© Richard L. Copley 1960s It was a newspaper, after all, that after 40 years still ran a daily cartoon featuring an insulting caricature of an African-American named "Hambone" even as black strikers walked the city's streets wearing signs attesting that "I Am a Man."

SHARE The Commercial Appeal files 1841 The paper traces its origins to April 21, 1841, when Col. Henry Van Pelt's first weekly issue of The Appeal appeared. unknown artist/Associated Press 1862 The opening sentence of correspondent Robert Ette's second-day dispatch from the battle of Shiloh is still considered a classic of war reportage: "We slept last night in the enemy's camp." The Commercial Appeal files 1862 Memphis fell to Union forces after a June 6, 1862, battle on the Mississippi River, but even as the naval encounter raged, The Appeal was loading its press onto a train bound for Grenada, Mississippi. Artist unknown/Courtesy of the Memphis Public Library and Information Center 1878 In vivid, heart-wrenching daily accounts, editor Col. J.M. Keating described the toll taken by the yellow fever outbreak. "Whole families have been swept out of existence — father, mother and children have followed each other in rapid succession to the grave."

By Tom Charlier of The Commercial Appeal

As lightning split the night sky and a chorus of storms echoed the turbulence of the times, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s baritone thundered through Mason Temple, exhorting striking sanitation workers to persevere in their quest for justice and assuring them, in a stirring finale to the most famous speech ever delivered in Memphis, that he had been "to the mountaintop."

Somewhere in the South Memphis sanctuary on that evening of April 3, 1968, sat a reporter for The Commercial Appeal who would disregard the most memorable parts of the speech. The unnamed reporter's story, buried on Page 11 in the next day's editions, mentioned nothing of the mountaintop, nothing of King's soaring rhetoric, nothing of his emotional appeal to constitutional ideals. It did, however, make note of the "disappointingly small crowd."

The dismissive report on what would be King's last speech was hardly surprising for a newspaper that had relentlessly attacked the civil rights leader and Nobel laureate as a dangerous agitator while depicting his followers, the striking workers, as lazy opportunists trying to blackmail the city. It was a newspaper, after all, that after 40 years still ran a daily cartoon featuring an insulting caricature of an African-American named "Hambone" even as black strikers walked the city's streets wearing signs attesting that "I Am a Man."

In retrospect, it may be difficult to describe The Commercial Appeal's journalism during the period leading up to King's April 4, 1968 assassination in Memphis as anything other than tragically inadequate. But it wasn't always so.

Less than a half-century earlier, during the early 1920s, this same newspaper boldly crusaded against the Ku Klux Klan as the terror group rode to nationwide prominence on a wave of nativist and racist hatred. Through articles chronicling the KKK's violence, and editorial cartoons condemning its bigotry, The Commercial Appeal helped blunt the Klan's power. For its efforts, the newspaper became the first in the South awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

The Commercial Appeal is observing its 175th birthday this year by looking back on its history — good, bad and otherwise — and peering ahead into a future that appears increasingly uncertain for newspapers everywhere.

It's a history that traces the time from frontier privations, Civil War devastation and Reconstruction bitterness. Through yellow fever epidemics, disastrous floods, financial panics and crime outbreaks as violent as any today, the newspaper's fortunes fell and rose with the region's — sinking to the brink of bankruptcy three times and later soaring to a level of profitability rivaling that of any metropolitan daily in the nation.

The CA's editorial track record over that period defies easy labels. While the paper tended to be woefully behind the times on racial issues, it abhorred the lawbreaking and violence of racist mobs. Long considered an organ of the white establishment, it also stood up for immigrants' rights and was an early supporter of women's suffrage.

For all its flaws, the newspaper produced investigations, daily reports and editorials that not only improved lives, but — as evidenced by a 2005 landmark series on infant mortality — inarguably saved lives. In the face of threats and violence and subscription cancellations, The CA has exposed wrongdoing by politicians and popular sports and entertainment figures. Especially in recent years, it has fought long, costly battles to secure the public's right to open government.

The newspaper consistently has championed public health improvements, economic development and agricultural diversity. So indelible has been The CA's imprint that it can be seen in everything from current farming practices to the type of municipal government running Memphis.

As is usually the case with a dominant metro daily, The Commercial Appeal has been a favorite target of critics from across the political spectrum. It has been picketed by civil rights and labor groups on the left even as those on the far right labeled it The Communist Appeal and others ridiculed it as The Comical Appeal.

The newspaper regularly provoked the wrath of powerful figures. Longtime political power broker E.H. "Boss" Crump accused it of plumbing the depths of "indecent and irresponsible journalism," while Mayor Henry Loeb, who led the city during the sanitation strike, said the paper was so foul he could smell it when it landed on his doorstep. Former University of Memphis basketball coach John Calipari found the newspaper worth looking at only "when I run over it backing out of the driveway."

But for legions of loyal readers spread across a mostly rural, conservative region from Central Mississippi to the Missouri bootheel, The Commercial Appeal held a special, hallowed status — a "Southern newspaper Southerners have sworn by for ages," in the words of a 1956 letter-to-the-editor writer. Perhaps it's best known as "Old Reliable," a moniker earned by its persistence in publishing during the Civil War. Many an obituary ended with the affirmation that the deceased was "a lifelong reader of The Commercial Appeal."

As the late former editor Frank Ahlgren wrote in a 1991 retrospective piece for the paper's 150th anniversary, "people didn't believe until they had read it in The Commercial."

The newspaper traces its origins to April 21, 1841, when Col. Henry Van Pelt's first weekly issue of The Appeal appeared. The name referred to the "sober second thought of the people," which, in Van Pelt's view, was "never wrong and always efficient."

Perched on the Mississippi River at the edge of the frontier, the fledgling paper depended on other publications for news of the nation and world. Thomas Harrison Baker, author of a history of The Commercial Appeal, wrote that the paper provided the steamboats free ads — called "puffs" — in exchange for their delivery of bundles of newspapers from Cincinnati, Louisville and New Orleans, which were left in a box nailed to a post at the river landing.

In 1848, by which time the paper had become a daily, Memphis tapped into a telegraph line, enabling The Appeal to publish cotton prices and river stage information a few hours after they were posted. Nine years later, the Memphis & Charleston Railroad would connect the Atlantic Seaboard with the Mississippi.

During the period before the Civil War, the paper's columns were thick with ads for steamboat travel, patent medicines, carriages and farm implements. But it also made money from the slave trade. Issues from January 1850 show advertisements headlined "MORE NEGROES" and "Negroes and Land For Sale."

The Appeal's pro-slavery stance largely explains its almost fanatical support for the cause of the Confederacy. When South Carolina seceded from the Union, the newspaper organized a torchlight procession in celebration. On Feb. 12, 1861, following the formation of the Confederate States of America, and Jefferson Davis' inauguration in Montgomery, The Appeal declared in an editorial headlined "The Birth of a New Nation" that the South had become "united, free and prosperous."

Under Col. John R. McClanahan, one of its editors, the paper went so far as to recruit and equip a Rebel gun battery. The Appeal Battery saw considerable action — it "baptized itself in a rivulet of Yankee blood," read an account published in the paper — before being captured at Vicksburg.

But the intensely partisan stance of the paper didn't obscure its often-sterling war coverage. The opening sentence of correspondent Robert Ette's second-day dispatch from the Battle of Shiloh is still considered a classic of war reportage: "We slept last night in the enemy's camp."

Nor did The Appeal shrink from telling its readers grim news from the battlefronts. It reported, for instance, that the Rebel army had been "cut to pieces" at Corinth, and following the battle at Mill Springs, Kentucky, the paper said, "It is useless to look upon the matter in any other light than that of the truth. We have been badly defeated."

Memphis fell to Union forces after a June 6, 1862, battle on the Mississippi River, but even as the naval encounter raged, The Appeal was loading its press onto a train bound for Grenada, Mississippi. The paper had previously announced it would rather "sink our types, press and establishment into the bottom of the Mississippi River" than become a censored organ of federal occupation.

When it emerged in print again, three days later, The Appeal said it escaped so that it could "render official service to the Cause we advocate." And it defiantly declared: "Our fate is indissolubly connected with that of the Confederacy."

For nearly three years, the newspaper would continue to publish, staying one step ahead of the Union forces that were so eager to silence the South's most effective editorial voice. After Grenada, The Appeal fled to Jackson, Mississippi, where it later escaped in a flatboat that crossed the Pearl River under fire, then moved to Atlanta, Montgomery and, finally, Columbus, Georgia, where the paper's equipment and one of its editors, Col. B.F. Dill, were captured a full week after Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

Their long exile over, McClanahan and Dill returned to Memphis and began work to resume publication. But neither editor lived long after the war; McClanahan was killed in a fall from a window of the Gayoso Hotel during the summer of 1865, and Dill died the following January.

The city to which the Appeal returned had changed significantly since prewar days. The Appeal and other formerly pro-Confederate papers reflected the humiliation and resentment felt by white residents at the equality that had been bestowed on former slaves and the authority given to black troops garrisoned in the city.

The simmering bitterness exploded into violence in May 1866 after a confrontation between white police officers and African-American troops. The mayhem that followed was referred to as a "riot" in a headline in The Appeal, but historians would apply a different label: Massacre. White residents stormed through black neighborhoods, burning homes and churches and murdering nearly four dozen African-Americans.

The Appeal placed blame for the violence squarely on "rowdy blacks," whom it wanted expelled from the city.

"We have had too much of this lawless aggression on the part of the vicious Negroes infesting South Memphis," the newspaper said. One of the principal lessons of the riot, it said, was the folly of attempting "to establish a personal, social equality between the inferior and superior races."

A congressional investigation, however, laid partial responsibility for the massacre on "Rebel newspapers," such as The Appeal, that had helped stoke anti-black hatred.

Like the city it served, The Appeal withered in the economic gloom that followed the war. Circulation dropped by 50 percent to 2,000, and eventually the paper fell into receivership in 1867, with a court ordering that a buyer be found to keep it open.

Financial pressures might help explain an episode in the 1870s, when The Appeal accepted what Baker, the author of a history of the newspaper, called a "bribe" of $7,000 from railroad magnates who owed the state money for bonds issued under the widely despised Reconstruction-era Gov. William Brownlow. In return for the money, the newspaper ran editorials denouncing the bonds, reducing their value, and, in effect, helping the railroads defraud the state.

The yellow fever plague of 1878, however, would cast the newspaper in more heroic light. As the mosquito-borne disease spread throughout Memphis, killing more than 5,000 people and driving another 25,000 from the city, the Appeal continued publishing daily accounts of the pestilence, never missing an edition. The disease didn't spare the newspaper, either, killing 18 staffers and sickening 21 others, until only Col. J.M. Keating, the editor, and one printer remained on duty.

In vivid, heart-wrenching daily accounts, Keating described the toll taken by the outbreak. "Whole families have been swept out of existence — father, mother and children have followed each other in rapid succession to the grave," he reported in the Aug. 28, 1878, edition.

In the years following the epidemics, two African-Americans — millionaire businessman and philanthropist Robert Church and journalist, activist and civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells — rose to prominence with little recognition, if not hostility, from the newspaper. In December 1884, when Wells won a $500 judgment (later overturned) against a railroad that had refused to allow her to sit in the ladies coach, The Appeal headlined the story "A Darky Damsel." And, after she began publishing her research on lynchings, The Commercial, a predecessor to The CA, helped drive her out of Memphis with an editorial that further incited a mob to storm and destroy her newspaper.

As the 19th century drew to a close, major changes overtook the newspaper business in Memphis. In 1890, the majority owner of the Appeal purchased the rival Avalanche. But two years later, with the owner overextended with debt and the Panic of 1893 causing economic turmoil, The Appeal-Avalanche fell into receivership. It was purchased by the publisher of the rival Commercial the following year, ushering in the publication name that remains in use.

In its debut edition, on July 1, 1894, The Commercial Appeal set forth its editorial policies, saying it would "labor for the success of the Democratic Party and Democratic principles." The publication also pledged to "promote the welfare and prosperity of the South" and produce a "clean and wholesome, while a newsy and progressive, paper ..."

The merged publication grew rapidly, from a circulation of less than 25,000 in 1890 to nearly 70,000 in 1910. By then, The CA's mast and stationery would carry the claim, "The Largest Circulation in the South."

In 1908, one of The CA's most influential journalists, C.P.J. Mooney, returned to Memphis to lead the newsroom.

Tireless, combative and a devoutly Catholic teetotaler, Mooney once nearly killed a reporter who had shown up drunk in the newsroom. The two men brawled so violently in the office that other staff members had to separate them. Later, after the reporter approached Mooney on a Downtown street, apparently to apologize, the editor pulled a gun and fired a shot that missed only because another man shoved his arm just in time.

Editorially, Mooney took aim at a man of similar temperament — Crump — who at the time was beginning to assemble a political machine that would dominate local and state governments for 40 years. The CA regularly attacked the Crump machine and prematurely wrote its obituary.

The full fury of The CA's battle against Crump was unleashed in an Aug. 5, 1914, editorial that used the N-word and was headlined, "An Orgy of Machine Politics." In it, the paper declared that "the outlook for an honest election is not good" and took special umbrage at Crump's practice of enlisting and registering poor African-Americans, then teaching them how to spell the name of a write-in candidate favored by the machine.

Letters preserved at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library reveal the enmity between Crump and Mooney, which intensified even further after the newspaper reported on canceled personal checks of Crump's it obtained and cited them as evidence the political boss maintained a "slush fund" for his own benefit. In a 1917 single-spaced, typed letter covering two legal-size pages, Crump angrily denied the charges.

That same year, as America's entry into World War I dominated national news, the major story in Memphis was the murder of a white girl, Antoinette Rappel, and the lynching of her accused killer, a black man named Ell Persons.

The Commercial Appeal devoted extensive coverage to the efforts of a mob to find and abduct Persons from authorities. On May 22, 1917, a front-page headline announced the impending lynching and revealed the method of the planned killing: "Mob Captures Slayer of Rappel Girl, May Resort to Burning."

Responding to the publicity, some 5,000 men, women and children showed up at the Wolf River bridge on Macon Road to see Persons burned at the stake. "Thousands Cheered When Negro Burned," blared the following day's headline. The story said the crowd "could not well be described as a mob. There was no drinking, no loud talking."

The CA, which had sent a car of reporters to cover the lynching, described Persons' horror — how his "animal eyes rolled and shifted unceasingly" — as he was led to his doom. No gruesome detail of the lynching was spared.

"When the body had been burned sufficient to the lust of the executioners, one man in the crowd cut out the Negro's heart, two others cut off his ears, while another hacked off his head."

But if the tone of the front-page news story of the lynching was approving, the editorial in that same day's edition was not. "The forces of law and orderly living have never been forwarded by lynching ...," it said. "Men cannot give the law temporary paralysis and then expect it to resume a vigor in protecting all the rights of all the people."

Although the newspaper continued to oppose lynchings, it also fought against anti-lynching legislation in Congress, arguing the measure would provoke rather than prevent further mob violence.

By the early 1920s, The CA turned its attention to a different kind of lawless mob — the Ku Klux Klan. In the years just before and after World War I, the KKK ably exploited resentment and fears generated by the large numbers of Catholic and Jewish immigrants pouring into the country, as well as the continuing migration of African-Americans seeking better opportunities in the North. The Klan's message of "100 Percent Americanism" — meaning white Protestantism — resonated so well that the group gained power in many states and even paraded in robes in front of the Capitol in Washington.

Mooney's opposition to the Klan was rooted much deeper than the group's enmity toward his fellow Catholics. He objected to the KKK's secrecy, its lawlessness and its violence, and he opined the group's presence gave Northern politicians license to "cast a slur on the South."

Under Mooney, The CA gave front-page play to coverage of beatings and murders for which the Klan was suspected. This was especially true of the case of the abduction, torture and murder of two men in Northeastern Louisiana who had been critical of the group. When a local grand jury, apparently subject to KKK intimidation, refused to issue any indictments, Mooney wrote that "no aggregation of individuals has a right to take unto themselves the duties of judges and juries ..."

To augment the paper's campaign against the Klan, Mooney relied heavily on the talented Arkansan he'd hired as cartoonist, J.P. Alley. Front-page cartoons depicted Klansmen as cowards and vultures. One famously showed a disabled World War I veteran pointing to a Klansman with a "100% American" label on his robe and saying, "I'm unworthy — my religion ain't right!"

On May 14, 1923, The CA carried a front-page story announcing it had won the Pulitzer Prize. Judges cited the newspaper's "courageous attitude in the publication of cartoons and the handling of news in reference to the operations of the Ku Klux Klan."

The 1920s were a period of maturation and expansion for the newspaper. With the advent of radio, The CA launched its own station, WMC, in 1923. The paper also had shelved the sensational crime coverage of previous decades. Still, with Memphis plagued with one of the highest murder rates in the nation, editorials such as the one of May 11, 1923, headlined "Our Daily Shootings" appeared.

Mooney died of a stroke while at work in 1926. He is perhaps best known today for penning "Jesus: The Perfect Man," a piece The CA reprints as a tradition each Christmas.

Alley was well known for creating "Hambone's Meditations," featuring the musings of a heavily stereotyped African-American. After Alley died in 1934, sons Cal and James took over the cartoon.

In addition to Mooney, another towering figure in Memphis journalism worked for The CA during the 1920s. Mississippi-born Turner Catledge, whose reporting had prompted the KKK to burn down his previous newspaper in Tupelo, arrived in Memphis and trained his investigative sights on the Crump machine. In 1926, after reporting on voter fraud in the Tennessee Democratic primary, he was beaten bloody by supporters of Crump.

But it was the great flood of 1927 — during which he provided exhaustive coverage of the devastation in six states and even made broadcasts for the radio station — that thrust Catledge to prominence. City detectives were dispatched to bring him to The Peabody hotel to meet with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who had been sent by President Calvin Coolidge to oversee flood-relief efforts.

Hoover, the future president, was sufficiently impressed with Catledge to recommend that The New York Times hire him, which it did. There, during a career spanning 40-plus years, he rose to become executive editor and director of The New York Times Co.

Back in Memphis, George Morris, a newsman who had been named by Mooney to run the new Evening Appeal, took over The CA upon the editor's death. As the newspaper's fortunes plunged during the Great Depression, he resigned, then was rehired as general manager, then quit again.

In letters to Crump and various businessmen, Morris railed about the financial problems that threatened the paper's survival. The CA by 1933 was losing $15,000 a month, he wrote, and adding to the difficulty was the paper's decision to move to the former Ford manufacturing plant on Union Avenue. The CA paid $200,000 for the building, and the move itself cost $125,000 — five times the sum estimated.

Morris' letters, preserved at the Hooks library, suggest that once again the paper's financial troubles overrode its ethics. He wrote that The CA had dedicated itself to writing "propaganda about the railroads," especially the one that transported its ink.

Morris again rejoined the newspaper after James Hammond, a former Arkansas banker who had gotten rich as an executive for department stores in the East, purchased The CA and its evening paper for $3 million in 1933. Hammond promptly closed the Evening Appeal, but pursued circulation-building promotions that helped ensure The CA's survival.

In 1934, The Commercial Appeal launched a public campaign that would last three decades and attain notable success in changing agricultural practices — so much so that the paper was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

At the time, farming throughout the region was tied to a one-crop system — that of cotton. During the 1920s, prices for cotton crashed, and boll-weevil infestation wreaked further havoc on the hundreds of marginal and submarginal family farms and tenant farms in the area. In the 1930s, as the Depression deepened, huge cotton surpluses piled up, driving prices even lower, and cultivation practices had led to ruinous soil erosion.

The CA's 'Plant to Prosper' program was a sustained campaign that offered cash prizes to farmers who converted cotton land to the best uses and improved their farming practices. By the 1940s, more than 100,000 farmers were participating in the program, which dovetailed with the diversification initiatives of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Plant to Prosper and the associated Live at Home program weren't shut down until 1965, when The CA's editor, Ahlgren, said they had "served the purpose for which they were started."

Another of the newspaper's promotional programs, however, met with tragedy in May 1939, when a plane carrying a photographer-pilot, a reporter and the youngest son of Crump crashed in Grenada, Mississippi, killing all three. The aircraft, owned by The CA, was among five planes on a tour to promote the Memphis Cotton Carnival.

Three years after buying The CA, Hammond sold it in 1936 to the Scripps-Howard chain, which owned the evening Press-Scimitar. Despite the generally conservative, pro-business editorial tint to Scripps papers, The CA was an enthusiastic backer of FDR, saying the South had hugely benefited from the New Deal.

By 1940, The CA had become a print powerhouse, its block-long presses on Union Avenue cranking out nearly 150,000 copies daily. A regional network of some 300 correspondents filed stories from cities and towns across the Mid-South.

Ahlgren, named editor in 1936, was considered one of the most powerful men in Memphis. Even he, however, deferred to Crump, whose relations with The CA had improved somewhat since Mooney's days.

Ahlgren was among a group of local leaders who met with Crump and persuaded him to support a sales tax to help the depleted state budget, said Charles Crawford, history professor at the University of Memphis. Letters on file in the Crump collection at the Hooks library show that Ahlgren also asked for Crump's backing for events such as a parade to celebrate the 1949 opening of the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge over the Mississippi.

"And we, of course, would like to publicize such a project," Ahlgren added. Crump, however, nixed the plan.

During the 1950s, The CA devoted much of its editorial energy to the Cold War and threat of Communism. But civil rights battles were emerging.

After the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling ended legal school segregation, the newspaper tried to rally other Southern states to fight any federal attempts at forced integration.

In 1955, a chilling episode that would further galvanize the civil rights movement occurred in The CA's circulation area. A black teenager from Chicago named Emmett Till was visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta when he was abducted and murdered for reportedly whistling at a white woman at a store in Money, Mississippi.

The case drew international media attention after Till's battered body, weighted down with a cotton gin fan, was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. The attention turned to outrage after an all-white jury acquitted the two white men charged with the murder after barely an hour's deliberation. Safely acquitted, the two men — Roy Bryant, husband of the woman whistled at, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam — admitted in a paid magazine interview that they killed Till.

Stories in The CA described the circus atmosphere of the trial in Sumner, Mississippi. Editorially, the newspaper defended the verdict and castigated critics, especially those in the North, who had questioned Mississippi's legal system. It also saw darker forces at work in the criticism. "As was inevitable, the Emmett Till murder is being made a cause célèbre by communists who are going to get all the mileage they can from it," The CA said on Oct. 17, 1955.

As postwar Memphis grew into a major manufacturing and banking center, The CA was prospering, as well. By 1960, circulation shot past the 250,000 mark.

Through the 1960s, civil rights remained a dominant issue locally and nationally. In Oxford, Mississippi, just 80 miles south of Memphis, riots broke out in October 1962 as a black student, James Meredith, integrated the University of Mississippi with the aid of federal marshals.

Editorially, The CA denounced the violence and placed blame for it on the "political demagoguery" of Gov. Ross Barnett and other Mississippi officials. The paper chided Barnett for having referred to the presence of federal troops as an "invasion" when it was he who allowed state police to stand down while "civil strife tore his state apart."

By the mid-1960s, according to Baker's book, it had become clear to such leaders as Edward Meeman, editor of the afternoon Memphis Press-Scimitar, attorney Lucius Burch and former Mayor Edmund Orgill that Memphis' commission form of government was outmoded and inadequate for such a large city. It provided for no separation of administrative and legislative functions, and, with the all-powerful Crump gone, disputes among commissioners could shut down City Hall.

In 1965, the newspaper joined the crusade to modernize government, publishing an in-depth series called "Managing the Metropolis." That series helped give rise to a civic initiative called Program of Progress, in which 25 directors elected in a public forum in December 1965 drew up a proposed city charter with a mayor-council form of government. The proposal was put on the ballot and approved by voters, taking effect Jan. 1, 1968.

But in the 1960s racial issues were never far from the horizon, some of them involving The CA itself. Ahlgren was credited with approaching the city's hotels and businesses and persuading them to integrate without incident. In an effort to head off possible unrest, both local dailies — The CA and Press-Scimitar — also agreed to withhold publicity in advance of the 1961 integration of Memphis City Schools by 13 African-American first-graders.

But only under the threat of an NAACP boycott did The CA agree to use the same honorifics (such as Mr. and Mrs.) for black people as it routinely did for white people in the news.

Ahlgren, who had come to Memphis during the 1920s, grew up in Wisconsin. But he displayed an affinity for Southern ways and would later acknowledge he had not been an early convert to the cause of civil rights.

"It's fair to say I never had any idea of being a big champion of Negro rights when I first came here," he wrote in the 1991 piece. "The only blacks I had been exposed to were mainly very ignorant and uneducated people. But times change and people do too."

Against that backdrop of changing times, Memphis' biggest story of the decade — and probably the century — began on Feb. 1, 1968, when two city sanitation workers were crushed to death as a result of a mechanical malfunction in a garbage packer as they sought shelter from rain. Their families got almost nothing in the way of death benefits.

After a meeting 10 days later, a full-blown strike erupted as 1,300 employees refused to work. Loeb, a fiscal conservative who had won election on a "Law and Order" platform, called the strike illegal — a violation of an injunction from a failed strike a year earlier — and refused to negotiate with the workers.

The CA concurred wholeheartedly with Loeb's intransigence, saying the city had a "firm and legal foundation" for refusing to talk.

In its news columns, the paper gave straightforward, front-page coverage of the two workers' deaths. But it later portrayed strike leaders in a less-than-flattering light. A profile of T.O. Jones, the president of the Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, depicted him as a drama-prone leader with a poor work history and sketchy personal background.

The CA and other media organizations also stressed the influence of outside labor leaders, particularly P.J. Ciampa, AFSCME's abrasive director of field operations, and depicted local workers as pawns in a larger battle.

As the strike persisted, the inescapably racial dimension of the struggle — black workers vs. white leadership — led black ministers and others to cast it as part of the larger civil rights campaign. The CA, however, ascribed cynical motives to the civil rights activists. Its political editor wrote that "there is money to be raised and power to be gained by expanding a local labor situation into a civil rights demonstration." Editorially, the paper complained that the strike had been "converted into an excuse for a massive racial protest," adding that the "strike issues are not racial."

Increasingly frustrated with the coverage of the strike, African-American ministers called for a boycott of The CA and the Memphis Press-Scimitar. They also voiced outrage at The CA's continuing publication of "Hambone's Meditations." In the daily cartoon, Hambone — whom the newspaper, in a 1940 book commemorating its 100th anniversary, had called a "philosophical Southern darkey" — uttered platitudes in barely intelligible black dialect.

Despite complaints about the paper's coverage, the Memphis Roundtable of the National Conference of Christian and Jews on Feb. 21, in the middle of the strike, awarded Ahlgren its annual Human Relations Award for his efforts to advance the welfare of citizens of "all religious beliefs and racial, economic and cultural backgrounds."

Expanding its strike coverage, The CA published a story showing wage rates of sanitation workers in Memphis were in line with those in comparable cities. And a reporter who spent a day collecting garbage wrote a first-person account of the arduous nature of the work.

Readers, however, weren't given a complete picture of conditions that prompted the strike. In addition to often making less than $70 a week, workers could be sent home on rainy days with just two hours' pay while their white supervisors stayed at work drawing full pay. Under the cost-cutting Loeb, new equipment purchases had been curtailed, leaving workers with unsafe trucks such as the one that crushed the two workers.

In her book "At the River I Stand," author Joan Turner Beifuss (mother of The CA writer John Beifuss) said the true failure of the newspaper's strike coverage extended well beyond its editorial positions and even Hambone. The CA's and Memphis Press-Scimitar's main flaws, she said, "lay in the lack of coverage of the black community in this crisis and of general background news stories which could have put the strike into some kind of context."

Angus McEachran, who was metro editor in 1968, doesn't dispute those assertions. He said the newspaper was blinded by having a virtually all-white staff. "We tended to think that because we had some rapport with the black ministers, we knew what was going on in the black community. That simply wasn't true," he said.

"We were not deliberately biased, but I think bias certainly entered our coverage."

The CA was hardly alone among newspapers, especially those in the South, in the way it approached civil rights coverage, said Doug Cumming, a longtime reporter who now is a journalism professor at Washington and Lee University.

"We like to believe that we are bound by dedication to the public good and are independent of pressure from the community and advertisers," he said. "The fact is, local newspapers reflect the mood and culture of their communities."

In communities such as Memphis, where slavery and the Jim Crow era overshadowed the culture for nearly 150 years, newspapers almost invariably defended "the Southern way of life," which was based on white supremacy, Cumming said.

The stalemate in the strike led to a series of ultimately fateful visits by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. To King, who was planning a poor-people's march on Washington in April, the Memphis strike offered an almost perfect reflection of the racial and economic disparities afflicting the nation.

The newspaper greeted King's arrival coolly. After an initial rally on March 19 in which the civil rights leader called for a general work stoppage if the city didn't agree to union dues checkoff for sanitation workers, the paper editorialized King's visit helped only him, not the city or strikers. "But he saw how many Negroes were aroused and quickly decided to attach himself to the local issue," it said.

During his next visit, on March 28, King led a march in Downtown that dissolved into violence, with storefront windows smashed, stores looted and a black youth fatally shot by police. The CA's comprehensive news coverage over the next three days included accounts from black residents strongly disputing police accounts of the teenager's death and told of incidents in which African-Americans said they were abused by officers for no reason.

But in an editorial and a cartoon, The CA blamed King for the riot, saying, "Dr. King's pose as leader of a nonviolent movement has been shattered."

A front-page story on March 30 also reported King had met with representatives of the Invaders, a black militant group. The same story made reference to King's "$29-a-day room at the Holiday Inn-Rivermont," then one of the city's nicest hotels, without mentioning that a patrolman had taken him there after the riot broke out because routes to other hotels had been blocked.

King's place of lodging had been an issue raised by the FBI, whose director, J. Edgar Hoover, harbored a well-documented hostility toward the rights leader. In a memo approved for release to the press, the FBI noted King had called on African-Americans to boycott white-owned businesses, showing the apparent hypocrisy of his stay at the "plush," white-owned Rivermont. "There will be no boycott of white merchants for King, only for his followers," it said.

For his final visit, King would stay at the black-owned Lorraine Motel, where he was assassinated while standing on a balcony at 6:01 p.m. April 4. But media criticism apparently didn't drive that lodging choice. Fellow civil rights leader and King associate Ralph Abernathy later told a congressional committee investigating the assassination that the Lorraine had been King's usual choice in the past when staying in Memphis.

King's stay of the Lorraine was widely reported by the local media, especially radio and television stations. On April 4, The CA carried a front-page story stating that federal marshals serving court papers found King eating lunch at the motel.

One man undoubtedly saw that story. Assassin James Earl Ray left a copy of the April 4 edition, with his fingerprints on the front page, among a bundle he ditched during his escape immediately after firing the fatal shot.

Along with coverage of the assassination and the looting it sparked, The CA's April 5 edition carried a rare front-page editorial appealing for calm and offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the killer's capture.

In the weeks to come, the paper initiated its own investigation, dispatching reporters to Canada and Great Britain to retrace Ray's steps after the killing. McEachran expresses pride in The CA's reporting after the assassination, saying it could have won a Pulitzer if the paper's reputation — along with that of the city — had not been so tarnished.

In the aftermath of the assassination, The CA made efforts to hire more black staff members. It also put an end to Hambone.

But the FBI found at least one reporter at the newspaper still receptive to using information supplied by agents to discredit the Invaders and the Black Knights, identified as local militant groups. In a Feb. 23, 1969, memo to headquarters, the FBI's Memphis office said it had made contact with an unnamed CA staff member who "has always been cooperative with this Bureau" and was interested in producing stories on the groups based on information to be "leaked" by agents. Reporters at several newspapers across the nation helped the FBI's counterintelligence effort against the Black Panther Party and similar groups, memos show.

King's assassination and the accompanying strife helped drive Downtown Memphis into a decadeslong decline. But The CA's circulation was still surging, exceeding 270,000 by the end of the 1960s. The paper, which produced five editions every day, circulated throughout an 84-county area stretching from Little Rock to the Tennessee River, from the Missouri bootheel to Central Mississippi.

Ahlgren retired in 1969, replaced by Gordon Hanna as editor.

The 1970s were highlighted by such events as the 1973 move of brand-new Federal Express from Little Rock to Memphis and the then-Memphis State University's exhilarating run to the NCAA basketball championship game that year. But the newspaper also was busy with more troubling news — rancor over forced school busing, the beating death of a black teenager by police, and crippling strikes by city firefighters, police officers and teachers, all in the same year.

And then there was a single death — that of Elvis Presley, on Aug. 16, 1977 — that turned worldwide attention to Memphis. The CA had a reporter infiltrate the private funeral ceremony. And the paper's front page and special edition on the singer's death became such collector's items that within two months the paper was able to make a $25,000 donation to the United Way from proceeds from their sale.

Barely eight weeks after Elvis' death, however, the newspaper began printing stories that fans of the singer did not cherish. The articles reported evidence of Elvis' heavy drug use — high levels of codeine, morphine, Placidyl and other substances were found in his blood — and how it might have contributed to his death. The reports called into question Shelby County Medical Examiner's Jerry T. Francisco's ruling that hypertensive heart disease alone killed the singer. The CA's stories generated furious complaints and hundreds of subscription cancellations.

During the 1980s, the newspaper honed its investigative capabilities, with mixed results.

One target was MSU basketball coach Dana Kirk, who had led the Tigers to the Final Four in 1985. In an investigation that prompted death threats from boosters against Executive Editor David Wayne Brown, The CA delved into wide-ranging allegations against Kirk and found, among other things, he personally took in money from attendees at his basketball camps. He was later forced out and indicted by a grand jury on charges of tax evasion, filing false tax returns and obstruction of justice. The NCAA, citing rampant recruiting violations under Kirk, forced Memphis State to vacate all tourney appearances between 1982 and 1985.

In 1986, one of the newspaper's most controversial investigative efforts targeted St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Appearing less than a month before the hospital's board was to vote on a proposed move from Memphis to St. Louis, the series "People of Charity" examined the backgrounds of St. Jude leaders, most of whom were of Lebanese and Syrian heritage. The series said a number of hospital board members had been involved in lobbying for "Arab causes" and had links to groups that had been targets of Middle East violence. But despite language that hinted the contrary, it found no links to terror or wrongdoing by the hospital or its leaders.

The City Council passed a resolution condemning the series. Dick Hackett, who was mayor at the time, found the stories particularly embarrassing, though the St. Jude board voted to keep the hospital in Memphis. He called the series ill-conceived, insulting and inaccurate, saying it smeared "some of the finest Americans I have ever known."

The series was controversial inside The CA newsroom, as well. Staff members circulated a petition asking that it not be submitted for journalism awards.

Still, Brown, the executive editor, said there were positive results from the series and its findings that a high percentage of the money donated to the hospital was funneled back into fundraising efforts instead of going to research. "I think they did take a harder look at their fundraising apparatus," Brown said.

The afternoon Memphis Press-Scimitar, which operated out of the same building as The CA, was closed in 1983. Leadership of The CA, meantime, changed often during the 1980s. Michael Grehl, who had replaced Hanna as editor in 1975, retired in 1985 after suffering a stroke. From 1985 through 1988, the paper was led by Brown, and after he resigned, Lionel Linder, a veteran newsman who most recently had edited The Detroit News, was named editor of The CA.

At the time, the newspaper was booming. Financial data disclosed as part of an antitrust lawsuit filed against The CA by a local shopper publication showed that in 1988, the paper, with a Sunday circulation of nearly 289,000 (210,000 daily), reaped revenues exceeding $120 million against expenses of $77 million, resulting in operating income of $43.6 million. The alternative weekly Memphis Flyer, which reported the figures from the lawsuit, quoted industry experts as saying The CA's 36 percent pretax profit margin was perhaps the largest of any metro daily in the nation.

The newspaper over the decades shared some of that largesse with the community. Beginning in the early 1900s, it contributed funds for a new YMCA building. It operated such charities as The Cynthia Milk Fund, which provided milk and nutritional supplements to indigents, and the Christmas Basket Fund for needy children. It also sponsored events such as the Mid-South Fair Youth Talent Contest and a competition recognizing Mid-South towns for their efforts to develop industry.

One of the newspaper's most noticeable donations helped transform the Memphis Zoo. The Commercial Appeal Cat Country, an open-air exhibit, was completed in 1993 after the newspaper donated $1 million toward the $5.4 million cost.

Under Linder, the paper hewed to a conservative editorial stance. Inspired by President George H.W. Bush's call for voluntarism, Linder and the paper launched a series called "A Thousand Points of Light" profiling local volunteers.

In recognition of The CA's initiative, Bush traveled to Memphis on a rainy Nov. 22, 1989, to honor the volunteers and the newspaper. The Columbia Journalism Review gave The CA a "dart" condemning what it described as the paper's fawning coverage of the visit, which included a large portrait of Bush on the front page.

The paper was in for more dramatic changes as the 1990s dawned. Linder was killed by a drunken driver while heading home along Union Avenue on New Year's Eve, 1992. McEachran, a Memphis native who was editor of the Pittsburgh Press, returned to run his hometown paper.

In 1994, cartoonist Michael Ramirez won The CA's second Pulitzer for cartoons on a variety of local and national topics.

But the arrival of the Internet represented the biggest change of the decade. The CA launched its website in the mid-1990s, but competition from digital advertising and other news sources began eroding newspaper revenue like no other technological advance — including radio and TV — ever did.

The same was happening nationwide. Between 2005 and 2014, total print and digital advertising revenues for newspapers fell from $49.4 billion to less than $19.8 billion, according to the Newspaper Association of America and the Pew Research Center. The digital portion of that advertising rose from about $2 billion to $3.5 billion during the period, while print revenue fell from $47.4 billion to $16.3 billion. The upshot: For every dollar newspapers gained in digital advertising, they lost $20 in print advertising.

Total daily newspaper circulation, which had peaked at 62.8 million in 1987, fell to 40.4 million in 2014.

Those circulation and revenue trends have hit The CA as well.

From its peak of more than 300,000 Sunday subscribers and 225,000 weekday readers in the early 1980s, the paper's circulation has fallen to nearly 105,000 on Sunday and 69,000 daily.

Where it once had correspondents stationed in more than a dozen towns from Blytheville, Arkansas, to Tupelo, Mississippi, as well as bureaus in Washington, D.C., and in state capitals of Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, only the Nashville and Washington bureaus remain.

And where more than 1,100 CA employees worked at 495 Union during the 1980s, fewer than 300 remain. The editorial staff, which numbered more than 200 just 20 years ago, has shrunk to 71.

But traumatic as the current upheaval might seem, newspapers have been through the convulsive change before — successfully evolving to adapt to new technology and consumer demands. In many ways, today's media landscape of niche websites and partisan blogs is "a throwback to an older form of journalism — Ben Franklin's form of journalism," Mitchell Stephens, a journalism professor at New York University, said in the May edition of Smithsonian Magazine.

And the irony in the circulation and revenue decline is that the CA is more popular than ever, in terms of total readership — print and digital combined. In April, for example, nearly 900,000 different users (up 31 percent year over year) on desktops, phones and tablets visited commercialappeal.com. They viewed more than 7.4 million pieces of content, giving the newspaper a major slice of a very fragmented Memphis digital media market.

Though it charges users after a dozen visits a month, the newspaper's website had more readership during a 30-day period than four of the city's five television websites — all free — and it was neck and neck with the fifth, according to the most recent survey (last year) by the research firm Nielson Scarborough.

Part of the reason may be that through the layoffs and attrition, The CA has continued to pursue high-quality, high-impact journalism.

Prompted by the deaths of two toddlers who were forgotten in separate day care vans on a single scorching day in July 1999, The CA undertook an examination of subsidized child care in Shelby County, uncovering widespread misuse of funds. The probe resulted in the convictions of four contractors and a government worker, the abandonment of the state's "broker'' system and a state Attorney General's investigation that sought to recoup hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds intended for poor children but squandered on Caribbean cruises, Las Vegas gambling trips, fancy cars and lavish lifestyles.

Another target of the newspaper was state Sen. John Ford, who dominated Memphis' legislative delegation for nearly a quarter-century. His reign collapsed in 2005 after The CA revealed the lawmaker had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from two contractors participating in TennCare, the state's expanded Medicaid program.

Amid a monthslong Senate ethics investigation, Ford was indicted in Memphis on unrelated bribery charges stemming from the FBI's Tennessee Waltz undercover sting. He resigned his seat and eventually was convicted in separate trials in Memphis and Nashville, though the TennCare kickbacks conviction was later vacated after the Supreme Court gutted the federal Honest Services Fraud Law.

Another investigation by the newspaper resulted in changes that protected recipients of Habitat for Humanity homes from predatory lenders and businesses. The 2003 series found that of 229 recipients, 93 had filed for bankruptcy and several lost their homes in foreclosures. As a consequence, the group began requiring applicants undergo "financial fitness" education and additional screening measures.

In 2005, The CA published a series that galvanized local health officials to launch a coordinated campaign to fight one of the Memphis area's most chronic health problems: infant mortality. Titled 'Born to Die,' it reported that in 2002, the rate in metropolitan Memphis was double the U.S. figure and the highest among the nation's 60 largest metro areas.

The series provided the catalyst for a collaborative effort among government agencies and partners throughout the community, who convened a summit meeting to draw up strategies. The effort produced results. Between 2004 and 2013, Shelby County's infant mortality rate fell from 12.8 to 9.2 per 1,000 live births — a drop of 28 percent.

"It wasn't that we were waiting around to act until we saw the story, but it gave us an extra push and mobilized countless entities," said then County Mayor A C Wharton. "That series put it in your face."

The newspaper invested nearly a year of reporting time to explore and explain Memphis' long-building financial problems for a 2015 series — "Our Financial Mess" — named by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers as the best piece of explanatory journalism in the country that year. Noted one judge: "The series displays a deep affection for the city and a nuanced understanding of the challenges facing its people and leaders."

Through its investigative work and role as a daily watchdog, the newspaper also has helped secure the public's access to courts and government by suing to inspect records and have legal proceedings opened. The CA's name is "littered throughout the case law" regarding open records and open meetings in Tennessee, said Lucian Pera, longtime outside counsel to the newspaper.

It was The CA, for instance, that pressed the legal battle to have the subleases for businesses along city-owned Beale Street opened to review. The newspaper also sued to gain access to the Memphis Police Department's investigative file on the 1983 "Shannon Street incident" in which seven occupants of a home were killed in a shootout, and a police officer who had been taken hostage died. It also won cases opening records and meetings related to the selection of a Memphis City Schools superintendent and requiring judges to open the jury-selection process in prominent trials. The newspaper sued the FBI to obtain its records on Withers, triggering a legal battle that cost more than $100,000 and led to a landmark ruling in The CA's favor.

Its history notwithstanding, The CA in recent decades has tried to broaden its reach among African-Americans and provide more insightful coverage of the community. Newsroom diversity remains a major challenge, but black journalists now make up 17 percent of the staff, including the managing editor who oversees all news coverage and opinion page editor who, along with the editor, determines the paper's editorial positions.

"The paper, I think, has changed with the times," said Rev. LaSimba Gray, president emeritus of the Memphis affiliate of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition.

All the while, newsroom leadership has been changing. Chris Peck, who had edited the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, took over as editor after McEachran retired in 2002. After Peck retired in 2013, Louis Graham, a longtime investigative reporter focused on corruption in local government who had risen through the ranks to managing editor, assumed the editor's job.

Ownership of the newspaper has been in transition, as well. In 2014, E.W. Scripps Co., having already split its highly profitable cable television networks from its less-prosperous newspaper division, sold The CA and its other papers to the Milwaukee-based Journal Media Group. A year later, the paper was under new ownership, again, this time controlled by the nation's largest publisher of daily newspapers, Gannett.

Whatever new ownership brings, the newspaper that earned the nickname "Old Reliable" during the Civil War will be dealing with strong economic and technological headwinds confronting the industry. Having dodged Yankee troops and survived yellow fever outbreaks, The CA faces another daunting challenge.