The Press: Shift at the Gazette

Harry Ashmore, the Arkansas editor who last year believed Little Rock could and should comply with the Supreme Court decision for school desegregation, saw the conflict in a different light last week. “There is no way, for the time being at least,” wrote the executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette, “to obtain such compliance.”

Never an integrationist. Editor Ashmore won a 1958 Pulitzer Prize for his protests against the Little Rock mob and the way it was goaded into lawlessness by Governor Orval Faubus. “The people of Little Rock,” he wrote a year ago, “will not allow a tiny, militant minority to take over Central High School and run it under mob rule.” Gazette circulation dropped from 99,573 to 88,068, while the pro-Faubus Arkansas Democrat took up the slack. Ashmore refused to be bullied, and an attempted advertising boycott failed.

As to reasons for his new look, Ashmore explained that “deterioration in public opinion” could only result in irreparable damage to the public-school system. “I was trying,” he said, “to head off a showdown between the state and federal governments—because no one could win it. They can use force to bring about integration, but if they do, it will require force of such degree that it will disrupt public education for a long time to come. I guess what I’m saying is that I see this as a dead end.”