Editor’s Note: Exactly a century ago, a publisher named Paul Block bought his first newspaper in the South – the Memphis News-Scimitar, in one of the South’s fastest-growing and most progressive regions. But when he sought to properly celebrate a heroic black man who saved many white lives, he ran into trouble. The following is excerpted from Reason vs. Racism, a new book on newspapers and race by Jack Lessenberry.
**
When a negro lies bleeding to death, there is no other call than that of humanity.
– Memphis News-Scimitar, July 1925
**
Paul Block, the once-poor immigrant boy whose father had been a rag-picker, had become a success by the 1920s, first in the field of newspaper advertising and then as a publisher who owned papers in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Minnesota. Then, exactly a century ago, he moved into the South. He bought the Memphis News-Scimitar in February 1921. There, he would boost circulation, pioneer newspaper delivery by air, and make himself and his newspaper popular and successful — for a time.
That is, until he began running signed editorials urging better treatment of Black people, took a Black hero who had saved dozens of white lives to the White House, and tried to get white-owned ambulance companies to take critically injured Black people to the hospital.
Then, the local citizens more or less ran him out of town
**.
He suspected none of that in the beginning. The numbers indicated buying the Memphis newspaper made a lot of sense. The city was prosperous and growing fast – it had increased in population from barely 100,000 at the turn of the century to 162,351 by 1920, and would be more than a quarter-million by the end of the decade.
Nor was he a stranger to the town or the newspaper. Paul Block, who was 45 in 1921, had been its advertising representative and a major stockholder for years. In fact, the newspaper’s previous publisher, Bernard Cohn, reportedly said that the News-Scimitar, a paper founded in the 1880s, would have gone out of business if it hadn’t been for Block getting big national advertisers like Ford, Chevrolet, and Coca-Cola, to buy space.
Though the News-Scimitar was in intense competition with the older Commercial Appeal and a weaker Scripps-Howard paper, the Press, it was highly respected, had a healthy circulation of 42,000, and was well-positioned to grow.
Block, as usual, threw himself into building the paper and increasing circulation by doing everything from sponsoring tennis tournaments to flying copies of the News-Scimitar daily into Helena, Arkansas, 55 miles away. This was revolutionary at the time.
Aviation was still in its near-infancy; it was five years before Charles Lindbergh managed to cross the Atlantic. But as Block correctly predicted, air delivery would soon become commonplace. Fast regional delivery was especially important in Memphis, the unofficial capital of the “Mid-South” and a city that bordered both Arkansas and Mississippi.
In fact, Memphis was also seen by many as “the most important city in Mississippi,” and after the News-Scimitar’s demise, the rival Commercial Appeal would, for decades, be the largest circulating paper in Mississippi as well as in Tennessee.
Tennessee was attractive to northern businessmen like Paul Block for another reason: it was seen as one of the states of the more progressive “Upper South,” which was ripe to move away from cotton and the legacy of the Civil War to a more progressive, modern business outlook. For years, ever since the last union soldiers left in 1877, the “Solid South,” still resenting Reconstruction, had voted solidly Democratic.
But by 1921, some saw signs that things might be changing. Slowly and quietly, the Republican Party was gaining a toehold among business classes in larger southern cities. Tennessee itself had broken from tradition by voting Republican for president in Warren Harding’s landslide victory the year before, and Block had to be hopeful that would continue.
It’s important to remember again, that a century ago the Republican Party was seen by farsighted business leaders in the South as the party of progress.
Republicans, including Block, also tended to be in favor of better and more decent treatment for African-Americans. That didn’t mean they thought that they were ready for anything like fully equal status.
But when he arrived in Tennessee, Block seems to have thought he could persuade Memphians to help African-Americans improve their lives and become more fully capable citizens.
What he didn’t realize, however, is that there are three “states of Tennessee,” as the state flag with its three stars makes clear. East Tennessee is more like Appalachia, much of it is in the Eastern Time Zone, and its largely hardscrabble farmers were basically unionist and Republican.
Middle Tennessee, a region of rolling hills which revolves around Nashville as its center, is today the country music capital of the world. In Block’s time it was the seat of government and the state’s major universities. But Western Tennessee, where Memphis is the capital, was really part of the cotton south, the home of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Klan leader and virulent white supremacist.
The “War Between the States,” as Southerners preferred to call it, had started only sixty years before Paul Block bought the News-Scimitar.
Reconstruction had ended barely forty years before Block arrived. The South was not ready in the 1920s to embrace tolerance and more opportunities for Blacks. Tennessee itself recorded more lynchings after Reconstruction – 251 victims, 204 of them Black – than South Carolina, and the three states where the News-Scimitar circulated – Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee – had well over a thousand lynchings.
Memphis also had a large percentage of African-Americans in its population, then about 38 percent. In every other city where Block had owned a paper, the Black population was in single digits at best.
Most Memphis Blacks lived in fairly wretched conditions. Paul Block wrote occasional editorials pleading for Memphians — and the entire Republican Party — to do more to help Black citizens. But these seem to have been ignored, or met with reaction from resentment to open hostility, including among some in the News-Scimitar newsroom.
But then a Memphis story came along that captured the nation’s attention, and which Paul Block might have thought offered a chance to change local attitudes about race.
On May 8, 1925, members of the Mid-South Society of Civil Engineers, in town for a big annual meeting, had piled into two excursion boats for an outing that was supposed to be part work and part pleasure; they were going to view a major engineering project underway down Mississippi River.
They never made it. One of the ships, the Norman, had been overloaded and soon capsized, throwing scores of people into the water.
Tom Lee, a thirty-nine-year-old Black laborer from Memphis, was the only possible help in sight; he was coming up the river in a twenty-eight-foot wooden skiff, returning to Memphis after dropping his boss off at a job in Arkansas. Though he could not swim, he gallantly went to work saving the lives of those who had been thrown into the water.
He managed to haul thirty-two people, many of them half-drowned, aboard his battled old boat, which was named the Zev. He ferried them to the riverbank, going back repeatedly until there were no more to be saved.
Twenty-three people did drown, some trapped in the overloaded boat when it capsized. A few others managed to swim to shore.
But the real hero was plainly the modest, soft-spoken Tom Lee.
This was a good news story if there ever was one, and instantly, both the city’s major newspapers, the Commercial Appeal and the News-Scimitar, jumped on the story. For a few days, it was all Tom Lee, all the time – and Paul Block’s newspaper was not about to be outdone by the competition.
Two days later, the News-Scimitar ran an editorial praising Tom’s heroism, though in somewhat patronizing tones: “Tom probably wouldn’t care for a medal, nor would the adoption of resolutions commending his heroism interest him in the least.”
Instead, the newspaper advised that, “we don’t know what the rule of the government is about giving pensions to civilians, but if there is no rule against it, Tom ought to be made comfortable for life – and if there is a precedent against it, this is a favorable time to break it.”
Later, a columnist for the paper argued that Tom should be given the Carnegie Medal for Heroism. Despite the acclaim, the coverage was marked by racial stereotypes and condescension unimaginable today.
“Tom is only a black, kinky-haired negro,” a front-page story in the News-Scimitar said two days after the tragedy. “But he proved he had red blood in his veins.” Shocking as it may be, most newspapers did not capitalize Negro, then the preferred term for Black citizens.
Worse, Tom Lee’s speech was always rendered in dialect worthy of a minstrel show, and the “n-word” was frequently used.
“I didn’t do no more than any other ‘n-’ would have done,” Lee was quoted as saying, adding. “I’m goin’ to church Sunday mornin’ and evenin’. I always prays Sunday for forgiveness of my sins foh de past week.”
Indeed, whenever Tom Lee was quoted in the News-Scimitar, his speech was rendered as something straight out of an Uncle Remus tale. Whenever Lee or any other Black citizen was referred to in the paper, only his first name would be used on second reference, as if he were a small child.
What Block thought of this is unknown, though it is known that he increasingly didn’t see eye-to-eye with his Memphis editors on many things, including racial issues, and his call to treat African-Americans with more dignity was meeting with increasingly stony hostility.
Undaunted, the publisher arranged to take Tom Lee to Washington to meet President Calvin Coolidge, who was a close friend.
The News-Scimitar, naturally, reported on this in detail, complete with a front-page picture on May 31, 1925, of an uneasy-looking Lee shaking hands with President Coolidge while a beaming Paul Block and George Morris, editor of the newspaper, looked on.
Later, when the hero got back to Memphis, the News-Scimitar reported that he had been “sho tickled” to get back home. He reportedly said that the president “done shuck ma han’, treated me jes lak white folks.”
When asked if he would go on stage to talk about his heroic deed, ““Ah done say, ‘Gemin, Ah’s jes’ a cawn field, river-running (n) from Memphis!’ Ah shore ain’t gwine to appear on no stage.”
After that, Tom Lee passed fairly quickly from history. He never got a Carnegie Medal, but the Engineers’ Club of Memphis, some of whose members he had saved from drowning, led a successful campaign to raise money to buy him a house.
The city didn’t settle a pension on him immediately, as the News-Scimitar suggested, but did give him the best job it had available for a Black laborer: they made him a 20-cent per hour garbage man.
Bizarrely, years later, the city named a Blacks-only swimming pool after Tom Lee, a man who couldn’t swim and was famous for an accident in which people drowned. After Lee died in 1952 the city erected an obelisk commemorating his good deed and calling him “A Very Worthy Negro.”
Paul Block, however, faced a storm of criticism and hate mail for his celebration of Tom Lee. Even though the Black hero had been made to seem and sound like a real-life Stepin Fetchit in the news columns of the News-Scimitar, many Memphians, including leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, were angry that he had been so lionized.
They hated that Block had taken him to the White House, and they sent a huge volume of hate mail. Nor did race relations seem to be getting better in Memphis, despite editorials continually urging more tolerance.
Two months after Tom Lee’s heroism was touted, Andrew Jordan, a Black switchman on a Memphis railroad, was badly injured in an accident, losing an arm and a leg. Two ambulances refused to take Jordan to the hospital because they were white-only rescue vehicles.
By the time an ambulance arrived that would accept African-Americans Jordan had bled to death. The News-Scimitar covered this in a series of front-page stories in July 1925 that indicated how deep the city’s racism went. “I’m not promising I would carry negro emergency cases,” J.J. Collins, the proprietor of one funeral home and ambulance service said. “It all depends… what’s all this rumpus about, anyway?”
Frazier Hinton, the owner of another ambulance service, said, “My men would render first aid to a dying dog, in order to save the animal’s life. But consideration must be given to established precedent,” which evidently meant dogs, yes; Black people, no.
Paul Block’s News-Scimitar then ran one of its most courageous editorials on race. Noting that Memphis’s acting mayor had said that the city couldn’t compel white firms to convey Black people in their ambulances, the editorial said, “he may be right, but he is only half right.” The newspaper then suggested the city tell the ambulance firms, “We are going to take away all your privileges unless you agree to give aid to any emergency case, regardless of religion, race or color.”
If Memphis did that, the editorial suggested, “the ambulance firms would be ready to get in line pretty quickly.” If that weren’t enough, the paper suggested that the real facts motivating the ambulance drivers was greed.
Ambulances in Memphis at that time were all owned by funeral homes. They made no money doing emergency runs, but if the patients were to die, the hope was that they would be hired for the funeral.
“We might as well be frank about this ambulance business… White firms do not bury negroes. Therefore, there is no chance for profit in hauling an accident victim who happens to be a negro.
“When a negro lies bleeding to death, there is no other call than that of humanity,” the editorial went on, asking plaintively, “How long will the citizens of this community tolerate such a state of affairs?”
Sadly, the answer was: Longer than Paul Block was prepared to wait. On top of his failure to improve race relations, he was also facing increasing hostility for his attempts to win support for the Republican Party. Tennessee had swung back to the Democrats the year before, despite a national landslide for his friend President Coolidge.
Additionally, a corrupt Democratic machine led by “Boss” E.H. Crump was in firm control of Memphis and would remain so for well over a decade after Paul Block’s death. Disillusioned, Block sold the News-Scimitar to the Scripps-Howard newspaper group in 1926. They promptly combined it with their Memphis Press, to form the Memphis Press-Scimitar.
That was to be Paul Block’s last foray into owning a newspaper below the Mason-Dixon line. “My grandfather advised my father never to have a business in the South,” Allan Block, chairman of the board of Block Communications, told this writer in 2019.
“Racial attitudes were, I am sure, the main reason.”
What is clear is that while he did own a newspaper in Memphis, Block not only tried to make it the best modern paper he could, he did attempt to improve racial attitudes and conditions for Black residents in the five years he was there – even though that likely wasn’t good for business.
He may not have succeeded. But he tried, and that was far more than most publishers did in his lifetime,
(Editor’s Note: A version of this story also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
