DATE: Tuesday, October 14, 1997             TAG: 9710140002

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Perry Morgan 

                                            LENGTH:  137 lines

RECALLING LITTLE ROCK AN INJUSTICE DONE BY AN EDITOR'S PEN IS CAUSE FOR REGRET

Fair warning: This windy, rambling piece is personal. It's about my own tiny part in the shame of Little Rock. How nine black children at the precipice helped save my career and thus helped open Harvard's and other doors to a plowboy from Sharpsburg, Ga., Shakerag, sweet Senoia and other towns of no renown that are falling down in long shadows. Though, praise be, rust is slow.

Why do this now, 40 years after, in my own small way, I failed those nine children? Because these are days of craving forgiveness for words not said.

In Drancy, France, Archbishop Olivier de Barrenger says ``the Catholic Church knows that conscience is constituted by memory,'' and that no society or person ``can be at peace with himself if his past is repressed or dishonest.'' He begs pardon for his church's acceptance of Vichy France's ferocious anti-Semitic lows. As does the International Red Cross for seeing the Holocaust coming in Poland and saying nothing.

A New York Times editor saw the serendipity of the bishop's words and Bill Clinton's superb speech Sept. 25 at Little Rock and put them on the same page.

Come back, please, to September 1957. Gov. Orval Faubus hazards the lives of nine black children for their wanting to walk through a door opened to them by a Supreme Court that finally found the vein of conscience in the 14th Amendment. Faubus first incited mobs. Next, he called out the Arkansas National Guard to ``control'' the mob's desire to ``kill just one of them and let the others go.''

A three-week stand-off ensued. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, checkmated, finally and almost offhandedly, from a phone at a golf course, sent U.S. troops back to Dixie - what Faubus wanted all along: Rage to cloak his impotency.

Now to my little part, of which a friend advised: ``Be direct. Spit out the grits. Put me in your seat.''

Very well. It's a seat wet with sweat as Brodie Sheppard Griffith, editor-in-chief of The Charlotte News, weighed my words. I was a greenhorn editorial writer asked to opine on Little Rock, and I'd used up all my sure opinions in three samples written to get the job in the first place. Worse, I was second at bat. An excellent editorial on Little Rock - written by my boss, Cecil Prince, - already had been rejected. Now Brodie Griffith, this genial segregationist, was weighing me, too. He who'd cheered a parade of talent from Charles Kuralt to W. J. Cash, whose Mind of the South described a stubby gothic tower standing over deep and misty basements.

I was the son of a sharecropper. My father's best virtue was knowing he'd ``never met a nigger worse than white trash,'' and, in the manic phases of his depression, would say so in Ed Park's crowded barbershop. And be shunned again. And shame me in his always going against the grain.

Brodie Griffith's office was hot. His eyeshade cast green pallor on ruddy cheeks. The place stank of our untipped Camels and Old Golds.

``You are right,'' he said. ``Cecil's piece is in many ways better than yours. But I must tell you now what I hid from you to get you here. The Charlotte News is busted. Broke. Paydays are never sure. We simply can't afford pieties.'' Being too soft on the Negroes, he was saying, could cost us critical advertising revenue.

I'd heard about the cut-rate ads that gave the paper bulk. So I'd asked myself already: How much could I risk saying about the amazing grace of black children at bay? About simple decency?

Not one word.

The surest thing I knew then about Brodie Griffith was his hate for William Tecumseh Sherman. That abandoned child grown up as general who torched South Carolina not for keeping slaves, which suited him, but for their damnable disorders of pride and secessionism and for firing on Fort Sumter. That needed punishment. His foot on their stiff necks. Sherman's bummers burned out into the weather the Brodies and maybe, too, some Sheppards and Griffiths. Sherman's passion was Order, Order, Order!

Brodie Griffith lifted cool, gray eyes. Scanned my gray face. Smiled warmly. Sherman did not intrude.

``This will do. Puts us on the mudsill. For law and order, which for now will have to do. I see some common-sense substance and broad sympathies for all of us hemmed up down here, our ways repealed. You know not to preach the way liberals must.''

He looked away.

``I know writing opinion is like digging ditches with your teeth. But don't quit. The News needs you.''

As it happened, the presses didn't break down that day, although the paper eventually went broke, no matter what we said about Little Rock. Brodie Griffith asked every reader who thanked him for the piece to call ``my associate Perry Morgan.''

Many did. For a piece that, like Ike, never mentioned courage, honor, faith, hope or charity. Blind to transcending courage in children. And to their names.

For 40 years I've owed them this apology.

Charlotte had some fame, even then, as a progressive place, but it was not. Its virtue was restraint. And manners. Put to it, that many-steepled city had tolerated five black children crossing the color line. Though no one touched them, a white lout spat in the face of Dorothy Counts, a girl of slender elegance. A Charlotte News photographer captured the boy's hate, her repose, his hot eyes, her serene gaze. World competition honored the picture; it never appeared in Charlotte.

Too provocative, said Brodie Griffith at a glance. He feared the Klan's spirit still burning in rural Carolina - eager to ram the little bridges Luther Hodges, businessman governor, was building toward compliance with the Constitution as, Virginia had thought to do before Harry Byrd tersely signaled from Europe: ``This will not do.''

Byrd, perhaps alone, believed old Virginia glory could bar the schoolhouse door to that one black first-grader who stood for fate.

Did Byrd know (few did) that Bob Woodruff, Mr. Coca-Cola, sat listening nights to Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, and that a new South was being born of those conversations?

Now Coca-Cola influence would see to it that Ralph McGill would prevail. Cold money often has vision and hope of growth. This much explains Atlanta and other towered places south of Richmond.

That ``nigger-lovin', Jew-loving Ralph McGill,'' shouted four-term Georgia Gov. Eugene Talmadge. Dying in the 1940s of many malignancies of flesh and spirit while begging under scorching skies for ``just one more vote for Ole Gene.''

White Georgians scorned McGill but somehow could not quite turn from him. He knew their virtues and their fields and rotted hopes and soured yearnings, and gave them true reports from breaking bread with them and sleeping on their iron bedsteads after the lamplit ephiphanies of lovely butterbeans, okra, fried chicken and melting cakes.

So, some of the South stepped forward; much of it had to be dragged. Nine children integrated Little Rock and one Charlotte editorial writer flinched. And forty years later, his thoughts go back to Little Rock. To nine lives, nine names living still. I just now looked them up. They are:

Melba Patillo Beals, a writer; Elizabeth Eckford, unemployed on disability; Ernest Green, a managing director of Lehman Brothers investment bank; Gloria Ray Karimark, a retired lawyer; Carlotta Walls LaNier, real estate broker; Terence D. Roberts, chairman of the psychology department at Antioch University; Jefferson Thomas, Department of Defense financial specialist; Minniejean Trickey, a social worker; and Thelma Mothershed Wair, a retired educator.

Their lives have made a monument that awaits granite sculpture shedding light for our better sides. Commission the art, Little Rock; but guard it well. Invite the world. The world will come and look and see through art a miracle. That did occur and is occurring still. My sins were commonplace, I guess. But my warrior mother hated common all her life. Thanks again, Fannie, for the fierceness of your heart.

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