children and exposing them to the hazards of street brawling to line their own pockets must be a bit nauseating even to the Justice Dept.
Even if true, the editorial could hardly be construed
as an aid to clearing the air. As it was, the paper ran
a correction on the editorial page the next day that
included the statement: “The Post-Herald has no
information to indicate money collected to support
the SCLC has been appropriated for the personal use
of King or anyone else and intended no such inference.
“We are informed that in 1962 the SCLC board
offered to ‘put $500,000 aside for King’s personal use’ and he refused it. He, according to his assistant, draws
only a dollar a year from SCLC ‘so as to be eligible’ for group insurance.”
In contrast, the News, whose publisher, Hanson,
was a member of the Senior Citizens, emphasized the
necessity for dealing with the demonstrations by way
of the conference table. After the May 11 bombings,
too, there was another difference in opinion, with the
Post-Herald decrying the propinquity of federal
troops, and the News citing reasons why it was logical
for them to be at hand.
The facts set down here do not, of course, summarize the entire performance of the papers in the
field of racial relations. It is possible, however, to
make some broad observations:
1. In the early part of the month, there seemed to
be an effort to insulate Birmingham readers from
the national impact of the demonstrations. Little
comment from outside appeared, not even wire-service material from Washington.
This isolation was shattered after the News printed
on its front page a long telegram from Hanson to the
President. There could be seen a considerable loosening in the appearance of dispatches from the News’s Washington bureau, and by Relman Morin of the
Associated Press, who was on the scene. Until that
time, however, there was little recognition in the
papers that the demonstrations had caught the world’sSummer, 1963 31
