Sir Harold’s jarring moment at Raleigh water fountain

“That ritual hypocrisy [in Jim Crow laws] was made clear when I spent time working on the liberal-minded News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina. The newspaper was edited by the doughty Jonathan Daniels, a New Dealer and for a short time press secretary to President Harry Truman….Daniels was a fine writer and open-minded, as were his staff.

“Tagging along with the paper’s columnist Charlie Craven, who could see the funny side of anything, I half-forgot the predicament of blacks. Then one hot day I stopped to drink at a town water fountain, one marked ‘White,’ situated next to one marked ‘Colored,’ and looking up up I saw that the adjacent statue was dedicated to ‘Liberty and Equality.'”

— From “My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times” by Harold Evans (2009)

Sir Harold Evans, best known as editor of the Sunday Times in London (1967 to 1981) and now as husband of magazine editor Tina Brown, spent time at the News & Observer during a year-long fellowship in the United States in the mid 1950s.

 

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