Dabney and the Doukhobors

Tall, scholarly, bespectacled Virginius Dabney, 43, lives like a typical upper-class Southerner in a white frame house in Richmond, Va., with his pretty, vivacious wife "Doug," their three children and a maid of all work named Cora. Last summer, eyeing Cora enviously, a Richmond lady told V Dabney's wife, "If V would stop talking so much we might have some cooks in our kitchens."

V Dabney's talk has long plagued conservative Virginians. As editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, he has tilted his pen at almost every Southern household god. He has offended the Solid South by urging its return to the two-party system. He has outraged the Baptist South by criticizing prohibition and fundamentalism. He incensed the cheap-labor South by leading a campaign which resulted in the shortening of the Virginia work week for women from 60 to 48 hours.

At It Again. Last week, as Virginians hotly argued over the State Supreme Court's invalidation of their soldier ballot act, cool Virginius Dabney celebrated the conclusion of his tenth year in command of the Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial page by harping gently on a familiar string. Since the poll tax is the nub of the soldier-vote question, why not--he suggested--use the projected constitutional convention to repeal the poll tax? Virginia's Bourbons, who pride themselves on the fact that the purpose of the poll tax is and always has been to limit the vote, shook their heads sadly and muttered that V Dabney was at it again.

Virginius Dabney has arrived at his liberal views by patient, thoughtful effort and constant conflict with his patrician heritage. His editorials, ground out with painful slowness, are almost pedantically preoccupied with both sides of the question. They are invariably prosaic and humorless. His advocacy last year of the abolition of Jim Crow busses and streetcars in Virginia, which set the whole South on its ear, was put forward in a quiet editorial entitled "The Conservative Course in Race Relations." Excerpt: "Many Virginians probably do not know it, but we have now arrived at the point where radicals from the North will find it easy to secure a large following . . . unless reasonable and proper concessions to the colored people are made." Because of such reason ableness, many of the more fiery Negro leaders call Dabney "far too conservative."

Intellectual Integrity. Grave, intelligent, industrious Editor Dabney is well liked, personally, among Richmond's banker-lawyer-merchant aristocracy. But as an editor they call him everything from a "starry-eyed idealist" to a "nigger lover." Dabney himself says: "I'd like to think that I get by with my views in circles which don't agree with me because I am credited with intellectual integrity, but that might be stretching a point."

Last week, over his regular breakfast of oatmeal covered with molasses, Editor Dabney discussed the press. The trouble with most editorial pages, he said, is that they "deal with such earth-shaking subjects as 'Be Kind to Animals Week' and the misdeeds of the Doukhobors--provided the Doukhobors are at least 1,000 miles away." On Virginius Dabney's editorial page the Doukhobors are right around the corner.

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