NEWS WARS THE RISE AND FALL OF THE
CLARION-LEDGER
September 7 - 13, 2011
‘Black Day of Tragedy’ The Clarion-Ledger has a complicated 14 past. As its hyphenated name indicates, today’s
publication is the merger of several papers. It was already a hybrid in 1920 when brothers Thomas and Robert Hederman bought The Daily Clarion-Ledger from their cousins. During the Great Depression, the Hedermans made a deal with the competing Jackson Daily News, and in 1937, the two newspapers
and its business manager, Walter Johnson, told employees they had sold out under pressure of heavy losses of television station WJTV, owned jointly by the papers, and high court costs of a bitter legal battle that began a year ago,” The New York Times reported. Fred Sullens stayed on as editor of the Jackson Daily News. From 1954 until 1982, the Hedermans owned both newspapers in town, the Jackson Daily News, the “afternoon paper,” and The Clarion-Ledger, the “morning paper.” Since at least the 1940s, The ClarionLedger has marketed itself as a statewide paper. The older Hedermans left a mark for publishing newspapers that openly promoted white supremacy, even as white residents considered it an important community news organ. “In a very racist state, they were the standouts,” said Hodding Carter III, who worked with his father Hodding Jr., owner of the Delta Democrat-Times, in Greenville during the 1950s and 1960s. “The Clarion-Ledger was not a newspaper. It was an organ for the white segregationist establishment.” In 1957, The ClarionJackson native Charles Overby was editor of The ClarionLedger when it won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1983. Ledger publicly identified blacks with connections to incorporated as Mississippi Publishers Corp. the National Association for the Advancement to sell joint advertising. In 1954, the Jackson of Colored People, considered by segregationDaily News sold out to The Clarion-Ledger ists to be a group of communist “agitators.” for $2.25 million. The New York Times re- Printing those names endangered the safety of ported the deal happened despite a court rul- many Mississippi residents. ing that blocked the Hederman family from Julius E. Thompson, in “Percy Greene controlling both papers. Time magazine wrote and the Jackson Advocate” (McFarland and in November 1954 that the Hedermans were Co., 1994), identified the leading white Misbuying up Jackson Daily News stock. When sissippi press segregationists of the decade as Fred Sullens and other owners of the Jackson Bob Hederman Jr. and Tom Hederman Jr. Daily News found out, they tried to block a of The Clarion-Ledger/Jackson Daily News; buyout in court. The judge sided with them, Fred Sullens, editor of the Jackson Daily News; but the expense of a legal fight forced a sale. and James M. Ward, who succeeded Sullens as “The News’ editor, Frederick Sullens, Daily News editor in 1957.
COURTESY NEWSEUM
O
rley Hood and Walter Philbin lugged their laundry bags into the laundromat near the Jitney 14 on Fortification Street. They sorted their clothes, put their coins in the slots and waited for the first wash cycle to begin. Then Philbin pulled out a stack of old Associated Press wire stories he’d been saving. It was 1971. Hood was 21, finishing his degree in sports information at Belhaven College and working at the Jackson Daily News as a sports reporter. Philbin was a cub reporter at The Clarion-Ledger covering what he could. As they waited for the spin cycle, Philbin read part of one story out loud to Hood, then stopped and wrote something in the margin. “How do you think he got that source to say that?” Philbin asked Hood. “I don’t know,” Hood said. He then offered a couple of theories. The young men put their clothes in the dryer, then deconstructed the story, trying to figure how to be great. The conversation turned to journalism and their future in it. Philbin left Jackson a couple of years later and became a crime reporter for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. He stayed with that job until he retired this summer. He developed a reputation over the years for wearing a certain hat to crime scenes. Younger reporters referred to him as “Columbo.” After his year at the Jackson Daily News, Hood got a dream job when The Commerical Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., hired him. He had grown up believing The Commercial Appeal was the best newspaper in the South. Getting that job made his family proud and his daddy cry, Hood said. In 1976, Hood returned to the Jackson Daily News and The Clarion-Ledger and stayed 32 years as a loyal newspaperman. From 1983 to 2008, he was the preeminent columnist at The Clarion-Ledger, a popular local personality who won awards and developed a strong following. Then, on Dec. 3, 2008, The Clarion-Ledger laid him off.
by Valerie Wells
The newspaper family loudly supported the Citizens’ Council, a group of white businessmen and leaders founded in 1953 to maintain segregation, especially in schools. Both The Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News reported on meetings of the Citizens’ Council and gave the organization free advertising. When the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that black and white children should attend the same schools, an editorial in the May 18, 1954, Clarion-Ledger called it “a black day of tragedy for the South, and for both races.” Orley Hood, meanwhile, was growing up in Vicksburg enamored with the treasures inside his daily newspapers. Every day when he was 6, he stood at the end of his driveway and waited for the delivery guy to throw a rolledup paper at his house. The little boy learned to read in 1956, studying the Yankees’ box scores in the sports section of the paper. When he was a couple of years older, he went to the public library after school got out at 2:30 p.m. to wait for his dad to get off work from his job with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Young Orley read newspapers from New York City before heading home with his dad. “You had to fight for information,” Hood said. Over in Jackson, though, the Hedermans were not interested in a free flow of information. The publishers often worked hand-inhand with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, an official part of state government that spied on Mississippi residents and others who supported integration in any way. The commission kept extensive files that included “intelligence reports” on “race mixing invaders” and “racial zealots,” as well as letters and memos from commission leaders showing that they could and did ask “Bob” (the publisher) and “Tom” (the editor) to publish or not publish information that the white establishment believed would help or hurt their cause. In 1954, the day after the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board, an editorial on the front page of the Jackson Daily News declared “Bloodstains on White Marble Steps.” Editor Fred Sullens wrote: “Human blood may stain Southern soil in many places because of this decision, but the dark red stains of that blood will be on the marble steps of the United States Supreme Court building.”