Depth from Dixie

During the wave of rapes and stabbings in New York City schools this winter, the South's segregationist dailies pounced jubilantly on the story as a Yankee-sent sermon on the evils of mixing the races in the classroom. When a Brooklyn principal killed himself during a grand jury investigation of violence at his junior high school (TIME, Feb. 19), Mississippi's extremist Jackson Daily News front-paged the story with a picture of a Negro policeman guarding the school. Caption: "Mixed school violence led to this."

The facts did not support such racist conclusions, and despite pressure from Southern editors, the wire services refused to give that slant to their reports on Northern school delinquency. Many Southern editors nonetheless echoed the Montgomery Advertiser's taunt that the real story was being suppressed by ''such deluded racists as the New York Times.'''' A widely distributed series of cartoons in the Nashville Banner derided "Mixiecrats" and "Bleeding Hearts," pictured the North's "objective liberal press" as burying delinquency stories on the obituary pages. When newsmen such as the Atlanta Journal's Managing Editor William Ray tried conscientiously to dig deeper by demanding a racial breakdown of the 644 students expelled from New York schools as troublemakers, they ran afoul of school regulations that forbid such identification.

A Place in Society. Last week the Southern editors finally got firsthand coverage of the racial angle in New York's school problem from a first-rate Southern reporter. To cover the story in depth the United Press assigned able, Georgia-born Alfred G. Kuettner, the U.P.'s longtime Atlanta bureau chief. Promised the U.P.'s Executive Editor Harry Ferguson: "If there are any squawks, I'll be your lawyer."

Hard-driving Reporter Kuettner, 44, spent a week prowling the city from the cluttered streets of East Harlem to the seedy side of Brooklyn, talked to school officials and students, white and Negro members of teen-age gangs, storekeepers and social workers, judges and Mayor Robert Wagner. Result: a perceptive, carefully documented three-part series. Reporter Kuettner's conclusion: "You cannot in honesty find that actual racial conflict is causing the rampage of juvenile delinquency. You cannot but admit that Negroes, white children and Puerto Ricans get along amiably in their classes."

Al Kuettner also reported that the racial issue is "at least partly to blame," that Negro and Puerto Rican children cause "a huge percentage of the crime and violence." But, he found, "mixing of the races is not the basic cause." As a tough-minded Brooklyn principal told him: "This problem is not because Negroes are Negroes, it is because they are newcomers. They are often at the bottom of the economic scale." The school man added an observation of equal relevance to the South:* "It is a sociological truth that until a person finds his place in society, he is rebellious."

Lost Viewpoint. Virtually every major U.P. paper in the South ran Kuettner's series; South Carolina's segregationist Greenville Piedmont gave it an eight-column top-of-the-banner headline. To most editors. Al Kuettner's byline was the story's best recommendation. He has amassed 45 file drawers on racial problems since spotting desegregation as a looming battle in 1945, roamed 3,600 miles through the South in 1956 to write a series on integration that won him Sigma Delta Chi's top award for general reporting.

Though his New York series will prompt few Southerners to trade in their prejudices, it bridged briefly a chasm that is making it increasingly difficult to report the news with any depth in the Deep South. As segregationist Atlanta Journal Editor Ray, who gave the series a big play, said last week with unconscious irony: "I don't think Kuettner presents the viewpoint of the South. I expect he has become so objective that he may have lost his viewpoint."

*Which has such serious delinquency problems as vandalism, theft and knife-carrying in some of its all-white schools. In Atlanta, of 3,7DEGDEG juveniles who appeared before the courts in 1957, SDEG% were white.

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