
          "Covering History as it Broke"  John N. Popham
          
            
              Ashmore, HarryHarry Ashmore
            
          
          Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 17-19
          
          In 1947, when he first stopped in at my office at the Charlotte
News, John Popham was the only newspaper correspondent assigned to a
beat that stretched from the Potomac to Eagle Pass. His one-man bureau
in Chattanooga was the first the New York Times had ever established
in the continental United States outside of Washington. To these
unique distinctions he added two of his own that I am reasonably
certain have not been duplicated by any of his talented young
successors: for more than a decade he covered this vast territory
without benefit of air transport or strong drink.
          Sustained only by black coffee, he managed to more than hold his
own in the convivial colloquies that mark any gathering of the working
press--but then he often left early, dispatched by his desk in New
York to some new outbreak of news in Miami, or Dallas, or Louisville,
explaining that he ought to get started since he was
driving. Moreover, he always said he avoided the through highways and
kept to the back roads so he would have a chance to absorb the wisdom
of the ordinary folk he encountered in crossroads stores, smalltown
cafes and rustic pool halls.
          His explanation for his abstemiousness was that his innards had
been ravaged in the course of his wartime service with the Marines in
the Pacific, but I found this dubious. To one who had been there, it
seemed unlikely that a man with a delicate stomach could survive the
cuisine in those backcountry establishments where the overpopulated

flypaper curled down in strips from the ceiling and a prudent man
would limit his order to a hardboiled egg and an orange, and insist on
peeling both.
          It was only after he had left the secondary roads for a more
sedentary assignment as executive managing editor of the Times'
outpost in Chattanooga that Pop joined the rest of us at the bar. On
the sad occasion of Ralph McGill's funeral I first encountered him
with a tall glass of bourbon in his hand, and in my astonishment
exclaimed, "My God, Pop! It may make you garrulous!" But there was in
fact no perceptible change in his delivery, which has been
described--by Claude Sitton, I believe--as resembling sorghum fired
from a Gatling gun. At his retirement party aboard the Wabash
Cannonball in the railyard at Chattanooga the truth was finally
divined by Bill Emerson of Newsweek, who had trailed Pop across the
South in the years of the Troubles: "The sneaky little devil has been
saving up his liver for the golden years."
          Happily, both liver and larynx have remained in fine fettle, and
the mellifluous voice of Popham is still heard in the land--on
platforms wherever worthy causes command his attention, in seminars
where awed academics sit at his feet, 

above all in free-flowing
conversation with old friends and young admirers who know where to
turn when they seek insight into this New/Old South that continues to
baffle all too many of those who write about it.
          When he settled in at Chattanooga in 1947 he brought to his new
assignment the passion of the native returned from exile. His roots
are deep in the Virginia tidewater, but his boyhood was spent trailing
his peripatetic father, a distinguished officer in the U.S. Marine
Corps. His college was Fordham, he apprenticed on a Brooklyn newspaper
before graduating to the Times, and he got his first
whiff of politics covering New York's City Hall.
          But when he came back from his own service as a Marine officer in
World War II a new boss had taken over the newsroom at the
Times, Turner Catledge of the Philadelphia,
Mississippi, Catledges. Instinct told Catledge that the post-war South
was going to be the next great domestic news arena, and he knew where
to find the right man to interpret the impending socio-economic
changes for the parochial readers of the nation's leading
newspaper.
          So Pop began the odyssey that would make him a witness of the
historic confrontations that marked the era of what Ralph McGill
called "guerrilla fighting among the ruins of the segregated society."
He was one of the few who had innocent passage 'across the lines--the
trusted confidant of diehard segregationists and embattled black
leaders, and, above all, a sympathetic audience for the ordinary
citizens of both races who were trying to find somebody who understood
what they were talking about.
          Those were the days when politicians who professed to speak for the
South finally abandoned the fiction that the region's second-class
citizens were a happy, contented lot, and began to talk in terms of
the apocalypse. When the Brown decision came down in 1954 John Bartlow
Martin toured the Southern statehouses and proclaimed in the
Saturday Evening Post: "The South Says Never!" A swarm
of hit-and run national correspondents descended upon the region and
there would have been an even greater multiplication of the ubiquitous
black and white Southern stereotypes had Pop not been available as an
omnipresent oracle wherever there was an outbreak of violence.
          To those who were willing to listen, and some who weren't, Pop
explained that the facts of Southern life were rarely what they seemed
to be, and almost never what the spokesman for an agitated
constituency said they were. There was, God knows, plenty of overt
brutality, but there was also a reservoir of interracial goodwill that
would make it possible to dismantle the old segregated institutions in
reasonably orderly fashion.
          There are still those who believe the great sea change which has
made possible this audience in this hotel was bracketed by the
Montgomery bus boycott and the triumphant march from Selma to the
Alabama capitol, where Martin Luther King proclaimed, "We are on the
move now--no wave of racism can stop us."
          Willie Morris, who once thought he could go north to home, is still
bemused by the high drama of those stirring days now that he has again
taken root in his native Mississippi. Writing of what he found there
upon his return, he dated the recasting of race relations from the day
the FBI dug the bodies of three slain civil rights workers out of an
earthen dam down in Neshoba County:
          "Gradually, almost imperceptibly in the years which followed,
something would begin to stir in the soul of the town. A brooding
introspection, a stricken pride, a complicated and nearly-indefinable
self-irony ... would emerge from its dreadful wounds. A long journey
lay ahead, marked always by new aggrievements and retreats, yet this
mysterious pilgrimage of the spirit would suggest much of the South
and the America of our generation."
          Pop could have told him that the instrospection, the pride, and the
self-irony have been around since the first slave ship, and the first
Popham, landed in the Tidewater. There are the qualities that have
marked his tour of duty below the Mason-Dixon Line--the qualities that
left their imprint upon the blend of the Old and the New that is John
Popham's South.
          And to these he added one more that he demonstrated in remarkable
fashion when he was finally unbound from his desk at the Chattanooga
Times. Once again he hit the road, this time as a commuter, first to
Nashville, then to Atlanta, where he enrolled in law school. I submit
that only an abiding commitment to justice could have motivated the
seventy-three-year old applicant for admission to the Georgia Bar you
welcome tonight as a Life Fellow of the Southern Regional Council.
          
            Remarks by Harry S. Ashmore upon the installation of John
Popham as a Life Fellow of the Southern Regional Council; Peachtree
Plaza Hotel, Atlanta, November 12, 1983.
          
        