This so-called Dixie option

This was the first time Rock had been in the basement library of the Arkansas Gazette building in nearly twenty years, but it was perfectly unchanged. It remained dark, dank, and cool, with the same musty smell of old damp paper he remembered. He was there to find a story he had written about an Arkansas-Pine Bluff football game in the fall of 1990.
Within minutes, with story in hand, Rock was back in his blue bedroom, which had much the same feel as the basement library. Cool wind blew in from his rain-drenched backyard, and his cat Jo watched on quizzically as Rock spoke with a seventy-year-old African American copy editor named Wade, a cohort of his at the Gazette all those many years ago.
Wade explained how the Gazette had maintained what he called a "Dixie Option" on all of its copy from the Civil Rights era forward. He demonstrated: "We never used it, but it went like this," he said. Wade then punched up two copies of Rock's story. The first was as Rock had written it, but the second was changed so that its subjects appeared Caucasian, so that Arkansas-Pine Bluff no longer appeared as the historically black college it was.
Rock was fearful for several minutes, even after he had proceeded to his kitchen to turn down a fan, that this so-called Dixie option would be exposed, and with his name on the copy. He thought surely men at the presses must have seen the result of Wade's expose. He knew that in today's age of hypersensitivity, even to misdeeds from long ago, this could turn disastrous.