Ned Touchstone

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Ned O'Neal Touchstone
Born	September 27, 1926(1926-09-27) Florien in Sabine Parish, Louisiana, United States
Died	July 16, 1988 (aged 61) Lake Palestine, near Tyler in Smith County, Texas, USA
Residence	Shreveport-Bossier City, Louisiana
Nationality	American
Occupation	Newspaper editor and publisher; researcher; journalist; political activist
Political party	Democrat
Spouse	June A. McGehee Touchstone (born 1927)
Children	David Mark Touchstone (born 1952), Lia Touchstone Tippit, and Lauren Touchstone Jones
Parents	Mr. and Mrs. Sam F. Touchstone
Notes A leader of the "Radical Right" in Louisiana

Ned O'Neal Touchstone (September 27, 1926 -- July 26, 1988) was a newspaper publisher who was a leader of the "Radical Right" in Louisiana politics during the 1960s. He was born in the village of Florien in Sabine Parish but resided in the Shreveport-Bossier City metropolitan area for most of his life. At the time of his sudden death, he resided on Lake Palestine near Tyler in Smith County in east Texas.

Touchstone was descended from Richard Touchstone, a settler of Maryland prior to 1650, and Benjamin Merrell, who was hanged, drawn, and quartered in North Carolina in 1771 in an early attack on the British crown. His family members were pioneers in the settlement of Mississippi in 1798.

1 An unusual publisher
2 Opposing King, integration, and globalism
3 Running for superintendent of education
4 Touchstone's obituary
5 References

[edit] An unusual publisher

Touchstone was a professional researcher and writer and owned and operated a retail book store in Shreveport. For eight years, he published in his print shop in Bossier City numerous weekly newspapers in Louisiana and Texas, including the Waskom Gazette in Waskom in east Texas. He claimed to have worked on Capitol Hill as an administrative assistant for five years to an undisclosed U.S. representative.

His congressional activity was presumably prior to 1962, when he became editor of The Councilor, a publication of the White Citizens' Council of America, which claimed a readership of 106,000. The Citizens Council was formed in the middle 1950s to oppose the civil rights movement in the South. The White Citizens' Council's membership was comprised mostly of wealthy white southerners who sought to exert financial pressures on civil rights supporters. It grew in numbers until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law.

The Councilor was hostile toward liberals in both major parties, and particularly the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Often Touchstone employed ridicule and vociferous personal attacks against those whom he politically opposed.

Touchstone once printed a "letter to the editor" in The Councilor in which a black man from the North derided young blacks in Sebring, Florida, where the city had set aside a beachfront for black recreation, but the site was constantly littered, "filthy," in the words of the letter writer, and therefore unusable.

[edit] Opposing King, integration, and globalism

Touchstone decried the civil rights activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), whom he claimed had political and financial ties with international communism. Touchtone said that many Americans would not understand that "King gets his money from known Reds until they are hit over the head with the facts. We stand ready to hit them over the head with solid facts." First FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, however, said that communists had attempted to infiltrate the civil rights movement but had failed in that mission.

Touchstone opposed the Fair Play for Cuba movement, a communist front in which Lee Harvey Oswald had been active prior to 1963. The "Fair Play" group sent busloads of northern blacks into the South to work for desegregation. Touchstone and another "Radical right" ally, George Singlemann of New Orleans, instead organized the "Reverse Freedom Ride movement," which raised funds to provide bus trips for southern blacks wishing to relocate to the North. Disgruntled southern minorities were encouraged to relocate to Hyannisport, Massachusetts, the home of President Kennedy, or to other cities where northern leaders who supported civil rights legislation lived. Touchstone claimed that his "Reverse Freedom Ride" neutralized the "Fair Play for Cuba" activists.

Touchstone was an early critic of growing American globalism. He singled out "dangerous" groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Federal Reserve System, the Bank of France, the Bank of England, the three major American television networks, as well as the Rothschild and Warburg families. He claimed that these families were so interrelated that to preserve their domination he found 64 examples where the Rothschilds had married first cousins. These international families provided the money to establish V.I. Lenin in the Soviet Union and continued to assist the international communist movement, Touchstone claimed.

Six months prior to Touchstone's death, the United States had observed the third annual celebration of the birth of Martin Luther King. In many cities with large numbers of minorities, the King holiday has become the third most popular of the year. The honor to King was especially troubling to Ned Touchstone, who was never reconciled to desegregation.

[edit] Running for superintendent of education

In 1967, Touchstone ran as a Democrat for Louisiana state superintendent of education. He claimed that he would use administrative measures to thwart the continuing process of school desegregation in Louisiana. He was badly defeated by incumbent William J. "Bill" Dodd (1909-1991). Ironically, Touchstone was born in Sabine Parish, and Dodd, who was seventeen years older than Touchstone, grew up there.

Ned Touchstone was also reportedly a member of the radical Original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

He was among those members of the "Radical Right" who questioned the Warren Commission report that President Kennedy died from a single bullet fired by one gunman. For years, Touchstone investigated Kennedy's assassination. He supported the conspiracy viewpoint formulated by Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison.

[edit] Touchstone's obituary

Services for Touchstone were held on July 30, 1988, at the Osborn Funeral Home Chapel in Shreveport. The obituary does not give the location of burial. Nor does the obituary mention his past political activities.

Touchstone was survived by his wife, June A. McGehee Touchstone (born 1927), then of Tyler and a native of Homer in Claiborne Parish; his father, Sam F. Touchstone (1904-2002), a taxidermist in Haughton in Bossier Parish, who was living in Bossier City at the time of Touchstone's death; a son, David Mark Touchstone (born 1952), a business lawyer in Shreveport-Bossier City; two daughters, Lia Touchstone Tippit then of Rockwall, Texas, and Lauren Touchstone Jones then of Knoxville, Tennessee; two sisters, three brothers, and ten grandchildren.