July 17, 1957
Los Angeles
The painful comparison: "800 Negroes Lose Jobs" and "Deep South Editors Here, See Race Tension Ending." And to make things even worse, the Southern editors were entirely well-meaning and sincere.
The Mirror interviewed editors from a variety of U.S. newspapers who were in Los Angeles to attend "Editor's Day" at Disneyland the week after the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention in San Francisco.
Although the story mostly gathered the editors' impressions of Los Angeles, it led with the views of George Chaplin of the New Orleans Item and Grover C. Hall of the Montgomery, Ala., Advertiser.
Chaplin, a former editor of Pacific Stars and Stripes who was later editor in chief at the Honolulu Advertiser, said: "I believe there is too much generalization about the race problem–which is a national and an international problem, rather than one confined to the South. There is a tremendous body of goodwill in the South and it is found among the moderates. But too much of the news is being made by extremists since the moderate, by nature, is reluctant to grab the mike or the headline."
What's even more interesting are the remarks by Hall, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1928 for editorials attacking racial and religious intolerance. According to a 1941 Time magazine article, Hall broke the power of the Klan in Alabama.
According to the Mirror: "Hall said his city is proud of its Negro population, and that they are fitting into the community from an economical standpoint.
"Of course," he said, "colored people are leaving the rural sections in spectacular fashion. However, those that remain manage to contribute to the community in a very satisfactory manner.
"We have no violence. The colored people, for the most part, are resolving the problem themselves. Our part is to help."
Let me repeat that: The editor of the Montgomery, Ala., Advertiser says there's no violence. In 1957. And the Mirror let him get away with it.
Jan. 6, 1957
Jan. 11, 1957
Jan. 28, 1957
May 31, 1957
We don't have any problems in Montgomery. No sir. "The colored people, for the most part, are resolving the problem themselves."
ladailymirror.com 