To the Brink

Like many another well-intentioned newspaper, the Toledo Blade scrupulously avoids identifying criminals by race, creed or color, a policy that has its hazards and drawbacks as well as its virtues (TIME, Oct. 29). Like few other papers that impose a similar taboo, the liberal evening Blade (circ. 194,501) this month had to fight for its 13-year-old policy against a community brought to the brink of explosion by reports of a crime wave among Negroes. Paul Block's worldly, well-edited Blade not only stood by its rule but also last week gave Toledoans of equal good will a lesson that few will soon forget.

Judo, Anyone? Racial tension began to build up in Toledo (pop. 330,000) after the teen-age daughter of a Lutheran minister told police that she had been raped by three Negroes. While the Blade story said merely that the girl had been attacked by "three boys," newscasts on all of Toledo's TV and radio stations except WTOL repeatedly identified the rapists as Negroes. After its home edition was delivered, the Blade was besieged with telephone calls accusing it of coddling Negroes.

The gossip mills ground out new rumors of Negro violence two days later when a waitress was attacked by a man she did not even identify as a Negro. The next day after a nurse reported that a "burly Negro" had burst into St. Vincent's Hospital and gagged her with an ether-soaked rag. Again, radio and TV stations fanned the fever; a WSPD radio program called The People Speak even broadcast angry bleats from citizens who denounced the Blade for covering up a Negro crime wave. More than 1,500 women registered for judo courses at the U.S. Marine Corps station. Toledo's police chief asked for ten more patrolmen. Vice Mayor Ned Skeldon proposed an 11 p.m. curfew. Citizens' committees bombarded city hall with demands for action.

Evil Hoax. The Blade wavered under fire but came no closer to surrender than to describe the nurse's attacker as a "dark brown man." Same day, the paper ran an editorial decrying racial "extremists" and rumormongers. Last week, as Toledo teetered on the edge of serious race troubles, both the minister's daughter and the nurse confessed to police that their stories were wholly fabricated.

Publisher Block did not crow to his readers. A research chemist who earned degrees from Yale, Harvard and Columbia before taking over following the death of Paul Block Sr. in 1941, dark-haired, retiring Paul Block, 46, dispassionately analyzed Toledo's "evil hoax" both in the evening Blade and its sister paper, the stodgy morning Times (41,841), which had also avoided the racial tag but stirred few complaints. (The Block-owned Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which is published by younger brother William, has the same racial policy.)

In a Page One editorial, the Blade explained that it avoids racial identifications in crime stories because 1) "a crime is the same regardless of who commits it." and 2) "such identification is often confused and mistaken." From last week's scare, the Blade was able to add a new argument for holding to its policy. "As all of us have seen," said the editorial, racial identification in a crime story "clearly plays into the hands of those who would stir up animosity."

Manhattan newspapers' avoidance of the racial tag posed a more delicate problem for editors. Nepal's U.N. Delegate Rishikesh Shaha was stabbed and robbed in Central Park last week, and six of the city's seven major dailies (exception: the Daily News) omitted any racial description of the muggers. But then some of the U.N.'s Asian and African delegates began murmuring that brown-skinned Ambassador Shaha had been attacked because of his color. The conscientious New York Times promptly reported that both thugs were Negroes, while the Herald Tribune described one of them as a man of "dark complexion."

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