Harkey lived long enough to see state embrace ideals

By Columnist Sid Salter
 

— There’s a certain symmetry in the fact that Pascagoula journalist Ira B. Harkey Jr. lived long enough to see the University of Mississippi dedicate a monument honoring the admission of James Meredith as its first African-American student.

On Sunday, Oct. 1, Ole Miss dedicated a monument to mark the 44th anniversary of its 1962 integration.

Meredith, now 73, spoke at the dedication along with his son, Joseph, who was the university’s top business school doctoral student in 2002.
The Ole Miss civil rights monument, located between the library and the Lyceum on the Oxford campus, features a life-sized bronze statue of Meredith.

Harkey, 88, died a week later in nursing home in Kerrville, Texas. He had suffered from the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s Disease for a number of years.

In life and in death, Harkey and Meredith will be forever linked in Mississippi’s tortured history. Harkey’s “courageous editorials devoted to the processes of law and reason during the integration crisis in Mississippi in 1962” won him the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing at the Pascagoula Chronicle.

Speaking of those days in a 2004 interview with Tulane University journalist Nick Marinello, Harkey recounted being invited to speak at the 1950 Mississippi Press Association on the topic of “How to Handle the Negro in the News”: “I would like to say that this is not a Negro policy.

We carry out the same policy of doing away with all tags . . . unless they are pertinent. We do not regard ourselves as pro-Negro. We are pro-people. We are not bleeding hearts, we just don’t like undignified treatment of any people, not just Negroes or Jews or fat men.”

When Harkey won the Pulitizer Prize, few Mississippi newspaper folks celebrated the Pascagoula editor and publisher’s winning of journalism highest award. Greenville’s Hodding Carter III — whose father also won a Pulitizer for his editorials on civil rights in Mississippi — was one of the few who saluted Harkey.

Many others, including “Hacksaw Mary” Cain, the fiery editor of The Summit Sun weekly newspaper, castigated Harkey as a dupe of the Yankees or worse.

Harkey corresponded with me over the years and we had occasions to meet a few times. Despite the passage of more than three decades, he maintained a wary detachment from his former colleagues in the Mississippi press corps.

In 1993, Harkey was inducted into the Mississippi Press Association’s Hall of Fame some eight years after it was established. Even at the induction ceremony during a summer MPA convention weekend, Harkey groused about how he was treated in the 1960s.

Time had not salved the hurt, nor did the olive branch of the MPA’s highest honor. He still wondered aloud why more Mississippi journalists had not stood with him against racism and segregationist blather back in the day.

Despite his occasional bluster and his long memory of the very real threats on his life and the even more painful wounds of the slights of his former colleagues, Harkey saw progress in Mississippi after he left the state to pursue life as a college professor.

I remember Harkey as a man of deep conviction and courage. Even in advancing age, Harkey was a talented writer and a true intellectual. He was a man who had little patience with those for whom reason and logic were foreign concepts.

Some 44 years ago, Meredith and Harkey each sacrificed a great measure of his privacy, his personal safety and his peace of mind to the breaking of barriers that had existed for more than a century.

Each of them paid a price. But each of them also lived long enough to see the fruits of his labor.

The two men lived to see a measure of vindication for the sacrifices they made and an embrace of the ideals they both espoused.

Contact Perspective Editor Sid Salter at (601) 961-7084 or e-mail ssalter@clarionledger.com.