Jackson Advocate

New York, Feb. 17-A Pulitzer Prize-winning Mississippi journalist warned today that heavy emigration from the South is threatening the economic and social structure of the region.

Hodding Carter, editor of the Greenville, Miss., Delta Democrat-Times, urged Southerners to face the "melancholy facts" that dying farms, too few jobs and low paying industries have prompted more than a million people to leave the South between 1950 and 1956.

Writing in the new issue of Look Magazine, Carter criticized the "unrealistic" assumptions of Southern spokesmen that industrialization has compensated for a decline in agricultural employment and that most of those leaving are Negroes whose departure will ease racial tensions.

"These assumptions and the optimism they engender are as unrealistic today as the old Southern dream of dollar-a-pound cotton," Carter said.

Hardest hit by emigration, he wrote, were Arkansas, which lost 358,000 in the six-year period; Mississippi, 291,000; Alabama, 289,000, and Kentucky, 231,000.

He estimated that 60 per cent of those now leaving are white.

"More alarming than their number is the caliber of the white emigrants. They are largely in the productive age group from 18 to 35 . . . and are, on the whole, better educated than the average of those who stay at home," Carter said in Look.

Long reliant on outside investment capital, Carter declared that the South must now turn more and more to its own people to finance new enterprises and create new economic opportunities.