Page 1, but below the fold

I've heard a few stories in the six months I've lived in Arkansas about how newspapers around here ignored their black readers, even made a conscious effort to keep their pictures out of the paper.
I guess you expect that kind of thing in pre-Civil Rights Era South, but we in the North weren't without some guilt on that account.
I went to work for The Indianapolis News in February, 1967, at a time when The News and her sister paper, The Indianapolis Star, were still owned by the Pulliam family. Eugene C. Pulliam ran his newspapers with a paternalistic attitude. He cared for his employees, even created a recreational facility on the city's eastside for them that he named The Fourth Estate. It had a swimming pool, picnic facilities, baseball diamonds and was the scene of the annual Star-News family picnic at which time Gene announced the annual summer bonuses.
But Gene was an arch conservative and he saw the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a dangerous rabble rouser - a trouble-maker of the highest order. That's why Gene put out a directive that nothing about Dr. King was to appear on the front page of a Pulliam newspaper.
So we at The News and our colleages across the hall at The Star found ourselves in a bit of a quandry on the night of April 4, 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis.
Sen. Robert Kennedy was running for the Democratic nomination for president at the time and was in Indianapolis for the May Indiana primary.
Kennedy was scheduled to speak at a rally that evening at the Broadway Christian Center at 1654 N. Broadway on the city's largely black near northside.
While most of his audience of 2,500 probably already knew of Dr. King's death, there were shrieks of anguish when he announced it from the stage.
“Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings,” he said. “He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black — considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible — you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.
“We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization — black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.
“For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with — be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”
Pulliam phoned The Star newsroom that night from his home in Phoenix with orders to downplay a story and remarks by Kennedy that would dominate the front pages of every other major newspaper in America the next morning. So the King assassination story was buried on an inside page in a story about student leaders endorsing Gov. Roger Branigin's campaign as a primary stand-in for President Lyndon Johnson.
The News was the state's largest evening daily, so Managing Editor Wendell C. Phillippi had plenty of time to decide how to handle the King story. To his credit, he put it on the front page, but as an apparent nod to Pulliam's edict, it ran below the fold.