Profile in black and white

by Howard H. Quint

Of all the Northern newspapers, the New York Times is the chief bête noire of the South Carolina press in general and the News and Courier in particular. The Charleston paper’s plaint is that the Times is a “liberal” paper which writes its own views into news stories. As to the Times’ liberalism the News and Courier summed it up by saying that the New York paper “places its faith in government and laws for rapid improvement of mankind. It is a concept much like the totalitarian ideology.” The News and Courier, which professes admiration for Cuba’s Batista and the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo, proceeded to develop this idea further: “The history of the world does not indicate that laws improve the breed. The best that can be hoped from laws, as we see it, is to maintain law and order so that people can live out their lives in some degree of safety and comfort. By tampering with the laws and customs about race in the United States, the ‘liberals’ have created disorder and discomfort both in the South and in the North.... Today, as it has been doing for years, the Times is pamphleteering for its cause—the intermingling of the races.”[465]

The summer of 1957 was a particularly fecund one for attacks on conditions in the North by South Carolina newspapers. Revelations in the Syracuse, New York press of filthy and abominable conditions in migrant labor camps in the Empire State coupled with NAACP charges of peonage and the ordering by Governor Averill Harriman of a sweeping investigation by state authorities occasioned the State to send staff writer Bob Pierce northward on a “muckraking” expedition. Pierce, who received full co-operation from the Syracuse Post-Standard which threw open its files to him, sent back to Columbia a series of stories that were picked up by other papers of the state. They were like heady wine for the embattled defenders of the Southern way of life. Enjoying for the moment the luxury of having still another tangible social abuse in the North to attack, the State combined in several editorials a mixture of Southern chauvinism, eloquence, and what it evidently considered to be irony. Said editor Latimer on one occasion: “Now we read a complaint that New York migrant camps are a twentieth century slave racket. Well, the people up North should know how to operate such a place. Their forbears were primarily responsible for the introduction of slavery in this country.... Conditions up North must be getting bad for the NAACP to admit that anything but racial harmony and fair treatment to Negroes is to be found above Mr. Mason and Mr. Dixon’s line.”[466]

That the national news media have been at least partially effective in shaping public opinion in the segregation controversy is evidenced by the repeated criticisms of their policies. The News and Courier declared that freedom of the press as it related to “truth about race matters” had already vanished “from a large segment of American daily newspapers.” Race news was rarely reported outside the South without a pro-NAACP bias. Also radio and television and Hollywood film producers were “under the black curtain of race censorship.” “The other day, in a Charleston theater, we saw a movie short in which John C. Calhoun was pictured as a scheming, treasonous troublemaker,” the News and Courier indignantly exclaimed. In a letter to the same paper Fred Grossman noted “a palpable spirit of antipathy” between the North and South, a feeling which he blamed on the NAACP “and affiliated organizations of equally dubious allegiance.” Southerners on national television shows, he asserted, were “inevitably browbeaten, ridiculed, outwitted by well-rehearsed MC’s.” In the movies, Southerners were always villains. As a result of this slyly conducted campaign of propaganda and insinuation, the mere mention of the word South automatically brought to mind such “evil connotations as bigot, demagogue, Simon Legree and the like.”[467]

The News and Courier, insisting that it does “not especially admire a policy of pandering to popular views to please the subscribers,” and summarizing its presentation of the race controversy as “the truth as we see it,” proclaims itself as far more objective than its Northern counterparts. In presenting “the truth as we see it,” the News and Courier commented in the following fashion on the segregation riots of Clinton, Tennessee:

Truly, this is a tragic time in American history.... Who would have thought that tyranny would come so quickly to America, or that the federal government would seek to restore all the brutality and oppression of Reconstruction days? And yet the day of infamy has arrived....

Today the North approves the methods of Hitler in attempting to force racial mixing upon a people who will not mix. If Nazi techniques are upheld by the higher courts and by public opinion in the North, one day the people of the North themselves will feel the sting of tyranny.[468]

The newspaper chose to overlook the fact that “the brutality and oppression” in Tennessee was being enforced by the National Guard of the state, called out by the governor and not the federal government. Ignored too was the parallel of “racial superiority” both in Nazi Germany and in Tennessee.

That some white South Carolinians accept the Charleston paper at face value as the fountainhead of truth is indicated by a letter to the editor by C. H. Ruppert of Charleston. Ruppert wrote: “Each time I pick up an issue of your paper, I thank God I live in a state where the truth is printed regardless of personal views and I also know that both sides are presented in any issue that may arise. If the truth could be presented in the Northern papers, maybe the honest and worth while people who live there could understand Southern people for what they really are.”[469]

Frequently blame for the whole integration fight is placed on “Negro politics.” “Afro-Americans,” said the News and Courier, “brought in chains to the New World, are about to seek their revenge. They are forging now the handcuffs whereby 10 percent of the population would dominate 90 percent through the fluke of concentration.” This observation concluded: “More than ever the Southern States seem destined to play a role in eventual redemption of the rest of the Republic from Negro politics.”[470]

South Carolina newspapers throughout the entire segregation-integration controversy of the past four years have shown a peculiar insensitivity in regard to the effort of the United States to win the support of the nations of Asia and Africa. They have refused to see any connection with the propaganda efforts of the nation’s diplomacy in behalf of the democratic ideology and their espousal of racial supremacy doctrines at home. A naked statement demonstrating lack of concern with this particular problem came not surprisingly from the News and Courier which entertains no special regard for the democratic credo: “We are tired of manufactured nonsense about ‘propaganda’ overseas. The suggestion that American laws and customs are subject to foreign veto makes us sick. Our government should not look over its shoulder to see whether it wins applause or boos from the peanut galleries of the world.”[471]