MGJR Volume 2 2014 | Page 32

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Telegraph; Harry Ashmore, Arkansas Gazette; the Hodding Carters, Greenville, Miss. Delta Democrat-Times, Hazel Bannon Smith, Lexington, Miss., Advertiser, and P.D. East, the Petal Paper.

The movement also enhanced the reputations and credentials of a number of journalists already employed by major news organizations. Among them, to name only a few, besides Valeriani, were Charles Moore, Karl Fleming, Eugene Roberts, John Herbers, Claude Sitton, Haynes Johnson, Jack Nelson, Herb Kaplow, Harrison Salisbury, Calvin Trillin, Sander Vanocur and Reese Cleghorn.

Until Britt moved to Chicago to become managing editor of Jet, we enjoyed good, normal, collegial relations with most of our white fellow journalists. Surely, there were some racists and segregationists among them, but the motivating factor seemed to be concern about their careers and futures. We socialized with a few, sharing drinks and house parties, violating Georgia’s segregation laws some of the time. I was at a party at Bud Trillin’s pad one night when several of us decided to integrate the downtown Piedmont Park. Under cover of darkness, his former Yale schoolmate, Hal Gulliver, and I batted around a few

tennis balls. Had the cops arrested us, who knows how our personal histories would have turned out.

The only southern paper with a black reporter at the time was the Nashville Tennessean, but he did not cover the movement. Britt and I tried to integrate the Atlanta papers, but were turned down. Neither Ralph McGill nor his successor, Eugene Patterson, was bold enough to break the racial barrier at the Constitution - we knew the conservative Journal was out of the question. But, when I was approached by the Dayton, Ohio, Daily News, also owned by Cox Publications, I was interviewed by editors at the Constitution who gave me high marks and I left Atlanta for Dayton in September 1963, the movement still in full swing.

Dayton was my first real daily newspaper job. I did not cover civil rights there, but wrote a lot of rights stories as the movement spread to the North. I covered SNCC’s training session that prepared its young workers for the 1964 Mississippi Summer project. The gathering was held at Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, near Dayton, where three of them – James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman – departed and went to their deaths in Philadelphia, Miss.

Another personal moment for me occurred during my final days at the World, prior to Scott firing me a few days before Christmas, 1961. It was a lesson in journalistic ethics. As mentioned, I had made many friends in the movement and helped them set

up their publications, even writing for them after work, stories the World would not print, yet an ethical no-no. Julian Bond was editing my first big story for page one. He

called me at home to ask what byline he should use for me.

“Julian,” I told him, “You’re a smart college kid, you come up with something.”

The byline the next day on the top story read, “By P. Delano Lane.” He, Charlayne Hunter-Gault and a few others from those days still jokingly greet me by that moniker. Others helping out student journals included M. Carl Holman, brothers James and John Gibson and Jondell Johnson. Holman would later serve as staff director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission with John Gibson on the staff; James Gibson would head the Atlanta Branch NAACP, followed by Jondell Johnson.

All journalists, regardless of color, risked their lives every day they spent covering the civil rights wars, especially at the beginning as momentum picked up across the South, and eventually beyond the region's borders. As the movement was overcome and overshadowed by other issues - Vietnam, urban rioting, poverty, the women's movement - some of the battles seem futile, in retrospect. School segregation is nearly as much of a problem today as it was pre-1954. Historian John Hope Franklin, in a very honest interview with me, was notably dejected; he acknowledged that rights leaders made a huge mistake after the Brown decision.

"In our enthusiasm, we naively assumed that whites would accept the decision of the Supreme Court, the law of the land, as we did," he commented. "We didn't think they'd oppose it so violently and for so long. We misjudged them; we should have seen it coming and prepared ourselves for the longer crusade." g

Atlanta Daily World Publisher C.A. Scott kept reporters from covering some aspects of the movement.

Photo courtesy of BlackPast.org.