The Birmingham Story

Birmingham whites and blacks share a community of fear . . . Every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, reinforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob . . . Telephones are tapped . . . Mail is intercepted and opened . . . The eavesdropper, the spy and the informer have become a fact of life.

So wrote New York Timesman Harrison Salisbury last month in a two-part story on race tensions in Birmingham, Ala. As might be expected, Salisbury's molten prose brought an immediate outcry from Birmingham.

To the Times went a letter from Birmingham's three city commissioners demanding speedy retraction and a public apology. A second letter came from Birmingham's Committee of 100, composed of businessmen who try to win new industry for their city, and the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce: they complained that the stories were "biased, warped, and misleading. The facts as adduced by Mr. Salisbury were either outright misstatements or, what is worse, half-truths."

Full & Balanced? Salisbury stuck to his guns and so did the Times. Wrote Managing Editor Turner Catledge in two rare signed statements: "The Times standards require the reporting of the news in its fullest and most balanced form . . . The New York Times has every confidence that Mr. Salisbury reported the situation as he saw it through the eyes of an objective newspaperman. He did not go to Birmingham 'seeking sensationalism' or anything else but the facts." Yet, Catledge admitted: "We recognize that the articles did not stress the obvious fact that an overwhelming percentage of the citizens of that city lead happy and peaceful lives in a growing and prosperous community. Nor did the articles stress the equally obvious fact that this substantial element of the citizenry deplores any lawlessness that may exist in their city and is working in its own way to correct and reduce such tensions as exist."

These were precisely the omissions that disturbed Birmingham.

How had Salisbury, who was based in New York, gone about getting his story? On arriving in Birmingham, he had picked up an initial list of some 15 names from the local Times stringer, spent the next 48 hours traveling around by himself interviewing Birmingham citizens. City officials say he did not interview them. "Why, we never even knew the man was in town," says City Commissioner James W. Morgan, who acts as Birmingham's mayor. "If we had, we would have been delighted to take him around to see both the good and the bad." The moderate leaders of the city's business community also complain that Salisbury snubbed them, argue that the extreme racists cited in the articles are not the true caretakers of the white viewpoint. The moderates state that Salisbury dealt with the worst examples of racial violence, created an illusion of perpetual strife, and overlooked the fact that Birmingham Negroes have the highest standard of living of any in the South.

To the Test. As for flat "misstatements," Birmingham's leaders deny that the views of John Crommelin, a retired Navy admiral running for the U.S. Senate on an anti-Negro, anti-Semitic platform, have, as Salisbury wrote, "a wider acceptance than many Alabamans will admit." Fact: running in a gubernatorial election in 1958, Extremist Crommelin polled 2,245 out of 681,000 votes.

Last week Salisbury's objectivity and the Times's responsibility were put to a legal test by the city of Birmingham. In the Federal District Court for North Alabama, City Commissioners James W. Morgan, Eugene ("Bull") Connor and J. T. Waggoner filed a $1,500,000 libel suit against the Times and Salisbury, charged that the articles "falsely inferred and insinuated" that the city commissioners "encouraged racial hatred . . . and oppression of the Negro race."

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