Southerner by Inclination

For 58 years the Charlotte, N. C. News (circ. 62,000) has covered the Carolinas with its good intentions, exposing and opposing brutality to Negroes and chain gangs, working for better housing. Its campaigns brought it a measure of fame, but no great fortune. Since January, when a well-heeled syndicate of business tycoons took over, Carolinians have wondered whether the News's new owners would turn out to be too fat to fight.

This week they got a reassuring answer when Publisher Thomas L. Robinson appointed a new editor. His choice was Harry S. Ashmore, the News's associate editor, and one of the South's more realistic and readable editorial writers.

A decade ago, as a fresh-from-college reporter on the Greenville Piedmont, Ashmore got a big hand in the Carolinas by touring "the Deep North" to do a series on Tobacco Roads above the Mason-Dixon line. He took charge of the News's editorial page after serving as an infantry lieutenant colonel in Europe. His campaigns (for two-party politics, racial and religious tolerance, votes for Negroes, higher pay for teachers) have established him as neither a Yankee-lover nor a deep-dyed Southerner.

Ashmore, who is 30 but looks older, tempers his enthusiasm for reform with consideration for the facts of Southern life. Says he: "We hope to avoid the usual Southernisms, [such as] undue sensitivity to outside criticism. . . . We will maintain, however, that the Southern white man is a member of a persecuted minority, constantly damned by U.S. liberals who ignore his considerable accomplishments. ... I am a Southerner by inclination as well as by virtue of two Confederate grandfathers, but it is high time we rejoined the Union."

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