But while the Courier provides friendly intermediaries who can negotiate some of Alabama's political thickets, it occasionally effuses hopelessly naive goodwill. One New Englander, told that business dealings in the South are relaxed and informal, called a beauty shop owner to sell her an ad and initiated the following dialogue:

"Mrs. Jones? How are you?"

"Jes' fine."

"Lovely weather we're having."

"Uh, yes."

"How's the family?"

"Who IS this?"

That sort of interchange is symptomatic of the Courier's gravest problem: most of its staff members are from the North, and they are white. One hope of early Courier staffers was that local talent could be recruited, trained, and finally put in command; at the starting pay of $25 per week, the first step has proved rather difficult. While most of the Courier's office workers are Negro, only three of its salaried reporters are. The rest, including Editor Michael S. Lottman '62, former managing editor of the CRIMSON and reporter for the Chicago Daily News, are graduates of or on leave from Northern colleges like Harvard, Wellesley, and Antioch.

That is not the way things were supposed to be, and Lottman is painfully aware of it, but without the money to pay competitive wages, he feels powerless to do much. At any rate, SNCC workers have from time to time lashed out at the notion of a white-dominated newspaper for Negroes. As one SNCC staffer put it, "Man, it's just one more white man tryin' to tell me what to think." SNCC seriously discussed at one point organizing a boycott of the Courier. The idea apparently was forgotten by the time of last year's elections, when SNCC instead bought advertising space for the Lowndes Co. Freedom Organization.

The Courier reaches people that no other paper does, and politicians--whether they are running under the Black Panther or are ardent segregationists--respect it for that, perhaps far more than it really merits. At any rate, any candidate with more than a passing interest in the Negro vote purchased advertising space during last year's campaigns, several tried to court editor Lottman for an endorsement (the Courier has a policy of not endorsing anyone for anything), and a friend of a candidate in next Monday's Montgomery City Commission election primary offered Lottman $500 to print damaging articles on an opponent.

Through most of last year, with Negro voting strength nearly double what it had been in the previous election, white officials exercised remarkable restraint in dealing with Negroes. Even Gov. Wallace, running his wife as a stand-in gubernatorial candidate, learned to say "knee-grow" for the first time in his political history.

There were about 100 Negro candidates in last May's Democratic primary, and the Courier was viewing its future--which held out the prospect of warm friends in high places--with unabashed enthusiasm. A couple of days before the vote, editors set into type a jubilant editorial on the power of the Negro vote. It never ran; the ed, framed in black, hangs in the Courier office. All but a handful of Negroes and white liberals were clobbered at the polls.

A powerful friend and attentive reader, then-Attorney General Richmond Flowers, was out of office. (Flowers was interviewing a job applicant last year when his executive assistant recalled seeing the name in the Courier; he dug out the story--a series of chats with friends of Ku Klux Klan Wizard Robert Shelton--showed it to Flowers, and the interview ended abruptly.) A number of federal and state judges and other officials continue to subscribe (Alabama has two subscriptions--one for the state archives, the other for the anti-poverty office), but few are as avid followers of it as was Flowers.

Since the elections, according to Lottman, state and county officials have been much less discreet in their behavior towards Negroes; they have condoned behavior that they discouraged in the days when Negroes were lining up in large numbers to register. "Nobody's afraid of the Negro vote these days," says Lottman. "Nobody's afraid that the federal government is going to do anything."

"This has been," he adds, "the bloodiest winter anyone can remember."