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Sun Herald - Biloxi, MS - October 11, 2006
EDITORIAL

On the first Sunday of this month, the University of Mississippi dedicated a civil rights monument featuring a bronze statue of James Meredith, the first black student admitted to Ole Miss.

On the second Sunday of this month, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ira B. Harkey Jr. died.

Life, it seems, has its own sense of timing.

Harkey was just 15 years older than Meredith when he wrote editorials urging Mississippians to permit Meredith to enroll peacefully at Ole Miss.

Harkey's editorial voice was not heeded in 1962, and in the melee that marred Meredith's admission, two persons lost their lives.

But Harkey's editorial voice was heard and honored by those awarding the Pulitzer Prizes the next year. In 1963, Harkey received a Pulitzer for his work... and his courage.

At the time, Harkey had been editor of The Chronicle Star, now The Mississippi Press, in Pascagoula for 14 years.

Jerry St. Pé of Pascagoula, a reporter for The Chronicle Star before making his mark in the shipping industry, said of Harkey, "His work was the most significant and important of the time."

And it had been for some time.

As George Thatcher of Gulfport, himself in the newspaper business on the Coast before making his mark in the banking industry, recalls, Harkey addressed blacks in print as Mr., Mrs. or Miss early in his tenure as editor. "It may sound like a very small thing these days, but that was a very great step for a newspaper back then," says Thatcher.

Thatcher thinks Harkey may have been the first white editor in Mississippi to be so respectful of blacks in print. We don't doubt that.

Nor do we doubt that, as Thatcher noted, only Mississippians of a certain age truly appreciate the significance of that act of courtesy and respect.

We salute Harkey's legacy.

And we regret that such a salute was not rendered all those years ago. Not that that lack of appreciation shocked Harkey. As he told us not long ago, "I wasn't surprised that the community or Mississippi newspapers didn't rejoice with me when I won the Pulitzer." Now we can rejoice only in remembrance.