Inspirational Ira
Idoubt you’ve heard the name Ira B. Harkey Jr. That’s understandable since he was a crusading Mississippi newspaper editor during the 1950s and early ’60s who purchased the Pascagoula Chronicle-Star weekly in 1949 after retiring from the Navy.
For me, this man with enormous integrity who later wrote several books, including the autobiographical
The Smell of Burning Crosses, was to become among my most inspirational mentors, alongside late UCA journalism professor J. Dean Duncan.
And Harkey’s influence came at a time when the moxie and fiery determination he’d displayed a decade earlier in his editorials (and that book) were just what I needed to hear after becoming editor of the Hot Springs
Sentinel-Record in 1973.
A reader had dropped Harkey’s book by the paper one morning and suggested I read it. To her, it seemed Harkey and I shared common views about what journalism, even in the smaller communities (where council meetings, weddings, crime and social events fill the majority of space) could be, and the force for positive reform motivational words could hold.
I finished the book within three nights and immediately sent a personal letter to Harkey in 1977. By then, he’d long since left the Pascagoula newspaper for retirement in the mountain country around Kerrville, Texas. I told him what an inspiration his battles and convictions had been to a 20-something early into the editor’s role and how proud I was of the unwavering stand he’d taken in support of integration, particularly the 1962 admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi.
He unexpectedly responded by telling me that letter was the “nicest compliment” he’d ever received. Afterwards, we regularly exchanged messages until his death from complications from Parkinson’s disease at age 88 in 2006.
A number of Mississippi editors had adopted similar positions that promoted equal rights for black citizens in that state, such as equally courageous people like Pulitzer Prize winners Hazel Brannon Smith, owner and editor of four weekly rural newspapers, and Hodding Carter II of the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times.
Harkey held no punches in his heroic editorials, often referring to local hard-line segregationists, including followers of the local sheriff, as “goons.” He also began treating black citizens in Jackson County with respect and dignity in his news pages, something that further inflamed many white residents who were accustomed to being treated as, well, superior.
You can imagine how popular that made him in the Jackson County seat on the Gulf Coast—then about 17,000 population and home to shipbuilding and blue-collar industries—where he and his family lived.
Yet his ability and solid reasoning as an eloquent wordsmith with such strong convictions reached far beyond the smaller circulation area,
giving him, like Smith and Carter, a disproportionate voice for its relatively limited size.
For his relentless efforts at the typewriter and in newsprint, his wife left him, wooden crosses were burned on his front lawn, and newspaper windows were shot out.
After deservedly winning the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, Harkey earned his master’s and doctorate degrees and taught journalism a while at Ohio State University where, perhaps ironically, years later I would come to spend 1989-’95 in an endowed chair heading the master’s-degree Kiplinger Public Affairs Journalism Program.
Each of my classes of as many as 10 bright professionals, chosen competitively worldwide for the program, was assigned Harkey’s book as required reading. Some seminar classes even had him on speakerphone to discuss his experiences.
My thinking, as the director of that program, was that the conviction and courage contained in his book could likely reach them much as it had me when I read it.
Upon his 2006 death in a care home, Jocelyn Y. Stewart wrote in the Los Angeles that, “during an era of irrational and many times brutal opposition to integration, Harkey’s view brought him ostracism, death threats and violence. Still, he continued to write.
“‘I had the feeling—and I hate to say this because I sound like a jerk—I had the feeling I could make a difference,’ he said in a 2004 interview with Tulane University [his alma mater] magazine. ‘That I could really teach these people that the black man was a human being and not an animal. That he deserved the same rights as everyone else.’”
In quoting Robert Oswald, a former chancery judge who had been Harkey’s faithful attorney in those tumultuous crusading years, Stewart also wrote that Harkey, whose name for many sadly has been lost to history, was among that small group of Mississippi journalists who “recognized that segregation was an albatross around the neck of Mississippi and that it was holding the whole state in bondage. He saw just the rank unfairness of it, the inhumane aspect of it.”
It is people like Harkey and the other editors who attached their names and lives to their honorable convictions in smaller communities, where speaking forcefully for what’s right is anything but pleasant or easy, that I find woefully lacking in today’s newspaper industry.