Southerner Rises Again for Justice : Racism: Harry S. Ashmore, a passionate ‘moderate,’ has been a longtime voice of reason during the struggle for civil rights.

If there is such a political animal as a radical moderate, Harry S. Ashmore may fit the bill. If there isn’t, then maybe he can’t be pigeonholed at all--which would be fine with him.

For nearly half a century, Ashmore, 73, has promoted the virtues of reason and dialogue in this country’s acrimonious and sometimes bloody battles over civil rights and social justice. But he also believes in rooting out inequity, however uncomfortable that may make the entrenched social order.

He reveals his passion for moderation with statements such as this: “The trouble with the race issue (in the United States) is that it’s only dealt with in extremes on both sides.” The effect of such polarization, he maintains is that “there’s less contact between blacks and whites now than there ever has been.”

Ashmore has been in the uncomfortable middle in plenty of fractious confrontations. Perhaps most memorably, he was executive editor of the Arkansas Gazette when the Little Rock school integration crisis made the Southern town a national crucible. For a time, the paper was the single voice of support for calm integration in an environment of race-baiting demagoguery.

In 1957 Ashmore and his paper were awarded the first double Pulitzer Prizes for editorial-writing and coverage of the federal-state confrontation precipitated by then-Gov. Orval Faubus.

Even now, when he might reasonably be expected to moderate his life into a quiet retirement, Ashmore is a sort of one-man truth squad. Operating from his pleasant, secluded house here, he is busy waging quiet campaigns for historical reassessment and governmental action on civil rights.

Ashmore’s house, within shouting distance of the Pacific, includes a book-lined study and a separate office where the telephone keeps him in seemingly constant touch with Washington and the network of friends and associates gathered over 40 years of public life. An affable, low-key man not above using an occasional swear word, Ashmore apparently draws on a well of good humor even when being deadly serious. But his chief characteristic seems to be persistence, particularly in matters that engage his sense of fair play and equality.

Whether it’s finger-wagging over an interpretation of the early civil rights struggle, or trying to rehabilitate the reputation of an important man, Ashmore is willing to write at least a long letter--and maybe a book--to get his viewpoint across.

Recently the Greenville, S.C., native has done both.

Ashmore’s biography of Robert Maynard Hutchins, “Unseasonable Truths,” was published this fall--a 541-page resurrection of the once prominent and controversial educator and reformer.

As the book traces his long career, Hutchins became president of the University of Chicago at age 31 and much later founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, the “university above universities” that flowered briefly in Santa Barbara.

Hutchins died in 1977 and has since fallen into semi-obscurity, at least partly because he left a spotty record of actual accomplishment to back up his grand dreams, including higher education reforms he never quite implemented at the University of Chicago. Indeed, a major Hutchins flaw--especially in his earlier years--seems to have been his impatience with the long grind it takes to change institutions.

Nonetheless Ashmore, who had a long association with Hutchins, holds up the educator as a model advocate of egalitarianism, freedom and idealism. Reviews of “Unseasonable Truths” have been mainly favorable, praising Ashmore for his even-handed treatment of his friend Hutchins, who was brilliant but far from perfect and a longtime lightning rod for McCarthyism and its kin.

“The idea of keeping minority voices alive was an obsession of his,” Ashmore says, reflecting one bond between the two men.

In a review that particularly pleases Ashmore, Leon Botstein, president of Bard College in New York, writes that Hutchins “was, if anything, a radical, who uniquely combined individualism with a faith in social intervention and engineering in order to serve the claims of equity and the goals of a just society.”

In a passage approvingly underlined by Ashmore, Botstein suggests that Hutchins would have been in the “front lines” of some of today’s most acrimonious public debates. Hutchins would have been against restricting freedom of expression in federal grants to the arts, against reversing decisions of the U. S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, opposed to anti-abortion laws and constitutional amendments to prevent flag-burning and against teaching creationism in the schools, Botstein writes. Above all, he adds, Hutchins would have opposed “the vacuous appeals for the inculcation of unexamined but seemingly virtuous ‘values’ in some didactic, preacher-like manner in the classroom.”

Ashmore himself points out that Hutchins egalitarian instincts came to bear most in education. Unlike some educators today, Hutchins believed that with proper teaching almost anyone could acquire the knowledge and skills to be a productive citizen, Ashmore says.

“If you were going to make democracy work, you had to have an informed constituency,” Ashmore says, summarizing Hutchins’ belief. Indeed, Ashmore says much of Hutchins’ career was devoted to exploration of the tension between individual liberty and the role of government, particularly after he established the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in 1959.

“Hutchins was a libertarian in the sense of believing in the maximum amount of freedom and rights for the individual,” explains Ashmore, who was executive vice president and president of the center from 1967 to 1974. “But he also believed in the need for community . . . He believed government should do more than preserve order and provide national defense. It had a social obligation.”

Ashmore charges that the federal government abandoned many of its social obligations during the Reagan Administration, in effect reviving states’ rights doctrines that had been discredited by the Supreme Court in civil rights cases.

He argues that the United States has regressed in matters of race relations and that black-white tensions have increased.

The struggle for civil rights and the early battles in the South are the biggest theme in Ashmore’s life. Most of his 10 books are devoted to some aspect of these topics and all are rooted in his Southern perspective. The best known probably are “The Negro and the Schools,” “An Epitaph for Dixie,” and “Hearts and Minds: A Personal Chronicle of Race in America.”

Early in his career Ashmore says he made a decision to stay in the South: “I had a sense that this time of showdown was coming, that this great cataclysm was coming . . . and that it was the paramount question of my time.”

Along with Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, Ashmore was one of a small group of Southern editors who counseled moderation and order as the civil rights issue wracked the South.

Ashmore wrote “The Negro and the Schools” in 1954 as a summary of ground-breaking research by Southern scholars into the condition of the segregated school systems then prevalent throughout the South. The book exposed the fallacies in the “separate but equal” myth used to justify segregation.

Today Ashmore is concerned that the social and historical context of that period has been misconstrued or distorted. The period was much more complex than it is sometimes portrayed, he maintains. Specifically, he has chided the editors of the “Encyclopedia of Southern Culture” for perpetuating “the view that the South’s treatment of blacks reflected a peculiar cast of mind as well as a set of peculiar institutions” that sustained racism.

“Sure there’s a Southern historical basis of racism, but racism has been the history of this country,” Ashmore says. “It’s been a racist society in all of its institutional arrangements from the very beginning and the only real distinction in the South at the time of the (Supreme Court’s desegregation) decision was that the segregated facilities were legally segregated. When you remove legal segregation in the South, you leave a de facto segregation in the South--as it existed everywhere in the country.”

Ashmore believes that one important lesson to be drawn from the past is “the changing and softening of the Southern white attitude” on desegregation after whites realized that integration was to be preferred over brutality and anarchy.

“What emerged was a moderate white attitude that was reluctant but also didn’t want to see any disorder,” Ashmore says. “The Establishment everywhere, including even Birmingham, when the rioting started, couldn’t stand that, couldn’t stand the publicity. So finally the Chamber of Commerce and all the really conservative urban people began to come out of the storm cellars and tell the politicians that this stuff has got to stop.”

Meanwhile, Ashmore himself shows little signs of stopping. The University of Arkansas is considering reissuing “An Epitaph for Dixie” and he sees an updated edition as one more way to raise issues of race and justice.

However, Ashmore has no plans to return to the South. Realistically, he says, jet travel makes frequent trips back a good substitute for living in his native region. There is also the lingering aftertaste of his apostate days when he was “a kind of pariah” among Southern whites. Then, too, time has changed the South since he came to California 30 years ago. “There isn’t much left of the South I grew up in,” he says of his hometown of Greenville: “It looks like the San Fernando Valley.”