Arkansas: A History eBook: Harry S. Ashmore: Kindle Store
(South and West, delta and mountains, black and white, ric...)
South and West, delta and mountains, black and white, rich and poor, Arkansas is a complex state whose history has not been widely understood. In this graceful and good-humored account, author Harry S. Ashmore takes us on an instructive journey over the state's fascinating terrain and offers important new insights into Arkansas's historical character. Arkansas lies west of the Mississippi River and has shared much with that vast western region. Yet it also joined the Confederate States of America and has prided itself on its southern heritage. In the early nineteenth century, Arkansas was little removed from its wilderness beginnings, but the Indians who first made its hills and forests their home soon learned that the white man's frontier meant their demise. Later in the antebellum era, the young state searched for a sense of identity, covering with a patina of gentility the energy and violence that was characteristic of frontier America. The Civil War and Reconstruction brought both suffering and freedom and for the future left a mixed legacy. In the last hundred years, Arkansans struggled with old problems in a new context--race, cotton, sharecropping, and a colonial economy--and they discovered anew the need for hard work and good faith. On rich delta plantations and spare upland farms, in small towns and in cities like Little Rock and Fort Smith, the plain people of this state applied themselves to the pursuit of prosperity and hoped for a richer near future for their children.
Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins
(A personal and engaging account of the life of the renown...)
A personal and engaging account of the life of the renowned and controversial educator, who, as president of the University of Chicago, remolded the undergraduate curriculum and attracted many of the country's leading scholars.
Civil Rights and Wrongs: A Memoir of Race and Politics, 1944-1996, Revised Edition
(Civil Rights and Wrongs is a powerful and important reapp...)
Civil Rights and Wrongs is a powerful and important reappraisal of the American racial dilemma by a uniquely qualified observer and sometime participant who viewed it from the eye of the political storm that it spawned. In this revised edition, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and editor Harry S. Ashmore assesses the ideological impasses that limited Bill Clinton's effort to reinstate activist government in Washington and offers a penetrating analysis of the 1996 election.
Harry Scott Ashmore was an American journalist who became Pulitzer Prize winner for his reports and commentary on the Little Rock, Arkansas, school integration crisis.
Background
Harry Ashmore was born on July 28, 1916 in Greenville, South Carolina, in the northwest part of the state. His father, William Green Ashmore, was a merchant, and the Ashmore traced their lineage in Greenville County to the colonial period of American history. Harry's mother, Elizabeth Scott Ashmore, came from Scotch-Irish roots that began in America with her father's migration from County Antrim, Ireland. Harry recalled in his boyhood a region marked by numerous textile mills that made it emblematic of the "New South" and its industrial character. Nonetheless, the people of the area were highly partisan in their Old South prejudices. Ashmore remembered that his relatives considered white supremacy a "fact of life" and the social dominance of whites over Blacks as the "natural order" of society. Both of Ashmore's grandmothers related with pride their husbands' military service in the armies of the Confederacy.
Education
Ashmore attended Greenville High School. He then graduated from Clemson College in 1937. In 1941 he attended Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow and focused his studies on American history, primarily with Professors Paul H. Buck, Frederick Merk, and Arthur Schlesinger.
In 1937 Ashmore began a career in journalism. His work on the Greenville Piedmont included an assignment to study living conditions of the poor in northern cities, a report that his editor hoped would retaliate against northern journalists' exposes of wretched conditions in the Greenville area textile mills. Ashmore's investigation of New York City drew a notice in TIME magazine and won a measure of vindication for the South, but Ashmore later regretted that the effect was to make the South indifferent to the social evils in its midst.
Ashmore saw extensive military service in World War II, fighting with George S. Patton's Third Army and winning decorations for his achievements. After his return home, he became editor of the editorial page of the Charlotte (N. C. ) News, a job that he accepted in part because his work on the Greenville paper had alienated the reigning Bourbon politicians in the state.
At Charlotte Ashmore succeeded Wilbur J. Cash, a brilliant writer whose deflation of the South's sentimental mythology in his classic The Mind of the South greatly influenced Ashmore. In 1947 he joined the Arkansas Gazette, a venerable Little Rock newspaper of longstanding Democratic party loyalties. He had by this time become a familiar name as part of a small group of Southern liberal journalists that included his good friends Harry Golden and Ralph McGill.
As editor of the editorial page, Ashmore turned the Gazette against the segregationist movement in the Democratic Party led by Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and known as the "Dixiecrat" schism of 1948. Ashmore, always a voice of restraint, had initiated reforms in the Gazette that called for consistent courtesy titles ("Mr. , "Mrs. ," and "Miss") for both African-American and white people. He also headed a team of scholars, organized by the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Advancement of Education, to study race and the public schools in the South. He also worked with the Adlai Stevenson campaigns of 1952 and 1956 as strategist and speechwriter.
The Negro and the Public Schools was published one day before the United States Supreme Court issued its historic desegregation decision in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. That decision raised a defiant South, with campaigns for massive resistance to court-ordered school integration. Ashmore at the Gazette won national attention for his calls for moderation and responsibility among Little Rock area citizens. He repeatedly criticized the defiant position of Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus and answered conservative journalists who spoke for white supremacy and racial segregation, James Jackson Kilpatrick of the Richmond News-Leader in particular. In Little Rock and around the state, white Citizens Councils led a boycott against the Gazette and had the encouragement of Faubus in their efforts. Ashmore received threats of violence to himself and his family, as Little Rock became the center of the nation's attention in the fall of 1958.
In 1960 Ashmore accepted the invitation of Robert Maynard Hutchins to join the Fund for the Republic and to become the chairman of the executive committee of its Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California. The fund had been created by the Ford Foundation to advance the cause of civil rights and civil liberties and had been providing grant support for interracial organizations in the South. Ashmore maintained his interest in race relations in America and took on special assignments for major newspapers. He became president of the think tank of the center in 1968. From 1960 to 1963, Ashmore was also editor in chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Ashmore spoke out against the militant and violent elements that became vocal in the civil rights movement after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and warned against the radical ideologies of the New Left movement of the 1960s. He opposed President Lyndon Johnson's conduct of the war in Vietnam, and in 1967 and 1968, with journalist Bill Baggs of the Miami News, he undertook an unsuccessful peace mission to Hanoi with the cooperation of the State Department. He also maintained his liberal commitments through his work with the American Civil Liberties Union and his service to that organization as its vice-president. Ashmore died at the age of 81 on January 20, 1998 in Santa Barbara, California.