THE OVERSIGHT

When a man from Pennsylvania wrote Hodding Carter [in the1940s] that he had subscribed to the Delta Democrat-Times for a year and had not seen one editorial denouncing intolerance, Hodding replied that during the previous year the paper had campaigned for employing blacks on the Greenville police force; published a series of articles on the woeful state of black school facilities in the county and slums, principally black, in town; vigorously endorsed construction of two swimming pools, equal in size and cost, one for blacks and one for whites, and seen the proposal passed with the help of about four hundred Negro votes; chronicled the county's approval of plans for a low-cost hospital with identical white and black wings, and for a new black grammar school in town, and authorization for another; editorialized against the States' Righters' fantastic proposal to strip the federal government ofvirtually all its powers and endits economic programs; written against racial discrepancy in teachers' pay and againsthe beating by a deputy of a black prisoner who had killed a white man; applauded the inclusion of a black on a jury panel for the first time since Reconstruction, the congressional legislation for slum clearance and aid to education, and the increase in black farm ownership in Mississippi.

"But, he added, "since I didn't get around to an editorial denouncing intolerance, I herewith denounce it."

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