Civil Rights and Wrongs: A Memoir of Race and Politics, 1944-1994

New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. First edition. First Edition [stated]. First pringing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/very good. xx, 441, [1] p. Bibliographic Note. Index. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and political advisor recounts his years on the front lines of the partisan infighting surrounding the civil rights movement. Asmore gives us a powerful reappraisal of the American Dilemma and the Dixiecrat rebellion from the eye of the storm. From Wikipedia: "Harry Scott Ashmore (July 28, 1916, Greenville, South Carolina January 20, 1998, Santa Barbara, California) was an American journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials in 1957 on the school integration conflict in Little Rock, Arkansas. Ashmore was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on July 28, 1916. He attended Greenville High School and Clemson Agricultural College where he graduated with a degree in general science in 1937. He showed an early ability in journalism, having served as editor of the student newspapers at both Greenville High School and Clemson College. After graduation from Clemson, Ashmore worked as a newspaper reporter, first at the Greenville Piedmont, and then at the Greenville News. In 1940, Ashmore married Barbara Edith Laier, a physical education teacher at Furman University. Ashmore was accepted for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1941. When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Ashmore left Harvard to join the United States Army, and served as an operations officer (reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel) with the Ninety-fifth Infantry Division, part of the United States Third Army. After the war, Harry Ashmore became the editorial writer at the Charlotte News (in Charlotte, North Carolina). In 1947 Ashmore was recruited to be the editorial writer at the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock, Arkansas. He soon became the executive editor at the paper, and gained a reputation as a moderate-to-liberal thinker. In 1951 Governor Sid McMath of Arkansas invited Ashmore to address the Southern Governors' Conference when it met at Hot Springs, Arkansas. Ashmore spoke to the governors on civil rights, a contentious subject in southern states, and newspapers around the United States reprinted the speech or excerpts from it. Ashmore wrote the first of his eleven books in 1954. The Negro and the Schools was a report of a Ford Foundation study of segregated education in the South. It was published shortly before the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision ending school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. Chief Justice Earl Warren later told Ashmore that the book was used as a source while drafting the 1955 implementation ruling known as Brown II. Also in 1954, Ashmore came to the aid of Orval Faubus, who was running for Governor of Arkansas. Francis Cherry, the incumbent, had tried to smear Faubus by revealing that he had attended Commonwealth College, a socialist school in Arkansas. Faubus at first tried to deny the charge, but Cherry produced documentary evidence. Unhappy with Cherry's tactics, Ashmore ghostwrote a speech for Faubus to respond to the charges. The speech was successful, and is credited with saving Faubus's political career. In 1955 Ashmore took a leave of absence for a year to work on Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign. In 1957 the Federal courts ordered integration of the schools in the Little Rock School District, starting the Little Rock Crisis. Governor Faubus defied the court order, while Ashmore editorialized for compliance with the law. This ended the friendship between the two. Ashmore became a rallying point for moderates and liberals in Arkansas, and a figure of hatred for segregationists, who labeled him a carpetbagger. In 1958 the Arkansas Gazette won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, For demonstrating the highest qualities of civic leadership, journalistic responsibility and moral courage in the face of great public tension during the school integration crisis of 1957. The newspaper's fearless and completely objective news coverage, plus its reasoned and moderate policy, did much to restore calmness and order to an.