Editor & Publisher is running a wire item (Associated Press, 7/16/09) on the Richmond Times-Dispatch‘s recent front-page editorial and website video “expressing regret for supporting the state’s fight to maintain separate schools for blacks and whites in the 1950s.”

The paper’s confession of its “central role in the ‘dreadful doctrine’ of Massive Resistance–a systematic campaign by Virginia’s white political leaders to block school desegregation“–functions as testament to both their current integrity and one of the darkest episodes of U.S. journalism. Here’s an except: