Voice from the Middle

The South's noisy extremists do not necessarily represent the South. On one hand are the in-power gallus snappers who would rather have their children go ignorant than have them educated in company with Negroes. On the other side are the cause pumpers who somehow always seem to end up at New York fund-raising rallies. Somewhere in between lies a substantial but generally silent group of moderates. Among these, few make their presence more manifest than the Atlanta Constitution's Cartoonist Clifford H. Baldowski, who draws under the name of "Baldy."

For nine years Baldy has sought to depict the plight of the reasonable Southerner who, like himself, stands aghast between the extremists. He has, for example, shown two antagonists locked in mortal combat, one labeled "Reality," the other labeled "Tradition." The caption: "It's a tough fight, Ma!" Baldy put "Reality" on top.

This theme--the old South in an agonizing self-appraisal--is subtly stitched through most of Baldy's work, now and then shows up with stark clarity, as in the cartoon that won him a Sigma Delta Chi award last month (see cut). No integrationist, Atlanta's Baldy crusades only for reason. "As far as I'm concerned," he says, "the only thing worse than mixing the races in school is closing the schools. But my mother doesn't feel as strongly about segregation as her mother felt, and

I certainly don't feel as strongly as my mother does."

Temperate as they are, Baldy's appeals to reason have earned him the hatred of the traditionalists, who sometimes send back his cartoons with the faces blacked in, or scrawled: "You are a Negro, aren't you, Mr. Baldy?" Recently, a last-ditch racist type, learning for the first time that Baldy's full name was Baldowski, wrote angrily: "I always wondered why you were such a Nigger lover. Now I know. You're one of those foreigners." As a matter of fact, Moderate Baldy was born in Augusta, Ga.

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