[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 11 (Thursday, February 12, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S779-S781]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                HARRY S. ASHMORE: COURAGEOUS JOURNALIST

   Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, the revered journalist Harry 
Ashmore died last month at the age of 81. He died one day after the day 
set aside to observe Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday and our 
nation's bitter struggle for civil rights. Mr. Ashmore was a leader in 
the struggle to integrate schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. His 
writings helped deliver Americans peacefully from unjust and oppressive 
laws.
  A native of Greenville, South Carolina, Mr. Ashmore was raised to 
revere Southern traditions. His grandfathers fought for the 
Confederacy. As a young man, he was graduated from Clemson Agricultural 
College and then worked as a reporter in Greenville and in Charlotte, 
North Carolina. He served during the Second World War as an infantry 
battalion commander in the European theater and completed his military 
service a Lieutenant Colonel. After the war, he returned to North 
Carolina and to The Charlotte News, where he rose to the position of 
editor. In 1948, he moved to Little Rock and began his eleven years at 
The Arkansas Gazette. There, he would become The Gazette's executive 
editor.
  Harry Ashmore loved the South. He embodied the dignity of a southern 
gentlemen throughout his years. But he was never provincial--either in 
his writing or his thinking. He studied at Harvard University as a 
Nieman fellow; from 1960 to 1963, he was editor-in-chief of the 
Encyclopedia Britannica and from 1969 to 1974, he was president of the 
Center for the Study of Democracy in Santa Barbara, California. In 
addition, he found time to author, co-author and/or edit a dozen books. 
In 1996, he was honored with the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Lifetime 
Achievement Award.
  But it was in newspapers where he would have his greatest influence 
on American life. In 1957, three years after the Supreme Court's 
decision in Brown, Arkansas' Governor Orval E. Faubus called out the 
National Guard because of ``evidence of disorder and threats of 
disorder.'' As ever, Harry Ashmore called it like he saw it. He 
described

[[Page S780]]

the eerie scene as, ``the incredible spectacle of an empty high school 
surrounded by the National Guard, troops called out by Governor Faubus 
to protect life and property against a mob that never materialized.''
  Ashmore knew Governor Faubus wanted to prevent nine students from 
entering Little Rock High School. He warned against delay, realizing 
that resisting the Supreme Court would bring bloodshed. In The Gazette, 
he argued dispassionately for the people of Arkansas to uphold the law. 
He wrote: ``There is no valid reason to assume that delay will resolve 
the impasse which Mr. Faubus has made. We doubt that Mr. Faubus can 
simply wear the Federals out--although he is doing a pretty good job of 
wearing out his own people.'' Harry Ashmore understood before so many 
others the power and the moral force of civil liberty. And yet, he also 
knew the rooted strength of the opposition.
  Above all he was honest, to himself and to his readers. Through his 
calm and reasoned editorials he stood for justice despite daily threats 
on his life and on his family. The Gazette suffered financially for his 
courage. It lost advertising revenue and circulation. Harry Ashmore, 
however, fought for his beliefs, and he helped lead Arkansas and the 
Nation toward equality for all its citizens. In 1958, the Pulitzer 
committee recognized Harry's excellence in editorial writing by 
awarding him the Pulitzer Prize for ``clearness of style, moral 
purpose, sound reasoning, and power to influence public opinion.'' In 
addition to his own Pulitzer, in 1958, The Gazette was awarded the 
Pulitzer for public service.
  Harry Ashmore was on the front lines of the struggle for civil rights 
in this country. His leadership, courage, and wise words must not be 
forgotten.
  I ask that the New York Times' article on Harry Ashmore from January 
22, 1998, be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

                [From the New York Times, Jan. 22, 1998]

    Harry S. Ashmore, 81, Whose Editorials Supported Integration in 
                             Arkansas, Dies

                             (By Eric Pace)

       Harry S. Ashmore, who was executive editor of The Arkansas 
     Gazette when he won a Pulitzer Prize for antisegregation 
     editorials he wrote during the crisis and confrontation over 
     admission of black students to a Little Rock high school in 
     1957, died on Tuesday night in the infirmary of the Valle 
     Verde retirement home in Santa Barbara, Calif., where he and 
     his wife moved several years ago. He was 81.
       He evidently died as the result of a stroke he suffered 
     early this month, his wife, Barbara, said.
       Mr. Ashmore, a native of South Carolina, was a prominent 
     figure in Southern journalism while he was executive editor 
     of The Gazette--published in Little Rock--from 1948 to 1959. 
     He went on to be the editor in chief of the Encyclopedia 
     Britannica from 1960 to 1963 and president of the Center for 
     the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal think tank 
     headquartered in Santa Barbara, from 1969 to 1974.
       On The Gazette's editorial pages in the eventful days of 
     1957, he argued with controlled but eloquent passion that the 
     law of the land--following the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling 
     that all segregation in public schools was ``inherently 
     unequal''--should be honored and that Arkansans should permit 
     the admission of nine black students who wanted to enter the 
     school under an integration plan drawn up by the Little Rock 
     school board. He contended that resistance was useless.
       Confrontation loomed when Arkansas' populist Governor, 
     Orval E. Faubus--formerly a boon companion of Mr. Ashmore's--
     ordered the National Guard to bar the nine from the school. 
     But President Dwight D. Eisenhower gained control of the 
     Guard and ordered Federal troops to be sent to Little Rock to 
     restore order and accompany the nine. And the school became 
     integrated.
       Well before the crisis, a plan was adopted by the Little 
     Rock school board that restricted integration of the city's 
     schools initially to only one of them, Central High School, 
     and scheduled that for 1957.
       Tension rose as the integration date approached. Resistance 
     to the plan, called the Phase Program, swelled among white 
     people. Robert Ewing Brown, leader of a segregationist group 
     in Little Rock, said, ``The Negroes have ample and fine 
     schools here, and there is no need for this problem except to 
     satisfy the aims of a few white and Negro revolutionaries.'' 
     And early in 1956, Mr. Faubus declared he could not cooperate 
     in ``any attempt to force acceptance of change to which the 
     people are so overwhelmingly opposed.''
       In August 1957, someone hurled a stone through the window 
     of an Arkansas N.A.A.C.P. leader, Daisy Bates. An attached 
     note said: ``Stone this time, dynamite next.''
       In September 1957, the night before Little Rock's schools 
     were to open, Governor Faubus proclaimed that he was going to 
     deploy National Guard troops around Central High School 
     because of ``evidence of disorder and threats of disorder.''
       And when Central High opened, more than 200 National Guard 
     troops were on guard. As Mr. Ashmore put it in an editorial, 
     there was ``the incredible spectacle of an empty high school 
     surrounded by the National Guard, troops called out by 
     Governor Faubus to protect life and property against a mob 
     that never materialized.''
       But a 15-year-old black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, who tried 
     to enter the school, recounted later that ``somebody started 
     yelling, `Lynch her! Lynch her!' '' A white woman accompanied 
     her away from the scene.
       After the nine black teenagers were eventually permitted to 
     begin attending the school and, as Mr. Ashmore wrote in one 
     editorial, ``peacefully attending Central High School under 
     Federal court order and Federal military protection,'' 
     Governor Faubus contended that resolving the crisis required 
     that the nine withdraw from the school. He said that all he 
     wanted was delay in integrating the high school until some 
     unspecified future time.
       But Mr. Ashmore said in that editorial: ``There is no valid 
     reason to assume that delay will resolve the impasse which 
     Mr. Faubus has made. We doubt that Mr. Faubus can simply wear 
     the Federals out--although he is doing a pretty good job of 
     wearing out his own people.''
       Yet Mr. Ashmore's approval of integration was limited then, 
     though it became complete later. One of his editorials during 
     the crisis advocated acceptance of the phased desegregation 
     plan worked out by the school board as the handiwork of 
     individuals who felt ``(as we do) they were working to 
     preserve the existing pattern of social segregation'' by 
     coming up with a program which would lead to ``the admission 
     of only a few, carefully screened Negro students to a single 
     white high school.''
       Recalling those days, Henry Woods, a Federal district judge 
     in Little Rock who was a leading Little Rock lawyer in 1957, 
     said: ``Harry was the central figure in the crisis. He was 
     the leader of the opposition to mob rule, and all of us who 
     opposed Faubus rallied around him. The thing I admire most 
     was the great courage Harry displayed. He received daily 
     threats against his life and his family, but he stood in the 
     breech and held the walls against the barbarians.''
       During the crisis, Mr. Ashmore's editorials caused declines 
     in advertising revenue and circulation. An unsigned letter 
     was sent to some business people in Little Rock saying that 
     The Gazette, in taking its antisegregation stand, was 
     ``playing a leading role in destroying time-honored 
     traditions that have made up our Southern way of life.''
       In 1990, Mr. Ashmore, speaking of himself and two other 
     Southern editors of that era, Ralph McGill of The Atlanta 
     Constitution and Hodding Carter of The Delta Democrat-Times 
     of Greenville, Miss., said, ``As refugees of the Old South, 
     we were never comfortable being called liberals or 
     integrationists. Philosophically, we all knew segregation was 
     wrong, but we weren't doctrinaire liberals. I had a 
     temperamental difference with the two of them, though. They 
     were more glandular, more angry about the segregationist 
     abuses, whereas I tended to laugh more at the absurdity of it 
     all.''
       He also did not take himself too seriously. A former 
     colleague at The Gazette recalled not long ago that after 
     attending a daily afternoon meeting about the paper's news 
     coverage, Mr. Ashmore would go off to write editorials and, 
     as he departed, he would often observe wryly, ``I'm off to 
     think great thoughts.''
       When Mr. Ashmore won his Pulitzer Prize, The Gazette was 
     given another Pulitzer award, for public service, for its 
     news reporting about the events of 1957. Mr. Ashmore was 
     cited for ``the forcefulness, dispassionate analysis and 
     clarity'' of his editorials during the crisis, and The 
     Gazette was cited for ``demonstrating the highest qualities 
     of civic leadership, journalistic responsibility and moral 
     courage in the face of mounting public tension.''
       In 1991 the newspaper ceased publication, and its 
     competitor, The Arkansas Democrat, acquired its assets and 
     became The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The paper's editorial 
     page editor, Paul Greenberg, said yesterday that Mr. Ashmore 
     ``was a part of the great epic of The Gazette's courageous 
     stand in coverage of the Central High crisis of 1957.'' Mr. 
     Greenberg, who won a 1969 Pulitzer Prize for editorials on 
     race that he wrote for The Pine Bluff Commercial of Arkansas, 
     said: ``He will always be a much admired figure in Arkansas 
     journalism. No account of Arkansas history will ever be 
     complete without mentioning Harry Ashmore.''
       Mr. Ashmore wrote, was co-author or editor of a dozen 
     books. Over the years, he was also in the active leadership 
     of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Fund for 
     the Republic, the Committee for an Effective Congress, the 
     American Civil Liberties Union and other national 
     organizations.
       He received the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Lifetime 
     Achievement Award in 1996.
       Harry Scott Ashmore was born in Greenville, S.C. He became 
     aware of black people's problems partly when he became a 
     summer laborer on a cotton farm. He went on to graduate in 
     1937 from Clemson Agricultural College in Clemson, S.C., 
     worked for some southern newspapers and studied as a Nieman 
     Fellow in Journalism at Harvard.
       During World War II he served with the Army in France and 
     elsewhere and rose to

[[Page S781]]

     the rank of lieutenant colonel. After the war he rose to 
     become editor of The Charlotte News in North Carolina. He 
     went to The Arkansas Gazette as editor of its editorial page 
     in 1947 and was promoted to executive editor.
       In addition to his wife, the former Barbara Edith Laier, 
     whom he married in 1940, Mr. Ashmore is survived by a 
     daughter, Anne Ashmore of Washington.

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