Harkey: Southern journalist let truth be guide

As a journalist, Ira B. Harkey Jr., who died Sunday at the age of 88, did it all.

He was a tenacious reporter, an insightful editor, a small-town publisher, a noted author and an enduring teacher.

Harkey's achievements are too numerous to name here, and his obituary that was published in The Clarion-Ledger on Tuesday is even still an abbreviation that cannot come close to doing him justice.

But the mark of a journalist - and, despite all his many achievements and accolades, that is what he remained - is to speak the truth without fear.

Harkey did that. In newspaper columns, editorials, books and from the podium as a professor, Harkey's name was synonymous with the highest ideals of journalism - speaking the truth, telling it like it is, pulling no punches, letting the readers decide.

Harkey would have been a great voice wherever he lived. That he lived in Mississippi, from the publisher's pulpit of the Pascagoula Chronicle at this state's critical hour, and later as a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, was this region's blessing in a time of curses.

He was a true Southern journalist whose courage during this region's most tumultuous times - as the civil rights movement took shape in pride, bloodshed and shame - was a beacon of truth, however brightly it caused many to flinch from its revealing glare.

Harkey won the Pulitzer Prize for his bold editorial stands during the integration at Ole Miss - courageous, because he called for law and reason during a time of unruly madness when silence or meek acquiescence was the path of his peers.

His is a legacy of truth and, in death, his life should be any journalist's guide.