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Mississippi Press - Pascagoula, MS - October 10, 2006

A legacy not forgotten
 

A great voice in American journalism died Sunday.

Ira B. Harkey Jr., 88, the former owner, publisher and editor of The Chronicle Star, the predecessor of The Mississippi Press, passed away surrounded by friends and family in Kerrville, Texas.

Though Harkey only spent 15 years in Pascagoula, from 1948 to 1963, they were beyond a doubt the most tumultuous and rewarding years for the son of a New Orleans businessman.

Harkey lived in a Pascagoula divided, like the state, by racism and hatred.

It was a time, he recalls in his memoirs, "The Smell of Burning Crosses," in which African-American women were not referred to as Ms or Mrs., a time when Mississippi newspapers advocated state-sponsored segregation, and a time when supporting integration resulted in death threats.

Harkey didn't shy away from what he believed was morally and legally right. For 15 years, through The Chronicle Star's editorial page, Harkey pushed for racial equality. His support for the integration of Ole Miss and James Meredith's admission to the university won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1963.

In a 2004 article about his life published in Tulane University Magazine, Harkey said, "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. 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."

Following the Pulitzer announcement, the editor of the Holmes County (Miss.) Herald wrote that he "read with a taste of gall on my palette where another Mississippian has collected his reward for playing the part of traitor, defecting to the Kennedy-King Klan."

While his journalistic peers turned their backs on Harkey, he also became a popular target for misplaced hate in his adopted hometown. He was shot at, received regular death threats and awoke one morning to find a cross burning in his yard.

One month after receiving the Pulitzer for editorial writing -- "For his courageous editorials devoted to the processes of law and reason during the integration crisis in Mississippi in 1962" -- Harkey sold the newspaper.

In "The Smell of Burning Crosses," Harkey said of his decision to leave, "I could not remain in Pascagoula, could not bear to exist in the vacuum of ostracism that remained in force after victory, could not function in a silence of total isolation as if I were underwater or in galactic space. I had become an ambulatory and ubiquitous monument to the shame of my fellow townsmen, galling their late-blooming consciences."

It is a shame that such an honorable man left Pascagoula, that his victory against racism was bittersweet.

But everyone who calls Mississippi home should be proud that Ira B. Harkey Jr., a son of the South, courageously stood and did the right thing.