Fifty-Fifty in the South

On their way home from a civil rights march to downtown Eutaw, Ala., Negro demonstrators kept on the alert for any sign of danger from local whites. And still they were surprised. Suddenly a light plane made a low pass over the road and spewed out a heavy, yellow spray of insecticide. Coughing and gagging, the Negroes stumbled out of the fog with ruined clothing and numbing nausea. In an area noted for ingenious forms of Negro harassment, this was surely one of the most notable. Yet the story ran in only one Southern paper--the weekly Southern Courier.

Ever since it was founded last July, the Courier has been digging out and printing civil rights news that most other Southern papers ignore. Published in Montgomery, Ala., the Courier is the brainchild of Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) workers who went South in the summer of 1964, and soon felt that the local press was either disregarding their work or utterly distorting it. In desperation, two Harvard Crimson staffers--Peter Cummings and Ellen Lake--started mimeographing sheets of news and passing them around. This summer they decided to put out a paper on a permanent, year-round basis.

Kind Words for Matt. The six-page Courier, which sells for 10-c-, covers the news with a professionalism that belies the inexperience of its editors and their meager resources. Refusing to accept any money from civil rights groups, the paper raises what it can on college campuses in the North--about $43,000 to date. Advertising income amounts to an inconsequential $100 a week. The youthful twelve-man staff (down from a summer peak of 18, now that students have returned to college) works for $20-a-week salaries and the sheer exhilaration of it. "Coming down here was about fifty-fifty," says Managing Editor Michael Lottman, 23, on leave from the Chicago Daily News; "half for a good journalistic opportunity, half to do something for civil rights."

In its own way, the Courier, too, is fifty-fifty. It is a conscientious crusader that tries to tell both sides of the story. However violent the event, the Courier reports it with a calmness and dispassion not often matched in easily aroused Northern newspapers. "We've been leaning over backwards to be fair to the people we disagree with," says Lottman. The Courier even had some kind words about Ku Klux Klan Lawyer Matt Murphy, killed last August in an automobile crash. Murphy, the paper noted, had often defended Negro clients and had helped a Negro lawyer to gain admittance to the Alabama bar.

Subscribers on the Sly. Courier reporters and stringers, who include Negro boys as young as 15, have suffered the expected difficulties: threats, a beating, a harrowing 100-m.p.h. chase on the highway. But often the white community can be helpful. In Lowndes County, where Tom Coleman was acquitted of the murder of the Rev. Jonathan Daniels, Coleman's sister, county superintendent of schools, cheerfully briefs the Courier on school affairs.

To date, most of the 14,000 people who buy the paper are Negroes; but the editors hope to win more white readers. They have a few surreptitious white subscribers already. An Alabama woman recently wrote: "I am delighted with your paper. Will you please send it in an envelope? My husband sees red on the subject of race relations, so I have to be pretty careful." The editors, who are willing to send the Courier anywhere in any sort of disguise, were glad to oblige.

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