‘My Soul Is Rested’ Stirs Unrest In Marketing

By Bill Cutler

Vol. 1, No. 2, 1978, pp. 16-18

“White people don’t have much experience in running into that sort of prejudice. It fills you with a powerless anger. So I think it was maybe good for me, having recorded this history in as sensitive a way as I could, to then have the educational experience of feeling in a small way what millions of citizens in the South have had to deal with in a large way every day.” Howell Raines spoke deliberately, calmly, without anger, about the marketing and distribution of his highly acclaimed book, My Soul Is Rested, an oral history of the civil rights movement published last October.

He sat in his small office on the 17th floor of downtown Atlanta’s Peachtree Center. On a wall behind his right shoulder were tacked four demographic maps of the Deep South and Border South region over which he has jurisdiction as Southeastern national correspondent for the New York Times. Behind his left shoulder were posted mementoes of a Klan rally he covered in Tupelo, Mississippi, two months previously: an application form for membership (“I certify that I am a White citizen over 18 years of age of Gentile descent”) and a catalog advertising bumper stickers, T-shirts, and other paraphernalia bearing the message “In Racial Purity Lies the Nation’s Security.” On its cover, a red-white-and-blue Uncle Sam jabbed his forefinger in the familiar Army-poster pose next to an inscription: “THE KLAN NEEDS YOU.”

A short, compact man of 35 with large, slightly protruding brown eyes, small mouth, a jawline beginning to lose its definition, and a dense thicket of tightly ringleted brown hair graying at the edges, Raines looks like the god Bacchus if Bacchus spent several years eating barbecue at Southern political rallies. He grew up in a working-class district of Birmingham, the son of parents from rural North Alabama “who did not teach racial prejudice as an article of faith.”

Raines wrote of the world his parents grew up knowing in a first novel, Whiskey Man, published last year by Viking. “The people of that area are at once of the South and not of it,” Raines said. “The traditional Southern racist code doesn’t exist up there. There are no Black people, there were no slaves. Systematic, casual racism is not a part of that world, and it’s a tremendous advantage for a White Southerner, especially one who doesn’t come from well educated or affluent people, to have grown up in a home where racism is not taught in a systematic way, which was the case with me. ‘Nigger’ was not a word that was allowed, conversationally, in my home – or at least not encouraged. When you put that up against the vast canvas of Birmingham, that’s a very small thing, but psychologically I think it’s a big thing.”

After graduating from Birmingham Southern, Raines went to work as a cub reporter for the Birmingham Post-Herald. “Being in Birmingham in 1963 and then becoming a newspaperman were the things that helped to educate me about race and gave me what has become a lifelong fascination with the civil rights movement. In the South at that time, unless you were bold enough -and in Birmingham in 1963, this was a considerable boldness – to become involved directly, there were only one or two ways that you could actually see what was happening. That was to be a policeman or a reporter. So, being a reporter was very lucky for me, in that, without having to make that very great personal commitment, I got a ringside seat.”

Eleven years later, Raines took the financial and professional gamble of quitting his job as political editor at the Atlanta Constitution to assemble the material for My Soul Is Rested. “One of the reasons I did My Soul Is Rested is, knowing that world as I did, I became fascinated with the idea of moral courage. I wanted to talk to people who had challenged this monolithic system of – not only segregation , but of segregation enforced by terror.”

---

Page 17

The book was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons and received excellent reviews from influential publications like the New York Times and was chosen as an alternate selection of the Literary Guild, but Raines began hearing complaints from friends in Atlanta and other parts of the Southeast that My Soul Is Rested was difficult to obtain. “I became alarmed when the man who is now president of the American Booksellers Association, Charles Haslam, came to me and told me that Putnam’s regional salesman for the Southeast was making negative presentations about my book, negative presentations with racial overtones. Haslam quoted this man as saying, ‘This is a good book, but we’re not going to do anything with it because we don’t think it has any sales potential. No one wants to read a book about Black people by a White man.'”

The issue of race became even more pointed when Raines dealt with Rich’s department store in Atlanta about stocking the book. “Faith Brunson (chief book buyer at Rich’s downtown store) told me that she would buy only a few copies of My Soul Is Rested because people were not interested in the subject matter, and her direct statement to me was – as accurate as I can quote it, and this is pretty close to direct – that ‘The only people who will buy that book are Julian Bond and a few of those people.’ So, alarmed by this, I contacted Putnam and asked them to contact Miss Brunson and try to overcome her reluctance, and I was told that this was done, prior to the time that I was to have an autograph party at Rich’s. When I showed up there, there were something like 50 copies of Whiskey Man and three or four of My Soul Is Rested. I then protested again to Putnam’s, and I have in my correspondence a letter from them saying that they had again approached Miss Brunson about stocking the book and were rebuffed.

“I would from time to time call Rich’s and ask about the book, Raines continued, in which case I was invariably told that there was a heavy demand for the book, that it was not in stock, that it was a ‘special-order’ book – that is the terminology used – and that it would take six weeks to get it in. Frustrated by this, I finally was able to discuss this situation with another employee of Rich’s, who I’m not going to name because I think it might cause the person some career problems, who told me that my book was not being stocked because I had, quote, a problem, unquote, in the book department.

“The clear implication of the conversation was that the problem was antipathy toward the content of the book. I have never pursued it directly with Rich’s. My frank feeling was that it was useless to do so. I’ve lived in the South long enough to know that when you encounter

---

Page 18

those sorts of attitudes, it’s often impossible to change them. So, when I heard that local people were having difficulties getting My Soul Is Rested, I then set up sort of an informal system whereby I would order the book from Haslam’s bookstore in St. Petersburg (where Raines at the time was political editor for the St. Petersburg Times), where it was heavily stocked, and have it shipped into Atlanta, and I could do it much more quickly than Rich’s. It takes them six weeks, and it took me about a day to two days to handle each order.”

A check of major booksellers in Atlanta on July 6 confirmed Raines’s experience. An employee in Rich’s downtown department said My Soul Is Rested would have to be special-ordered and would take six weeks to arrive. The Ansley Mall Book Store regularly carried the hook, had sold over 20 copies since January, and could restock it in a week. Oxford Book Store had just sold its last copy, but could have the book in store again in a week to 10 days. B. Dalton Booksellers downtown carried it, had sold it “extremely well,” and could reorder it in four days. Brentano’s downtown had five in stock, had sold 10 to 20 since last fall, and could replenish their supply in “less than a week.’ Doubleday had never stocked it, but had special-ordered several copies for customers, and UPS had shipped those in less than a week.

Asked about sales of My Soul Is Rested at Rich’s, Faith Brunson said, “We don’t give out that kind of information.” Was the book in stock at Rich’s? “The only way we can tell that is to do an instock count in 12 different stores.” Was it in stock at the downtown store? “I don’t know,” said the downtown store’s chief buyer.

“I might as well be explicit about the import of this experience,” Howell Raines said, speaking very deliberately. “I think that Rich’s did not stock My Soul Is Rested because of the racial prejudice of its chief buyer, the antipathy toward it and its subject matter by its chief buyer. In her remarks to me, Faith made it clear that part of this antipathy arose from her personal negative feelings about Black people who had been involved in the civil rights movement. I can speculate that the fact that one of the major sit-ins of the civil rights movement took place in Rich’s about 20 paces from the book department at a time when Rich’s was defending segregation may have been a factor in contributing to that negative feeling.”

Bill Cutler, a frequent writer on Atlanta and Southeast politics, is the associate editor of Brown’s Guide to Georgia.

My Soul Is Rested can be ordered from the publisher, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, or from the following bookstores: Halsam Books, St. Petersburg, Fla.; Smith and Hardwick, Birmingham, Ala.; Old New York Book Store, Atlanta, Ga.; Ansley Mall Book Store, Atlanta; and Davison’s Department Store, Atlanta.

Southern Newspapers: Watching the Watchdogs

By Larry Noble

Vol. 1, No. 10, 1979 pp. 19-23

Daily newspapers play a key role in the lives of the people of the South. The papers provide us with commercial and economic information, with information on political and non-political events, with entertainment information and entertainment itself. They also present us with advice on what positions we should take on public affairs and furnish a controlled forum of letters to the editor.

Newspapers are also very lucrative businesses. About two thirds of the space in the daily newspapers is devoted to advertising. Traditionally, the personnel costs of newspapers has been kept low, while revenues are high – a combination of which produces large profit margins. Adding to these substantial margins is the trend over the recent decades to be fewer newspapers, hence less competition, especially in the large cities.

Newspapers, as watchdogs of our liberties, are especially protected by the Constitution. The First Amendment declares that Congress shall make no law “abridging” the freedom of the press. States also provide constitutional press protection, and in 1931 the U.S. Supreme Court went a step further and said that the national government will insure press freedom from state and local government encroachment. Despite occasional attacks on the press which have been sanctioned by the various branches of the nationalgovernment (such as the Supreme Court under the leadership Warren Burger is presently conducting) the constitutional protections remain.

The role of the press is extremely important as we seek to build a more just and equitable society. The press is proud of its assigned role, and says so, especially during National Newspaper Week once a year. But who watches the watchdogs? Is the press doing its job properly and effectively? What is the actual content of these newspapers day in and day out, year by year? What information and opinions are they giving to us?

Southern Newspaper Content

In an effort to answer these questions for daily newspapers in the South, a study was made of the decade of the 1960s. One morning daily newspaper in an important economic and political center was chosen from each of the eleven Southern states.

These newspapers were: Richmond Times Dispatch; Charlotte Observer;

---

Page 20

The State, Columbus, S.C.; Atlanta Constitution; Tampa Tribune; Birmingham Post-Herald; The Tennessean, Nashville; Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, Ms.; Times-Picayune, New Orleans; Dallas Morning News; and Arkansas Gazette, Little Rock.

The content of the newspapers was read, measured, coded and analyzed. A random sample was taken of the decade, twelve dates for each of the ten years. Sunday issues of the newspapers were not included. Some twelve million column inches of newspapers content were included in the study covering a total of 1,320 issues of newspapers.

For purposes of the study the content was divided into news, opinion, and advertising. Opinion was further divided into editorials, editorial cartoons, editorial opinion columns, and letters to the editor. The material was studied by geographical coverage, government level and branch, and public policy issue. Over two hundred categories were examined. A few of the findings of the study are reported in the present article. The Southern Regional Council is planning to publish the entire study later this year.

Study Findings

Only about ten percent of the total newspapers – thirty percent excluding advertising – was devoted to news about politics and government. At every level, local, state, and national, news attention was focused more on the administrative agencies than on the executive, legislative, or judicial branches. It was policy administration and not policy-making that lent itself to the heaviest coverage. Part of this stems from the character of the policy-making machinery of government. Although the people are getting more information on policy after it has been made than during the policy-making process, at least they are hearing about the end that touches them most directly. With more press attention to the production of the policy, the people would have a greater voice in the

---

Page 21

making of policies which affect them.

Only four political subjects received more than ten percent coverage each. These were military affairs, war and peace, education, and political parties and elections.

About half of the news dealt with events at the local level, and half of that was political or economic in nature. Slightly over one-fourth of the news covered national events. State news made up eleven percent of the news. Regional news – news about the South – got only three percent of the coverage.

International events made up ten percent of all news. Within this category, Europe received the most attention, with forty percent of the coverage. Asia, including Vietnam War reportage. received thirty-two percent. These were followed by Latin America. with thirteen percent, Africa, with eleven percent, United Nations, with six percent, and Canada, with two percent.

The newspapers examined in the study were essentially White newspapers, so the coverage of Black community affairs was almost nonexistent. Most of the newspapers cleaned up their most blatant racist practices during the 1960s. That is, classified advertising by race, designating race to Blacks only in crime stories, and segregated Black social news was abandoned except in the most racist newspapers.

The study attempted to place the newspapers on a liberalconservative continuum. Editorials and cartoons, the most local reflection of views of the newspaper, excluding letters to the editor, were examined for attitudes on six selected issues. These issues were: race, big government, business, freedom of expression, the Vietnam War, and poverty and welfare policies. It was assumed that the attitudes which were the most anti-Black, anti-big government, probusiness, antifreedom of expression, pro-Vietnam War, and anti-poverty and welfare policies would be the most conservative, and that the opposite attitudes would be most liberal. The

---

Page 22

attitudes were examined and rated with a percentage score. Percentage scores were then added for a total score. The scores were derived so that the highest scores would reflect the most liberal views, and lowest scores most conservative. Attitudes in editorials were scored separately, as were attitudes in cartoons, and the scores were combined. The combined rating is presented below, with scores by issue.

A perfect total liberal score would be 600, and a perfect total conservative score would be 0. The score range for each individual issue would be, from most liberal to most conservative, 100 to 0. On several of the issues, if not all, the dichotomy is ambiguous. Early in the decade, for instance, liberals were very much in favor of the Vietnam War. Liberals and conservatives both support business interests. And conservative whites are discovering that there are also conservative Blacks, who can be new allies.

Based on this scoring scheme, the newspapers fall into three groups. Little Rock, Charlotte, Atlanta and Nashville can be called most liberal. New Orleans, Tampa, and Birmingham are in the middle. Richmond, Dallas. Columbia, and Jackson are most conservative.

Letters to the editor were scored using the same methods as were used for editorials and cartoons: The results ran from most liberal to most conservative as follows, with total scores in parentheses: Little Rock (365), Atlanta (322), Charlotte (314), New Orleans (291), Nashville (290), Tampa (267), Columbia (232), Richmond (221), Dallas (185), Birmingham (184), and Jackson (152).

---

Page 23

The letter groupings were similar to those for editorials and cartoons. The range from liberal to conservative was smaller among letter writers, and letter writers seemed less liberal than liberal editors and less conservative than conservative editors. Birmingham writers probably reflected the editorial position of the local editor more than the editorials and cartoons. That newspaper is part of the ScrippsHoward chain, and many of the editorials were not written locally.

The editorial material was further examined to see if it urged citizens to vote or to take other action, if policy changes were urged at various governmental levels, if policy was ever critized, or if policy was praised. The theory was that newspapers which were effective watchdogs would be critical, would urge specific changes, would encourage citizens to seek action, and would praise where justified.

The study showed that only a tiny percentage of the editorial material urged citizens to vote or to act. The conservative papers urged the most policy changes at the national level and the least at the local level. Local -government received very little criticism from any newspaper, but a great deal of criticism was aimed at the international level. There was generally more criticism than urging or praise. Positions of praise accounted for about one-third of total positions, and there was a high level of praise for national government, though praise for local and state governments combined exceeded the national amount of praise.

About half of the letters to the editor were critical. The national government received the most criticism, followed by local, state, international, and regional. Letter writers in the conservative newspapers were heavily critical of the national government, writers in liberal papers were less so. Editors of papers published in state capitals used letters to produce the most criticism of state government.

Most political opinion columns were of the nationally syndicated type, devoted almost exclusively to national and international issues. Columns contained slightly more praise than criticism, and had few suggestions for policy changes.

Some one-fourth of the editorials suggested specific policy changes. About one-half of these suggestions were for the national level, and onethird for the state entities. Only onefifth of the letter-writers made policy suggestions, and these were mostly at the state and local levels.

The biggest advertisers in the newspapers were the department stores of all types, food stores, and businesses that sell, maintain, and in any other way deal with automobiles. Classified ads made up about thirty percent of all advertising in space used. The largest newspapers by number of pages might be expected to have the most advertising and the most text. In fact, the largest papers had such a large volume of advertising that the text in those papers did not amount to much more than the amount of text in the smaller papers. When the newspaper grows in size, it makes more and more money through advertising, but it does not give a commensurate amount of news and other features.

Conclusions

This very brief sampling of a voluminous study gives us only a clue about what our daily newspapers were presenting to us during the 1960s. Most of them were conservative on selected issues, and most letter-writers were also conservative. On the other hand, very conservative editors were more conservative than the writers of the letters which they published, and very liberal editors were more liberal than the writers of their published letters. The newspapers were not urging us to act, and although they did provide a commentary on governmental issues, they did not suggest specific policies for change.

The newspapers were apparently making a lot of money. Ninety percent of the newspaper was devoted to something other than the watchdog function of attending to political and governmental matters. About two-thirds of the newspaper was advertising. Newspaper revenue comes from two main sources, circulation and advertising – three parts advertising and one part circulation. To get a rough estimate of the income of a newspaper, figure the circulation revenue from the circulation figures and subscription rates and prices (it ill be a rough figure) and multiply by four.

Local and national affairs were covered well on the basis of allocation of text space. State, international, and regional affairs got much less attention. Yet editorially, attention went outside the local community, especially critical editorial concern.

Very little attention was paid to the affairs of the Black community by these white newspapers. That might have been expected. African affairs, in the decade of liberation on that continent, received the smallest amount of international coverage. There was six times more news about Europe.

These newspapers are locally rooted economic institutions with strong interests in protecting their powerful positions. During the 1960s, they directed critical attention away from the actions of state and local governments, and focused instead on the national government. A pattern of newspaper behavior emerged revealing little coverage or criticism of local and state policymakers. In addition, these newspapers were covering only one segment of the community the white segment. These and other practices raise serious questions about the performance of these Southern daily newspapers during the 1960s.

Attitudes shown by editorials and cartoons in selected Southern daily newspapers during the 1960’s
Liberal to Conservative, high to low, attitudes in editorials and cartoons, by percentage of agreement.

(For instance, Columbia, was 98 percent opposed to positions favorable to Black people; 96 percent opposed to big government; 91 percent favorable to business; 70 percent opposed to freedom of expression; 89 percent in favor of the Vietnam War; and 77 percent opposed to pro poverty and welfare policies.)

Larry Noble teaches political science at Atlanta University.

Paper	Race	Big	Bus.	FExp.	VietW	PosW	Total
Little Rock	90	75	58	89	76	88	476
Charlotte	77	41	59	87	71	87	422
Atlanta	73	66	35	83	32	94	383
Nashville	43	74	55	77	41	81	371
New Orleans	33	48	28	40	27	75	251
Tampa	37	37	40	61	37	30	242
Birmingham	35	25	36	44	33	69	242
Richmond	18	19	30	29	28	14	138
Dallas	26	14	6	34	4	10	94
Columbia	2	4	9	30	11	23	79
Jackson	10	32	4	9	5	6	66

The Making of a Ghetto

By Bob Powell

Vol. 2, No. 2., 1979, pp. 17-20

For Southerners who weren’t raised in them, federal housing projects are often visualized as inner city creatures of high crime with vandalized shells where rats and cockroaches populate among the left behinds of the Great Society. While they are generally thought of as exclusively a downtown, big city problem, public housing projects are creeping into the suburbs where new problems create old, disappointing results.

The move towards the suburbs began in the early 1970s when the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and local housing authorities around the country came under fire for allegedly perpetuating housing segregation in the nation’s cities. Critics claimed that placing new projects in predominantly inner city neighborhoods perpetuated residential segregation.

The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 mandated that “large concentrations” of poor people be avoided in the selection of new project sites. With lawsuits later filed against some major urban housing authorities for failure to comply with the Act and with charges of violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1974 and due process, the move of housing projects to the suburbs began.

In 1975, the Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) acquired two suburban sites, called Red Oak and Boatrock. Originally built as middle class apartments, the projects went to the city authority when the original developers went broke.

With 15,000 apartment units serving 51,000 tenants, AHA became involved in disputes with the county housing authority over who owned the projects. The courts finally awarded control to the county authority which is slated to take over this year.

---

Page 18

Until the court battle with AHA, Fulton county had no projects that it owned or ran directly and had dealt only with rental subsidies of private landlords on behalf of the tenants. Based on Atlanta’s experience with Boatrock and Red Oak, the county may find some unique problems with suburbia housing.

A root problem is physical isolation. At Boatrock in Southwest Atlanta the nearest physical structure, a hugh Western Electric plant, is a quarter of a mile away. The closest store – just a country store – is about three miles and the nearest shopping district, Ben Hill, is 7 miles away. The project is 17 miles from downtown Atlanta.

The Red Oak project is better off. It is located 5 miles from the suburban town of College Park and only a mile from the nearest chain grocery store.

While these may not be great distances to a middle class commuter they are terrific barriers for the poor dependent on second hand gas guzzlers and public tranportation. Even the AHA management agrees that transportation is a problem for outer city projects. Margaret Ross, information officer of AHA, says of Boatrock, “Boatrock had transportation problems but they were cleared up.”

According to residents of the projects the transportation woes still exist. In its first year Boatrock had no bus service at all. Now, buses are available at Boatrock and Red Oak but only during business hours. It also takes at least 45 minutes for the one-way trip to downtown Atlanta. The last bus from downtown to the outer reaches of the projects leaves at 6 o’clock p.m. and only Red Oak has weekend bus service to downtown.

Annie Morrison, president of the Boatrock Tenant’s Association is not only critical of the buses’ timing but also of their destination points. The buses to Boatrock run only between the project and downtown, 17 miles away. To travel to the nearby shopping center of Ben Hill, a resident must go 17 miles downtown and then 10 miles back to the shopping area. A direct bus route to Ben Hill would allow easier access for Boatrock tenants to grocery stores, commercial enterprises, the post office and to the local public health clinic.

The outer limit projects have other distinct disadvantages.

The bulk of doctors and clinics who treat the poor are located downtown. Grady Memorial Hospital, which accepts large numbers of welfare/Medicaid clients and pro-rates service costs for the working poor ineligible for Medicaid assistance is downtown close to the inner city projects. Scottish Rite Hospital, which serves many handicapped poor people at little or no cost, is 30 minutes from downtown housing projects. A bus ride from Red Oak or Boatrock takes as long as two hours one way.

The suburban projects are also separated from the centers of power that shape their lives. A former Boatrock tenant, who had previously lived in Techwood, a downtown project, contrasted the affects on activism. “At Techwood, we had a strong community group,” said Betty Thompson, “but at Boatrock, we are isolated from everything.”

While the seats of power (the mayor’s office, the City Council chambers, housing authority officers, the major media, and the state capitol) are all within a stone’s throw of most projects in Atlanta, “it’s a little hard to make those nighttime council meetings when the buses don’t run after 6:00 p.m. or you have to depend on your beat-up car,” one suburban project dweller pointed out.

The Boatrock Tenant’s Association has sent representatives to meetings of coalitions of citywide housing residents. One activist in the local welfare right’s organization sees the projects’ move to the suburbs not so much aimed at breaking down segregated housing patterns as breaking up poor people’s concentration of political power.

Another activist in the downtown Bedford-Pines area, Joe Boone recently accused a

---

Page 19

White developer of trying to drive the poor out of the city when plans for luxury condominiums next to poorer Bedford-Pines were announced.

Boone and other activists fear that the gas crunch will increasingly encourage White middleclass suburbanites to opt for city life. Already, Whites are beginning to trickle back into Atlanta’s inner city neighborhoods to renovate houses that were once left in disrepair.

As they trickle into neighborhoods like Grant and Inman Park, and Midtown, real estate prices skyrocket. The neighborhoods get better but moderate and low income private housing is forced out due to higher prices of real estate. If the trickle of Whites turns to a snowball, more public housing will be necessary and suburban projects may be more in demand.

For the present, the suburb is still the place of the American Dream for the many of the middle class and housing for the poor is not often welcomed.

Where the mountains of North Georgia meet the urban sprawl of Atlanta, North Fulton County is an idyllic area of station wagons, dogs, children, PTA meetings and homes ranging from $50,000 to $100,000.

The Fulton County Housing Authority announced early this year plans to build small projects in two suburban enclaves in North Fulton, Aipharetta and Sandy Springs. The suburbanites were not happy to hear the news and several hundred of them jammed hearings on the proposed projects. They held high banners that told how projects will bring crime and undesirables, welfare deadbeats and folks with dark skins. As one man said, “I moved out here to get away from those people”.

However, one North Fulton resident took a

---

Page 20

more mocking view in private of her neighbor’s fears. “They should be happy about the projects. Now they won’t have to send all the way to downtown Atlanta for their maids.” HUD tried to allay fears by issuing a report denying that rising crime and the pillage of the suburbia would occur.

Because the county housing authority can give priority to residents living outside Atlanta, the North Fulton residents probably would not face any influx of Black inner city residents. They can hardly escape the poor Whites, however.

Down the dirt road away from the new suburban neighborhoods, live the poor Whites of North Fulton in wretched housing, worse than many of the inner city housing projects.

Many shacks of these poor Whites are without running water or electricity and some have no indoor plumbing or heating except for wood burning stoves.

With political sophistication and economic advantage, the middle class residents of North Fulton may be able to use the problems of inner city projects and the fear of Black migration to the suburbs to consolidate support and block any federally funded project in their area. If so, the poor Whites of the area – the most likely beneficiaries – will have lost the opportunity for better housing.

At the same time, the problems of residents in suburban Boatrock and Red Oak remain overshadowed by the controversy over additional housing projects outside downtown. Frustrated and hampered, these residents wish for a return to the old projects or become disillusioned and disrespectful of their present housing. The makings of a ghetto are thus laid.

HUD appears incapable of avoiding the political decisions and unwilling to help residents of the suburban projects solve their problems. The bureaucracy is apparently much better at identifying project sites than nurturing the projects to become livable, convenient housing.

While inner city residents may face the blight of everyday deterioration and crime, the housing projects of the suburbs may be subject to the same forces, as they slowly take hold, without the political influence and downtown services that at least make life bearable.

Bob Powell is a free-lance writer living in Atlanta, Georgia.

Atlanta Blacks Lose in Special Election

By Boyd Lewis

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 9-10

It’s the hottest political secret of Atlanta, the city “too busy to hate”, that the unhorsed barons of the old White power structure are now busily stringing together a collection of “great White hopes” to recapture the city’s top political position from Black office-holders.

There has been some anxiety as to just when the offensive will be launched. But with meticulous precision, the Ivan Allen Jr. Memorial Political Resurrection Machine is being assembled to pull the Atlanta mayorality, city council, county comission and the city’s legislative delegation back into the right-thinking, White-thinking, commercially sensitive camp.

But despite rumors to the contrary, the loss suffered by two Black candidates to the Whites in the City’s October special election and run-off did not signal the opening of the crusade to recapture the Political Grail from the Black Mecca.

Instead, the losses of Clint Deveaux in a county-wide legislative race and ma Evans in the election for a vacated post on the Atlanta City Council reflect dynamics all their own – dynamics both peculiar to Atlanta and applicable in all multiracial cities.

Deveaux lost to Bettye Lowe, wife of county commissioner Tom Lowe, who swamped him with 62 percent of the vote. InaEvans, whose previous political aspirations have floundered on heart-breakingly thin margins, teetered on the edge of victory all through the night of the October 23 run-off but lost to a former city neighborhood planner, Elaine Wiggins Lester.

In the general election of October 2 and the runoff three weeks later the turnout of registered voters was uniformly dismal. Seventy-five percent stayed home for the first vote, 88 percent didn’t vote in the runoff.

The general apathy was bad enough but Black voter apathy was so extreme that political observers had to go back to the days of the White Primary, the poll tax and nightriders to match the dismal figures. At Precinct 9 R in the heart of the Black district (Perry Homes) 4 percent of those registered voted. Precinct 9 K (Archer High School) had a 7 percent turnout. Many other predominantly Black precincts had less than 10 percent of their voters go to the polls.

The once-omnipotent political machine assembled in 1972 by former Congressman (and later UN Ambassador) Andy Young which mobilized the Black and progressive White neighborhood movements has since collapsed and

---

Page 10

there is no longer any effective voter education /voter registration effort ongoing in the city.

Those who felt that the defeat of the local option sales tax measure October 2, piggybacked onto the special elections, was due to a revived coalition of Blacks and politically progressive Whites in the manner of the old Young Coalition were winking at the truth. The tax was supported by some of the builders of the Young machinery, Mayor Maynard Jackson, Julian Bond, and “Daddy” King as well as the downtown Chamber of Commerce and the daily newspapers.

The poor voted against the sales tax because they would be hit with another penny at the checkout counter and would benefit not at all by an alleged $29 million property tax rollback.

The city’s neighborhood movement, mostly lead by young White professionals at this point, opposed the sales tax because they didn’t want to dump more millions into a city council which has become a braying legislative jackass, oblivious to the overall needs of the city and grandly arrogant (as in the case of the refusal to let Atlantans vote on a replacement for city council president Carl Ware who resigned during the summer).

And the third leg on the stool of the “no” vote on the sales tax came from the White enclaves to the north of the city. This was the White flight getting in a joyful kick at Maynard Jackson, the coloreds, White hooligans of the liberal stripe and Atlanta in general.

A tin whistle is the prize to anyone who can link that vote into a coalition. Even Maynard Jackson’s troops defected in droves, with people who campaigned for him in 1973 and for reelection in 1977 being just as efficient in spending the sales tax hike/property tax cut scheme into the dustbin for years to come.

The White victors Lowe and Lester are hardly to be considered soul sisters. Bettye Lowe is a conservative, suburban oriented Republican and former lobbyist for the family, environment and something called the Committee for Moral and Social Decency. Elaine Lester lives in the integrated East Lake community, has excellent personal and professional contacts in the Black community and is as city-oriented as Lowe is county.

And there is very little bond of political commonality between Deveaux and Evans.

Deveaux is an articulate issues man who insists on personal campaigning without plugging into the infamous and often corrupt network of “endorsements”. His independence has cut him off from the usual round of kind words from the pulpit, introductions around Paschal’s inner circle at breakfast and presence on the “tickets”. His clearly middle class background (not to mention marriage to popular WSB TV news anchor Monica Kaufman) was not well perceived by lower income Black voters. His very name was remote and to the last, a mystery (“Dever – Oh, that Frenchman?”)

Ina Evans had far more street savvy than Deveaux, endorsements from such archangels of the city’s lumpenproletariat as former police commissioner Reginald Eaves and State Rep. Bill McKinney, a tireless sign-stapling crew and a husband who aggressively directed the DeKalb County NAACP. The polling results show how much stronger a campaigner she was than Deveaux but the ultimate outcome was no different: defeat. Evans failed to win the in-town White neighborhood support that Deveaux did because of her incomplete attention to issues research Time and again she would confess in debates that she honestly didn’t know the answer to a fairly routine question. Honesty is always good to have in politicians but not while confessing that homework has not been done.

The October elections demonstrated anew the fact that Atlanta remains a snug haven of political anarchy. No political machines set the tone or anoint the candidates. City elections remain a game played and won through a random process. But as sure as they’re bears in Atlanta’s Grant Park Zoo, the pale archons of the driving clubs and executive suites are viewing it all and marveling aloud how easy the Second Reconstruction could be slammed to a halt by swift, highly coordinated assaults when the next elections roll around.

What waits in the wings for Atlanta is far more important than the personal wins and losses acted out on the stage of October’s special election.

Boyd Lewis is a news reporter for WABE FM radio in Atlanta, Georgia.

French Images of the American South

By Thomas Noland

Vol. 2, No. 6, 1980, pp. 8-13

PARIS – As French television viewers watched in horror, 12 men leaped out of two vans and a car, crouched, and began firing guns at a group of people with signs. Bodies wilted like empty sacks and fell to the pavement. The sign-carriers fired back or ran for cover; some were cut down in mid-stride. Finally, after what seemed a very long time, police arrived, the shooting stopped and the men who fired were hustled off in paddy wagons.

It was not “The Untouchables” or “Hawaii Five-O” or any of the other American reruns that are standard fare on “Television Francaise.” t was the evening news, Nov. 4, 1979, and the astonishing footage had been made only one day earlier during an anti-Ku Klux Klan demonstration in a place few French had ever heard of Greensboro, N.C.

“You could tell from the tone of the anchorman, that the idea was ‘Once again, a violent outburst in this violent country,” recalled Chris Henze, a press attache at the U.S. Embassy who watches the news as part of his job. “I think things of this type get more attention if they come from the U.S. After Iran, the Greensboro shooting was the major story that night.”

There was an important aspect that set the Greensboro story apart from similar tales

---

Page 9

of American mayhem, however. The issue in Greensboro was race, and even if most French cannot tell Greensboro from Buffalo, almost everyone connects racial violence with “le sud” — the South.

It is Henze’s job to convince French journalists, who in turn convince the French, that such incidents are echoes of a Southern past that is long dead, and only twitches unexpectedly now and then.

The day after the shooting, he briefed a reporter for France-Soir – Paris’ largest circulation daily — who was about to appear on a television panel to discuss it. Evidently, Henze made his point.

“He did an admirable job of putting it in perspective,” Henze said, “talking about the rela tively low Klan membership in the U.S., the fact that it was an isolated incident. It was a very unfortunate event. That sort of item makes people believe we’re a country that allows racists to get out of control. I think there’s a great amount of ignorance about the progress that has taken place in the South.”

Indeed, comments from businessmen, day laborers, housewives and government workers interviewed here indicate Henze is right. The South’s forward strides from the dark ages of Bull Connor’s police dogs and Lester

---

Page 10

Maddox’s race baiting are recognized mostly by those rare Frenchmen who, in visiting or doing business below the Mason-Dixon line, have experienced the newest New South first hand.

For the great majority, impressions of race relations in the region are derived from sources so spurious that comments have a fairy-tale quality. Many believe the Georgia portrayed in “Autant Emporte le Vent” (Gone With the Wind) is the Georgia that brought forth Jimmy Carter, and imagine his Plains peanut farm to be graced by an ante-bellum mansion issuing nubile belles in crinoline dresses, and docile, buck-dancing Blacks who sing spirituals as they wander through the fields carrying enormous burlap sacks. Most Frenchmen do not know that George Wallace is no longer governor of Alabama; any mention of Fob James, who succeeded Wallace last year, is met with shrugged shoulders and blank stares. Some express a desire to visit the South they are attracted mainly by what they have heard of the gentle climate – but almost all want to see either Florida’s Disneyworld or New Orleans, where they imagine everyone speaks French. Mississippi? Alabama? South Carolina? These are terra incognitas to the French, slightly menacing places off the beaten path, places where, they believe, the kind of violence they saw on television Nov. 4 still occurs routinely.

A more realistic view is held by those whose friends or relatives have seen for themselves. Yvonne Perret, a Paris hotel clerk, has a cousin who bought a house in Jackson’, Mississippi and emigrated there with her husband and children. Mrs. Perret tells of worried letters from her relative after Blacks moved into the neighborhood, “which drove down the property prices.” And yet, she said, her cousin stayed on, and soon a daughter — Mrs. Perret’s niece – began to make friends with the Blacks who moved in.

“These were friends she loved and respected,” Mrs. Perret said. “It couldn’t be like the 1960s. Things must be changing there.”

Indeed, race relations in the South have changed a good deal faster than they have in France which is one reason why the French find it difficult to imagine the South’s painful and ongoing evolution toward a society of biracial equality. Here, although segregation never was established by law there is a strong feeling about what is French and what is not — and the Blacks, most of them from former French colonies in Africa, are not considered French.

As a rule, they do not mix socially with their former masters. While overt racial hostility is rare, the covert kind, described by a French government employee who asked to remain anonymous, is common.

“The French are much more racist than the Americans, because the races have no experience of living together,” the employee said. “If there is a Black man in the top floor of your apartment building, people still complain, they still say, ‘What kind of apartment is this, with Black people in it? ‘

A second reason why the French have been slow to accept racial change in the South is no fault of their own. What appears about the region in the French press often is

---

Page 11

reported first in the International Herald Tribune, the highly esteemed English-language daily published here. Generally, the only news about the South that makes the Tribune has to do with race – and usually, with racial confrontation. If a Frenchman were to write a history of the region since 1960, based on the Tribune‘s clip files, his volume would faithfully record the 1961 bus beatings and burnings in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama; the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery; the 1971 school busing crisis in Charlotte and, of course, the recent deaths in Greensboro. The book would be topheavy with information in its early chapters. When race as an issue in the South quieted down in the early 1970s, the Tribune — and the French press — quieted down too.

And so, because the age of dramatic racial confrontation is mostly over, “We are told from America that America is no longer interested in fighting for the rights of Black people,” said a French professional, who follows American and French newspapers closely. “It (the American press) gives the impression that the situation is better. However, I always see stories where this is not true for example, the busing in Boston – but I don’t think the French public is aware of that.

“In France, people are just repeating what they read in the press. This is how they form their ideas. First the American press writes the stories, then the French press picks up what they say and it has nothing to do with reality. During the Vietnam War, you know, people were against America but they were just repeating what they read in the papers. Now that America is not intervening anywhere, the papers are saying America is weak, Carter is weak.”

Carter himself is a curiosity for people who equate ”farmer” with “peasant.” While the American press makes much of the president’s geographical origins, of his being the first Southerner to reach the White House since the Civil War, the French are more intrigued by his peanut business – which is widely misunderstood. “The French refer to Carter as a ‘marchand des cacahuettes’, the little Arab on the street who sells peanuts,” a Paris businesswoman said. “You say to them ‘He is also a very smart engineer,’ and they say, ‘Oh really?’

“I’m not too sure the average Frenchman even knows what being a Southerner means,” she continued. “You have to be very well-informed about America to know the difference. I don’t think most of them even know where Atlanta is.”

For those few who do know the role of Blacks in Carter’s election – especially Southern Blacks is notably appreciated. Le Monde, France’s finest daily and one of the most respected newspapers in the world, is unusually sensitive to race when writing about American politics. Unlike most foreign papers it has its own Washington staff and its reporting tends to be more comprehensive and accurate than that in Paris’ six other major dailies, some of which rely on second-hand information or short dispatches from Agence France-Presse.

Le Monde “no longer writes stories about Black voter registration in the South,” according to one French press critic – an indication of the newspaper’s acknowledgement of Blacks’ progress in this area. But the paper also exhibits an awareness that the struggle for Black equality is far from finished. When Andrew Young was dismissed as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations last August, Le Monde congratulated Carter on appointing another Black, Donald McHenry, to the post. It admiringly reviewed Young’s civil rights activism during the 1960s, his years with Martin Luther King in the heyday of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. And in a front-page editorial, the newspaper suggested that had Young been White, he might

---

Page 12

still have the job. It remarked that U. S. Ambassador to Austria Milton Wolf kept his position despite committing the same sin – meeting with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) — which ostensibly led to Young’s ouster. Wolf, of course, is White.

But the French whose perspective on Southern race relations is closest to reality are those who have studied the region as tourists or investors. In both groups, according to U.S. officials here, the belief that the South is the land of “colored” waiting rooms, dual drinking fountains and midnight lynching parties has died an honorable death – and many of these Frenchmen, like New South apostles, are convinced the races get along better in Nashville or even Greensboro than in New York or Detroit.

William Tappe is regional director in Paris for the U.S. Travel Service of the Department of Commerce. Part of his job is to arrange tours of the U.S. for French journalists; in many cases his agency provides free airline transportation through an arrangement with the Civil Aeronautics Board, along with discounts on such items as hotel rooms and rented cars. He also monitors reactions of the journalists – as well as ordinary tourists – who return to France after a sojourn in America.

Among those who visit the South, Tappe says the only complaint, besides a universal disgust with fast food, has nothing to do with race relations. “Recently, some have commented on how fat the Americans are in the South,” he said, smiling. “The French who are concerned about racial discrimination think of it as part of the folklore of the U.S. They are a very small minority — those who are aware at all. They have been receptive to criticism of the U.S. and they have retained that and they expect to find it. Especially first-time travellers to the U.S. seem to think they find it.”

For the most part, the journalists and others who are helped by Tappe’s organization return with glowing accounts of Southern

---

Page 13

charm and hospitality, although many French are distressed to find that New Orleans is not the Gallic mecca they imagined. “There’s a tremendous attraction to Louisiana,” he said, “and Miami, the destination of a National (Airlines) flight from Paris, is becoming well-known. The rest of the South doesn’t have much of an image.” As for the folkloric dimension of racial discrimination, as rendered by the french-dubbed Gone With the Wind and perpetuated in the horror stories from the worst civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s, Tappe concluded, “It’s certainly not a problem for us in selling the U.S. as a travel destination.”

Similarly, a spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy’s Commercial Division said the average French businessman who thinks of locating a plant in Dixie does not look upon Black-White relations the way he might have 15 years ago. Like the tourist who has educated himself about the region’s recent past, the businessman is more likely to consider the South’s labor climate than its racial climate.

Asked whether she knew of any French businessman who had balked for racial reasons over locating a plant in the South, attache Carolyn Ervin said, “I’ve never heard anything like that. French businessmen are aware of the easier labor climate in the U.S. generally, and there might be some understanding that the South is less expensive. The official U.S. government policy is to be neutral on all capital movement. We have lots of general literature which we give him (the potential French investor); then the Embassy lets the various state offices here know and they jump all over each other trying to get the industry.”

The jumping works both ways. Each of the offices also is interested in promoting its own state’s products for sale abroad. Louisiana, with an office near Paris’ most fashionable neighborhood, is the only state with a bureau in France; most states maintain their foreign offices in Brussels (headquarters of the Common Market), Germany or Japan. Especially aggressive as Atlanta increasingly becomes an international city, Georgia has foreign bureaus in Brussels, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, and Toronto.

“The serious investors,” Ms. Ervin added, “go to the large banks or investment houses, and they know, they educate them” about conditions in the South.

But how many serious investors take time to study Dixie? And how many tourists actually see the region? In relation to the total French population, with its fantasies, biases and amiable misinformation, both groups are miniscule. More importantly, the knowledge they acquire is barely diffused beyond a closed circle of friends and associates. Most of them are Parisians; the average French provincial never visits or does business with Spain or Germany, let alone the American South. Last year, according to the U.S. Travel Service, 259,818 Frenchmen came to America – and only 5 percent indicated they came to learn about the U.S. political or social conditions. Many more came to see “the sights,” and that, for the foreign tourist, means Hollywood, the Capitol and the Statue of Liberty not Birmingham, Little Rock and the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

The shooting in Greensboro last November is more likely to shape the average Frenchman’s impression of current Southern race relations than any single factor. His knowledge of the South is largely imagistic: a bulldog-faced Alabama governor blocking the schoolhouse door; firehoses sweeping back a crowd of Blacks who tumble and cover their eyes; a man, his voice like the waters, telling thousands of his dream; a body wrapped in blankets on the balcony of a Memphis motel – and now, the dead on a street of another Southern town that will never become a tourist mecca. School desegregation patterns and voter registration figures simply can’t compete with that.

Thomas Noland writes for the Atlanta Constitution from Paris and teaches English at the American College.

Big Profits and Little Pay in South’s Backwoods: Woodcutters Organize (Part II)

By Wayne Greenhaw

Vol. 3, No. 2, 1981, pp. 14-17

---

Page 15

Woodcutters have generally been considered the bottom of the barrel when you are talking about agriculture in the South,” stated a forestry professor at Alabama’s Auburn University.

“The industry has been a profitable one for the huge companies, but the workers in the woods, cutting the timber and hauling it to the woodyards have been submissive to the demands of the companies,” explained Dr. Herman Aiken, who has worked with half-dozen top companies as a consultant to their new timber crops.

“Today we can plant a hybrid pine tree in the South and harvest it in less than fifteen years. The Sun Belt may even lend itself to faster harvesting in the near future. When you have an annual rainfall of between forty-five and sixty inches with a preponderance of sunshine during most of the year—even in the winter, you have an ideal situation for the modern fast-producing forest. In the Pacific Northwest, Washington, Oregon, and parts of California and Idaho, it takes nearly sixty-five years for a tree to mature,” Dr. Aiken added.

“The time factor is one reason for the tremendous growth in the pulpwood industry in the South during the past decade,” the professor said. “Another reason is the cheap labor. There is no doubt about that. The company looks at the overall picture in every agricultural area before it decides to move in that direction,” he said.

This movement was emphasized recently by the decision of Georgia-Pacific, a leader in the pulpwood industry, to come South. A company spokesperson explained the move of corporate headquarters from Portland to Atlanta by saying, “We are not going to abandon the Northwest, but we have shifted our interests to the South, where we have more than two-million acres.” In 1979, Southwest Forest Industries, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, registered what the president, W.A. Franke, termed “a milestone” in its purchase of a Panama City, Florida, pulp and linerboard mill, a railroad line and 425,000 acres of timberland in Florida, Georgia and Alabama from International Paper Company. “We looked at Panama City on an opportunistic basis. It was clear that the longterm economics for owning the timber were good. This was our initial objective. After studying the project, we concluded there were also opportunities for added profitability at the paper mill. So our thinking moved from a timberlands-oriented acquisition to the concept of an integrated profit center that would be a long-term contributor to the company’s earnings,” Franke remarked.

In its move into the South, Southwest Forest Industries purchased 245,000 acres in pine and 157,000 in hardwoods. A company representative said, “We have the wood to supply a large portion of the Panama City mill’s needs. We bought lands that have been managed intensively for high productivity and we have the resource base to diversify into lumber and plywood production. Most important, we are now in the South in a meaningful way, where the fast timber growth cycles point to more rapid expansion in our industry than in other parts of the country. We made a good buy here.”

The Panama City mill uses about eight-hundred-thousand cords of pulpwood and woodchips every year, and company-owned timberlands furnish about twelve and one-half percent of the mill’s needs. “Many, many woodcutters depend on our operation to keep them in work, and we want to continue to work with them,” a mill representative said. However, it was added, by 1985, the company’s pine plantations should be supplying about twenty-five percent of the mill’s needs.

0ne of the people who have been attempting to organize woodcutters throughout the region, Ben Alexander of Atlanta, Georgia, greets these moves, “We want to welcome the new companies. All the woodcutters want to see more and more companies coming into the area. It’s good to see, it revitalizes the business of pulpwooding. But we want to educate them from the beginning. We don’t want them to think they are coming into a backward area where the labor force will lay down, roll over, and play dead.”

Alexander pointed out that the wage structure in Southern states has been a great incentive to companies to move from other sections of the United States into the South. “That sort of green is irresistible,” said Jim Drake, coordinating officer in Mississippi of the Southern Woodcutters Assistance Project (SWAP). “Trade unions in paper mills report that similar jobs in Oregon pay three times the wage in Mississippi. Furthermore, the old standard that ‘Prices are cheaper down there’ does not hold. In Mississippi, March 1980 gasoline prices were the highest of all fifty states,” Drake continued.

“In Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, Texas, Arkansas and Florida there are more than fifty to sixty thousand aging pulpwood trucks hidden in

---

Page 16

deep woods,” Drake stated. “Each truck requires a crew of three persons. Thus, tucked away in hollows and hamlets are over one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand families dependent on pulpwood for a living.”

“No congressional subcommittee has ever delved into the misery of these people,” Drake continued. “They are the invisible workers and their families. They go unseen, unheard. They live in the poorest counties of America, and Black or White, they suffer malnutrition, poor healthcare, inadequate education and substandard housing.

“And yet, on their strong backs and out of their sweat, International Paper, Georgia-Pacific, St. Regis, Masonite, Weyerhauser, and Scott Paper, to mention only the giants, have built their vast empires,” the United Church of Christ minister said.

With the accelerated growth of the paper industry in the South during the past ten years came the emergence of people like Jim Drake who were interested in organizing the pulpwood workers. Drake, for instance, was sent into the backwoods by the Board for Homeland Ministries of the United Church of Christ to work with SWAP in Mississippi. Several years earlier a young Massachusetts attorney named Grant Oldfield had been in Mississippi to register voters during the summers of 1964 and 1965, “and while we were there we found that not only were Black people discriminated against but the White as well as Black pulpwood worker was being pushed to the back of the bus. The woodcutter was the second-class citizen of the agricultural South. After I finished Boston University Law School I came back to Hattiesburg and set up an office to start working with the woodcutters. We got a little money from Catholic Charities and the Southern Voter Education Project, and we worked to put some sting into the political makeup of Mississippi.”

But three years later, having met with dozens of local political defeats and numerous stumbling blocks, Oldfield went back to his native state to fight for other causes. He was more or less replaced by other young lawyers and organizers in Hattiesburg who began working in the late 1960s with the Gulfcoast Pulpwood Association (GPA), which by 1973 had organized some three thousand woodcutters in southwest Alabama, southern Mississippi and northwest Florida.

Oldfield and his associates filed a lawsuit in the early 1970s against two companies. The paper companies countered with their own lawsuit against the cutters. For nearly a year in the mid 1970s, GPA was ordered to discontinue its organizing efforts while the case was before the courts. However, in 1975, after limited victories for the woodcutters in federal courts, Scott and International Paper companies agreed to an across-the-board raise in prices of pulpwood paid to the cutters and haulers. The companies also agreed to pay GPA attorneys $25,000 in fees.

The cutters were given an overall five-dollar-per-cord increase in payment, and owners of standing timber, which is cut to become pulpwood and sold to the woodyards, were given a one-dollar-and-fifty-cent raise per cord. Scott and International also agreed at the time not to take their fight against GPA’s organizing efforts to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It was a significant step forward at the time,” commented a GPA leader. “Unfortunately, however, that was the last we heard from the companies. We got the increase. They could not deny us that. But the negotiations stopped there. That was the last raise we received. Now, it appears, we have to go back into court to seek further relief.

“GPA is continuing its organizing efforts. We have moved in several directions. We are looking now for a more substantial increase with a more permanent basis of cost-of-living raises. It costs the pulpwood cutter more and more to live every year, just like it costs the paper companies more and more to produce pulpwood. They are making more and more profits, but those profits are not shared with the man who is working hard to produce the pulpwood. We feel that it is time that we made something for our sweat and blood.”

Many woodcutters participating in

---

Page 17

organizing their fellow workers believe that the various labor associations need to ban together in a southwide effort. In northern Mississippi and Louisiana, SWAP spokesmen say that they do not wish to compete with GPA, “but we would like to join hands with all woodcutters to make sure our efforts do not go to waste.”

Wayne Greenhaw is a freelance journalist in Montgomery, Alabama and author of several Southern books. His final installment on the woodcutters will appear in the next issue.

“Covering History as it Broke”
John N. Popham
Harry Ashmore

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 17-19

In 1947, when he first stopped in at my office at the Charlotte News, John Popham was the only newspaper correspondent assigned to a beat that stretched from the Potomac to Eagle Pass. His one-man bureau in Chattanooga was the first the New York Times had ever established in the continental United States outside of Washington. To these unique distinctions he added two of his own that I am reasonably certain have not been duplicated by any of his talented young successors: for more than a decade he covered this vast territory without benefit of air transport or strong drink.

Sustained only by black coffee, he managed to more than hold his own in the convivial colloquies that mark any gathering of the working press–but then he often left early, dispatched by his desk in New York to some new outbreak of news in Miami, or Dallas, or Louisville, explaining that he ought to get started since he was driving. Moreover, he always said he avoided the through highways and kept to the back roads so he would have a chance to absorb the wisdom of the ordinary folk he encountered in crossroads stores, smalltown cafes and rustic pool halls.

His explanation for his abstemiousness was that his innards had been ravaged in the course of his wartime service with the Marines in the Pacific, but I found this dubious. To one who had been there, it seemed unlikely that a man with a delicate stomach could survive the cuisine in those backcountry establishments where the overpopulated

---

Page 18

flypaper curled down in strips from the ceiling and a prudent man would limit his order to a hardboiled egg and an orange, and insist on peeling both.

It was only after he had left the secondary roads for a more sedentary assignment as executive managing editor of the Times’ outpost in Chattanooga that Pop joined the rest of us at the bar. On the sad occasion of Ralph McGill’s funeral I first encountered him with a tall glass of bourbon in his hand, and in my astonishment exclaimed, “My God, Pop! It may make you garrulous!” But there was in fact no perceptible change in his delivery, which has been described–by Claude Sitton, I believe–as resembling sorghum fired from a Gatling gun. At his retirement party aboard the Wabash Cannonball in the railyard at Chattanooga the truth was finally divined by Bill Emerson of Newsweek, who had trailed Pop across the South in the years of the Troubles: “The sneaky little devil has been saving up his liver for the golden years.”

Happily, both liver and larynx have remained in fine fettle, and the mellifluous voice of Popham is still heard in the land–on platforms wherever worthy causes command his attention, in seminars where awed academics sit at his feet,

---

Page 19

above all in free-flowing conversation with old friends and young admirers who know where to turn when they seek insight into this New/Old South that continues to baffle all too many of those who write about it.

When he settled in at Chattanooga in 1947 he brought to his new assignment the passion of the native returned from exile. His roots are deep in the Virginia tidewater, but his boyhood was spent trailing his peripatetic father, a distinguished officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. His college was Fordham, he apprenticed on a Brooklyn newspaper before graduating to the Times, and he got his first whiff of politics covering New York’s City Hall.

But when he came back from his own service as a Marine officer in World War II a new boss had taken over the newsroom at the Times, Turner Catledge of the Philadelphia, Mississippi, Catledges. Instinct told Catledge that the post-war South was going to be the next great domestic news arena, and he knew where to find the right man to interpret the impending socio-economic changes for the parochial readers of the nation’s leading newspaper.

So Pop began the odyssey that would make him a witness of the historic confrontations that marked the era of what Ralph McGill called “guerrilla fighting among the ruins of the segregated society.” He was one of the few who had innocent passage ‘across the lines–the trusted confidant of diehard segregationists and embattled black leaders, and, above all, a sympathetic audience for the ordinary citizens of both races who were trying to find somebody who understood what they were talking about.

Those were the days when politicians who professed to speak for the South finally abandoned the fiction that the region’s second-class citizens were a happy, contented lot, and began to talk in terms of the apocalypse. When the Brown decision came down in 1954 John Bartlow Martin toured the Southern statehouses and proclaimed in the Saturday Evening Post: “The South Says Never!” A swarm of hit-and run national correspondents descended upon the region and there would have been an even greater multiplication of the ubiquitous black and white Southern stereotypes had Pop not been available as an omnipresent oracle wherever there was an outbreak of violence.

To those who were willing to listen, and some who weren’t, Pop explained that the facts of Southern life were rarely what they seemed to be, and almost never what the spokesman for an agitated constituency said they were. There was, God knows, plenty of overt brutality, but there was also a reservoir of interracial goodwill that would make it possible to dismantle the old segregated institutions in reasonably orderly fashion.

There are still those who believe the great sea change which has made possible this audience in this hotel was bracketed by the Montgomery bus boycott and the triumphant march from Selma to the Alabama capitol, where Martin Luther King proclaimed, “We are on the move now–no wave of racism can stop us.”

Willie Morris, who once thought he could go north to home, is still bemused by the high drama of those stirring days now that he has again taken root in his native Mississippi. Writing of what he found there upon his return, he dated the recasting of race relations from the day the FBI dug the bodies of three slain civil rights workers out of an earthen dam down in Neshoba County:

“Gradually, almost imperceptibly in the years which followed, something would begin to stir in the soul of the town. A brooding introspection, a stricken pride, a complicated and nearly-indefinable self-irony … would emerge from its dreadful wounds. A long journey lay ahead, marked always by new aggrievements and retreats, yet this mysterious pilgrimage of the spirit would suggest much of the South and the America of our generation.”

Pop could have told him that the instrospection, the pride, and the self-irony have been around since the first slave ship, and the first Popham, landed in the Tidewater. There are the qualities that have marked his tour of duty below the Mason-Dixon Line–the qualities that left their imprint upon the blend of the Old and the New that is John Popham’s South.

And to these he added one more that he demonstrated in remarkable fashion when he was finally unbound from his desk at the Chattanooga Times. Once again he hit the road, this time as a commuter, first to Nashville, then to Atlanta, where he enrolled in law school. I submit that only an abiding commitment to justice could have motivated the seventy-three-year old applicant for admission to the Georgia Bar you welcome tonight as a Life Fellow of the Southern Regional Council.

Remarks by Harry S. Ashmore upon the installation of John Popham as a Life Fellow of the Southern Regional Council; Peachtree Plaza Hotel, Atlanta, November 12, 1983.

Popham: “Avoiding the Hit and Run Press”

By Eleanor Mccallie Cooper

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 19-22

“Just call it as you see it, John, anything that you can see in the South, the enormous changes that are about to take place. We don’t know, nobody knows how it’s going to be this time. We know it’s a different world, and we intend to report it in depth.”

The voice was that of Turner Catledge, the assistant managing editor of the New York Times and a Mississippian himself. The year was 1947. He was sending out a young reporter from the Times, John N. Popham, to be the first regional correspondent in the Southeast, to cover the South from DC to the Delta, fifteen states that made up what John later termed “a hundred Souths.”

Leaving behind New York’s multi cultural diversity, the young reporter found himself with a new beat of well over fifty-thousand miles a year, covering such divergent regions as the Mountain South, the Piedmont, the Delta, the Black Belt and the coasts. With Chattanooga as its headquarters, he made it home only five days a month for the next eleven years.

The reasoning behind this assignment, Popham explains, was that the New York Times was going to try to “stamp the country on a regional basis.” As the largest news

---

Page 20

enterprise in the nation, its managers decided to tap the news from across the land: “‘Let’s put a man in Boston who will take all the New England states; put a man in Detroit to take the heavy industry, automobile and steel; put two men in Chicago to take the great wheat world and mid-America; put a man in L.A. to take Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and a man in San Francisco to take Northern California, Oregon and Washington, because they go together.’ And then I got the whole South.”

The Southeast bureau was stationed in Chattanooga, because of the family connection between the Chattanooga Times and the New York Times. Adolph S. Ochs, a native of Tennessee, had owned and operated the Chattanooga Times twenty years prior to acquiring the New York Times in 1896. Because both papers had remained in the Ochs family, Chattanooga was the natural choice for Popham’s headquarters.

When Popham became managing editor of the Chattanooga Times in 1958, the Southeast bureau moved to Atlanta. But in those early days, Popham said, “It didn’t make any difference where it was. The South had not grown that much, and Atlanta wasn’t much different than Chattanooga at that particular time. No sir, not a whole lot different, just a couple of hotels downtown and the governor’s office.”

A Tidewater Virginian himself, John was no greenhorn to the South. The Popham family had been in Virginia since the colony was founded, and his father, like other military officers from Virginia, had bought a house in Fredericksburg, close to his native Culpepper. Young John grew up well rooted in the life of the small town South, the history of the area, and the heritage of his great-grandfather who was publisher and editor of the Richmond newspaper, the Southern Intelligencer, and later of tine’ Washington Intelligencer. His sense of history and his understanding of small town politics served as assets in his new assignment, as did his forever undimished Tidewater accent.

After finishing college at Fordham, he had landed in New York in 1930 as a reporter for the Brooklyn Standard Union, covering all the beats, the courts, the police, the criminal world: “Here I was with this family background and schooling from a small town in Virginia, and then suddenly, I end up in New York, thrown into the midst of the greatest multi-cultural city on the face of the earth. And it’s my job to report it, with all the cultures.”

He learned that world so well that when he returned from service in the Marine Corps at the end of World War II, he was asked by three successive New York mayors to be the director of public relations. Having spent the war in the Pacific, and many summers of his youth traveling with his father to Latin America and Asia, intercultural exchange was nothing new to young “Pop”: “I was in a position to make judgments, to see things as I would never have seen them if I had stayed in the South all of my life, or if I had come from the North only. I was able to bridge that gap a little better than the average person would have thought of.”

But he never accepted the offers of Mayors O’Dwyer, Walker or LaGuardia. Instead, he stayed in the old world of newspaper reporting where he accumulated no credits, few by-lines and not much salary to speak of.

Popham describes the state of the South as he found it in the late 1940’s:

In the face of efforts which were under way to broaden the scope of civil rights for blacks in this country, Southern political leaders were making their usual response: “We’ll handle that, “and “We have our way of life, “and “We will not adjust or change except on our terms. ” That had been the winning hand for generations and there wasn’t any reason for anybody in high office at that time to see that there would be anything different.

The thinking was that the South was going to be more industrial, that it had an opportunity to have a larger slice of the economic pie of the country. Air conditioning had come. It was pleasant and comfortable.

The war had brought literally millions of people into the South–military people and their families. Many stayed here; some married Southerners.

Our universities were getting larger; they were going from thirty-five hundred students in the state university to ten-thousand, and young people from the rest of the country were coming here to attend classes.

There was an excitement, a feeling that the South would overcome its poverty. It had lived right through the war as the poorest section of America. Now there was an excitement that the South could become a much more viable part of the country.”

In tapping the stories of fifteen states on the verge of economic and social upheaval, Johnny Popham was helped by his background, by his personal drive and by the enormous empathy which made him trust and be trusted. In conversations lasting long after an event had been covered and a story had been written, he came to know Southerner’s thoughts, feelings, fears and ambitions. He based his stories on these insights rather than on the latest opinion polls.

If, for instance, he were assigned to a conference in New Orleans, he would get the story then stay around to make contacts:

I would stay the whole week that it lasted, sitting up way into the nights talking to scores and scores of these people from the small towns and cities of the South. After that, I would go out of my way on an assignment, or stop at a town and look that person up and talk to them, recall that friendship, or maybe find there was a story in that town, what they were trying to do to make the community a better place to live. And I might do a little Sunday piece about some particular effort, get them some local and national attention for their efforts. I built up a large network like that, and consequently, I always had an opportunity to know where something was going to take place.

If it was evident from the way things were taking place that there was going to be a confrontation in a certain city, most of the newspaper men would respond like a bucket brigade–they’d come in when the trouble began to break. But I would always call someone, for example, the governor in that state, and say, “Well, Governor, this is Popham. Who’s a friend of yours in that town? Who do you know?” With politics it was going to be a feed merchant or a druggist or somebody down there that handled the patronage for the governor, and he’d say, “I’ll call him, Pop, and tell him you ‘re coming in. ” I’d go in two or three days in advance; this man would take me out to the country club for dinner or introduce me to people on the main street. Consequently, I always knew just about where to stand, where to be, what place to go to, and later when the press might be the target of bitterness and anger, I would be excused

---

Page 21

for several days. People would say, “Oh, that is Mr. Jones’ buddy, he’s all right–until they read the New York Times `and then decided that I had to go too. But it took them a long time to get the Times in there.

In a car with little, or no, air conditioning, over roads with little, or no, pavement, usually alone and often at night, Popham covered fifty, sixty, seventy thousand miles a year. His salvation was, as he said. “I don’t bore myself.” In fact, the long hours on the road served to his advantage in a way that jet age telecommunications do not allow:

If I had to come back to Chattanooga from New Orleans or from Jacksonville or Dallas, I’d drive three or four days, stopping off at different places. What I wanted to write would be filtering though my mind. I’d be pretty well prepared to sit down and knock out the Sunday piece or the interpretive piece that this event called for a few days later. I think that some of the success that I had in that period resulted from the fact that I could contemplate what I wanted to do and put it in a good frame. I didn’t think about that at the time, but as I look back, I think it helped a lot.

The first task for Popham was to find the sages, the vital and vibrant figures who had some wisdom about what was happening around them, the people who “could envision the future and worked behind the scenes to solve a great many problems.” Once he found them, he cultivated them, respected them, and took time to build trust.

These people were all over the South. He found them as governors, workers, newsmen, lawyers, sociologists and teachers. People such as Ralph McGill, Hodding Carter, Howard Odum, Rupert Vance, Charles Johnson. A. T. Walden, Gerald Johnson, George Mitchell, Harold Fleming, Virginius Dabney, and Alf Minders became his sources of knowledge and wisdom. But more than just the leaders, he found endless numbers of people throughout the South who cared and worked quietly:

They were all over the South. There were many wonderful people who had been silenced in many ways, and they accepted that, but they didn’t stop working! There was an enormous number of people that were doing good things in the South, but if you came from outside, they were not going to show their hand.

If you just came pouring in from out of the region and stuck a mike in somebody’s face and said, “Well, how do you feel about desegregation?” the first thing that was on his mind was his family and his job, and he’d say, “Well, I can ‘t see it. ” He was protecting himself. You might find if you sat down and talked to him about yourself that he felt there was a trustworthiness and he’s begin to open up too. But he was not about to disclose that world to an outsider who asked in a manner dangerous to him at that time.

This Southerner that Popham’s late night divulgences uncovered was not the Southerner publicized across the

---

Page 22

country. As Popham says, “We lived so long with our own myths. There were hundreds and hundreds of Southerners who didn’t think that way but who were trapped at the moment.” Later, they were able to “come out and declare themselves.” Today, Popham observes, “there’s no such thing as a serious candidate running for statewide office in the entire South on a racial ticket. It’s gone.”

The other Southerner that the “hit and run” press missed was the black leader, often quiet, also trapped by circumstances, but just as silently laying the foundations. Popham sought out these leaders and found them in the black universities and churches.

If a black university, for example, invited a speaker, the local press would arrive, cover the speech and leave. However, Popham stayed on, lingered around the punch bowl long after the microphones and cameras had left and learned a great deal more:

You’d have a story about what the man said; he had come to the South to bring a message and you’d write that story. And yet there were scores of things that were going to take place, and all of the leads were available that evening at the party; going to somebody’s house afterwards, a group of professors would come and maybe one or two bright students and sit and talk until midnight. By ten o’clock at night, he’d open up his heart about what he really thought and felt. That makes for better reporting. Then I’d go back to my motel. I could always call on him afterward.

In 1948, John married Frances Evans of Nashville who settled in Chattanooga and raised John IV and Hillary while John traveled in the family’s only car. After a decade on the road, John, in 1958, chose to stay closer to his family and accepted the position of managing editor of the Chattanooga Times. John’s third career in the newspaper world came to a close nineteen years later. Only in looking back over the entire spectrum could he see the preparation he had had and the role that he had played in the South.

You have to leave the South to see it. If you stay here, you think it is this way everywhere. I owe so much to those trips overseas with my father, to my years as a Marine–you can ‘t underestimate the influence of military experience upon the South–and to the multicultural experience of New York. Those were golden years of print, before television, when all of these critics went through the press. We were prepared to respond to eruptions, to converse with people and to cover many, many issues. Other people did it better than I in New York; I was a junior reporter. But it prepared me for my role in the South. Only later could I see what I had done.

Eleanor McCallie Cooper lives in Chattanooga, Tenn. Thanks to the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library for permission to excerpt the interview with John Popham conducted on August24, 1983, by Norman Bradley for the Chattanooga Oral History Project.

Figures of speech–High Tech Drifter

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, pp. 1-3

There is an unmistakable glint in Dirty Gary’s eye as he takes point blank aim at the man who holds the Democratic Party hostage. “Go ahead Mondale, make my day.”

“Dry up and blow away, Gary, ” snaps the bleary Fritz, his arm tightening around the neck of the Nomination as he backpedals toward San Francisco.

As the Live Eye opens, the hawk-faced Coloradan is taking questions.

“Senator, your rapid rise this primary season brings to this reporter’s mind the recent blockbuster movie ‘Sudden Impact.’ But just how long can you continue to build a presidential campaign out of Clint Eastwood scripts?”

“Just as long,” counters Dirty Gary, “as Eastwood continues to call himself an independent, Western, charismatic, Jeffersonian Democrat, not especially big on gun control.”

“But Eastwood’s not fresh,” argues a columnist. “He’s a dinosaur. Why don’t you get with the team?”

“It’s true,” says Dirty Gary, “Eastwood’s films have roots in the vigilante past, but they respond to the hidden agendas of the new idealism of self-interest. They are for youngsters of any age. They also happen to be the only scenarios which can beat the Death-Valley-warmed-over plot lines of Reagan in November. I offer a choice between the past and the future: government on horseback and by twenty-muleteam or the digital cowboy on the microwave range–the Western Sizzler.”

“Aren’t you getting a bit ahead of yourself? What about Mondale?”

“Mondale is mush. Until after New Hampshire all he did was retreat beyond understatement. He’s part of the complacent, back-scratching, bloated menagerie of Washington insiders who have the look of losers. Their butts have the shape of the chairs behind their desks.

“Eastwood,” continues Dirty Gary, “always has to move against the corrupt, bureacratic organization men–the bosses on the take–at the same time as he pinches

---

Page 2

off the heads of the low-life hoodlums who make life hard for young, urban professionals in parking garages and in the elevators of fitness centers.”

“How do you respond,” asks a savvy anchor, “to the often heard criticism that both you and Eastwood are steely, aloof loners with an Irish fatalistic sense of inevitability?”

“Look,” snaps Dirty Gary, “I put on my business suit like everybody else–one Lucchese boot at a time. I’m often called detached and laid back. That’s just the way I am.”

“Senator, what do you mean when you say, ‘People will know about me through what they read or what they see’?”

“I mean television spots, airport fly-ins and full page newspaper ads. As you know, our campaign has set the pace in making democracy safe for television. Iowa and the New England states were our test markets, but I’ve given up more than a year to learn how to appeal to the young and the restless–the voters who can decide the ’84 election.

“Mondale dared to be cautions for too long while we have taken the initiative in making caution look daring. Consider my defense proposals for instance. I call for an increase even beyond Reagan’s military budget and at the same time am able to appear both modern and pragmatic, and to lay claim to the high moral ground of the Nuclear Freeze.

“We’re patching up voter indifferences with a play to the young at heart. Computer graphics give us the look of the future in our video ads. We’ve benefited from my easily communicated maverick astringency and hatred of phoniness. We’ve also gained from Mondale’s own TV appearances with his crime boss’ wet look, banker’s suit and leaden eyelids. And, once the primary votes began to come in, Mondale–despite his fighting phrases–has not yet been able to wipe the chagrin off his face–even after Illinois.

“Then,” continues Dirty Gary, his words coming in an uncharacteristic rush, “you know the advertisement that the New York Times runs for itself? The one that goes, ‘Every message is at the mercy of its environment’? Well, we’ve made our media shots with that ad in mind. First, we’ve concentrated on the main entertainment shows of television–the local newscasts. You’ve seen how in a single hour at an airport I can appear live on the news shows of every station in a local market. Also, we buy commercial time as close to the newscasts as we can get. Our spots look and sound as technically flashy and as newsy as the news appears entertaining.

“Second, we choose key words, dramatic moods and poses in our ads to resemble those in commercials which are popular with the same audience that we are targeting. That way, successful products reinforce our message. Every time Chrysler touts the New Chrysler Technology, or ATT flashes up their futuristic hardware and logo while talking about A New Revolution from ATT Information Systems, we benefit. Think of what happens when Michael Jackson sings and dances for Pepsi: There’s A Whole New Generation Out There. My biggest mistake in the campaign so far is letting Mondale beat me to ‘Where’s the beef?’. It’s a real underdog’s slogan–hype that pays upon the consumer’s current distrust of hype.”

“I don’t understand,” confesses a reporter. “How can you expect to benefit from the New Chrylser when everyone has heard that you voted against the bail-out.”

“Never mind. That’s the past. My image of the new reminds you of other new images, they remind you of me and that generates the character of the emerging environment–which wouldn’t be complete without Michael Jackson and the New Chrysler Corporation and ATT and Gary Hart. Bunkmates with the future.

“We intend to make our place among a fast moving and exciting ensemble of leading-edge imagery,” says Dirty Gary through his rugged good looks. “Many citizens of the electronic village don’t want their lifestyles to get out of phase. We want to be as necessary to their poise and moods of desire as a Pepsi.”

“Senator, it seems more and more likely that the party’s nominee will not be chosen until this summer’s convention. How are you going to keep track of delegates, particularly the uncommitted?”

---

Page 3

“That’s simple enough,” answers Dirty Gary. “I’ll do what Eastwood–or, for that matter, what Jack or Buddy Kennedy would do–break down the delegates’ hotel room doors and see if they’re dressed like neo-liberals. If not, I’ll open fire. A final question?”

“Yes. What happens when the Great Communicator hears about this?”

“Reagan puts on his coat and tie just like I do,” Dirty Gary replies, “one shoulder holster at a time. I think it’s clear that the New is not new enough for both of us.”

The Press as Company Store, Atlanta Style

By Eric Guthey

Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 8-10

To doubt the current charming presentations of Southern growth and prosperity is to bring anathema on one’s head. What! The South not prosperous. Impossible, they cry, and the individual who questions is an idiot.–Lewis Harvie Blair, The Prosperity of the South Dependent on the Elevation of the Negro (1889)

Although Harvie Blair, native Virginian and former Confederate soldier, wrote his description of such defensive, pro-Southern attitudes a hundred years ago, his words apply just as well to the South today. The survival of this mixture of the New South creed, corporate-expansive boosterism, and belligerent local patriotism is not breaking news. But when Bill Kovach abruptly resigned as editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in November, the papers’ corporate managers who accepted his resignation and the community members opposed to it lined up on both sides of the myth and pushed it into the national headlines.

Atlantans who supported Kovach and liked what he had done with the papers during his two-year tenure claimed the corporate elite-who traditionally have promoted New South posturing and urban boosterism to bolster their own power-had forced out the former New York Times Washington bureau chief because of his tough coverage of the Atlanta business community. Publisher Jay Smith and David Easterly, president of the papers’ parent company, Cox Enterprises, denied that business pressure had anything to do with their acceptance of Kovach’s resignation. He had resigned and they had accepted because of a lack of “mutual trust,” they said.

But Smith and Easterly defended their actions against a barrage of national criticism by doing what all good New South boosters do-retreating to a stance of intense regionalism and denying any problem existed. In an article in The Wall Street Journal, Easterly responded to a comment from Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee by telling him to “stuff it.” Meanwhile, good ol’ boys like Journal-Constitution sportswriter Furman Bisher and columnist Lewis Grizzard, both of whom had been at the papers long before Kovach, gloated as the crowd they saw as “Northern invaders” from the New York Times lost the battle for the control of the papers. Said Bisher: “Maybe now we can get back to covering Dixie like the dew.”

To many, though, that meant the papers would return to the previous state of mediocrity which had chased serious Southern journalists away and allowed local talents like Bisher and Grizzard to thrive. “These papers have never attempted to excel,” said Dudley Clendinen, a former Timesman who had joined the papers in 1986 as Kovach’s assistant in charge of local news and who resigned two weeks after Kovach’s departure. “They’ve always been content to have to find their reputation in a single editor of conscience and great writing ability. But those editors always felt threatened: Ralph McGill spent every day afraid that he was going to be fired. Gene Patterson was forced out.”(In 1967, Constitution editor Eugene Patterson lost his job for running a column criticizing Georgia Power’s request for a rate hike).

“The [Cox] family takes the profits,” Clendinen said. “It doesn’t involve itself in the conduct of the paper, to see to it that they produce are cord of quality. That’s always been the case here in Atlanta, and because it has, people don’t know better. They’ve always lived here, always read these papers. If they’ve lived elsewhere they’d know better.” According to a recent ranking in Advertising Age, Cox Enterprises, an empire originally built around newspaper money from Dayton, Ohio, is the thirteenth largest media company in the world, and pulls in the ninth largest revenues from newspaper operations (over $710 million in 1987). According to the Forbes 400 listing, the sisters who control the family business, Anne Cox Chambers and Barbara Cox Anthony, together share the distinction of being the eighth richest people in the United States. Each is worth $2.25 billion.

Kovach joined the Journal-Constitition in 1986, reportedly after being passed over for the position of editor at the New York Times. The local community and the national media heralded his hiring as a signal the Cox sisters had decided to convert the Journal-Constitution from the haven for mediocrity and soft business coverage it had become into an institution that commanded national respect. Kovach himself declared that he intended to turn the Journal-Constitution into a world-class news organization.

As business institutions, large U.S. city newspapers at their best are never more than instruments of liberal reform, criticizing their business communities within certain “acceptable” limits. Bill Kovach tried to expand those limits at the Journal-Constitution, and his improvements were encouraging compared to the papers’ dismal record. Under Kovach, the papers ran lengthy investigative pieces exposing the Atlanta banking community’s discriminatory lending practices in black neighborhoods, the alleged bribing of Russian officials by Coca-Cola representatives, and Georgia Power management’s coercion of employees to make political contributions to the campaign of Public Service Commission candidate Bobby Rowan.

---

Page 9

The papers’ coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta last summer also drew national attention. In fact, even the papers’ senior management publicly praised Kovach as the man who had turned around the Journal-Constitution and likened him to the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Constitution editor Ralph McGill, under whom the papers were said to have had their best years. At a party in the newsroom on the convention’s last night, Smith stood atop a desk and declared: “These are no longer the newspapers of Ralph McGill. These are the newspapers of Bill Kovach.”

But five months later, Smith was explaining that he and Kovach had never been able to establish a relationship of “mutual trust.” In a November 12 editorial, Smith instated that the company had let Kovach go because he was impossible to work with. This very well may be the immediate reason why the papers’ management got rid of Kovach. Kovach himself conceded that direct pressure from the business community had nothing to do with his leaving. Some of Kovach’s own hirees admitted he had a hot temper, and may have threatened to quit one time too many.

Yet, it doesn’t matter if a corporate conspiracy to Iynch Kovach didn’t exist. New South boosterism does not work that way. Rather, it is a pervasive consciousness, a framework of attitudes within which serious analysis and criticism-especially of the New South’s booming capital-are just not welcome. Complaints from Atlanta business leaders over what they saw as Kovach’s unfair coverage merely reflected and contributed to that ethos. So did Kovach’s protracted arguments with Smith and Easterly, who wanted the papers to look more like USA Today, the shallow but highly successful paper replete with short stories, bright graphics, and a decidedly “up-beat” approach to the news. The Cox chain’s desire to emulate USA Today indicates that it places a higher premium on marketing strategies and revenue than on solid news coverage. All of these factors add up to a situation in which the Cox corporate managers find themselves predisposed to think that someone like Kovach would be difficult to work with.

“I no longer respect or believe in the ownership of the paper, or the corporate managers more particularly,” Clendinen said, adding he lamented Kovach’s departure in part because it signaled the end of an important experiment for the region. “There’s never been a great regional newspaper in the South,” he explained. “Serious editors and reporters have had to go North because there’s been nothing to aspire to. What we had here with Bill Kovach was an effort to create a paper that would report on and examine and reflect the culture of the South.”

Clendinen still bristles over the way he, Kovach and city editor Wendell “Sonny” Rawls, who also joined the papers in 1986, have been portrayed as an intrusive “New York Times Mafia” Kovach and Rawls are both from Tennessee and both worked at the Nashville Tennesseean before going to the Times. Clendinen is from Tampa, Fla., went to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and his family’s roots are in Georgia, where his great-grandfather was surgeon general during the Civil War. “The foreign implant, if you will, are the five people from Dayton, Ohio, who now run the Cox corporation,” Clendinen said.

“This is representative of a tradition that has existed in the South since the Civil War: that is, much of the choices that have been made in the South have been given over to Northern, Midwestern industrial money,” Clendinen said. “The Dayton ownership, the Cox family ownership, has been happy to play to and to patronize Southern impulses, a set of impulses which has been true also since the War-this defensiveness, resistance to outside influence, ‘We’re just fine, thank you, just as we are.’ You know, the Lewis Grizzard line-if you don’t like it, Delta is ready when you are-that whole business…This was not an affectation, this was part of that dug-in Southernness. And the papers, owned by Ohio money, played on that fact.”

The real issue, though, Clendinen insisted, is the quality of the public record. “These papers, this ownership-we thought-had made that commitment, had joined the circle of the few who re really committed to the quality of the record as opposed to the size of their profits first. In retrospect, it most certainly seems a mistaken impression.”

At a protest rally held outside the papers’ downtown offices on November 12, one week after Kovach resigned, journalist Hodding Carter interpreted the incident in much the same way-as the latest battle in a war for the soul of American journalism. “Is it going to be packaging or the product? Is it going to be reality or is it going to be happy times? Is it going to be speaking truth to power or speaking power’s truth? And each time that question is asked today too often the answer comes back: packaging not product, happy time, not reality, power’s truth, not truth to power.”

Carter also stressed that the issue was important not just for Atlanta, but for the South and for the nation as well. “In a fight like this, in an issue like this, there aren’t really any outsiders at all. Because in the most basic way all of us, whether we’re in journalism or outside it, are being treated as outsiders by the fewer and fewer who own the more and more in this life called journalism.”

Also at the rally, novelist Pat Conroy attacked Lewis Grizzard, whom he saw as the premier representative of the insular Southern attitudes that had contributed to Kovach’s downfall. He read to the crowd of about 250 concerned community members and Journal and Constitution staffers the contents of an ad that Grizzard had considered taking out in the Constitution in which Grizzard said, “In fact, we might even benefit from

---

Page 10

[Kovach’s] departure, with apologies to those who enjoy exhaustive series on what’s doing in Africa.” Grizzard was referring to a series on the devastating famine in the Sudan.

Conroy responded to Grizzard, “Because I too am a redneck, I want to translate for all your readers and for the Cox chain what you meant… You wrote it in code but the translation is this: Atlanta doesn’t care if niggers starve.”

However accurate might be Conroy’s emotional indictment of the racism undergirding Grizzard’s attitude towards investigative journalism, it does not change the fact that the papers’ corporate management-not Grizzard and not its readers or its staff-retain the final say over what news in Atlanta will be like. In which direction they will lead the papers now that Kovach is gone is not clear. But there have been indications in recent weeks that the changes bode ill for the public’s need for more responsible coverage in Atlanta and throughout the region.

“The publisher and the corporate managers will now get the kind of paper that they want” says Dudley Clendinen. “It’s all a question of direction, emphasis, and aspiration. Look at the front page in the last three weeks-Christmas trees, Santa Clauses, warm, optimistic business stories and tender family stories. What you see is a reflection of the wishes of the corporate management. They want a marketing tool, as opposed to a record of quality.”

“USA Today has become the symbol of how you compete with people who are drawn to the images of television. You create a package, an information package, which is not so much a newspaper as it is a packaged digest of information bytes, like sound bytes. And that is the paper that Easterly likes to cite-I don’t think anyone would argue that it is a record of quality.”

Perhaps an even stronger indication of the Cox chain’s intentions is its choice of a successor for Kovach. Arnold Rosenfeld has been in the Cox chain since 1969. He will take over the papers for the next six months, search for another editor, and then move further up in the corporation. Rosenfeld most recently has served as the editor of the Cox chain’s Austin American-Statesman in Texas.

“He’s just another guy from Dayton,” says Clendinen. “So he knows what they want, which is not very much.”

Even though Rosenfeld will be directly in charge of the papers for only six months, his hiring sends out a definite signal. In the past few years, community members in Austin have complained about that paper’s blatant boosterism as well. And last spring, Rosenfeld’s Statesman fired reporter Kathleen Sullivan because, according to accounts in Texas Monthly and The Columbia Journalism Review, Sullivan had aggressively pursued stories on worker safety in high-tech industry while the city itself was trying to woo just such companies to the area. In other words, many believed that Sullivan was fired because she was “a skeptic, not a booster.”

The paper also offered Sullivan over $8,000 to sign a severance agreement which would have prevented her from criticizing the paper or running the story anywhere else. She refused.

Committed reporters and editors remain at the Atlanta papers who would refuse to bow to such pressure as well. But many say they no longer have any incentive to initiate potentially controversial articles or major investigative projects. If the papers’ management can get serious and find an editor equally as committed to the quality of the public record as Kovach was, then perhaps those staffers will stay on and continue to improve the papers. Otherwise, Harvie Blair’s characterization of defensive, New South boosterism will still to apply to the Coxes’ Journal-Constitution and to Atlanta another hundred years from now.

Eric Guthey is a student in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University in Atlanta.