From “Redemption” to “Jim Crow North”: The New York Times,its first columnist,and the legacy of Reconstruction

The New York Times and the legacy of Reconstruction

Although born in Cincinnati, Adolph Ochs grew up in Kentucky and Tennessee, where he was raised on the “Lost Cause” mythology of the Confederacy and the Old South (Salisbury, 1980: 352; Tifft and Jones, 1999: 9). He was 2 years old when the Civil War began, and his father sided with the Union. But his mother, Bertha—the woman Adolph called “my inspiration, my comfort, and the creator of all that gives me self-respect”—was a full-throated Confederate (Tifft and Jones, 1999: 9). After emigrating from Bavaria in 1848, she had lived with relatives in Natchez, Mississippi, where she absorbed the local culture. Bertha supported slavery, proclaimed her pro-southern views proudly, and risked jail to aid the rebel cause. Months after the war began, she was arrested in a failed plot to smuggle quinine to Confederate troops across the Ohio River. She was spared jail time because of her husband’s Union ties. After the war, she joined the Daughters of the Confederacy and proclaimed her allegiance to the “Lost Cause” until her death in 1908 (Salisbury, 1980: 352).

At age 20, Adolph Ochs entered the newspaper business during the bitter postbellum struggle over Reconstruction, a period when the fate of Black citizenship—and the future of American democracy—dominated political discourse. After the Civil War, the radical Republicans who controlled Congress successfully amended the U.S. Constitution to abolish slavery and grant full citizenship rights to the formerly enslaved, launching an “unprecedented experiment” in interracial democracy in the South (Foner, 2002, 1988). Over the dozen years of Reconstruction, Black male citizens helped elect some two thousand Black officials to serve in federal, state, and local governments. In response, white southern Democrats—many of them former Confederate leaders—launched a murderous campaign of terror to intimidate Black voters, sow chaos in the southern states, and undermine the credibility of the new interracial Republican governments (Foner, 2002, 1988; Sinha, 2024). At the same time, the white Democrats used books, popular culture, and their newspapers to launch a propaganda campaign designed to sway public opinion outside the South (Gates, 2020). They spread a racist narrative of Reconstruction that championed “white supremacy,” demonized Black Americans, and defended the party’s effort to “redeem” the former states of the Confederacy from the “tyranny of negro rule” (Foner, 2002, 1988; Sinha, 2024). By the 1870s, the white liberal newspapers and magazines in the North that had once championed Black citizenship began turning against Reconstruction. They embraced the “redemptionist” propaganda emanating from the white South and accepted the need to restore white Democrats to power and acquiesced in the spread of Jim Crow discrimination across the region (Joseph, 2023: 10; Gates, 2020; Foner, 2002, 1988).

In 1878—a year after the last federal troops were withdrawn from the South—Ochs bought a failing newspaper in Tennessee, the Chattanooga Daily Times, and declared its support for the redemption campaigns. The paper’s editorial policy, Ochs wrote, would be “in line with the Conservative Democrats in the South” (Tifft and Jones, 1999: 16). Over the following decade, against overwhelming odds, the young owner revived the dying newspaper and turned it into a moneymaker.

The story of how Ochs repeated that feat in New York is well known. After purchasing the New York Times in 1896, Ochs vowed to deliver “a high-standard newspaper, clean, dignified, and trustworthy” (New York Times, 1896: 1). He branded his paper in opposition to the sensational and entertaining “new journalism” of Pulitzer’s World and Hearst’s Journal. The newspaper’s content—straightforward informational reports that skewed toward commerce and finance—appealed to those aspiring to wealth and status. To be seen carrying the New York Times, Schudson argues, was like displaying “a badge of respectability” (1978: 117).

As the Great Migration accelerated, Black journalists and activists viewed the Times’s growing prestige with alarm. In The Crisis, the journal of the newly formed NAACP, editor W.E.B Du Bois claimed the Times “spares few opportunities to treat black folk unjustly” (The Crisis, 1912: 201). Ochs’s newspaper—the emerging paper of record for elite opinion leaders—delivered a message that reflected the redemptionist view of Black incapacity. The Times defended “the supremacy of the white race,” described Black voting rights as a “blunder in statesmanship,” bemoaned the “negro invasion” of New York, and blamed Black citizens “for almost all” crime (New York Times, 1900: 6; 1915: 6; New York Times, 1911: 14; 1919a: 8).

In 1912, Du Bois denounced the newspaper’s support for racially segregated housing, a critical component of the emerging Jim Crow system of discrimination in New York and across the North. Over the previous year, the Times had published several editorials urging white homeowners to engage in “voluntary agreements” to prevent Black New Yorkers from occupying properties in their neighborhood (New York Times, 1911a: 6; New York Times, 1911, 10; New York Times, 1911, 14). The paper claimed these racially restrictive covenants were needed to prevent what would later be called “block busting”— speculators persuading white owners to sell below market rates after allowing Black residents to move into the neighborhood. The Times claimed “colored folk reaped the rewards” from these schemes. “Unfortunately, they are still an unstable race, often justifying by their own acts the prejudice against them,” one Times editorial concluded (1911a: 6). Another one praised restrictive covenants as an effective way to block “the negro invasion” of the Harlem neighborhood (1911c: 14). Du Bois accused the Times of hypocrisy. The newspaper showed no sympathy for the Black family seeking a decent home, he wrote, but if a Black child living in dire conditions in the “slums and purlieus” commits a crime, readers would hear the “holy horrors of the Times and its ilk” (1912: 201).

In 1915, the Times expressed outrage when the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited use of the so-called “Grandfather Clause,” a policy employed by southern states to prevent the formerly enslaved and their children from voting. The newspaper agreed that a law granting voting rights only to those whose grandfathers had cast a ballot clearly violated the 15^th Amendment. But southern states had been forced to adopt such chicanery, the Times argued, to end the “terrible consequences” of “negro government.” The real culprits were the Republicans in Congress who had supported Black suffrage. These “misguided ‘statesmen’ of Reconstruction” had tried to thwart a “determination that has never been thwarted in the history of the human race”—the determination of “the white man to rule the land wherein he lives.” As proof, the Times cited the 1898 massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina, when a white mob—orchestrated by Democratic Party leaders, including owners of the Raleigh News and Observer and other white newspapers—rampaged through the port city, killing dozens of Black citizens. The Times described the event approvingly as an example of “when white men went to the polls armed” and “overthrew negro government.” The next day, the Times continued, the building housing Wilmington’s Black daily newspaper “was burned to the ground by 600 armed white men” and the paper’s editor forced to flee for his life. “Order and the white man have reigned ever since,” the Times said, repeating once again the editorial’s central argument: “The white man will rule his land” (New York Times, 1915: 10).

Four years later, when soldiers returning from World War I clashed in a series of racial confrontations around the country, the Times blamed the violence on Black citizens. In one editorial the newspaper appeared to encourage white vigilantes and called for police to use a “heavy hand” in the Black community (1919: 8). The violence had occurred in the nation’s capital, where a white woman claimed two Black men had jostled her on the street and tried to steal her umbrella. Fueled by incendiary headlines in the Washington Post, a white mob attacked a Black neighborhood, igniting four days of violence that left at least 15 people dead. What seemed to gall the Times editorialist was the reaction of Black residents: They had fought back. Before the war, Blacks in Washington had been more like “southern negroes… well behaved… deferential almost to the point servility,” the Times said (1919: 8). But a new migration of Black residents had changed the capital city: “It is certainly not the old, law-abiding negro population, the friend of the white man, that has been committing these crimes against women, these daylight holdups, and all the other outrages that have incited white men to general war against negroes.” In response, the Times called on Washington police to follow the lead of its New York City counterparts and get tough on the Black community. Police in the nation’s capital had been trained to “regard the negro population in the main as not only as law-abiding but submissive, and to use the heavy hand only over the minority of negro criminals” (1919: 8). That needed to change, the paper concluded.

Arthur Krock, his mentor, and his influence as a political columnist

In 1927, Arthur Krock joined the New York Times after 4 years in a management job at the fading New York World (Krock, 1968: 63-78). Born in rural Glasgow, Kentucky, in 1886, Krock was a protégé of Henry Watterson, the former Confederate editor who helped launch the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1868 and served as its editor for fifty years. In the 1870s, Watterson’s editorial assaults on the Republicans who championed Black voting rights—and his plea for sectional reconciliation between white elites—transformed the provincial Courier-Journal into a national player in Democratic Party politics (Margolies, 2006; Osthaus, 1994; Wall, 1956). Early in his career, Krock spent a decade under Watterson’s tutelage, first as the Courier-Journal’s Washington bureau chief, then as Watterson’s top deputy in Louisville.

Watterson was one of the last of a dying breed, a practitioner of the so-called personal journalism that nineteenth-century editors like Horace Greeley and James Gordon Bennett had used to define their newspapers and engage in politics. After taking control of the newly merged Courier-Journal in 1868, Watterson had launched a vitriolic editorial campaign designed to “free the South” from Reconstruction (1890: 35). In a move that angered many southern Democrats, Watterson sought to appease Northern elites by declaring his support for the Reconstruction amendments that had granted citizenship to the formerly enslaved and allowed Black men to vote. Watterson claimed that southern elites—the leaders of the former Confederacy—sought to nurture the aspirations of Black southerners and help them develop into productive citizens. If left alone, these southern elites would protect their Black neighbors from the lower-class whites who feared Black freedom. This would have happened naturally, Watterson argued, if radical reformers had not intervened in southern life (Osthaus, 1994; Wall, 1956).

Watterson had aimed his conciliatory message at northern elites in business and politics, but in candid moments he revealed his primary motivation. The South’s “hand was in the Lion’s mouth. We could do nothing, hope for nothing until we got out,” Watterson wrote in an essay honoring the late Henry Grady of Atlanta, another “New South” editor who courted northern investment with promises of cheap, compliant labor and friendly race relations (1890: 34). In Watterson’s view, the South was at the mercy of the Republicans, and the only way to “disarm the radicalism” was through a reasoned appeal to the nation’s conservative elites (1890: 37). Yet that appeal was disingenuous. Even as Watterson delivered it, his New South allies were implementing debt peonage, convict leasing and other violent forms of economic exploitation and social control of the formerly enslaved across the South (Lichtenstein, 1996; Mancini, 1996). But in the final decades of the nineteenth century, as the United States stepped gingerly onto the world stage as an imperial power, Watterson’s pro-business paternalism found an appreciative audience among Northern elites determined to move past sectional debates over race. It appealed to Arthur Krock as well. Watterson’s visceral rejection of federal power, fear of meddlesome reformers, and abiding commitment to white supremacy would shape Krock’s worldview. They were themes that would appear repeatedly in his column on the nation’s most influential editorial page.

In 1931, when Ochs and his lieutenants in New York persuaded Krock to take over the Washington bureau, the Times remained firmly committed to the dry, informational reports that had helped revive the newspaper’s economic fortunes over the past three decades. In the 1920s, Ochs had eagerly embraced the newly articulated concept of “objectivity,” and he refused to follow the lead of the New York World and add bylined opinion columns to the editorial page (Ritchie, 2005). By the 1930s, however, the Times’s staid approach to news coverage seemed out of touch. The economy’s stunning collapse—and the Roosevelt administration’s flood of New Deal policies in response—created a demand for interpretation, and a growing number of bylined columnists were providing it (Schudson, 2001). It was Walter Lippmann’s syndicated column, launched in 1931 by the Times’s primary competitor, The New York Herald-Tribune, that forced Ochs to relent. In 1933, he agreed to let Krock write a competing column, as an experiment (Krock, 1968).

Krock’s emergence as a leading Washington columnist played a significant role in maintaining the Times’ influence and prestige during the rise of modern professional journalism in the mid-twentieth century. As the New Deal and World War II focused the nation’s attention on Washington, and as new media—national news magazines and broadcast outlets—increased competition, major newspapers like the Times relied on their columnists to remain relevant in the nation’s capital. Leading opinion journalists like Krock were important not because they were read by a mass audience—although some were—but because of their influence on “political elites and policy makers” (Jacobs and Townsley 2011: 4). As the Times’s Washington bureau chief and first bylined columnist, one who published four and five times a week, Krock became a political elite himself, a Washington thought leader whose views were respected by politicians and journalists alike. By 1940, just 7 years after its debut, Krock’s “In the Nation” column had won two Pulitzer Prizes and been selected by Washington Press Club members as one of the capital’s most reliable and influential sources of news and analysis (Rosten, 1937). Even presidents who despised him, like Roosevelt and Truman, acknowledged Krock’s clout within Washington’s political class and granted him exclusive interviews and private briefings at critical moments in their presidencies.

1930s: Krock and the fight over a federal anti-lynching bill

Krock’s column first addressed the issue of race in 1935, during debate over anti-lynching legislation. Between 1880 and 1940, more than 4000 Black Americans were killed in mob violence (Equal Justice Initiative, 2017). The epidemic of lynching began during the struggle over Reconstruction and Black voting rights in the South, but by the turn of the century racial terror killings had spread nationwide. The NAACP was formed in 1909 partly in response to a murderous assault on the Black community in Abraham Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois (Sullivan, 2009). As the Great Migration escalated during and after World War I, the violence grew. After rampaging white citizens of Tulsa, Oklahoma, slaughtered hundreds of Black residents and destroyed the prosperous Greenwood neighborhood in 1921, the NAACP pressed Congress to pass a federal anti-lynching law. The first attempt, in 1922, was blocked by a Southern-led filibuster in the Senate. But the NAACP made the issue a priority, and through the 1940s the civil rights organization lobbied Congress for federal protections against lynching (Sullivan, 2009).

By 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt had denounced mob violence in a radio address, but despite the pleas of the NAACP, the Black press, and his wife, Eleanor, the president refused to endorse a new anti-lynching bill proposed by two prominent senators, Edward P. Costigan of Indiana and Robert Wagner of New York. Krock argued the Costigan-Wagner bill was unconstitutional, and when the threat of a filibuster killed the measure, he cheered: “Not since the New Deal began has the Senate revealed so strongly, if belatedly, a feeling for States’ Rights” (Krock, 1935a). In Krock’s view, the defeat of the anti-lynching legislation was a “turning point,” the Depression era’s first rejection of the “frantic pleas of business, finance, local government and private citizenry” for help from the federal government (Krock, 1935a).

The 1935 debate over lynching led to Krock’s first open conflict with the NAACP. When Costigan and Wagner first proposed the bill in early spring, Krock defended the mostly southern senators who threatened a filibuster. They had conducted the debate on a “high plane,” he argued, and they had shown that “State laws and the education of public sentiment have brought about real change” in the South (Krock, 1935b). Krock conceded that a majority in the Senate would support the bill if it reached the floor. But he argued that a long and divisive filibuster, “conducted by some of the ablest men in the Senate” and supported by “important sections of the country,” would derail work on more important legislation and defeat the measure in the end. The NAACP executive secretary, Walter White, telegraphed the Times to challenge “grave misstatements” in Krock’s column (White, 1935). The “ablest men” in the Senate support the anti-lynching bill, White wrote. The senators vowing to defeat it included such racist demagogues as South Carolina’s Ellison D. “Cotton Ed” Smith, Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo, and Georgia’s Walter George. If Krock believes those are among the Senate’s best, White said, “he is unique among Washington correspondents” (1935: 20).

The Times published the contents of White’s telegram over his name, but without identifying the civil rights organization that he represented. And the paper’s editors allowed Krock to attach a snide response directly below it. White had been risking his life to investigate lynchings in the Deep South since 1918, yet Krock dismissed him as a mere “special pleader” (Krock, 1935c: 20). He defended the skills and intelligence of the filibuster leaders and vowed they would “defeat the Costigan-Wagner bill by any means” (1935c: 20).

Krock’s exchange with White exacerbated what was already a tense relationship between the Times and the NAACP. Two years earlier, Du Bois had expressed the organization’s frustration in a stinging editorial that referred to Ochs’s Judaism. After Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany, Du Bois wrote: “When the only ‘inferior’ peoples were ‘niggers’ it was hard to get the attention of the New York Times for little matters of race, lynching and mobs. But now that the damned include the owner of the Times, moral indignation is perking up” (1933: 197).

Initially, it appeared that Krock had celebrated the demise of the federal anti-lynching legislation too soon. In 1938, Wagner’s new bill passed the House easily and appeared to be gaining support in the Senate. Three years earlier, merely the threat of a filibuster had killed Wagner’s last attempt. This time, it took a six-week shutdown of the Senate to quash the measure. The move to invoke cloture—to end filibuster and allow a full Senate vote—fell short of the required two-thirds vote. And the New York Times’s Washington columnist played a surprising role in the final deliberation.

In the lead-up to the cloture vote, Wagner pleaded with opponents to bring the bill to the floor for an up-or-down vote. In response, the opposition leader, Senator Tom Connolly of Texas, said Wagner was out of touch with public opinion, even in his home state. As evidence, he cited columns from “that outstanding publicist, editorial writer, and newspaper man, Mr. Arthur Krock of the New York Times.” The senator quoted Krock’s contention that “the country does not want the bill and the Senate does not want the bill and that this filibuster is entirely justified” because the public does not want to see a senate majority “swept on by passion and prejudice, cramming down the throats of a large section of America a bill which is not only distasteful to them, but unconstitutional” (New York Times, 1938: 12; Krock, 1938a). “This is what Mr. Krock says,” Connolly concluded. “He is not a Southerner. He is not a partisan. He is not standing here representing the forces of darkness and sectionalism” (New York Times, 1938: 12).

Krock did consider himself a southerner, as he often mentioned in replies to letters from southern readers. But Krock’s position at the New York Times conferred a level of national respect that Connally and his allies could put to good use. Krock was no sectional hack, the Texas senator implied; he was the lead columnist for the most prestigious newspaper in the nation, a journalist of the highest regard among the Washington press corps, and a writer whom political elites read carefully and turned to for advice. In this way, Krock could transcend sectionalism and deliver his ideological views on race to a northern audience without the taint of southern prejudice.

Later that year, when President Roosevelt opposed the re-election of two of those “ablest men” in the Senate—Smith of South Carolina and George of Georgia, both opponents of key planks in the New Deal—an outraged Krock accused the president of stirring up “white supremacy” rhetoric in the South (Krock, 1938b). Both George and Smith made race a central issue on the campaign trail. In South Carolina, Smith’s regular stump speech included his so-called “Philydelphy” story, a baroque account of how he walked out of that city’s 1936 Democratic National Convention when a Black minister began to deliver the invocation. “When the blue-gummed Senagambian started talking, I started walking,” Smith would proclaim, “and as I did I believe I heard ’ol John Calhoun say from his mansion in the sky, `You did good, Ed’ ” (Bedingfield, 2017: 60-61). Krock called Smith’s tactics “noxious,” but he blamed the race-baiting on Roosevelt’s intervention in southern politics (1938b). The president’s personal influence is “prodigious,” his political methods are “ruthless,” and the “vote-purchasing power of relief is great,” Krock wrote. “Therefore when a Southern politician finds himself in the path of such a machine, intent upon his destruction, he is inclined to take what ammunition lies closest and best to hand” (1938b). For Krock, it was the effort to reform that triggered a racist backlash, not the actions of southern racists themselves. Both Smith and George defeated their primary opponents easily and returned to the Senate.

1940-1951: The Democratic Party courts black voters in the North

On the morning of February 27, 1948, an exuberant Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia was in fighting mode. Three weeks earlier, President Truman had unveiled the first sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, and now the Virginia senator was launching his counterattack. The state legislature—controlled by the Byrd’s political organization—was debating a measure that would eliminate national party nominees from the state’s presidential ballot. Virginians would no longer cast ballots for president; they would instead elect the state’s representatives to the Electoral College. Under Byrd’s plan, those electors could support any candidate they liked when the Electoral College met to determine the next president. If the other ten states of the former Confederacy followed Virginia’s lead, the white South would control more than a third of the nation’s presidential electors and could shape the outcome. It was not a new idea. In the antebellum era, another Senate heavyweight, South Carolina’s John Calhoun, had encouraged slave-holding states to band together to create a “concurrent majority,” a Congressional and Electoral College block so powerful it could veto policies and candidates it did not like (Ford, 1994).

Byrd and Krock were close friends and the senator had shared the plan with the columnist during one of their frequent “long talks” (Byrd, 1948: personal communication). On this morning, he wrote to thank Krock for his helpful analysis in that day’s Times. “Nothing in the Constitution or in any high court ruling” prohibits Virginia from proceeding with its plan, Krock informed his readers (Krock, 1948a). In his letter, Byrd told Krock that southern Democrats had found a way to “reestablish Southern influence in the Democratic Party.” But if needed, the white southerners could “free ourselves” from the national party altogether. Byrd believed the latter option was more likely: “The National Democratic Party has no hope, now or in the future, unless it appeals to the lunatic fringe, and this will drive a greater wedge” between the national Democrats and the white South (Byrd, 1948: personal communication).

Truman’s proposed civil rights legislation would abolish the poll tax, end discrimination in interstate transportation, make lynching a federal crime, and create a permanent Federal Employment Practices Commission. A year earlier, the president empaneled a blue-ribbon commission to investigate growing racial tension after a series of assaults on returning Black veterans in the South. The most infamous case involved Isaac Woodard, a Black solider who was beaten with a Billy club and permanently blinded after a dispute on a bus in South Carolina (Sullivan, 2009). The racial violence that erupted after World War I seemed to be repeating itself in the mid-1940s, and Truman decided to respond. In June 1947, he became the first president to address the NAACP’s national convention, and in October, the president’s commission published a surprisingly strong final report calling for Truman to take steps to end anti-Black discrimination (To Secure These Rights, 1947).

The president knew the reforms he proposed in early 1948 had no chance of overcoming southern opposition in Congress, but Truman believed the effort would bear political fruit in that fall’s presidential race. The Great Migration had dramatically increased the Black population in key industrial states in the North. As the first president to support civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, Truman believed he could lure this increasingly important group of voters away from the GOP without triggering a massive defection in the white South (Frederickson, 2001). Infuriated by the president’s move, Byrd was eager to launch just such a defection. And he had sought Krock’s help in getting it started.

By that summer’s Democratic National Convention, Truman’s team moved to placate the southern Democrats by rejecting calls to strengthen the party’s platform on civil rights. But northern liberals led by the young mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert H. Humphrey, refused to go along. Stirred by Humphrey’s call for the party to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,” delegates narrowly passed a strong civil right plank, prompting the full Mississippi delegation and half of Alabama’s to walk out of the convention (Freedman, 2023). In the Times, Krock described the events as a “second Appomattox,” but this time the North “did not even leave the Southern leaders with their side-arms and their horses” (Krock, 1948b).

During the 1948 presidential campaign, Krock once again complained that misguided reformers were stirring up trouble in the South. Like Watterson before him, Krock argued that “temperate and enlightened” white southerners were working diligently to support “black aspirations” (Krock, 1948c). But he said they would draw the line at attempts to eliminate the Jim Crow system. For the white South, Krock wrote, “segregation is an essential barrier against amalgamation of the races,” and the doctrine of states’ rights is the only way to maintain it.

In Krock’s view, the South was already moving to expand Black voting and eliminate mob violence. But those efforts were undermined by overzealous and hypocritical reformers eager to bring “quick and drastic change to the social-economic system below the Mason-Dixon line” (1948d). The worst offender was President Truman, whose “so-called civil rights program” promised to remake the South “by force of the central government.” A close second was Henry Wallace, the “communist manipulated” third-party candidate who was challenging Truman from the left. Wallace’s campaign tour of the former Confederate states during the 1948 race had revived “acute racial prejudice” in the region, Krock declared. Wallace was another “unsympathetic and uninformed” voice whose “rain of criticism” hampered efforts by the white South to solve its “great Negro problem” (1948d). Who benefits from these misguided reform efforts? “Not the Southern Negroes,” Krock wrote. Their “just aspirations” will now be decided by southern whites “whose fears and prejudices have been aroused by the very persons who professed a desire to allay them” (1948d).

The columnist concluded with a ringing defense of southern reform efforts that would enrage Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP’s chief lawyer. The white South, “on its own, and through the efforts of its best citizens,” has improved the lives of Black citizens dramatically since “the fires of Reconstruction died down,” Krock wrote. Blacks are voting in numbers “no one could have estimated a decade ago,” and lynching is now a rarity in the South, he said. (Krock, 1948d).

It was Krock’s claim that the South had expanded Black voting “on its own” that angered Marshall. It had taken a U.S. Supreme Court ruling to force the former Confederate states to allow Black citizens to participate in Democratic Party primaries—the only elections that mattered in a region dominated by one political party. And that decision only came after a twenty-year legal battle led by the NAACP. Marshall refuted Krock’s version of southern reform efforts in a three-page letter—and he demanded the Times publish a correction. “In the interest of keeping the record straight,” Marshall said, Krock should retract his claim that the South expanded Black voting “on its own, and through the efforts of its best citizens” (Marshall, 1948, personal communication). The NAACP counsel pointed out that “the only reason (Black southerners) are now voting is because of four cases from Texas which were carried to the U.S. Supreme Court” on behalf of “aggrieved Negro citizens.” In the last of those cases, Smith v. Allwright (1944) Smith, 1944, the justices had declared the use of all-white Democratic Party primaries to be unconstitutional. Even then, Marshall noted, officials in Georgia and South Carolina had taken dramatic steps to evade enforcement of the court’s ruling. By the summer of 1948, federal courts had demanded that all southern states allow Black voters access to the Democratic Party primaries. “I believe it unwise to give the impression that the South as such is doing so much ‘on its own,’” Marshall concluded (1948, personal communication).

In his curt and confusing response, Krock claimed that Marshall had misunderstood his column Krock, personal correspondence). The phrase “on its own” did not mean that white southern officials deserved credit for expanding Black voting “in all cases,” Krock said. But the increase in Black voting, “which is a very drastic experience for many southerners,” has been accepted peacefully, “and that is an advancement of the South ‘on its own.’” Krock’s abrupt ending to his short reply seemed to answer Marshall’s request for a correction. “So far as I am concerned,” the columnist wrote, “this closes the correspondence on the subject” (Krock, personal correspondence).

In a stunning upset, Truman won reelection in 1948, despite losing four southern states to the breakaway “Dixiecrat” campaign of South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond. Even Krock described the president’s victory as the product of “a miracle of electioneering” (Krock, 1948g). Byrd was less magnanimous. He vowed to continue the southern revolt against Truman and the national party.

After the Brown decision: Krock confronts a shift on civil rights at the Times

After the death of Adolph Ochs in 1935, son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger assumed the role of the publisher of the Times. Three years later, he appointed Charles Merz, a former colleague of Lippmann’s, editor of the editorial page. Sulzberger and Merz were more progressive on race and less sympathetic to the South than Ochs, but they moved cautiously in shifting the tone and substance of the Times editorial pages (Salisbury, 1980). Over the following two decades, the newspaper’s unsigned editorials gradually grew more moderate on racial questions concerning the Jim Crow South—although Black activists still complained about coverage of racial issues in New York (The Crisis, 1941, 1951). In 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, Krock denounced it as judicial overreach, but the Times’s unsigned editorial said the decision moved the nation “toward a more perfect democracy” (New York Times, 1954: 28).

In the decade after Brown, the gap between Krock’s views and the newspaper’s editorials grew into a chasm. Krock expressed support for Byrd’s “massive resistance” campaign in Virginia, and he used debunked pseudo-science to defend segregation as a means of protecting society from the “anthropological consequence” of interbreeding between the “Caucasian and African races” (1956a; 1956b: 24). After President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Arkansas to enforce Brown, Krock declared that “Southern memories of Reconstruction are still vivid and burning after eighty years” (1957b: 175).

In 1966, at the age of seventy-nine, Krock was asked to retire from the Times. In one of his final columns, he once again addressed Reconstruction, the issue that had shaped his racial conservatism. The radical Republicans of the 1860s had exploited the assassination of Lincoln “to turn the Southern states into the post-war penal colony,” the columnist fumed (1966: 46). The misguided reforms of Reconstruction had, in Krock’s view, postponed for decades “the attainment by Southern Negroes of their equal right to political and legal equality of citizenship.” Black activists would have surely questioned the accuracy of Krock’s claim. But after thirty-three years and an estimated 8500 columns published in the nation’s most influential newspaper, Krock’s “redemptionist” views on Reconstruction remained remarkably consistent.

Conclusion

In the opening decades of the twentieth century, as the Great Migration picked up pace, the New York Times emerged as a profitable and highly respected news outlet. The paper used that respectability to argue for systems of anti-Black discrimination that would have devastating effects on generations of Black Americans. The Times disseminated a narrative of Black criminality and cultural incompetence that had its origins in the Reconstruction era, and it used those arguments to press for segregated housing and second-class citizenship outside the South. By the 1930s, when Arthur Krock emerged as the paper’s Washington columnist, the roots of Jim Crow discrimination were deeply embedded across the nation. With the support of the Times’s publisher and top editors, Krock used his position on the nation’s most prestigious editorial page to play defense against those who would reform the discriminatory systems in the South and nationwide. The columnist presented a redemptionist narrative of Reconstruction as a social and political disaster, one that served as a stark warning for those who would tamper with racial hierarchy and create a truly pluralist democracy in the United States. In the late 1940s, when the Truman administration renewed the federal government’s push for Black civil rights, Krock went on offense. Working closely with southern lawmakers like Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, the Times’s columnist used the respectability that came with his platform at the Times to rally opponents against racial reform.

This research concludes that the Times’s embrace of anti-Black narratives launched during Reconstruction helped legitimize the institutionalization of anti-Black discrimination beyond the Jim Crow South across the first half of the twentieth century. Given this history, it is ironic, perhaps, that in the late 1950s and early 1960s the Times became the bête noir of southern segregationists who accused it of biased coverage in favor of the Black Civil Rights Movement (Bedingfield, 2018). And in the 2010s, the newspaper earned plaudits for publishing some of the most searing and insightful Black advocacy journalism in the nation’s history (Bedingfield, 2023). In 2019, one of those Black journalists, Nikole Hannah-Jones, launched an ambitious project to move slavery and the sort of anti-Black discrimination that Adolph Ochs represented to the center of the nation’s founding story (Hannah-Jones, 2019). The 1619 Project was one of numerous efforts by mainstream news organizations to revise the historical record on race in the United States—to produce what Usher and Carlson have called “second draft of history journalism” (2022). This research presents a “second draft of history” as well, one that asks readers to reconsider the role of The New York Times—and journalism in general—in the nation’s racial politics in the first half of the twentieth century.