The Press: Jim Crow’s Other Side

In all the South, not a single newspaper ran the angry series that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Reporter Ray Sprigle wrote after four weeks of touring the “Land of Jim Crow.” Admittedly onesided, his stories of segregation, discrimination and degradation (TIME, Aug. 16) made the South look bad. Last week, the South’s side was heard from. Many Southern papers which did not print Sprigle found space to print a Northern Negro publisher’s account of his own untroubled tour. And many more were likely to print a rebuttal to Sprigle by Hodding Carter, the able Mississippi editor who won a Pulitzer prize for his editorials on racial tolerance.

“I Know the Score.” Negro Publisher Davis Lee of the Newark weekly Telegram (circ. 110,000) found a Negro’s life below the Mason-Dixon line more tolerable than north of it. In an editorial he wrote: “When I am in Virginia or North Carolina I don’t wonder if I will be served if I walk into a white restaurant. I know the score. However, I have walked into several right here in New Jersey . . . and have been refused service . . . New Jersey today boasts of more civil rights legislation than any other state in the union, and the state government itself practices more discrimination than Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina or Georgia . . .

Editor Carter, of the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times, was brought into the act by the Providence Journal. It had carried the Sprigle series (along with 13 other Northern papers), and felt that its readers had a right to hear from the defense. Carter wrote a six-part series called “Jim Crow’s Other Side,” which was offered last week to papers which syndicated Sprigle.

“Slanted Selectivity.” Some of Sprigle’s findings, Carter conceded, were “tragically true. But . . . anyone who tours the South with a representative of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People isn’t going to find anything good there … it [the N.A.A.C.P.] isn’t interested in the evidence of improvement of relationships within the framework of segregation, for its dominant objective is the destruction of that framework . . .

“There are trigger-happy, sadistic law officers in the South, too many of them. But I challenge Mr. Sprigle to produce any sheriff who has either won or even run on such a platform, who was ever re-elected after a term characterized by the slaying of guiltless, unarmed Negroes. Mr. Sprigle is guilty of slanted selectivity throughout his narrative . . .

“The Southern white,” wrote Carter, “is increasingly overcoming all but one of the emotional biases inherited from 250 mutually blighting years of a master & slave relationship. The one: the white South’s insistence upon segregation in the mass . .. [It] is as united as 30 million people can be in its insistence on segregation . . . But [its] evolution is being immeasurably slowed down by the ferocity, the punitive spirit and the lack of balanced approach which Ray Sprigle’s articles in great part exemplify . . . How about giving some recognition to the good things that are happening in the South . . . ?”