Word: southern
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Race in the News was published by Atlanta's Southern Regional Council, Inc., one of the South's most effective race-relations groups. Dr. George Sinclair Mitchell, the council's executive director, thought up the idea and collected 1,000 clippings of "racial news" from Southern papers. Then 29-year-old Associate Editor Calvin Kytle of the weekly Calhoun, Ga. Times turned out the booklet...
Different Colors. Despite great improvement in the past ten years, and such "laudable exceptions" as the Chattanooga Times and the Richmond Times Dispatch, many Southern newspapers still follow a "double standard" in news. Says Race in the News: "Negroes . . . are almost always identified by race; whites . . . are not . . . Hardly ever does 'Mr.,' 'Miss,' or 'Mrs.' precede the name of a Negro in the regular news columns . . . To refer to the widow of a lynched Negro as 'the Mallard woman' . . . is to deny her even the elemental dignity of grief . . . The Negro...
...gravest charge: "Through repetition [Southern newspapers] have made the word 'Negro' in a headline synonymous with 'crime' and, in the minds of many, with 'rape.'" In 4½ months, the respected Macon News and Sunday Telegraph-News ran 153 headlines identifying Negroes with violence or lawbreaking; in the same period, in 801 stories about white lawbreakers, only four headlines mentioned their color. The council's conclusion: "Crime is peculiar to no race, religion or national group. [Mention race only if] this information is a relevant part of the news." Relevant: NEGRO RIGHT...
Same Values. Few Southern papers indulge in the old "inflammatory treatment" of race stories, says Race in the News, but there are still a few lucifers: "[Newsmen] strongly suspect that the 1946 riot in Columbia, Tenn. and the 1949 lynching in Wilkinson County, Ga.* would never have happened had editors there showed either more courage or less prejudice...
Actually, said the booklet, the average Southern editor is not as anti-Negro as he sometimes sounds; he is just trying to give readers "what he thinks they want." The council's counsel : give them what the editor thinks they ought to have. "The responsible editor . . . need not indulge in special pleading for the Negro. He need merely apply the same news values . . . the same respect for accuracy, the same sense of fair play and good taste...