of journalism and its role in Southern society in this period.

By declaring segregation illegal, the Supreme Court forced Southern leaders, newspaper editors among them, to wrestle with race in a new way. The old view of segregation as a benevolent system was placed on the defensive. The view of segregation as an unjust and detrimental system was given greater credibility. The ruling of the Supreme Court could be resisted, as happened in the decade that followed Brown, but it could not be denied. The Supreme Court’s ruling split open the hidebound arguments of the segregationists and forced a reconsideration of the dual Southern system. The result was an energetic and sometimes alarming intellectual, political and ethical contest — and much of this warfare was conducted on the opinion pages of the South’s newspapers. The rules were changing during this time, as was the scope of legitimate commentary. Debate on the South’s great issue — race — entered new areas, and the

South’s newspaper editors had the potential for new freedom — a chance to help craft either a new critique of Southern society or a new defense. What they made of this opportunity and how they dealt with this new challenge is the focus of this history.

8 In this way, this analysis looks beyond the editors themselves to the quality of intellectual exchange and dialogue in the South in this crucial period in the region’s history. For this reason, this study examines the arguments of the editors as presented on their opinion pages — the editorials and columns they wrote as they engaged the issue of segregation. Each newspaper’s coverage of desegregation is examined as well, but news stories are secondary to the arguments put forth by the editors themselves.

This account looks at each editor at a time of crisis, a moment when a local community came to terms with lunch counter sit-ins, for example, or school integration or other challenges to Jim Crow. These times of strife forced Southern leaders to address the questions that otherwise were often ignored. Editorial comment in newspapers could run for months, even years, without addressing salient topics. The larger and more complicated the issues, the more likely the editors were to dance around the key questions out of fear of offending readers, advertisers or political leaders. Certainly the issue of racial equality was avoided by most white journalists in the South. In times of crisis, however, these matters cannot be ignored. Crises flush out opinions that under other circumstances can be held in private. Crises throw individuals and their points of view in sharp relief. Studying communities at these times provides insight into the mind of the South, a culture practiced in the art of avoidance and denial when it comes to the ethics of racial discrimination. Beyond the particular point of crisis, each editor and each newspaper is examined for editorial comment on other benchmark issues that affect other communities or the South as a whole — on the Brown decision, for example, on the Birmingham crisis, on the bus boycotts, etc. Taken as a whole, these soundings provide a sense of where the editors stood on racial segregation in general as well as on certain issues in particular. This provides a more nuanced portrait, screens for telling inconsistencies and gives a firmer assessment of how each editor fit into the publishing-politics partnership.

Historians seeking to understand and explain the rise of the conservative movement in

American politics have recently turned their attention to the 1960s, and they are reshaping our view of that decade. They still see the 1960s as a time of liberal politics and of cultural change and individualistic exploration. Now, however, they also describe the decade as the source of

9 the conservative passion and determination that captured the White House in the 1980 election and held sway over the nation’s capital for the next two decades. Some historians assert that the legacy of the 1960s is not liberal politics and policies, as many liberal initiatives were switched off or scaled back in the decades since, but rather a deep and strong conservatism in politics and in culture and in religion. Writing in The Conservative Sixties, David Farber and Jeff

Roche argue that while the liberal energy and excesses of the 1960s caught the imagination, it was the conservative movement, in reaction, that caught fire:

Scholars of contemporary conservatism in the United States, who almost all recognize the 1960s as the crucial era in the resurgence of a vibrant right-wing political movement, have begun to refocus the narrative of the 1960s. To do so, they have had to challenge the traditional interpretation of the decade and forty years’ worth of popular imagery. Unlike antiwar demonstrations, civil rights marches, and the antics of the counterculture, which gained so much popular attention, most conservative organizing took place outside the purview of the mainstream media. Americans formulated a conservative political ideology in countless coffee-table discussions with neighbors, whispered conversations in the college library, heated debates around the break-room snack machine, over fifty-pound bags of seed at the rural feed store, and, most important, at the precinct meetings of the Republican Party.… Operating under the national media’s radar, they went largely unnoticed.1

Faber and Roche and other historians of conservatism argue that this reshaping of the 1960s is overdue. Conventional wisdom has been sorely off the mark when it comes to this important decade, they argue. There is no denying that the 1960s was much more than good music, a lot of dope, the Yippies and the Great Society. But perhaps Faber, Roche and others need to look further to find the true source of the conservative Nile. Yes, family members and business people in the 1960s were reacting with shock over policies coming out of Washington and hippies coming out of Berkeley, and this helped form a crucible for a new sense of political urgency and the kind of common ground found when people identify a common enemy. But while these Americans were building a working philosophy and strategy and making political connections, other Americans — white Southerners — were already living in a culture steeped in strong conservative beliefs. These beliefs were part of their everyday lives and, for them, were politics as usual. The editors of the white press of the South were important members of this conservative South, and many were energetic and outspoken advocates for the conservative cause. Their activism created opportunities for some — Kilpatrick, for example, and others such

10 as Thomas R. Waring Jr. of Charleston, South Carolina — to became influential in the conservative movement well outside the region. Were these Southerners not a contributing source of what was to come to Washington? If so, then how these editors framed issues and used rhetorical tools is worthy of analysis. This study attempts to shed light on how these editors worked within Southern politics and culture as they used old arguments and created new ones in the fight over preservation or destruction of Jim Crow and the Southern way of life.

1 David Farber and Jeff Roche, eds., The Conservative Sixties, (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2003), pp. 2, 3.

11 CHAPTER TWO

DRIVEN BY DOGMA

It was a Thursday afternoon in the fall of 1951, when James J. Kilpatrick, who fresh in his job as editor of the Richmond News Leader had not yet established himself as the wunderkind of Southern journalism, nosed his car past the Capitol, out of Richmond and down through Petersburg toward the town of Franklin, on the edge of the Tidewater in Southeast

Virginia. The drive gave him an hour or so to go over in his mind the remarks he had prepared, though he didn’t need rehearsing, for Kilpatrick never lacked for confidence in his words or his ideas. This day’s assignment was typical of the public-service duties of an aspiring editor — an address on the topics of the day given over chicken and meatloaf to a gathering of community leaders, businessmen and their wives, followed by a few questions, some handshakes and a cold ride home. In this case, there was the added drudgery of Franklin itself. Though a pretty little village to the eyes, Franklin was best known for its never-ending assault on a visitor’s sense of smell — it reeked of a paper mill’s sulfurous waste. Not the most inviting opportunity for a young up-and-comer, but Kilpatrick, as always, made the most of it.

Taking the lectern, he unfurled remarks that rambled far and wide across the globe and through the ages. The Franklin Rotary Club members (the Union Camp plant managers, the

Chamber of Commerce members, the preachers, teachers and shopkeepers) may have struggled to follow a speech that touched on Juan Peron’s roughing up of La Prensa in Argentina, the imprisonment of a journalist in Czechoslovakia, Keynesian economics, Mary Shelley, Pericles,

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Domitian, Marcus Aurelius, ethics and American philosophy, the problems of education, King Philip and the Spanish Armada, the War of the Roses, Hammurabi and Buchenwald, but they certainly found it easy to be impressed with the young man from

Richmond. To Kilpatrick, that was the point.1

What was missing from Kilpatrick’s tour de force before the Rotarians was a defense of segregation, the social division that had been an unavoidable part of life in Virginia since the end of the Civil War. In 1951, segregation of the races was strictly enforced. It was

12 comprehensive — there were no opportunities for black and white Virginians to interact, except in a few accepted ways. Separation was so complete that it was taken for granted by whites. It remained a foundation of the Democratic Party’s rule in the state, as elsewhere in the South, but this meant that it usually became a prominent issue only in those election years when a candidate felt threatened and needed to bring out the big gun of allegiance to the Southern way of life to blast away at the competition. Acceptance of segregation, and support of the practice, was almost universal among whites — certainly so among those with political ambitions — so there was little need to berate the Franklin audience with it. Not, at least, in 1951.

That would soon change, of course, for Virginia, for Kilpatrick and for the South, once the U.S. Supreme Court issued the 1954 landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education. In just a few years after his trip to Franklin, Kilpatrick was at every opportunity speaking in defense of segregation and in support of the South’s opposition to the Brown decision requiring the integration of public schools. Through his editorials for the Richmond News

Leader he became a leading advocate of preserving segregation and fighting the federal courts, and through his political connections he became a source of ideas and strategies adopted by politicians in Virginia and throughout the South. Smart, quick-witted and gifted with a prodigious memory of facts and history and anecdotes, Kilpatrick was full of energy and never afraid of hard work or long hours. Dedicated to the cause and excited by the challenge, he quickly rose in prominence to become the most influential Southern journalist of his generation.

Kilpatrick, however, was not satisfied with preaching to the Southern choir. Like many others in journalism and politics in the South, he saw the need to reach the Northern audience, and among conservatives Kilpatrick was the most successful in doing so. He traveled up and down the Eastern Seaboard giving remarks, participating in debates and evangelizing the North on Southern sensibilities. Some Northern audiences warmed to Kilpatrick’s arguments; others responded with icy reproach. Kilpatrick collected his victories, ignored his defeats and pressed on with his Northern crusade well into the 1960s. After George Wallace, Orval Faubus and a few other demagogues, Kilpatrick was the best-known Southern conservative, both in the South and beyond, and he was among the most respected.

13 Kilpatrick’s star rose quickly because he gave the Southern political regimes a lifeline in a time of rough and changing currents. Though race and segregation were only background issues in Virginia, at least most of the time, they remained, nonetheless, essential parts of the

Democratic Party’s smothering control of the state’s politics.

Kilpatrick’s intellectual vigor, brashness and ambition meant that he was likely to make his name, no matter what the situation, but Virginia was an unusual setting for such a personality to find success. The Old Dominion looked back like no other state. It revered its past, and it honored family lineage. If you were not from Virginia, you started with two strikes against you. Kilpatrick was from Oklahoma, bearing a journalism degree from the University of

Missouri — not the kind of bona fides typically found among the Virginia movers and shakers.

Richmond, in particular, was obsessed with heritage, and to be a native of the South was all but a requirement for good work and advancement in the Virginia capital. Kilpatrick’s Oklahoma roots — Southern, only by a stretch of the map — were embarrassingly lacking, especially in comparison to the insurmountable heritage of Virginius Dabney, editor of the city’s other daily, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and a descendant of none other than Thomas Jefferson. The politics of Virginia was a system of old men in control, all under the grip and guidance of the old-man master, Harry Flood Byrd. This Byrd machine — known in Virginia as the Byrd

Organization, as Byrd resented the machine label — was a political grinder, eating up the young and ambitious and allowing only the most dedicated, disciplined and faithful to creep their way into positions of power and influence. This was rocky ground for an outspoken young man full of himself and ready to show off. Yet Kilpatrick flourished in this environment. He became a force of his own, a dominant figure in Richmond and beyond.2

Kilpatrick had the good fortune of coming to work at the newspaper guided by Douglas

Southall Freeman, the eminent Southern historian of George Washington and Robert E. Lee. A man of hard work and keen efficiency — he tracked all his actions and gave up smoking once he learned he lost 37 minutes a day fiddling with cigarettes, lighters and ashtrays — Freeman sought to spend more of his precious time working in history. Freeman’s writing was prodigious. R.E. Lee: A Biography filled four volumes, and George Washington ran to seven. He

14 earned the Pulitzer Prize for biography for each (for Washington, published in 1957, four years after his death, the prize was awarded posthumously). Other works included the three-volume

Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command and his first work, Lee’s Dispatches, built on the general’s war correspondence with the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. All of Freeman’s works were well-received by historians, and his books on Lee and his key officers fed popular interest in the Civil War for generations of Americans (Lee’s Lieutenants remains in print, as do abridged versions of Washington and Lee). To continue his research and writing — the enormous Washington was still a work in progress — while maintaining his twice-daily radio broadcasts, his weekly classes in journalism at Columbia University and his stewardship of the

Richmond News Leader, Freeman needed an able assistant, and Kilpatrick, already making a name for himself in the newsroom as a productive reporter, caught the historian’s eye. Freeman handed over many of his duties to the young Kilpatrick, who adopted the editor’s work ethic, as best he could. Kilpatrick also made the most of the freedom his mentor allowed, exerting a strong influence over the newspaper’s pages, and when Freeman retired from the Richmond

News Leader in 1949, Kilpatrick was his obvious and able successor. He was 29 years old, the same age as Freeman when he first sat at the editor’s desk.3

Kilpatrick’s rise was due to his skills and ambition, certainly. He achieved great influence, however, not because he was a bright young man but because he provided the political machinery of Virginia what it needed in a time of crisis — an ideological argument of great appeal, something the politicians could put to work and the public could rally around, a new and powerful argument for preserving the status quo. A powerful ideology is the foundation of the Southern style. The old ideology — that segregation was the one and only

Southern way — was suddenly cracked and broken by a unanimous ruling of the U.S. Supreme

Court. The Brown decision rocked Southern politics and left the Byrd Organization, already weak after decades of rule, staggering and stumbling for a valid response and a plan for recovery. Kilpatrick stepped up and filled the breach with something bold and new. His argument gave new life to Byrd and his tired machinery, and it captured the imagination of the

South.

15 Virginia, at mid-century, was very much about the status quo, as it was under the control of a political machine founded on extreme fiscal and social conservatism. For much of the twentieth century, the politics of Virginia were centered on one man, Byrd, and the machine he directed. Though the Organization got its start in a previous generation of politicians, it was

Byrd who captured the apparatus and made it his own.4

Byrd’s big break in Virginia politics came in 1923, when a bond issue was proposed for highway construction. Byrd, then a state senator in the General Assembly and a Democratic

Party leader, challenged the idea and successfully fought for its defeat. Thus was born the Byrd policy of pay as you go — that is, collect tax revenue until enough is in reserve to pay for construction of roads and bridges and other capital projects. Pay as you go was Byrd’s claim to political power, and so he made it the defining philosophy of the Byrd Organization. One biographer, Alden Hatch, described Byrd as having an “almost pathological horror of going into debt.” Pay as you go ruled all appropriations, and with such strict adherence Virginia’s government operated debt-free for decades. Governing without borrowing is an admirable practice in many ways, but as a result of this strict fiscal conservatism Virginia trailed the nation in support for education and other basic state activities.5

As a result of this conservatism and the fact that pay as you go provided few resources to work with, Byrd and the Byrd Organization did little to change Virginia from where he and his machine started. “Caretakers of the status quo and the public treasury,” Byrd biographer

Ronald L. Heinemann described the state’s political leaders at the time, “they were conservative to a fault, overseeing a Virginia that remained rural, racially divided, parsimonious in its services, suspicious of outsiders, and fiercely independent.”6 W.J. Cash, in The Mind of the South, put Byrd on “the higher level” of “men whose integrity, by their lights, was not open to doubt” but acknowledged that Byrd and others like him did not show “much interest in the fundamental problems of the South.”7 Byrd’s machine drew its power from the rural counties, most strongly from the Southside, an area of great slave-based wealth in the nineteenth century and of large African-American populations in the twentieth. These counties were stridently conservative. The white citizens there did not want their taxes to build bridges and roads in

16 Richmond, Norfolk or other cities, and they did not want any loosening of the social controls that Jim Crow held over their black neighbors. In some of these Southside counties the black population was either a heavy majority — 57.8 percent of Brunswick County’s residents in the

1950 census, 60.9 percent of Southampton County’s, 65.3 percent of Nansemond County’s — or close to it. Yet African-Americans held little political influence in these counties south of

Richmond. The Virginia constitution of 1902, a product of the earlier incarnation of the political machine, disenfranchised most blacks, and many poor whites as well, through a poll tax, a literacy test and other means. The constitutional rewrite diminished black voting power by a shocking degree — 147,000 African-Americans were registered to vote in 1902, but only 21,000 a few years after. Many whites also lost the franchise, but not by a similar cataclysmic number.

Even the timing of state elections — on odd years, so as to avoid the large turnout of presidential contests — was employed to keep voter participation at a minimum. Also helping to keep participation low was the inevitability of Virginia politics under the machine. “The average citizen was simply not excited over elections in which the outcome seemed always so certain,” wrote J. Harvie Wilkinson III in his comprehensive 1968 study, Harry Byrd and the

Changing Face of Virginia Politics 1945-1966.8 This shrunken Virginia electorate, barely half its previous number and now almost entirely white, was easier for the Byrd Organization to control, and under these conditions the machine thrived and expanded. Based in rural counties and the courthouse culture of an agricultural South, the Organization maintained, year after year, consistent and unchanging policies and views. Byrd himself was, by nature, tradition-bound. His power base ensured that he and his Organization remained that way.9

Byrd ran for governor in 1925 and won easily — the first of many landslides for him and his machine. Under Byrd, overwhelming majorities became the norm for Organization

Democrats in Virginia. When a Virginia seat in the U.S. Senate opened, Byrd got himself appointed in 1933. He won re-election the same year and many years to follow. Time after time,

Byrd would repeat his election success with crushing victories. He remained a member of the

Senate, with increasing seniority, power and authority, until his retirement in 1965. As a member of Congress, Byrd continued his control of the Virginia machine. For decades, no

17 Democrat successfully ran for office without Byrd’s blessing — he maintained a high level of personal involvement and control. As a result, his influence over policy and legislative affairs was unmatched throughout his 40 years of service as governor and U.S. senator. Byrd was the central figure of the Old Dominion in the twentieth century.

As a U.S. senator, Byrd initially gave strong support to Franklin Delano Roosevelt — they both took the oath of office on the same day — but that changed when the scope of New Deal programs became apparent and when Byrd felt he had the political security to challenge a popular president. Byrd’s frugality and no-debt dogma could not be reconciled with FDR’s spend-now, worry-later strategy of buying the nation out of the Great Depression. Byrd established himself as a vocal opponent of expansion of the federal government’s role and of any proposal that bore a whiff of federal generosity, and he would often write articles for publications giving the conservative view. Once he gained chairmanship of the Senate Finance

Committee, Byrd’s parsimonious nature became a force to be reckoned with. When Roosevelt and the presidents who followed complained of roadblocks laid down by Southern senators,

Byrd was first in their mind.10

Throughout his career in politics, Byrd ran a growing business in apples and ink. He took over his father’s failing newspaper, the Winchester Evening Star, when he was only 15 years old, leaving school to devote his energies to turning the business around. He dealt with the newspaper’s debt problems by agreeing to daily payments to the newsprint supplier, a tough way of doing business. The newspaper became a success. Later, Byrd would acquire another Shenandoah Valley paper, the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record, and several other smaller ones as well. For Byrd, however, the newspapers were just a business — a curious position for a politician to hold. His true love was his apples. Byrd spent many hours walking his apple groves, trimming trees, checking for insects, monitoring development of new plants, taking notes for his farm managers. He loved this work more than any other. He studied the latest agricultural techniques and adopted those he thought would benefit his trees — he was, for example, an advocate of frequent use of pesticides. Byrd grew his groves and his refrigerated warehouse — an industry innovation — into one of the largest apple businesses in

18 the world. Curiously, Byrd borrowed money routinely to expand his groves and to construct his warehouse, a personal deviation from his public creed. Though the Byrd Organization was known for its clean government, Byrd himself was not above using his connections to secure a few favors for his apple trade. During World War II, when trains were needed to move men and weapons for the war effort, Byrd convinced Washington to divert some freight cars to

Winchester, so that he could complete his warehouse. Not the greatest of plunder, and small stuff for a 40-year career in politics, but it was evidence of a willingness to put government to work for his own business.11

In a sense, Byrd managed his machine in the same way he cared for his groves. He was very much into the details; he knew the jobs and the names of those who would want to hold them, down to the local level. He pruned away the untrustworthy, the ones that grew too fast, anyone who was different from the Byrd Organization model. Byrd’s manipulation of appointments invited corruption, and it was corrupt in the sense that it was not a case of equal opportunity. It was, like any other machine, all about political loyalties and who knew whom.

But the machine was not corrupt in the most base ways — it was not known for theft, bribery, kickbacks or any of the other vulgarities common to governments big and small. In fact, its reputation was of by-the-book operations free of stain. Byrd Organization men were scrupulous in their work. Byrd insisted on clean and neat government and, with his fear of the unseemly and what it could do to his machine, he would tolerate no dirty hands. His reputation at the time of his death, in 1966, was that he had been the state’s best governor of the modern era and left a legacy defined by honesty and integrity. Byrd’s fear of scandal, tied to his control over who got opportunities and who advanced, formed a powerful filter of personalities. The

Byrd men were all similar, all Byrd-like in public demeanor. Byrd wanted the predictable and the bland, men destined to tread the straight and narrow. He abhorred the arrogant and those who drew attention. The brash need not apply.12

Which makes Byrd’s relationship with Kilpatrick of the Richmond News Leader an unlikely partnership, at least on the surface. Byrd himself could be colorful, even playful, and was often charming and always the gentleman, but in others he sought the dull, the drab and

19 the determined. Byrd and the Byrd Organization attracted reliable bureaucrats. Byrd wanted men (and men only) who were dependable, not creative. Kilpatrick had determination, no doubt, but he also had flash, the kind of fire in the belly that made Byrd nervous. Kilpatrick was outspoken, loud in language and too quick and clever for Byrd to find comfort there. Yet they became close friends and allies. The senator and the editor came to exchange many letters over the years, and this correspondence covered personal issues, mundane topics and strategic planning in the fight against integration. “I think people are awakening to the fundamentals that must be preserved, and no man has done more than you to bring this about,” the senator wrote Kilpatrick early in the state’s fight against the Brown decision. “If and when that happens,”

Kilpatrick wrote the senator in a later letter regarding a possible challenge to Byrd’s reelection,

“we will roll out the vote for you that will make last Tuesday’s returns look like peanuts.”13 Byrd even invited the editor along for his annual hikes up Old Rag, Byrd’s favorite of the Blue Ridge peaks. There’s a photo of Byrd and Kilpatrick resting at the top of the climb, the senator with his shirt loose and his face in a big smile, the editor looking tired and taking a drag on a filter- free cigarette, two buddies out for a walk in the woods.

Byrd could overlook Kilpatrick’s pride and his brash way because he sensed that

Kilpatrick brought what all those dark-suited, like-minded appointees could not — a fresh idea in a time of need, a new and exciting dogma to replace the old argument of separate but equal, the aging Southern warhorse now crippled by the Brown decision. That new dogma, Kilpatrick’s great contribution and his ticket to Byrd’s inner circle, was interposition.

Kilpatrick’s big idea was to invoke the old political notions of nullification and interposition to hold back the decision of Brown and any court orders that might follow.

Nullification was a curious concept in a federal system — it argued that a state, drawing on its sovereignty, could nullify federal statutes the state found excessive and offensive and an overreaching of federal authority. Interposition was a slightly milder form of the same — that a state could interpose its own authority between the federal government and the citizens of that state, to protect those citizens from extreme federal actions. The concepts are most closely associated with John C. Calhoun, the cast-iron man of South Carolina who early in the

20 nineteenth century advocated for nullification as a means for the South to protect its practice of slavery from political actions by the Northern majority. Though discredited by later legal understandings of a functioning, robust federal government, nullification and interposition enjoyed prestigious pedigrees, especially in the eyes of Virginia. Nullification was put forth by

Thomas Jefferson in the Kentucky Resolution, interposition by James Madison in the Virginia

Resolution — both were leaders of revolutionary thought, both served as president early in the

Republic and both were sons of the Old Dominion. Kilpatrick championed both in the pages of the Richmond newspaper, and he published lengthy excerpts from their written works of almost two centuries earlier.

As Kilpatrick feverishly developed his defense of the South, other Southern leaders in the press and in politics struggled to construct an argument persuasive with Northern colleagues. They used various arguments of their own — there was no talking points memo — and generally settled on three versions. The first was based on the mythology of racial harmony in the South, one that tried to assert, with little success and no evidence to prove the case, that black Southerners were comfortable with Jim Crow; the second was based on cultural norms —

this is how the South sat, and though the Southern ways were different they should not be disrupted, as the region’s norms did no harm to African American Southerners and did not limit their aspirations; the third was an appeal to what Southern whites believed were racial prejudices common to the North but not openly expressed. Kilpatrick incorporated all these ideas in his many editorials and articles and in his public appearances, but he also introduced a new weapon to what had been a long war of retreat.14

In the decades before the Brown decision, Southern leaders grew increasingly aware that the tide of history was pulling away from the South, that changing social and legal standards would, in time, doom segregation. They used these arguments of racial harmony, benign cultural norms and universal racism as they fought, cagily and quietly when they could, but roughly and loudly when they felt it was needed, in a war of strategic delay. The best they could hope for was to hold the forces of change at bay for a few years, perhaps a few decades, longer.

But Kilpatrick’s interposition offered something else — a way off this dead-end road. If states

21 could nullify Supreme Court rulings, then states could chart their own course, indefinitely. The

South could remain Southern and segregated forever. This is why Kilpatrick’s work flashed a charge through the white South. For leaders raised in the romance of the Lost Cause,

Kilpatrick’s interposition offered a second redemption for Southern conservatives.

Though nullification and interposition are closely related, and though Kilpatrick used both terms and employed both arguments, it was interposition that he adopted with the greatest enthusiasm. “The assertion of this right pre-supposes that ours is a Union of co-equal sovereign States, joined together under a compact, called the Constitution, by which the member States delegate certain of their sovereign powers to a common Federal Government, and reserve all other powers to themselves respectively, or to the people,” Kilpatrick and his publisher, David Tennant Bryan, explained in an introduction to a collection of Richmond News

Leader editorials they printed and distributed throughout the South to satisfy strong demand for the newspaper’s interposition arguments. “The doctrine of Interposition asserts the right of each State to judge for itself an infraction of the compact; and depending upon the seriousness of the violation, to interpose its sovereign powers in such honorable and constitutional manner as it deems best in order to arrest the progress of evil.”15

The “progress of evil” is strong language. Such words, heavy with history and ringing of religion, both strong currents in Southern culture, held powerful appeal to Southern leaders and signified that interposition was resistance of the most unbending kind. The language was something new as well, in that it made no mention of white belief in the disparity of the races, of the virtues of segregation or of the sainted Southern way of life — the usual cannon blasts of segregation’s defenders. Kilpatrick’s interposition shifted the argument onto a new, legalistic and historical foundation. “By insisting that the South objected to the Supreme Court's activism and not racial integration,” one historian observed later, “Kilpatrick's formulation of the

‘transcendental issue’ was at the same time respectable and extreme — a strategy that made local decisions about closing schools seem reasonable.”16 This was a brilliant strategy, one that continues to ring in conservative rhetoric today. To Kilpatrick, interposition was a way to beat back desegregation on something other than racial terms. “It was a platform,” wrote Gene

22 Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in their 2007 overview The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights

Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, “that would also enable him to both rise above, and rail against, the white riffraff whose small minds and stupidity led them to resort to mob violence.”17 This rising above was key to interposition’s allure. Faced with arguing to preserve a clearly discriminatory and unjust system of education, Southern leaders were eager to adopt a more appealing dogma. Kilpatrick’s interposition allowed them to do so. They may not have understood the implications of interposition or sensed its legal and practical weaknesses and, in truth, they didn’t want to know of problems or complications. Denial made room for the comforting sense of righteousness they found in Kilpatrick’s enthusiastic crusade. In this way, they could tell themselves and the world that their opposition to the Brown decision was not about preserving separation of the races. It was a dedicated defense of constitutional separation of powers, a noble cause.

Kilpatrick skillfully touched on both the racial fears and the statesmen-like aspirations of his white audience. “I believe, in common with the overwhelming number of white

Southerners, in the essential separation of the two races in the South,” Kilpatrick told a group in Sharon, Connecticut, in 1957. Integration of the schools, he said, would bring students of both races “into a social relationship at once intimate, personal and prolonged. This could not be accomplished without a bloody revolution in our society … it would cause grave social and moral problems.”18 That’s powerful stuff, he was telling his listeners, but that’s not what this struggle is all about. “Yet,” Kilpatrick explained, “the greater issue here goes not to sociology, but to law.… The greater issue, I submit, involves the State and Federal relationship under the

Constitution.”19

Kilpatrick made this transition, from the expected racist view to the unexpected “greater issue” of judicial excess and rampant federal power, hundreds of times, in editorials, in magazine articles and in speeches throughout the state, the region and the nation. “The South’s position, stated most briefly, is simply that the States alone have the power to amend the

Constitution,” he told the Connecticut group, in one of his most succinct summaries of the

Kilpatrick package. “There must be a point in judicial opinions at which interpretation stops,

23 and substantive amendment begins, and we feel strongly on May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court boldly crossed that boundary line.”20 So, the problem is not a racist South, but a court that has reached way beyond its authority. The Brown decision amounts to an illicit amendment of the

U.S. Constitution, Kirkpatrick asserted, and the decision set a precedent that was a danger to all.

“And we say to our Northern friends, as earnestly as we know how, that far more is involved in this matter than the attendance of Negro pupils in white schools of the South,” he warned the now captured audience members. “Once a policy is established of condoning so flagrant a usurpation of power by the Supreme Court of the United States, no provision of the

Constitution, no traditional understanding of construction, remains safe and reliable.”21 It happened to us, he told his Northern friends, and it can happen to you.

Whether this argument persuaded anyone in Sharon, Connecticut, is not known, but it is doubtful he won over this group, or any of the others he addressed in the years after Brown, though he always made a big impression. Some audience members, perhaps most, might have told one another over drinks later that Kirkpatrick’s description of the Supreme Court’s

“usurpation of power” is, in fact, what the court is asked to do in its review of unsettled issues.

Outside the South, Kilpatrick’s ideas fell on mighty rocky ground. In the South, however, he found fertile soil, and plenty of it. Powered by Kilpatrick’s intellect and energy, his portrayal of white Southerners as victims of a court run wild captured many hearts and minds in both politics and the press. This strategy of using a false argument — driving an issue with hot rhetoric wrapped around beliefs that are separate and apart from the true issue — has since become a powerful part of the Southern style.

Though it is Kilpatrick who is credited with launching interposition as a campaign of resistance to Brown v. Board of Education, and rightly so, the idea was not his own. Georgia

Governor Herman Talmadge was privately exploring the idea in 1951, well before the Supreme

Court’s ruling, according to historian Numan V. Bartley, but Talmadge did not create a public issue. It wasn’t until August of 1955 when interposition entered the public mind as a tool of opposition in a pamphlet drawn up by William Old, a conservative hardliner in Petersburg,

Virginia. A lawyer, Old dug up interposition, printed his pamphlet and spread it around.

24 Eventually, the pamphlet reached the desk of Kilpatrick. The newspaper editor, always on the hunt for a good argument he could run with, grabbed interposition, tucked it under his arm and took off for the goalposts, and the crowd — elected Democrats from Richmond, Virginia, to

Tallahassee, Florida, to Jackson, Mississippi — gave a robust cheer.22

Of course, by the mid-twentieth century nullification and interposition stood, at best, on shaky legal grounds. Given this, some observers have questioned Kilpatrick’s dedication to his own arguments, seeing the labors of the Richmond News Leader as a delaying tactic, not a true attempt to skirt beyond the reach of the Supreme Court. “In retrospect,” wrote historian Joseph

J. Thorndike in 1998, “Kilpatrick’s efforts to revivify interposition seem almost incomprehensible. How could an educated, politically astute, and deeply ambitious young journalist believe that state defiance of federal authority could succeed in twentieth-century

America?”23 Thorndike cited correspondence to a friend in which Kilpatrick stated that “life is too short to waste it in vain and abortive causes that offer no hope of advantage anywhere. I don’t mind taking up lost causes — it is the fate of every Southerner — but I want to be a little selective in the lost causes I take up.”24 Thorndike concluded that Kilpatrick’s interposition campaign was a way to drape opposition to the Brown decision in respectable clothes, “a transparent attempt to cloak the base motives of race and segregation in the fine raiment of constitutional theory.”25 Interposition was not, Thorndike found, to be taken at face value.

Kilpatrick’s own correspondence makes a strong case, and it is possible that Thorndike had it right. That correspondence, however, must be weighed against the hundreds of column inches of editorial ink Kilpatrick spilled in support of interposition, against the enthusiasm he held for the interposition fight and against the fact that Kilpatrick and Tennant, the Richmond News

Leader publisher, were proud enough of their efforts that they collected the newspaper’s interposition writings and published them separately in a booklet distributed around the South.

Kilpatrick was no fool, and in his correspondence he may have sought to give himself a way out should his risky endorsement of interposition prove in time to be a great embarrassment. In the larger view, however, taking into consideration all that was said and done, Kilpatrick’s dedication to the cause appeared sincere. He believed interposition had a chance.

25 Full of confidence and on a mission, Kilpatrick, Bryan and the Richmond News Leader set off on a march of triumph through constitutional law and history, through the great minds of Virginia’s past and through the biggest issue of the day. As the crusade began the readers of the News Leader didn’t know what to expect. What was the newspaper up to? Each afternoon they turned to the editorial pages with a mix of excitement and trepidation, curious to see what was next. Day after day, the newspaper’s editorial pages trumpeted the virtues of states’ rights and limited federal authority. With relentless repetition and dauntless enthusiasm, the

Richmond News Leader worked feverishly to replace the old argument — extolling the natural goodness of the Southern way of life — with the new — delineating the extent of federal power.

The key issue wasn’t race or segregation. The key issue, the central struggle, was constitutional authority — states’ rights. This substitution was important to Southern white opinion leaders and politicians of the 1950s, and it is the dominant element of the Southern style in its current use today. Substitution was a watershed innovation. Before Kilpatrick, Southern whites were forced to defend what the rest of the nation increasingly saw as vulgar beliefs. Now, under the flag of interposition, the Southern press, with all its fire and steam, was sent rolling down a fresh track. It was, of course, pulling in the same direction as before. It was doing the same hard work. But it was no longer burdened with the fetid cargo of Jim Crow. It was now delivering something new and noble — a defense of freedom, a rallying around the arguments of Jefferson and Madison and the heroes of old. “Kilpatrick,” wrote Roberts and Klibanoff, in

The Race Beat, “by propagating a whole vernacular to serve the culture of massive resistance — interposition, nullification, states’ rights, state sovereignty — provided an intellectual shield for nearly every racist action and reaction in the coming years.”26

The Richmond News Leader began the crusade more than a year after the Brown decision. One reason the crusade at first left readers puzzled was the fact that in the days and weeks after Brown came down, such certainty was hard to find. “Dixie is slow to comment on decision,” stated the headline on an Associated Press story on the day of the Brown decision, and that was an accurate depiction. It may seem odd that Southern leaders were not prepared with statements carefully drawn. They were, after all, anticipating a ruling, and a few were even

26 anticipating what they considered the worst, an end to segregated schools. But Southern whites had for generations been in denial about the sins of Jim Crow, and most had paid no attention to the great racial imbalance in education. With separate but equal being the ruling doctrine since Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896, white Southerners did not consider integrated public schools a possibility. So it is not surprising that the Brown decision threw white Southerners into a state of shock. Among political leaders, there was confusion and uncertainty. Some spoke of resistance, some of resignation. ”There is no doubt in my mind,” said James S. Peters, a leader in the Democratic Party of Georgia, “but what the people of Georgia will find a way to continue operation of their schools on a segregated basis.”27 Peters’ statement was not surprising, but it was not the only point of view. In Oklahoma, Governor Johnston Murray said he saw no fight ahead as his state moves to integrated public schools. In Kansas, Governor Ed Arn said the

“ruling is the law for all states.”28 Kansas, though not Southern, had a school district in the lawsuit, and the Kansas attorney general predicted full integration “within two years and perhaps earlier.”29 In Alabama, Governor Seth Gordon Persons withheld comment, which says something about the dazed state of Southern whites. In Texas, Governor Allan Shivers predicted a long battle over the implementation of the desegregation ruling. Shivers, like many other

Southern political leaders, fell quickly into shifting blame onto civil-rights advocates for what might follow and also suggested the South could simply drag its feet and be done with it.

“Sometimes,” he complained, “those who seek reforms go so far that the evils of the reform movement are more onerous than the evils they are trying to remedy.… Just saying ‘We abolish segregation’ … what is going to be done about enforcing it is the important thing.”30

In Virginia, the governor at the time of the Brown decision, Tom Stanley, was levelheaded and reserved in his remarks. “I am confident the people of Virginia will receive the opinion of the Supreme Court calmly,” he stated. The governor said it was his intention to meet with white and black Virginians as he worked out steps “in keeping with the edict of the court.”31 Though there were complaints about the governor’s remarks, both public and private, it appeared that at least one key member of Virginia’s leadership was open to the possibility of bringing school segregation to an end.32

27 Of course, in Virginia, no opinion mattered more than that of Senator Harry F. Byrd, and he showed no sense of resignation in his strident response. The Brown decision “is not only sweeping but it will bring implications and dangers of the greatest consequence,” Byrd said the afternoon of the decision. “It is the most serious blow that has been struck against the rights of the States in a matter vitally affecting their authority and welfare.”33 Byrd went on to complain bitterly about Southern expenditures on African-American schools in the years leading up to the court decision, a failed strategy to hurry up and build something approaching separate but equal. “One of the cruel results arising out of the ‘about face’ of the Supreme Court is that the

Southern States,” said the father of Pay as You Go frugality, “accepting the validity of the previous decisions have in recent years expended hundreds of millions of dollars for the construction of new Negro school facilities in an effort to comply with the policy previously laid down by the court.” Byrd made no mention of what this landmark ruling might mean to the millions of black citizens of his state, and he never would. He spoke only of the burden this placed on the state’s leaders and on its parents (presumably, its white parents). “In Virginia we are now facing a crisis of the first magnitude,” the senator said. “Those in authority, and the parents directly affected in the education of their children, should exercise the greatest wisdom and discretion in shaping our future course. Whatever is done should be based on our most mature judgment after sober and exhaustive consideration.”34 What all that meant, Byrd did not indicate, but his statement made it clear that Virginia’s leading political figure held no interest in quick compliance with the U.S. Supreme Court.

As for Kilpatrick, he and his newspaper were at first like most Southern opinion leaders

— uncertain and unhappy but accepting of desegregation as all but inevitable. Writing in an editorial published May 18, 1954, the day after the decision, Kilpatrick warned against rash action. “This is no time for rebellion,” he cautioned. “It is no time for a weak surrender either. It is a time to sit tight, to think, to unite in a proposal that would win the Supreme Court’s approval. It is a time, if you like, for prayer. “35 The editorial called on the Supreme Court to allow local flexibility on meeting the requirements of the Brown decision, which the court was to spell out in a later ruling, and it warned against a declarative imperative to integrate all

28 schools immediately. “If the court decides upon precipitate action — for example, that on Sept.

1, 1955, every public school everywhere must be opened to white and Negro children alike — some tragically bitter consequences may be envisioned.”36 Such warning of calamity was common among Southern conservatives and served multiple purposes: a form of pressure on the federal court and the federal government; a signal to the South’s radicals that resistance, even violent resistance, is within the scope of conceivable reaction to the court’s decision; and a washing of the hands, a shedding of responsibility and accountability, by the South’s leadership.

Kilpatrick wasn’t the worst offender when it came to the calamity cry, but he used it often enough. In the May 18 editorial, Kilpatrick continued in this vein: “A tinderbox situation would be created, wanting only an overt spark to kindle an ugly flame.”37 Then came another threat, of another kind — no public schools. “We can imagine that so abrupt a decree, admitting no exercise of discretion, would provoke a resentment in many localities that would manifest itself in abandonment of tax-supported education altogether.”38 This speculation later became reality for some education districts in Virginia, but in all but one case it was the state’s leadership, not localities, that closed the schools.

Kilpatrick included in this day-after editorial his vision of responsible action — one that, looking back at all that followed the 1954 decision, might have been a wise choice for the

Southern states: “If the court were to fix, say, a 10-year period, and permit the States to integrate 10 per cent of their schools a year — leaving it to the States to decide where this best could be accomplished without the risk of bloodshed or a sacrifice of educational opportunities

— a solution might be found that would preserve some vestige of State and local responsibility without doing violence to the court’s basic decision.”39 Kilpatrick concluded with a statement of resignation. “We accept the Supreme Court’s ruling,” he wrote, in a passage that he would, in time, forget. “We do not accept it willingly, or cheerfully or philosophically. We accept it because we have to.…”40

This reluctant agreement — “We accept the Supreme Court’s ruling” — represented at that moment the sentiment of most of the South’s leadership, but not all. Most prominent among the exceptions was Senator Harry F. Byrd. Had Kilpatrick kept to his original argument

29 — resignation and a request for slow implementation and local decision-making — he might have guided the South through a period of adjustment and social progress, and he could have made a name for himself along those lines. Kilpatrick, however, was already, in 1954, a young and rising member of Virginia’s elite, and he was keen to advance his position and reputation.

Making an argument contrary to Senator Byrd’s was not how to move ahead. Something had to change.

Kilpatrick had a contrary streak that he liked to display at times. In the early 1950s, before Brown, he used editorials to hammer away at the criminal conviction of a black man on charges he killed a policeman. Arguing that the case against him was thin and perhaps manufactured, Kilpatrick convinced the governor to grant a pardon. In prison on a life sentence, the man went free. Later, in the 1960s, when a Virginia school board decided to ban Harper

Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Kilpatrick arranged for the students to get free copies. He liked, sometimes, to thumb his nose at authority. Had Kilpatrick done as much to Byrd — challenged him on his recalcitrance and shown him a new path for his politics and his state — the story of

Virginia and the South might have been different. But Kilpatrick was not inclined to give Harry

Byrd anything but his friendship, his support and his best advice.41

What followed those first few days of shock and fear and resignation were months of study and deliberation on what the white South should do in response to Brown. The uncertainty of that time was reflected in one day’s letters to the editor of the Richmond News

Leader. “I am sure no good and much evil will result from this very unexpected turn of events,” wrote B. Johnson, in a letter published May 24, 1954. ”I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t have to call the soldiers home to fight a war within the States now.”42 Another reader, H.R. Leary, was baffled by the court’s misunderstanding of the South. “Does our Supreme Court think that after

100 years of segregation that they can just up and say that there will be no more segregation?

Well, that can’t and I hope won’t be done, even if it means the Southern States directly disobeying our Supreme Court which made a fatal mistake this time.”43 R.R. Hazlett Sr. wrote,

“As a matter of fact their decision is fraught with unseen dangers and far reaching and

30 dangerous possibilities,” and Mrs. Audrey Brooks complained, “It seems the only individuals in

Virginia who are gaining any privileges are the Negroes.”44

A few other readers, however, expressed different points of view. “I would suggest that we do a whole lot of praying over it, have a little more faith,” wrote McKinley Nichols. “A Negro does my cooking and takes care of my children and if we are so afraid that our children will be maladjusted because of school contact, then there is something wrong in the way you have been bringing them up.”45 Samuel Meyer offered an impassioned plea for acceptance and expressed concern for some of the views previously printed in the paper’s letter column. “In the service, we slept next to Negroes, ate with them and lived together without any contamination one way or the other,” reader Meyer wrote. “I cannot comprehend people who will eat in a restaurant where the food is prepared and served by colored people, but who blanch at the thought of eating at the same table with a Negro. These same people may even have a Negro domestic in their home raising their children, but the same kids can’t go to school with certain other children simply because their skin is of a different color.”46 Two days later, another reader wrote in a similar vein. “Now is the time to restrain our feelings and produce a social revolution in the South as calmly as possible…,” wrote J.A. Moore of Williamsburg, Virginia. “A few of us in

Army experiences and elsewhere have already had our first lessons in meeting Negroes as social equals. It is a strange, weird feeling but once that strangeness is overcome it is easy.”47

The diversity of views in the letters to the editor was remarkable. The white South’s response to Brown was mostly through official actions, and almost entirely those were acts of resistance. These letters suggest, however, that at least a portion of white Southerners were holding, or at least exploring, views contrary to the conventional. This period of uncertainty, after the Supreme Court declared a new future and before the South’s leadership officially and totally rejected it, allowed the white South to think in new and even daring ways. “I cannot afford to hate, it is too costly for me,” wrote one citizen, Robert L. Marshall, in a letter to the editor that must have set his neighbors talking. “I am the father of five children. I will not bring my children up to the place of Justice with the thoughts that their father taught them to hate.”48

This language is unexpected and unusual, both exciting and revealing. Some Southerners were

31 compelled to express these thoughts in a public forum, the letters to the editor, in hopes, presumably, of influencing others to reach beyond their past and to try to get a purchase on this new future before it slipped away. At the same time, however, elected leaders of the South offered no such thoughts and made no similar statements. Leadership slowly rallied around themes of never, not here, no way. This meant that these citizen-writers were on their own, which was never a comfortable place in Southern communities. On the fundamental issue of white dominion, expressing alternatives was daring, even risky. Hearing few voices of support, and none at all from the Byrd Organization or from the press, these voices grew quiet and, not surprisingly, this window on the soul of the South was closed.

As for Kilpatrick and his editorial page, there was bluster, as usual, in the weeks and months after Brown but no clear direction and no defiant call to action. “It is worth noting, a full week after the Supreme Court’s ruling in the school segregation cases, that the sun has continued to rise in the morning; it still sets in the afternoon,” he wrote in “The Decision, One

Week Later,” the editorial of May 24, 1954. “We still have with us the Indochina situation, the

McCarthy hearings, and one-run losses by the Virginians. In brief, the world has not come to an end.”49 He promised some sort of resistance — “If some of the South’s critics interpret this restraint as a meek submission to the Supreme Court’s opinion, they ultimately will find themselves mistaken” — but he did not give a clue what that might be, because he did not know.

This mild threat of undefined resistance was followed by vague words of encouragement. “The one point we would make here is simply to say, again, that these months of grace must be used constructively for the keenest thinking both races can bring to the problem. This is not the time for action — that will come later, when the court’s final decree is handed down — but it is the time for working out, in detail, a wise and constitutional course to pursue when the hour of decision arrives.”50 This expression of openness and uncertainty, a gesture unlike Kilpatrick, was telling: At that early hour, the South remained confused. There was no plan, there was no strategy, and there was no driving argument. All that, of course, would change, and change dramatically.

32 A year later, any doubt or reserve had been overcome by bravado and determination.

“These nine men repudiated the Constitution, spit upon the Tenth Amendment, and rewrote the fundamental law of this land to suit their own gauzy concepts of sociology,” Kilpatrick and the

Richmond News Leader declared in an editorial on June 1, 1955, after the release of the ruling known as Brown II. “If it be said now that the South is flouting the law, let it be said to the high court, You taught us how.” The editorial went on to promote a lengthy series of court challenges. “Litigate? Let us pledge ourselves to litigate this thing for fifty years.” And to make it clear that any belief in the inevitability of integration had been extinguished, the editorial stated: “When the Court proposes that its social revolution be imposed upon the South ‘as soon as practicable,’ there are those of us who would respond that ‘as soon as practicable’ means never at all.”51

This tone of defiance and strategy of resistance was repeated on November 21, 1955, as the newspaper launched its full-blown editorial campaign against Brown: “This was the grave action taken by the Supreme Court, when irrespective of precedent, long acquiesced in, it asserted the right to change its interpretation of the Constitution at its pleasure, disregarding the orderly processes for its amendment set out in Article V thereof.…” The high court had run amok, Kilpatrick argued, and had reached so far beyond the bounds of legal tradition as to render the decision illegitimate. “Was it ever intended by the founding fathers that such authority should be vested in the court … does not Virginia have a right and a duty to interpose its sovereignty in a valiant effort to halt the evil?”52

This argument lies at the heart of interposition — that the Supreme Court had erred with reckless abandon and had acted wildly to upset the longstanding and settled law of Plessy vs. Ferguson. Kilpatrick asked: Who could set the law right again? His answer: The states, exercising their sovereign powers, with Virginia and its Southern brethren courageously leading the way.

And lead, Kilpatrick did, through detailed explorations of arcane law and forgotten history. With editorials, guest columns, reprints of legal opinions, Kilpatrick took his readers to the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 — “Nothing in today’s paper, we would suggest

33 to our readers, merits their thoughtful attention more than these resolutions of 157 years ago”53 — and beyond to his reinvigorated notion of interposition. It was part tour de force, part pedantic drudgery. Kilpatrick loved it, and he worked at a fevered pace to research the articles and bang out the acres of text. No newspaper had ever attempted anything similar. There was a bibliography on interposition sources, writings of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, an excerpt from an address by John C. Calhoun, historical commentary on a failed interposition attempt in 1832, and more, including pages of editorials rich in self-importance. “If the ‘most fundamental of the rights of the States and of their citizens’ are not to be swept away by judicial encroachment,” bellowed one of the editorials introducing the concept that dazzled lawmakers across the South, “and the States reduced to the status of mere counties, must we not exert every possible effort to halt the courts in their usurpation of our sovereign powers?...

This is the right of interposition.”54

The campaign continued daily from November 21, 1955, to February 1, 1956. With page after page of heated persuasion and historical citations, readers could not help but be persuaded, or at least intrigued. The impact on the South was powerful. Legislators in Virginia,

Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and other Southern states launched serious discussions on the viability of interposition and how they could best use this exciting legal weapon. Other editors watched the Richmond News Leader’s campaign with amazement or amusement, but in time most joined in with hearty editorials of their own. “As the tactic of interposition stormed through every southern state capital,” wrote Roberts and Klibanoff in The Race Beat, “the press covered it as if a supernatural force had been discovered to save a troubled region.”55 Kilpatrick clearly gave the South’s leadership, both in politics and in the press, the tool they needed — a fresh idea and a powerful, dogmatic argument.

Kilpatrick and his newspaper were relentless. Explanations of interposition erupted at every opportunity, along with examples of how it could be used and why it was needed. There was even an attempt to explain away the Civil War, which to many minds had settled the question of states’ rights as regards federal powers. Not so, Kilpatrick argued. “That the war established a certain military supremacy, Virginia would be the last to deny…,” stated one

34 editorial, a bit coyly. “But if the war also established the constitutional supremacy of the

Federal government over the member States of the Union, then this fact surely would have been spelled out for us to read in the Constitution today. This nowhere appears.… Ours is still a

Union of States, each State retaining certain sovereign rights that it never has surrendered.… ”56

In this fashion, the Richmond News Leader kept interposition in motion, protected it from its enemies, and asserted its utility. Missing was any discussion of whether interposition was for real — it wasn’t, was the general opinion of cool-headed observers — and any consideration of more realistic alternatives. But dispassionate discussion and the seeking of alternatives were what Kilpatrick might disparage as lovely lace — and that’s not what the

South required in its hour of need. Instead of presenting options, the pages of the Richmond

News Leader heaved and steamed in full dogma mode. There were no doubts and there were no alternatives. More than that, it advocated, strongly, for the rapid and forceful use of interposition by Virginia’s General Assembly.

On November 29, 1955, with the General Assembly meeting the next day, the newspaper published an editorial titled “Interposition, Now!” in which Kilpatrick presented interposition as a test of manhood: “The question we would submit to the Assembly — the ‘transcendent issue’ that surpasses any questions of racial segregation — is whether the compact among the sovereign States has been violated by the Supreme Court; and if the compact has been violated, whether Virginia’s General Assembly will meet the infraction with the same high courage and the same eloquent reliance upon fundamental principles that Jefferson and Madison relied upon in years gone by.”57 Invoking Jefferson and Madison was a serious challenge to elected officials in the Old Dominion. Kilpatrick would have thrown in Robert E. Lee, too, if only he could find a way, for at this point the editor had rounded the curve with interposition, and he was determined to bring the rest of Virginia with him.

Kilpatrick’s taunts were not successful in getting the General Assembly to take action on interposition that day, but the juggernaut was unstoppable. Soon after, on January 19, 1956, a group of 35 lawmakers introduced an interposition resolution. Everyone knew Kilpatrick as the father of the measure, and when his progeny suffered criticism in the Capitol, the editor got

35 pushy in print. “We would say to these gentlemen, as forthrightly as we know how,” Kilpatrick wrote, “that the hour has come to stand up and be counted.”58 Then he turned up the heat.

“There was a time when Virginia could recognize the face of tyranny,” Kilpatrick wrote. “We had strong men in this Commonwealth then, fearless men, men who loved liberty, men who would resist usurpation. What has become of this spirit? How has our heritage been so wasted?”

Kilpatrick pressed further, without restraint. “Virginia has an opportunity now to stand valiantly before the nation, protesting a palpable abuse of the Constitution. Are we to fritter away this opportunity in lick-spittle fawning … and squander the main chance? God, give us men!”59

One can easily sense in the editorial Kilpatrick’s commitment to interposition and how that commitment and the newspaper’s ambitious editorial campaign had strained his good judgment. Though never short of words, Kilpatrick was always in control of his argument and his language. He appeared to lose control of both in the “strong men” editorial, a rare lapse for a disciplined writer. Despite the excess and the pathos, the editorial helped rally support, and on February 1, 1956, both houses approved the Resolution of Interposition by overwhelming margins. Kilpatrick had won.

But what his achievement meant for the state, its citizens and its schools was not clear.

Despite all the words of passion and persuasion, interposition was at best an intriguing concept.

It was not, in reality, a viable option. It had no legal use. Its value was symbolic. Interposition became a rallying cry for a threatened and confused culture, a lofty sounding, history-laden shout of anger. The rush to adopt interposition showed Virginia’s determination to do something in response to Brown, and the General Assembly’s support for Kilpatrick’s foolish idea revealed deep confusion over what that response should be. Virginia’s leadership was faced with a unanimous ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court that fundamentally reshaped both the state’s system of education and its divided society. Rather than wrestle with the real issue — whether to reform Southern law and culture to embrace basic American values — they happily pursued another that was rich in dogma but was, at its core, all but meaningless. Kilpatrick pulled the trick of the substitute, and they loved him for it.

36 Just as Kilpatrick’s substituting a new argument of interposition for the old argument of the Southern way of life gave him a wider audience and greater influence, hewing to the old line limited the prospects of others. One example is South Carolina journalist Thomas R. Waring Jr.

A contemporary of Kilpatrick’s, Waring wanted to be the voice of the South in its fight to preserve the old ways. He sought celebrity as a Southern leader, but Waring never got to the center stage. Waring was old school, through and through, at a time when the nation sought modern figures from the South. Kilpatrick shrouded the Southern case in new, legal robes, and that made Kilpatrick interesting — it made him a star. But Waring’s robes were not far removed from the hoods of the Ku Klux Klan. Waring desperately needed to pull a substitute, but he didn’t know how.

Without a doubt Waring had gifts of persuasion and determination, and within his state he was a leading figure. Though his reputation reached beyond South Carolina, his influence was never as great as his ambition. As the nation in the 1950s and 1960s began to turn its eyes and ears to the South, it quickly marginalized the classic Southern blowhards — Major Sullens of the Jackson Daily News in Mississippi, and others like him — and looked for new voices to explain the conflict. Waring thought he could be this new voice. He wanted to speak for the man in the middle, neither unbending conservative nor liberal seeking change. He was plagued, however, by his own social views and hard-core politics. Though younger and not as extreme as the cartoonish Sullens, Waring failed to distance himself from a fundamentally racist argument.

As a result, Waring’s role was as both preacher and scold — he supported those who kept the faith in the old ways and blasted those who showed any signs of conversion to the new — but not as a credible Southern spokesman.

Waring was among many who saw themselves as guardians of Southern ideology, and he was among the most active, aggressive and determined. As editor of the Charleston News and

Courier, Waring brought to the cause the high spirit and bold outspokenness of South Carolina politics. In his newspaper, his editorials and columns on desegregation were known for their hard edge and resolution — Waring was not one for compromise. Time magazine once described his newspaper as “one of the South's noisiest advocates of segregation” and his

37 editorial policy as “one long, high-fidelity rebel yell to hold that color line.”60 Adding an extra dose of bitterness to his sharp tongue was the fact that Waring’s uncle, J. Waties Waring, was a federal judge who for almost a decade before the Brown decision had begun siding with the call for social change in his civil-rights rulings. The judge’s rulings shocked the city of Charleston and divided the prominent Waring family, with young Thomas giving hot expression to the family’s conservative dissent. “Law or no law,” he wrote in one 1951 editorial in anticipation of another of Uncle Waties’ rulings, “no matter what decisions federal courts shall hand down, in

South Carolina there will not be integration of the white and Negro races in schools.”61

In his national argument, however, Waring toned things down. He presented himself as one of the moderates and as a leader of the well-educated Southerners who he wanted to show were the equal of any Northerner in intelligence, in political acumen and in moral responsibility.

While Waring’s work and influence in the South continued for two decades, his big splash on the national scene came in January 1956, when Harper’s Magazine published his article “The

Southern Case Against Desegregation.” Commissioned by editor-in-chief John Fischer to give the Southern side of the national debate, the article caused anguish for Fischer and his Harper’s colleagues. Waring was asked to write draft after draft, as the editors sought to drain away

Waring’s racist portrayal of black Southerners. The version eventually accepted by Harper’s contained enough unpleasantness to require what Kilpatrick described as a struggle “into print weighted down by the longest, most apologetic editor's note in magazine history.”62

The extensive note by the Harper’s editors provided insight into how conservative leaders were viewed by others outside the region. To begin, they were generous to Waring and his reputation. “He has a sense of responsibility to the public interest, as he conceives it; a wide acquaintanceship throughout the South; and instincts of decency and good will. He speaks for a considerable body of opinion throughout the seventeen Southern and Border states,” they wrote.

“These people believe — with some reason — that they have been denied a hearing in the national press. As a result they are convinced that the country as a whole carries in its mind a dangerously false picture of the situation in their region.” The editors noted that Waring

38 does not speak for the Negroes…. Neither does he speak for the Southern liberals — a small but articulate group which has proven quite capable of speaking for itself…. Mr. Waring has little in common with the lunatic fringe of White Supremacy fanaticism of the old Klan variety … and he stands equally far apart from the cold-blooded demagogues…. The group Mr. Waring does represent is less noisy than either the liberals or the demagogues. Consequently it is often overlooked. This is unfortunate, because its influence on the course of the South — during the next five years, at least — probably will be decisive. It consists of solid, stubborn, well-meaning, worried middle-class citizens, much like Mr. Waring himself.63

Having done their duty with the pleasantries, the editors set to work putting distance between their magazine and its progressive views and Waring’s defense of the segregated South.

Waring’s well-meaning Southerners, the editors insisted, “seem unwilling to accept the Negro as a true party-of-interest, who has just as much right as the white Southerner to a voice in working out a mutually acceptable solution.” Further, the editors argued, “What infuriates the white Southerner beyond all else is the feeling that he is being pushed.… But the Northerner

(and the Negro) can reply that the white Southerner never moves at all unless he is prodded — and prodded hard. Every improvement in the status of the Negro as a citizen has resulted from outside pressure, and at every step the white Southerner has shouted ‘too fast.’”64

Waring tried not to shout in his contribution to Harper’s, but he couldn’t help but repeat the chorus of complaint of the white South: a Northern audience that misunderstood the South, a troublesome burden of sharing space with a backward race and a Supreme Court determined to trample states’ rights and Southern sensibilities. “The metropolitan press almost without exception has abandoned fair and objective reporting of the race story,” he wrote. “For facts, it frequently substitutes propaganda.”65

Waring complained that few of their kind could get past the gatekeepers of the national publications. “Furthermore,” he insisted, “with the exception of a small coterie of Southern writers whom Northern editors regard as ‘enlightened,’ spokesmen for the Southern view cannot gain access to Northern ears.”66 Waring, Kilpatrick and other Southern conservatives resented the exposure and support provided to Harry Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette,

Hodding Carter Jr. of the Delta Democrat-Times, Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution and a few others recognized as representing a more progressive future for the region. “When the

39 literate Southern conservative — and there are some literate Southern conservatives — seeks access to the major media of national communication,” wrote Kilpatrick, in 1957, echoing

Waring’s words, “he finds the borders closed to him as though he carried typhoid.” Kilpatrick complained that those Southerners who did gain access were not true representatives of the

Southern majority but those “whose views are as typically Southern as those which prevail in, let us say, South Amboy, New Jersey.”67 This is more than just the age-old debate of who is

Southern and who is more righteous in their Southern ways. This is an important part of limiting the field of play of one’s political enemies. Asserting who has the right voice, and who has the right to use it, is a crucial part of the Southern style.

Waring struggled, in his Harper’s piece, to find a moderate voice, the kind that could keep his foot in the door of the Northern press, but his argument never budged from the commonly heard views of a Southern die-hard. He asserted, for example, that Southern parents could not, in the foreseeable future, allow their children to share space in the public schools because parents were afraid of what such exposure would bring. It is not surprising that the

Harper’s editors found his article offensive, for he described African-Americans in the South as unhealthy and unclean — he claimed they had a rate of venereal disease many times higher than that of Southern whites, were culturally backward, sexually loose and plagued with illegitimacy (“Many white persons believe that morals among their own race are lax enough as it is, without exposing their children to an even more primitive view of sex habits”), inclined to criminal ways and, lastly, intellectually not on a par with Southern whites.68 As for the idea that integration would give African-American students exposure to better teachers and well- educated classmates, Waring had this to say: “The trouble with this theory is that even if it works, a single generation of white children will bear the brunt of the load. While they are rubbing off white civilization onto the colored children, Negro culture will also rub off onto the whites.”69 Waring defended the White Citizens’ Councils as well-meaning foils against the Ku

Klux Klan, charged that the crusade for social change was directed by those outside the South and suggested the NAACP was rich with money and “more interested in forcing the Negro into the white man’s company than in equipping the Negro to qualify fully for such association.”70

40 That Waring’s article and its racist nature gave the Harper’s editors heartburn is obvious from the editor’s note. Elsewhere, Waring had mixed reviews. Time magazine said Waring

“gently” made the case against desegregation, and it gave his paper credit in that it

“occasionally offends rabid racists by printing constructive news of the Negro community.”71 In far away Oregon, the Eugene Register-Guard gave him the credibility he sought as a Southern spokesman. Describing Waring as an “intelligent, high-minded, decent Southerner,” the newspaper’s editors called his Harper’s argument “one of the most cogent articles on the subject that we’ve seen in a long time.… His viewpoint is not that of the extreme racist who believes that God decreed segregation. He doesn’t urge that the Civil War be fought again.”72

The editors summarized the article for their readers but stopped short of endorsing his point of view, and they reminded subscribers that the paper had cheered the Brown decision as a victory for the “ideal of the brotherhood of man.” A bit of a split decision for Waring with the

Eugene Register-Guard, but a warm reception, nonetheless. His words received a cooler welcome from the MANAS Journal, a philosophical weekly published by Henry Geiger, which asked, “If the Southern gentlemen of Mr. Waring's stamp and ineffable background could be found taking pleasure in Negro achievement, side by side with white students and men, their appeals for

‘patience’ and for the South's right to meet the race problem ‘in its own way’ might win greater sympathy in the North.”73

Seen from the distance of more than half a century, Waring gave his readers a complete profile of a Southern resister, obsessed with race, a man afraid of his black fellow citizens and openly disdainful of them. Waring may have been a moderate on his better days, but those were few and far between. To Northern readers, he was the stereotype of old-school Southern leadership. This is, in part, why Kilpatrick eclipsed Waring in the national media, because he presented a different, less overtly racial argument and cut a more interesting figure.

Waring sought an audience outside the South and was largely denied. Kilpatrick, by comparison, was actively recruited to speak at Northern functions and to write for national publications, and he used his appeal to advocate the Southern conservative point of view. Like many other Southern writers, both moderate and conservative, Kilpatrick believed the South

41 was seldom given its due in Northern publications and was often portrayed inaccurately, even crudely. “My complaint from time to time,” Kilpatrick said in remarks before the Virginia Club in New York, in 1957, “has been that the asphalt lobby spends more time and money in effective promotion of macadam roads than the Southern states have spent, thus far, promoting a cause of infinitely more importance to the country.”74 He called for a Southern legislative commission on “presenting Southern views in State capitals and the country.… We will never know how much support we have until we go out to look for it and cultivate it.”75

Lacking such a regional commission, Kilpatrick shouldered much of the burden. He helped found, in 1958, a state-run Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government that spread the conservative message on limited federal powers and wrote a curriculum for a required high-school class for Virginia students. On the lecture circuit, he was hot property — growing interest in civil rights generated the need for Southern envoys to the North, and

Kilpatrick was eager to oblige. As always, he was fearless, speaking to audiences that he knew would be hostile and sometimes getting booed for his trouble. Nevertheless, he soldiered on.76

He addressed college groups and civic groups and appeared on television programs, including one televised debate with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Kilpatrick spoke on his own or as part of pairings — invariably, he was given the role of the sour conservative, griping about integration. He didn’t like such casting, but he went along, out of his duty to the South and his desire for an audience.

At times, he took pleasure in pointing out that Northern critics were happy to criticize the South for sins they overlooked in their own backyards. He mocked Northern newspapers for taking rigid positions on Southern segregation while offering only soft criticism of racial discrimination found in Northern cities and states. “I think it is a splendid thing for American journalism that all newspapers are not cast in the solemn mold of the New York Times,” he told the Greater Los Angeles Press Club, speaking in 1960. “Deliver us, I would pray, from the custard prose of its editorial columns, in which all opinions are chiseled into tapioca and all the lumps are squishy ones.”77 And always, he spoke of conservative values, of concern for expanding federal power, of a firm belief in the right of states to manage their own affairs. That

42 includes, of course, how states run their schools, and whether those schools are segregated or integrated. “My role this evening,” Kilpatrick told a forum at the Villanova Law School in 1958,

“is to a degree that of an evangelist on the sawdust trail. I would exhort you to the old-time religion — to what we of the South call ‘the sound doctrine’ — to the constitutional trinity of strict construction, enumerated powers and the sovereignty of states.”78

In various ways, through many variations, Kilpatrick made those same strong and simple points in every speech at every stop. Sometimes there would be more detail, reflecting the latest developments in the lengthy struggle over school desegregation. Sometimes there would be more humor. Often there would be classical allusions — he enjoyed impressing his audience with his breadth of knowledge. And like any good speaker, he adjusted his material for the interests of the audience. In a speech in Ohio, for example, he gave a lengthy, detailed legal history of how that state had dealt with public schools and segregation, over many decades, and drew parallels to the policies of Southern states. He touched on how white

Southerners believed social change was developing and progress was being made: “I believe the

Negro people of the South could have achieved most of these changes in the course of time under conditions — voluntary conditions — that would have represented a net gain indeed.”79

He expressed the belief, common among some Southern whites, that the Brown decision had badly damaged race relations: “[I]t fostered bitterness, turmoil, and social upheaval that could have been prevented.”80 And he addressed the argument that equality does not mean integration: “Equality of rights does not involve the necessity of educating white and colored persons in the same school, any more than it does of educating children of both sexes in the same school, or that different grades of scholars must be kept in the same school. There is no ground upon which the plaintiff can claim that his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment have been infringed.”81

Wherever he was, he spoke on the South and on what he portrayed as excesses of the federal judiciary. “What has happened is that some of our judges, like those artists who cut the emperor’s new gown, have manufactured out of thin air powers and prohibitions wholly of their own contrivance,” he told the Villanova audience. “I am so naïve I cannot see this magic

43 garment. All I see is the hard, unyielding language of the Constitution itself.…”82 Sometimes, as with the Villanova forum, the talk gets complicated, with lawyerly language and references and citations. Other times, his words are more streamlined. But always they are sharp, and always they cut deeply into the Supreme Court and its landmark ruling on public schools. “Any effort to impose such [integrated] schools must result in bitterness, bloodshed, race hatreds and social chaos of a sort we have never experienced in Virginia,” he told the Richmond Rotary Club, in 1958. “And for my own part, I will continue to resist such efforts in every legal, honorable and constitutional fashion that can be devised: I will resist them, if you please, ‘massively,’” a reference to Senator Byrd’s resistance plan.83 In a speech before the City Club of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1959, he was no less hostile to the court and the Brown decision. “The effect of the court’s decision at that time was to amend the Constitution, which the court had no right to do; to usurp the legislative powers of the Congress, which the court had no right to do; and to trespass upon the reserved powers of the States, which the court had no right to do,” he told the Ohio group. “But the court was not concerned with questions of constitutional right. It was concerned with the formation of national social policy by its own naked power.”84

In this way, Kilpatrick saw his role outside the South as similar to his role within the region or within his state: to reinforce the core beliefs, the dogma, of the conservative movement. In the South, his arguments centered on preserving segregation; before other audiences, his arguments focused on the federal threat to conservative principles of limited government and local control. His speeches, if reduced to skeletal form, were much like talking points today, the key touchstones of the conservative argument, repeated often and with strength and vigor. Kilpatrick was a Southern evangelist, but he was an evangelist for the conservative moment as well. He fulfilled an important need in both respects — teaching the

North that white Southerners know the law and can defend their beliefs, and sharing with fellow conservatives the arguments he had honed as an active editorial writer in the midst of battle. In the long run, Kilpatrick was more successful with the latter. Because of his speeches and his writings on conservative issues, he was asked by CBS to join its news magazine, “60

Minutes,” for a fast-paced, bombastic segment called Point-Counterpoint. He was paired up

44 against Shana Alexander to create a liberal-conservative — not Northern-Southern — faceoff.

Kilpatrick, once the great Southern defender, was soon known nationwide as the great conservative offender. After leaving “60 Minutes” after a few seasons he returned to print as a syndicated columnist, where he spent decades correcting Americans for mistakes in both their writing and their politics.

His greatest legacy remains, however, his leadership as Virginia and the South grappled with the court’s mandate to desegregate public schools. Interposition may have been a sideshow, but it distracted the mind of a South when thoughtful work was needed to bring the

Southern states into the modern world. The agitation over interposition quickly shifted to support for Massive Resistance, with tragic consequences. Under Byrd’s plan, and with able and aggressive encouragement from Kilpatrick and the Richmond News Leader, Virginia put in place strict anti-integration policies that, in 1958, led to the state’s forcing the closure of nine public schools in Norfolk, Charlottesville and Warren County.

The loss of the public schools and the threat that more schools could follow shocked parents and the public, and various groups began work to end the madness. In 1959, courts struck down the school-closure laws, and Massive Resistance in Virginia was effectively over.

That same year, however, officials in Prince Edward County decided to shut down their school system rather than admit African-American students, as required by court rulings. Prince

Edward’s public schools would remain closed until 1964. Kilpatrick played a part in all these decisions as one of the state’s primary resistance leaders. His role and the events he helped put in place in Virginia and across the South showed the power of the Southern style. Kilpatrick, as

Virginia’s leading spokesman, employed the Southern style of political rhetoric to drive all of the key decisions. The citizens of the state were receptive to powerful messages, and when

Kilpatrick substituted a false issue for the authentic, few voices of protest could be heard over the heavy breathing of the state’s excited leadership. As a political tool, the Southern style was dramatically effective.

In practice, the Southern style restricted participation in the debate by enforcing conformity of beliefs. It limited ideas as well by forcing them to conform to the Kilpatrick’s

45 driving message. As a result, the options on the table for Virginia and its decision-makers were few, and the review of those options was weak and ineffective. Dogma-driven decision-making did not serve Virginia in this time — it only deepened the intractability of the state’s leadership and created new crises.

The strength of the Southern style, as a tool of political agitation, is that belief is strong.

That same attribute, however, creates problems in a changing world. Dogma can damage one’s ability to recognize that ideas outside the ideological frame may be good and true. Consider

Kilpatrick’s reflections, given in a column printed in newspapers nationwide in 1972. “My own impression, for whatever it may be worth, is that the American people, both North and South, have come to accept the constitutional provision that was fashioned nearly 18 years ago in

Brown vs. Board of Education. I will go to my grave still convinced that Brown was bad law — a willful perversion of the clear meaning and intention of the 14th Amendment — but the principle no longer is challenged. That principle, quite simply, is that the states cannot engage in discrimination by race.”85 Even a mind as sharp as Kilpatrick’s was dulled by dogma he created and conveyed and by the power of his own beliefs.

1 James J. Kilpatrick, speech to Rotary Club of Franklin County, Virginia, Oct. 11, 1951, papers of James J. Kilpatrick, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

2 Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), p. 117.

3 Ibid, p. 113.

4 J. Harvie Wilkinson III, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics 1945-1966 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1968), p. 5; Alden Hatch, The Byrds of Virginia (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), pp. 422-423.

5 Wilkinson, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics 1945-1966, p. 417.

6 Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 11.

7 W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Random House, Vintage Books Edition, 1991), p. 422.

8 Wilkinson, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics 1945-1966, p. 37.

46

9 Wilkinson, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics 1945-1966, pp. 5, 60, 115-116; Hatch, The Byrds of Virginia, p. 423.

10 Wilkinson, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics 1945-1966, pp. 66, 245; Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia, pp. 159-160, 167, 175.

11 Hatch, The Byrds of Virginia, pp. 406-410.

12 Hatch, The Byrds of Virginia, p. 424.

13 Elizabeth Atwood, “‘Dear Harry,’ ‘My Dear Jack,’” Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, vol. 121, no. 4 (2013), pp. 346-376.

14 Keith M. Finley, Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights, 1938-1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), pp. 127-129.

15 David Tennant Bryan and James Jackson Kilpatrick, Interposition: Editorials and Editorial Page Presentations, The Richmond News Leader, 1955-1956 (Richmond News Leader, 1956), introduction (no page number); William P. Hustwit, James J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), p. 57.

16 Robert G. Parkinson, “First From the Right: Massive Resistance and the Image of Thomas Jefferson in the 1950s,” Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, vol. 112, no. 1 (2004), pp. 2-35.

17 Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, p. 116.

18 James J. Kilpatrick, notes on talk before Opinions Unlimited, Sharon, Conn., Dec. 13, 1957, papers of James J. Kilpatrick, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969, Louisiana Paperback Edition, 1999), pp. 128-129; Benjamin Muse, Virginia’s Massive Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), p. 20; Benjamin Muse, Ten Years of Prelude: The Story of Integration Since the Supreme Court’s 1954 Decision (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), p. 70; Joseph J. Thorndike, “‘The Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation’: James J. Kilpatrick and the Virginia Campaign against Brown,” in The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Segregation in Virginia, Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis, eds. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), p. 52.

23 Thorndike, “‘The Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation,’” in The Moderates’ Dilemma, p. 51.

24 Thorndike, “‘The Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation,’” in The Moderates’ Dilemma, pp. 51-52.

47

25 Thorndike, “‘The Sometimes Sordid Level of Race and Segregation,’” in The Moderates’ Dilemma, p. 52.

26 Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, pp. 118-119.

27 Associated Press, “Dixie is Slow In Comment on Decision,” Richmond News Leader, May 17, 1954, pp. 1-2.

28 Associated Press, “Dixie is Slow In Comment on Decision,” Richmond News Leader, May 17, 1954, p 2.

29 Associated Press, “Dixie is Slow In Comment on Decision,” Richmond News Leader, May 17, 1954, p. 2.

30 Associated Press, “Dixie is Slow In Comment on Decision,” Richmond News Leader, May 17, 1954, p. 2.

31 Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia, p. 325.

32 Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia, p. 326.

33 “Senator Byrd Scores Decision as Dangerous to South,” Richmond News Leader, May 17, 1954, p. 1.

34 “Senator Byrd Scores Decision as Dangerous to South,” Richmond News Leader, May 17, 1954, pp. 1-3.

35 “The Decision,” Richmond News Leader, May 18, 1954, p. 10.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, p. 115.

42 “The Supreme Court’s Opinion Provokes Strong Opposition, Some Support,” Richmond News Leader, May 24, 1954, p. 10.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

48

47 “Readers Urge Governor to Fight for State’s Rights Against Court,” Richmond News Leader, May 26, 1954, p. 12.

48 Turner Road Trees, High FHA Fees, Indochina Intervention Arouse Ire,” Richmond News Leader, May 31, 1954, p. 12.

49 “The Decision, One Week Later,” Richmond News Leader, May 24, 1954, p. 10.

50 Ibid.

51 Francis M. Wilhoit, The Politics of Massive Resistance (New York: George Braziller Inc. 1973), p. 98.

52 “The Transcendent Issue,” Richmond News Leader, Nov. 21, 1955, as reproduced in “Interposition: Editorials and Editorial Page Presentations, The Richmond News Leader, 1955- 1956” (Richmond News Leader, 1956), p. 1.

53 “Kentucky-Virginia Resolutions,” Richmond News Leader, Nov. 21, 1955, as reproduced in “Interposition: Editorials and Editorial Page Presentations, The Richmond News Leader, 1955- 1956,” p. 1.

54 “The Right of Interposition,” Richmond News Leader, November 22, 1955, as reproduced in “Interposition: Editorials and Editorial Page Presentations, The Richmond News Leader, 1955-1956,” p. 6.

55 Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, p 110.

56 “What Did the War Change?” Richmond News Leader, Nov. 23, 1955, as reproduced in “Interposition: Editorials and Editorial Page Presentations, The Richmond News Leader, 1955- 1956,” pp. 10-11.

57 “Interposition, Now!” Richmond News Leader, Nov. 29, 1955, as reproduced in “Interposition: Editorials and Editorial Page Presentations, The Richmond News Leader, 1955- 1956,” pp. 18-20.

58 “Time to Fight It Out,” Richmond News Leader, Jan. 23, 1956, as reproduced in “Interposition: Editorials and Editorial Page Presentations, The Richmond News Leader, 1955- 1956,” p. 42.

59 Ibid.

60 “The Paper Curtain,” Time, May 25, 1962, p. 94.

61 Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, pp. 36-37, 46-47.

62 Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, p. 212; James J. Kilpatrick, “Conservatism in the South,” in Louis D. Jr. and James Jackson Kilpatrick, eds., The Lasting South: Fourteen Southerners Look at Their Home (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1957), p. 195.

63 “Personal and otherwise: Man Here Wants to Be Heard,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1956, p. 22.

49

64 “Personal and otherwise: Man Here Wants to Be Heard,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1956, p. 24.

65 Waring, “The Southern Case Against Desegregation,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1956, p. 39.

18 Waring, “The Southern Case Against Desegregation,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1956, pp. 39-40.

19 Kilpatrick, “Conservatism in the South,” in The Lasting South, p. 195.

20 Waring, “The Southern Case Against Desegregation,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1956, pp. 41-42.

21 Waring, “The Southern Case Against Desegregation,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1956, p. 42.

22 Waring, “The Southern Case Against Desegregation,” Harper’s Magazine, January 1956, p. 43.

23 “Dilemma in Dixie, Time, Feb. 20, 1956, p. 76.

24 “Why Those Southerners Feel as They Do,” editorial, Eugene Register-Guard, Jan. 9, 1956, p. 6A.

25 “Frontiers: Aspects of Desegregation,” MANAS Journal, Jan. 25, 1956, p. 12.

74 James J. Kilpatrick, notes for talk in New York City, the Virginia Club, Nov. 22, 1957, papers of James J. Kilpatrick, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

75 Ibid.

76 Hustwit, Salesman for Segregation, pp. 90-103.

77 James J. Kilpatrick, address to the Greater Los Angeles Press Club awards dinner, Dec. 7, 1960, papers of James J. Kilpatrick, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

78 James J. Kilpatrick, notes for address at Villanova Law School Forum, March 5, 1958, papers of James J. Kilpatrick, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

79 James J. Kilpatrick, “School Integration in the South: The Greater Meaning,” an address before the City Club of Cleveland, Ohio, March 14, 1959, papers of James J. Kilpatrick, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid.

50

82 James J. Kilpatrick, notes for address at Villanova Law School Forum, March 5, 1958, papers of James J. Kilpatrick, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

83 James J. Kilpatrick, draft of a talk prepared for delivery before the Richmond Rotary Club, Nov. 11, 1958, papers of James J. Kilpatrick, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

84 James J. Kilpatrick, “School Integration in the South: The Greater Meaning,” an address before the City Club of Cleveland, Ohio, March 14, 1959, papers of James J. Kilpatrick, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

85 James J. Kilpatrick, “Bussing Threatens to Tear U.S. Apart,” The Blade (Toledo, Ohio), Feb. 12, 1972, p. 9.

51 CHAPTER THREE

THE BLIND EYE

James J. Kilpatrick’s surrender on massive resistance was the result of a political calculation, not a personal great awakening. The editor of the Richmond News Leader recognized the courts would not allow this strategy to play out and, sensing another Southern lost cause, chose to cut his losses. Kilpatrick, however, did not acknowledge the failure of

Southern leadership and politics, nor did he come to see the cause of black citizens in a new light. He continued to throw words and energy at his readers and encouraged whites to resist the Brown decision and any social change.

None of this is surprising. For generations, Southern whites had turned a blind eye to the true consequences of the Southern way of life. They refused to see the inequality, the injustice, the violence and the cruelty of the class system they ruled. This practice — both a self-defense mechanism and a means of enabling decisions of neglect — continues today.

Though the fight over segregation has come and gone, the practice of turning a blind eye remains a key part of the Southern style of politics.

Kilpatrick simply continued this tradition, as did other conservative leaders in the press and in politics. A full eight years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision, Kilpatrick kept up his call for Southerners to rally around resistance with his 1962 argument, The

Southern Case for School Segregation. His book offers solid evidence of an informed individual’s turning the blind eye and contains some classic examples of Southern denial. “In plain fact,” he wrote, arguing that Northerners don’t understand the amity among the races to be found in the South, “the relationship between white and Negro in the segregated South, in the country and in the city, has been far closer, more honest, less constrained, than such relations generally have been in the integrated North.”1 Black Southerners likely held a different understanding.

On the fundamental question of equality, Kilpatrick expressed a view out of step with the times and one that indicated he had kept his eyes and his mind closed throughout all of the

52 debates, discussions and exchanges that flowed from the Brown decision. “Here and now,” he wrote, adding italics for emphasis, “in his own communities, in the mid-1960s, the Negro race, as a race, plainly is not equal to the white race, as a race; nor, for that matter, in the wider world beyond, by the accepted judgment of ten thousand years, has the Negro race, as a race, ever been the cultural or intellectual equal of the white race, as a race.”2 Kilpatrick went on to argue that critics in the North were themselves choosing to be blind. “This we take to be a plain statement of fact, and if we are not amazed that our Northern antagonists do not accept it as such, we are resentful that they will not even look at the proposition, or hear of it, or inquire into it.”3

Kilpatrick returned, pages later, to his assertion of black inferiority:

The reality that the South has had to cope with most constantly, beyond the realities of defeat and poverty, is the reality of the Southern Negro. Other races of men, caught at the bottom of the ladder, have clambered up…. Who would have imagined in, say, 1880, that a Boston Irish Catholic would be President? But the Irish fought their own way up, on merit and ambition and hard work. They made a place at the table. They won acceptance, and they paid their own way. No such reality has been visible in the South. Instead of ambition (I speak in general terms), we have witnessed indolence; instead of skill, ineptitude; instead of talent, an inability to learn.”4 A number of pages later, he asked, “[W]hat has man gained from the history of the Negro race? The answer, alas, is ‘virtually nothing.’ From the dawn of civilization to the middle of the twentieth century, the Negro race, as a race, has contributed no more than a few grains of sand to the enduring monuments of mankind.5

A final example is found in how Kilpatrick brushed aside the South’s undeniable history of disenfranchisement and laid the problem of lack of ballot access, in 1962, at the feet of black citizens. “Negroes now are not prevented from registering or voting over most of the South,” he wrote blandly of a serious breach of constitutional rights that persisted well into the decade.

“In most areas,” he asserted, “it is no longer the intimidation of the white man, but far more often the indolence, indifference, and incapacity of the Negro himself that keeps him from the polls.”6

Kilpatrick, Richmond and Virginia were not alone in their ability not to see. Every community in every Southern state practiced blindness, and virtually every journalist did the same. One of the most telling examples of how turning a blind eye infected the Southern press

53 and warped its portrayal of reality can be found in Alabama, in 1963, in the steel-making city of

Birmingham.

The blind eye ruled Birmingham. One of the few true centers of heavy industry in the

South, Birmingham was sharply segregated, and enforcement of segregation by the authorities, the Ku Klux Klan and others often took violent turns — the city earned the nickname

“Bombingham” for good reason. Evidence of unfair policies and harsh conditions was abundant, yet whites, including the writers and editors of the city’s daily newspapers, refused to acknowledge what was around them every day of their lives. In 1963, as key events in the civil rights struggle thrust the city onto front pages and television screens nationwide, Birmingham became the nation’s window on the worst of the South. The city’s white citizens, however, perceived little of this reality. They turned a blind eye, as did Birmingham’s journalists.

Birmingham proved an important step in the evolving American awareness of the civil rights movement. Events there aroused sympathy, even outrage, among white Americans in the way that other desegregation efforts had not. Little Rock had captivated Americans in 1957, with the arrival of the 101st Airborne and incongruous scenes of soldiers enforcing order among students and the community. The integration of the University of Mississippi had stunned the nation in 1962, with its riot and killing on a college campus. But both crises were largely of the law — each pitted a governor too clever for his own good against the authority of the federal courts. Birmingham in 1963 was different. Birmingham was about the common brutality of Jim Crow, and in 1963 television brought evidence of that brutality into the living rooms of most every American home. Citizens watched fellow citizens bitten by police dogs and knocked down by blasts from fire hoses, and many were shocked and disturbed. Their revulsion shifted national politics and led to passage, a year later, of the Civil Rights Act of

1964.

There were many players in the Birmingham story that spring and summer — steel- industry leaders, owners of downtown stores and businesses, the city’s two daily newspapers, various activists for social change, the Ku Klux Klan, Governor George Wallace, U.S. Attorney

General Robert F. Kennedy and others — but the spotlight stayed on three individuals whose

54 decisions and actions wrote the drama: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Fred L.

Shuttlesworth, and Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor.

King was already the acknowledged leader of the civil rights movement by the time he came to Birmingham, but he had suffered a frustrating defeat in Georgia, where weeks of protest brought many arrests but no significant reforms and little national attention. He worried that the movement was losing momentum and that the national media were losing interest. He sought a new setting where he could demonstrate, in clear and stark images, the injustice of Southern society. So when he was asked to help lead protests already underway in

Birmingham, said to be the South’s most segregated city, King chose to return to Alabama and attempt his next big initiative.7

Shuttlesworth, like King, was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership

Conference, but the two were strikingly different in personality, in style and in preferred tactics.

As a result, their relationship was often tense. Shuttlesworth lacked King’s comfortable middle- class upbringing and level of education. While King’s parents were well established socially and sent their son to Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University,

Shuttleworth’s parents were poor and unmarried, and he studied theology at night at an unaccredited seminary while making a living driving a truck. Tall and thin, he was quick with opinions and often mercurial, which made him a poor companion for the slow, careful and deliberate King. Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the

Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, described Shuttlesworth as “the un-King, the product not of polished Atlanta but of rough, heavy-industrial Birmingham. As the public face of the movement, King was its ambassador to the white world, while Mr. Shuttlesworth was the man in the trenches.”8 Wary of Shuttlesworth’s temper and quarrelsome nature, King kept him from his inner circle, a rejection Shuttlesworth carried for many years. Despite this distance,

King did listen to Shuttlesworth, and it was Shuttlesworth who infused King’s strategy with energy and daring.9

What he lacked in social graces Shuttlesworth made up for in courage and a determination to confront discrimination. Shuttlesworth was a pioneer in direct action. He put

55 people in protest on the streets of Birmingham in the late 1940s, well before the 1955

Montgomery bus boycott thrust the movement, and King, onto the national stage. He was, by his account, arrested dozens of times, and he repeatedly suffered beatings by police and by the

Klan, as well as other attacks. One of the more spectacular attempts at intimidation came on

Christmas Day in 1956, when someone or some group — the Klan is the likely suspect — planted six sticks of dynamite outside his bedroom wall. The blast should have killed him, but the ever-lucky Shuttlesworth, in bed asleep when his house blew apart in the night, rode the mattress into the air and survived with bare injury. He came away from the attempt on his life with a defining story that lifted him into permanent standing as a civil-rights leader and shrouded him in a mystique of destiny.10

His growing notoriety triggered increasing resentment among whites. In one case of bizarre and tragic violence, on September 2, 1957, members of the Klan overtook a black man,

Edward Judge Aaron, walking alone in the night. Aaron had no association with Shuttlesworth and no history of protest, but he was on this night a convenient and unfortunate target. “Stop sending nigger children and white children to school together,” they told him to tell

Shuttlesworth, “or we gonna do them like we gonna do you.”11 The Klan members then castrated him. A week later, Shuttlesworth and his wife, Ruby, went to all-white Phillips High School to enroll their two daughters as the first students of color. Two other students were in the car, driven by the Rev. J.S. Phifer, as they pulled up to the school and were met by a white mob.

Shuttlesworth, in daring and perhaps foolish fashion, got out, and the crowd attacked, beating him with bats and whipping him with bicycle chains. When his wife got out to help, they began beating her as well. Birmingham police officers watched, but only one policeman attempted to aid the couple. Shuttlesworth came away bloody and bruised but unbroken. Ruby was stabbed in the hip. Not surprisingly, some took pleasure whenever Shuttlesworth suffered. “I’m sorry I missed it,” Connor once said when told that Shuttlesworth had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. “I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.”12 For his lack of fear and disregard for personal safety, Shuttlesworth came to be known in civil rights circles as the Wild Man of

Birmingham. The sobriquet was granted not entirely in honor, but it was well deserved. In 1961

56 Shuttlesworth left Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church to lead a congregation in Cincinnati, but he returned to the city often and was a steady force in the confrontations of 1963.13

“Bull” Connor had once worked for the steel mills, on the security force, where he earned a reputation for brutality in suppressing union drives. Elected to the Alabama

Legislature in 1934, he then ran successfully for the Birmingham city commission in 1937. As a commissioner, he railed against vice, though he himself briefly fell out of office when caught in a hotel room with his secretary. He focused most of his energies, however, on controlling the lives and limiting the freedoms of the city’s African Americans.

Early in his political career, Connor came to understand how to frighten dissenters through aggressive acts of repression. In 1938, one year into his role as commissioner of public safety, he stormed into a meeting of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, a biracial group of preachers, politicians, journalists, academicians, union activists and others.

Participants included none other than first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Gunnar Myrdal, the

Swedish economist and sociologist who, a decade later, would author An American Dilemma, his groundbreaking study of race relations in the South. In a bit of theater, Connor drove a stake in the lawn outside the Municipal Auditorium, attached a rope and dragged it through the front doors and into the conference space. Surrounded by Birmingham police officers, he ordered white attendees to one side of his line, black attendees to the other. They could continue, he said, but they must hold no integrated meetings and must refrain from mixed company. “White and negro,” he declared in one of his many malapropisms, “are not to segregate together.”14 The startled participants complied — though Roosevelt, in a small act of defiance, centered her chair over the rope and took her place astride the racial divide. The cowed conference members learned that good intentions were no shield against Southern demands for conformity. For his part, Connor learned that he could force others to abide by segregation, that such intimidation expanded his power in Birmingham and that he enjoyed the role of cultural enforcer. With this audacious stunt, Connor stepped into a new role as the official bully of Birmingham and an icon of white resistance.15

57 Hunched down in the low mountains of northern Alabama, Birmingham rose to prominence in the 1870s with development of the area’s rich resources of coal and iron ore. In

1886, the founding steel company was purchased by Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad

Company, which turned Birmingham into an industrial powerhouse. Merged into U.S. Steel in

1907, the steel operations continued under the old name, known locally by the acronym TCI, and grew to produce as much as 4 million tons of steel a year, making TCI one of the top steelmakers in the nation. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the steel mills defined

Birmingham, and the owners and managers held great influence over the city and over the smaller municipalities huddled around the steaming, clanking TCI machines.16

TCI’s record in shaping race relations is mixed. Originally the main union serving the plants, the American Federation of Labor, was for whites only, but dogged efforts in the late

1930s by the rival Congress of Industrial Organizations to bring in black workers led the AFL to follow suit, creating employment opportunities unheard of elsewhere in the South. When the

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ran short of private cars during the Montgomery bus boycott, he was advised to look to Birmingham, where many of TCI’s black steelworkers earned enough to own two automobiles. While black men who secured employment in the mines and the mills held better-paying jobs than did many of their peers elsewhere in the South, they still faced discrimination. The best jobs went to whites, and despite the protections of union membership

African-American workers faced abuses typical of Southern employment of the era. Racial relations worsened as modernization in steel production in the 1950s and 1960s reduced manpower needs. TCI reduced its employment by almost a third in the early 1960s. Layoffs brought intense competition for remaining jobs and fostered greater white resentment. These tensions spilled out from TCI’s giant operations and made Birmingham, never a happy place for

African Americans, a city of constant stress.17

The story of the Birmingham crisis is rooted not only in the city’s industries by also in its complicated power structure. In all ways, Birmingham’s politics were dominated by the “Big

Mules,” the city’s banks, insurance companies, heavy industries and politically connected law firms. The influence of the Big Mules extended well beyond Birmingham — they were a

58 powerful force in Alabama politics, especially regarding economic matters. In the city itself, they were the true ruling elite, and all of Birmingham’s politics, policies and practices were shaped to meet their approval, including those of the city’s newspapers.18

The Big Mules were important players in race relations because segregation served their economic interests. This was especially so for TCI, the biggest mule of all. TCI’s furnaces became the engine that drove Birmingham, and the fate of TCI and the city were so entwined that city officials erected a statue of Vulcan, the god of fire and metalworking, atop Red

Mountain, the mineral-rich hump on which the city’s wealth was established. TCI was the city’s largest employer, and as such it was particularly sensitive to wage issues. And it was regarding wages that segregation worked in the steel company’s favor.

Birmingham’s appeal to U.S. Steel, the industrial giant that owned TCI, was not the iron ore that lay at Vulcan’s feet but the abundant cheap labor that lay in the working class neighborhoods along the valley floor. Cheap labor kept TCI alive — if wages approached those of workers in the North, then U.S. Steel likely would have shut the plant down. The steelmaker didn’t need another Pittsburgh, with its costly work force. It wanted a low-cost operation, and

TCI used segregation to keep it that way. At TCI, as at all companies in Birmingham, the better jobs were white-only jobs. Blacks could not aspire to skilled work. Whites were the foremen at

TCI, and blacks were the muscle. As throughout the South, blacks were paid inferior wages — the cheapest of the cheap labor that formed the bedrock of TCI’s success. And so Birmingham’s black laborers in 1950 earned a median income of $1,725 a year, less than half that of white workers.19

This wage disparity worked to the steel company’s obvious advantage. It provided a low- cost labor pool and gave the company a wedge to use against the power of the unions. When organized labor picketed and threatened to strike over pay, TCI threatened to put black replacement workers in white-only jobs. The threat was effective. The great fear of the steelmaker’s directors was that whites and blacks would come to see one another as allies and forge a working-class alliance. To guard against such a development, TCI and the Big Mules

59 advocated strict enforcement of Jim Crow rules of segregated races. They found a willing enforcer in Connor, Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety.20

Under Connor’s guidance, Birmingham’s police — known for corruption — used routine violence against citizens and came to exercise extraordinary acts against blacks. It was during

Connor’s tenure that one Birmingham neighborhood came to be called “Dynamite Hill” after several homes were bombed when black families moved into a former all-white area, in defiance of the city’s strict ordinances requiring segregated housing. Between 1947 and 1965, an estimated 50 bombs rocked the city. Prosecution of the bombings was all but nonexistent. In one case Connor arrested the victim of a bombing, charging that he had dynamited his own home to help subversive elements. In another, Connor refused to bring charges against three

Klansmen, even though the homeowner had witnessed the men lighting the dynamite fuse.21

Though the Big Mules got what they needed in Connor, the hot-tempered, vulgar and violent man and his undisciplined and corrupt police drew unwanted attention. In 1961, during the Freedom Rides to desegregate Southern bus stations and bus seating, Connor agreed to give the Ku Klux Klan a free pass on violence when the first bus arrived in Birmingham. As Raymond

Arsenault of the University of South Florida described it in Freedom Riders: 1961 and the

Struggle for Racial Justice, “the Klansmen and their police allies were all in place, armed and ready to do what had to be done to protect the Southern way of life. Police dispatchers, following the agreed-upon plan, had cleared the ‘target’ area: For the next fifteen minutes there would be no police presence in or near the Trailways station. The only exceptions were two plainclothes detectives who were in the crowd to monitor the situation to make sure that the

Klansmen left the station before the police arrived.”22 Friends warned Connor that working with the Klan could be perilous for a politician, but he refused to call off the ambush. When the

Freedom Riders arrived, the Klan members attacked in a fury of kicks, punches and beatings with pipes. Many of the Freedom Riders were badly injured; some were beaten unconscious. The resulting press coverage —the Klan had foolishly invited a few reporters to witness their work

— disturbed the nation and worried Birmingham’s business community.23

60 Some of the city’s younger business owners came to question the wisdom of keeping

Connor in office. “It was true that Connor had his share of supporters, most of them at least as fanatical as he was,” wrote journalist Frey Gaillard, in his 2004 account of Alabama’s struggles,

“but there were some white leaders who found him embarrassing — bad for the civic image of the city and bad for business.”24 Those same white leaders knew they were unable to remove

Connor from office via the ballot. They decided to rewire Birmingham city government and unplug Connor from power. In 1962, the city’s business leaders launched a petition drive to put on the ballot a referendum to replace the three-member system of commissioners with a mayor and a city council. The artful strategy appeared to meet with success when the votes were counted, but Connor, experienced in resistance and exultant in controversy, had none of it. He refused to step down. Connor and his fellow commissioners filed a legal challenge. As the new city council came into office, the old commissioners — Connor among them — refused to yield, demanding that they be able to serve out their terms. With the old and new city governments each meeting on the same day, in the same room, one hour apart, the city’s leadership was in turmoil. As this strange political contest got under way, the great crisis of Birmingham was about to begin. Though ultimately forced out, Connor kept control as Birmingham’s public safety commissioner for half a year longer, time enough to play a central role in one of the turning points of the civil-rights movement.25

That a unified challenge to Jim Crow came to Birmingham, and not one of many other

Southern cities, was due in large part to the personality and practices of Connor. His explosive nature was well known, and he came to be seen by King and his advisers as the kind of adversary they needed — predictably hotheaded, racist and vindictive. King had just come out of another protest movement in Albany, Georgia, where the leading law enforcement figure —

Police Chief Laurie Pritchett — skillfully deflected the impact of the march on the national conscience. Pritchett accomplished this through planning and restraint. He did not fill his jails with protesters, because he had arranged ahead of time to fill the jails of other nearby communities. He did not crush the demonstrations but, instead, allowed them to proceed — but in a limited manner. Pritchett’s goal was to prevent white violence and police abuse, which he

61 saw as playing into King’s strategy. Pritchett schooled his officers in how to make arrests without busting heads. He tolerated a few protesters to picket and politely arrested the rest.

The effect: Hundreds were arrested, but few in the North took interest. The key to King’s strategy was to alarm the sense of fair play and decency among Northern whites, but this failed to occur with the Albany movement. That was largely because Pritchett himself failed to react

— that is, overreact — in the expected way. The Albany movement consumed energy and hope and resulted in frustration and disappointment. King sensed that the movement was in danger and that it could die of its own weariness. The next chapter, he knew, must be one that would energize the faithful and electrify the nation. And so he came to Birmingham, where a desegregation effort was already under way, led by Shuttlesworth.26

King’s work in Birmingham would begin the same week as the contested election, at a time when Connor, the losing candidate for mayor, was struggling to maintain his power and position over the city’s police. The strident segregationist was in no mood to accommodate black protesters. In Connor’s view, the civil rights movement was not legitimate — it was, he argued, un-American. “The so-called Negro movement,” Connor once announced, “is a part of the attempted takeover of our country by the lazy, the indolent, the beatniks, the ignorant, and by some misguided religions, and bleeding hearts, and all are being led by the politicians who stay in office by appealing, remember, not to reason, but to the most votes.”27 Connor’s venom- laden statement is an example of how white segregationists viewed those in the civil rights movement as the enemy and how they attributed to those in the movement qualities and characteristics borrowed from other enemies of the conservative white South — from beatniks, from misguided religions, from the lazy, the indolent and the ignorant. Surprisingly, Connor left out that other great enemy of the 1950s and 1960s — Communists. But that was an oversight he and others in Birmingham did not routinely make.

Such characterizations marked the crisis in Birmingham. This willingness of white leaders to read evil and bad intentions into the hearts and minds of the protesters and the inability to perceive the brutality of their own actions are part of the tragedy of Birmingham

62 that spring of 1963. And it is a tragedy and a failure that the editors of the Birmingham News did not escape.

The newspaper was like many Southern metropolitan dailies of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

It carried a lot of international news, most with a Cold War spin, and wrote extensively of politics, both state and national. The salient issue of the day was race — and many stories regarding the contest over desegregation made the front page of the Birmingham News. This editorial judgment was not consistent, however, as the protests that filled the streets of

Birmingham and became the nonstop topic of discussion never made it to page 1. As big as the protests were as a news story, they were trumped by another policy — that of suppressing news about blacks.

Rarely did the face of an Alabama black person appear in the Birmingham News.

Throughout the crisis, King was the only African American shown in the newspaper’s front-page photographs. Blacks usually appeared once a week only, under the heading “What Negroes are doing,” on a special Sunday page — the “race page,” it was commonly called in the trade — that covered the local black clubs and community groups.28 Elsewhere in the paper few blacks were mentioned, except as the victims or perpetrators of crime (an exception was a photo, run in the sports pages, of golfer Arnold Palmer and his black caddie, “Iron Man” Nathaniel Avery). In these ways the Birmingham News was a typical example of the white-owned Southern press. In most cities, the newspaper editors forbid publication of photographs of blacks, except on the race page, and most papers downplayed — and often ignored — racial demonstrations. Rare was the Southern newspaper that put such stories on the front page, and the Birmingham News followed that pattern. As a result, page 2 was likely the best-read page of the entire newspaper that spring, because that is where readers found stories of the lunch counter sit-ins, the marches on City Hall and the massive arrests occurring in their own city.

The coverage of the crisis was conventional as well, by the standards of the Southern white press. It was one-sided — not once did a Birmingham News staff writer ever interview

King, Shuttlesworth or any of the demonstrators, and not once did a reporter visit the jail to investigate allegations of crowded conditions and poor treatment. The News did run a guest

63 article written for the Associated Press by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Relman Morin, who visited a courtroom and a facility holding some of the arrested. He found the makeshift jail very comfortable. Morin’s article gave a rare account of the views of one of the protesters, a 15- year-old who was before the county judge (“Well, you can say that about freedom because you’ve got your freedom. The Constitution says we’re all equal but Negroes aren’t equal.... We’ve been waiting over 100 years.”)29 Though it stood above the work of the News staff, Morin’s article was naïve and inadequate. Nevertheless, it was all the paper devoted to exploring the philosophy of the protest and to investigating complaints by King that conditions in the jail were deplorable.

The question of how those arrested were treated illustrates how editors of the

Birmingham News, like those of other Southern newspapers, did not see it as their duty to pursue the black viewpoint. News footage of the time, however, shows that network television reporters did — and network TV crews visited the sites where Birmingham’s blacks were being held. They gave a very different portrayal, that of crowded, hot and uncomfortable conditions.

Readers of the afternoon Birmingham News got one version — the limited, cautious version that satisfied the whites trying to suppress the protests. Those who also watched the evening network news got yet another, one that challenged the status quo. Which were the citizens to believe? The editors proceeded as if the TV news did not exist — they continued to try to bend the news to match their view of how things should be. But the network news, serving a national, not a parochial, audience, was usurping that control and exposing its flaws.

The news stories of the Birmingham News did not, at first, reflect flagrantly racist points of view. The stories relied almost entirely on official sources, so the newspaper’s grasp of events was limited and distorted, but the articles did not fall into the alarmist language often found in the Southern press. This restraint was short-lived. When the events in Birmingham reached their apex — when Connor turned the police dogs and the fire hoses on the demonstrators — the tone of the coverage changed. Reporters now used terms of fear and invasion to describe the conflict, and it placed the blame for the violence on the demonstrators, not on Connor and his officers.

64 On May 3, the same day the front page carried a story celebrating the anniversary of a woman’s act to save the Confederacy, page 2 bore the news of fire hoses and dogs being used against the demonstrators. The story said police and firefighters were struck by bricks and bottles, and suggested that the use of dogs and fire hoses were acts of self-defense. It told of how “one Negro grabbed an officer’s pistol from its holster,” how some youths taunted police dogs and how “Officer C. R. Boyd’s dog was struck in the head with a brick.” Readers of the

Birmingham News came away with the impression that the police were victimized by the

“singing, strutting ... boisterous Negroes.” No one questioned whether the use of dogs and fire hoses was necessary, and none of the famous photographs of the conflict were published in the

News. Page 2 carried instead a photograph of a young girl, said to be 6 years old, waiting her turn to be loaded into a police wagon. The photograph highlighted the controversial use of children in the protest, an element that the May 3 story, and later stories, emphasized as well.

The following day, the arrests continued, as did the use of dogs and fire hoses. The story noted the use of high-pressure hoses (“Two of the fire hoses were equipped with monitor guns which takes [sic] water simultaneously from two hoses. Water from these hoses hits with such force that it knocked the bark from trees 100 feet away.... Two Negro girls ran around the park clad only in slips — their outer clothing had been ripped off by the water.”)30

By May 7 and May 8, the newspaper was describing the protesters in frightening terms.

“Swarms of Negro school students flooded downtown ... rampaging.... White women shoppers, many of them with children, had to run to get out of the path.... One white woman and her small child were knocked to the pavement.... Areas in which Negroes have rampaged virtually unchecked for the past few days remained quiet this afternoon.... Tuesday’s demonstrations were called the worst so far as thousands of Negro teen-agers broke and ran against traffic lights.... Twice Tuesday the yelling and jeering Negro mobs flooded 19th and 20th Sts. downtown, shoving white people off sidewalks and bullying their way in and out of department stores.” 31 To the newspaper’s staff writers, this was a white nightmare, and their coverage of the civil rights demonstrations focused not on the nightmarish treatment of blacks but on deep- seated white fears of large numbers of blacks running free of white control.

65 Though the violent arrests did not make the front page, Governor George Wallace’s condemnation of the demonstration did. “We regret these demonstrations do exist,” Wallace told staff writer Mickey Logue. “They do no good for anybody.”32 Wallace went on to praise the police for the kind of behavior that stunned the nation. Others, including the editorial page of the Birmingham News, followed suit. Within days, the shocking treatment of the civil rights demonstrators were lauded repeatedly on the pages of the newspaper, by politicians, by the mayor and by the editors themselves. Again, no one in the stories, and apparently no one on the newspaper’s staff, asked the question that TV viewers nationwide were asking themselves — how could a community tolerate such treatment of its citizens? Beginning May 4, and on several days after, the paper ran stories on the use of police dogs in other communities, and on May 9 the News carried an Associated Press story in which Birmingham law enforcement officials told why they used dogs. “Using police dogs is one of the accepted practices in police riot work,” said Sheriff Melvin Bailey. The story noted that “photographs of the use, lunging at Negroes, have been transmitted all over the United States and the world. Probably no aspect of the dangerous racial strife in Birmingham has stirred so much reaction.”33 None of those photographs was published in the Birmingham News, and that one sentence was the only direct acknowledgment the newspaper made of the controversy.

All of this activity provided fruitful material for the Birmingham News editorial writers, but it was material they failed to consider. The opinion staff, led by Editorial Page Editor E.L.

Holland Jr., appeared loath to address the biggest crisis in Birmingham’s history. This is unfortunate, for the page suggested that the editors were not arch-segregationists. They appeared, from what little evidence they provided, to be Southern liberals, or at least moderates.

The editorials did not back Connor in his bid to become mayor; they endorsed Albert Boutwell, the reform candidate. And when U.S. Rep. Carl Elliott of Alabama criticized the John Birch

Society as a “motley group of malcontents,” the editors stood behind him, though they noted,

“Mr. Elliott is a liberal, hence his remarks will be written off by some, understandably.” And they argued that Alabama, great state that it was, could stand some improvement in order to clear away its backward image. “It does no good to tear down unnecessarily, but it is just as

66 harmful to say everything’s rosy when everything is not rosy.” The Birmingham News editors took pride in what they described as their realistic views and objectivity. “This newspaper believes that realism — hard, cold objective analysis of facts as they affect us — is absolutely imperative.” And they noted, in a vague and cautious way, desegregation developments in other states, arguing that “Alabama folk ought at least to know what is going on, agree or disagree with it.” These were people who believed they were doing what was right for Birmingham and who wanted progress and change.34

Change was coming fast and quick to Birmingham — change on a daily basis. The editorials of the Birmingham News show the editors were not as willing to embrace progress as they had suggested. The editorials also reveal an astonishing ability to ignore the events around them — to turn a blind eye — if that evidence clashed with their perceptions of Birmingham as the fast-growing “Magic City” of the South.

This failure to embrace the ending of the old guard in Birmingham, the kind of development the editors had seemed to be encouraging, may have surprised even themselves.

For as the crisis in Birmingham began to build, Holland, the editorial page editor, wrote a thoughtful signed editorial in which he called on the races to be patient but to work for understanding. “This problem will be here a long time. We need patience, Negroes and whites.

Some may say, facetiously or otherwise, that the matter is one of ‘black or white.’ It must not be.

The matter is one of citizens with differences — white differing white, Negro differing with

Negro, as well as race differing with race. Never,” Holland continued, “did a free, self- determining people require more understanding and mental effort. Emotion, on either side, will obscure logic.”35 Such words were not a rousing call to tear down Jim Crow laws and customs, but they did reflect a mind that was not hidebound on matters of race. Holland, however, never returned to this train of thought, and as events in Birmingham grew more intense, the editorial page grew more distant from the issue, and days would go by with no mention at all of the events consuming the city’s attention. None of the editorials that followed echoed the willingness to engage the debate that Holland hinted at. Whatever door he tried to open appeared to have soon closed.

67 Nevertheless, the Birmingham News editorial page did not champion the belligerents, as so many others did. For example, the editors took Wallace to task for his opportunistic stratagems and remarks on race. “The prospect of Gov. Wallace personally reversing court edict is non-existent,” the editors wrote on April 26, regarding an impending integration issue, “and

The News cannot escape the assumption that this Gov. Wallace knows. Therefore the road ahead is without profit for this state or its people.” The editors again chastised Wallace, as well as Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, for invoking the glory of the Confederacy and crying that the South must take a stand again. “There is something sad about governors of Alabama and

Mississippi holding out the hope, apparently, that a spirit of 1861 suffices unto this day....

Tragedy lies, for those willing to see it, in the essence of looking backward instead of forward....

That way lies only defeat after defeat and an increasing bitterness.”36 Editorials such as these are not the voice of hard-bitten segregationists. Other editorials later that spring demonstrated, however, that when faced with a crisis the Birmingham News editors were willing to turn the blind eye to violent and oppressive actions of their city leaders.

Editorial criticism of the governor’s grandstanding was small stuff given the extraordinary events that were swirling through Birmingham, just outside the editors’ door.

Those events — those people and those principles — seem to have been lost in the fog, unseen by Holland and his staff. Though evidence abounded that something was clearly wrong in

Birmingham — something the rest of the world could witness on the evening news — the editors could not take notice. They could not reconcile what was happening in the streets with their preconceived notions of the “Magic City” still alive in their heads. Faced with such conflict, the editors could have revised their view of Birmingham to bring it in line with the brutality of

Connor’s police and called for humane treatment or a reconsideration of Jim Crow status given blacks. Or the editors could have rejected the evidence before them. The editors, apparently at the limits of their capacity for change, chose to cling to their old views.

The result was a string of out-of-touch editorials that seem incongruous with the outside world. When a civil rights protester in northern Alabama was shot dead, the

Birmingham News called on authorities to track down the killer. “It is unthinkable that the rest

68 of the nation and the world be left with the belief that a bullet in the head is Alabama’s answer to those whose views are ‘different,’’’ the editors intoned in an April 25 editorial, seemingly unaware of the condemnation already heaped upon Birmingham for its treatment of protesters.

The editors continued loftily, “Be he white or black or red, whatever his beliefs, as long as he obeys laws a man has the right to express them and a right to walk the streets and highways, if he chooses, wearing signs proclaiming them.”37 Praiseworthy sentiments, but yet at the time of publication, dozens were being arrested almost daily on the streets of Birmingham for taking similar action. The editors launched no words in their defense.

Still writing of the fatal shooting, the editors on April 29 warned that “the sad truth is that such incidents will occur as long as shouts of defiance are interpreted by a few as a mandate to violence, as long as that law-abiding majority says too little and does too little to indicate that it won’t stand for such things in this state.”38 The editorial reads like a critique of the newspaper’s own silence.

Finally, the editors went beyond simply omitting criticism of Connor’s brutality to praising the work of the Birmingham police. The editorials revealed the great gulf of misunderstanding between the city’s white establishment and its African Americans. The editorials also showed that although Birmingham’s leadership had stepped outside the circle of respectability, the bad judgment was not acknowledged by local journalists and the alarming use of violence went unseen. If the official response to the protests was a national disgrace, it was a point of pride in the eyes of the Birmingham News. “From Public Safety Commissioner

Bull Connor and Police Chief Jamie Moore on down, the department has acted smoothly and calmly and with great determination to handle both potential white troublemakers and Negroes who have refused to obey lawful authority,” the editors wrote on April 18, in an editorial that rendered abusive and discriminatory violence as able law enforcement taking fair and appropriate action. “Birmingham police, the Sheriff’s Department, and others who have been asked to join the law enforcement body, have conducted themselves with still more remarkable caution and good judgment,” the editors stated in a May 9 editorial. “Birmingham police, the

Jefferson County sheriff’s department and police of other municipalities in the county have

69 done a superb job,” they declared again on May 15. “They have been responsible, restrained and effective.”39 Such judgments seem to defy explanation. These soothing words of praise and expressions of pride cannot be reconciled with the stark events in plain view on the city streets.

The editors of the Birmingham News editors did not want to wrestle with the reality of the

Southern way of life and what steps the city’s leaders were taking to enforce the old racial codes. They did not want to see what was happening, and they chose not to. There is no better example of the South’s blind eye protecting white sensibilities than what was written and what was never acknowledged on the editorial pages of the Birmingham News that spring. The news and the myth were at war in Birmingham, and thanks to the blind eye, the myth won.

The determination of the newspaper’s editors and other whites not to see showed the great task that fell to Shuttlesworth and his fellow activists as they labored to penetrate the armor of the white Southern heart. How do you awaken the conscience of those who refuse to see? The rejection of reality by the Birmingham News editors also showed the wisdom in King’s strategy of seeking out tinderbox situations and hotheaded individuals — Birmingham and

“Bull” Connor — that were likely to generate the extreme reactions and violence that would attract national attention. King had given up on making the white South open its eyes. He wanted to touch the heart and soul of the nation outside the South, and he would reach those

Americans through the national media.

As they stepped farther into the fantasy that the blind eye allows, the editors of the

Birmingham News found themselves standing close with Governor George Wallace, whom they often criticized. On May 8, Wallace released a statement in reaction to comments by President

John F. Kennedy indicating that Birmingham business owners were meeting with black citizens to address what the president called “the justifiable needs of the Negro community.”40 Not surprisingly, Wallace began with the angry, defensive language that defined his style. “As the

Governor of Alabama and on behalf of the citizens of Alabama, I reject President Kennedy’s statement which in substance says the people of Birmingham have inflicted abuses on the

Negroes and that this should come to a stop.” He continued with an assertion that whites had behaved admirably during the crisis. “The white people of Birmingham should have been

70 commended for their restraint during the present demonstrations.” And he laid blame on the black citizens of Birmingham. “White people have not been involved — only lawless Negroes.”

Wallace complained of “lawless Negro mobs” injuring police and violating injunctions and ordinances and asserted that “the President wants us to surrender the state to Martin Luther

King and his group of pro-Communists who have instigated these demonstrations.” Finally, he turned to the actions of the commissioner of public safety. “I wish to commend Bull Connor and his forces upon their handling of the matter to date.”41 Wallace’s statement reflected no sense of the true state of affairs in his state and in Birmingham, only adherence to the true beliefs of Southern white conservatives. His statement was removed from the truth, but it mirrored, in large part, the arguments and observations of the Birmingham News editorial page.

Once again, the press and politicians had aligned through their determination not to see.

Birmingham showed angry white authorities turning police dogs loose on young, well- behaved Americans. It showed firefighters blasting away at them with high-pressure hoses. It showed scenes of oppression that weren’t supposed to happen in America, but there they were on the “Huntley-Brinkley Report,” and it couldn’t be denied. It hurt Americans in their hearts, and it turned them against thick-necked segregationists portrayed so ably by Connor. It made them see the efforts of King, Shuttlesworth and others in a new and compassionate light. It was a time of transformation of both the movement and white America.

Birmingham also proved a turning point for the American press. Southern editors had long grown accustomed to reflecting a distorted picture of reality — a partial view, a voice that commanded conformity and dogma. Events and arguments that did not conform to the politics and philosophy of the segregationist leaders, to whom most editors were obliged, were not acknowledged on the pages of most Southern newspapers. Seemingly undeniable social change was, in fact, denied, and compelling stories were left untold. But as the national media were drawn toward the civil rights dramas unfolding in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Southern editors found they no longer enjoyed a monopoly over the news. Other reporters, who held no obligations to Southern politicians or businessmen and who were not reared in a culture that demanded they not see, were covering events in a new and different way. This was especially

71 true for television, which in the late 1950s and early 1960s became the new eyes of the nation and the world. It was in Birmingham that the connection between TV news and the civil rights movement was cemented.

The use of the blind eye was not exclusive to Birmingham, for the blind eye was universal in the South. Exceptions to this rule were rare, especially among individuals of influence or prominence, but one unusual case of a political leader overcoming the handicap and a journalist reluctant to do the same took place in Tallahassee. Florida of the twentieth century was a state of almost constant growth and change, yet the state retained, sometimes fiercely, its Old South ways. In Tallahassee, as elsewhere in the South, both the utility value of the blind eye to whites and its lasting harm to reform and progress was made apparent in this tension between the old and the new. A stark example of the power of the blind eye — the freedom it provided whites to tolerate injustice, inequality and terrorism, and the price it exacted in crippling a community’s potential — is found in the Florida capital in the 1920s as the city embraced an exciting future of commercial flight while refusing to turn away from a crude and murderous past.

Tallahassee swelled with pride in the fall of 1929 as civic leaders feverishly prepared for the opening of a municipal airport, Dale Mabry Field. Hotels were full, and a call went out for

“Tallahasseeans having spare rooms for rent during the two-day celebration to make them available for the throng of visitors expected.”42 None other than Orville Wright had signed a sanction on behalf of the National Aeronautic Association, Goodyear promised to send the

Defender, its flagship blimp, and speculation bubbled over how many pilots and airplanes — or

“ships,”— would fly in for the aerial parade over the Capitol, the air race, the stunt show, the spot landing contest, formation flying, balloon strafing and aerial acrobatics, along with the airplane giveaway, the boxing match and the Aviation Ball and Crowning of the Queen. “It is entirely possible that nearer one hundred ships will be here instead of the fifty first expected,” said the chairman of the airport committee, as the two days of dedication drew near.43 The city’s newspaper, then published as the Daily Democrat, did its best to fuel the excitement, filling page after page with details of the dedication, timed for Armistice Day, and with articles

72 explaining the still new world of aviation, along with aviation-themed advertisements from merchants and city government.44

Expectations grew that the beginning of air service would become a turning point for the community, its first great chance to join the modern, mechanized twentieth century.

“Indications point to the two-day celebration being the greatest in history of the city,” the event chairman stated, without great exaggeration.45 The excitement was more than planes and pilots.

Airships could connect the Florida capital to Miami and the Caribbean, to Atlanta, to Dallas, to

New York, to the world. Such connections could end Tallahassee’s isolation on the far edge of the Deep South and bring commerce and industry to a small community getting by on a strict diet of government jobs. The new airport marked the promise of new opportunities and the birth of the city’s New South dream, but the events of that week — community celebration and racial murder — and the Daily Democrat’s view of both showed the limits of Florida’s embrace of a new future.46

“Quincy Negro In Jail Here,” said the headline of a Daily Democrat story the Friday before the big air show. The arrest of an African American was rarely news in 1929, but the incarceration of this man from a town in the neighboring county warranted front-page play.

“Speedy justice will be meted out to Will Larkins, 40, Quincy negro, charged with criminally assaulting a thirteen-year-old Quincy school girl late Thursday afternoon,” said the article, which explained that Larkins was arrested by Gadsden County deputies quickly after the girl reported being attacked, was briefly held “but later spirited away and brought to Tallahassee and confined in the Leon county jail for safe keeping when feeling in Quincy ran high against the negro.”47 The article suggested the concern for Larkins safety was warranted, as Sheriff

Scott Gregory and a deputy reported threats against the man and told the newspaper that

“several automobiles filled with Quincy men followed their car here.”48 The newspaper predicted a trial within days “to dispose of the case, it was believed in Quincy, fortstalling [sic] any attempt at violence.”49

“Tallahassee’s Airport Dedicated With Brilliant Program of Events,” declared the headline the following Tuesday. Governor Doyle E. Carlton gave the main address, and, in the

73 eyes of the editors, “Not a single untoward event occurred during the aerial program to mar the proceedings and pilots and public alike declared that the affair was handled as near perfectly as possible.”50 Events elsewhere cast a troubling shadow, however, on the celebration and on the city’s attempt to showcase its candidacy for industry and investment. Larkins was dead.

“Quincy Negro Killed by Mob,” stated another headline on the front page, beneath a photo of a pilot posing with wings on her shoulders. The Gadsden County sheriff had moved

Larkins to a jail in Madison, 50 miles to the east of Tallahassee, at the request of the Leon

County authorities. The sheriff said he was moving Larkins to Jacksonville, on Florida’s east coast, when a mob stopped him on the highway and “at the point of leveled shotguns” took the man from his custody. Larkins was “returned to the scene of his crime,” the Daily Democrat reported, “and lynched by a mob of between thirty and forty men.”51

Larkins’ murder was public, violent and horrific, and the paper related the details to its readers. Investigations were promised, but the Gadsden County sheriff’s statement that “he was taken completely by surprise when the masked mob confronted him in the road near Madison, declaring he is unable to identify any member of the crowd” left little hope for arrests and convictions. The newspaper reported that, in similar fashion, the “coroner’s verdict held that

Larkins came to his death ‘at the hands of parties unknown.’”52

A few mentions of investigations into Larkins’ murder followed, but the lynching quickly sank from pages of the Daily Democrat, and the editors offered no criticism of the mob or of the sheriff’s failure to protect the man in his custody, and they gave no cries for justice. In an editorial summarizing the airport’s dedication, the Daily Democrat made no mention of the tragedy. If Larkins’ kidnapping, hanging and shooting said anything about Florida and its future, the editors did not see the connection. “Tallahassee’s progressive and hard working citizens whose tireless efforts for the past several months were met with signal success can now heave a long sigh of relief and look back on their work as well done…,” the Daily Democrat said in an editorial published just days after Larkins’ death. “Your successful airmeet did much to create good will towards Tallahassee in valuable places … and the quality of the airport will be broadcast far and wide to the everlasting benefit of the city…. So let us all pull together to keep

74 progress marching forward from the great beginning already made.”53 Though the editorial offered hopeful encouragement of a growing reputation for Tallahassee’s potential, the lynching undoubtedly shocked Northern dignitaries attending the celebration, and it is likely they shared with friends and associates an entirely different view of Florida and its capital.

Local white citizens may have been rattled as well, and perhaps it was to reaffirm their trust in the racial order that the paper printed a column about a fanciful meeting between a black teenager and a Southern white man on a business trip up North. “Please, boss,” the black boy said, “take me with you, you know I don’t belong up here, and this ain’t and never will be home to me.” The white man protests. “Look here, nigger, what you trying to do to me …?” But he relents and helps the black boy return to the South, and they become lifelong friends and inseparable companions. The column — racist and paternalistic — was far out of step with any articulation of a New South vision.54

The Daily Democrat’s indifference to the lynching and its assertion, days after the crime and tragedy, of an offensive view of black-white relations put the paper and the city well outside the bounds of a modern democratic community. The New South dream was about aligning the once agrarian region’s resources and labor with the capital-driven economy of the rest of the nation. It was about industry, first and foremost. Henry Grady, the Atlanta

Constitution editor who in the 1880s evangelized New South industrial development, did not call for radical realignment of the social order, and he asserted that “the whites and blacks must walk in separate paths in the South.”55 Grady held and expressed self-serving views of race relations. “He [the black Southerner] … has the fullest protection of our laws and the friendship of our people,” he said in one 1886 speech. 56 “[T]he South, with the North, protests against injustice to this simple and sincere people,” he said in another address, three years later.57 Both give clear indications that Grady the visionary had not escaped the South’s blind eye. But Grady did acknowledge that the South had changed and that a more equal arrangement between white and black Southerners was due, if for no other reason than for economic efficiency, since

African Americans were a large part of the Southern workforce. “The South found her jewel in the toad’s head of defeat,” he said of the region in the post-Civil War years. “The shackles that

75 had held her in narrow limitations fell forever when the shackles of the negro slave were broken. Under the old regime the negroes were slaves to the South; the South was a slave to the system.”58 Grady’s views of white superiority were commonly held among whites of his time, as were his beliefs that black Southerners were protected from injustice. His New South sermons were rooted in his time, his experiences and his privileged class. Grady did, however, argue for change. The South needed to free itself, in economic policies and in other ways, from the limitations of its past. That included a break from eruptions of racial violence. Tolerance of lynching, as expressed by Tallahassee’s leaders in 1929, was not part of Grady’s New South vision.

Few Southern whites in 1929 called for racial equality, but some Southern leaders recognized the need to moderate the region’s worst behaviors. To become partners with

Northern business, the segregated society must operate with at least a modicum of fairness.

The Daily Democrat’s editors did not see this need, and their cleaving to the old view, their advocacy of rigid ways of thinking and their turning a blind eye to the cruelty and injustice in their own community hurt Tallahassee’s reach for the future. In 1929, the city opened its airport, but it would not open its mind.

These tensions of old and new were barely acknowledged two-and-half decades later in

Time magazine’s cover story on Florida’s economic boom — “the fastest growing state east of the Rocky Mountains” — and its new leader. Governor LeRoy Collins, “a middle-of-the-road

Democrat who presides over this most active and restless of states, is one of the most interesting and effective governors in the U.S. today,” the magazine declared.59 Time’s view of

Florida and its capital was all hustle, growth, investment and potential — the New South incarnate. “It's real crazy,” a Florida State University student — or “coed” — told the magazine.

“Things are happening. I keep asking people about it and they don't know how to explain it, but they go home for a weekend and find a new factory where there used to be an empty lot, or maybe 200 houses where there was a golf course. The whole state's jumping.”60 The only Florida of old in Time’s account was that of Collins’ years hunting in the Florida wild, of “the jolt of a single-barreled shotgun on his shoulder and a bobwhite dropping through the yellow winter

76 sunlight at the edge of a slash-pine grove,”61 of fishing for catfish, of picking corn in the heat of

August. The cover itself painted nothing but promise — the young governor, showing a bit of executive gray in his wavy hair, gazed out with confidence, with a state behind him bursting of fruit, industry and cattle as a bikini-clad woman leaned back and enjoyed the famous Florida sun. This was, Time suggested, the dream of the New South arrived.

The reality for Florida and its governor was a continued tug of war between competing

Southern mindsets, the old and the new. Time only hinted at this struggle, with its reference to

Collins’ gubernatorial contest with a fellow state senator, Charley Johns, “a former railroad conductor, who as a legislator had voted to put the brakes on improving educational standards and against a law to unmask the Ku Klux Klan.”62 Collins won the election, and, Time suggested, so did the progressive politics of growth and reform. Collins’ time as governor was hardly so easy, and his election was but the first of many fights with Johns and many other old-school powers in the Legislature, in the Cabinet and in the press.

Johns was a leader of the Pork Chop Gang, senators from rural counties, primarily in

North Florida, who wielded power far out of balance to those elected from fast-growing South

Florida. Replacing this system of malapportioned districts — the Pork Choppers “represented more pine trees than people,” observed one critic — with one-person, one-vote district lines was one of a number of progressive reforms Collins championed as governor.63 Though his campaign for fair districting proved fruitless, the good ol’ boys resented the earnest young governor’s attempts to undo a good thing for them and their rural counties. Election reform became a hot point of friction, and it was not the only one. Collins also pushed for good government reforms as well, seeking to professionalize a state workforce that sagged with the weight of political appointments. Of course, the Pork Chop Gang enjoyed making those appointments and saw no need for change. Collins also pressed for more open meetings and other modern transitions away from inefficient traditions of decision-making — creaky, dusty and opaque — that were out of step with Florida’s Sun Belt future.

Collins was part of the postwar generation of leaders marked by their impatience.

Unwilling to slog through the old-school system of creeping advancement and unhappy with the

77 nineteenth century approach to governing a growing state, the new legislators allied and brought key changes. Collins, in the Florida Senate, was an effective advocate, as was House

Speaker Dan McCarty. Together, Collins and McCarty pushed through a new system of funding the state’s public schools, one that shrank the gaps between rich and poor school districts.

Their success launched each into the Governor’s Mansion. McCarty, a World War II combat veteran honored for his service, got there first, in the 1952 election. McCarty laid out a plan of reform and modernization, with an emphasis on education improvements, but on February 25,

1953, barely a month after taking the oath of office, he suffered a heart attack that brought his ambitious agenda to a standstill. McCarty was seldom seen in the months that followed, and he died on September 28, at the age of 51.

Florida at that time had no lieutenant governor, and the line of secession called for the governor’s seat to be filled by the Senate president, Charley Johns. The Pork Chop leader stepped in and quickly laid the foundation for a gubernatorial campaign, facing election the next year. Once Collins announced his bid, as did a third candidate, state Rep. Brailey Odham, who came in last in the primary, the race for the Democratic Party’s runoff sharpened along Old

South-New South lines. Collins ran on a campaign of good government, of reapportionment and of greater efficiency, and he portrayed Johns as a wild spender willing to play fast and loose with state contracts to help his friends and benefactors. Collins did poorly in North Florida — winning his home county and only three others — but dominated Johns in the vote-heavy urban counties of Central and South Florida. He won the Democratic Party’s nomination — the only real contest in a run for governor in Florida’s Solid South days — by 54 percent.64 Issues of race and integration were not prominent in any of the candidates’ agendas, statements or comments, even though the Brown decision came down during the campaign. This was not because racial segregation was unimportant to Florida’s white voters but because all of the candidates running for governor — Odham, Johns and Collins — held conventional views on segregation. The

Brown decision was a landmark case, but it proved barely a bump in the road in the gubernatorial contest of 1954 because everyone pursuing the office saw the South from the same perspective and everyone suffered from the South’s blind eye. “As a political explosive in

78 the Florida Governor’s race, it looked a dud,” wrote one political reporter, a few days after the ruling.65 This cultural acquiescence would, however, evaporate during the new administration.

Collins stepped into the Governor’s Mansion a segregationist, but he left it six years later as a racially tolerant leader of the New South who saw not only the legal questions surrounding racial conflict but the moral ones as well.

There was little in Collins’ upbringing to hint of this future as a free thinker in the Jim

Crow South and nothing in his background that set him apart from the good ol’ boys he struggled against throughout his political career. A native of Tallahassee, his father was a grocer and his mother had once taught school. Both were strongly religious, as was Collins, in the Methodist faith (later he would join his wife’s Episcopal church). Martin A. Dyckman, one of

Collins’ biographers, suggested that his religiosity helped Collins gain the ability to look beyond the blinders of the segregated South, but regular church attendance and sincerely held religious convictions were hardly uncommon among those Southerners who refused to see. His childhood in Leon County, shouldered up against the Georgia line, meant exposure to little of the world outside the segregated society. He was not well educated — he chose to continue his job in a grocery store after high school graduation and briefly attended Eastman’s Business

School in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., only to be driven home by loneliness. When a family friend, a

Florida Supreme Court justice, encouraged him to pursue a legal career, he chose to enroll in the Cumberland School of Law, in Tennessee, an unconventional academy that did not require a bachelor’s degree and offered a single year of intense study. Collins did well at Cumberland — he passed the Bar exam in his own state and in Arkansas and Tennessee as well — but it is not likely that the experience changed him. Nor did Tallahassee’s two institutions of higher learning

— Florida A&M College for African Americans and Florida State College for Women for white females — as both campuses were largely divorced from the city itself, and Collins’ contact was limited to chasing FSCW girls. State government brought in outsiders, as did the two colleges, and their points of view moderated the city’s outlook. However, Tallahassee was not remarkably distinct from other Southern cities of its size. As a result, Collins grew up in the South of white privilege and black oppression with little exposure outside the region. Collins joined the Navy

79 late in World War II, and the military trained him to be sent to Taiwan for an anticipated invasion of Japan, but he spent his brief naval career at Princeton University and at bases in

California and Washington state. In 1946, Collins returned to Tallahassee, and he never indicated that his Navy days changed him or his outlook in any way.66

Segregation was the norm in the Tallahassee of Collins’ youth, and racial violence was a possible response to any violation of the code. Lynchings, in particular, were common. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, Florida had a higher rate of lynchings than any other state, and in the capital and the surrounding area, the lynching of Will Larkins of Quincy in 1929 was followed by other mob killings. In 1934, a man accused of rape was tortured and hanged in Marianna; in 1937, two suspects in the stabbing of a policeman were taken from the jail and murdered in Tallahassee; in 1941, a man was lynched in Quincy; and as late as 1945, a man accused of a sex crime was taken from an unguarded jail in Madison and shot to death.67

Violence wasn’t the only tool whites used to support Jim Crow. Politics was also turned to this use. In Florida, as in other Southern states, preserving the segregated society was commonly the focus of the state’s political activities. “Politics in Florida throughout much of this century can be seen largely as an effort by the white population to use the Democratic party to maintain white supremacy and to prevent the rise of a Republican party,” wrote David

R. Colburn and Richard K. Scher in Florida’s Gubernatorial Politics in the Twentieth Century.68 As

Collins grew from childhood to a young adult, he remained in a culture of racism and discrimination. As he entered politics, he joined a system that worked to preserve and protect this racial status quo.

Florida was, however, not entirely cut from standard Southern cloth. Thanks to many families moving to the Sunshine State, emigration that started early in the twentieth century and swelled throughout the postwar years, the state developed two personalities. North Florida was traditionally Southern in all ways, but Central Florida and South Florida, where newcomers often outnumbered the natives, were more moderate in politics and racial views. The state was undoubtedly conservative, but not in the monolithic sense common to other Southern states.

Florida’s politics throughout the twentieth century increasingly reflected this tension, and a

80 candidate for statewide office had to find a way to strike a balance, to offer assurances to one group while making appeals to the other. This was tricky business, made more so with each election cycle as Florida continued to diversify. Forging a blended image — traditional, but modern — was beyond the ability of all but a few gubernatorial hopefuls, and Collins, better than Johns and other competing figures, had this gift.69

As with any hopeful politician, Collins found a key ally in his local paper, which took pride in his rise to prominence in the Florida House and Senate and cheered his election as governor. Through most of Collins’ political career, the editor of the Tallahassee Democrat was

Malcolm Johnson, who in August 1954 left a job covering Florida politics for the Associated

Press to become the paper’s executive editor. Like other journalists, Johnson thought he was centered on his community’s politics and values, but he was clearly conservative and offered little to his more moderate readers. Johnson was “quite conservative in his viewpoints,” observed Hendrix Chandler, a friend and fellow Associated Press writer. “He was probably slightly more conservative than Tallahassee.”70 Johnson was also strident, even stubborn, and always outspoken. “Malcolm had a butt-headed streak in him like you would not believe,” recalled Mike Beaudoin. “He could be ornery as the devil.… I would say that people either loved

Malcolm or hated him, and there were a good many on both sides.”71

Helping Johnson hew to the conservative side was John M. “Jack” Tapers, the newspaper’s publisher. Tapers was deeply conservative, and he seldom approached moderate territory. Like other white leaders in Tallahassee and the Capitol, he opposed school integration.

Tapers, in a 1956 interview with U.S. News & World Report, acknowledged that desegregation would come to the South, but he cautioned that the change would come slowly, and “in rural areas, it may be decades.”72 Tapers looked favorably on James J. Kilpatrick’s radical ideas and considered interposition a legitimate response to the Brown decision. “If the federal courts carried it further and ordered integration in specific cases, then I think definitely the

Legislature would take an interposition stand as several other States have taken.”73 As publisher,

Tapers’ responsibilities lay largely with the business side of the newspaper, but he read each editorial before it was published and invoked his veto power if needed. His emphasis on the

81 political and cultural views of the Tallahassee Democrat, and on the positions taken by Johnson, was considerable. Not that there was ever much disagreement between the two. Beaudoin considered Johnson more moderate than his boss, but Alma Tapers, the publisher’s wife, recalled that her husband and Johnson “were of the same mind.”74

As the city’s most heard voice — he wrote his “I Declare!” column, in addition to the editorials — Johnson gave enthusiastic support to Tallahassee’s favorite son, but he was not a fellow traveler on Collins’ journey of reflection and discovery on race relations. When Collins made his call for a New South turn on segregation, Johnson’s exuberant voice fell silent.

Johnson loved all things Florida and Tallahassee. A native of Idaho, he was a child in

Canada when his family left one bitter winter and never looked back, and like many new to

Florida from the frozen north, Johnson embraced his adopted home as an exotic paradise. “He came here from Canada, and he came here from an extremely poor background,” recalled

Dorothy Clifford, a Tallahassee Democrat writer who worked with Johnson in the late 1950s and early 1960s and again in the late 1970s. “I think he just thought life was so wonderful here.”75 As an editor and columnist, he focused his attention and criticism on the work of the

Legislature and local government but was loath to find fault with the Sunshine State and his city. “Tallahassee happens to be considered by Malcolm the best of all possible places to live on this earth,” wrote Bill McGrotha, the newspaper’s longtime sports editor, in 1968.76 After his retirement, and shortly before his death in 1989, Johnson described himself as a Tallahassee booster, through and through. “Even the traffic doesn’t bother me,” he declared. “I can’t think of a better place to be.”77 Such heartfelt commitment was charming, and it served Johnson and the city well. As editor, he advocated a catalogue of civic improvements, from better roads and hospital improvements to a new Capitol and a research park. But this enthusiasm for the city’s virtues kept Johnson in a steady state of denial, and it crippled his ability to observe the truth about his community. Like virtually every other Southern editor, Johnson believed there was no racial unrest in his town. Though not a native to the region, he practiced the blind eye as thoroughly as any journalist reared in the land of Dixie, and as Collins, the Legislature and

82 Tallahassee wrestled with issues of civil rights and social justice, he found many opportunities not to see.

In his inaugural address, on January 4, 1955, Collins stressed the key points of his progressive politics and his campaign — “something clean and good and wholesome,” free of

“lies, government by trade, barter and sale.”78 It was a hopeful speech, in keeping with most such addresses, though it made rough references to Johns, the outgoing acting governor.

Collins made only a brief and oblique reference to race relations and the Brown decision. “There is no place under our sun for the demagogue,” he said. “We must discard the false prophets who would array little counties against big counties, section against section, and class against class.”79 This, too, was hopeful, and perhaps naïve as well, as the state’s political leaders quickly plunged into the reactionary camp. Throughout his time as governor, Collins spent much of his energy and political skill outmaneuvering the Legislature to prevent extreme ideas from becoming Florida policy.

On school integration, Collins was hardly a liberal. His goal was to avoid conflict, and early in his administration his contribution to the debate was as a moderating influence, not as a powerful leader on race relations. In 1955, for example, he told the Legislature he supported segregation and intended to employ his “lawful power … to preserve this custom and law,” and he cautioned against legislation that could “inflame the passions of our people.”80 In other words, do little or nothing and don’t cause a fuss. Collins did support passage of a Pupil

Placement Law, which gave local school boards the authority to decide, on the broadest terms of “health, good order, education and welfare of the public schools,” which school a student must attend.81 Collins embraced pupil placement as a reasonable response to Brown, despite its obvious conflict with the Supreme Court decision, and he used the legislation as a shield against conservative criticism throughout his administration. He buttressed this defense with expressions of support for Jim Crow, balanced with cautions against rash resistance. “I am against any effort to make political capital out of segregation,” he said in a statement issued in response to criticism from a political rival. “I am for the orderly and effective assertion of our rights under authority of law.”82

83 Collins’ public remarks revealed his uncertainty over the Brown decision, over how

Florida should proceed toward integration and over segregation in general. He was cautious on the issue of integration, and many of his decisions were largely ineffective. For example, the

Pupil Placement Law he supported simply reinforced common practice in Florida’s public schools. The legislation gave school boards new and convenient criteria, other than race, to be used to keep black Floridians from attending the all-white schools, but it changed nothing in practical terms. Collins was comfortable with this do-nothing, make-busy reaction to Brown, but legislative leaders and others sought a more robust response. The Pupil Placement Law and

Collins’ don’t-rock-the-boat admonitions failed to satisfy their desires to join the Southern fight.

Throughout his time in office, Collins played a game of defense on the issue of integration, repeatedly reacting to crises and trying to calm the waters disturbed by segregationist leaders.

Unsure of where he stood on the issue himself, the governor was reluctant to press an agenda, and this opened the door for those with strong views and strident ideas.83

Frustrated by the governor’s lack of response, Florida’s lawmakers stepped into the ring during the 1957 legislative session. Captivated by Kilpatrick’s success with interposition, which a number of Southern states had endorsed, the Florida Legislature quickly adopted an interposition resolution of its own. The resolution asserted that the “people of Florida do not consent to changing state precedents and their right by having doctrines thrust upon them by naked force alone, as promulgated in the school cases” and that “said decisions and orders of the Supreme Court of the United States … relating to separation of the races in the public institutions … are null, void and of no force or effect.”84

With interposition, the Legislature pushed the governor too far. Collins, who a year earlier used a long-forgotten and never invoked power to adjourn a special session of the

Legislature when passage of interposition legislation appeared likely, was angry at lawmakers and disappointed in Florida’s attorney general, Richard Ervin, who had said the resolution held moral force as an expression of the will of the people. Collins now took a strident position of his own in opposition to interposition, using clear and sharp words. “The resolution on its face is a lie,” Collins said. “I cannot attribute any moral value to a lie. Nor can I attribute any moral

84 value to defiance of this nature.”85 Further, Collins wrote blistering comments in his own cramped hand across the tail page of the document:

This concurrent resolution of 'Interposition' crosses the Governor's desk as a matter of routine. I have no authority to veto it. I take this means however to advise the student of government, who may examine this document in the archives of the state in the years to come that the Governor of Florida expressed open and vigorous opposition thereto. I feel that the U. S. Supreme Court has improperly usurped powers reserved to the states under the constitution. I have joined in protesting such and in seeking legal means of avoidance. But if this resolution declaring the decisions of the court to be 'null and void' is to be taken seriously, it is anarchy and rebellion against the nation which must remain 'indivisible under God' if it is to survive. Not only will I not condone 'interposition' as so many have sought me to do, I decry it as an evil thing, whipped up by the demagogues and carried on the hot and erratic winds of passion, prejudice, and hysteria. If history judges me right this day, I want it known that I did my best to avert this blot. If I am judged wrong, then here in my own handwriting and over my signature is the proof of guilt to support my conviction.86

The interposition resolution proved a wakeup call for Collins. He had misjudged the capacity of other state leaders to reach for the extremes, despite his own struggle against a challenger’s racist campaign in his reelection a few months earlier. Like other Southern moderates, he had failed to lay out a clear path for his state to follow after the Brown decision. The interposition resolution and various anti-integration bills filed by lawmakers were an attempt both to find that course and to take advantage of the governor’s timidity on issues of race. With the interposition resolution, as with other segregations issues, the actions of others forced Collins to state his views and take a strong position.87

Earlier, in 1956, Collins also had learned that African American citizens of Florida were not waiting for the state’s white leadership to find their way to reform. On May 26, two students at Florida A&M University, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, sat in the front of a crowded city bus, sharing a bench with a white woman rather than stand in the back with other black riders. Ordered to move back or get off, they refused, and the driver pulled over and called the police. The students were arrested and, after a few hours, released on bail paid by

FAMU’s dean of students. By Sunday morning, they were the talk of Tallahassee’s black community and by Sunday evening the target of a cross burning. By Monday morning, they were the inspiration of a campus movement to end the humiliation of back-of-the-bus seating. The

85 defiance by Jakes and Patterson excited black Tallahasseeans and shocked and puzzled the city’s whites. In an editorial, Johnson, choosing to see the issue in a legal frame only, attempted to explain their decision as a case of “misunderstanding of what the United States Supreme

Court ruled was their right in intrastate bus seating.”88 It was disturbing, the editor added, that the leader of the local NAACP chapter promised to take the boycott citywide.89

The boycott quickly caught the interest of African Americans throughout the city. Under the leadership of the Rev. C.K. Steele, a Baptist pastor, and others, a number of black

Tallahasseeans formed a new protest group, the Inter-Civic Council, and joined with the students. Some African Americans continued to use the bus system, but most of the bus system’s former customers chose to walk, drive or share a ride, and many buses ran largely empty. Johnson called for establishment of a committee of black and white leaders to prevent future such conflicts, and a biracial group was quickly brought together. At its first and only meeting, however, the committee chose not to take up the bus boycott, since the conflict was already under way. Johnson, acting at the request of the bus company’s lawyer, chaired a similar meeting in his office at the Tallahassee Democrat, but nothing was accomplished, and no further meetings followed. Negotiations between the Inter-Civic Council and Tallahassee’s government leaders proved fruitless as well, and as the boycott dragged into weeks, then months, the city resorted to harassment measures in an attempt to prevent carpooling.90

The Legislature, meeting in the summer of 1956 for a special session on school integration, did some harassment of its own as well. Two bills were proposed, one to outlaw carpooling during boycotts and the other to prevent state employees from joining boycotts.

Neither saw success, but the Legislature did create a special body, the Florida Legislative

Investigation Committee, to investigate the NAACP. This committee, led by Senator Charley

Johns, grew into a powerful and paranoid investigative arm of the Legislature. For years the

Johns Committee hounded and persecuted Floridians suspected of Communism, activism in various causes, homosexuality and other perceived threats to the state. Its scope of work expanded broadly, but its members never lost their obsession with civil rights and the fear, held by Johns and others, that outside agitators within the NAACP and other organizations were

86 driving unrest and guiding protests in the Sunshine State. At one of its first meetings, the investigative committee called in Jakes and Patterson and grilled the FAMU students. Were they affiliated with the Communist Party? Did they take orders from the NAACP? Neither was true, the students told the committee members, who were apparently satisfied with the answers. The students were given a quick tour of the Capitol and sent on their way, never to hear from the committee again. Jakes and Patterson were lucky that the committee was still in its infancy. In later years, the Johns Committee treated few of its suspects as generously.91

Throughout the boycott, the students and the Inter-Civic Council members were dogged by accusations of conspiracy with the ubiquitous outside agitators. These suspicions, often seeded by the Johns Committee staff, fed the fears of Tallahassee’s white leaders, who couldn’t accept that Tallahassee’s African Americans found conditions in the city intolerable. The local boycott leaders, whites believed, were likely acting under the direction and influence of others.

Skepticism of the intentions of the students and the Inter-Civic Council activists was pervasive, and as the boycott dragged on it darkened the thoughts of whites and colored their remarks.

Johnson gave it voice in comments after a cross was set afire in Steele’s front yard. The perpetrator deserves revulsion, Johnson wrote, but he added that “we might not even discount the possibility that a Negro seeking sensation might have done it to create another incident.”92

Throughout the bus boycott, Johnson and others failed to recognize the legitimacy of the protest. Johnson understood that something was happening in the community and that something had changed, but he saw this shift through eyes of white paternalism. As the boycott began, he observed that “the Negro who once accepted his seat at the back of an empty bus with humility has children who are moved back there now with a genuine sense of humiliation.

We have failed to recognize that we have helped a race along toward cultural maturity and now it wants to stand among men.”93 Johnson’s view was largely unchanged when the boycott finally played out in 1957, with the city’s quiet but grudging abandonment of strict seating rules.

Johnson was similarly unchanged when, during the course of the boycott, an African American, the Rev. K.S. Dupont, decided to seek a seat on the city commission. Dupont was the first black candidate to run for the office, and Johnson hoped he would be the last. Johnson warned that

87 “if the minority race should at this moment — through some dereliction by voters of the majority race — obtain a seat on the commission, we sincerely believe a racial strain would be applied to nearly every decision and action by the board.” The desirable course for Tallahassee, he wrote, was “if the white man wins.”94 The white man did win, and Johnson argued that he always would. “[W]henever they bring their case to the greatest of all forums, the ballot booth, on a strict issue of race vs. race they are going to lose,” Johnson wrote, noting that white election workers “seemed to go out of their way to help ignorant first voters master machines and cast their ballots.”95 Tallahassee had all-white civic leadership in a community with a heavy black population, but in the editor’s eyes this was good and fair and how it should be.

For his part, Collins took a similar view of the bus boycott participants, labeling the leaders as outsiders, and though the growing crisis in Tallahassee concerned him as a threat to his New South modernization efforts, he tried to stay removed from the conflict. He took no action when the Ku Klux Klan rallied outside the city and did nothing when eleven boycott leaders were arrested on charges their car pools amounted to illegal transportation operations.

The governor stepped in only after whites shot up a grocery store and attacked the home of

Steele with bricks, rocks and shotgun blasts. Collins blamed the tensions and violence on

“irresponsible Negro Leadership” and “rabid pro-segregationists” and shut down the bus service on January 1, 1957. Collins’ order to end bus service had little effect, other than to dishearten the boycott activists, as sporadic violence continued. The governor lifted his order twelve days later.96

In the meantime, Collins was inaugurated for a second term, and his address reflected a growing awareness of the need for social revision, even as his actions on the boycott and on school desegregation were lacking. As before, Collins straddled the dividing line on desegregation and advocated the cautious, often frustrating do-nothing strategy that defined his administration’s approach to integration. He spoke against interposition and other means of blocking the Supreme Court’s authority, and he promised white parents that integrated schools were a long way off in Florida’s future. Collins stepped outside his usual circumspect positions, however, and hinted at a hope for social change. In remarks regarding the bus boycott, Collins

88 said that Florida could move forward on race relations “if the white citizens will face up to the fact that the Negro is morally and legally entitled to progress more rapidly” and if “the Negro will realize that he must merit and deserve whatever place he achieves in a community.”97

Collins’ speech was far from a call for tearing down Southern traditions of privilege, and his condescending language barely comported with New South expectations of a society respectful of all its citizens. The speech did, however, bring two new ideas before the citizens of Florida:

That social change could happen, and that the case for change extended beyond legal arguments to include consideration of what is moral and what is not about the Southern way of life.

By the end of the bus boycott Collins and Johnson were speaking of race relations in different ways, but they were not, in practical and political terms, far apart on the primary issues. Neither advocated immediate school desegregation; both kept with the policy of delay, as did virtually all Southern politicians and opinion leaders. Collins’ second term, however, provided a number of crises that forced the governor to wrestle with the issues of civil rights, integration and Jim Crow. Johnson had freedom to ignore events and controversy — to put the blind eye to work — because as an editor he could decide which issues to write about and which to leave off his pages. Collins had far less room to move. As governor, issues were often thrust upon him. The blind eye was a tool Collins could not always easily employ. In addition,

Collins had an inner dialogue on segregation that led him to question the unrealistic stands of other Southern leaders. As he watched other governors dodge the issues raised by civil-rights activists, Collins grew disinclined to avoid the obvious questions facing his state and region. As a result, he emerged from the 1950s a different man than when first elected governor in 1954.

Johnson, for his part, remained largely unchanged.

That separation was still easy to bridge in 1957, when Little Rock’s Central High School became front-page news across America, and Arkansas’ governor, Orval Faubus, became the new face of the South. The crisis in the Arkansas capital, however, pushed Florida’s governor further toward honest appraisal of civil rights and further ahead of many of his contemporaries in Southern politics. Along with other closeted racial moderates, Collins watched events in

89 Arkansas with shock and dismay, as Arkansas had been poised to integrate its schools in

September in an orderly fashion that could set a precedent for Florida and other states. There was reason for real hope. Arkansas was a border state, not part of the Deep South, and had already integrated its public colleges. Industry in the state had integrated workforces, and Little

Rock had ended racial seating on public transportation. There had been missteps in desegregation efforts in the state. For example, in Sheridan, on May 21, 1954, just weeks after the Brown decision, the school board voted to desegregate schools in the new school year, and the decision raised alarm and protests from whites. “I came back from California when my daughter was five so she wouldn’t have to go to school with Negroes,” complained one parent,

“and now, here Sheridan is the first place in the South to abolish segregation.”98 The pressure was too much for the school board in Sheridan, just south of Little Rock, and it rescinded the vote. Elsewhere in the state, an effort to desegregate was successful. Fayetteville’s school board, on the same day, voted for integration, and the board members in that city in the far west rode out the white dissent. In 1955, African American students and white students enrolled together in Fayetteville’s schools without great incident.99

Events in Sheridan and in Fayetteville showed that Arkansas, like the rest of the South, was of two minds regarding integration of public education and the right response to the Brown decision. Plans to desegregate could be derailed or they could proceed, and failure or success would rest with the determination of community leaders. In the case of Little Rock, the school board announced three days after the Brown decision that it intended to comply. In 1956, the board laid out a timetable that called for high schools to integrate in 1957, for junior highs to integrate by 1960 and for earlier grades to integrate in later years. The Little Rock plan called for full integration by 1963 — a calendar that drew protests and a court challenge from the

NAACP, which found the pace too slow. The plan met with court approval, however, and the city’s public schools were to take the first step in September of 1957, starting with Central High

School.100

Faubus had other ideas. Elected in 1954, in the same gubernatorial class as Collins,

Faubus and the Florida governor shared similar views on segregation. Like Collins, Faubus grew

90 up in the Jim Crow South but held moderate racial views, and in his campaign he promised to employ more African Americans in state jobs. Similarly, he opposed school integration and promised to protect segregation through orderly, legal means. Faubus and Collins were not mirror images of one another — compared to Collins, Faubus had a more rural upbringing (in the Ozarks), a thinner education (three months of college study), a leftist upbringing (his father was a socialist) and a more impressive World War II service record (an Army officer in major campaigns in Europe), but on integration and on progressive politics, they appeared to be cut from the same cloth. The similarities were shredded, however, when Faubus, facing re-election and growing nervous that his moderate views might make him vulnerable among white voters, decided to get right on race.101

The governor found his opportunity to reveal the new Orval Faubus in late August, when he was subpoenaed to testify in a case brought by the Mothers League of Central High School, a group formed by parents seeking to block the school board’s action. Giving testimony in a state court on August 29, just days before the school year was to begin, Faubus sounded alarmist. He expressed fears of violence if integration took place (though none had been threatened), said reports showed gun sales had risen dramatically as summer raced toward fall (he produced no such reports), and warned handguns had been confiscated among students both black and white (educators denied this). The governor’s testimony convinced the judge to grant an injunction against integration. The next day the school board turned to the federal courts, which had already approved its plan, and U.S. District Judge Ronald Davies ruled the state court had no jurisdiction. Central High School’s integration by a small number of African American students was back on course.102

Two days later, at 10:15 p.m. on September 2, Faubus went on television statewide and announced he would not allow the integration of Central High School. He said the risk of violence — “the harm that may occur on the morrow”— was too great, and he had ordered the

Arkansas National Guard to prevent the nine African American students from entering the school when classes began in the morning.103 “This is a decision I have reached prayerfully…,”

Faubus told his TV audience. “But, I must state here in all sincerity, that it is my opinion—yes,

91 even a conviction, that it will not be possible to restore or to maintain order and protect the lives and property of the citizens if forcible integration is carried out tomorrow in the schools of this community…. The Public Peace Will Be Preserved.”104 By the time of his announcement,

National Guard troops were already in place. His decision was a closely held secret — he gave no advance notice to the police, to the mayor or to the school board, though he did advise the head of the state police — and shocked the citizens of Little Rock.105

School administrators quickly asked that the black students stay away on the first day of school, and they complied. Collins and other cautious Southern leaders looked on with dread, but Faubus reveled in his new role on the vanguard of Southern resistance. “There is the possibility that this action could develop into a test of authority of the federal government to force its decisions on an unwilling people,” he told the evening Arkansas Democrat, the more sympathetic of Little Rock’s two daily papers, on the first day of troops at the school.106 The

Arkansas Gazette, Little Rock’s morning newspaper, portrayed Faubus’ action as the first use of interposition in an integration crisis. “In effect,” the Gazette reported in a front-page news story,

“he personally interposed the office of governor between the local School District and the

United States Supreme Court…. Thus Mr. Faubus apparently has posed the first test case of the legal line espoused by the Deep South governors who have advocated all-out resistance to federal authority in integration cases.”107 Faubus, forgotten New South moderate of a backwater state, was now carrying the flag of the Old South and redrawing the boundaries of federal authority.

Faubus also was thwarting the intent of a federal district court, and in a front-page editorial, the Arkansas Gazette warned that the court and the federal government must respond with action:

Little Rock arose yesterday to gaze upon the incredible spectacle of an empty high school surrounded by National Guard troops called out by Governor Faubus to protect life and property against a mob that never materialized….

Mr. Faubus contends that he has done nothing that can be construed as defiance of the federal government.

Federal Judge Ronald N. Davies last night accepted the governor’s statement at its face value, and ordered the School Board to proceed on the assumption that

92 the National Guard would protect the right of the nine enrolled Negro children to enter the high school without interference.

Now it remains for Mr. Faubus to decide whether he intends to pose what could be the most serious constitutional question to face the national government since the Civil War. The effect of his action so far is to interpose his state office between the local School District and the United States Court. The government, as Judge Davies implied last night, now has no choice but to proceed against such interference or abandon its right to enforce its rulings and decisions.

Thus the issue is no longer segregation vs. integration. The question has now become the supremacy of the government of the United States in all matters of law. And clearly the federal government cannot let this issue remain unresolved, no matter what the cost to this community.108

With this editorial, the Arkansas Gazette’s editor, Harry Ashmore, who in the past had supported Faubus on his more progressive policies, locked horns with Faubus in what became a heroic effort to bend the state back to a legal and legitimate response to the Brown decision.

The Arkansas Gazette earned two Pulitzer Prizes in 1957, for the editor’s commentaries and for the newsroom’s coverage, but Ashmore and his newspaper had little effect on Faubus in the first week of the crisis or in the many months that followed. Ashmore and observers in the national media expressed alarm and condemnation, but many Southerners, in Arkansas and throughout the region, shouted their approval. As the crisis in Little Rock began to unfold,

Faubus and a number of other Southern governors, in Atlanta for an education meeting, took in the University of Georgia’s football game against the Texas Longhorns. As usual when elected officials attend public functions, introductions were made, and the crowd showed disinterest until the announcer mentioned the governor of Arkansas. Faubus’ name triggered a roar of excitement and extended applause, enough to delay the game, and football fans turned Faubus devotees crowded around the man standing up for the white South. “Dixie,” wrote Collins biographer Tom Wagy, “had a new folk hero.”109 Collins, however, found the outpouring unsettling.110

Back in Little Rock, the African American students — soon to be known worldwide as the Little Rock Nine — had few fans, but they did have a court order supporting them when they arrived at Central High School on the second day of classes. It meant little, however, to the troops of the Arkansas National Guard, who, still acting under Faubus’ order, turned them away

93 but offered them no protection. The scenes that morning were of young, well-dressed African

Americans being denied access by armed soldiers and white students, parents and others harassing the students as they came to the school and departed. Newspapers throughout the nation and around the world ran heart-breaking photos of 15-year-old Elizabeth Ann Eckford, who had become isolated from the other African American students, being berated by one white woman as she tried to find her way through the agitated crowd. Dressed in white, wearing sunglasses and clutching a book and notebook, the 15-year-old was silent but clearly in distress.

She eventually came to a bus stop, where she sat and waited for a ride home as whites taunted her and yelled threats while photographers took pictures and reporters took notes. It was a defining image of the decade. For many, the agony of the girl that morning portrayed, in clear and heart-breaking detail, the cruelty of Southern whites and the madness of the South’s decision-makers.111

The spectacle of Little Rock continued, with National Guard troops in place, while the federal court and the White House considered its options. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was reluctant to get involved. He had some sympathy for Southern whites — Collins was shocked when, in a meeting with the president over the Little Rock crisis, Eisenhower told him that he had no problem with conditions in the South — “I understand how you folks feel.”112 Eisenhower told Collins, however, that he had to enforce rulings of the Supreme Court. The president also grew to regret his appointment of Chief Justice Earl Warren to the court — “the biggest damned-fool mistake I ever made,” he once said.113 Events in Arkansas, however, forced his hand on desegregation. Once the federal district court ordered integration to proceed, Faubus withdrew the National Guard on September 20, and Eisenhower, in a statement, described

Faubus’ decision as “a necessary step in the right direction” and spoke with promise of a return to order. “I am confident that the citizens of the city of Little Rock and the state of Arkansas will welcome this opportunity to demonstrate that in their city and in their state proper orders of a United States court will be executed promptly and without disorder.”114 Eisenhower’s optimism was misplaced. When the black students returned to school the following Monday,

September 23, they came under attack from whites, despite a sizeable force of local and state

94 police officers who tried to maintain control. A crowd of whites chased one student and attacked two African American reporters covering the crisis, and fights broke out inside the school. By noon, Little Rock’s police chief had the students removed from Central High School, fearing the worst. Faubus, who had left the state over the weekend to attend a Southern

Governors’ Association convention at Sea Island, Georgia, blamed the students, their NAACP advisers, city officials and the school board. “They should have had the good sense to do what I urged them to do — allow for a cooling off period,” he said.115

As order broke down in Little Rock and violence erupted, Eisenhower began steps to assert federal authority in a situation out of control, and Collins prepared to address the

Southern governors later that day, with Faubus attending. In the hands of another governor, the address (“Can a Southerner Be Elected President?”) could have avoided the obvious question of desegregation — Southern politicians were well practiced in dodging issues of race — but the

Florida governor decided to include remarks on the issue on everyone’s mind. Collins gave the luncheon audience a catalogue of virtues a Southerner must possess to hold hope of winning the White House, such as holding an approach to foreign policy that matched the challenges of the modern world and demonstrating a commitment to goals of national, not just regional, importance. This gifted Southerner — who was looking more and more like Collins himself as the speech rolled on — must show competence in government and bear skills in marketing his own future, including “a compelling and persuasive presence on the television screen, for it is here that future campaigns will be won and lost.”116 As his fellow state leaders took up coffee and dessert, Collins worked his way gently into tougher material, starting with a redefinition of state and federal relations. Along with greater states’ rights, he said, should come greater state responsibilities. The notion of greater authority was hardly an upsetting notion to any of the state leaders. Finally, Collins turned to how a Southern leader might manage social change. “An essential goal which any serious presidential candidate must seek is that of racial harmony and progress,” he said, as coffee cups suddenly rattled into saucers throughout the hall. He spoke of “the brotherhood of mankind, and the dignity of the law,” and he proposed that a hopeful

Southern candidate could build national prominence by skillfully addressing racial issues in a

95 manner free of alarm. “I am convinced that the prevailing sentiment in this nation is not radical,”

Collins warned the governors. “It is realistic and understanding…. It believes the decisions of the United States Supreme Court are the law of the land and insists that ours be a land of the law.”117

Collins continued, with his audience in keen attention, with observations on how it was easy for those in the North to call for changes in civil rights but hard for a Southerner to work toward such changes while keeping the support of constituents. A Southern leader “must have the discretion and judgment required to raise a standard out front, but not so far that it is beyond the horizon of the people....”118 Collins insisted that a Southerner running for president could not escape these central issues. “The Southern leader who understands and accepts these facts will find himself not opposed to national sentiment but in harmony with it,” he said. “He who does not might as well stay home.”119 The address was warmly received — the governors gave him a standing ovation — but some state leaders in comments later distanced themselves from key points. “We in South Carolina,” said Governor George B. Timmerman, “will run our own affairs, regardless of what other people want.”120

For Collins, the speech was a turning point, a public declaration of a new position on desegregation. In the past, he was for opposition conducted in a legal fashion, though he, like others, struggled to define legal resistance to Supreme Court decisions and federal court orders.

In this speech, he declared his recognition that the rulings of the high court are the law of the land and must, without qualification, be honored as such. Collins, from this speech onward, advocated compliance with the law as defined by the Supreme Court. Collins wrote the speech with care and deliberation, and he knew he was breaking new ground. Was it too much — was he raising his standard too far ahead of his fellow Southerners? To gauge the question, Collins days before had run an advance copy by Johnson, the Tallahassee Democrat editor. In a sign that the governor and his old friend were starting to see the South in different ways, Johnson cautioned against using the address. The speech, Johnson said, was too liberal. In another sign,

Collins decided to give his remarks without revision.121

96 Collins’ address, in which a Southern governor accepts limits to states rights and accepts the authority of the Supreme Court, got some attention, but not what the speech warranted. Faubus was the real show. During the convention at Sea Island, Eisenhower had first brought the Arkansas National Guard under federal control, to relieve the troops from Faubus’ orders, then sent in troops of his own — the 101st Airborne Division — to restore order and enforce the court order on the school’s integration. The keynote speech was quickly forgotten.

Collins’ entanglement with Faubus and the Little Rock crisis continued, however, as the association members voted the Florida governor as its new chairman, then created a special committee to sort out the Arkansas mess. For the first time since Reconstruction, U.S. Army troops were enforcing federal authority in the South, and what had been the problem of one governor, Faubus, was now a region-wide concern. The Southern Governors’ Association was determined to work out a quick exit for the 101st Airborne. The group named Collins to the special committee, and within days he and three other governors headed to Washington.122

In phone calls October 1 with Faubus, who had returned to Little Rock, the governors worked out a possible settlement in which Faubus was to issue a statement declaring that “the orders of the federal courts will not be obstructed,” and Eisenhower was to withdraw the troops.

The president, in meeting at the White House with Collins and the other governors later that day, signed off on the plan. When the statement was released in Little Rock, Eisenhower, Collins and the special committee learned with dismay that Faubus had modified the approved language, adding two words — “by me” (“the orders of the federal courts will not be obstructed by me”). As amended, the statement meant Faubus could wash his hands of events at Little

Rock Central High School while letting others continue the dirty work of blocking integration.

Eisenhower saw the double-cross for what it was and rejected the agreement. “The statement issued this evening by the governor of Arkansas does not constitute in my opinion the assurance that he intends to use his full powers as governor to prevent the obstruction of the orders of the United States District Court,” Eisenhower said in a statement that night.123 Federal troops would remain. Faubus, in remarks the following day, remained in character as the great

Southern belligerent. “What all this double talk in Washington means is simply this — they

97 want me to take my troops and put bayonets in the backs of the students of my state, and bludgeon and bayonet my own people,” he said. “I have never felt the necessity for this kind of action.”124 Faubus also said that the committee in Washington was aware of his “by me” addition.

Collins was embarrassed by Faubus and felt betrayed by the duplicity of the Arkansas governor.

Faubus’ foolishness and the disappointing mission to Washington strengthened Collins belief that what the South needed, and desperately lacked, was courageous, moral leadership.125

The remaining years of the Collins administration gave the governor any number of opportunities to consider the question of leadership in a time of change. The Legislature continued to be active and agitated on issues of race, desegregation and civil rights protests, and Collins tried to reign in the excesses when politically possible. In doing so, he gained a reputation as a Southern moderate of good intentions but scant action — leadership by veto was one critic’s largely accurate summation. Time magazine looked on his New South credentials with skepticism, wondering if his moderation was “the protective coloring of a good politician who has discovered the magic combination for winning friends in the North and offending precious few in the South.”126 As the decade of the 1950s grew long a few schools in

South Florida implemented token integration, but with those exceptions the state still operated its public schools with segregated enrollment. In his last year in office, Collins was again challenged by civil-rights activists in his hometown, as he had been earlier with the bus boycott.

This time, Collins made more of the opportunity.127

As with the bus boycott, the later protests were triggered by students at Florida A&M

University. This time, however, the FAMU students would guide the actions on the streets of

Tallahassee, with little assistance from those outside the campus. Their target: segregated operations at the downtown lunch counters. Like other Southern communities, Tallahassee had a number of five-and-dime stores, all-purpose chain retailers of household goods, toys and other inexpensive items. Typically, the five-and-dimes also ran lunch counters, which made sodas, shakes and hamburgers and sandwiches. At lunch, the dime-store counters were busy social centers, and like all things social in the Jim Crow South, the counters had racial rules.

Whites could sit at the counter, give their orders and eat their burgers and French fries. African

98 Americans, however, could not. Black customers could stand or take their food to go, but the booths and the stools that ran along the counter were for white customers only.

Patricia Stephens and her older sister, Priscilla, began testing the customs and policies of segregation in Tallahassee while students at Florida A&M. The sisters, natives of nearby

Quincy but reared in Palm Beach County, studied the Ghandian philosophy and practices of

CORE — the Congress of Racial Equality — while in South Florida. When they came to

Tallahassee, they were ready to share CORE’s tactics with fellow students and begin instigating change by highlighting Jim Crow’s curious lines of separation. The sisters were still exploring these lines in bus stations, on city buses and other public places and considering a plan of action when, on February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina, four young students from

North Carolina A&T University went to a Woolworth’s downtown, bought some school supplies and sat down at the lunch counter for a snack of coffee and doughnuts. “You’ll have to leave,” said the stunned waitress, but the students, all freshmen, remained until the store closed. They returned the next day as a group of more than 20 African American students seeking counter service. Their defiance of long-recognized racial practice shocked whites in the city and electrified the black community. Word spread quickly, and a new form of protest — the sit-in — was born.128

Within days, students throughout the South, many part of the CORE alliance of activists, began choosing their own targets for sit-in protests, and the Stephens sisters and other students decided on Woolworth’s. On February 13, a Saturday and a busy shopping day for downtown merchants, ten young African Americans, most from FAMU, settled onto stools and tried to place their orders. As expected, they were refused service, and as planned, they refused to leave. A few whites offered words of encouragement, but other whites soon began harassing the students. When more students returned a week later, Mayor Hugh Williams arrived with police officers in tow and ordered the arrest of any who refused to leave. Police arrested eleven protesters, including both of the Stephens sisters.129

With the arrests, Tallahassee’s business community, civic leaders, police, prosecutors and judges began a process of harassment and persecution, repeating the pattern of reaction to

99 the bus boycott. Their abuse received little, if any, rebuke from other whites, including those in the press and those in politics. Collins, as with previous protests, reacted first with strong and condemning language, labeling the sit-ins illegal and dangerous and defending the unqualified right of business owners and operators to turn away any customers. At the Tallahassee

Democrat, Johnson was slow to put some ink to paper on the biggest issue of the day. Three weeks after the protests began, Johnson finally gave the city his view of student activism.

Following the governor’s lead, Johnson defended businesses that discriminated against black customers and criticized students for their misplaced belief that they deserved to be treated the same as whites. “As the Governor pointed out in his press conference yesterday,” Johnson wrote, “the law of Florida is plain and specific in declaring restaurants, lodging houses and similar public service businesses to be private enterprises. The law also recognizes the right of the business operator to deny service to anyone he feels will have an undesirable effect on his business. Even if there were no specific statute on the books,” Johnson added, “this must be the way things are done under our system of government, business and ordinary living. These

Negro students say they are trying to win their ‘rights,’ but the law gives them no such rights.”130 Johnson’s editorial was an able and declarative summation of the conventional view of white citizens in Tallahassee and throughout the South. Whites did not understand what the students wanted, and, as always, they saw nothing wrong with the ways things were. It tells of the challenge faced by the Stephens sisters and the protesters to compare Johnson’s editorial to one in The Citizens’ Council, a newspaper published monthly by the Citizens’ Councils of

America, the national organization of the local anti-integration groups. “To place ‘sit-downs’ in their proper perspective,” The Citizens’ Council editorial stated, “one must first realize that these demonstrations have occurred on private property — that the Negro demonstrators have actually, in some instances, taken over a private business establishment. Let it be here noted,” the editorial continued, “that no legal body — not even the U.S. Supreme Court — has ever said that proprietors of private businesses must serve persons whose presence they deem objectionable…. Throughout the South, these demonstrators have ignored state laws and city ordinances which protect the sanctity of private property, and reserve to the proprietor the

100 right to select his customers.”131 The local paper and the national segregationist organization were of the same mind and making the same argument. The problem wasn’t that Tallahassee was unfair to some of its citizens or that some practices in the South were counter to basic

American values. The problem, to Johnson’s eye, and to that of the White Citizens’ Council, was much simpler — some people were not following the rules. Collins agreed, at least publicly.

Privately, he was not so sure.132

Collins and the rest of white Tallahassee were getting little help from their local paper in understanding the students. The sit-ins were the talk of the town, but the newspaper’s coverage was hard to find. The students were trying to prick the conscience of the city, and to whites they were showing “attitudes and behaviors completely alien to tradition,” observed C.U. Smith, who as a professor at Florida A&M wrote extensively on the subject of civil rights in Florida.133

The newspaper’s reporters and editors, baffled by the protests and unwilling to encourage the students through its journalism, adopted the blind eye. “One thing you’ve got to remember is that while today this kind of thing is commonplace, back in those days that was a brand-new phenomenon,” recalled Beaudoin, who in 1960 was the main assignment editor, or city editor.

“We didn’t know how to react. We were shocked. Here’s a bunch of young kids letting themselves be handcuffed and physically dragged out to a police car and thrown in it…. And we still had enough racism, for lack of a better word, in us from the years past to think that maybe they shouldn’t have been doing what they did.”134

The confusion among whites — Why are they doing this? — and the sense of alarm grew only stronger when white students from Florida State University joined the sit-ins. Official harassment by police and deputies continued, sometimes by overt action against the demonstrators, sometimes by neglecting to take action when whites threatened the demonstrators. As the protests continued and white anger mounted, the students came under growing threats to their personal safety. On March 12, another busy Saturday, events got out of control. Students were blocked one day by the head of the local White Citizens’ Council, carrying a club and leading a group of similarly armed whites, and other groups of whites roamed downtown. Patricia Stephens rallied students to march downtown and protest the many

101 arrests police made that day, but as they left campus, the students met a wall of law- enforcement officers blocking their way. The mayor ordered them to return to campus, and the officers fired tear gas. Stephens suffered eye injuries from the gas that troubled her the rest of her life. More students were arrested, and a number of them — the Stephens sisters and a handful of others — would refuse bail. They spent many days in jail. Johnson complained editorially that black protesters ended up behind bars but not any of the white demonstrators

(actually, some FSU students were held by police for a few hours, then released, and a small number of FSU students did face charges). “Omissions from the police blotter … lay our police open to charges of being one-sided…,” he wrote. “Some white-girl students from FSU who were just as much involved as agitators and demonstrators were arrested and released….” He also noted that none of the armed whites roaming the streets ended up in jail. “Arrests were made among unarmed demonstrators,” Johnson wrote, “but none from among the stick-bearing resisters….” Johnson praised the police response in general, but said, “It would have put our community and our law enforcement in a more justifiable position if some of that bunch had been arrested and charged, too.” 135 The editorial indicated that to the Tallahassee Democrat, the disparity in the arrests was a problem because it created a public relations issue, not because it fell short of fair and even-handed treatment of citizens of all races.136

The large number of arrests did nothing to calm the nerves of Tallahassee’s whites or to give city and state leaders cause to dial back the pressure and show restraint. Instead, the official response grew more strained and threatening. In a letter to Collins, Thomas D. Beasley, the speaker of the Florida House, expressed growing concern. “I am very much alarmed over this development by students attending state supported schools,” he wrote, “and I have reached the point where I believe the proper authorities should take such action as is necessary to discourage this type of demonstration in the State of Florida.” The speaker’s proposal: The State

Board of Education should adopt a rule requiring state universities to expel any student or to fire any employee who participates, in any way, in a sit-in demonstration. If the education board won’t do so, he warned, the Legislature might. “I am convinced,” the Speaker told the governor,

“that unless corrective measures are taken to stop such demonstrations by those enjoying the

102 benefits of state supported institutions that soon it can no longer be said that the people of

Florida live under the law but that rule by violence has been substituted for rule by law. We simply cannot allow this to continue in this state.”137 The judge handling the arrests of the students lectured them that CORE was tied to the Communist Party and found them guilty.

Tallahassee’s city commission turned down a recommendation by Collins to establish a biracial group to help resolve tensions. “We rejected then and reiterate the rejection of this idea,” wrote

Tallahassee Mayor George S. Taff to Collins, “as we know from past experience in dealing with racial problems that such committee action … only postpones positive actions by responsible officials.” The commission went a different route, asking the governor to work with the governing board of the universities and the presidents to crack down on students who “further endanger the public welfare, peace, and tranquility of the City of Tallahassee and its citizens by participating in off-campus demonstrations” and to ensure that “faculty members, who have been involved with these demonstrations and have used their position of influence to instigate and encourage action of these students, be properly dealt with.”138 Lewis Killian, an FSU sociologist and one of the professors suspected of directing student activists, became the target of efforts by local legislators, city commissioners and the Chamber of Commerce to have him removed from the university. “We urge the State Board of Control and other duly constituted officials charge[d] with such responsibility to take immediate, positive disciplinary steps with respect to faculty members and students who are fomenting, directing and engaging in these deliberate acts which tend to discredit and destroy both our community and our great universities…,” wrote R. Spencer Buress, the Chamber president, in a letter to Collins.139 Robert

Manning Strozier, the FSU president, told Killian that he was to meet with the governing board of the universities to discuss his employment and that of another faculty member. Killian’s job likely was saved by the sudden demise of Strozier, who suffered a heart attack. His death came before the meeting was to take place, and the issue passed away with the 53-year-old president.140

In this environment, Collins continued his hard-line approach in his words and actions.

After the tear-gassing of the FAMU students, the governor immediately ordered law-

103 enforcement to lock down the campus until morning, and he stated that no one had a right to engage in a demonstration that might likely lead to trouble. He also said racial protests followed a Communist Party pattern and were hurting America’s prestige abroad. The governor’s moderate instincts appeared to be overwhelmed by events on the street. At the same time, however, Collins reached out to learn more about the motives of the protestors, an expression of curiosity uncommon among Southern politicians. This engagement of the other side — he heard plenty from conservative whites — shaped Collins’ understanding of the social change under way in Tallahassee and set the stage for a dramatic address to the citizens of his state.141

Collins did not engage the demonstrators themselves — to do so could make him vulnerable to demagogic attacks as he continued in his political career, and it is not clear that

Collins would have felt comfortable seeking wisdom and insight from young African Americans, political risk aside. Instead, he consulted with Killian and Charles Grigg, also an FSU sociologist.

In a lengthy meeting in the Capitol, the governor, his staff and the professors discussed the sit- ins. Killian and Grigg repeatedly asked Collins to look through the eyes of the black students, not just see the events from the perspective of tightly wound city leaders and police. They also encouraged him — and this proved critical — to view the demonstrations in a new way. Yes, there was the law, but there was also something more, a moral component, he must weigh.142

Soon after, Collins took steps for an unprecedented statewide address on the issue of segregated lunch counters. To speak statewide, in 1960, required establishment of a temporary network of television and radio stations. With both TV and radio, Collins could reach virtually every Floridian. His plan was to speak directly to the citizens. He labored over his remarks the day before, and he tried to lock the ideas in his mind, so he could avoid reading from a text. On

Sunday, March 20, from a TV studio in Jacksonville, Collins spoke in an informal manner, and in his hands he clutched a Bible — a signal, from the start, that this was not an ordinary political speech.143

“Well, I want to talk to you about race relations…,” Collins said. “I believe this is a very grave and serious matter facing the people of this state, affecting all of us, and I think the

104 people of this state expect their governor to have convictions, and I think the people of this state when their governor has convictions about a matter expect him to express those convictions directly to them.”144 Floridians tuned in might have expected at this point to hear their governor speak strongly against protest, to warn of potential violence and to announce a plan of action to contain demonstrations and preserve the Southern way of life. What followed was something else entirely.

Collins expressed his conviction to “represent every man, woman and child in this state as their governor, whether that person is black or white, whether that person is rich or poor, or whether that person is influential or not influential,” then moved into a quick overview of the sit-in movement, starting with Greensboro and ending with the ongoing sit-ins in Tallahassee, and he criticized the official response in his hometown. “There the City of Tallahassee took a rather rigid and punitive position in respect to these demonstrations…,” which, he said, “caused the conditions to become aggravated and we finally developed conditions there in Tallahassee of which I am frankly ashamed.”145 Viewers and radio listeners began to take great interest, as they’d never heard a governor speak of their state in anything but glowing terms.

“Yesterday and the day before there was a tenseness about the atmosphere in

Tallahassee that was disgraceful,” he said. “We had armed patrolmen, state, county and city, patrolling every street because we have had the wildest rumors imaginable going on there … widows asking me if I thought they would be safe in their homes at night time.”146 He told of how his Florida Highway Patrol driver expressed alarm that a bus full of young black men carrying bats had pulled onto the FAMU campus and of how he called the university president as soon as he could to get an explanation. The president said, Collins related, “‘It is true,

Governor, we’ve got a bus load … here with their bats to play the ball game.’”147 The fear, rumors and paranoia were warping the city’s good sense, he lamented, and allowed “a perfectly absurd situation to develop here in our free America, in our free Florida and in our free

Tallahassee.”148

Collins then turned to the question that had proved the stopping point for Johnson of the Tallahassee Democrat, for legislators, for business owners, and, until recently, for Collins

105 himself — what is legal under the laws of Florida? The state must maintain law and order,

Collins said, and it must also protect the rights of individuals and respect the freedom of choice held by business owners and customers. “Now under our free enterprise system and under our laws a merchant has the legal right to select the patrons he serves…,” Collins said. “The customer, of course, has the legal right to trade or not to trade with any man he wants to — and, of course, there is the right to demonstrate and the people should be protected in that right, too.”149 He added that the right to demonstrate was limited if public disorder were likely to result.

Collins then made a sweeping turn and hoped he carried his audience along. “But actually, friends, we are foolish if we just think about resolving this thing on a legal basis…,” he said, a clear expression of the concerns of FSU’s Killian and Grigg in their meeting earlier. “And so far as I am personally concerned, I don’t mind saying that I think that if a man has a department store and he invites the public generally to come into his department store and trade, I think then it is unfair and morally wrong for him to single out one department though and say he does not want or will not allow Negroes to patronize that one department. Now he has a legal right to do that, but I still don’t think that he can square that with moral, simple justice.”150 In one sentence, Collins put years of distance between himself and every other

Southern governor, and he rewrote the basic rules of commerce for every town square and downtown street in Florida. What’s legal is not necessarily what is right. Collins, the cautious moderate, had crossed over to liberal territory and sided with the young black protesters who were confounding downtown commerce and troubling the minds, if not the hearts, of Saturday shoppers.

“Now none of us have all the answers to this situation, friends,” he deferred. “I think all of us are part right and part wrong. We must have more tolerance, more understanding, more

Christianity, less words and less demonstrations, I think, if we are going to find the answer ultimately.”151 He related how an acquaintance suggested that “all this could be eliminated if the colored people would just stay in their place,” and added: “Now friends, that’s not a Christian point of view. That’s not a democratic point of view. That’s not a realistic point of view. We can

106 never stop Americans from struggling to be free. We can never stop Americans from hoping and praying that some day in some way this ideal that is imbedded in our Declaration of

Independence is one of the truths that are inevitable that all men are created equal, that that somehow will be a reality and not just an illusory distant goal.”152

Collins’ address was both frank and romantic. Its portrayal of the scene in Tallahassee was more accurate than any description offered by other white observers, and its defense of black activism drew on foundation values of the Declaration of Independence. The speech can, of course, be faulted in a number of ways. Collins adopted a false equivalency — “we have got extremists on one side and we’ve got extremists on the other. We’ve got this mob shouting here; we’ve got that mob shouting there”153 — when, in fact, the students participating in the sit-ins were well-behaved to an astonishing degree, neither extreme in their views nor mob-like in their actions. Collins puzzled some viewers and listeners when he invoked the Hindu story of blind men describing an elephant and again when he fell into a long and confusing account of the

Robert Sherwood play “The Trial of Pontius Pilate,” which he said had impressed him when he saw it on television “about two years ago.” His quoting of Scripture and his references to

Christianity may have put some Floridians ill at ease. Like any speechwriter, he could have benefited from an editor. The greatest weakness of the address, however, was also its greatest strength —it was a naïve invocation of the better side of the South’s white citizens. Collins thought he could, in a single, heartfelt address, educate the state and point it in the direction of the well-mannered, even-handed New South of his dreams. Such a change required broad reassessment of the fundamental fairness of Southern life in many of its daily functions, big and small, from serving coffee to making home loans. It was foolish of Collins to believe he could bend that piece of Old South iron so easily, and it was courageous of him to try.

Surprisingly, the speech was well received by much of the Florida press. “The people caught between the two extremes of racism in Florida have been puzzled, confused and, in many instances, conscience-stricken,” wrote the Miami Herald’s editors. “The Governor offers them some leadership.…” The editorial observed that Collins went beyond the simple legal determination. “The matter divides into two compartments…. One concerns what is ‘right’

107 under the law…. The other compartment is the moral one. Gov. Collins is the first Southern chief executive to open it forthrightly…. This took courage as well as candor.”154 The St.

Petersburg Times’ editorial was gushing in its praise, saying Collins “set a high mark of courageous statesmanship for other leaders to follow” and “took a stand which will go down in

Southern political history.”155

The state’s more conservative major dailies showed more restraint but were kind in their assessments. The Tampa Tribune did not endorse the governor’s position but said his

“words ought to be studied by all people, of both races, who have any concern for the future of

Florida,” and added: “We give the Governor credit for political courage; and we concede that from a moral viewpoint there is an element of unfairness to the Negro.”156 The Orlando Sentinel was less generous but approved Collins’ effort to avoid violence. The Sentinel’s editors, however, were not happy with what they termed remarks on “race-mixing” and reminded readers that

“the governor has no constitutionally-driven right to make laws or interpret laws.”157 The Florida

Times-Union, the strongly conservative Jacksonville newspaper, could only muster a nod to the governor for bringing the issue “into clearer focus.”158 The newspaper also buried the news story on the speech 21 pages deep. The St. Petersburg Independent did not attempt to shroud its criticism in well-tempered tones. “Unless the governor got carried away with his own oratory or ambitions,” the Independent’s editorial said, “ his talk of moral obligations makes less sense than no sense at all.”159

At the Tallahassee Democrat, the speech proved troubling for Johnson, Collins’ long- time friend, for a number of reasons. For someone with as rosy a view of Tallahassee as

Johnson, the speech came as an insult to the community he loved. In his address, Collins said conditions in the city made him “frankly ashamed,” and Johnson could not accept that opprobrium. He had spent his career extolling the city’s virtues while encouraging civic improvements. To Johnson, Tallahassee was a delightful place to live that grew only more delightful year after year. He could tolerate none of the criticisms Collins laid out — that

Tallahassee had moral flaws and that racial problems existed in the capital and must be

108 addressed — and he could not forgive the city’s native son for airing Tallahassee’s dirty linen in a statewide address.

Johnson’s was not the meanest pen in Southern journalism, and hardly the most racist.

He did, at times, acknowledge the complaints of African American citizens, which was much more than many of his colleagues in journalism could muster. The Tallahassee Democrat editor’s understanding of civil rights, however, was cloudy and indistinct, and like other whites he made little effort to focus his attention on the great issue of his time. He was trapped by his paternalistic attitude and by his denial of the obvious inequalities around him. The blind eye freed him of any duty, personally and professionally, to explore and adapt to new social thinking. The blind eye shielded him from considering a new and modern future, just as it trapped him in the past.

With his address, Collins sought to bring Tallahassee and Florida across the New South threshold. But for Johnson and most of Tallahassee, the Old South’s grip on their hearts and minds remained strong. Johnson had reached his limit of his progressive arc well before Collins went before the cameras and microphones and talked of a Florida foreign and unsettling to

Johnson’s affectionate view. In Collins’ own terms, he had raised a standard too far ahead, well beyond Johnson’s horizon, and had asked too much — that he open the blind eye and see a new truth, as the students were striving to reveal it. But the blind eye was comforting to Johnson, as it was for whites across the South. The editor held no interest in acknowledging the flaws

Collins tried to point out, and he resented the challenge to do so.

Clifford, the Tallahassee Democrat staff writer, recalled a chill in the newsroom the day after Collins gave his address on television and radio. Johnson and Tapers, the editor, were perplexed. They could not reach agreement on an editorial statement, so the newspaper in

Collins’ hometown offered no comment. “The speech permanently affected Collins’s relations with Malcolm Johnson….,” wrote Dyckman, the Collins biographer. “Johnson’s silence spoke volumes.”160

Johnson was not the only friend Collins lost on his mission to teach his city and state to see. Long-time acquaintances gave him the cold shoulder. As natives of the South, they grew up

109 as part of the white culture, and at early ages they learned the skill of choosing, through subtle daily acts of denial and neglect, what was best to ignore. They did not appreciate, any more than Johnson, the attempt by Collins to teach them how to see. They did, however, return the favor, and taught the governor a lesson he could never forget: Life in the South was lonely for a liberal.

1 James Jackson Kilpatrick, The Southern Case for School Segregation (np: Crowell-Collier Publishing Co., 1962), p. 24.

2 Kilpatrick, The Southern Case for School Segregation, p. 26.

3 Kilpatrick, The Southern Case for School Segregation, p. 26.

4 Kilpatrick, The Southern Case for School Segregation, p. 35.

5 Kilpatrick, The Southern Case for School Segregation, p. 50.

6 Kilpatrick, The Southern Case for School Segregation, p. 94.

7 Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climatic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Touchstone, 2001), p. 308.

8 Diane McWhorter, “Marching in King’s Shadow,” New York Times, Oct. 7, 2011, p. A1.

9 Jon Nordheimer, “Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, an Elder Statesman for Civil Rights, Dies at 89,” New York Times, October 5, 2011, p. A33.

10 Frye Gaillard, Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), p. 128.

11 Gaillard, Cradle of Freedom, p. 128.

12 Nordheimer, “Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, an Elder Statesman for Civil Rights, Dies at 89,” New York Times, p. A33.

13 McWhorter, “Marching in King’s Shadow,” New York Times, p. A1; Frye Gaillard, Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), pp. 128-129.

14 McWhorter, Carry Me Home, p. 50; Carolyn Maull McKinstry and Denise George, While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age during the Civil Rights Movement (Carol Stream, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, 2011), p. 35.

15 Frye Gaillard, Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), p. 125; McWhorter, Carry Me Home, pp. 50-51.

16 Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 41-42.

110

17 Stein, Running Steel, Running America, pp. 58-59.

18 Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 10-13, 177.

19 Eskew, But for Birmingham, pp. 85-86.

20 Eskew, But for Birmingham, p. 91.

21 Eskew, But for Birmingham, pp. 55, 92, 96; William Warren Rogers, Robert David Ward, Leah Rawls Atkins, Wayne Flynt, Alabama: The History of a Deep South State (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), p. 554; Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 116.

22 Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 153.

23 Arsenault, Freedom Riders, pp. 153-158.

24 Frye Gaillard, Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), p. 131.

25 “Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965,” videotape (produced by Blackside Inc. and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for WGBH Boston, 1986-1987), episode 6; Don Brown, “New city leaders get down to business,” Birmingham News, April 16, 1963, p. 10; Gaillard, Cradle of Freedom, pp. 131-132.

26 Eskew, But for Birmingham, pp. 46-47, 52; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 527; David Halberstam, The Children (New York: Random House, 1998), pp. 432-434.

27 “Eyes on the Prize,” videotape, episode 6.

28 Geraldine H. Moore, “What Negroes are doing — Eight women will receive awards at Wenonah School,” Birmingham News, April 21, 1963, p. C-14.

29 Relman Morin, Associated Press, “Both Sides ... and human side,” Birmingham News, May 9, 1963, p. 2.

30 “Singing, kneeling marches — Fire hoses, police dogs used to halt downtown Negro demonstrations,” no byline, Birmingham News, May 3, 1963, p. 2; “Negroes renew march — City firemen again hose down rock-throwing demonstrators,” Birmingham News, May 4, 1963, p. 2.

31 “Swarm over downtown area — Negro mobs break through police,” Birmingham News, May 7, 1963, p. 2; “Demonstrations said suspended,” Birmingham News, May 8, 1963, p. 2.

32 Mickey Logue, “Gov. Wallace deplores mix demonstration,” Birmingham News, May 4, 1963, p. 1.

111

33 “Police dogs break riot at St. Louis,” Associated Press, Birmingham News, May 4, 1963, p. 2; Martha Cole, Associated Press, “Use of police dogs widespread,” Birmingham News, May 14, 1963, p. 14.

34 Your Choices,” Birmingham News, April 1, 1963, p. 6; Rep. Elliott’s Right,” Birmingham News, April 1, 1963, p. 6; “Alabama Fact, Fancy,” Birmingham News, April 1, 1963, p. 6; “Let’s Get The Wheels Turning!” Birmingham News, April 5, 1963, p. 10; “Elsewhere The States Change,” Birmingham News, April 29, 1963, p. 6.

35 E.L. Holland Jr., “Some Patience On Color Issue,” Birmingham News, April 7, 1963, p. A- 16.

36 Montgomery Meeting,” Birmingham News, April 26, 1963, p. 10; “Offkey Bugles Call to What?” Birmingham News, May 7, 1963, p. 16.

37 “Find the Killer,” Birmingham News, April 25, 1963, p. 14.

38 “How We’re Publicized,” Birmingham News, April 29, 1963, p. 6.

39 “Police Doing A Fine Job,” Birmingham News, April 18, 1963, p. 14; “The President Said Too Little,” Birmingham News, May 9, 1963; “Let’s Keep ALL Facts Straight,” Birmingham News, May 15, 1963.

40 John D. Pomfret, “Kennedy Reacts — Early Report of Peace Leads Him to Hail Racial Conferees,” New York Times, May 9, 1963, p. 1.

41 “Governor Wallace’s Statement,” New York Times, May 9, 1963, p. 17.

42 “Need Accommodations For Throngs Expected Here for Celebration,” Daily Democrat, Nov. 5, 1929, p. 1.

43 “Sanction Received for Air Meet Here,” Daily Democrat, Nov. 5, 1929, p. 1.

44 “Sanction Received for Air Meet Here,” Daily Democrat, Nov. 5, 1929, p. 1; “Blimp May Be Unable To Attend Air Meet,” Daily Democrat, Nov. 6, 1929, p. 1; “Program,” Daily Democrat, Nov. 10, 1929, p. 1; Various advertisements, Daily Democrat, Nov. 10, 1929, n.p.; “The City of Tallahassee” advertisement, Daily Democrat, Nov. 8, 1929, p. 3.

45 “Sanction Received for Air Meet Here,” Daily Democrat, Nov. 5, 1929, p. 1.

46 “Tallahassee Municipal Airport Given Good Rating by Officials,” Daily Democrat, Nov. 10, 1929, p. 1.

47 “Quincy Negro In Jail Here,” Daily Democrat, Nov. 8, 1929, p. 1.

48 Ibid, p. 1.

49 Ibid, p. 1.

50 “Tallahassee’s Airport Dedicated With Brilliant Program of Events,” Daily Democrat, Nov. 12, 1929, p. 1.

51 “Quincy Negro Killed by Mob,” Daily Democrat, Nov. 12, 1929, p. 1.

112

52 “Quincy Negro Killed by Mob,” Daily Democrat, Nov. 12, 1929, p. 1; “Investigation Is Under Way,” Daily Democrat, Nov. 13, 1929, pp. 1, 8.

53 “Tallahassee Comes Through,” Daily Democrat, Nov. 13, 1929, p. 4. 54 “A MAN AND A BOY!” Daily Democrat, Nov. 14, 1929, pp. 4, 7.

55 Henry Grady, “The New South,” 1890, p. 244.

56 Joel Chandler Harris, Joel Chandler Harris' Life of Henry W. Grady Including His Writings and Speeches: A Memorial Volume (New York: Cassell Publishing Co., 1890), p. 89.

57 Ibid, p. 90.

58 Ibid, p. 90.

59 “A Place in the Sun,” Time, Dec. 19, 1955, pp. 20-26.

60 Ibid, pp. 20-26.

61 Ibid, pp. 20-26.

62 Ibid, pp. 20-26.

63 Gene M. Burnett, Florida's Past: People and Events That Shaped the State (Englewood, Florida: Pineapple Press, 1986), p. 106.

64 Martin A. Dyckman, Floridian of His Century: The Courage of Governor LeRoy Collins (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), pp. 56-57, 70-71.

65 Ibid, p. 70. 66 Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, pp. 5, 10, 12, 19, 20, 38, 39.

67 David R. Colburn and Richard K. Scher, Florida’s Gubernatorial Politics in the Twentieth Century (Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1980), p. 12; Tameka Bradley Hobbs, “‘Hitler is Here’: Lynching in Florida During the Era of World War II” (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 2004), pp. 5, 30.

68 Colburn and Scher, Florida’s Gubernatorial Politics in the Twentieth Century, p. 12.

69 Ibid, pp. 12, 18.

70 Hendrix Chandler, former Associated Press correspondent, interview by author, July 20, 1996, tape recording.

71 Mike Beaudoin, former city editor of the Tallahassee Democrat, interview by author, Aug. 14, 1996, tape recording; Dorothy Clifford, “Malcolm Johnson dies at 76,” Tallahassee Democrat, Dec. 7, 1989, p. 6A.

72 “Segregation Pattern ‘100 Years Old,’” U.S. News & World Report, Feb. 24, 1956, p. 139.

73 Ibid, p. 139.

113

74 Beaudoin, interview by author; Alma Tapers, wife of former Tallahassee Democrat publisher John M. Tapers, interview by author, July 20, 1996.

75 Dorothy Clifford, staff writer for the Tallahassee Democrat, interview by author, July 23, 1996, tape recording and notes.

76 Bill McGrotha, “He’s Tallahassee’s Nosiest, Gabbiest,” Tallahassee Democrat, May 26, 1968, p. 1E.

77 Andy Lindstrom, “The rocking-chair editor,” Tallahassee Democrat, Oct. 22, 1989, p. 6A. 78 Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 79.

79 Ibid, p. 80.

80 Ibid, p. 87.

81 Glenda Alice Rabby, The Pain and the Promise: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Tallahassee, Florida (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), p. 34; Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 89.

82 Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 114.

83 Rabby, The Pain and the Promise, p. 208-209.

84 http://www.floridamemory.com/exhibits/floridahighlights/collins/ 85 Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 159.

86 http://www.floridamemory.com/exhibits/floridahighlights/collins/page9.php

87 Rabby, The Pain and the Promise, p. 35; Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 130; Tom Wagy, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida: Spokesman of the New South (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1985), p. 75, 87-89.

88 Editorial, Tallahassee Democrat, May 29, 1956.

89 Rabby, The Pain and the Promise, pp. 9-12, 13.

90 Ibid, pp. 15, 20-21, 33.

91 Ibid, pp. 34-35; Stacy Braukman, Communists and Perverts Under the Palms: The Johns Committee in Florida, 1956-1965 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), pp. 3-4.

92 Braukman, Communists and Perverts Under the Palms, pp. 36-37; Rabby, The Pain and the Promise, p. 51.

93 Editorial, Tallahassee Democrat, Aug. 2, 1956.

94 Editorial, Tallahassee Democrat, Feb. 25, 1957.

95 Editorial, Tallahassee Democrat, Feb. 27, 1957.

114

96 Rabby, The Pain and the Promise, pp. 35-36, 38, 43, 49, 50.

97 Rabby, The Pain and the Promise, p. 53.

98 Ken Kaufman, “Integration Plan Rescinded by Sheridan School Board,” Arkansas Democrat, May 23, 1954, pp. 1-2.

99 Corrine Silverman, The Little Rock Story, Inter-University Case Program (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1959), p. 4.

100 Robert R. Brown, Bigger Than Little Rock (Greenwich, Conn.: The Seabury Press, 1958), p. 7; Silverman, The Little Rock Story, p. 4.

101 Roy Reed, Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997), pp. x, 25.

102 Silverman, The Little Rock Story, pp. 6-7.

103 Reed, Faubus, p. 208.

104 “Here’s What Governor Said About His Action,” Arkansas Gazette, Sept. 3, 1957, p. 1A.

105 Ray Moseley, “Troops Take Over At Central High; Negroes Told: Wait,” Arkansas Gazette, Sept. 3, 1957, p. 1A.

106 “Governor Sees Test of Laws,” Arkansas Democrat, Sept. 3, 1957, p. 1.

107 “Faubus First to Take Route of Interposition,” Arkansas Gazette, Sept. 3, 1957, p. 1A.

108 “An Editorial: The Crisis Mr. Faubus Made,” Arkansas Gazette, Sept. 4, 1957, p. 1A. 109 Wagy, Goveror LeRoy Collins of Florida, p. 92.

110 Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 168.

111 Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986, originally published New York: D. McKay, 1962), pp. 70-76; Reed, Faubus, pp. 208-209; Melba Patillo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High (New York: Washington Square Press, 1994), pp. 48-50, 83; David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993), pp. 674-676.

112 Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 171.

113 Alden Whitman, “For 16 Years, Warren Saw the Constitution as Protector of Rights and Equality,” New York Times, July 10, 1974, p. 24.

114 Associated Press, “President Says Faubus Took ‘Necessary Step In Right Direction,” Arkansas Democrat, Sept. 21, 1957, p. 1.

115 George Douthit, “Faubus May Fly Back From Parley,” Arkansas Democrat, Sept. 23, 1957, p. 1; Wagy, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, pp. 97-98.

116 Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 168;

115

117 Wagy, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, p. 94.

118 Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 169.

119 Ibid, p. 169.

120 Wagy, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, pp. 94-95.

121 Wagy, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, p. 94, p. 91; Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, pp. 167-168.

122 Wagy, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, p. 97; Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 169-170.

123 “Ike’s Reply to Faubus,” Arkansas Gazette, Oct. 2, 1957, p. 1A.

124 George Douthit, “Faubus Stands Firm; Says He Won’t ‘Bayonet Own People,” Arkansas Democrat, Oct. 2, 1957, p. 1.

125 Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 169-171; Wagy, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, p. 96-100; “‘Suggested’ Statement Causes Row; Faubus Says Extra Words Inserted in White House Draft,” Arkansas Democrat, Oct. 2, 1957, p. 1.

126 Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 177.

127 Ibid, p. 177-178.

128 Rabby, The Pain and the Promise, pp. 81, 84, 86-87.

129 Ibid, pp. 88-89.

130 “Desires Confused With Rights,” Tallahassee Democrat, March 4, 1960, p. 4A.

131 “Seditious Sit-Downs,” The Citizens’ Council, Vol. 5, No. 6, March 1960, p. 1.

132 Wagy, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, p. 134; Rabby, The Pain and the Promise, p. 91.

133 Charles U. Smith, “The Sit-Ins and the New Negro Student,” The Journal of Intergroup Relations, Vol. II, No. 3 (Summer 1961), p. 229.

134 Beaudoin, interview by author.

135 “Police Blotter Omissions,” Tallahassee Democrat, March 14, 1960, p. 6A.

136 Rabby, pp. 91, 93-97.

137 Thomas D. Beasley, Speaker, Florida House of Representatives, letter to Gov. LeRoy Collins, March 15, 1960.

138 George S. Taff, Mayor-Commissioner, City of Tallahassee, letter to Gov. LeRoy Collins, March 17, 1960.

116

139 Tallahassee Chamber of Commerce letter to Gov. LeRoy Collins, March 17, 1960, University of South Florida, Tampa Campus Library, Collins Papers, Box 19.

140 Rabby, The Pain and the Promise, pp. 113-114.

141 Ibid, pp. 97, 99.

142 Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 193; Rabby, The Pain and the Promise, p. 101- 102.

143 Wagy, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, p. 135; Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 194.

144 Transcript of Statewide TV-Radio Talk to the People of Florida on Race Relations, Gov. LeRoy Collins, delivered over statewide TV-radio network, March 20, 1960, University of South Florida, Tampa Campus Library, Collins Papers, Box 19, Radio Television, pp. 1-2.

145 Ibid, pp. 2-3.

146 Ibid, p. 3.

147 Ibid, p. 3.

148 Ibid, p. 3.

149 Ibid, p. 4.

150 Ibid, p. 4-5.

151 Ibid, p. 6.

152 Ibid, pp. 6-7.

153 Ibid, p. 9.

154 “Something of Value, Miami Herald, March 22, 1960, p. 6A.

155 “Challenge to Brains and Good Will,” St. Petersburg Times, March 22, 1960, p. 8A.

156 “Middle Against the Ends,” Tampa Tribune, March 22, 1960, p. 14A.

157 “Collins’ Lunch Counter Talk,” Orlando Sentinel, March 22, 1960, p. 8A.

158 “In Lunch Counter Issue, Sides Become Clearer,” Florida Times-Union, March 21, 1960, p. 4.

159 Wagy, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, p. 137.

160 Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, p. 196; Clifford, staff writer for the Tallahassee Democrat, interview by author.

117 CHAPTER FOUR

POLICING THE PUBLIC SQUARE

Florida Governor LeRoy Collins held great expectations for his address on racial segregation, but he came away with great disappointment. It was clear that he hoped his remarks would amplify speculation on his future as a national candidate, though the governor denied this in his speech. “It seems almost every time I speak out about anything these days … I am projected as being a candidate for vice president or having some personal motives of some sort,” Collins said. “Now that is absolutely — there is nothing to that.”1 Nevertheless, one of his aides made it clear, in a letter to John Popham of the Chattanooga Daily Times, that national coverage was appreciated. Some national publications took note. The Washington Post published a favorable editorial, and WTOP television and radio, stations affiliated with the newspaper, called the speech “a remarkable performance” and said “his appeal to both whites and Negroes for a moderate, responsible attitude was a credit to himself and a service to his state.”2 The address failed to gain traction in the national press, however, and Collins’ attempt to reframe the segregation argument became a passing story. Collins’ deepest disappointment came in the lack of public support from his friends in Tallahassee and from citizens across the state. The governor’s office received many letters of support, but public declarations, such as letters to the editor, were hard to come by. He was personally hurt by critical comments from close associates and by hateful correspondence, and he complained of the silence of the many

Floridians he believed shared his point of view.3

The silence should not have surprised him. As a native of the South, he knew the pressure to conform to social rules on race, and he knew the price of breaking that code was social isolation. Fellow whites shunned Collins and his family. It was only because of his social standing in the community that they were not publicly ridiculed as well. (Collins and his wife did find a burning cross in their front yard one night.) The threat of social isolation and other threats — of loss of employment and of physical violence — were part of the Southern system of controlling behavior and political expression during the decades of Jim Crow. The

118 Tallahassee Democrat declined to comment on the governor’s historic address on segregation, and the paper continued to distance itself from Collins for years after. In 1968, when Collins campaigned for the U.S. Senate, Malcolm Johnson, Collins’ former friend and the editor of the paper, wrote an editorial explaining that the Tallahassee Democrat was endorsing no candidate.

Shunned again, Collins failed to win his home county and lost the statewide count as well. He never again sought elective office. “The one that hurt deepest,” Collins said later of the disappointments of the failed campaign, “was a feeling that the people of the state knew me and my record and yet were prone to throw all this aside because of their emotional antagonism toward my efforts to bring harmony and progress in race relations.”4 Fears of becoming an outcast and fears of exposure of one’s unconventional views — that is, moderate or liberal beliefs — ran deep among Southern whites. Southern leaders, in politics and in the press, used these anxieties as tools of control to restrict free exchange of ideas. The South’s leaders used fear to police the public square and keep it clean of dissenting opinions. Policing the public square was common practice throughout the Southern states during the Solid South and the years of resistance to desegregation. Throughout the Jim Crow era, Southern newspapers played the leading role in suppressing dissent — in policing the public square.

Nowhere was this police work practiced with greater vigor and authority than in Jackson,

Mississippi, the capital and home to the state’s largest and dominant daily newspapers.

The Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News, sister publications owned by the same

Jackson family, were dedicated to the defense of segregation. Openly racist, the editors and columnists shot daily cannonades of segregationist propaganda. Through such prodigious efforts, the Jackson newspapers paced the rest of the Mississippi press and worked diligently, often feverishly, to keep everyone — the public, fellow journalists, even the state’s political leadership — in line with white-supremacist dogma and the Southern way of life. The two

Jackson newspapers enjoyed formidable influence, and they shaped to a large degree how the state’s leadership responded to a federal court order to allow a black man to enroll in the

University of Mississippi. The newspapers drove decision-making and helped propel the state toward a conflict with President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy that

119 culminated in a nightmare of violence, gunfire, death and destruction on the college campus.

Throughout the lengthy buildup to the crisis and for many years previous, the editors and columnists at the Jackson newspapers attacked any voices of moderation or dissent and, in so doing, limited the options of state leaders. Policing the public square was routine throughout the South, as the press saw it as its duty as gatekeepers to determine which points of view were legitimate and which arguments were worthy of engagement. In practice, this police work chased away moderate and liberal points of view in most communities and enlarged the influence of status quo thinking. In Jackson, the scrutiny was extreme and helped create and maintain what James W. Silver described as “Mississippi: The Closed Society,” where “the

Mississippi press as a whole mounts vigilant guard.” Silver, a professor at the University of

Mississippi who created shock waves with his Closed Society analysis, noted that, ““Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the closed society is the refusal of its citizens to believe that there is any view other than the orthodox.”5 Preserving the orthodox views and stripping away the credibilty of dissenting arguments was the work and goal of the editors and columnists of the Clarion-

Ledger and the Jackson Daily News. Their efforts at policing the public square had a profound chilling effect on the citizens of Mississippi.

Among those who felt the chill was the Rev. Ed King, a Methodist minister and chaplain at Tougaloo College in the early 1960s and a white Mississippi native active in Jackson’s civil- rights campaigns. King recalled that even among committed liberals of that time, the sense of isolation and the fear of exposure were strong, and the worry of discovery caused individuals to be cautious and guarded, even among friends and family. He related the curious case of two sisters who were unaware that each held growing doubts about the Southern racial code:

We would have meetings at Tougaloo, after I got there as chaplain…. I remember one night in midwinter of '63, where one day I had visited a friend of mine, an Episcopal priest in a small town in the state, and his wife. They were sort of secret integrationists…. They had come to see me at Tougaloo but sneaked in … because they were afraid for me to visit in their home with my wife. A few nights after we met with them, they were talking about how alone they were and how there was nobody [they could talk to] in their families, nobody that they knew professionally, maybe one or two ministers. They were totally isolated.

A few nights later a Jackson public school teacher who sneaked out to Tougaloo, one of these Borinski [biracial discussion] meetings, was telling me that there

120 was no one else in her school except one other teacher that came with her, and that the parents would lynch them, that all of the students are conservative, and that there was no one, even in her own family, that she would dare let know that she questioned what happened in the Meredith crisis [the state resistance to the integration of the University of Mississippi]. This was the sister of a woman who had secretly visited me two days earlier, saying there was not a single person that she could talk to. They would not have dared, even with each other.6

That two sisters were unaware of each other’s doubts about segregation, and were afraid to even broach the subject with one another, demonstrated the effectiveness of the

Southern style. By assertively disseminating a strident ideology, the South’s leaders gave its white citizens exposure to only a single set of ideas on the South’s social system. By turning a blind eye to the injustices of this system, Southern leaders made certain that the dogma and the politics it supported suffered no challenge. Finally, by restricting the public debate to sanctioned concepts and opinions, the South kept individuals either aligned with the status quo or in a state of quiet confusion, isolation and dismay. The two sisters, lonely and isolated, were part of a inchoate community of moderates who were afraid to raise questions about the morality of Jim Crow.

The Southern style was universal across the region, with variations on the intensity and effectiveness of its application found community to community, state to state. Mississippi employed the Southern style with a heavy hand, and the state’s press, in particular the two dominant newspapers, both based in the capital of Jackson, played major roles in maximizing its impact. The best illustration of how Mississippi employed the Southern style, especially the media’s role of policing the public square, to push state policy toward a reckless confrontation with federal authority was drawn in the fall of 1962.

The air was cool as 42,000 football fans piled into Jackson, Mississippi’s newly expanded

War Veterans Memorial Stadium on September 29, and the atmosphere was charged with excitement. The Ole Miss faithful came to watch their Rebels play the Wildcats of the University of Kentucky, and, as usual in the Southeast Conference, spirits were high. The fans were in a state of agitation. In part, it was because the University of Mississippi, a football powerhouse in the early 1960s, was a contender for the national championship. Hopes were that the Rebels would go all the way that fall (the team finished the season undefeated, victorious in the Sugar

121 Bowl and third in the national standings). The promise of such glory had packed the stadium full. As the New York Times noted, “Football fever grips the South in a way only dimly remembered in Ivy League circles.... Jackson’s hotel and motel rooms had been reserved for

7 months.” It was, by any measure, a big game.

For this game, however, a special kind of thrill ran through the crowd, a tension and a sense of danger. Mississippi was engaged in an altogether different game than that about to unfold on the grassy field that evening, and its opponents — Mississippi native James Meredith, backed up by the U.S. Justice Department, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and President

John F. Kennedy — were formidable.

Meredith, a 29-year-old black Air Force veteran, sought admission to the University of

Mississippi, and by late September attempts by state authorities to block his enrollment at the all-white institution had placed Meredith and the university at the heart of a constitutional crisis. Meredith had a federal court order to gain admission, but Governor Ross Barnett, a

Democrat and a segregationist, vowed to defy the court’s will and keep him out at all costs. The

Justice Department and the Kennedys were just as determined to protect federal authority and the integrity of the judiciary. When the football game began amid the frantic flash of hundreds of Confederate battle flags and the playing of “Dixie” by the Rebel band, a tragic showdown, many weeks in the making, was but hours away.

Five years after Little Rock, the risk and futility of challenging a federal court order on integration were apparent to many Americans. Barnett, university administrators and the citizens of Mississippi were implored almost daily to end their resistance. “The Federal

Government will not have to fight another war to win this contest,” wrote the editors of the

New York Times, in an argument typical of editorial opinion outside the South. “But it will win it. The question is simply how long such reckless extremists as Governor Barnett and

Lieutenant Governor [Paul] Johnson will be able to postpone the inevitable — and whether, as we fervently hope, the matter can be settled without the use of any force. But settled it must be,

8 and soon, and in only one way.” The Times’ editors continued the following day, in a similar

122 vein. “The battle has already been fought, and lost, in enough states of the old Confederacy to make clear that the end result is certain defeat for Governor Barnett. There can be no turning

9 back for the United States; there can be, and should be, for the Governor.” The newspaper continued, on September 29, with a call for “this leader of the embattled forces of hate” to “halt

10 his rebellion against Federal authority.”

The New York Times held no persuasive power over Mississippi’s segregation-minded political leaders, but as the crisis mounted a few Southern newspapers urged Barnett to compromise. In Alabama, the editors of the Birmingham Post-Herald advised Barnett and his allies to “accept the hopelessness of a cause in which the odds against them are so

11 overwhelming.” The Memphis Commercial Appeal, which circulated widely in northern

Mississippi, including Oxford, home of the Ole Miss campus, warned Barnett that “unless concessions are made, the Mississippi situation may result in violence.... Playing politics and waving the Bonnie Blue flag are not answers. The answers may be unpalatable,” the Commercial

12 Appeal advised. “But not so bitter as hatred and violence.”

By late September, Barnett’s defiance of the federal court and Meredith’s determination to enter the university had captured the attention of the world. Newspapers abroad, some of whose readers could not even pronounce the word Mississippi, were weighing in against the governor’s stand. The London Daily Express was dismayed to find that “all the old hates of the

Civil War 100 years ago are boiling again.” The Expressen of Stockholm judged that “the spokesmen for segregation are not waging more than a delaying fight.” The East German news service ADN said from Berlin that the U.S. government had “bowed to the fanatical racists in

Mississippi.” Izvestia, the Soviet government newspaper, labeled the crisis “still another slap at the vaunted American democracy.” And L’Aurore of Paris declared the “James Meredith story

13 more than saddening” and asked gravely, “Hitler, then, has not cured the world of racism?”

This was a big game, indeed, but as world opinion stacked up against him, Barnett, sitting with his wife, daughter and son-in-law in his box on the 50-yard line in Memorial

Stadium, appeared untroubled and unconcerned. As the crisis deepened and the possibility of

123 conflict grew worse, Barnett maintained a public face of implacable resistance. Two days before, after a massing of white resistance in Oxford forced Meredith to delay plans to come to the university, Barnett drove to the campus and gave a brief speech. The students cheered when he

14 reaffirmed his stand against integration. Earlier in the week, Barnett, invoking the dubious right of interposition, personally blocked Meredith’s entrance to the state’s college board headquarters in Jackson, the state capital. Stopping Meredith in the crowded halls of the

Woolfolk Building and holding in his hand an executive order, Barnett addressed Meredith in a statement that read: “I, Ross R. Barnett ... acting under the police powers of the State of

Mississippi, interposed the sovereignty of this state ... in order to prevent violence and a breach of the peace, and in order to preserve the peace, dignity and tranquility of the State of

Mississippi ... do hereby finally deny you admission to the University of Mississippi.”

Challenged by a Justice Department official who reminded him of the court order to enroll

Meredith, Barnett responded that the Tenth Amendment allowed such powers as interposition.

“I am not showing any disrespect for the federal courts ...,” Barnett added, “my conscience is

15 clear.”

Perhaps this was so, but behind the scenes Barnett signaled signs of doubt and worry that his public appearances did not transmit. Barnett’s negotiations with the attorney general revealed growing anxiety and insecurity as events quickly spiraled out of the governor’s control.

His greatest concern appeared to be how to save face. Barnett had sold himself as the one courageous segregationist governor, the man who had the guts to stand up to the Kennedys, and for that he had garnered an adoring following. “Gov. Ross Barnett is upholding the thoughts of the people of Mississippi and should be praised for his intelligence and courage,” wrote one admirer at Mississippi State College for Women, in a letter to the editor. “His name

16 will go down in history for his convictions and beliefs.” But unlike the letter-writer, Barnett knew that integration of the university was all but inevitable. Despite his machinations and his skills at feint and withdrawal, Barnett found himself boxed in. He worried that Meredith and

124 Bobby Kennedy were going to win. Against such a future, Barnett struggled to engineer a way to

17 preserve his segregationist reputation. The source of all his glory had become a heavy burden.

Barnett, by the time of the Ole Miss game, was living two lives. One was the increasingly frantic governor, trying to patch up the thin legal wall he had erected between the university and Meredith’s court order. The other was the untroubled leader of the South’s Old Order. It was this persona who was, it seemed, simply delighted to be in the stadium that fall evening, waving a little Confederate flag while waiting for halftime, when he was scheduled to introduce a new state song, “Go, Mississippi.”

“We want Ross!” the crowd chanted as the 64-year-old governor made his way down to a microphone on the playing field. He looked at the many faces — all of them white in the segregated stadium — and saw their Confederate flags waving. The governor raised his fist high. “I love Mississippi!” he cried into the microphone. Pausing to let the crowd bellow its approval, he raised his fist again. “I love her people!” he shouted in a voice straining with emotion, to more roars and more flag-waving. Then, getting to the heart of the matter, Barnett declared, “I love our customs!” Barnett was speaking the code of the white, segregationist

South, and everyone in the stadium, whether they agreed with him or not, understood what he

18 meant. Segregation was good and must be preserved.

Silver, the University of Mississippi professor who wrote about the crisis in Mississippi:

The Closed Society, described the governor’s halftime show as Barnett’s “greatest triumph of

19 oratorical lunacy.” But for the mass of those watching the governor from the stands, Barnett’s words were electric. “That night,” an Ole Miss student said later, “people would have been glad

20 to die for Ross.” Within a day, some people would be dead, but at that moment the Ole Miss fans and the man at the microphone were enthralled in their solidarity and their defiance.

They were not alone. Cheering Barnett and rousing the fans were the owners, editors and staff members of the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News, the state’s dominant newspapers. Both were owned by the Hederman family, a quiet but powerful clan with close ties to Barnett and the Mississippi political establishment. Throughout the crisis over the

125 integration of the university, the Hederman presses rolled out bitter and emotional arguments against racial change. In the battle over the future of Ole Miss, the Hederman family, along with

Barnett, led the way.

The Hederman newspapers and Barnett were not alone in this crusade. They found numerous allies in the Mississippi press and among the state’s political leaders. The Jackson publications and the governor were simply the loudest in a chorus of voices calling for resistance. All were operating out of a tradition of strict racial orthodoxy that ruled Mississippi for the century that followed the Civil War. After the Brown decision, the press and the political leadership worked feverishly to maintain their legacy of white supremacy. After the U.S.

Supreme Court’s ruling, much of their energy was devoted to policing the public square to prevent discussion of alternatives to the die-hard defense of segregation.

Racial orthodoxy was not unique to Mississippi. Each Southern state, to some degree, labored under this doctrine, and all of the South tried to close itself off from the more liberal mainstream. Each Southern state had its pockets of moderation and its places of hard-bitten prejudice and provincialism. Many had figures who used race hatred as a political tool. South

Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, Georgia’s Eugene Talmadge and Alabama’s George Wallace all rivaled, or surpassed, Barnett as racial demagogues. Mississippi was but one state whose white leadership sought to preserve the past. Others struggled to do the same.

Mississippi’s story in these years is representative of the South, and of the Deep South especially. Yet though its history in this time is not remarkably different, its turn inward, away from outside influences, was more dramatic. Mississippi, more than any other Southern state, sought to achieve a closed society and came closest to that goal. This was in keeping with

21 Mississippi’s tradition of defiance, isolation and resistance.

This tradition is rooted in the state’s physical isolation — for much of the nineteenth century, Mississippi was in a far corner of the settled white lands — and its frontier background of quick and often violent justice. It also draws upon the defensive attitude adopted by

Southern whites, especially slave-holding plantation owners, as abolitionist sentiment grew in

126 the North in the 1850s. As arguments mounted against slavery, the South hardened its heart, closed its mind and grew increasingly defiant in its pro-slavery pronouncements and politics, a path that ultimately led to the Confederacy. The Civil War ended slavery and settled the question of secession, but it did not salve Southern resentment or erase Southern memory. The old arguments, ideas and attitudes continued, sometimes lying dormant but often within reach of those leaders eager to mine the angry past. The South, during Reconstruction, during reestablishment of all-white Democratic Party rule and during the Jim Crow decades that followed, saw many such leaders. Mississippi had more than its share.

Among these was James K. Vardaman, a turn of the century populist and virulent white supremacist. A man of intense pride and bearing, Vardaman’s standard costume was a suit of white linen, which set off his shoulder-length black hair. Standing in the sun on a wagon pulled by a team of white oxen, Vardaman would rail against the dangers of the mixing of the races. A favorite theme was to play on fears of the mythic, atavistic sexuality of the black male — the

“big, black buck” — an image routinely exploited by Southern demagogues. No one did this better than Vardaman, who through such work came to be known variously as “The Leader,”

22 “The White Chief” and even “The Great White God.”

In 1903, in a vote heavily in his favor, Vardaman was elected governor, and he later served in the U.S. Senate as well. His outrageous style, showmanship and appeal to racial fears and hatreds was a potent combination that was not lost on later Mississippi whites, who in their ambition for political office borrowed from The White Chief’s ways. Vardaman’s legacy, however, is more than a precedent for demagoguery. His race-baiting years in office were marked by a resurgence in lynching. From 1904 to 1908, under Vardaman’s time in the

Governor’s Mansion, a black man was lynched, on average, once a month in Mississippi. As would happen later in the twentieth century, declarations of racial radicalism on the part of

Mississippi’s elite gave license for others to engage in lawlessness in the name of white

23 superiority.

127 The Great White Chief could be dismissed as an anomaly, the rise to glory of a highly eccentric and opportunistic individual amid the racial tensions of post-Reconstruction politics, when Mississippi’s Democratic Party was obsessed with securing a lock on political power, had not another demagogue risen to replace him. Elected governor in 1917, Theodore “The Man”

Bilbo remained a force in Mississippi long after Vardaman was a distant memory.

Though his personal contact with blacks was limited, Bilbo’s opinions on African

Americans were expansive. First as a legislator, then as governor, Bilbo developed a reputation as a man who spoke, with evangelistic fervor, on what he perceived to be the many faults of the black race. Like Vardaman, The Man on the stump was as much theater as philosophy. Holding court on a storefront porch, Bilbo would jab a bony finger in the air, grab his red suspenders or fondle his trademark diamond horseshoe tie pin, cock back his head, close his eyes and

24 pontificate on the evils of race-mixing. In a statement typical of these speeches, and one that was later quoted in White Citizens’ Council pamphlets, Bilbo declared that our nation was mighty and could overcome almost any calamity. “But,” The Man warned, “if the blood of our white race should become corrupted and mingled with the blood of Africa, then the present greatness of the United States of America would be destroyed and all hope for the future would be forever gone.”25 Or The Man might issue a more direct warning to those blacks with ideas of equality with Southern whites. To those who might have become “contaminated with Northern social and political dreams of equality,” he offered a reminder that “we have all the room in the world for what we know as N-i-g-g-e-r-s, but none whatsoever for ‘colored ladies and

26 gentlemen.’”

His loquacious nature — proudly never at a loss for words, Bilbo once promised to “out-

Huey Huey Long” in Congress— and his political longevity meant the people of Mississippi

27 heard plenty from The Man. Reelected governor in 1927, Bilbo won a seat in the U.S. Senate in

1934 and was twice re-elected. Throughout three decades he held forth on many topics but never strayed far from the issue of race. He spoke often, for example, of the need for voluntary colonization of millions of black Americans in Africa, and he introduced bills in Congress to set

128 such a plan in motion. Not satisfied with the pulpit provided a senator, and sensing the challenges to segregation mounting in the courts and in the culture, Bilbo in 1947 wrote Take

Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, a screed against integration. Bilbo’s book was popular in some circles but an embarrassment to his fellow senators. That year they refused to seat him in the Senate, despite his successful re-election, on grounds that he had intimidated blacks and discouraged them from voting. During the 1946 campaign, Bilbo urged white audiences to keep blacks away from the polls or risk a wave of black political action. “But you and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” Bilbo said, encouraging

Mississippi whites to racial violence and intimidation. “You do it the night before the election. I

28 don’t have to tell you any more than that. Red-blooded men know what I mean.”

Such remarks, and the testimony of Mississippi blacks who said they were afraid to cast their votes, were enough to end Bilbo’s career in Washington. Technically still a member of the

Senate, he could no longer enter the chamber. Though Bilbo died soon after this humiliation on

August 21, 1947, of cancer of the mouth, “Bilboism” lived on in the dangerous racial environment fostered by The Man and by those encouraged by his words.

This climate of racial extremism was the creation of neither Vardaman nor Bilbo, though each exploited and deepened it. It was, instead, the product of Mississippi’s harsh racial history, a record that reached back to its antebellum period, when the state and its lower South neighbors had reputations for severe treatment of slaves. It is true that for a few years — after the Civil War, during Reconstruction and in the years following the “Redemption” by conservative Democrats — blacks in Mississippi enjoyed some autonomy in their daily and political lives, unlike in the later Jim Crow years. This time of new opportunities, however, was not long-lived. By 1890, a turning point in Mississippi’s political and racial history, those

29 freedoms had been replaced by various forms of segregation and exclusion.

By 1890, Mississippi’s political leaders were routinely using white supremacy as a tool to hold white voters in line. The goal was to prevent either party, the resurgent Democrats or the fading Republicans, from soliciting black support, and disfranchisement of blacks was key. The

129 goal was to sanction legally what was already practiced outside the law. Toward this end,

Mississippi led the way, and its constitution of 1890 set precedents that other states would follow. Its two most powerful innovations were the poll tax, a fee required to exercise the right to vote, and the “understanding clause,” a requirement that those registering to vote must first demonstrate ability to interpret the state’s constitution, a notoriously complicated and obtuse document. As Bilbo later acknowledged, “Senator [James Zachariah] George wrote a

30 Constitution that damn few white men and no niggers at all can explain.”

This double punch against black voters was devastating. Those who could afford to pay the poll tax — and who did so by the deadline, and who preserved the receipt until election day

— were unlikely to pass the understanding clause, as administered by registrars who saw it as their duty to keep blacks from casting ballots. By 1892, only one of the state’s 39 black majority counties had a black majority of registered voters, and by 1896 there was none. Mississippi’s once formidable black electorate was reduced to numbers so small as to pose no threat to the state’s white leaders. “In Mississippi we have in our constitution legislated against the racial peculiarities of the Negro...,” Vardaman explained. “When that device fails, we will resort to

31 something else.”

That “something else” was voter fraud and intimidation. Though whites had effectively repressed the black vote, they had not cast out their own obsessions with Republicans and the old GOP-black alliance. Despite holding almost total control of the ballot, white Democrats went to great lengths to further ensure electoral victory. Stuffing of the ballot box was epidemic, sometimes to ridiculous proportions. For example, in 1903, Yazoo County had an estimated

2,500 eligible voters for the all-white primary, another anti-black innovation of the Democratic

Party. Assuming that each of these men registered to vote and showed up at polling stations on

Election Day, an unlikely scenario, there remains no explanation but fraud for the 3,698

32 Democratic votes counted.

Perhaps more effective than these extensive legal means of disenfranchising African

Americans was the threat and use of violence. To preserve white supremacy, the foundation of

130 Mississippi’s politics and culture for much of the twentieth century, whites used terror, in various forms, to control black life. Its ultimate expression came in lynching. The awful tide of lynching ebbed and flowed across Mississippi; it was at its worst in the decade before and after the turn of the century and in the five years following the end of World War I, and there were periods when it appeared to have fallen into disuse. By the 1940s, the great public “lynching bees” and “Negro barbecues” in town squares were becoming supplanted by other, secretive forms of violence. An African American who crossed the racial line might come to a murderous end, drowned in a river or shot to death in a far woods. Either way, the message to black

33 Mississippians remained the same.

In general, the police and the courts offered blacks little protection and scant justice.

Mississippi’s legal system was highly arbitrary; there was law for whites and law for blacks.

Some crimes committed by blacks against blacks were not enforced, while the same crime committed by a black against a white resulted in strict, quick and harsh prosecution. Most crimes committed by whites against blacks were often not seen as crimes at all. Should a black man be arrested, his fate was often tied to the esteem of a white employer, friend or ally. Those who could not draw upon the influence of powerful whites were left to the hard mercy of

Mississippi’s courts, where coerced confessions were not declared illegal in criminal trials until

34 1936.

Mississippi’s courts, politics and culture gave whites license to operate against blacks virtually without regulation. Whites, however, did not perceive themselves to be lawless. Quite the contrary, they often described themselves to be law-abiding people, and such declarations appeared regularly in editorials and letters to the editor during the state’s civil-rights crises. But whites did hold an unorthodox view of what it meant to be law-abiding. It is not, explained historian Neil McMillen, “that whites disdained law, but that they shared an expansive view of it, one not limited by the conventional meaning of law, one that embraced such cultural codes as community tradition, family pride, personal vengeance, feminine virtue, male honor, and white supremacy.” This broad, flexible view, combined with what McMillen termed the “conveniently

131 permissive” attitude of the state’s leaders, was a combustible mixture and a constant threat to

35 blacks. It allowed politicians, the social elite and the press to decry lawless acts of violence, all the while knowing that violence would be done if needed to enforce the white code.

Though this menacing atmosphere continued through the 1960s, Mississippi’s tradition of racial demagoguery largely died out with Bilbo’s passing. Race remained a constant in the state’s politics, but it was seldom a leading issue. This gives the appearance of a softening of attitudes, but such was not the case. Instead it reveals that segregation and white supremacy were core values, ingrained in the culture and sustained by the politics, and could not be challenged. Nor was there ground to be gained in political campaigns by challenging an opponent’s stand on segregation. No one, regardless of what private views they might have held, risked attack as being weak on segregation. Former Governor William F. Winter was engaged in his first statewide race, for tax collector, in 1959, and he remembers that each and every candidate had to be right on race. “It was impossible for anyone in politics, or business or the professions or anything else, to question the issue of segregation,” Winter said later. “The only discussion was how we dealt with it, and even here it was within very limited parameters in which you could even talk about that. Any suggestion that there be an accommodation on

36 any front was immediately shot down.”

The wise candidate took great pains to protect his race credentials. No white political hopeful would allow himself to be photographed with someone of the other race, for example, or be seen shaking hands with a black person, even while in pursuit of votes. As Elise Winter, the wife of the former governor, explained, this required a strange vigilance on the campaign trail. “Here you go up and down the streets in a small town,” she recalled, looking back at her husband’s statewide campaigns of the early 1960s, “shaking hands with everybody that you can find, but carefully omitting the black man in overalls, who might be along with the white in overalls. You could not do that. Consequently,” she observed, “we were as bound as blacks, in

37 that respect.”

132 This system of political and social repression was highly effective — it kept many of the state’s black citizens in lives of poor education and financial jeopardy. But it did not prevent black agitation for change. Despite the dangers, blacks after the Civil War pressed for greater economic and social parity. Given the opposition and the risks, they often had to tread lightly, but they persisted, and by the close of World War II some blacks and a few whites in the state sensed that social change was imminent. This potential threat to the old order met with stiff resistance. The Brown decision signaled an alarm throughout the South, and the warning clanged loudly in Mississippi. The state’s leaders responded with a return to the strident language of racial radicalism and the emergence of a new demagogue, Ross Barnett.

Barnett, a successful trial lawyer, first ran for governor in 1951, then again in 1955. Both efforts were unsuccessful, and in neither contest was race a significant issue. It wasn’t until his third try, in 1959, that Barnett declared himself the great defender of what he often referred to as Mississippi’s way of life. Barnett did so, in large part, to tap into a new political powerhouse, the Citizens’ Council. It is telling that, upon election, the first public speech of the new

38 Governor Ross Barnett was to a Citizens’ Council meeting in Jackson.

The Citizens’ Council and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, both established in response to the Brown decision, tell much about Mississippi’s dedication to preserving segregation and white supremacy. The two institutions, one private, one public, together formed a ghost branch of government in Mississippi, one with considerable influence over the governor, the Legislature, the courts and the press. Both had strong ties to the

Hederman newspapers.

The Citizens’ Council was borne of one man’s anger over the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Brown case. Robert “Tut” Patterson of Indianola, in the Mississippi Delta, was inspired by the angry remarks of Thomas P. Brady, a Mississippi circuit court judge. Brady characterized

May 17, 1954, the day of the landmark Supreme Court ruling, as Black Monday, and in a speech and a book under that title he cast black Mississippians as coarse, animalistic and similar to chimpanzees. “Likewise,” the judge wrote, “the social, political, economic and religious

133 39 preferences of the Negro remain close to the caterpillar and the cockroach.” Black Monday was widely circulated. The book became a bible for segregationist leaders, and its popularity

40 catapulted Brady to fame and, later, in 1963, to a place on Mississippi’s Supreme Court.

In Black Monday, Brady recommended a variety of responses to the Brown decision, from the establishment of a new state as the exclusive domain of blacks to the election of justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. What Patterson found most inspirational was Brady’s call for the founding of resistance groups that, unlike the Ku Klux Klan, were respectable and operated within the law. With this in mind, Patterson called together some fellow businessmen in

Indianola and together, on July 11, 1954, they established what they called a Citizens’ Council

(other chapters often took the name White Citizens’ Council, in Mississippi and in other

Southern states). It was to be the first of many. A year later, Patterson reported 253 councils in

Mississippi, with 60,000 members. The Council movement soon spread to other Southern states, making the Citizens’ Council a regional force. Its popularity, strength and influence continued to grow in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and among the cheerleaders of this new resistance movement were the owners and editors of the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily

News. In a June 1959 memo, Patterson named nine Southern editors whom the Citizens’

Council found “strong for segregation.” Among those named were Caleb King Jr. of the

Jacksonville Florida Times-Union, Tom Waring of the Charleston, South Carolina, News and

Courier and James J. Kilpatrick of the Richmond News Leader. At the top of Patterson’s list was

41 Jimmy Ward, editor of the Jackson Daily News.

While Patterson and civic leaders like him throughout Mississippi built a private network of resistance, Mississippi’s legislative leaders sought ways to shore up segregation against the coming assault. In 1956, they decided on an agency to spread the true “Mississippi story” and watch and document the actions of integrationists. The Mississippi State Sovereignty

Commission was created as both a propaganda arm of the Legislature and an investigative body. Under Governor James P. Coleman, considered a racial moderate compared to others of his time, the emphasis was on propaganda, and the agency worked energetically to counteract

134 the bad press about Mississippi and the Southern way of life. Under Barnett, Coleman’s successor, the Sovereignty Commission turned over most of its propaganda efforts to the

Citizens’ Council, and it gave money to the council to help produce its “Forum” series of radio and television broadcasts. As it moved away from public relations, the Sovereignty Commission delved deeper into investigative work, relying heavily on tips from a network of informers, black and white, across the state. The commission became, in effect, a secret police bent on

42 tracking and repressing those deemed out of step with the racial orthodoxy.

The Sovereignty Commission’s record is one of intense official paranoia. Black civil- rights activists were, of course, prime targets of surveillance, but the commission’s spies kept track of many others as well. They slavishly monitored the behavior of suspected white liberals.

“If they could tell that there were some white people going into the black community,” recalled

Rims Barber, a white activist during the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign, “like to Tougaloo

College or somewhere, they would sit outside and write down license plate numbers and then

43 go check and see who they belonged to.” The Sovereignty Commission’s agents held Tougaloo

College, which educated blacks, in suspicion. But their furtive eyes also peered into Ole Miss, the sanctum sanctorum of whites, searching for the feared and despised traitor to his race. One professor, whose Yale education made him untrustworthy, discovered that his lectures were being secretly taped and transmitted to watchdogs at the Sovereignty Commission and the

Citizens’ Council. In at least one case, investigators looked into the racial purity of a white woman’s child. “Mongrelization” was one of the Sovereignty Commission’s prime obsessions — it once claimed to have revealed a plot by historian Allan Nevins to encourage dreaded

44 miscegenation.

Though the work of the Sovereignty Commission was often blundering and sometimes comical, its effect on Mississippi was profound. Though it operated in secret, its work was widely known and deeply feared. Its goal was to keep the citizens in line, to keep the mind of

Mississippi closed to alternatives. Toward this end, its harassment of private citizens was effective. The actions of the secret police assured those who abided by the racial orthodoxy that

135 their beliefs were right and correct and intimidated those working for change or who simply wanted to learn more about the other race. “When whites attempted to find out, and there were some who out of intellectual curiosity or whatever it was wanted to find out what was going on from the other perspective, they did it as surreptitiously as possible, to avoid being spotted, to

45 avoid being exposed in the public,” said Barber.

The Hederman press had close ties to the Sovereignty Commission, and this relationship went well beyond the newspapers’ acting as a cheerleader to the agency’s spy work. The

Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News themselves became tools of the Sovereignty

Commission. The commission’s managers gave Tom Hederman, with whom they shared political connections and segregationist ideology, access to the commission’s secret files. This gave the Clarion-Ledger’s editor tantalizing facts, allegations and innuendoes regarding the behavior and politics, real and imagined, of his neighbors, friends, competitors and enemies.

For its half of this relationship, the Hederman papers printed segregationist propaganda at the request of the Sovereignty Commission and, at times, killed stories the commission sought to repress. The commission considered the Hederman newspapers trustworthy and compliant, and one internal commission memo praised Ward of the Jackson Daily News for his “excellent

46 judgment on what not to print.” Another commission memo mentioned a potential source, an acquaintance of Ward’s, who might provide damaging information on John Salter, a Tougaloo professor. “Jimmy Ward has a friend who wrote to him about Salter when he was teaching [in]

Wichita, Kansas,” the memo said. “Jimmy would no doubt arrange a meeting with his friend so he could furnish at least investigative leads.”47

That the owners and editors of the two largest and most influential newspapers in

Mississippi became partners with the state’s surveillance and propaganda agency, rather than watchdogs over it, is a sad commentary on Southern journalism. The Hederman family and its editors traded two tenets of journalism — independence and objectivity — for a taste of the delicious dirty work of the Sovereignty Commission and the gratitude of the politicians in charge. This trading of favors came easily to the Hedermans, who were proud of their political

136 and business connections and who had not forgotten that such contacts helped the family get its start in Jackson decades earlier.

The Hederman family came to the capital from Hillsboro, in Scott County, east of

Jackson. There two young brothers, Robert M. Hederman, known as “Bertie,” and 16-year-old

Thomas M. Hederman, called “Tom,” would make contacts that would serve them a lifetime.

They were friends of Woods Eastland, who later had a son, James, who was elected to Congress and became a powerful defender of segregation in the U.S. Senate. They attended school with

Paul B. Johnson, later governor of Mississippi, as was his son. The Hederman family, successful in business and in political kingmaking, took great pride in these old connections. “It may be well to note here,” said Robert M. Hederman Jr., Bertie’s son, in a 1966 speech, “that some of the Clarion-Ledger’s well-known political associations are perennial plantings, not the mere

48 annual sproutings that wither and die after the fall elections.” The Hedermans jealously treasured these contacts that benefited the family financially, socially and politically and helped the brothers establish a foothold in Mississippi’s elite. When the elite that had embraced and nurtured the two boys felt threatened by the Brown decision and other social changes, the

Hedermans saw it as their duty to rise to its defense.

In 1894, Bertie, then 18 years old, and Tom, 16, left Hillsboro and the family’s farm and moved to the city looking for work, bringing with them their mother and sister. Their father,

Martin Hederman, a construction contractor, had plummeted to his death while working on the steeple of the Hillsboro Baptist Church 14 years earlier. What drew them were the greater prospects a city could offer and the work that a cousin, Colonel Robert Hiram Henry, could give them at his printing shop and newspaper, the Clarion-Ledger. From there began the family’s

49 long association with ink and paper, the foundation of the Hederman fortune and influence.

The Clarion-Ledger already had a history as a well-traveled newspaper by the time the

Hederman boys first stained their fingers with printer’s ink. The paper was founded in 1837 as a weekly, the Eastern Clarion, in Paulding, south of Meridian, and went through several owners by the time of the Civil War, growing in profits and in influence to become the state’s leading

137 newspaper. During the war, the Clarion moved to Meridian, a town made prosperous by a railroad junction, and by war’s end moved again, to the capital. The paper, a champion of secession in 1861, was an ally of the Democratic Party and a bitter enemy of the Reconstruction

50 governments, and its criticism earned it the nickname of “Thunderer.”

Henry, the cousin of the Hederman boys, founded his own paper, the Ledger, at Newton, near Meridian, in 1871, moved it to Brookhaven in 1875 and moved it once again, to Jackson, in

1883, as the State Ledger. The two Jackson papers, both Democratic Party supporters, merged as the Clarion-Ledger in 1888. Ten years later, the Hederman brothers purchased Henry’s printing equipment and set up their own print shop, with the older brother running the plant and the younger staying on at the newspaper, which began daily publication at the turn of the century. In 1924, the enterprising pair took a giant step and purchased the Clarion-Ledger from their aging cousin. Bertie and Tom now owned not one but two prosperous businesses. Their connections, hard work and conservative investment practices had paid off, and the Hederman brothers would continue to rely on that formula in the years that followed to build their

51 enterprise into one of the state’s leading corporations.

The elder Hederman brother died in 1944, and the younger passed away four years later. With each death, a son — another Robert, another Tom — stepped up to replace the father. This second generation, Robert M. Hederman Jr. as publisher and Thomas M. Hederman

Jr. as editor, remained in control of the Clarion-Ledger and Daily News, which the Hedermans purchased in 1954, until the family sold these and other newspapers to the Gannett

52 Corporation in 1982.

The Hedermans were good businessmen; the growth of the Hederman empire testifies to their skill. They prided themselves on their cautious, conservative decisions. “Naturally,” said

Robert M. Hederman Jr., speaking of his father and uncle, “each entrepreneurial venture had to undergo intense investigation. Before the brothers dared invest, they must investigate.” Their financial successes allowed the Hedermans to live comfortably, but despite their wealth they

53 eschewed extravagance.

138 The Hedermans were civic leaders, and they prided themselves on their commitments to their church and to improvements in Jackson. “The benefactions of the enterprises started by

Mr. Bob and Mr. Tom have been many,” said Robert Jr. in his 1966 speech, “both in the form of public services rendered and in gifts to religious, educational and other benevolent causes.”

Certainly the citizens of Jackson were grateful for the family’s generosity, but fellow businessmen did not hold the family in complete trust. In 1954, when the Hedermans purchased the afternoon Jackson Daily News, giving them a monopoly on the city’s daily press, a variety of advertisers and other businessmen grew alarmed. Within a month of the deal, work began quietly in Jackson business circles to establish an independent newspaper. Those involved were unhappy with the Hedermans’ business practices and with the quality of its journalism. They recognized that by reestablishing competition in the newspaper market, they might gain better advertising rates and better news coverage as well. These businesses

54 launched the State Times, a second afternoon daily.

Establishing a third daily newspaper and keeping it running was a tremendous task, more than the inexperienced owners could manage. The paper began publication on February

28, 1955, promising its readers that it would be “soundly progressive, Democratic by persuasion but independent by nature ... and we will seek the truth and speak the truth in

55 kindness.” In its run, the paper established a reputation as a fair-minded, moderate and enlightened newspaper, but it was not a moneymaker. On January 16, 1962, the State Times folded, and control of Jackson’s daily press once again lay fully in the hands of the Hederman family. Only the Jackson Advocate, a black weekly led by the conservative Percy Greene, remained. Greene, who was on the payroll of the Sovereignty Commission and who wrote and spoke against the Brown decision, provided little challenge, financially or otherwise, to the

56 Hedermans.

As a family, the Hedermans were by nature averse to change, and their habits reflected a discomfort for those who stepped outside the order. The leading members lived on the same street in Jackson, enjoyed identical incomes and drove identical cars. Individualism, in the

139 Hederman clan, was not a cherished trait, and abiding by the status quo was the respectable way to behave. Through their Mississippi media empire they told the rest of the state how to behave as well and punished dissenters. They were prominent members of the most powerful congregation, Jackson’s First Baptist Church, and the pages of their newspapers, especially the

Clarion-Ledger, reflected their religious beliefs. Each day’s editorial page offered devotional guidance taken from The Upper Room prayer guide, and the newspaper fought to keep liquor sales illegal. The Hedermans helped keep Mississippi dry until 1966. “They were Bible-quoting,

Bible-toting racists,” said Bill Minor, who covered Mississippi politics for the New Orleans Times-

57 Picayune. “They were dictators who wanted to run the whole state — and they did.” Wrote

John Dittmer in Local People: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, “Their wealth and respectability, together with their influence over the media, made the Hedermans segregation’s

58 most potent voice in Mississippi.”

Journalism in 1950s Jackson was known for writers who gave free voice to their opinions. None was more outspoken or outrageous than Frederick Sullens, the longtime guiding force of the Jackson Daily News. Sullens was a fire-eating character seemingly more at home in

Mark Twain’s “Journalism in Tennessee” than in a modern newsroom. Prolific and opinionated,

Sullens would take on any subject, near and far, and squeeze out an editorial riven with humor, insult, insight and roundhouse turns. No topic was too arcane to pass his notice or too distant from the lives of his readers to keep Sullens from blowing his foghorn. He stuffed his editorial pages full, top to bottom, with the world according to Major Sullens, as he preferred to be

59 known, in reference to his service in military public affairs during World War II.

One Sunday in May of 1954, in a typical weekend edition, Sullens put forth views on the construction industry, thinking machines, the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ actions in a

Mississippi election, the possibility of military satellites in space, federal aid programs, the

Confederacy, Indochina, manpower needs in time of war, government spending on research, the lack of support for the local United Givers Fund, hiring older workers, building a gas chamber for executions in Jackson, restoring the Yorktown battlefield, reviving the liberal arts, practicing

140 your golf swing in waltz time, preparing for hydrogen-bomb blasts and lobbying in the

Legislature. Sullens was nothing if not prolific; he produced similar truckloads of observations on a daily basis, in addition to a daily front-page column, “The Low Down on the Higher Ups,” in which Sullens did his most colorful work. “The Low Down” was a string of short bits of commentary and invective leavened with comedy and other filler. A couple of blasts at the

Supreme Court might be followed by a joke about a farmer’s bull loose in a pasture, an explanation of the term “hitch-hiker” and another chestnut about old saloons and modern

60 nightclubs. It was a curious, often jarring, mix.

Sullens’ notoriety was founded not on his capacity to pound out copy but on his ferocity in print and his profound racism. Sullens once threatened to summon a white mob to the door of a black journalist because the man’s views on African American citizenship did not comport with his own. “If that Negro newspaper, the Jackson Advocate, keeps on talking about Negro voting and participating in politics, there is going to be a lynching in Jackson, and that Negro

61 editor, Percy Greene, is going to be in the middle of it.” He delighted in mocking those who failed to share his wisdom. “If he ever gets a whiff of his own odor,” Sullens wrote, smacking down the editor of Christian Century for criticism of the Citizens’ Council, “he’ll stink himself

62 to death.”

When Sullens changed his mind — a rare thing — he fought the new as vigorously as the old. Early in his career he favored Prohibition, but later he came to decry it as a “ruthless invasion of the rights of others.”63 Then, upon his conversion to Christianity by a traveling

English evangelist, he took up the temperance cause anew, in typical Sullens fashion.

“Thousands of homes have been made happy because of this law,” he wrote, “thousands of derelicts have been rescued from the jaws of hell” and “when you hear of any person demanding light wines and beers you can generally size him up as some old rum-soak who still thinks that his ‘personal liberties’ have been taken from him.”64 Still later, he declared

Prohibition a failure and put temperance advocates “in the same class with fleas, lice, redbugs,

141 ticks, and other carnivorous insects that feast and fatten on human blood.”65 Sullens knew no restraint, no matter where he stood and no matter how he got there.

Sullens’ targets were many — he even lambasted Mississippi’s own William Faulkner, upon his accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature, for writing works that cast “our people as ignorant, uncouth, depraved, and but little above the level of beasts of the field.”66 He hounded his enemies with vigor and stung them with venom, often recklessly administered. “He cost the

Daily News thousands of dollars in libel suits and threats,” said Purser Hewitt, a Clarion-Ledger reporter and editor who watched Sullens in action over three decades. “He would not be

67 restrained.” If pain in the purse did not cool Sullens’ fire, nor did a painful crack across the skull. On one occasion a governor of Mississippi, Paul B. Johnson, a moderate man by reputation, was driven to violence by a blast of vinegar from Sullens, who held Johnson’s progressive programs in contempt. Sullens himself had weakly supported the progressive movement years earlier, but progressive enthusiasm for a minimum-wage law and anti-lynching legislation drove him back to the conservative fold. By the late 1930s he had grown hostile to old progressive friends and New Dealers. Johnson, in particular, felt the brunt of his disdain for progressive reformers, and Sullens’ criticism of “Paul Pee Wee Johnson” grew personal. Even

Johnson’s successful libel suit against the Daily News in the early 1930s, and the payment of damages, did little to rein in Sullens’ ridicule. Out of frustration, and in a scene reminiscent of nineteenth century Southern politics, Johnson, on May 2, 1940, lay in wait at Jackson’s Walthall

Hotel, where Sullens kept an apartment. As the editor came through the lobby, the governor joined him close behind and, catching Sullens at the elevator, raised his cane and struck.

Sullens staggered under the blow but recovered, turned and hurled Johnson back over a chair.

Like a schoolboy in a playground brawl, the editor mounted the prostrate governor — both men were in their sixties at the time — and delivered a series of blows before being pulled free by the governor’s aides and shocked hotel guests. What Johnson hoped to gain from his attack is unclear. What he got was an ever more aggressive Sullens, who complained on his newspaper’s front pages of the lack of manly behavior exhibited by Johnson in his sneak attack. He

142 challenged the governor to meet him and finish things off. Johnson wisely declined, but it did

68 not end there for Sullens, who vowed to strengthen his criticism.

Sullens was part of the old press of the Solid South — he was a devout conservative

Democrat and a foe to any Republican Party politician or proposal. Another favored target was anyone who suggested changing, to any degree, the Southern social order. Though such advocates for social change were rare in Jackson, Sullens nevertheless sought opportunities to let fly with stern warnings of what might follow the slightest weakening on the issue of race. On such occasions, he seldom failed to remind his readers of his belief in the inferiority of blacks.

For his clamorous and reliable defense of “our Southern way of life,” Sullens was honored by

William J. Simmons, an organizer and publicist of the White Citizens’ Council. The cause of

69 white supremacy in Mississippi had no better friend in the press than Sullens.

Mississippi’s press, surprisingly, did not leap into print with attacks on the Brown decision. Perhaps they were resigned to the finality of a Supreme Court ruling, or perhaps they believed that this decision, like Plessy v. Ferguson before it, would be subverted or ignored.

Whatever the cause, most of Mississippi’s editors in general said little about the landmark case.

Not so Sullens, who responded editorially the day after the decision and characteristically cast the ruling in terms of horror and doom. Signaling his alarm, Sullens moved the editorial to the front page, under the hyperbolic headline, “Bloodstains on White Marble Steps.” In this editorial, itself a landmark in Southern journalism, Sullens declared the Brown decision to be “the worst thing that has happened to the South since carpetbaggers and scalawags took charge of our civil government in reconstruction days. It is even worse. It means racial strife of the bitterest sort.” Continuing in this vein of violence, Sullens warned, “It can conceivably lead to much

70 bloodshed and loss of life.”

In his “Bloodstains” editorial, Sullens found complying with the court to be out of the question. “Even though it was delivered by unanimous vote of the nine members of the nation’s highest tribunal, Mississippi cannot and will not try to abide by such a decision [and] will never consent to placing white and Negro children in the same public schools.” The ruling was

143 unacceptable, Sullens argued, and must be resisted: “Every possible human effort will be made to prevent it from happening.” Here, Sullens became one of the first voices in the South to use the court decision as an invitation to violent resistance and to lay the blame not on Southern leaders such as himself or on Southern whites who broke the law but on the justices of the

Supreme Court. “Human blood may stain Southern soil in many places because of this decision,” he wrote, “but the dark red stains of that blood will be on the marble steps of the United States

71 Supreme Court building.” Sullens’ editorial was prophetic in its anticipation of violence, but the prophecy was self-fulfilling on the part of the Southern press and Southern leadership.

Sullens’ “Bloodstains” worried and intimidated Mississippi’s quiet community of moderates. Among these troubled moderates was the Rev. King, the white chaplain at predominantly black Tougaloo College. As a high school senior in Vicksburg in 1954, he remembered reading the “Bloodstains” editorial in the Jackson Daily News after classes that day.

He was struck by the finality of Sullens’ declaration and how it ruled out any moderate course of action. “I had been to some interracial church meetings of teen-agers, this sort of thing,”

King recalled. “We knew it was coming. We knew it was sort of morally right and could be talked about. My civics teacher in public school in Vicksburg, the morning after the decision came down, talked to the class about it, and explained this is the law, the Supreme Court is in

72 charge, and ... the world was going to be different. And that we would make this work.” The fact that his church youth group and his high school teacher could discuss desegregation showed, King believed, that at the time of Brown there was an opening for a rational and reasoned response. In school that day, he sensed a spirit of optimism. Reading the Jackson

Daily News that afternoon, he sensed instead an atmosphere of dread.

King saw the editorial as designed to chase moderate voices from the public square, to block the efforts of his teacher, his minister, his Methodist Youth Fellowship leader and other moderates who supported or accepted desegregation. “The Daily News,” he explained, “was throwing down a challenge, instantly, that this cannot be done without bloodshed and

73 violence.”

144 Sullens became editor in 1907 when the paper was a full-fledged competitor with the

Clarion-Ledger. Though they participated in some shared business activities, an arrangement established during the Depression to cut costs, the two newspapers remained antagonists until

August 6, 1954, when Sullens and other owners sold out to the Hederman family. He remained editor of the Jackson Daily News until his death in 1957. For 50 years, Sullens shaped the race relations debate statewide through his stewardship of the Jackson Daily News, Mississippi’s second most widely circulated newspaper. His aggressive stance, his disparagement of his enemies and his bellicose defense of white supremacy set the tone for Mississippi journalism.

“We are fighting not merely for our Southern way of life, but for our existence,” he told fellow members of the Mississippi Press Association in a 1956 speech, exhorting them, in typically strong language, to stand firm against integration. “We need to mobilize all of our forces for this fight.” Sullens’ formidable personality loomed over Mississippi newsrooms throughout the

74 1950s and 1960s, and his style of work was a model for others in the Hederman stable.

With Sullens’ death, the role of editor fell to his protégé, Jimmy Ward. Ward was a watered-down version of Sullens — less fire and smoke, more jokes and gags — and his editorial pages did not range far and wide like those of his mentor. Ward adopted Sullens’ conventions, such as the front-page personal column of short pieces of commentary strung together, the mix of the serious and the humorous, but his execution lacked the reckless spirit of his predecessor. Ward’s sword was dull, compared to that of Sullens, but he swung the blade the best he could and in time became a Jackson celebrity, the Pearl Street Philosopher. On the critical elements that defined the Jackson Daily News — disdain for other points of view, dedication to white supremacy and unvarnished racism — Ward and Sullens were cast from the same mold.

Other personalities in the tradition of Sullens were filling the opinion pages of the morning Clarion-Ledger. Executive Editor Purser Hewitt produced pages that were closed minded, vitriolic and famously racist. In a strange contrast, Hewitt himself authored a column,

“Hew-itt to the Line,” that was so mild and bland as to appear mindless. Hewitt’s column

145 highlights a trait of the Hederman press, it’s capacity to be both acutely aware of racial issues and blithely blind of blacks and the lives they led. While his own editorials raged against James

Meredith and the Kennedys and while the Clarion-Ledger’s other columnists described the horrors of African rule, Hewitt quoted Scripture and printed poems submitted by readers, many

Bible-inspired, as well as snippets of news from the past. The Sunday school tenor of his columns was in keeping with his upbringing as the son of a Baptist preacher — his father was pastor of Jackson’s First Baptist Church, which the Hederman family attended, guided and supported. Hewitt spent his entire professional life at the Clarion-Ledger. He worked as a sports stringer for the paper and other publications while attending Mississippi College — the Baptist school was also the alma mater of the second-generation Hedermans — and, after a year teaching and coaching at a high school he joined the Clarion-Ledger as a sports writer in 1926.

Over the years he worked his way up to the senior journalist in the newsroom hierarchy second only to Thomas Hederman Jr., who acted as editor. He considered himself a loyal employee and a personal friend to the Hederman brothers who hired him. He also considered as friends the governors of Mississippi he came to know as a reporter and editor. Among these was Ross

Barnett. Hewitt and the future governor were classmates at Mississippi College, and Hewitt and

Barnett’s wife attended the same high school. Once again, the First Baptist Church provided another point of contact, as both men were deacons in the church, and Barnett taught a Sunday

75 school class there.

The executive editor, like much of Mississippi, was in love with beauty queens. A typical

Hewitt item took note that Hinds County Junior College’s president, George McLendon, had hired one: “Guess what Prexy GEORGE has done now? He’s up and added to his secretarial staff

76 none other than ANNINE RAY JERNIGAN, Miss Mississippi of 1962!” In the fall of 1962, while tension mounted over integration, the editors and their readers found a diversion in the aspirations of Charlotte Ann Carroll, who hoped to follow another Mississippian, Mary Ann

Mobley, as Miss America. Her bid was well documented; the Clarion-Ledger sent a staff member to Atlantic City to cover the pageant, and the September 10 edition carried no less than four

146 photographs of “Charlie,” who was a finalist but did not win. Other beauty queens and young women filled the pages on a daily basis, a perpetual parade of Southern womanhood. With white supremacy under attack, the women, always smiling, always pretty, gave assurance that all was well and right in the white world of the Old South. Hewitt’s column, like the

77 photographs of Mississippi beauties, offered the same comforts.

Hewitt’s style contrasted sharply with that of two of his writers, Tom Ethridge and

Charles Hills, who were every bit as mean as Sullens and Ward and every bit as racist, but without the attempts at humor. These two Clarion-Ledger columnists were angry, vulgar and race-obsessed. Winter, the state treasurer and later governor, described Ethridge and Hills as the Hedermans’ “poison-pen experts,” an apt characterization. Ethridge wrote about Mississippi and the South — his column at one time was decorated with a Confederate battle flag. Hills covered the Capitol and ground out the mind-numbing articles on legislative process that is the work of a political reporter. Ethridge and Hills, however, turned their attention to race — and turned their volume up — whenever civil rights activists made the news. During the crisis over

78 the integration of Ole Miss, the poison pens kept busy.

Together, these personalities kept public debate in the Mississippi capital wrapped in a straitjacket. The Hedermans, their political allies and their editors had no stomach for a free and open debate on the failures of segregation and the future of the South as an integrated society. Their obligation, as they saw it, was not to help citizens explore the various paths the

South could take in a time of stress and change or to expose Mississippians to diverse points of view. Their duty was to keep minds and conversations focused on one option alone — resistance. These were men whose fortunes, jobs, politics, reputations and philosophies were tied to the old order, and when the old order came under assault they threw up a bristling defense.

In building this defense, the Hederman newspapers employed all three elements of the

Southern style to shape understanding and control the exchange of ideas and opinions. The editors and their writers expressed ideology, sharp and strong, by the daily dose; they refused

147 to see and acknowledge the harsh realities of Southern life; and they relentlessly policed the public square by attacking those who dared to dissent. In a time when newspapers were the dominant means of communication and community conversation, the only viewpoints available for public consumption in Jackson were those sanctioned by the Hederman press. Twice a day, in the morning Clarion-Ledger and in the afternoon Jackson Daily News, the editors gave the public a steady diet of white supremacy and black failure, of Cold War paranoia and conspiratorial fear, of federal overreach and state defiance. Their efforts to keep the citizens of

Jackson and Mississippi in line were effective, judging from the letters to the editor, which were the common means of individual political expression in the 1950s and 1960s.

The views of the letter writers typically mirrored those of the newspapers’ editorials and columns. “To impress the Asiatics, nine misguided political appointees have decided to change the way of life of fifty million Americans in twenty one states of our great nation,” wrote

Patterson, who later founded the White Citizens’ Council movement, in a letter published May

24, 1954, a week after the Brown decision. Patterson’s letter compressed much of the resistance argument down to a few sentences. “If we red blooded southern Americans submit to this unconstitutional ‘judge made law’ and surrender our Caucasian heritage of sixty centuries, the malignant powers of communism, Atheism and mongrelization will surely follow.”79 A Black

Hawk, Mississippi, reader cited the bête noire of Reconstruction in warning against African

Americans’ voting. “These ruinous conditions will be duplicated if Negro voters should ever greatly outnumber the white voters of the South,” he wrote in a letter of March 7, 1962. “To keep Negroes from voting is a protection to the Negroes themselves as well as to others.”

“There is much information to the effect that the big guns of Communist subversion have long been aimed at our churches…,” wrote Robert W. Pelton, chairman of the Americanism

Committee of his local American Legion in Pascagoula, Mississippi. “Does a priest, a minister, a family man or for that matter any title mean that a particular person is immune to being a

Communist, pink, fellow-traveler or dupe?”80 His March 26, 1962, letter echoes a peculiar fear of the Sovereignty Commission that members of Mississippi’s clergy were secret Communists or sympathizers. “The deeper you go in this review,” wrote John D. Sullivan, a former FBI agent

148 who ran a private detective agency employed by the commission, “the more firmly fixed becomes the conclusion that the CP [Communist Party] has made tremendous strides in some

Southern Churches and schools.”81 Communist infiltration was a deep fear of the Hederman press and its readers. “Why has the Communist Party more rights than we do ourselves?” asked a Macon, Mississippi, reader. “We have some leaders who will continue to bargain with and trust

Khrushchev and Castro until doomsday…,” wrote another reader, of Brookhaven, Mississippi, the same day. “We are headed for total dictatorship….”82 “We believe the time has come, in fact, it is far past,” wrote a Raymond, Mississippi, couple on September 6, 1962, “for all who love our state and its traditions and who love this country as ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ to rise up in indignation against the evils of Communism and its twin-sister, socialism, which is eating at us every day.”83 Writing in a similar vein, a Jackson reader warned that Reds had Southerners in their target. “The communists would like nothing better than to see the

South divided,” advised the September 8, 1962, letter writer who — borrowing from the

Hederman editors and columnists — conflated the Communist menace with court orders on integration. “This state of Mississippi is the last stronghold, and I believe if we keep our heads and refuse to give in we can set a precedent for this whole country.”84 “We should tell every individual and school and other places that tolerate and give aid and comfort to enemies to get out of Mississippi and get out quick,” asserted a Brookhaven writer, on September 12, 1962.85

“The die is cast,” offered a reader in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on September 15, 1962. “The paramount litigation involved here is not whether a Negro enters the University of Mississippi, but whether the Constitution-given laws of a state can be trampled by a Supreme Court that has voted more times for Communists than it has for Americans. No state should surrender to such tyranny.”86

Racial anger and white Southern victimhood were common themes as well. “By order of his Negro masters,” wrote a Philadelphia, Mississippi, reader on September 10, 1962, as tensions mounted between Governor Barnett and the White House over the integration of Ole

Miss, “Robert Kennedy has launched an evil ‘hate campaign’ against the people of Mississippi….

Mississippi, in honor and decency, has been the great roadblock against Kennedy tyranny and

149 Negro bigotry…. Mississippi will not be ruled by the ignorant and the immoral; neither will it surrender to the African jungle.”87 “We couldn’t have many race problems without these outside bleeding-heart trouble makers,” wrote a Brandon, Mississippi, reader, providing a succinct reflection of the attitudes of the state’s opinion leaders and politicians, in a letter published

September 11, 1962.88

The letters to the editor of the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News read as mirror images of the newspapers’ editorials and columns, with agitated citizens reflecting the strident and paranoid views of the state’s dominant daily press. The Hederman publications successfully created an echo chamber of resistance arguments, with readers, writers and politicians bouncing back and forth the same melodramatic language and paranoid views. The public square was a quarter of hysteria that offered no comfort to those with moderate views.

Letters that fell outside the frame set by the Hederman editors were rare, but some citizens did put pen to paper in unconventional arguments. Some of these regarded concerns unrelated to politics, such as the Clarion-Ledger’s romantic depiction of George Custer. “Most historians well knew Custer’s cruelty, arrogance, and his so-called reckless courage could be classified as incredible stupidity,” wrote one reader in a March 17, 1962, letter.89 Others, though, tackled the issues of the day. “We are all God’s children and he ignores the distinctions made by men,” wrote a Vicksburg, Mississippi, reader who questioned the South’s devotion to segregation in a letter published a few days after the Brown decision. “Segregation was man- made…. For the answer as to whether or not segregation is right or wrong, look not to the lawmakers, or politicians, but look to God.”90 The editors at times enjoyed printed letters critical of their own work, especially those from individuals outside the South. “What a shabby, cheap example of a newspaper yours is,” noted an observer from New York, who referenced a

Jackson Daily News editorial in her letter of October 4, 1962. “‘Never, No Never’ tells the world what a vicious and fearful place Mississippi is — a blot on the face of America.”91 These arguments typically met with antagonistic responses by other letter writers or by the newspapers’ editors and writers. In this way, the Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News punished those willing to think outside the bounds of Southern ideology and used this public

150 scolding as a warning to others —this is what happens to those who dare speak out. As a result, few ventured into the public square with contrary opinions.

On rare occasions, however, some letter writers took the risk. “I not only deplore your writings but I think they are stupid,” wrote one outspoken reader, who identified himself as a

Negro student from Jones County studying in Jackson and who asked the editors to “withhold my name from print for personal security reasons,” a wise request the editors honored. “The state of Mississippi has not only neglected the Negro’s education but at the same time has placed him at the bottom of every ladder and phase of culture, except Mississippi’s pride, lynching! There are many intelligent Negroes that would rank with the white students and would outrank them if given equal opportunity. We don’t want to marry your white women!

Nature did not discriminate against Negro women when she handed out beauty, (Thank God!).”92

Not surprisingly, the student’s audacious letter drew a heated response that mixed racial animosity with Cold War suspicion and questioned the veracity of the author. “No Negro from

Jones County or any other county in the South, seeking an education in as good schools for

Negroes as there are in Jackson, Miss., would write such mess,” wrote a reader from Crystal

Springs. “I am sure that this is from some Communist-inspired element, calculated to provoke discord, dissatisfaction, insurrection, race rioting and blood shed in the South.”93 The writer provided his own idea of what should happen to such critics. “Any Negro student that intelligent would not dare write you this” out of fear of prosecution “for scandal, insults, and defamation of character.”94 Would-be dissenters, take heed.

One critic who did not take heed was Dr. Ernst Borinski, a sociology professor at nearby

Tougaloo College. A historically African American institution, Tougaloo College was founded in

1869 by the American Missionary Association, an abolitionist group that continued to support

Tougaloo through most of the twentieth century. The college also enjoyed financial backing from other religious groups. It received no state funding, which gave its administrators and faculty a healthy, though not impenetrable, buffer from the machinations of angry legislators and other state officials (in 1964, the Sovereignty Commission tried to revoke the college’s accreditation, citing “ample evidence that Tougaloo has departed from its chartered

151 responsibility of teaching liberal arts” and that “class room time as well as time after classes is being devoted to political discussions led by representatives of CORE, SNCC, and NAACP”95).

The Hederman editors and writers viewed this freedom with suspicion, and they trained their eyes on the campus and its activities. A key suspect, in the Hederman view, was Borinski and his bimonthly Social Science Forums, which brought to campus white citizens from Jackson and elsewhere. Each forum began with a meal, with a student sitting next to each visitor, followed by a speaker and a discussion. Borinski started these biracial gatherings in 1952 and continued the forums for decades. He designed the forums as a safe and open dialogue away from the strict rules of the South — an ongoing free space where whites and blacks could meet to analyze segregation and to explore ways out of the confines of Jim Crow. With the Social

Science Forums, Borinski created a new public square that encouraged participants to break down barriers of race, while the Hederman newspapers worked to prevent such freedom from ever taking place in the public square under their scrutiny and command. To the Hederman editors and columnists, Borinski was an enemy of the state.96

A Jewish émigré from Germany — he came to the United States in 1938 — who lost his entire family to the Nazi death machine, Borinski was short, round, gentle and fearless. He knew he was a target of the Jackson papers, and he was aware that the sheriff’s department sent deputies to scribble down the license plates of forum participants, white and black. He likely knew that, upon its establishment in 1956, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission brought him under surveillance. In 1958, a Sovereignty Commission memo on Borinski described the professor as a “race agitator” and alleged that in a 1948 speech he “critized [sic] the United States as being imperialistic and endeavored to develop a sympathetic feeling toward

Russia among his audience…. It has been further alleged that in his teachings at Tougaloo

College he has fostered racial equality and integration of the races.” The memo ended with a recommendation: “That file be opened for investigation to keep up with the activity of Borinski at Tougaloo College, Tougaloo, Mississippi.”97 The file remained open for years and grew to include a number of documents, including a letter from the Louisiana State Sovereignty

Commission, reporting that Borinski spoke at an American Friendship House meeting in Baton

152 Rouge — “Our investigator, who covered this meeting, reported that over 60% of the people attending the meeting were negroes”— and requesting that the Mississippi investigators share any background on the professor.98

Despite such pressure from the press and from authorities, Borinski was not intimidated and, unlike virtually all other whites in Jackson, was not afraid to publicly state his criticism of

Jim Crow segregation. In a letter published December 2, 1955, Borinski criticized the White

Citizens’ Council for stating that the organization was dedicated to maintaining segregation by legal means and was not associated with any violence against blacks. “In the light of the very recent decision of the Federal Courts and many State Courts,” Borinski wrote,

segregation cannot be maintained any more by legal means…. Even the continuous statement that they intend to remain in the boundaries of the law cannot change this hard fact…. If the Citizens Councils invite the public to violate the law of the land — and segregation cannot be maintained otherwise — they also share the responsibility for acts of violence which are committed against Negro citizens and for that matter against white citizens on account of their stand on the race issue. It would be for the benefit of all citizens of our State if the citizens councils would finally arrive at a constructive and positive approach to the race question.99

Borinski’s letter was clever and polite and provocative. It clearly provoked Ethridge, the

Clarion-Ledger opinion writer, who dedicated a full column to the professor from, as Ethridge put it, Tougaloo Negro College. In his response Ethridge focused on crimes committed by blacks but picked up other pieces from the array of resistance arguments. “His professional function, we understand, is to lecture Negroes rather than members of the patriotic Citizens’ Council,”

Ethridge wrote. “Judging from the Negro crime rate, he and other leaders have a fertile field for missionary work within their own responsibility.” Ethridge raised alarms over sexual crimes —

“During this past year, at least a dozen women have been ravished and molested, yet Dr.

Borinski has not mounted his soapbox to pontificate against these violations of the law” — and over Cold War conspiracy — “our resistance is not to the Constitution but to Communist- inspired ideologies” — and over moral deficiencies among blacks — “A large percentage of colored people suffer from venereal disease. The race’s addiction to rape and murder has already been emphasized.” He concluded with advice to Borinski — and, though unstated, to all

153 readers holding moderate opinions on segregation— on future ventures onto the public square.

“It is hoped that Dr. Borinski may write a letter commenting objectively on the Negro’s responsibilities, as a welcome change from his energetic attacks on majority opinion in

Mississippi…. Full equality comes through performance of and not by law — regardless of what courts, vote-hungry politicians and visionaries may say to the contrary.”100 Through Ethridge’s column, the Clarion-Ledger gave a clear warning to Borinski and others who considered making statements critical of segregation or critical of individuals or organizations working to extend

Jim Crow’s reign. The newspaper also outlined the parameters of acceptable commentary on racial controversies: Respect white authority and Southern ideology; refuse to acknowledge any weakness in the Southern system; offer no public criticism and, if a problem must be noted, blame it on the blacks.

Borinski, however, was not cowed. In a lengthy, even-handed and professorial reply, he asserted that “I never look at our Mississippi society in terms of Negroes and whites” and that

“we cannot ignore the law of the land and the power of the Supreme Court to render binding decisions…. In the state meeting of the Citizens Councils one could not discover any positive approach to our problems. The meeting showed only one objective, to do all in their power to hinder integration. Such an approach does not lead us anywhere.”101 In this letter, as in his previous one, Borinski quietly encouraged Mississippi to seek a way forward into integrated

American society. Ethridge and the Clarion-Ledger were having none of that, and neither was one of the paper’s subscribers. “I am a regular reader of the Clarion-Ledger and I wish to bring to the attention of all Anglo-Saxon and true American Citizens of this great State of Mississippi this teacher of Tougaloo, Mississippi who signs his name, ‘Dr. Ernst Borinski,’” wrote The

Ambassador (no name given). The Ambassador accused Borinski of employing propaganda, numbered eleven points in support of segregation, most attached to Bible citations, and then challenged Borinski to reveal himself. “Let the true Democracy-loving people of Mississippi know who you are, your nationality, are you a native of a foreign country, why did you come to

America, why do you pick the subject of Segregation and race to write about?”102

154 The letters to the editor from the unnamed African American student and Borinski triggered agitated responses by the Clarion-Ledger and the newspaper’s readers. These responses demonstrated the risks involved when an individual gave voice to dissent in the public square of Jackson, Mississippi. Borinski was an unusual case — as a professor at a private college, he did not put his employment in great danger by writing challenges to

Mississippi’s leadership. Even so, Borinski came under lengthy investigation by the state’s secret police. For other Mississippians, the prospect of Sovereignty Commission review was feared, and a significant number of citizens were threatened with job losses as a result of coming to the commission’s attention. Some were fired. For most, the threat alone was enough to quiet their voices and curtail their activities. Borinski’s work at Tougaloo College indicated that meaningful dialogue across the races was possible in Mississippi, but the pages of the Clarion-

Ledger and the Jackson Daily News showed that for most residents of Jackson, a free space did not exist. Defiant statements by political leaders, community leaders and the White Citizens’

Council chased away moderates, and the lurking agents and secret informants of the

Sovereignty Commission made honest and frank discussions impossible in public and unlikely in private. The student and the professor were courageous exceptions to the repressive rule of fear and anxiety.

James Meredith’s attempt to integrate the University of Mississippi threatened the belief that Mississippi was protected from the wave of social change washing over the South.

Mississippi’s white leadership, in politics and in the press, had long come to think of their state as a conservative sanctuary, a preserve of the old way, and this placed a special burden on their shoulders as the keepers and protectors of all things Southern. Meredith’s challenge roused various forces — the state’s sense of duty to the Old South, it’s tradition of racial demagoguery, it’s opportunistic governor, its segregationist editors and publishers — to do battle, and the

Hederman press, with its ties to the governor, its tradition of firebrand commentary and its abhorrence to social equality and integration, took the commanding role. Mississippi, the

Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News warned their readers, was under siege. As had

Mississippians 100 years earlier, the Hederman press went to war.

155 In times of war, principles often get trampled under the warrior’s boot. So it was in this contest, and the casualties were many. Among them was a fundamental ideal of modern journalism — that a newspaper has an obligation to enlighten and inform the public. The

Hedermans and their lieutenants, in their cherished roles as defenders of the South, turned this ideal on its head. Their goal, vigorously pursued, was to close the minds of readers, not enrich them, by feeding them a steady diet of resistance rhetoric. Throughout the crisis, the Hederman press became the propaganda arm of Barnett, the Citizens’ Council and other advocates of white superiority.

It is surprising, then, to see how little attention the Hederman newspapers paid to

Meredith. In the months leading up to his appearance on the Ole Miss campus, Meredith and his efforts were seldom mentioned. Meredith himself, the central figure in the bizarre events of that fall, was never interviewed by a staff member of the Clarion-Ledger or the Jackson Daily

News. His photograph was seldom published, and he was rarely quoted, and then only in wire service articles. As with many Southern newspapers, ignoring blacks was nothing new to the

Jackson newspapers. With rare exceptions — an October 7, 1962, photograph of baseball’s

Willie Mays in the Jackson Daily News was one such case —African Americans stood no chance of reading their names in a Hederman publication unless they committed crimes or fell victim to violence. Regarding Meredith, the Hederman newspapers reported the bare minimum, and in so doing helped their readers turn a blind eye to the young man and what he hoped to achieve.

In part, this was out of hopes the Meredith problem would go away. By the fall of 1962,

Mississippi’s segregationists had lived with the threat of integration for eight years. Yet in many ways the state was unchanged since the 1954 Brown decision, the same year the state blocked

Medgar Evers’ application to study law at the University of Mississippi. In 1962, segregationists held hope that their skill at tactics of delay would keep Mississippi unchanged for many years to come. “Integration is not inevitable,” Barnett assured cheering members of the Memphis

Citizens’ Council in the spring of 1962. “That is pure, unadulterated propaganda.... The only way integration can prevail is for us to lie sublimely down and let it come.”103 Barnett was in denial that, in reality, Mississippi was changing in fundamental ways. Black activists and a

156 handful of whites were already at work tearing down the old walls and old attitudes, but most of this organizational effort by local people was unseen or dismissed by the state’s white leadership, who were looking instead for a great radical conspiracy and the hand of

104 Communism at work.

So Meredith was given the silent treatment, and his integration bid was largely ignored in the pages of the Jackson newspapers. That changed, however, after the university rejected his application and Meredith sued in federal court. In time, after many delays, his case reached the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, where Judge John Minor Wisdom rejected the university’s astonishing claim that Ole Miss was not racially segregated. To argue that segregation was not the policy of the state of Mississippi, Wisdom wrote, “defies history and common knowledge.” On June 26, 1962, Wisdom ordered the district court to issue an injunction allowing Meredith’s admission. The order came eighteen months after Meredith first applied to attend the University of Mississippi. As the Fifth Circuit judges noted, “from the moment the defendants discovered that Meredith was a Negro, they engaged in a carefully

105 calculated campaign of delay, harassment, and masterly inactivity.”

Segregationist hopes were not yet dashed, however, as a well-placed sympathizer, a federal judge in Meridian, interjected himself into the proceedings. Though not a member of the Fifth Circuit, the judge issued a stay against the injunction order. The New Orleans court set his stay aside, only to see him issue a second stay, then a third, before Justice Hugo Black of the

U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to vacate the Meridian judge’s actions and issue an injunction of his own against further interference. Finally, on September 13, a week before new students were to register for classes, Judge Sidney Mize, the district judge hearing Meredith’s case, ordered

Meredith’s enrollment. For the state’s segregationists, this was a time of desperation. That night, Governor Barnett, the man who got elected on a segregation platform, went on television to speak for the cause. His address — strident, defiant and full of bitter hyperbole — set the

106 tone for the two weeks of madness that followed.

157 Barnett, recognizing that his reputation was in peril, struck a pose of grave solemnity for his TV viewers. He spoke in tones a president might use in times of war. In an attempt to provide his actions a constitutional basis they did not enjoy, the governor began by opening a heavy volume and reading the Tenth Amendment. He then advised the audience that he was speaking “in a solemn hour in the history of our great State — in a solemn hour, indeed, in our nation’s history. I speak to you now in the moment of our greatest crisis since the War between the States.” Ignoring more than a century of law and history, Barnett argued that Mississippi, in defying the federal courts, was acting within its rights. In exercising these rights, he said,

Mississippi was being pursued by an aggressive, outlaw federal government. “In the absence of

Constitutional authority and without legislative action,” Barnett said, “an ambitious Federal

Government, employing naked and arbitrary power, has decided to deny us the right of self-

107 determination in the conduct of the affairs of our sovereign state.”

Barnett rolled on with an apparent reference to Mississippi’s Confederate past. “Having long since failed in their efforts to conquer the indomitable spirit of the people of Mississippi and their unshakable will to preserve the sovereign majesty of our commonwealth,” the governor said, “they now seek to break us physically with the power of force.” Adopting a voice of paranoia and describing a scene of invasion — his chosen metaphor throughout the crisis —

Barnett continued with a list of the enemies against the state. “Even now, as I speak to you tonight, professional agitators, an unfriendly liberal press and other troublemakers are pouring across our borders intent upon instigating strife among our people.” He made a call for unity and allegiance. “Paid propagandists are continually hammering away at us in the hope that they can succeed in bringing about a division among us,” he warned. “Every effort is being made to

108 intimidate us into submission to the tyranny of judicial oppression.”

Barnett’s address was a cry of alarm and a call to arms. “The day of expedience is past,” he announced, and he presented the citizens of his state with but two options: “We must either submit to the unlawful dictates of the Federal Government or stand up like men and tell them

“NEVER! ... I repeat to you tonight — NO SCHOOL WILL BE INTEGRATED IN MISSISSIPPI WHILE I

158 AM YOUR GOVERNOR.” Barnett declared himself ready to go to jail in support of the cause, and he called on others in the government to make the same pledge. “If there be any official who is not prepared to suffer imprisonment for this righteous cause, I ask him now to submit his resignation and it will be accepted without prejudice. A man who is prepared to stand firm will

109 be appointed in his place.”

Barnett had already characterized the conflict in dire, monumental terms. He went further, however, with a brief but shocking apology for segregation. He threw himself in defense not only of the vaunted Southern way of life but of the entire white race. “There is no cause which is more moral and just than the protection of the integrity of our races,” Barnett said. “To this end, we as parents will do whatever is necessary to defend those who are most dear to us. There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration,” he asserted, then added a Draconian touch: “We will not drink from the cup of genocide.”110

Finally, Barnett invoked the doctrine of interposition, a power the Mississippi Legislature had granted in 1956 — “I interpose the rights of the Sovereign State of Mississippi to enforce its laws and to regulate its own internal affairs without interference on the part of the Federal government” — and painted Mississippi as the last guardian of freedom, the “keystone in the fight for State’s Rights.… Should we fail and the keystone be removed,” he warned darkly, “our system of government will crumble and fall, and American liberty will be lost forever in the ruins.”111 His speech over, Barnett pulled out a handkerchief, removed his glasses and wiped the sweat from his brow. He was, at that point, already feeling the heat of friction between his

112 words and the Kennedy administration’s duty.

It is telling that Barnett made no mention of James Meredith and only one reference to the University of Mississippi. These were concrete details better left out of a speech thin on reality and rich on delusion. Rather than address the question of whether it was right and good to bar one citizen’s admission to a state university, or explain how state officials could legally violate the orders of a federal court, Barnett fell to tested Southern themes of righteousness, racial fear, pride and martyrdom. It was the old Lost Cause brought back to life, and these

159 themes resonated with the fears and fantasies of the Hederman press. In the days that followed, editors Ward and Hewitt, with help from the poison pens of columnists Hills and

Ethridge, would echo and amplify the polemics of their man in the Governor’s Mansion.

Barnett’s televised speech was a rallying cry for segregationists and obstructionists, who filled most positions of power in the state, and public criticism of the governor’s stand was hard to come by. Among the handful of elected officials to question Barnett’s strategy was

Congressman Frank Smith, a Delta representative, who saw Barnett’s call for resistance as fruitless. “Whether we like it or not,” he told the Associated Press, “the question of state vs.

Federal law was settled 100 years ago.” Smith spoke freely because he had already lost his bid for re-election, and his outspoken objection was unique among Mississippi’s congressional delegation. Others cheered Ross on. Rep. John Bell Williams said he backed Barnett “against this brazen encroachment in the sovereignty of our state.” Rep. William Colmer offered Barnett “my full support.” Rep. Thomas Abernathy declared that “the time has come for Mississippians to stand firmly together in opposition to the unlawful and unconstitutional encroachment of the federal government and a power-hungry administration upon the rights and privileges of our state.” Days later, in the Legislature, House members rushed through, on a near unanimous vote, a resolution commending Barnett. J.P. Coleman, who preceded Barnett as governor, lent his support, and Jackson’s mayor, Allen Thompson, chimed in as well. “Constitutionally,” the mayor said, “Gov. Barnett is 100 per cent right.” Letters to the editor gushed with praise for the man. “Hooray for the best governor the state of Mississippi has ever had,” wrote a citizen of

Roxie. “We are wholeheartedly behind you...,” stated a letter signed by eleven people of Jackson.

“Thanks for rekindling the spirit of our forefathers and their belief in a government for the people, of the people and by the people,” wrote a Barnett supporter from Columbia, Mississippi.

“I never was more proud that I am a Mississippian and I am equally proud that my vote helped

113 elect a man of such status and courage.”

Clearly, Barnett’s defense of segregation successfully united white Mississippians behind him. His melodramatic performance forced other elected officials to state their own positions,

160 and virtually all those who went public did so in support of Ross. It also touched a nerve with those who elected him as their segregationist governor, as the letters to the editor show. The tone of the remarks and the letters also show that this was not an atmosphere tolerant of dissent — the public square welcomed Barnett supporters only. Barnett challenged the legal standing of the federal court, an extraordinary act, yet others familiar with the law —

Mississippi’s elected lawmakers — all but unanimously endorsed his unwise action. The aggressive persecution of moderates by the press, led by the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson

Daily News, effectively suppressed alternative points of view. With the Hederman newspapers leading the way, the Mississippi media throbbed with dogma and paranoia. As a result, there were no effective voices of dissent in Mississippi, when dissent was sorely needed. Barnett laid out only one option — a dangerous play outside the law. The state’s leaders and its citizens needed other options to consider, and they needed to hear an honest airing of Barnett’s desperate stratagem. They got neither.

Barnett’s gubernatorial campaign had made segregation a litmus test, and the state’s politicians lined up to prove they were rolling with Ross and right on race. This vacuum of criticism put the onus on the traditional watchdog, the press, to rise to the occasion, but the

Hederman newspapers presented neither dissent nor criticism. The Hederman editors and writers were, in fact, worse than silent and, in the weeks of frantic journalism that followed, anything but objective. The work of the Hederman press offers insight into the failures of

Southern journalism — failure to its community, failure to American values of fair play, failure to tenets of journalism, failure to the future of the South.

The response of the Jackson newspapers to Barnett’s battle cry was immediate. “Barnett

Is Exactly Correct; Schools Are State Business,” stated the headline on the first of several front- page editorials. “We Support Gov. Barnett,” said another. In enlisting support for Barnett, the papers stressed the need for solidarity. “There is no greater service the people can render the governor and the state than to support him in this crusade to maintain the force and effect of

States’ Rights against federal encroachment...,” said another front-page endorsement. Massive

161 Resistance had proved an ineffective policy elsewhere in the South, but the Hederman

114 newspapers continued to embrace it and Barnett, its late standard-bearer.

So began the sanctification of Barnett, patron, as portrayed by the Jackson newspapers, of all things good and Southern. “Humble Plowboy Grown Up: Place Assured In History For

Fearless Ross Barnett,” crowed the headline on a front-page paean to the governor, written by the Clarion-Ledger’s Gene Wirth, city editor, Barnett confidant and Citizens’ Council member.

Barnett, he wrote, was “fearless in his refusal to yield principle to compromise” and “stands assuredly today on the blazing pages of American history awaiting a challenger to his order to resist.” As for Barnett’s vow to interpose himself between the university and the federal courts,

Wirth saw it as “an historic action that is without parallel.” The federal government, Wirth alleged, “seeks to void the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States by executive recklessness and judicial blindness.” If Barnett was a man uttering “eternal truth,” then the president and the attorney general, in Wirth’s judgment, were men of little consequence. “The next move,” Wirth wrote, “is up to the Brothers Kennedy, a pair of

Washington office-holders on loan from the swimming pools of Boston to the swimming pools

115 of the nation’s capitol.”

Barnett was an unlikely hero. Though a successful and crafty trial lawyer, he was not, to some minds, the South’s brightest light. This sense of the man was often reinforced by his tendency for inadvertent humor in speech — “If you can’t trust a trusty,” he once declared after a prison inmate failed to return from an errand to Arkansas, “who can you trust?” — and compounded by the notoriety he received when, during his 1959 gubernatorial run, he suffered serious injury by mindlessly walking into the still-turning prop of a campaign airplane. His personal appearance — thin, angular, long-necked, with glasses — gave him the look of the rigid, unbending Southerner, particularly to Northern eyes. This, together with his growing reputation as a spokesman for radical resistance to the federal courts, made him less than an ideal emissary to Northern opinion leaders, a role he, nevertheless, strove to fulfill by speaking and traveling. These forays outside the South were seldom fruitful, and Barnett, despite his

162 personal charm, was rarely granted a warm reception. To the Hederman press, however,

Barnett’s qualities — especially his racial orthodoxy, his uncompromising nature and his taking- a-stand-for-the-South pose — made him all the more appealing. The man the Northern press saw as a stiff-necked redneck the Jackson newspapers saw as a courageous soldier for the cause, and his rejection by the North made him not just a hero but a martyr as well. “Too much cannot be said in praise of Governor Barnett...,” wrote Florence Sillers Ogden, a Hederman society columnist who, inspired by one of Barnett’s trips up north, took a detour into political commentary. “He stood four-square for constitutional government, states rights and the segregation of races, just as he has stood through these troublous years.... Governor Barnett has grown ten feet tall.” Columnist Ethridge, in a characteristically uncompromising statement that summed up the view of the Hedermans and their newspapers, declared: “[W]e’ll back him, come

116 hell or high water.”

Throughout the crisis, the Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News sounded this trumpet of praise long and loud. The newspapers’ opinion leaders strove to erase any doubt in the public mind about the governor and his stratagem. Casting Barnett as the Southern Caesar was but a small part, however, of a complex and sometimes contradictory battle plan to shape and control public opinion in Mississippi, the South and, the editors hoped, the nation. It was an ambitious effort, but one far beyond the means of the Hederman press. The editors, columnists and reporters of the newspapers sensed that their grip on the mind of Mississippi was weakening and that the once mighty forces of white righteousness were being forced into a slow retreat. Other forces — the Supreme Court, the Northern press, television news, black activism and black enfranchisement — were asserting influence over the long-neglected South.

The Hederman voices still enjoyed considerable power — delivering newspapers to every corner of the state assured them a formidable presence — but they no longer held sway, unchallenged.

Their world, and the South, was changing, and fear of change triggered manic desperation in the newsrooms. The battle plan in the war to save Ole Miss from integration reflected this.

Sensing the worst, the Hederman press threw everything at the enemy in twice-daily fusillades

163 of hot words. It was a wild jumble of journalism. The Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News went on the attack with great cockiness and enthusiasm, as is the Southern tradition, but their overheated arguments showed the strain of fear and dread.

With his strident stand for white supremacy, the Mississippi governor made himself the ideal standard-bearer for the White Citizens’ Council and the Jackson newspapers. In its fight for the segregated society, however, the Hederman press went well beyond throwing gasoline on Barnett’s fire. The Hederman writers attacked integration on all fronts — as bad law, as poor politics and as doomed cultural manipulation — and with a variety of weapons — humor, anger, bitterness and intimidation.

Using a shotgun approach, the Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News fired wild, manic views at the reading public. The rapid pace of events threw the editors and columnists into a state of tightly wound paranoia. They leapt from one defensive mount to the next, often paying no heed to inconsistencies in their arguments. As a result, their blasts at the Kennedys, liberals, the courts, the NAACP and other enemies made for a tangle of herky-jerky rhetoric. They railed against blacks as dangerous and untrustworthy and wailed about the passing of the days of old when, to their minds, good blacks and decent whites shared understanding, respect and affection. In the Hederman view of the South and its race relations, hostility and antagonism blended with nostalgia and delusion. Sometimes these contradictory views emerged within the same article, even the same paragraph.

It is important to note that this mindset was at work long before Meredith sought to pursue his education at the University of Mississippi. Its roots lay decades deeper in the past of the two newspapers and in the personalities and politics that preceded the events of 1962. The

Hederman writers didn’t create these arguments anew out of reaction to the crisis over Ole

Miss, but in the heat of the conflict they sharpened their rhetorical weapons. The crisis was a crucible that compressed these rationales into harder, more destructive tools — words as weapons of the Second Civil War.

Wrapped around and throughout these arguments was one constant and unchanging view — that whites were superior, blacks inferior and the races should never mix. “If you

164 believe in God, believe in the Bible, believe in history, and have faith in yourself, then you must believe that God selected the white race to carry the Christian faith and the torch of civilization,” wrote Sullens, the previous Jackson Daily News editor who, even in death, cast a long shadow over the crisis in 1962. “You must also believe that God intended for the white race to be free — free to think, free to believe, free to act, free to select its own

117 companionship.” Ward, his protégé and successor, carried on in the same vein, as did the other Hederman writers.

Even on this bedrock issue of race, the Hederman writers were at times conflicted.

Contempt for blacks was the rule, but at times there were exceptions. Even in these rare diversions, however, the strict racial distinctions were never blurred. One such occasion came on Christmas Day in 1955, when Wirth, the Clarion-Ledger’s city editor, wrote fondly of a boyhood memory of a visit his family paid in 1934 to an old black couple to exchange

Christmas gifts. He tried to show how it used to be, and what had been lost, but he painted a picture of condescension and stereotypes. Wirth took note of the black couple’s “humble little home” with a “large, open fireplace,” of the “real sincerity in their greeting” and of how “two sets of pearl-white teeth shone happily in the bright sunshine.” He describes how after receiving gifts from the family, “Enoch puffed contentedly on his pipe” while “Henrietta’s deep down mammy-style chuckling evidenced the enjoyment she was deriving from the compliments paid her superb baking.” Writing a year and a half after the Brown decision, and facing the possibility of a new racial dynamic stirred by black activism, Wirth lamented the loss of the dreamy Southern myth of paternalistic whites providing caring stewardship of happy, contended and grateful blacks. “There is no relationship,” he wrote, “quite like the friendship that grows between the true darkies of the Old South and their ‘white folks.’ It is something

118 very beautiful.”

The Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News writers kept a keen lookout for such material they could present as examples of white benevolence. Later that week, Hills, the

Clarion-Ledger columnist, praised two white boys who saved the lives of five blacks whose car

165 had slid into a creek. “All Mississippi is today applauding the heroism of two Jackson high school youths,” Hills wrote, who “… once again have demonstrated that the white is a friend to the Negro.” He used this case to work a favored argument of the Hederman press and other

Southern newspapers, that racial friction was usually the work not of native whites but of outside agitators. “Hatreds attributed to Mississippi,” Hills wrote, “are most often fomented by

119 outside our borders.” The theme was amplified in the same day’s editorial, “Memo to Racial

Agitators.” “If the nation could learn of such acts as it learns of infrequent violence by whites toward Negroes,” the editorial asserted, “then outsiders could have a much better

120 understanding of the cordial relations between the races in Mississippi.”

Such examples of white selflessness were given great play in the Hederman press, but far more common on the pages of the Jackson newspapers were examples of black violence.

The Hederman editors were obsessed with such crimes, and they combed the wires for stories of blood and terror. Accounts of good whites trying to do what is right ran alongside portrayals of black killers, thugs and rapists. It was a tormented view of the world, and it reflected the tortured mindsets of the Hederman opinion makers, men who described scenes of peace and racial harmony but who at the same time played on racial fears. Readers of the Hederman papers didn’t know which image of race relations — as heaven or Hell — to expect. Three days after Wirth gave his homily of the Old South and one day before Hills offered his tribute to colorblind heroism came Ethridge, the other Clarion-Ledger columnist, with a tale of an elderly white woman who was “severely beaten, robbed and raped by a vicious colored fiend.” His complaint: “Amid loud outcries against infrequent white violence in the South, Negro rapists continue to commit acts of unspeakable brutality with little or no publicity in the national

121 press.” Hills invoked his fear of violent African Americans in making his case against the integration of the University of Mississippi. “With almost half the population black, Mississippi cannot allow the unleashed furies of the Congo as are seen on the doorsteps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, the beaches in Chicago, the Harlem of New York and the Presidio in San

Francisco,” Hills warned on September 30, 1962. “If Negro Meredith gains entry to Ole Miss, it

166 may well mean breaking down of all controls.”122 His dread admonition was published just hours before a mob of whites engaged in a night of riot and violence at the university in Oxford.

The dominant view of African Americans found in the Jackson papers was of a people inclined to criminal acts and wanton behavior. “It is to the credit of Southern clergymen that they do not go to the Harlems of the North and conduct prayer pilgrimages and prayer vigils for the sins of the Harlems, where crime and vice exist on every hand,” wrote Ward, the Jackson

Daily News editor, in typical commentary.123 At the same time, paternalistic commentary emerged when the editors attempted to demonstrate white restraint and understanding.

“Despite the tense situation, it should be noted that, as usual, the relations between the races in

Mississippi continue [to be] excellent and without friction,” wrote Ward two weeks after the riot at the University of Mississippi, declaring racial harmony as he tried to repair the state’s reputation. “This is commendable and is as would be expected. The friction today is between the white people and the Kennedy power structure. Mississippians actually love and appreciate the Negroes. The Kennedy clan can’t say as much.”124 What never graced the pages of the

Hederman press was a sense of noblesse oblige. This sense of obligation of whites to look after the welfare of blacks did exist in Mississippi well into the 1960s. It had roots deep in the

Southern mindset and the planter fantasy of ancient blood ties with Europe’s nobility.

Slaveholders took comfort in the romantic belief in a feudal relationship in which the strong lord and master cared for the weak and powerless serfs who toiled under him, and they believed that this tradition was carried over into the slavery of the American South. George

Fitzhugh, author of Cannibals All!, a radical defense of slavery as a positive good, gave voice to this naïve view of history in an 1857 article in defense of the South. “In the palmy days of royalty, of feudal nobility, and of catholic rule, there were no poor in Europe,” Fitzhugh wrote.

“Every man had his house and his home, and both his brave and his pious protectors. The baron and the priest vied with each other in their care of the vassal.” As did many of slavery’s protectors, Fitzhugh deplored the loss of this golden age of paternalistic masters. “This was feudal slavery; and what is modern liberty?” he asked. “Why, quietly, slowly almost insensibly, the poor have been turned over from the parental and protective rule of kings, barons, and

167 churchmen, to the unfeeling despotism of capitalists, employers, usurers, and extortioners; and

125 this was called emancipation!”

Statements of noblesse oblige were common in the defense of slavery. Slavery’s proponents argued that whites had a duty to nurture and protect innocent, child-like blacks who knew little of the world and could not prosper on their own. This argument ignored the clear realities of slave life, but like so much of Southern thought in the nineteenth century, realities of slavery were seldom addressed. Faith in noblesse oblige persisted, despite its fantasy nature, because it was immensely self-serving. The concept was powerfully ennobling to slaveholders, even if its influence on white behavior was weak. Just as the servant relationship continued well beyond Appomattox and Emancipation in the shadow slavery of the sharecropper, this sense of obligation of the master lingered among the planter class.

The cold calculations of the sharecropping system that replaced slavery tempered this sense of noblesse oblige, but the notion persisted in those areas of the South where large-scale agriculture persisted — that is, where life bore a resemblance to the antebellum South. Nowhere was this more the case than in the Mississippi Delta. There plantation-like agriculture carried on, cotton continued its rule and white landowners remained surrounded by blacks still attached, in some fashion, to the flat, broad, open fields. This lingering sense of obligation did not shield blacks from the many insults and dangers of life under Jim Crow. The sharecropping system was notorious for cheating the laborers, black and white, out of their fair share of the profits, and the Delta was far from free of racial violence. The Delta, after all, witnessed in 1954 the birth of the White Citizens’ Council and a year later the kidnapping and murder of young

Emmett Till as punishment for his flirting with a married white woman. Belief in a benevolent system may have been prevalent in the Delta, but so was the harsh reality of life for Southern blacks.

Nevertheless, blacks received marginally better treatment from whites in the Delta than elsewhere in Mississippi, thanks to the white elite and its belief in noblesse oblige. Members of the Delta’s patrician families — the old plantation landowners — distanced themselves from

168 lower class whites, and they looked disapprovingly on those who engaged in racial cruelty. In trying to define the planters as better people, they tolerated more liberal views toward blacks than was common in much of the Deep South. This was not entirely altruistic, as the Delta historically suffered a lack of adequate labor, and plantation owners in the years after the

Confederate defeat learned that they had to avoid the violence of their antebellum ways or risk losing the cooperation of black sharecroppers and tenant families vital to their enterprises.

Even in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when farm mechanization was well under way, landowners relied on the work of “hands,” as they referred to the black and white farm workers. White violence and terror could trigger another wave of migration north, leaving the

126 plantation owners, once again, in a labor crisis.

Ironically, the greatest benefit of this Delta attitude fell on whites themselves. Whites in the Delta were, relatively speaking, less confined in what they could say and think than were whites elsewhere in the state. Because the ruling elite set a standard of tolerance, other whites could follow suit. This was true of journalists, and this explains why the Delta, despite its reputation as the “most Southern place on Earth,” harbored a small collection of moderate newspapers. The Advertiser in Lexington, the Press-Register in Clarksdale and, most famously,

Hodding Carter’s Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville were moderate voices in a time of racial orthodoxy. These papers did not cry for great racial change — such views might threaten the

Delta patricians — but they did argue for sanity and compassion in race relations. The moderation of these newspapers reflected well on the Delta and on its leaders, who, while not entirely comfortable with the newspapers’ editorials, took satisfaction in their own tolerance of a strong press. The Delta was deeply agricultural, profoundly isolated, scarred by poverty and meager in opportunities. The voices in the moderate press supported the notion that the Delta was a better place, a more civilized and sophisticated place. Tolerating moderate points of view was an acceptable price to pay for that flattering sense of geography, and so the elite did not

127 press for strict conformity.

169 This is not to say that it was easy being a moderate editor in Mississippi, in the Delta or elsewhere. The sense of tolerance was not universal, even among the leading families, and it did not extend far down the class lines. Anyone who spoke in a liberal tone was certain to catch heat, and there was always the threat of violence. “If I get a chance,” Bryon de la Beckwith once

128 said after reading Carter’s paper, “I’ll kill him.” A few years later, the angry loner drove down from the Delta to Jackson and ambushed the NAACP’s Medgar Evers. Beckwith just as easily could have directed his rage at Carter or other perceived traitors to white supremacy. Though

Carter escaped Beckwith’s killing urge, he and other moderate editors were well aware of his kind and the role they played in keeping Southern opinion leaders right on race.

Despite such dangers, some Delta editors felt the pull of noblesse oblige and responded to that tradition. This moderating impulse was lost, however, on the Hederman family and its editors. The Hedermans came from another region, the Piney Woods, with different ways of agriculture and different values. As a result, the Hedermans and the journalists under their hire were, in fact, hostile to the notion of noblesse oblige and the Delta’s landed elite it represented.

Mississippi, more than any other Southern state at midcentury, remained tied to the land, and the land continued to shape the state’s farming, politics, culture and views on race.

The Delta, in the northwest corner of Mississippi, had deep, fertile soil and broad expanses; it was defined by plantation agriculture, both in antebellum days and after, and had large numbers of black laborers. The Piney Woods, in the central part of the state, had poor, thin soil and rolling hills; it was ill-suited to agriculture of almost any kind, short of cutting timber or putting livestock to pasture. Farms were small and the farmers poor, and so whites had little need for black laborers. At the time of secession, fewer than 3 percent of whites in the Piney

Woods held slaves. Slavery was of such little consequence that the idea of secession, which triggered a fever throughout much of Mississippi, was coolly received in this part of the state.

In Jones County, in the heart of the Piney Woods, the majority of white men favored remaining in the Union, though they did their duty and enlisted in the military once the war broke out.

This pro-Union sentiment did not die easily, however, and during the war Jones County became

170 a hideout for deserters, including a few who became outlaws in rebellion against Confederate authority. The land, and the type of agriculture it produced, bent the Piney Woods economy away from slaveholding and shaped its politics in a similar way.129

The Hedermans came from this land and from this tradition, but they set themselves apart from both. Like most in the Piney Woods, they were not part of a great land-holding family, and they resented those who were. Their family made good through entrepreneurial endeavor, not through toiling the land. After all, the family patriarch, Martin Hederman, the man who lost his life in a fall while building a church steeple, had been a contractor, not a planter. His sons, Bertie and Tom, had moved to Jackson for the greater opportunities the city provided and to take advantage of family connections in the printing trade. There, the

Hedermans made themselves key players in Jackson’s booming years after World War II, growth that fed on the shift of population from the plowed fields to the city streets. Robert M.

Hederman Jr. and Thomas M. Hederman Jr., who guided the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson

Daily News during this expansion, were the sons of the brothers who made this transition from rural town to urban center. They were proud of their family’s prosperity and influence, which they viewed as hard-fought in the rough and tumble of the marketplace. Although the

Hedermans enjoyed the benefits of doing business through the ties of family and friends, they saw themselves as self-made men, and they were resentful and suspicious of others, such as the planters in the Delta, who came by their success through the advantage of inheritance. The

Hedermans were disdainful of the planter class, which they viewed as elitist and undeserving, and for the Delta notion of noblesse oblige the Hedermans held nothing but contempt.

With their roots in the Piney Woods, which had a relatively small black population, the

Hedermans might have been sympathetic to blacks, or at least not become advocates for their oppression. Whites who lived and worked in regions where blacks were scarce did not necessarily look kindly on integration — racial liberals were scarce in the South, under any circumstances — but sometimes they held views more tolerant and flexible than were found elsewhere. Because blacks were not significant components of their communities, these whites had little practical need of a harsh racial code — it was, it could be argued, unnecessary

171 baggage. In this sense, the Piney Woods background could have liberated the Hedermans by giving them some degree of freedom of thought on race relations. Instead, their lack of contact with black citizens and their disdain for noblesse oblige liberated them in an entirely different way: It provided a dangerous disconnect. The Hedermans felt no obligation toward black citizens of Mississippi. They saw no reason to treat African Americans with anything but scorn.

When, in 1962, Census Bureau data showed that the South was becoming less black and that many young African Americans were leaving Mississippi — a worrisome development for Delta planters, who to some extent still relied on black labor, even in a time of mechanization — the

Clarion-Ledger cheered the news as “A Population Trend Generally Beneficial.” “This,” the editors speculated, “will bring a more equitable national distribution of the South’s social,

130 economic, crime and health problems.” When the fire-breathing editor of the Charleston News and Courier, Thomas R. Waring Jr., argued for relocating blacks from the South to New Jersey, the Jackson Daily News was happy to give his editorial a reprint. These were but two of many instances in which the Hederman newspapers treated blacks not as fellow Mississippi citizens

131 but as outsiders unworthy of fair treatment and concern.

The Hedermans saw Mississippi as the white man’s land, and the white man’s land only, and the newspapers they came to control preached that gospel. The Clarion-Ledger and the

Jackson Daily News became the strongest segregationist voices in Southern journalism. When the White Citizens’ Councils emerged with a message of resistance draped in middle-class respectability, the Hederman press cheered them on, and when Barnett joined with the councils in a segregationist run for governor, the Hederman newspapers became eager allies without restraint.

This unbridled rhetorical aggression was given added license by the culture of the Cold

War. Superpower tensions had the nation on a constant state of alert in the late 1950s and early

1960s. Politicians, newspapers, magazines and television provided Americans with daily reminders of the Red threat. Civil defense preparations — duck-and-cover drills, for example —

172 kept citizens on edge. No American was unaware of the Free World vs. Communism struggle, and few resisted the duty to remain on guard against threats too vast to imagine.

In this curious way, America’s atomic nightmares were both a constant anxiety and a common bond. John F. Kennedy touched on this phenomenon in his inaugural address. “In the long history of the world,” the new president said, “only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.”132 Kennedy expressed the widely held belief that fighting the rise of Communism was what it meant to be an American and a citizen of the free world. This is what good Americans were called upon to do. The ramifications of this Cold War view were not lost on those formulating the South’s interpretation of duty and vigilance in its own war against integration. The Cold War and its fear of infiltration energized the South’s defenders of segregation and helped legitimize their suspicion of outsiders. These themes appeared many times in the Clarion-Ledger and Jackson

Daily News, and the editors and writers drew on the Cold War’s wariness of others to paint their critics in the North as untrustworthy and soft on Communism.

In December of 1961, Time warned its readers of what the magazine described as “the resurgence of ultraconservative anti-Communism.” The ultras, as Time called them, blended ardent Christianity with paranoia on the home front of the Cold War. “Appealing to the

American penchant for action,” Time observed, “they urge citizens to fight this subversion by keeping a close eye on their fellow citizens.” It found the ultras to be stern and unbending in their suspicion. “In everything that he finds displeasing in modern society and political life, the ultra sees evidence of Communist plots and subversion,” noted the Time article. “With a dogmatic either-or attitude, he broaches no disagreement.” The magazine quoted a variety of ultra notables, from Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina — “This war we’re in is basically a fight between the believers in a Supreme Being and the atheists” — to an executive with a California electronics company — “You’re either for us or against us; there’s no room in the middle any more.” Time cited no journalists among this collection of hard-core anti-

173 communists, but it could have found salient examples in the Southern press, and few among

133 them more ultra than the editors and writers of the Jackson newspapers.

The Time article noted that both President John F. Kennedy and his predecessor, Dwight

D. Eisenhower, had expressed alarm over the rise of “superpatriotism” and the fanaticism it invited. Ward, the Jackson Daily News editor, scoffed at such criticism. As he explained to his readers, “It is better to be labeled a ‘super-patriot’ than it is to swagger around as a fringe

American.”134 He and the other writers of the Hederman press strove to prove him right on a daily basis. The pages of the Jackson papers throbbed with the punch of anti-communism.

“Despite the mouthings of leftwing voices that there is no internal threat of communism,” wrote Ward on October 11, 1962, in his front-page column, “respected authorities in

Washington point to a massive espionage assault on the nation. Patriotic Mississippi groups and individuals who have been working to learn more of the Communist menace and how to cope with it are to be commended for their hard work and sacrifices.”135 In Mississippi, the Cold War

136 ran hot, indeed.

A collection of these tensions and anxieties — racial fears, class resentments, hyper- patriotism and Cold War diligence, regional pride, suspicion, Old South defiance and more — poured from the pages of the Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News as the days rushed toward late September and the opening of the fall semester at the University of Mississippi. Governor

Barnett’s promise to preserve the racial purity of state institutions— in 1962, no public schools or colleges were integrated in any way — steamed on a collision course with the federal courts and the Kennedy White House over whether the stoic James Meredith had a right to enroll. In his emotional television address Barnett had painted himself as a man who stood above compromise. As the Hedermans’ corps of opinion leaders rallied Ross to be strong and all but dared the governor to stand, Wallace-like, in the registrar’s door, the governor was repeatedly reminded of the public’s expectation of total resistance. “We know now how far Ross Barnett will go and how far he will not retreat,” stated Hederman writer Charles M. Hills.137 “Anyone will tell you that the governor ‘sawed the limb off behind him’ when he told the people ‘no negro

174 will enter the University of Mississippi so long as I am governor,’” Hills wrote in another column a few days later. “Therefore, Barnett must keep that promise in spite of all things, or, lose face.

At least, he must stop Negro Meredith at this time.”138 With every turn of the Hederman printing press, the governor’s options narrowed.

The newspapers pressured Barnett without relief, and brought in other voices as well to pile it on. The editors ran letters from individuals throughout the state and nation, all standing with Barnett. “Your magnificent decision as governor of the sovereign state of Mississippi to invoke the historic doctrine of interposition against enforcement of a federal court order to admit a Negro to Ole Miss has brought new hope to an oppressed people in all of these United

States,” wrote the executive director of the South Louisiana Citizens’ Council, in a September 18 letter.139 “By order of his Negro masters, Robert Kennedy has launched an evil ‘hate campaign’ against the people of Mississippi,” alleged a reader from Philadelphia, Mississippi, in a

September 10 letter. “It is a privilege to resist the evil that seeks to destroy an honorable way of life.”140 “Ross Barnett has proven himself to be the Patrick Henry of this crucial hour,” wrote a supporter from Memphis.141 “I am willing to stand up and be counted because I know that we are right spiritually, morally, and legally,” wrote a resident of Longview, Texas, who also drew parallels to the figure from colonial Virginia. “If standing up for this means the sacrifice of my life then I say that I only regret that I have one live to give…. This cancerous, communist, devil- inspired ultimatum must be stamped out completely if we are to survive.”142 “We are proud of you for standing up for our white liberty rights,” wrote a Florence, Mississippi, reader, apparently also inspired by the Virginia patriot, in a September 22 letter. “Do not let the Negro

James Meredith enter the University of Mississippi. Give us our white liberty or give us death.”143

Some of the words encouraging defiance without compromise came from unlikely sources. The Clarion-Ledger reprinted a paranoia-rich resolution approved by the members of

Harmony Baptist Church in Laurel, Mississippi.:

“Whereas, the peace and tranquility of our Southland is being destroyed by outside agitators and trouble makers … we believe, and are sure, that these outside agitators and trouble makers are communistically inspired…. Whereas, it has become increasingly evident that integration is not the end, or the goal, sought by these agitators and trouble makers, but is only a means to an end, that

175 end being the subjugation of a free people…. We do here and now prayerfully, solemnly and earnestly pledge our absolute and unwavering support in this hour of crisis to our Governor… Furthermore, we do here and now resolve that we shall NEVER … allow ourselves to be dominated by or subjugated to a centralized power and the tyranny of a power crazed administration regardless of the cost or the sacrifice such a stand may demand, so help us God.144

The Hederman newspapers were not alone in raging against integration of the University of Mississippi. In September of 1962, all but three of the state’s nineteen daily papers addressed the crisis in editorials (the Grenada Sentinel Star, the Gulfport Daily Herald and the

Natchez Democrat carried articles on the crisis but did not weigh in with commentary). Not suprisingly, the editorials supported resistance, and though a number of newspapers balked at

Barnett’s threat to close the state colleges, they heaped laurels on the governor. “Governor

Barnett’s shrine in American history is already sculpted,” wrote Greenwood Commonwealth editor Thatcher Walt, in an editorial typical of those published as excitement mounted statewide. “His unflinching stand on principle will be studied by school boys as long as there is a free United States.”145 A rare voice of criticism came from J.W. “Jay” West, editor of the Laurel

Leader Call, who cast a cold eye toward Barnett’s call for interposition: “Barnett is a lawyer by profession. He knew, or should have known, that the theory of interposition has been rejected by the courts since 1792.”146 In a similar vein, the Tupelo Daily Journal argued that it was futile to fight the federal government. “The young people of our state are being made pawns in the battle as thoughtless opposing forces rush toward the point of no return,” wrote editor Harry

Rutherford. “Nothing except disaster can now be achieved by pushing the issue past the explosion point.” The Tupelo paper also asked why the governor did not acknowledge the inevitable. “Governor Barnett is a good lawyer. He knows that no person, agency or state has ever been able to defy the authority of the government of the United States.”147 Such mild complaints against the governor’s lack of historical wisdom was hard to hear over the roar of approval coming from the Mississippi press. The Jackson papers drove the journalistic herd hard, and across the state editors labored to express a level of outrage sufficient to match the perceived injustice of federally ordered integration.

176 The strain of the crisis was not the governor’s alone. The prose of the Hederman staff revealed that stress had weakened the good judgment of the writers and editors. “Little Brother,” wrote columnist Ethridge, referencing Attorney General Robert Kennedy, “has evidently concluded that the South must be forced to abandon its customs and traditions in deference to

‘world opinion’ — especially that of Asiatic cow-worshippers and African semi-savages not far removed from cannibalism.”148 Even by the loose standards of 1960s journalism in Jackson, those were shocking words.

As the national press focused its attention on the growing crisis, the Clarion-Ledger and

Jackson Daily News writers grew defensive, and they portrayed any criticism of Barnett’s chosen path as an insult to the citizens of Mississippi. “Magazines and commentators have waged a vicious, constant assault against the law abiding people of courage,” complained a Jackson Daily

News editorial on September 19, 1962. “Rather than crushing men of spirit and red corpuscles, these slanderous articles have inspired us all to stand fast.” The editorial also warned its readers against anything less than “righteous indignation” in support of Barnett. “The solidarity of Mississippi cannot be questioned…. It is gratifying that an aroused public is not a thing of the past, that patriots do and will place their shoulders to the wheel when a just cause is understood.”149 At times the writers whipped up dark blends of conspiracy, victimhood and calls to action. “[I]t is not expected the blood-seeking Kennedy clan will let things rest as they are…,” wrote Hills of the Jackson Daily News. “Mississippi may be overrun, but there is no intention to surrender or give up fighting all the way.” Hills reported that the university encouraged students to be calm. “But we may sit atop a powder keg,” he warned, and then shouldered blame for any violence onto the White House. “The match is in the Kennedy hands.”150

Through editorials, columns, letters to the editor, highly charged news stories and other materials, the Hederman newspapers closed off consideration of any option but the unworkable

— adamant defiance of a federal court order to enroll Meredith and allow an African American student in the state university. The readers of the Jackson newspapers gained only one point of view — total resistance. As the deadline for Meredith’s enrollment drew near and the press

177 coverage reached levels of high energy and excitement, alternative points of view, always a scarce commodity on the Hederman pages, disappeared. The editors and writers wanted a showdown with the White House, and to build support for Barnett’s hard line — and to keep the governor himself from backing down — they turned their newspapers into full-blown organs of propaganda for the cause of resistance. No one dared venture onto the public square with anything but cheers for Barnett. No one offered an alternative to Barnett’s dead-end design.

Publicly, Barnett maintained a persona of iron-willed determination to prevent integration of the university. Privately, in the few remaining days before October 1, when

Meredith was to begin as a student, the governor engaged in a series of telephone calls with

Attorney General Robert Kennedy and ultimately with President Kennedy. The White House initiated the conversations as the president sought some way to meet his duty of enforcing the court order without turning Oxford into another Little Rock. The telephone calls taxed the patience of the Kennedys, who came to believe the Mississippi governor had no plan at all.

Throughout the discussions Barnett dodged commitment for clear action on his part, tried to defer decision-making to others, changed his mind on key points and sought delay after delay.

In one of several conversations on Saturday, September 29, the president, attorney general and the governor discussed what could happen when federal marshals brought

Meredith to campus. The Kennedys were concerned that a crowd might gather and trouble erupt. “And I’d like to get assurances from you that the state police down there will take positive action to maintain law and order,” President Kennedy told the governor. “Oh, they’ll do that,” Barnett said. “Then we’ll know what we have to do,” the president said. “They’ll, they’ll take positive action, Mr. President, to maintain law and order as best we can,” Barnett assured him. Apparently unconvinced, President Kennedy returned to the question a short time later on the call. “Well, now, as I understand it, Governor, you would do everything you can to maintain law and order,” he said. “I, I, I’ll do everything in my power to maintain order,” Barnett replied.

“Right,” said the president. “Now,” he continued, but Barnett interjected. “And peace,” the governor said. “We don’t want any shooting down here.” The president said he understood, but asked again for a commitment. “Now, Governor, what about, can you maintain this order?”

178 “Well,” said Barnett, “I don’t know.” “Yes,” said President Kennedy, perhaps at a loss for words.

“That’s what I’m worried about, you see,” offered Barnett. “I don’t know whether I can or not.”151

To the Kennedys, the conversations presaged trouble. Barnett had given little thought to how the drama would end, and he resisted efforts to set a deliberate course through the coming days. The Kennedys themselves underestimated the resentment held by the people of

Mississippi and put too much trust in local authorities to take decisive action. In the meantime, leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and other reactionary groups as far away as Florida spoke of coming to Oxford to thwart what they considered an invasion of the South. Rallying the right- wingers was Edwin Walker, a former major general forced out of the Army after troops under his command complained he tried to indoctrinate them with propaganda and enlist them in extremist causes. Walker, who in 1957 had directed the 101st Airborne in its mission to protect the Little Rock Nine, was by 1962 showing signs of possible mental illness and extreme paranoia — he named Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman as suspected Communist sympathizers. Nevertheless, he was popular among the ultra patriots, and he arranged a number of radio interviews in which he called like-minded individuals to Oxford. “We have listened and we have been pushed around by the anti-Christ Supreme Court,” the Texan told a station in Louisiana. “It’s time to rise. To make a stand behind Governor Ross Barnett…. Rally to the cause of freedom…. Bring your flag, your tent and your skillet.”152 Walker came to Oxford on

September 29, and organizations throughout the South pledged to bring hundreds of volunteers to be at the general’s side.153

Anticipating trouble but believing they were prepared, federal authorities arrived in

Mississippi on Sunday morning, September 30, intent on spiriting Meredith onto the campus in

Oxford in quiet fashion and standing by as he enrolled to begin his studies. Later that day, a sizeable contingent of federal marshals arrived at Ole Miss and took up around the administration building, known as the Lyceum, to protect Meredith as he registered. University officials, however, changed the plan and said Meredith would enroll Monday morning. The marshals then served little purpose — Meredith had not yet arrived — but drew considerable attention, and a crowd of students slowly gathered. White House aides eased Meredith into a

179 dorm room without incident, and the federal delegation and the marshals prepared to settle in until morning. They never got the chance.154

Darkness brought a greater number of students to the Lyceum, and non-students joined the growing crowd, which began taunting the marshals and pelting them with small rocks and coins. The crowd grew agitated and hurled bottles and bricks at the marshals. Some students broke windows in the federal cars and trucks. As harassment mounted, the Mississippi State

Highway Patrol officers fell away, declining to assist the federal authorities or joining in with the students and others. At one point, Walker, the former major general, arrived. Tall and wearing a Stetson hat, he drew attention, and students who recognized him gathered around, expecting him to lead them in an assault. Walker declined the invitation but offered words of encouragement. Conditions worsened, and at 8 p.m. the marshals fired their first volley of tear gas. The crowd responded with anger and greater violence, and the situation, already perilous, spun out of control. The crowd, now in a riot, used cars, a stolen fire truck and a bulldozer as weapons against the marshals. As the night wore on the students thinned out but the crowd swelled with outsiders. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail, and others in the crowd began shooting at the Lyceum and the beleaguered marshals. Dozens of marshals were injured, one badly so. The White House ordered in the National Guard and, as the riot continued, Army troops, and they eventually cleared the campus. By morning, the university was littered with wrecked vehicles, and the Lyceum was pocked with damage. Two men were dead. A British journalist covering the crisis for a French publication was found shot in the back, and a local man who came to the campus out of curiosity took a random bullet to the forehead and died on the way to the hospital. Meredith, who was unaware of the events that night, got up early, dressed in a suit and tie and headed to the Lyceum. By 9 a.m., he was a student of the

University of Mississippi. He graduated on August 19, 1963. On his last day of class, he clipped to his lapel one of the “Never” buttons popular in Oxford during the fight against his enrollment a year earlier. Meredith wore it proudly, upside down.155

The world felt upside in Jackson after Meredith shattered the resistance and became a student at Ole Miss. The political establishment in the Capitol reeled with confusion and denial,

180 and the staff in the newsrooms of the Clarion-Ledger and Jackson Daily News seethed with resentment. Their dream of white triumph and glory had ended in another Lost Cause. The editors and writers of the Hederman newspapers might have paused for reflection and prepared their audiences for a fresh consideration of the changing South, but they would not be reconstructed. Instead, they used bitter, sometimes reckless, language as they encouraged their readers to consider themselves martyrs as they await the next chance to do battle. There was no need to change, no reason to adapt to new rules of what is right and fair. Hills’ assessment of the diminished state of white privilege was the most offensive. “Mississippi’s leadership and the legislature have fought down to the last battle line and, as expected, are at least temporarily defeated…,” he wrote on October 4, 1962. “So, watch the peace-lovers come to the fore, grab a nigger-neck and start bellowing brotherly love. For us … we’ll just go on being a bigot, a reactionary, a rebel and lick our wounds, till the next fight starts, and, plan to win somehow. We are licked but not beaten!”156

Ward characterized the decisions of the White House, which in reality were reached to enforce a court order, as a scheme to humiliate the South. “The ugly incident shows again the extremes to which racial agitators will go to achieve a propaganda goal to embarrass a decent, law-abiding people, patriotic Americans who have the intelligence to detect their diabolical designs…,” he wrote in a Jackson Daily News editorial of October 2, 1962. “Meanwhile, when it comes to supporting those customs and traditions which produced a tranquil society for us all that fight has just begun.”157

The governor and all of the state’s political leaders took similar positions of denial and bitterness. Barnett, who had reluctantly joined in talks with the White House as the president tried to avoid conflict and who had contributed little more than confusion and frustration to those discussions, was decisive in determining fault for the violence. He laid the blame on the president and attorney general. “In this matter the federal government has been the aggressor from the outset…,” he asserted in an evening television address the day after the riot. “The responsibility for this unwarranted breach of the peace and violence in Mississippi rests directly with the president of the United States. He ordered the armed forces to invade Mississippi and

181 their actions were directly responsible for violence, bloodshed and death.”158 Barnett was equally unrepentant when he returned to the TV screens the following night to speak of indignation. “Word comes to me from every section of Mississippi of the deep concern and deep anger and resentment that is in the hearts of all our people at this hour,” he told his statewide audience. “I join with you in resenting and deploring the present situation with every fiber of my body.” As Barnett continued, he returned to the tone of defiance that inflamed his comments in the run up to the Ole Miss crisis. “Fellow Mississippians, let all have courage and faith,” he said. “Join with me in the determination that we shall, in the end, attain victory. Right will most certainly prevail … we shall peacefully maintain our integrity and sovereignty.” How the state was to achieve a victory the governor did not say. This latest address was a fitting bookend to Barnett’s earlier call for resistance. Both were pieces of fantasy born of ego and grown large on the feast of encouraging words from the Hederman newspapers.

Fantasy and self-serving delusion ran rich through the newsrooms, too. Ward, responding to criticism in Newsweek of the Mississippi press during the Ole Miss crisis, gave this bit of blindness in response: “Mississippi newspaper people are accustomed to criticism, for this is one of the last remaining bastions of free expression of thought on editorial pages and a beachhead of honor where reporters continue sincere and conscientious efforts to report unshellacked facts on happenings of the day — news accounts without sociological goo crammed between the lines.”159

The true work of Mississippi papers, like those throughout the South, was nothing of the sort. Routinely, and with few exceptions, the Southern white press made ample use of the

Southern style. Jimmy Ward’s Jackson Daily News and its sister publication, the Clarion-Ledger, provided salient examples of how the Southern style operated on a daily basis. Ward and Purser

Hewitt, along with Charles M. Hills and Tom Ethridge, worked diligently to present Southern ideology morning and evening. The articles written by the newspapers’ reporters were also part of the daily dogma dissemination. As a result, the Jackson community was saturated with the ideas and arguments of Jim Crow segregation and the Southern political machinery. The letters

182 to the editor reflected this well. Everyday citizens matched the politicians and the opinion leaders in doctrinaire arguments.

The editors and writers of the Hederman newspapers also made thorough use of the blind eye, to an astonishing degree. The neighborhoods of Jackson and the rural communities surrounding the capital provided abundant evidence of the unfair conditions of Jim Crow segregation, yet Ward, Hewitt, Hills and Ethridge saw only examples of lives poorly led. They turned a blind eye to poverty and inadequate education. They saw only crime and low virtues.

Harsh discrimination, injustice and daily humiliations were, to the eyes in the newsrooms, just customs and traditions of the Southern way of life. It is hard to report the “unshellacked facts” when you choose not to see. The record of the Hederman press shows this amply well.

Just as the Hederman journalists worked to propagate Southern dogma, they also acted to ensure those ideas and concepts were the only currency available for exchange. Mississippi suffered greatly as a result, in the crisis over the integration of Ole Miss and in countless other ways. Mississippi and other Southern states had many issues that merited attention and many problems that needed to be addressed. Progress requires solutions, but progress in Mississippi and the South came slowly, or in fits and starts, because solutions were often hard to come by.

The public square, where ideas are offered, debated, endorsed or rejected, was often little more than an empty alley, a dead end. Policing the public square of alternative ideas and threating concepts, which the Hederman press did so well, served the South’s political system, but it failed the South itself.

“As the century turned,” wrote journalist Harry Ashmore in 1958 in An Epitaph for Dixie,

“a shrinking world began to pull the South back into the mainstream of history. An era of accelerating progress in communications brought the automobile, which made the most remote farm a suburb of the city, and spread newspapers and magazines away from the rail lines.

Voices, and then pictures, began coming in through the air, and ideas and concepts reached

Southerners direct, without first passing through the filter of their own leadership.”160 Ashmore

was too generous to the South and Southern journalism. The Hederman press and other

Southern newspapers worked reliably, and at times feverishly, to thwart this change and to

183 preserve this filter of the status quo. The Southern style enabled journalists to hold change at bay, while it handicapped the communities the journalists sought to serve.

1 Transcript of Statewide TV-Radio Talk to the People of Florida on Race Relations, Gov. LeRoy Collins, delivered over statewide TV-radio network, March 20, 1960, University of South Florida, Tampa Campus Library, Collins Papers, Box 19, Radio Television, p. 2.

2 WTOP Editorial transcript, March 23, 1960, University of South Florida, Tampa Campus Library, Collins Papers, Box 19, Radio Television, p. 1.

3 John L. Perry, aide to Gov. LeRoy Collins, letter to John Popham, Chattanooga Daily Times, April 6, 1960, LeRoy Collins Archives, Robert Manning Strozier Library, Florida State University; Martin A. Dyckman, Floridian of His Century: The Courage of Governor LeRoy Collins (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), pp. 196-197; Tom Wagy, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida: Spokesman of the New South (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1985), pp. 138-139.

4 Wagy, Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida, p. 196; Dyckman, Floridian of His Century, pp. 250-251.

5 James W. Silver, “Mississippi: The Closed Society,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 30, no. 1 (February 1964), pp. 7, 33.

6 The Rev. Ed King, interview by author, Jackson, Miss., April 16, 1999. Tape recording.

7 Thomas Buckley, “Football Diverts College’s Fervor,” New York Times, Sept. 30, 1962, p. 66.

8 “Centennial at Oxford, Miss.,” New York Times, Sept. 27, 1962, p. 36. 9 “Armed Camp at Oxford,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 1962, p. 32.

10 “The Law Must Prevail,” New York Times, Sept. 29, 1962, p. 22.

11 “Alabama Newspaper Bids Barnett Abandon Course,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 1962, p. 22.

12 “Memphis Newspaper Denounces Barnett’s Stand,” New York Times, Sept. 29, 1962, p. 9.

13 “Crisis in Mississippi Is Big News Abroad,” United Press International, New York Times, Sept. 29, 1962, p. 1.

14 Edmund Noel, “U.S. Changes Mind On Fourth Attempt,” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 28, 1962, p. 1.

15 Charles M. Hills, “Ross Halts Negro For Second Time,” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 26, 1962, p. 1.

16 Kay McCaleb, letter to the editor, Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 29, 1962, p. 6.

17 Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), pp. 657-661.

184

18 Phil Wallace, “Ross Cheered, New State Song Sung At Big Game,” Clarion- Ledger/Jackson Daily News, Sept. 30, 1962, p. 6A; Buckley, “Football Diverts College’s Fervor,” New York Times, Sept. 30, 1962, p. 66; Branch, Parting the Waters (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 659.

19 James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 119.

20 Walter Lord, The Past That Would Not Die (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 191.

21 Waldo W. Braden, “The Rhetoric of a Closed Society,” Southern Speech Communication Journal, vol. 45, no. 4 (summer 1980), p. 334.

22 A. Wigfall Green, The Man Bilbo (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1963), p. 23; Adam Nossiter, Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers (New York: Addison Wesley Publishing Co., 1994), p. 86; Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989; Illini Books edition, 1990), p. 235.

23 McMillen, Dark Journey, pp. 120, 232.

24 Green, The Man Bilbo, illustration no. 5, following p. 50.

25 Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-1964 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971; Illini Books edition, 1994), p. 181.

26 McMillen, Dark Journey, pp. 305-306.

27 Green, The Man Bilbo, p. 91.

28 John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994; Illini Books edition, 1995), p. 2.

29 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955; 3d. rev. ed., 1974), pp. 41-42; McMillen, Dark Journey, p. 5.

30 Albert D. Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks: Mississippi Politics, 1876-1925 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press; reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 59, 69; Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, pp. 82-83; McMillen, Dark Journey, pp. 333.

31 Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks, p. 72; McMillen, Dark Journey, pp. 46, 43.

32 Kirwan, Revolt of the Rednecks, pp. 76, 131.

33 McMillen, Dark Journey, pp. 232, 234, 251-252.

34 McMillen, Dark Journey, pp. 200-206.

35 McMillen, Dark Journey, p. 240, 239.

36 William F. Winter, interview by author, April 17, 1999. Tape recording.

185

37 Elise Winter, interview by author, April 17, 1999. Tape recording.

38 William F. Winter, interview by author; McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, p. 326; Erle Johnson, I Rolled With Ross: A Political Portrait (n.p.: Moran Publishing, 1980), p. 23.

39 Benjamin Muse, Ten Years of Prelude: The Story of Integration Since the Supreme Court’s 1964 Decision (New York: Viking Press, 1964), p. 42.

40 Muse, Ten Years of Prelude, p. 43; McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, p. 334.

41 Dittmer, Local People, pp. 45-46; McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, pp. 26, 258; Muse, Ten Years of Prelude, pp. 47-48; State of Mississippi Sovereignty Commission Files, “Ward, Jimmy,” document no. 9-11-1-11-1-1-1, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson.

42 McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, pp. 336-337, 38-39; William F. Winter, interview by author; Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society, p. 8.

43 Rims Barber, interview by author, April 17, 1999. Tape recording.

44 Nossiter, Of Long Memory, pp. 97-99, 236. Nadine Cohodas, The Band Played Dixie Race and the Liberal Conscience at Ole Miss (New York: The Free Press, 1997), p. 121; Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society, p. 40.

45 Barber, interview by author; Nossiter, Of Long Memory, p. 97.

46 Jerry Mitchell, “Jackson Papers Were Tools of Spy Commission,” Clarion-Ledger, Jan. 28, 1990, p. 1I; Dittmer, Local People, p. 60.

47 Memo, John D. Sullivan, March 8, 1964, Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, Sovereignty Commission Online, p. 2, SCR I.D. No. 3-74A-0-8-2-1-1, Mississippi Department of History, mdah.state.ms.us/arrec/digital_archives/sovcom.

48 Robert M. Hederman Jr., The Hederman Story: A Saga of the Printed Word in Mississippi (New York: The Newcomen Society in North America, 1966), pp. 8, 14.

49 Hederman, The Hederman Story, pp. 8-10.

50 Hederman, The Hederman Story, pp. 10-14; James T. Sellers, “A History of the Jackson State Times: An Agent of Change in a Closed Society” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern Mississippi, 1992), p. 12.

51 Hederman, The Hederman Story, pp. 12-14; Sellers, “A History of the Jackson State Times,” 12.

52 Hederman, The Hederman Story, pp. 12-14; Sellers, “A History of the Jackson State Times,” 13.

53 Hederman, The Hederman Story, pp. 16-17.

54 Hederman, The Hederman Story, pp. 16, 21; Sellers, “A History of the Jackson State Times,” pp. 40-43.

186

55 “A New Beginning,” editorial, Jackson State Times, Feb. 28, 1955, p.1, quoted in Sellers, “A History of the Jackson State Times,” p. 71.

56 Sellers, “A History of the Jackson State Times,” p. 71; David Halberstam, The Children (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 721; Dittmer, Local People, p. 74; Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society, pp. 349-350.

57 Tim Adams, “Mississippian Burning with a Passion for Books,” The Observer, April 2, 1995, review section, p. 4; “T.M. Hederman, 73, a Longtime Editor in Southern Capital,” New York Times, Jan. 8, 1985, p. 6B; Bill Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer: A Paper, A Family,” Washington Post, April 25, 1983, p. 1A; Kathy Lally, “A Journey from Racism to Reason,” Baltimore Sun, Jan. 5, 1997, p. 2A.

58 Dittmer, Local People, p. 65.

59 John Ray Skates, “Fred Sullens: Bourbon Out of His Time,” Journal of Mississippi History, vol. 45, no. 2 (May 1987), p. 93.

60 Editorial page, Jackson Daily News, May 2, 1954, p. 10; Frederick Sullens, “The Low Down on the Higher Ups,” Jackson Daily News, May 19, 1954, p. 1.

61 Julian Williams, “Percy Greene and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission,” Journalism History, vol. 28, no. 2 (Summer 2002), p. 67.

62 “A Parson’s Jackassery,” Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News, Dec. 18, 1955, sec. 4, p. 2.

63 John R. Skates Jr., “Fred Sullens and Prohibition,” Journal of Mississippi History, vol. xxix, no. 2 (1967), p. 85.

64 Ibid, p. 90.

65 Ibid, p. 94.

66 O.B. Emerson, “William Faulkner’s Nemesis — Major Frederick Sullens,” Journal of Mississippi History, vol. XXXVI, no. 2, May 1974, p. 162.

67 Purser Hewitt, interview by John Ray Skates and Orley B. Caudill, May 3, 1972, and Aug. 28, 1975, vol. 10, 1976, transcript, Mississippi Oral History Program, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, p. 4.

68 Skates, “Fred Sullens: Bourbon Out of His Time,” Journal of Mississippi History, vol. 45, no. 2 (May 1987), pp. 93, 94, 97-100, 102-103.

69 Weill, “In a Madhouse’s Din,” p. 72-73; Halberstam, The Children, p. 721; McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, p. 258.

70 Weill, “In a Madhouse’s Din,” p. 85; “Bloodstains on White Marble Steps,” editorial, Jackson Daily News, May 18, 1954, p. 1.

71 “Bloodstains on White Marble Steps,” editorial, Jackson Daily News, May 18, 1954, p. 1.

72 King, interview by author.

187

73 King, interview by author.

74 Sellers, “A History of the Jackson State Times,” pp. 14-18, 36; John R. Tisdale, “‘Don’t Stone Her Until You See Her Side’: New England Editors and the Sovereignty Commission’s Public Relations Campaign of 1956,” Journal of Mississippi History, vol. LXIV, no. 3 (Fall 2002), p. 175.

75 Hewitt, interview transcript, Mississippi Oral History Program, University of Southern Mississippi, pp. 1, 31, 38, 71, 74, 76.

76 Purser Hewitt, “Hew-itt to the Line,” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 20, 1962, p. 12A.

77 Jerry DeLaughter, “Cheering Throngs Greet Miss America Aspirants,” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 5, 1962, p. 1; DeLaughter, “Ohio Beauty Wins Contest,” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 9, 1962, p. 1; DeLaughter, “‘Charlie’ Coming Home to be Miss Mississippi,” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 10, 1962, p. 1; “A Winner Already,” photo caption, Jackson Daily News, Sept. 6, 1962; “Charlotte’s Cheering Section,” editorial, Jackson Daily News, Sept. 7, 1962; Nossiter, Of Long Memory, p. 85.

78 William F. Winter, interview by author.

79 “Voice of the People,” Clarion-Ledger, May 24, 1954, p 6A.

80 “Voice of the People,” Clarion-Ledger, March 26, 1962, p. 10A.

81 Memo, John D. Sullivan, March 8, 1964, Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, Sovereignty Commission Online, p. 3, SCR I.D. No. 3-74A-0-8-4-1-1, Mississippi Department of History, mdah.state.ms.us/arrec/digital_archives/sovcom; Yasuhiro Katagiri, The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States’ Rights (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), p. 149.

82 “Voice of the People,” Clarion-Ledger, March 28, 1962, p. 12A.

83 “Readers’ Viewpoint,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 6, 1962, p. 10A.

84 “Readers’ Viewpoint,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 8, 1962, p. 6A.

85 “Readers’ Viewpoint,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 12, 1962, p. 8A.

86 “Readers’ Viewpoint,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 15, 1962, p. 6A.

87 “Readers’ Viewpoint,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 10, 1962, p. 10A.

88 “Readers’ Viewpoint,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 11, 1962, p. 8A.

89 “Voice of the People,” Clarion-Ledger, March 17, 1962, p. 4A.

90 “Voice of the People,” Clarion-Ledger, May 22, 1954, p. 6A.

91 “Readers’ Viewpoint,” Jackson Daily News, Oct. 4, 1962, p. 7A.

92 “Voice of the People,” Clarion-Ledger, Dec. 20, 1955, sec. 1, p. 10.

93 “Voice of the People,” Clarion-Ledger, Dec. 24, 1955, sec. 1, p. 6.

188

94 Ibid.

95 Memo, Sovereignty Commission Director, Tougaloo College Report (No. 1), March 10, 1964, Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, Sovereignty Commission Online, SCR I.D. Nos. 99-143-0-1-1-1-1, 99-143-0-1-1-2-1, 99-143-0-1-1-3-1, Mississippi Department of History, mdah.state.ms.us/arrec/digital_archives/sovcom; Katagiri, The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States’ Rights, pp. 153-157.

96 “‘Sowing the Seeds of Discontent’: Tougaloo College’s Social Science Forums as a Prefigurative Movement Free Space, 1952-1964,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 39, no. 6 (July 2009), pp. 866, 869-871.

97 Memo, Zack J. Van Landingham, Oct. 9, 1958, Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, Sovereignty Commission Online, SCR I.D. Nos. 1-3-0-1-1-1-1, 1-3-0-1-1-2-1, 1-3-0-1- 1-3-1, Mississippi Department of History, mdah.state.ms.us/arrec/digital_archives/sovcom.

98 Letter, Lamar T. Loe, Director of Investigations, Louisiana State Sovereignty Commission, Feb. 23, 1961, Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, Sovereignty Commission Online, SCR I.D. No. 1-3-0-8-1-1-1, Mississippi Department of History, mdah.state.ms.us/arrec/digital_archives/sovcom.

99 “Voice of the People,” Clarion-Ledger, Dec. 2, 1955, p. 8.

100 Tom Ethridge, “Mississippi Notebook: Dr. Borinski Preaches in the Wrong Pulpit,” Clarion-Ledger, Dec. 5, 1955, sec. 1, p. 12.

101 “Voice of the People,” Clarion-Ledger, Dec. 8, 1955, sec. 1, p. 16.

102 “Voice of the People,” Clarion-Ledger, Dec. 13, 1955, p. 12.

103 “Work In Mix Fight Urged By Governor,” Clarion-Ledger, March 17, 1962, p. 3.

104 Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), pp. 208-209.

105 Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society, p. 114.

106 Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society, p. 137; James W. Loewen and Charles Sallis., eds., Mississippi: Conflict and Change (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), p. 263.

107 “Text of Governor’s Statewide Address,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 14, 1962, p. 1A.

108 “Text of Governor’s Statewide Address,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 14, 1962, p. 1A.

109 “Text of Governor’s Statewide Address,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 14, 1962, p. 6A.

110 “Text of Governor’s Statewide Address,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 14, 1962, p. 6A.

111 “Text of Governor’s Statewide Address,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 14, 1962, p. 6A.

112 “Barnett During And After Broadcast,” photo caption, Jackson Daily News, Sept. 14, 1962.

189

113 “All But Smith Support Ross,” Associated Press, Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 15, 1962, pp. 1, 10; “House Backs Governor, 130-2; Coleman Supports Action,” no byline, Jackson Daily News, Sept. 18, 1962, p. 1; “Israel Punished for Intermarriage,” “Time That Someone Said No To Feds,” “Stable Decision, Calmly Outlined,” letters to the editor, Jackson Daily News, Sept. 18, 1962, p. 3.

114 “Barnett Is Exactly Correct; Schools Are State Business,” editorial, Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 14, 1962, p. 1; “We Support Gov. Barnett,” editorial, Jackson Daily News, Sept. 14, 1962, p. 1; “United We Stand,” editorial, Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 17, 1962, p. 1.

115 Gene Wirth, “Humble Plowboy Grown Up: Place Assured In History For Fearless Ross Barnett,” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 15, 1962, p. 1; Lord, The Past That Would Not Die, p. 141.

116 Erle Johnston, I Rolled With Ross: A Political Portrait (np: Moran Publishing, 1980), pp. 124, 78; Florence Sillers Ogden, “Dis An’ Dat: Pat on Back For Ross, Who Stood For Principles,” Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News, Sept. 16, 1962, p. 6B; Ogden, “Dis An’ Dat: “Ross Is 10 Feet Tall; Adams Family Celebrates,” Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News, Sept. 23, 1962, p. 11A; Ethridge, “Mississippi Notebook,” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 15, 1962, p. 8.

117 Sullens, “The Lowdown on the Higher Ups,” Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News, Dec. 18, 1955, sec. 1, p. 1.

118 Wirth, “South’s Black and White Christmas Still the Best,” Clarion-Ledger, Dec. 25, 1955, p. 1, sec. 4.

119 Hills, “Affairs of State,” Clarion-Ledger, Dec. 29, 1955, p. 8, sec. 1.

120 “Memo to Racial Agitators,” editorial, Clarion-Ledger, Dec. 29, 1955, p. 8, sec. 1.

121 Ethridge, “Mississippi Notebook,” Clarion-Ledger, Dec. 28, 1955, p. 3, sec. 1.

122 Hills, “Affairs of State: State Stand is United,” Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News, Sept. 30, 1962, p. 7B.

123 Jimmy Ward, “Covering the Crossroads,” Jackson Daily News, Oct. 13, 1962, p. 1A.

124 Ibid.

125 George Fitzhugh, “Southern Thought,” De Bow’s Review, XXIII (1857), quoted in Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830- 1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 283.

126 John. M. Barry, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 104; John C. Willis, Forgotten Time: The Yazoo- Mississippi Delta after the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 149.

127 Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society, p. 297; James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. vii.

128 Nossiter, Of Long Memory, p. 124.

190

129 Rudy H. Leverett, Legend of the Free State of Jones (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984), p. 37, 40.

130 “A Population Trend Generally Beneficial,” Clarion-Ledger, April 6, 1962, p. 10.

131 “Testing Area For Relocation,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 21, 1962, p. 6A.

132 “Text of Kennedy’s Inaugural Outlining Policies on World Peace and Freedom,” New York Times, Jan. 21, 1961, p. 8.

133 “Organizations: The Ultras,” Time, Dec. 8, 1961, p. 22.

134 Ward, “Covering the Crossroads,” Jackson Daily News, March 5, 1962, p. 1A.

135 Ward, “Covering the Crossroads,” Jackson Daily News, Oct. 11, 1962, p. 1A.

136 “Organizations: The Ultras,” Time, Dec. 8, 1961, p. 24.

137 Charles M. Hills, “Ross Sets State Plan,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 16, 1961, p. 3B.

138 Hills, “Affairs of State,” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 19, 1962, p. 5A.

139 “Readers’ Viewpoint: Front Line of State’s Defense,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 18, 1962, p. 4A.

140 “Readers’ Viewpoint: Bombard Senators With Sentiments,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 18, 1962, p. 4A.

141 “Readers’ Viewpoint: Bombard Senators With Sentiments,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 18, 1962, p. 4A.

142 “Readers’ Viewpoint: No Sacrifice Too Difficult to Bear,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 18, 1962, p. 4A.

143 “Readers’ Viewpoint: Proud of Barnett For State Defense,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 22, 1962, p. 6A.

144 “Laurel Church Supports Barnett in Resolution,” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 19, 1962, p. 3A.

145 Susan Weill, In a Madhouse's Din: Civil Rights Coverage by Mississippi's Daily Press, 1948-1968 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2002), p. 83.

146 Weill, In a Madhouse's Din, p. 85.

147 Weill, In a Madhouse's Din, p. 87.

148 Ethridge, “Mississippi Notebook,” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 19, 1962, page 6A.

149 “Mississippi Stands Unified,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 19, 1962, p. 10A.

150 Hills, “Ross Sets State Plan,” Jackson Daily News, Sept. 16, 1961, p. 3B.

191

151 Jonathan Rosenberg and Zachary Karabell, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003), pp. 40-44.

152 William Doyle, An American Insurrection: James Meredith and the Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962 (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 96-98.

153 Charles W. Eagles, The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 329-331.

154 Ibid, pp. 347-352.

155 Ibid, pp. 353-357, 360-371, 421; Frank Lambert, The Battle of Ole Miss: Civil Rights vs. States’ Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 146.

156 Charles W Eagles, “‘The Fight for Men’s Minds’: The Aftermath of the Ole Miss Riot of 1962,” Journal of Mississippi History, vol. 71, no. 1 (2009), p. 8; Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society, p. 125.

157 “Federal Force Brings Chaos,” Jackson Daily News, Oct. 2, 1962, p. 6A.

158 Charles M. Hills, “Barnett Calls Use of Force Inflammatory,” Clarion-Ledger, Oct. 2, 1962, pp.1, 21.

159 Ward, “Covering the Crossroads,” Jackson Daily News, Oct. 16, 1962, p.1A.

160 Harry Ashmore, An Epitaph for Dixie (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1957, 1958), p. 16.

192 CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION

What of the liberals? The voices of the white South were overwhelmingly conservative in the 1950s and early 1960s, but liberals were at work in politics and the press. Most of those elected to office or holding positions as editors or publishers were natives of the South, and their upbringing was largely steeped in the same tea of conformity as their conservative colleagues. As a result, many of these voices were liberal only in comparison to other

Southerners who were fully comfortable with the ruling ideology. Having grown up in a segregated society, they were, with few exceptions, tolerant of racial discrimination though troubled by some aspects of its practice or enforcement. They were well aware of the elements of the Southern style — the reliance on the accepted dogma of politics and race, the use of the blind eye and the policing of the public square — and as liberals they felt its restraint, sometimes painfully.

A good example was Harry Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette, the editor who doggedly pushed Governor Orval Faubus to abide by the Brown decision and to obey the rulings of the federal courts. Ashmore was thoroughly Southern. Born in South Carolina, he had family roots in the state reaching back eight generations, and grandparents on both sides of his family fought for the Confederacy. He studied at Clemson Agricultural College and worked at his hometown newspaper in Greenville before joining the Charlotte News in North Carolina in 1940.

Like many Southern liberals, Ashmore spent time outside the South. He left the Charlotte News to study at Harvard under a Nieman Foundation fellowship, and then enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he served in Europe during World War II. He rejoined the newspaper as its editor after the war and in 1947, at age 31, moved to Little Rock to be editorial-page editor of the Arkansas

Gazette. He was recruited by J.N. Heiskell, the newspaper’s elderly owner and editor, who became a valuable ally once Ashmore took his stand during the crisis over school integration.1

Ashmore’s views on race relations were complicated. He anticipated the Brown decision and its implications for Southerners living in a culture bound by a tradition of segregation. He

193 knew that the South’s leadership would resist the ruling and social change, and in a 1951 address to the Southern Governors’ Conference, warned that a growing number of Americans supported civil-rights legislation. “The more we strike back in blind reaction to their demands, the more convinced they become that we are all misbegotten racists who will respond to nothing less than federal coercion,” he said. 2 The governors were shocked by his boldness, and an angry Herman Talmadge of Georgia left the room. Two years later, Ashmore took on the task of compiling facts and statistics on the South’s separate-but-equal system of education, a project conducted for the Fund for the Advancement of Education, part of the Ford

Foundation’s work. Working with dozens of researchers, he rushed to publication The Negro and the Schools, released on May 16, 1954, the day before the Supreme Court’s landmark decision. The book quickly became a resource for writers and others, and it made Ashmore a leading voice on the South and desegregation.3

Ashmore, however, did not advocate for integration. In his address to the Southern governors in 1951, he made this clear. “The practical problem before the South,” he said, “is to preserve social segregation while at the same time meeting the conditions of a Constitution and a national tradition which demand that full civil liberties and full equality of opportunity be extended to all citizens without discrimination.”4 Emphasis on the practical. Ashmore and many other Southern liberals in the era of civil rights saw the future as a defense of segregation based on practical accommodation of changes to the social rules, significant adjustments to the status quo but something less than a wholesale revision of the Southern way of life. For

Ashmore and others, this accommodation approach — often referred to as a gradual acceptance of integration — provided some degree of shelter from attacks coming from die-hard segregationists. At the same time, it handicapped their influence. They did not present the

South with a truly modern point of view, instead settling for a middle ground — segregation, but a supposedly fair and equitable version where separate schools truly were equal.

Sometimes the middle position on integration looked like wise shelter. When Faubus blocked integration of Little Rock’s Central High School and the Arkansas Gazette launched its relentless criticism of the governor, Ashmore took pains to note his support of segregation

194 while asserting that such personal convictions must stand down when in conflict with the law of the land. “Thus the issue is no longer segregation vs. integration,” he wrote in an editorial in the early days of the crisis. “The question now has become the supremacy of the government of the United States in all matters of law.”5 As Faubus’ resistance to integration dragged on, his allies in the White Citizens’ Council in Little Rock mounted a devastating boycott of the

Arkansas Gazette, and the newspaper suffered a 10 percent drop in circulation and a significant reduction in advertising. Ashmore later said Heiskell, the newspaper’s owner, lost millions of dollars as readers and advertisers shifted to the pages of the Little Rock’s Arkansas Democrat, the competing newspaper, which had not taken an editorial position against Faubus in the crisis.

Ashmore and Heiskell tried to stem the loss by asserting their convictions on the segregated

South. The newspaper “has never advocated integration,” they assured white readers in a front- page editorial, and “has never called for breaking down our segregation laws.” Heiskell repeated these assertions in an interview with Newsweek: “I’m not an integrationist — I’m a conservative.”

Nevertheless, the boycott continued. As other Southern liberals also learned, the middle ground provided scant cover in a South that believed it was under siege.6

Ashmore’s voice of reason in Little Rock earned him applause in the national press. He and the Arkansas Gazette won an unprecedented two Pulitzer prizes in 1958, one for his opinion writing and one for the newspaper’s coverage of the crisis. Ashmore’s 1957 book, An

Epitaph for Dixie, a sometimes frank, sometimes sentimental look at the South and the changes already taking place, was well received outside the South — it made the front page of the New

York Times Book Review — and he and Heiskell were awarded a string of honors for their steadfast fight for the rule of law. For Ashmore, however, the acclaim was not enough to keep him in Arkansas, where his time had proved exciting but frustrating. For all his efforts to educate the public about the governor’s pointless and reckless acts, Ashmore watched as

Faubus enjoyed broad support in Arkansas — he served six consecutive two-year terms and remained governor years after Little Rock Central High School became an international story in

1957. Ashmore’s middle-ground arguments had proved inadequate to penetrate the armor of the Southern ideology, had failed to convince Arkansas’ leaders to see the foolishness of their

195 resistance and had made the newspaper a vulnerable target for a punishing boycott. “I had become the personal devil of Governor Faubus and thought it was time to leave Arkansas,”

Ashmore said. He moved to California to work with the Center for the Study of Democratic

Institutions, supported by the Fund for the Republic, and to become editor in chief of the

Encyclopædia Britannica. He continued to write about the South, but he never again made it his home.7

Ashmore was not the only Southern liberal who left out of frustration. Ira B. Harkey Jr. was outspoken on civil rights throughout his 14 years at the helm of the Pascagoula Chronicle on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, and he was vilified for his unorthodox views. Harkey was the rare white Southerner who took a position against segregation, and he did so well before the Brown decision. The New Orleans native and World War II veteran purchased the newspaper in 1949 and quickly made it his own. He dropped all racial references — the Pascagoula Chronicle did not identify citizens as black or white in its coverage, a shift in newsroom practice that was decades ahead of other Southern newspapers — and ended racial segregation of obituaries, births and other lists. When the Brown decision came down, Harkey warned against resistance and stated again his belief that all citizens should be treated equally. “We were disappointed at the reaction of Mississippi’s top politicians, which was to call for immediate planning toward subverting the ruling,” he wrote in an editorial several days after the ruling. “If the principle of segregation is unconstitutional, it appears likely that any schemes rigged to perpetuate the principle would also be unconstitutional…. Democracy cannot exist when any blameless man receives from his state a lesser share of its bounty merely because of an involuntary and purely accidental physical characteristic.”8

Harkey followed with a number of editorials supporting the Brown decision. In response, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in the front yard of his home, and he and his newspaper became the talk of Mississippi. The paper survived the controversy and even thrived in ensuing years, and Harkey was awarded a Pulitzer prize for his courageous work. In 1962, Harkey again plunged headlong into conflict when he took on Governor Ross Barnett for his decision to block integration of the University of Mississippi. As was his fashion, Harkey railed against Barnett

196 and other state leaders, and his strident opinions were met with circulation and advertising boycotts and a number of death threats. Harkey’s editorial voice remained strong and outspoken, but he began searching for a way out of Mississippi, and the following summer he sold the Pascagoula Chronicle. The new owner, to Harkey’s surprise, joined with the segregationists. Harkey moved to Nevada, wrote a book on his experience as an outspoken advocate for racial equality and joined the journalism faculty at Ohio State University. Harkey’s legacy was of a determined moral crusader, but his record, as he acknowledged, showed little influence on policies and practices regarding race. For other Southern liberals, Harkey’s story proved a cautionary example, not a model for success.9

Other Southern liberals wrestled with the same challenges Ashmore faced in Little Rock and Harkey wrestled with in Pascagoula. They were often isolated — perhaps the only public liberal voices among whites in their communities. They faced a political structure built on an ideology opposed to social change, and they tried to persuade a public long practiced in the art of denial. They also risked strong criticism and social ostracism for their uncommon views.

Liberals persisted, but they took care with the ideas they embraced publicly. As a result, their influence was often muted.

The most successful white liberal in the Southern press was Ralph McGill, a columnist with the Atlanta Constitution (in time, he became the newspaper’s publisher). McGill had the advantage of time — he wrote about the South for decades — and location — Atlanta was already well on its way to becoming the capital of the South. Even so, McGill was careful with his arguments regarding racial discrimination. He chose to write about the effects of segregation on African Americans, but he did not, until the Brown decision, speak directly for an end to the practice. He still drew withering criticism from Georgia’s politicians and from the public. McGill also was pressured by the president of the newspaper to moderate his columns.

He caught fire from the conservative press. Jimmy Ward of the Jackson Daily News took McGill to task for noting that Hodding Carter Jr. of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville and George

McLean of the Tupelo Journal were two editors who did not support Barnett’s acts to prevent a black student from enrolling at Ole Miss. “This was certainly no time for finger-pointing under

197 an explosive situation,” complained Ward, who himself rarely showed restraint of any kind in his columns and editorials. “Mr. McGill’s interference and lecturing should be and is resented by all decent people in Mississippi.”10 Criticism of McGill was common and often artful. “His segregationist enemies called him Red Ralph and Rastus,” recalled Eugene Patterson, who from

1960 to 1968 was editor of the Atlanta Constitution under McGill as publisher. “They tried every kind of threat to break him, but he had their number. He was tougher than they were.”11 McGill is generally credited with helping set a moderate atmosphere in Atlanta on issues of race relations. He pricked the conscience of white Atlantans but he did not push them too far, and

Atlanta remained largely segregated into the 1960s, in keeping with other Southern cities.

Virginius Dabney, editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, had distinguished himself with editorials on equal pay for black teachers and an end to back-of-the-bus treatment of black passengers on the city transit, and he won a Pulitzer in 1948 for taking an editorial stand against lynching. Like some Southern liberals, however, Dabney’s support for black advancement found quick limits. He thought it unwise, for example, for Virginia’s black citizens to pursue civil-rights gains without the guidance of whites. Writing in 1942, Dabney warned that “the current effort to effect a drastic revolution overnight can only result in violence and bitterness, with the Negro suffering heavily, in the end.” Dabney adopted the separate-but-fair view of race relations common to Southern moderates, and he advocated a go-slow policy on social change. In the Virginia capital, these views put Dabney to the left of most of in the state’s politics and distinctly apart from James J. Kilpatrick, his colleague at the sister paper, the

Richmond News Leader. When Kilpatrick launched his campaign for Virginia’s use of interposition to thwart implementation of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, Dabney was troubled by the idea, but he was reluctant to challenge the newspaper’s publisher or force a public fight between the two sister newspapers. As a result, his paper, like Kilpatrick’s, professed interposition’s virtues as Virginia’s plan for Massive Resistance gained steam. Though the two editors held different views on how Virginia should response to Brown and on interposition, the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Richmond News Leader presented readers

198 with only one reality to consider — Kilpatrick’s radical resistance. On the key issue of the day, the liberal chose to sit silent.12

Sitting silent on the key issues or failing to offer an alternative to resistance was a persistent weakness in the work of Southern liberals. Though they sought improvement in the lives of all Southerners, white and black, liberals routinely failed to outline a vision for a South of the future that was dramatically different from the South of the past. In North Carolina,

Jonathan Daniels of Raleigh’s News & Observer, in an address given two months before the

Brown decision, expressed hope that whites and blacks could work together productively, whatever the Supreme Court might rule, but cautioned: “Do not misunderstand me. I am not among those hoping that the Supreme Court this spring and in one decision will wipe out segregation in all the schools of the South. I view that day with apprehension.”13 When the

Brown decision came down, Daniels, like many Southern moderates, was still asserting that social justice could be achieved if the goal of separate but equal were achieved in Southern schools.

Hazel Brannon Smith was editor of the Lexington Advertiser in the Mississippi Delta, and she enjoys legendary status as a strong and independent voice in the Southern press. Yet on the

Brown decision, she expressed ambivalence. Her assessment was both honest — she acknowledged that separate but equal education had never been achieved — and dismissive — she argued that the system of separate schools should continue. “We know that it is to the best interest of both races that segregation be maintained in theory and in fact — and that where it isn’t maintained trouble results…. The present situation has all of the ingredients necessary for a bloody revolution — if people don’t keep their heads. It is a situation where a few well trained

Communists could come into our section of the country and promote a revolution overnight.”14

Later, in 1956, she repeated her beliefs on separation of the races. “We do not believe in mixing the races in our schools, churches, social life or anywhere else,” she wrote, “and we regard racial intermarriage as something rejected by God.”15 She also expressed, however, concern for a form of justice in the segregated South and complained that the courts did not treat all citizens fairly.

199 In time, Smith and her Lexington Advertiser began to oppose the state’s Sovereignty

Commission and the White Citizens’ Councils, which were supported or tolerated by most of

Mississippi’s media. She described the partnership of the commission and the councils as oppressive. “It is time for everyone to speak out and oppose this violation of our basic rights and freedom as American citizens,” she wrote in 1961. “This monstrous thing will destroy us and our state…. Our freedom is being taken from us in Mississippi not by Communist Russia,

Nazi Germany or any other totalitarian country of philosophy — but by our own home grown variety of fascism, Mississippi born and nurtured. It should also be destroyed here.”16 Smith attacked the Sovereignty Commission and the White Citizens’ Councils for years — the “unholy combination,” she once termed the state-private cooperation under the headline “State Gestapo

Rule” —and she decried bombings and other acts of racial violence. She continued, however, to keep her distance from advocates of integration, even after she won a Pulitzer in 1964 for her editorials. “We had never advocated school integration at the time of the 1954 high court decision (nor since for that matter),” she reminded readers in January of 1965. Her statement and her career-long avoidance of endorsing desegregation suggested there were limits in the

South, even for the courageous.

There were other liberals in the Southern press, in newspapers big — Mark Ethridge of the Louisville Courier-Journal provided moderate commentary for many years — and small —

P.D. East of the Petal Paper, a tiny Mississippi publication, resorted to mockery and satire to ridicule his state’s stubbornness on racial issues. Each addressed a different community — journalism is, first and foremost, a local enterprise — and each faced the challenge of expressing alternative points of view in an era when the South was unaccustomed to free thinking. Some took more risks than others, but they all felt the discomfort of the outsider, and they all were constrained by the rigidity of Southern politics and the conformity of Southern culture.

Historians today take great interest in Southern liberals and their work in journalism during the civil-rights era, but the true influence of liberals on the South is hard to gauge. The

South did, in time, integrate its schools and instituted other social reforms as well. School

200 integration, however, was forced on most Southern communities through actions of the federal courts, not through a change of heart brought on by liberal leadership. The same can be said for other Jim Crow practices, such as seating on buses, in theaters or in waiting rooms. The white leadership resisted reforms, and change was forced on the white South through court action or through long and determined protests. Southern liberals deserve credit for taking positions contrary to the status quo, but often those positions failed to offer a distinctive difference. Their halfway arguments were easy to ignore.17

Southern liberals, of course, were operating in the same South as other whites, a political system and a culture defined and shaped by the Southern style of politics and press.

Southern liberals were largely ineffective because the Southern style worked to push them to the fringe of respectable circles and to keep them isolated. In politics and in the press, the

Southern style advocated and protected a collection of sanctioned ideas, and it worked to portray the liberal point of view as contrary to this dogma and as an enemy to good Southern tradition. The Southern style worked to intimidate liberals and moderates and to keep free- thinkers in the press, and others with similar ideas, cautious or quiet.

The Southern style of the 1950s and 1960s — proclaiming strong beliefs, learning not to see disturbing truths or complications, and policing the public square to keep it free of alternative ideas — was simple and powerful. Put in practice by the dominant Democratic Party, it helped extend the life of the Solid South. Used by the Southern press, it supported conservative rule and suppressed expression of different points of view and fresh ideas.

Collectively, this partnership of press and politics proved formidable, and its dominion extended from statehouses to courthouses, and to churches, classrooms and family dinner tables. Among whites, conversations about a different South, one of equality and opportunity, were scarce. At a time when communities throughout the South needed to align with American traditions, with the Constitution and with everything the Brown decision promised, the

Southern style successfully blocked serious considerations of change and reform. The great failure of Southern white leadership in the 1950s and 1960s can be laid, in large part, at the

201 feet of this partnership of press and politics. In the contest over whether the South would have free or restricted access to arguments and ideas, the Southern style won.

1 Contemporary Authors, First Revision (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1975), p. 34; “Notes and Comment: Editor,” New Yorker, Dec. 24, 1960, pp. 18-19; “Voice of the New South: Harry Scott Ashmore,” New York Times, Sept. 16, 1957, p. 18; Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), pp. 32-33.

2 Harry S. Ashmore, An Epitaph for Dixie (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1957, 1958), pp. 179-182; John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), pp. 577-578.

3 Anthony Lake Newberry, “Without Urgency or Ardor: The South’s Middle-of-the-Road Liberals and Civil Rights, 1945-1960,” diss., Ohio University, 1982, pp. 251-252; “Turmoil in the South,” Saturday Review, Jan. 11, 1958, p. 16.

4 Ashmore, An Epitaph for Dixie, p. 180.

5 “An Editorial: The Crisis Mr. Faubus Made,” Arkansas Gazette, Sept.. 4, 1957, p. 1.

6 Robert Sherrill, Gothic Politics in the Deep South: Stars of the New Confederacy (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1968), p. 105; “For Leadership,” Time, May 19, 1958, p. 57; “White Christmas,” Time, Dec. 23, 1957, p. 50; Harry S. Ashmore, Civil Rights and Wrongs: A Memoir of Race and Politics 1944-1994 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), p. 132; “At 85, a Big Moment,” Newsweek, May 19, 1958, p. 64; “Arkansas Gazette to Report Boycott,” New York Times, Dec. 13, 1957, p. 56; Martin Ochs, “Search for Racial Justice,” Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 71, no. 2 (Spring 1995), p. 354.

7 “Hillman Awards Given,” New York Times, May 16, 1958, p. 50; “Columbia Honors Arkansas Governor,” New York Times, May 30, 1958, p. 19; “Gazette of Little Rock Awarded Plaque By Freedom House for Integration Stand,” New York Times, Oct. 15, 1959, p. 29; Hodding Carter, “The South As It Was, Is and Will Be,” New York Times Book Review, Jan. 12, 1958, p. 1; “Peacetime Departure,” Time, Oct. 5, 1959, p. 46; “Farewell, Little Rock,” Newsweek, Oct. 5, 1959, p. 81; “Notes and Comment: Editor,” New Yorker, Oct. 5, 1959, p. 19.

8 David L. Bennett, “Ira B. Harkey, Jr., and the Pascagoula Chronicle,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, David. R. Davies, ed. (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), pp. 185, 181-182.

9 Ibid, pp. 185, 189-192, 202-203, 174.

10 Jimmy Ward, “Covering the Crossroads,” Jackson Daily News, Oct. 2, 1962, p 1A; Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, p. 62.

11 Eugene Patterson, “The greatest editor the South ever produced,” St. Petersburg Times, Feb. 6, 1998, p. 19A.

12 Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, pp. 22-23; William P. Hustwit, James J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), pp. 36, 65.

202

13 Charles W. Eagles, Jonathan Daniels and Race Relations: The Evolution of a Southern Liberal (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), p. 155.

14 Arthur J. Kaul, “Hazel Brannon Smith and the Lexington Advertiser,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, David. R. Davies, ed. (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), p. 241.

15 Ibid, p. 245.

16 Ibid, p. 252.

17 Roberts and Klibanoff, The Race Beat, pp. 23, 205; Gary Huey, Rebel With a Cause: P.D. East, Southern Liberalism, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1953-1971 (Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1985), pp. 1, 115.

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Newson, Moses J. “The Little Rock Nine.” Crisis, November 1987, pp. 40-44.

Neyland, Leedell W. “The Tallahassee Bus Boycott in Historical Perspective: Changed and Trends.” In The Civil Rights Movement in Florida and the United States: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Tallahassee: Father and Son Publishing, 1989), pp. 30-59.

Ochs, Martin. “Search for Racial Justice.” Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 71, no. 2 (Spring 1995), pp. 353-356.

Parkinson, Robert G. “First From the Right: Massive Resistance and the Image of Thomas Jefferson in the 1950s.” Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, vol. 112, no. 1 (2004), pp. 2-35.

Rorty, James. “Virginia’s Creeping Desegregation.” Commentary, July 1956, pp. 47-55.

James W. Silver. “Mississippi: The Closed Society.” Journal of Southern History, vol. 30, no. 1 (February 1964), pp. 3-34.

219 Skates, John Ray. “Fred Sullens: Bourbon Out of His Time.” Journal of Mississippi History, vol. 45, no. 2 (1987), pp. 93-104.

Skates, John R. Jr. “Fred Sullens and Prohibition.” Journal of Mississippi History, vol. XXIV, no. 2 (1967), pp. 83-94.

Smith, Charles U. “The Sit-Ins and the New Negro Student.” The Journal of Intergroup Relations, vol. II, no. 3 (Summer 1961), pp. 223-229.

Tisdale, John. R. “‘Don’t Stone Her Until You See Her Side’: New England Editors and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission’s Public Relations Campaign of 1956.” Journal of Mississippi History, vol. LXIV, no. 3 (Fall 2002), pp. 169-187.

Trescott, Jacqueline. “Daisy Bates: Before and After Little Rock.” Crisis, vol. 88, no. 5 (1981), pp. 232-235.

Van Matre, James. “The Congress of Racial Equality and the Re-emergence of the Civil Rights Movement.” In The Civil Rights Movement in Florida and the United States, ed. Charles U. Smith, 136-175. Tallahassee: Father and Son Publishing Inc., 1989.

Wakefield, Dan. “Siege at Little Rock: The Brave Ones.” Nation, Oct. 11, 1958, pp. 204-206.

Wallace, David. “Orval Faubus: The Central Figure at Little Rock Central High School.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 4 (1980), 314-329.

Williams, Julian. “Percy Greene and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission.” Journalism History, vol. 28, no. 2 (Summer 2002), p. 66-72.

Winter, William F. “Politicians and the Press.” Journal of Mississippi History, vol., 49, no. 2 (1987) pp. 83-92.

Woolner, Ann. “Southern Exposure.” Brill’s Content, vol. 3, no. 5 (June 2000), pp. 89-93, 128-130.

Young, Stephen Flinn. “The Kudzu: Sixties Generational Revolt — Even in Mississippi.” Southern Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 3 (1996), pp. 122-136.

“Arkansas Gazette to Report Boycott,” New York Times, Dec. 13, 1957, p. 56.

“At 85, a Big Moment.” Newsweek, May 19, 1958, p. 64.

“Ashmore, Harry S(cott).” Contemporary Authors, First Revision, Vols. 13-16, Clare D. Kinsman, ed. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1975, p. 34.

“‘Damned Good Pro.’” Time, Oct. 14, 1957, pp. 78-79.

“Farewell, Little Rock.” Newsweek, Oct. 5, 1959, p. 81.

“For Leadership.” Time, May 19, 1958, p. 57.

“Kilpatrick, James Jackson.” Contemporary Authors, New Revised Series, Vol. 1, Ann Evory, ed. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1981, p. 331.

“Muse, Benjamin.” Ann Evory, ed. Contemporary Authors, New Revised Series, Vol. 1, Ann Evory, ed. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1981, pp. 455-456.

220 “Notes and Comment.” New Yorker, July 5, 1958, pp.13-14.

“Notes and Comment: Editor.” New Yorker, Dec. 24, 1960, pp. 18-19.

“Organizations: The Ultras.” Time, Dec. 8, 1961, pp. 22-25.

“Peacetime Departure.” Time, Oct. 5, 1959, p. 46.

“South of John C. Calhoun.” Time, Nov. 30, 1970, p. 46.

“Turmoil in the South,” Saturday Review, Jan. 11, 1958.

“Voice of the New South: Harry Scott Ashmore,” New York Times, Sept. 16, 1957, p. 18.

“White Christmas.” Time, Dec. 23, 1957, p. 50.

Newspaper articles Carter, Hodding. “The South as it Was, Is and Will Be.” New York Times Book Review, Jan. 12, 1958, pp.1, 30.

Clifford, Dorothy. “Malcolm Johnson Dies at 76.” Tallahassee Democrat, Dec. 7, 1989, pp. 1A-6A.

Bryan, David Tennant, and James J. Kilpatrick. Interposition: Editorials and Editorial Page Presentations, the Richmond News Leader, 1955-1956. Richmond: Richmond News Leader, 1956.

Ensley, Gerald. “Community Turns Out to Honor Former Democrat Editor.” Tallahassee Democrat, Nov. 2, 1989, 1B-2B.

Foster, William B. Jr. “House Hears Plea By Boatwright.” Richmond News Leader, Feb. 1, 1956, pp. 1A-3A.

Hardee, Martin. “Malcolm Johnson Retires.” Florida Trend, April 1978, p. 153.

Holland, E. L. Jr. “Some Patience On Color Issue.” Birmingham News, April 7, 1963, p. A-16.

Kaufman, Ken. “Integration plan Rescinded By Sheridan School Board.” Arkansas Democrat, May 23, 1954, pp. 1-2.

Kihss, Peter. “Gazette Finds Readers Return After Segregation Boycott.” New York Times, May 6, 1958, p. 39.

Lewis, Anthony. “South is Talking of ‘Interposition.’” New York Times, Jan. 22, 1956, p. 68.

Lindstrom, Andy. “The Rocking-chair Editor.” Tallahassee Democrat, Oct. 22, 1989, 1F-7F.

McGrotha, Bill. “He’s Tallahassee’s Nosiest, Gabbiest,” Tallahassee Democrat, May 26, 1968, p. 1E-27E.

Mitchell, Jerry. “Jackson Papers Were Tools of Spy Commission.” Clarion-Ledger, Jan. 28, 1990, pp. 1I-5I.

John D. Pomfret, John D. “Kennedy Reacts — Early Report of Peace Leads Him to Hail Racial Conferees.” New York Times, May 9, 1963, p. 1.

221 Salisbury, Harrison. E. “Newspaper in Little Rock Wins Two Pulitzer Prizes.” New York Times, May 6, 1958, pp. 1, 39.

Samuels, Gertrude. “The Silent Fear in Little Rock.” New York Times Magazine, March 30, 1958, pp. 11, 78-79.

Smiley, Nixon. “Deadline on a Rocking Chair.” Tropic, April 18, 1971, pp. 34-36.

White, William S. “The Nature of the Union.” Review of The Sovereign States, by James Jackson Kilpatrick. New York Times Book Review, April 28, 1957, p. 6.

“A Cancer That Must Be Removed.” Tallahassee Democrat, Jan. 16, 1957, p. 4A.

“A Time of Testing.” Arkansas Gazette, Sept. 1, 1957, p. 1A, as reprinted in LittleRock, U.S.A. Ed. Wilson Record and Jane Cassels Record (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1960), pp. 34-35.

“Arkansas Gazette Says Faubus Yields.” New York Times, Sept. 15, 1957, p. 56.

“Challenge to Brains and Good Will.” St. Petersburg Times, March 22, 1960, p. 8A.

“City Arrests 11 In Sitdown Here,” Tallahassee Democrat, 21 Feb. 21, 1960, p. 1A.

“Collins’ Lunch Counter Talk.” Orlando Sentinel, March 22, 1960, p. 8A.

“Cooling Off the Bus Situation.” Tallahassee Democrat, Jan. 2, 1957, p. 4A.

“Columbia Honors Arkansas Editor.” New York Times, May 30, 1958, p. 19.

“Desires Confused With Rights,” Tallahassee Democrat, March 4, 1960, p. 4A.

“Faubus Criticizes Brownell’s Role.” New York Times, Sept. 23, 1957, pp. 1,14.

“11 Negroes Enter Not Guilty Pleas,” no byline, Tallahassee Democrat, Feb. 22, 1960, p. 1A.

“Gazette of Little Rock Awarded Plague By Freedom House for Integration Stand.” New York Times, Oct. 15, 1958, p. 29.

“Hillman Awards Given.” New York Times, May 16, 1958, p. 50.

“In Lunch Counter Issue, Sides Become Clearer.” Florida Times-Union, March 21, 1960, p. 4.

“Police Blotter Omissions.” Tallahassee Democrat, March 14, 1960, p. 6A.

“Poor Place For A Crusade.” Tallahassee Democrat, Feb. 25, 1960, p. 4A, reprinted from the Tampa Tribune.

“Pulitzer, 1958.” New York Times, May 6, 1958, p. 34.

Letter to the editor, Richmond News Leader, March 2, 1956, p. 12A.

Letter to the editor, Tallahassee Democrat, 15 March 1960, p. 6A.

Letter to the editor, Tallahassee Democrat, 17 March 1960, p. 4A.

222 “Little Rock Deplored,” Associated Press, New York Times, Oct. 3, 1957, p. 24.

“Middle Against the Ends.” Tampa Tribune, March 22, 1960, p. 14A.

“No Place For The Cross.” Tallahassee Democrat, Jan. 3, 1957, p. 4A.

“Seditious Sit-Downs.” The Citizens’ Council, Vol. 5, No. 6, March 1960, p. 1.

“Something of Value.” Miami Herald, March 22, 1960, p. 6A.

“Stanley Sends Out Va. Interposition Resolution.” Richmond News Leader, Feb. 3, 1956, p. 1A.

“‘Suggested’ Statement Causes Row; Faubus Says Extra Words Inserted in White House Draft,” Arkansas Democrat, Oct. 2, 1957, p. 1.

“Text of Gov. Collins’ Inaugural Address,” Tallahassee Democrat, 8 Jan. 8, 1957, Special Inaugural Edition, pp. 2A, 4A.

“Voice of the New South: Harry Scott Ashmore.” New York Times, Sept. 16, 1957, p. 18.

“We Must Prove Our Argument,” Tallahassee Democrat, Jan. 18, 1957, p. 4A.

Your Choices.” Birmingham News, April 1, 1963, p. 6.

Rep. Elliott’s Right.” Birmingham News, April 1, 1963, p. 6.

“Alabama Fact, Fancy.” Birmingham News, April 1, 1963, p. 6.

“Let’s Get The Wheels Turning!” Birmingham News, April 5, 1963, p. 10.

“Police Doing A Fine Job.” Birmingham News, April 18, 1963, p. 14.

“Find the Killer.” Birmingham News, April 25, 1963, p. 14.

“Ike’s Reply to Faubus,” Arkansas Gazette, Oct. 2, 1957, p. 1A.

“Montgomery Meeting.” Birmingham News, April 26, 1963, p. 10.

“Elsewhere The States Change.” Birmingham News, April 29, 1963, p. 6.

“How We’re Publicized.” Birmingham News, April 29, 1963, p. 6.

“Governor Wallace’s Statement.” New York Times, May 9, 1963, p. 17.

Adams, Tim. “Mississippian Burning with a Passion for Books.” The Observer, April 2, 1995, review section, p. 4.

Douthit, George. “Faubus May Fly Back From Parley.” Arkansas Democrat, Sept. 23, 1957, p. 1.

Douthit, George. “Faubus Stands Firm; Says He Won’t ‘Bayonet Own People.” Arkansas Democrat, Oct. 2, 1957, p. 1.

Ethridge, Tom. “Mississippi Notebook: Ole Miss and Africa: All Shook Up.” Clarion-Ledger, September 19, 1962, p. 6.

223 ______. “Mississippi Notebook: Grievous Loss.” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 21, 1962, p. 6A.

______. “Mississippi Notebook: Eagle Or Chicken?” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 17, 1962, p. 8.

______. “Mississippi Notebook: Placing the Blame.” Clarion-Ledger, Oct. 2, 1962, p. 6.

Hills, Charles M. “Affairs Of State: Ups And ????” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 19, 1962, p. 5.

_____. “Affairs Of State: Win, Lose Or Draw.” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 17, 1962, p. 6.

_____. “Affairs Of State: Double-Check,” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 18, 1962, p. 3.

_____. “Affairs Of State: Skalawags.” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 18, 1962, p. 2.

_____. “Affairs Of State: State Stand is United.” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 30, 1962, p. 7B.

_____. “Affairs of State: Accomplishment: Not Wanted.” Clarion-Ledger, Oct. 2, 1962, p. 9.

_____. “Affairs Of State: Watch ‘Em Gnaw.” Clarion-Ledger, Oct. 4, 1962, p. 3B.

Lally, Kathy. “A Journey from Racism to Reason.” Baltimore Sun, Jan. 5, 1997, p. 2A.

Prochnau, Bill. “The Tale of a Pulitzer: A Paper, A Family.” Washington Post, April 25, 1983, p. 1A.

Rich, Frank. “Bono’s New Casualty: ‘Private Ryan.’” New York Times, Nov. 21, 2004, Section 2, Arts & Leisure, p. 1.

Rich, Frank. “On Television, Torture Takes a Holiday.” New York Times, Jan. 23, 2005, Section 2, Arts & Leisure, pp. 1, 17.

Traub, James. “The Submerging Republican Majority,” New York Times Magazine, June 18, 2006, pp. 30-33.

Wallace, Phil. “More Than Just Teams: Ross Cheered, New State Song Sung at Big Game.” Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News, September 30, 1962, p. 6A.

Wirth, Gene. “Humble Plowboy Grown Up: Place Assured In History For Fearless Ross Barnett.” Clarion-Ledger, September 15, 1962, p. 1.

Alden Whitman. “For 16 Years, Warren Saw the Constitution as Protector of Rights and Equality.” New York Times, July 10, 1974, pp. 24-25.

Associated Press. “All But Smith Support Ross.” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 15, 1962, p. 1.

Associated Press. “President Says Faubus Took ‘Necessary Step In Right Direction.’” Arkansas Democrat, Sept. 21, 1957, p. 1.

“Gene Wirth Was Newspaperman Who Served In Finest Tradition.” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 21, 1962, p. 6A.

“Gov. Barnett Needs Moral Support, Not Mob Violence, In This Crisis.” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 15, 1962, p. 1.

“Heart Attack Is Fatal To City Editor Wirth.” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 21, 1962, p. 1A.

224 “T.M. Hederman, 73, a Longtime Editor in Southern Capital.” New York Times, Jan. 8, 1985, p. 6B.

“United, We Stand!” Clarion-Ledger, Sept. 17, 1962, p. 1.

Dissertations Burney, Ruben. “Newspaper Coverage of the Early 1960s Civil Rights Movement: A Content Analysis of World Views.” Ph.D. diss., University of West Florida, 1983.

Copeland, Harry Clay. “The Development of Panama City and its Newspaper.” Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1956.

Duke, Lois L. “Cultural Redefinition of News: Racial Issues in South Carolina 1954-1984.” Ph.D. diss., Florida A&M University, 1986.

Hobbs, Tameka Bradley. “‘Hitler is Here’: Lynching in Florida During the Era of World War II.” Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 2004.

Kelly, Thomas James. “White Press, Black Man: An Analysis of the Editorial Opinion of the four Chicago Daily Newspapers Toward the Race Problem, 1954-1968.” Ph.D. diss., Florida A&M University, 1971.

McClenahan, Heather C.R. “Florida in Black and White: Newspapers, Race, and the 1968 U.S. Senate Campaign.” Ph.D. diss., University of South Florida, 1994.

Newberry, Anthony Lake. “Without Urgency or Ardor: The South’s Middle-of-the-Road Liberals and Civil Rights, 1945-1960.” Ph.D. diss., Ohio University, 1982.

Rabby, Glenda Alice. “Out of the Past: The Civil Rights Movement in Tallahassee, Florida.” Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1984.

Sellers, James T. “A History of the Jackson State Times: An Agent of Change in a Closed Society.” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern Mississippi, 1992.

Sommerkamp, Theo Enoch. “Coverage of Church and Religious News by the Daily Press and Radio Stations in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1952.” Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1954.

Tisdale, John R. “Medgar Evers (1925-1963) and the Mississippi Press.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Texas, 1996.

Tomberlin, Joseph Aaron. “The Negro and Florida’s System of Education: The Aftermath of the Brown Case.” Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1967.

Turpin, William Howard. “Editorial Leadership in a Time of Crisis: Virginia’s Massive Resistance, 1954-1959.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1976.

Wallace, David Edwin. "The Little Rock Central Desegregation Crisis of 1957." Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, 1977.

Weill, Susan M. “’In a Madhouse’s Din’: Civil Rights Coverage by Mississippi’s Daily Press, 1948- 1968.” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern Mississippi, 1998.

White, Robert M. “The Tallahassee Sit-ins and CORE: A Nonviolent Revolutionary Submovement.” Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1964.

225 Interviews Barber, Rims, Jackson, Mississippi, activist. Interview by author, April 17, 1999. Tape recording.

Barnett, Ross Robert, former governor of Mississippi. Interview by Neil McMillen and Kenneth McCarty, May 8, 1971, and August 2, 1972. Vol. 26, 1975, transcript. Mississippi Oral History Program, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg.

Beaudoin, Mike, former Tallahassee Democrat city editor. Interview by author, Aug. 14, 1996. Tape recording.

Chandler, Hendrix, former Associated Press correspondent, Interview by author, Aug. 7, 1996. Tape recording.

Hewitt, Purser, executive editor of the Clarion-Ledger. Interview by John Ray Skates and Orley B. Caudill, May 3, 1972, and August 28, 1975. Vol. 10, 1976, transcript. Mississippi Oral History Program, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg.

Killian, Lewis, retired professor of sociology, former member of Florida State University faculty. Interview by author, June 12, 1996. Tape recording.

Smith, Charles U., dean of School of Graduate Studies, Research and Continuing Education, Florida A&M University. Interview by author, June 12, 1996. Tape recording.

Tapers, Alma, wife of former Tallahassee Democrat publisher John Tapers. Interview by author, July 20, 1996.

Winter, Elise, wife of former Mississippi Governor William F. Winter. Interview by author, April 17, 1999. Tape recording.

Winter, William F., former governor of Mississippi. Interview by author, April 17, 1999. Tape recording.

Videorecordings Bowen, Chuck, producer and director. “LeRoy Collins: A Great Floridian.” Great Floridian Series, Florida History Associates (Tallahassee: Museum of Florida History, Division of Historical Resources, Florida Department of State, 1990) videocassette.

Higgins, Patricia, producer and director. “Where He Stood” (Tallahassee: WFSU-TV, 1990) videocassette.

“Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965,” episode 6, videotape, produced by Blackside Inc. and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for WGBH Boston, 1986-1987.

Other materials Collins, LeRoy. LeRoy Collins Letters, Strozier Library, Special Collections, Florida State University, Tallahassee.

Johnson, Malcolm. Malcolm Johnson collection, Strozier Library. Special Collections, Florida State University, Tallahassee.

Kilpatrick, James J. Papers of James J. Kilpatrick, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

Ward, Jimmy. Document no. 9-11-1-11-1-1-1, State of Mississippi Sovereignty Commission Files, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson.

226

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Willard T. Edmonds worked as a writer and editor for newspapers in Virginia,

Kansas and Florida before leaving journalism to work in public service. He now works for Florida State University.

227