If Ira B. Harkey, Jr., publisher and editor of the Pascagoula Chronicle-Star on the Mississippi Gulf Coast had owned the Jackson Daily News in the state capital during the 1960s, things might have been different. But, of course, he did not. Harkey won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1963 for his hard-hitting, aggressive pro-integration stance in a state whose social and political systems were rooted in white supremacy. As a result, his newspaper lost advertisers and he received many threats. Six months after he won the Pulitzer, he sold the paper and moved away from Mississippi, after becoming a self-described pariah in his community. NPR's All Things Considered noted his passing in October 2006 and interviewed his son, Ira B. Harkey, III, about those tumultuous days in Mississippi. Click on the following link to listen to that interview.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6256069&ft=1&f=1021
NPR Interview with Ira B. Harkey, III.
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