a new state constitution designed to disenfranchise black voters by making voter registration and voting more difficult, The Clarion-Ledger applauded the move, stating: "Do not object to negroes voting on account of ignorance, but on account of color. ... If every negro in Mississippi was a class graduate of Harvard, and had been elected class orator ... he would not be as well fitted to exercise the rights of suffrage as the Anglo-Saxon farm laborer." In August 1963, when 200,000 people joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and Martin Luther King Jr. gave his now-famous "I Have A Dream" speech, The Clarion-Ledger made short note of the rally. It reported the litter-clearance effort the next day under the headline, "Washington is Clean Again with Negro Trash Removed". Earlier that year, when the Mississippi State University basketball team was scheduled to play the Loyola University Chicago Ramblers in the NCAA tournament, they learned that its starting lineup featured four African-American players. The Jackson Daily News prominently featured pictures of the four black players in an effort to scare the Bulldogs from playing the Ramblers. At the time, longstanding state policy forbade state collegiate athletic teams from playing in integrated events. The ploy backfired, as the Bulldogs ignored the threat and defied an order from Governor Ross Barnett to withdraw. Their competing with the Ramblers, the eventual national champion that year, is a significant, but often overlooked, milestone of progress in race relations in sports. The paper often referred to civil rights activists as "communists" and "chimpanzees." The paper's racism was so virulent that some in the African-American community called it "The Klan-Ledger", after the Ku Klux Klan. When violence, aided by such rabble rousing, took place in Mississippi, the paper sought to put the blame somewhere else. When Byron De La Beckwith was arrested for killing NAACP leader Medgar Evers, the headline read, "Californian Is Charged With Murder Of Evers", overlooking the fact that Beckwith had lived in Mississippi almost his entire life. In the mid-1970s, Rea S. Hederman, the third generation of his family to run the paper, made a concerted effort to atone for its terrible civil rights record. Hederman expanded the staff and news budget. Editors began to pursue promising young reporters, including from other states. To help rehabilitate the paper's image among blacks, who gradually became a majority of Jackson's population, the paper increased