Tell It NotinGath

When Northern newsmen covering the Negro boycott of Montgomery buses swarmed into the city room of Alabama's Montgomery Advertiser (circ. 60,144), Editor-in-Chief Grover Cleveland Hall Jr., 41, did his best to answer their questions. He also asked questions--and decided from the answers that the North's own racial sins were being covered by its press in a "conspiracy of silence." To prove his point, Hall launched a daily series on Northern discrimination. Said he: "Whatever we reveal will not solve any problem Alabama has. Our purpose is to point out to the self-righteous North that it's not doing so damn well either in solving the race problem."*

To get the series. Reporter Tom Johnson and other staffers telephoned Northern editors and public officials to ask about discrimination in their areas. They found plenty, and Hall let the stories sprawl over his editorial page under the standing rebuking headline:

TELL IT NOT IN GATH, PUBLISH IT NOT IN THE STREETS OF ASKELON./-When the Advertiser questioned screwball Mayor Orville Hubbard (TIME, March 5, 1951) of Dearborn, Mich., he bragged that not a single Negro could get a place to live in his city of 114,000, though 15,000 of them worked there. Said the mayor: "I am for complete segregation, one million percent, on all levels."

Dirty Wash. The Advertiser's series also reported that Chicago had assigned 150 police to the Trumbull Park development (TIME, May 17, 1954) to prevent violence over an influx of Negro residents. Hall's wry comment noted that Chicago race relations "seem incredibly violent to a Southerner," since "in all the Confederacy, there's not a single Negro family I know of that needs police protection."

Last week Hall angrily charged the Detroit press with burying news of the Rouse case (TIME, April 16), in which a part American Indian family was forced to move out of a Detroit neighborhood after a mob rioted around the house in the belief that they were Negroes. Commented Hall: "One paper ran it on page 3, one on page 16, and one on page 60. One story was only three paragraphs long. Anything like that happening in Montgomery would have made the lead story in all of those papers. Yet they ignore their own dirty wash. It makes me mad."

Both in Detroit and Chicago, Hall found, editors deliberately play down racial troubles in their own cities. The papers feel that full coverage of racial outbreaks might make them worse. By common consent, newspapers and radio stations in Chicago publish nothing about a tense race situation during its "incipient" stage; if a riot actually breaks out, they report it, but in the past tense as if it had already blown over, even if it should still be raging. Concludes Hall: "The race issue is not a Southern dilemma but a national problem. Discrimination is discrimination everywhere, not just when it happens under a Southern magnolia."

Middle Ground. Editor Hall's father, editor of the Advertiser before him, won a 1928 Pulitzer prize for editorials attacking the Ku Klux Klan. Young Hall worked as a police reporter, capital correspondent, and columnist before he took over the editor's chair in 1947. He was soon running one of the nation's liveliest editorial pages. He has editorialized wittily, and sometimes savagely, on everything from post office pens to international policy --with plenty of attention in between to blasting Alabama's Governor James ("Kissin' Jim") Folsom ("This untaught knave . . . lacks the grace and prudence to keep zippered his flapping mandible to conceal his void").

On integration, Hall has taken a middle-ground position; he thinks it unfeasible for years to come in the Deep South, but he avoids preaching resistance. He has rapped the White Citizens' Councils as "manicured Kluxers," and given the Negro bus boycotters a fair shake in his news columns. But his latest campaign is drawing praise from Southern extremists, and it won a laudatory resolution from the Alabama legislature. Admits Hall: "I am, unhappily, comforting a lot of people I don't want to comfort."

Yet Hall's series is also turning the North's eyes on its own vulnerability. In an exchange of open letters. Hall prompted Editor James Wechsler of the New York Post to assign Reporter Ted Poston to do a series on anti-Negro discrimination in New York. This week, describing how it feels to be a Negro up North, Reporter Poston, a Kentucky-born Negro, agreed that "there is no real Mason-Dixon line to American race prejudice." But he also made an important distinction that has slipped past Hall in his series thus far. Wrote Poston: "Prejudice up here is often a reflection of individual bias and ignorance. But it has neither the backing of the state nor the power of public opinion behind it."

*For a confirming item, see EDUCATION.

/- Thus David voiced the wish (II Samuel 1:20) that the slaying of King Saul and his son Jona than in battle with the Philistines could be kept from the Philistines themselves lest they rejoice.

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