"Damned Good Pro"

Before the Southern Governors' Conference in 1951, a bushy-haired, boyish-looking newsman stood up and spoke unpalatable truths. Said he: "We cannot turn our backs upon injustice simply because a black man is its victim. Nor can we find a safe retreat in the sort of legalistic buck-passing that recognizes the existence of an evil but insists it is somebody else's responsibility."

Six years later, Harry Scott Ashmore's words came home to roost--right on his own shoulders. In his post as executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette, he stood out last week as the strong voice for principle and reason in Little Rock and a central figure in the integration crisis.

Public Enemy No. I. Day after day, rumpled, greying Harry Ashmore, 41, turned out some of the most eloquent editorials of his distinguished career, supplied guidance and a stream of wisecracks for impatient newsmen from all over the world, briefed Government official on critical developments. Twice he scurried up to Manhattan to give TViewers a memorable glimpse of good will that was still at work in the South.

Through the turmoil. Harry Ashmore's telephone shrilled around the clock with threatening calls from agitators, who were fired by Governor Faubus' cry that Editor Ashmore was the worst of all possible culprits, "an ardent integrationist." Little Rock's white-supremacist Capital Citizens' Council (annual dues: $5) dubbed Ashmore "Public Enemy No. i." Eagerly abetted by some less scrupulous competitors, a statewide boycott against "that nigger-lovin' paper" had cost the 137-year-old Gazette (circ. 99,573) 3,000 subscribers by week's end.

Bar Raillery. With the solid support of J. (for John) N. Heiskell, 84-year-old president of the sturdily Democratic Gazette, Editor Ashmore emphasized from the day of the Supreme Court's school-integration ruling in 1954 that there could be "no choice between compliance and defiance." Far from urging integration, the Gazette, which had helped elect Orval Faubus in two gubernatorial campaigns, backed his efforts to postpone desegregation by "moderate," legal means. But when Faubus switched last month from legalistic buck-passing to outright defiance, Harry Ashmore's conscience-pricking editorials (more than 40 so far) repeatedly warned of the tragic consequences. When the mobs moved into the streets around Central High School, it was to Democratic Editor Ashmore that U.S. Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers telephoned for a precise estimate of the strength of the forces of moderation. "I told him," drawled Ashmore. "that about all our side had left was a broken-down editor, a lame-duck mayor and a former governor who has no public office."

The day that U.S. paratroopers landed, ex-Infantry Officer (Lieut. Colonel) Harry Ashmore sadly welcomed the invasion of Little Rock as the shock that might prompt Arkansas to "regain perspective, restore peace, sustain the law." The Gazette seemed even to prompt the enthusiastically pro-Faubus evening Democrat to aim a couple of mildly censorious editorials against the governor, but anti-Ashmore mutterings grew to shouts, and some businessmen started cornering the Gazette's Publisher Hugh Patterson to rail against his editor. Cracked Ashmore: "I'm lucky in having a publisher who does not consider what he hears at the countryclub bar the voice of the people."

Invitation to Integration. "The trouble with the South," says Ashmore, "is that nobody understands it, including Southerners." If Dixie has a natural-born interpreter, it is Harry Ashmore. Born in South Carolina's hilly Greenville County, he proudly recites his credentials to be an editor ("I'm a damned good pro") in the South: "The Ashmore gravestones in Greenville show before the Revolution. I had two Confederate grandfathers, which, I believe, is all you can have. My grandfather Ashmore is the only Confederate private I've ever heard of, though I'm sure he was called a colonel in later life."

Harry Ashmore was reared among Negro servants in an atmosphere of mutual interdependence that, as he has often noted since, "eroded away" in the Negroes' rise out of the old master-slave relationship. At Clemson College, at Harvard, where he studied the Reconstruction as a Nieman Fellow in 1941, and as an editor on the Charlotte News in North Carolina, Newsman Ashmore reached the firm conclusion that by continued failure to meet "the basic commitments of citizenship" in its worsening relations with the Negro, the white South could only invite what Ashmore regards as the equal evil of enforced integration. He has pushed that premise in two books, The Negro and the Schools (1954) and his upcoming An Epitaph for Dixie, and in Democratic party politics, which he entered as civil-rights adviser to Adlai Stevenson in 1956. ("How many Democratic editors were there available?" he asks.)

Temporary Tantrum. Harry Ashmore believes that history will look back on the Little Rock crisis as a "temporary temper tantrum," a time of transition in which "the best of us have been defeated and the worst of us have taken over--for the moment." Should this prophecy, like the one of six years ago, also come true, Editor Ashmore will be able to count himself among the men of tenacity and purpose who made it so.

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