Creator: Ethridge, Mark F. (Mark Foster), 1896-1981.
Collection number: 3842
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Abstract: Mark F. Ethridge was a journalist of Louisville, Ky. Professional correspondence and speeches of Ethridge relating to his career in journalism, principally as editor and publisher of the Louisville, Ky., “Courier-Journal” and “Times,” 1936-1963; editor of “New York Newsday,” 1963-1965; and instructor in journalism at the University of North Carolina. In addition to newspaper affairs, these papers reflect many social and political issues of the times, including race relations, southern economic development, national elections and Democratic Party affairs, freedom and responsibility of the press, World War II, the Cold War, the creation of Israel, the spread of Communism in postwar Europe, and international peace. A separate series, chiefly 1945-1947, relates to Ethridge’s fact-finding missions on behalf of the United States State Department and the United Nations to several Balkan countries, especially Bulgaria, Rumania, and Greece.
Repository: Southern Historical Collection
Collection Highlights: Letters concern American race problems in general (1933); civil liberties in regard to African Americans, Jews, and the Ku Klux Klan (1939); the education of African Americans in Mississippi (1940); segregation in the South (1956, 1964); and the Ku Klux Klan (1964). The collection also contains Ethridge’s personal notes on civil rights (Folder 166) and copies of his speeches, such as “America’s Obligation to Its Negro Citizens” (1937), a lynching speech (1940), “The Race Problem in the War” (1942), and “The South’s Worst Qualities Have Come Out,” which dealt with integration (1956).