The Paper Curtain

In the Charlotte, N.C., Observer, the news from Charleston, S.C., 120 miles to the southeast, made a considerable splash last week. "At least seven downtown merchants here," wrote the Observer in a two-column story datelined Charleston, "have hired Negroes as clerks or cashiers under pressure of a seven-week buying boycott. It is the biggest breakthrough of Negroes into white-collar jobs in the city, and probably in the state." But in Charleston itself, where the boycott has been in effect since March 17, the story rated nary a line in either the News & Courier (circ. 61,500) or the jointly owned evening paper, the Post (36,122).

The News & Courier's boycott of the boycott is only expected behavior for one of the South's noisiest advocates of segregation. The paper's editorial policy is one long, high-fidelity rebel yell to hold that color line. It has used the occasion of

Lincoln's Birthday to argue that the Great Emancipator never meant to free the slaves ("The black men for whom he felt compassion but not respect have won the victory that Lincoln intended as a safeguard for the white man's civilization").

Big news to the News & Courier is any race trouble up North, however slight.

Such incidents get prominent play in a deliberate effort by Editor Thomas R.

Waring, 54, to pierce what he calls "the paper curtain," a Northern newspaper conspiracy to hide the true South. But thanks to Tom Waring's stubborn silence, even his subscribers were beginning to wonder whether that paper curtain had not been hung by Tom Waring himself.

The race-conscious editor, who helped organize the first White Citizens Councils in the South to fight desegregation, and lectures on the subject "Prejudice Is Not Necessarily Wrong," had no such misgiving to trouble his conscience. By his definition, the boycott just wasn't news.

After an earlier story in the Charlotte Observer, a moderate paper, Waring did run a rambling editorial expressing "sorrow" over "the picketing of King Street stores in an attempt to force employment of clerks on the basis of race." Then the paper curtain descended once more--and stayed down. Said Waring: "This paper is not interested in promoting boycotts." Said News & Courier Assistant Editor Arthur Wilcox: "We don't think it's a story."

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