Now and then, there are things that can’t be said in newspapers

It seems as if we might have to pay more attention to things that can’t be said in certain spaces. Again. 

Because if you live in the American South or know anything about its history, you know we’ve been here before. We mucked through it then, though it cost us dearly in spilled blood, lost lives and wasted decades. Perhaps we can do it again.

Not long ago, Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, declared that his newspaper’s opinion section would become much less opinionated. Viewpoints that contradict Bezos’ feelings about “personal liberties and free markets” will no longer be tolerated. Pages that have served as an important marketplace of ideas will be supplanted by a controlled — no, curated — economy of well-vetted words. It was only the latest retreat by newspapers from robust editorializing, but it was a big one.

Many are crying betrayal. As for myself, I sense the fear and anxiety of a man whose worldwide delivery service — his primary source of income — and spaceship hobby are both vulnerable to a U.S. president who lacks a certain grace when it comes to criticism. I also see something familiar in Bezos’ response.

In the summer of 1954, Marvin Griffin brought his campaign for governor to a small Georgia town on the Alabama border. It was a fraught time — perhaps even more so than today. Three months earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had declared segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional, sending a shudder through the South’s race-based power structure. White voters, i.e., white newspaper readers, were in an uproar.

Griffin would go on to win the Democratic primary as well as the general election that fall, with a campaign that touted him as the state’s preeminent champion of white supremacy. Racial solidarity was crucial to the coming fight. White deviants needed to be called out, as Candidate Griffin made clear on that hot August day.

Specifically, Griffin read aloud six words of apostasy that had recently been penned by Ralph Emerson McGill, editor of The Atlanta Constitution: “Segregation no longer fits today’s world.” Given the time, it was a strong, bold statement guaranteed to raise the hackles of a majority of White voters in Georgia.

But here’s the thing: That sentence had never been printed in the newspaper that McGill himself led. The six words would appear the next day — and for the first time — in the Constitution’s news columns, but only because Marvin Griffin had given voice to them. As the candidate pointed out to his audience, the offending sentence originated on Page 120 of a slim volume of McGill’s writings entitled “The Fleas Come With the Dog,” which had been published that spring. I have a copy.

The primary editorial voice of the Constitution, who would be dubbed the conscience of the South in the coming fight over civil rights, doubted that his own newspaper could tolerate this creeping bit of logic — not that segregation had always been wrong, but that it was now outdated. Such a thought was too radical. Another, privately controlled vehicle was required.

McGill had written something close to that sentence in late 1953, after the Georgia legislature, anticipating the Supreme Court’s ban on school segregation, proposed a state constitutional amendment to permit the closing of all public schools and the establishment of a voucher-fueled private system.

The action, McGill had posited in his daily Page One column, amounted to the state’s admission that “segregation by law no longer fits today’s world.” (Emphasis mine.) He softened the blow by assuring readers that “an end to segregation — when it comes — will not, of course, force people to associate socially.”

Yet in McGill’s book, the trimmed-down sentence that provoked Candidate Griffin appeared at the end of a vignette in praise of a decorated African-American diplomat — which also never appeared in McGill’s newspaper.  The dropped words and changed context amounted to a blunt call for an end to Jim Crow. Clearly, it was a statement that McGill, the writer, felt obliged to make. Just as clearly, McGill, the editor, understood that it was a step his own newspaper was not ready to take.

In 1954, Ralph McGill was not yet the civil rights crusader he would become. As a newspaper columnist, he was a cautious, sometimes vacillating writer wary of alienating his readership. Other factors were at work as well. The Atlanta Constitution had been purchased a few years earlier by former Gov. James Cox of Ohio, who already owned the Atlanta Journal, and this newest acquisition was struggling financially. McGill’s boss, George Biggers, the first president of the corporate umbrella that was Atlanta Newspapers, Inc., was a firm segregationist who — so McGill believed — lived to torment him, according to Barbara Barksdale Clowse, author of a 1998 biography of McGill.

Both newspapers were also rich political targets. In his 1954 campaign, Marvin Griffin – himself publisher of a weekly newspaper in Bainbridge, Ga. — promised to strip the Atlanta papers of $600,000 a year (equivalent to about $7 million today) they received in advertisements from liquor dealerships. Eighteen months later, he threatened the state’s largest newspapers with an even bigger stick.

Perhaps the nadir of Georgia politics in the modern era was the 1956 session of the General Assembly, which gave statutory authority to Governor Griffin’s plan of “massive resistance” against the U.S. Supreme Court.  At Griffin’s bidding, lawmakers declared the high court’s Brown v. Board of Education rulings — by this time there were two of them — null and void. They set into law the process by which the state public school system would be disassembled should a black student enter a white classroom. A voucher operation would replace it.

Georgia lawmakers passed legislation to require police to enforce segregation laws at the request of any citizen, as well as a measure to permit cities to sell, exchange or lease parks and recreation facilities rather than integrate them.  They voted to put a giant Confederate “X” on the Georgia state flag, which would remain there for 45 years. To blunt any criticism, Governor Griffin also sponsored legislation to permit large Georgia newspapers, though not his, to be sued for libel in the smallest of the state’s rural, pro-segregation counties. It was a heavy hammer in the decade before the U.S. Supreme Court’s New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision gave the press significant protection against thin-skinned politicians. And it appears to have worked.

Across the two winter months that state lawmakers erected barricade after barricade to protect Jim Crow in 1956, Ralph McGill wrote 43 columns. Not a single one addressed the activity within Georgia’s state capitol. He wrote about communism in China, about the polio vaccine, about coal towns and Tennessee Ernie Ford’s hit song lauding sixteen tons of No. 9 coal. His criticism was to be found between the lines. In U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy’s new book, “Profiles in Courage, McGill pointed to the chapter on Sam Houston of Texas, who opposed his state’s secession from the union. His column on “dictators and the news” was focused on attempts to close newspapers by Huey Long in Louisiana and Juan Peron in Argentina.

The news columns of The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution — it would be decades before their news staffs merged — provided an acceptable level of who-said-what coverage of the state of Georgia’s rebellious ways. But their editorial pages conceded the central argument of the day to Marvin Griffin. “None can dispute Gov. Griffin’s statement that the people of Georgia have voted for his plan and have given him what amounts to a free hand,” a Constitution editorial stated at the outset of the 1956 legislative session.

McGill would continue to be more forthright outside the confines of his own newspaper. “In May, 1954, the trumpets of the nine black-robed justices in the Greek temple on the Potomac blew down the already weakened walls of political feudalism in the South,” he wrote in the Atlantic, three months after the end of the ’56 legislative session. “There long will be fighting in the ruins, but it will be guerrilla stuff and its denouement is sure.”

McGill’s hometown voice would become sharper — after getting a new boss and after Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas, with the apparent encouragement of Marvin Griffin, called out the state militia in 1957 to prevent the court-ordered integration of Little Rock classrooms. Guns and dynamite — the latter would be the calling card of hardcore segregationists in the late 1950s — have a way of sharpening one’s focus.

I’ve been a lifelong fan of Ralph McGill, who died in 1969, and remain one. Nor do I belittle the newspaper for which I toiled more than four decades. I had great colleagues there, and many are still there doing the hard work that democracy requires.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that newspapers, television networks, digital news sites and the like are all human institutions. We greatly prefer them to be constantly heroic and upright, but because they are human, they can also be intimidated, self-serving, overly cautious and even cowardly. Perhaps we need to work that into our expectations.

I will not cancel my subscription to the Washington Post because I still value the work of those who fill its news columns. Yet Jeff Bezos may be right about one thing. When it comes to looking for the hard truths that must be said, perhaps the Post is no longer where we should expect to find them. We should remember Ralph McGill and look elsewhere.