The Southern Courier, a weekly newspaper devoted to news of civil rights in the south, published its first issue Friday.
The Courier, conceived this spring by several Harvard and Radcliffe students, is presently publishing a weekly devoted to news of the state of Alabama. It is printed in Atlanta, Georgia. Original plans called for a weekly edition in each of five Southern states, but the operation had to be cut back for financial reasons.
Peter Cummings'66, president of the Courier and a member of the Harvard Crimson editorial board, said he hoped to enlarge the Alabama edition (the first contained six pages) and to inaugurate other statewide editions before the end of the summer. The Courier will continue to operate during the winter, when it will be manned chiefly by Southerners.
15,000 copies of the first edition were printed. The paper includes stories on voter registration activities during Alabama's five-day registration period, an attempt to integrate Tuskegee's white churches, a tear-gassing incident in Marengo and the arrest of a civil-rights leader on embezzlement charges in Selma. A long feature described a sharecropper's strike organized by a "Freedom Labor Union" in Mississippi.
An editorial entitled "A Paper for the People" promised that "the Southern Courier is independent of its advertisers, of politicians, of dogma, and of any group or organization. We will point out merits or demerits wherever we find them, treating whites and Negroes alike."
In addition to Cummings, the papers' staff consists of Michael S. Lottman '61, a former managing editor of the Crimson who has been a reporter on the Chicago Daily News since graduation, and Ellen Lake '66, currently features editor of the Crimson. Lottman is editor and Miss Lake executive editor.
The paper has regular correspondents stationed in Montgomery, Selma. Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville, and Tuskegee, as well as local stringers in a number of smaller Alabama cities. A "crisis car" will be responsible for covering major civil rights stories all over the south.
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