Playing with Fire

One night in September a fiery cross was burned on the lawn of the old governor's mansion of Milledgeville, Ga. (pop. 6,800), once the capital of the state. In the mansion lives President Guy Wells of the Georgia State College for Women, where a group of Negro college educators was meeting. They were frightened out of town. Fortnight ago three men were arrested after a Negro's house was shot up, and there was talk around town that night riders had been driving Negro families out of the county. Such terrorism caused Georgia's oldest weekly, the Milledgeville Union Recorder (est. 1819) to raise its voice against the Ku Klux Klan. "It is time people quit winking at law violations," it declared. "This is not Germany or Russia . . ." The paper demanded a grand jury investigation.

Last week the editorial brought some action. While Editor Jere Moore, 46, and his wife were out to dinner, a fiery cross was burned on their front lawn. But Editor Moore, an antiaircraft colonel in the Pacific in World War II, was not to be intimidated. He came right back with a defiant editorial accusing the Ku Klux

Klan of threatening freedom of the press. Said he: ". . . We shall fight to the death to keep the press free." At week's end, ten leading Milledgevillagers put up a $1,000 reward to help catch cross-burners. Said Editor Moore: "I think we're going to get somewhere this time."

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