No. 2 for Carter

Editor Hodding Carter of the Greenville (Miss.) Delta Democrat-Times has helped make Greenville a notable example of tolerance in the race-and religion-conscious South. Although Negroes outnumber whites nearly two to one in the Greenville area, there is little friction between the two races. Carter, a determined but unfanatical liberal who believes the South can best solve its own problems, has not attacked segregation. He has concentrated on building up respect between races and between religions. At 44-year-old Editor Carter's urging, Greenville Protestants and Catholics helped build a new synagogue for the Jews. Then he started a campaign to have the Jews and Protestants chip in for a new Catholic school. Moreover, he has made tolerance plus live-wire journalism pay: the Delta Democrat-Times nets some $75,000 a year on a gross of about $500,000.

Last week Editor Carter got a chance to widen his influence. In booming Natchez, whose population (now 22,678) has increased 48% in a decade, a group of businessmen started the afternoon Times 2 1/2years ago to compete with the 86-year-old Natchez Democrat (circ. 4,918). The Times almost caught up in circulation (4,513), but made so little money that the owners were glad to turn over the paper's management and sell half its stock to Hod Carter for an undisclosed figure. Publisher Carter and his 35-year-old general manager, John T. Gibson, who will split Carter's half-interest in the Times, immediately went to work to make things hot for the competition. In his first issue last week, Carter cleaned out a lot of the dull clutter from the anemic Times, gave it some reader-building liver injections by adding five new columns (the Alsops, Robert Ruark, Earl Wilson, Lee Bedford's "Southern Exposure," Carter's own weekly, "Looking at the South," already syndicated in 16 other papers). In the lead Times editorial, Publisher Carter tapped out a clean-cut statement of his own credo: "We want [the Times] to be a mirror in which the community can see its full face. If the face appears smudged sometimes it will not be the fault of the newspaper . . . We won't seek controversy for the sake of controversy or shun it for the sake of peace . . ." It looked as if things would soon be livelier in Natchez.

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