Ralph McGill

LAST WEEK, during Martin Luther King's funeral in Atlanta, the flag was lowered over the Georgia statehouse. As Ralph McGill, publisher of the Atlanta Constitution tells the story, Governor Lester Maddox had objected and had kept the state offices open all day. But Georgia's Secretary of State had jurisdiction over the flag, and he ordered it flown at half mast.

"So there sat old Lester," McGill relates, "the flag flyin' at half most over his head, and not a thing he could do about it."

Along with cities like Houston, Richmond and Birmingham, Atlanta epitomizes the New South. An industrial, modern, rapidly changing urban complex, Atlanta seems at once foreign to, but trapped within the rural Old South. Not as much a pearl of the Renaissance languishing in a medieval sea as some of its boosters like to imagine, Atlanta is more a cacophony of modernity occasionally pierced by the strident monotone of its feudal past. McGill calls his city "a fly caught in amber."

The 70-year-old McGill, widely known as "the Voice of Reason in the South," embodies several of the disparate elements that make up this New South. His penetrating, almost colorless eyes and bristle gray hair suggest the Mountain South; the mellow courtesy and the slow, hypnotic cadence of the careful storyteller recall the Cotton South; his easy humor and fascination with historical minutiae bespeak the Southern Culture which has always been more a potential than a reality.

AS EDITOR of the moderate Constitution from 1942 to 1960, and publisher since then, McGill has watched, coaxed and championed the changes in laws and attitudes which have begun to exorcise the Old South from the new Atlanta. As the city has moved toward fuller participation in the national economy, old habits and prejudices have become increasingly cumbersome and irrelevant both to Atlanta's industry and to her image.

In the late fifties, when the South was preparing to close down its schools in protest against the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision, McGill's daily front-page columns were avidly read and misread by both Southern racists and Northern liberals. To the grasseaters of rural Georgia he was a "race-mixer" and worse; former governor Eugene Talmadge referred to him as "Rastus McGill." To the liberals he was the South's single beacon of rationality; they were apt to overlook his claim that "this was never a question of being for integration or against it."

During the fifties, McGill was definitely a "law of the land" moderate: he stressed not the moral justness of the Supreme Court decision, but the necessity for accepting the Court's authority and eschewing any form of violence. "The exercise of authority may not always be palatable," he wrote in one column, "but it is accepted."

If he has in the past skirted a definite position on the race issue, McGill has consistently scored all forms of Southern extremism. Some of his most notable editorial writing, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1958, has been in angry pursuit of the Ku Klux Klan and other advocates of violence. "To the Kluxer mentality," he wrote in one anthologized column, "the Christian communion cup must be a Dixie cup."

At the same time. McGill is keenly antagonistic to Southern "liberals" who have continued to compromise their integrity on the race issue. A favorite target is Senator William Fulbright, whom McGill calls "a pathetic sort of character with a great liberal reputation."

"While he was asking Secretary Rusk about all the money that wasn't going into the ghettos," McGill relates, "Fulbright managed to take time out to go vote against the Open Housing bill."

ALWAYS eager to join a battle and turn it into a crusade if he can, McGill has never let the battle-field slip away under his feet. In 1938, when he became executive editor of the Constitution, the Atlanta chapter of the KKK staged a protest parade around the Constitution building, denouncing him. Since then, particularly in times of racial tension, he has received a steady stream of obscene phone calls and occasional loads of garbage dumped on his front lawn.

Still contentious in his gently astringent way, McGill revels in outflanking questioners who hesitate in pressing the Southerner too hard on race. Should blacks in the South as well as in the North be exposed to African history? "The white Southerner needs courses in African History and the achievement of the Negro in America just as much as the Negro does." And he chides some of the less militant civil rights organizations for becoming too middle class, losing their appeal for younger blacks.

McGill points with particular pride to the changes which civil rights legislation and maturing black political power have wrought in the South. In the past six years alone, he points out, Georgia has freed herself of the blatantly undemocratic county-unit rule, has reapportioned her legislature, and has seen the voting rights act, in conjunction with voter registration projects, raise Negro voting levels throughout the state.

Georgia now has 11 Negro legislators, McGill notes, more than any other states except Michigan and Illinois. All but one of the eleven come from Atlanta, where the influx of blacks from rural areas and the exodus of middle class whites to the suburbs have left the city with a 43 per cent black population. McGill claims that within about four years Atlanta will very likely have a Negro mayor.

THE rural South, McGill admits, has come along much more slowly. Coercion and overt oppression are still the rule in the rural Georgia which sent restaurant owner, axe-handle distributor, confused and frightened Lester Maddox to the statehouse in 1966. And the Wallace phenomenon, he concedes, is a very serious and dangerous malignancy. "Wallace speaks the new 'Magnolia Mouthwash.' He doesn't use the old words, just the new words, the code words," McGill explains.

"Wallace gets the people to weaving with him, and tells them, 'If you don't know what I'm talkin' about, ask the cab driver or the policeman... he'll tell you.' And he will. He'll be glad to use all the old words."

Despite the threat of a possible Wallace sweep in the deep South this fall, McGill displays a degree of optmism and faith in the eventual efficacy of the political process that has become increasingly rare in discussions of the racial quagmire in the North.

"I'm delighted to see the rise of this so-called Black Power," McGill claims. "It's a very healthy thing for the whole electorate."

McGill is confident that the coalition of black voters and moderate middle class whites, which has served for 15 years to keep Atlanta's mayor's office out of the hands of the rednecks, will survive and eventually broaden its base into the countryside. "The pre-1962 and 1964 molds are already broken," he wrote recently. "In the cities, where most of the population is, the Negro voter is aggressive, organized and active."

Whether McGill's New South will somehow escape the miasma of the Northern ghettos, or whether the tentative displays of good faith in Atlanta will harden into cynicism as bigotry yields to black economic stagnaton, remains to be seen. For now, McGill is still testy and hopeful:

"I'm not one of these people who say you've got to accept the world as it is. I don't. I object to the world as it is. But I do think you've got to begin with the world as it is. And that's a very different sort of a thing."