Mississippi Editor Says Focus On U.S. Racism Is Imperative

The editor of the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Miss. yesterday urged an immediate focussing of American political and journalistic energy on the issue of race.

At an Institute of Politics seminar yesterday, Hodding Carter III said that the nation is now at an impasse, faced with the problem of "how blacks and whites will co-exist." He called race "the issue on which America rises or falls."

Carter was also co-chairman of the biracial "loyalist" Democratic delegation which overthrew the regular Mississippi delegation at the 1968 national Democratic convention. He was delegate and vice-chairman of the Credentials Committee at the 1972 convention.

He said that the South now "has the potential to lead a part of the way" toward reform in the U.S. He said a biracial leftwing coalition of about 51 per cent of the South "can be pulled together to reach tangible goals."

This 51 per cent must achieve change through the legislative branch of the government, he said, since "the judiciary won't support the left." "What Nixon's doing to the court will make us realize that," he added.

Carter was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1965-66, and received the national Sigma Delta Chi (professional journalism) award for editorial writing in 1961. He said he sees the role of his liberal newspaper as that of "shaping the community tone, over time." He said his paper helped to change "the tone and substance" of Greenville politics in the 1960s.