The Smell of Burning Crosses: An Autobiography of a Mississippi Newspaperman

By Ira Harkey and William Hustwit

Journalist Ira Harkey (1918–2006) risked it all when he advocated for James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi as the first African American student in 1962.

Preceded by a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court and violent, deadly rioting, Meredith’s admission constituted a pivotal moment in civil rights history. At the time, Harkey was editor of the Chronicle in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where he published pieces in support of Meredith and the integration of Ole Miss. In 1963, Harkey won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing after firmly articulating his advocacy of change.

Originally published in 1967, this book is Harkey’s memoir of the crisis and what it was like to be a white integrationist editor in fiercely segregationist Mississippi. He recounts conversations with University of Mississippi officials and the Ku Klux Klan’s attempts to intimidate him and muzzle his work. The memoir’s title refers to a burning cross set on the lawn of his home, which occurred in addition to the shot fired at his office.

Reprinted for the fifth time, this book features a new introduction by historian William Hustwit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Oct 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781496824868

Ira Harkey

Ira Harkey was born in New Orleans in 1918. He served as editor of the Pascagoula Chronicle during the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962, and his opinion and editorial writing won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. Harkey wrote three other books and lectured at several universities before his death in 2006.

Book preview

Chapter One

THE END AND THE BEGINNING

PASCAGOULA—THE LOVELY INDIAN NAME OF A SMALL INDUSTRIAL CITY on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast one hundred sandy miles east of New Orleans and forty marshy ones west of Mobile—was sweet on the tongue of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who spent a lifetime savoring Indian words. In his poem The Building of the Ship, Longfellow described his shipyard as a tangle of machinery and raw material including:

Timber of chestnut, and elm and oak,

And scattered here and there, with these,

The knarred and crooked cedar knees;

Brought from regions far away,

From Pascagoula’s sunny bay.

And the banks of the roaring Roanoke!

One hundred years later the lovely name Pascagoula stung bitter on the tongues of most Americans who read it as a dateline in their newspapers. For four months in 1962–1963 Pascagoula citizen leaders abdicated their duty and allowed their community to be ruled by fear imposed by an organized gang of white supremacists. This was an aftermath of the entrance of Negro Mississippian James Meredith onto the campus of his state university. The Pascagoula gang was cloaked in a quasi-legality lent it by the office occupied by its leader, the Jackson County sheriff, a bloated hard-drinking semiliterate ruffian. The nucleus of the gang was a group of men who had gained local fame by taking part in the riots at Oxford after Meredith’s admittance September 30. These, numbering about thirty, had been called out over the Pascagoula radio station to be led by their sheriff in cars and a chattered bus to the University of Mississippi campus, arriving in time to enjoy the bone cracking and property destruction.

They returned to Pascagoula as heroes of the Southern cause, these hoodlums who would have been barred from entering the back door of Robert E. Lee’s stables. They boasted in Pascagoula saloons that none had outdone them in brick-throwing and vehicle-burning. Encouraged by the widespread approval that surrounded them—the first time most of them had ever been on the plus side in the public esteem—they decided to make their association permanent. They organized under a charter drawn for them by a local lawyer and duly submitted to the Secretary of State. Calling themselves the Jackson County Citizens Emergency Unit, they began to meet several times weekly in the County Courthouse, of which the sheriff was custodian. Beneath a bas relief of outraged Justice they outlined their program of civic improvement: to eradicate local niggerlovers, to boycott all businesses that employed or sold goods to Negroes, to attend to persons placed on a list by an action committee, to train a strong-arm squad at weekly maneuvers so we won’t be embarrassed like the people of Oxford was, and in the main and particular to put out of business the Pascagoula daily newspaper, the Chronicle, identified by them as the leading niggerlover in the State.

I know about these things and what the six-hundred-member Jackson County Citizens Emergency Unit intended to do in Pascagoula because I was editor and publisher of the Chronicle, the despised niggerlover who ridicules our great Governor Barnett, calls niggers ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.,’ writes news stories so you can’t tell who’s a nigger and who ain’t. For four months—from October 1962, to February 1963—my newspaper was the target for a campaign of vilification, boycott, threats, and actual violence. A rifle slug was fired through my front door and a shotgun shell blasted out the windows in my office. Hate spewed into the Chronicle telephones and mail box, grown men grabbed and shook and cursed our carrier boys on the street, advertisers were threatened and dropped their space in the Chronicle, the high sheriff himself chased a Negro carrier boy off his route and warned him not to return—part of the Negro boy’s route traversed a white area—and so thoroughly did the poison of hate permeate upward from the gutter that a lady library worker, supposedly a dispenser of culture and learning, could bring herself to write to me and pray that "instead of a bullet through your door I hope you get a bullet through your stupid