Another Voice in Atlanta

If Atlanta's jointly owned dailies, the morning Constitution and the evening Journal, were to go out of business tomorrow, their disappearance would gladden the heart of many a Georgian. But none would rejoice more than James C. Davis, 69. After 16 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Davis was defeated for re-election in 1962 in a campaign that drew enthusiastic participation from both the Journal and Constitution. Lacking the power to order his tormentors into silence, ex-Congressman Davis last week did the next best thing. He founded an opposition daily, the Atlanta Times.

These days it takes a generous supply of gumption and money to launch a daily in the face of established opposition. The last time anyone had the nerve to try was in Phoenix, Ariz., where after two years, the upstart competitors have yet to find their place. But Atlanta's new paper looked uncommonly hale for a journalistic juvenile. The Times's 128-page debut issue thumped on 175,000 doorsteps, a neatly balanced, eye-pleasing display of big pictures and ample white space to break up the body type. The paper's management claimed a solid circulation, after the souvenir hunters dropped out, of 140,000. The starting bankroll was impressively large: $3,000,000 raised by a public stock issue to which some 41,000 investors, all Georgians, subscribed.

Such backing certainly suggests that the paper has plenty of well-wishers, and it is just this point that Publisher Davis means to prove.

Central Weakness. In the opinion of many Georgians, the Journal and the Constitution are a disgrace to all red-blooded white Southerners. Roy V. Harris, a rallier of the state's racists, usually refers to the Constitution's publisher as "Rastus" Ralph McGill. While in office, Congressman Davis frequently castigated the papers from the House floor. "The mud throwing of this collection of little peewees," he said in 1961, "amounts to about as much as a flock of grassbirds*in a fence corner chattering at an eagle."

As measured by some familiar Dixie standards, Atlanta's two existing dailies have earned such opprobrium. Both are liberal in outlook, and have long held that it is morally wrong to discriminate on the basis of race. The Constitution was one of the first and is still one of the few Southern papers to accept the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision on public school integration. Both papers continue to champion the role of reason. Only last month Constitution Editor Eugene Patterson argued that "the central weakness of the old Southern segregationist position" is its effort "to justify wrong instead of trying to rectify it."

Expected Tolerance. It was this sort of talk that started James Davis on his campaign to vary Atlanta's newspaper conversation. He found some willing segregationist cohorts, among them Roscoe Pickett, who is now Georgia's Republican national committeeman, and Lester Maddox, proprietor of an Atlanta fried-chicken joint called the Pickrick. From the Journal, Davis and company lured Associate Editor Luke Greene, who had served 24 years on that paper without ever quite approving its editorial approach. "I have always been a conservative," said Greene, who was appointed Times editor.

The Times has pointedly avoided direct declarations of policy on the race issue. "We are not setting out to be any sort of extremist newspaper or trying to do anything that would create turmoil," said Editor Greene. "But I don't think we will go along with a lot of the tactics of the integration newspapers. It can be assumed we will not embrace the civil rights bill." The Times promised "to be conservative--responsibly so. We will be independent, free of any party affiliation, and seek at all times to reach decisions that embody character, discretion and sound judgment."

No Reason for Mixing. At the Journal and Constitution, the birth of the Times was greeted, strangely enough, with total silence. Neither paper printed a line, as if they considered the newcomer beneath notice. "We've got our newspapers and they've got their newspaper," said Bill Ray, executive editor of both the Journal and the Constitution, "and I don't see any reason for mixing them up."

Perhaps Atlanta's old dailies could afford to be lofty, with their circulations at a new high: 203,000 for the Journal, 258,000 for the Constitution. They were figures, however, on which Atlanta's new publishers had very definite designs of their own.

*Pisobia melanotos, commonly known as the meadow snipe. Davis' colloquialism salutes the bird's tendency, when alarmed, to take refuge in tall grass.

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