Tightrope

When the Southern Education Reporting Service started a journalistic experiment two years ago to tell all the desegregation news straight down the middle, it was damned by extremists of both sides. But the experiment proved a success: the service's monthly Southern School News has walked the tightrope of factual reporting so skillfully that partisans on opposite sides now look up to it, and an increasing number of Southern newspapers are carrying its stories. A single mail brought subscription renewals from Georgia's Segregationist Herman Talmadge and Desegregationist and Novelist Lillian (Strange Fruit) Smith. Last week the service's correspondents were back at their posts throughout the South after a conference in Nashville to plan another year of "providing accurate, unbiased information."

No Adjectives Wanted. A month after the Ford Foundation launched the project with $106,000 a year to "fill a vacuum" in the South (TIME, June 14, 1954), circulation of the News, then distributed free, leaped from 10,000 to 30,000. It went to top Southern state and city officials, hundreds of school boards, educators, editors--and ordinary parents who found plenty of opinion on the issue in their own newspapers but too little information. Last year, when the service began charging $2 a year, subscriptions began at 3,000 and quickly rose to 12,000 in 48 states and 40 foreign countries.

Each of the paper's 19 correspondents is an experienced reporter who still holds down a regular news job, gets $100 a month for doing a monthly roundup on the hard facts of desegregation developments in his state. "We don't want any adjectives or adverbs," says Executive Director Don Shoemaker. 43, who has held editing jobs on Southern newspapers since 1934. A major reporting problem is to get school officials to speak for attribution; the subject is often just too hot. It is just as hard to get frank views from ordinary citizens in any attempt to sound out public opinion. As desegregation advances, a more novel problem is to get hold of statistics on the school population. In St. Louis and Washington, for example, the number of Negroes in the integrated schools is unobtainable because those cities no longer maintain records with racial identification.

Treasure-Trove. To help Shoemaker keep tabs on the situation, the service clips everything about the subject from 60 dailies and 100 magazines, and accumulated books, pamphlets, speeches and court decisions--a growing treasure-trove for scholars present and future. The service gets daily queries from reporters and educators around the world; its headquarters was the first stop for a New York Times reportorial task force that prepared a special eight-page supplement on the problem this spring.

Examples of the kind of hard news the paper reports:

P:More than 100 tax-supported white colleges and universities, half the total in the South, now accept Negroes.

P:Some 256,000 Southern Negroes. 10% of Negro students in the South, are freely eligible to attend schools with whites.

P:Desegregation generally proves easiest where the Negro population is smallest, but there are such exceptions as the integrated schools of St. Louis, where Negroes are 35% of the students--a larger percentage than that of segregated Nashville. Richmond and Dallas.

P:School mixing invariably lowers academic standards for a while. Says Shoemaker: ''Whether this is an impeachment of the Negro's intellectual caliber or whether it is, as someone has said, proof of the inequality of public education under separation, I leave to others."

Such balance on the tightrope produces some exasperated mail. Wrote one Detroit reader: "Please state which end you are working for. You are not deffinet." To Southern Schools News, that comment--especially since it was scrawled on a renewal slip--was high tribute.

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