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.
Ira Brown Harkeys Black Sugar is an unusual novel set in history, based on the surviving facts of the life of one of the Souths most dynamic businessmen in the 19th and 20th centuries, General Jean (John) Baptiste Levert. General Leverts story is told through the actual people who helped make it happen his parents, children and grandchildren, descendants of his brothers and life-long friends, house servants, business associates and their descendants, detractors and admirers alike. Drawing on previously unknown material including the Generals correspondence and business records and letters and scrapbooks in possession of his descendants, along with stories passed down by generations of the Levert family Harkey serves up a gumbo with the right ingredients for a delicious character study of a complicated man from birth to death his youth, schooling, Civil War experiences, Reconstruction troubles, business career, and relationships with his large family, business partners, servants, and women: A man who rose from a plantation in Louisiana sugarcane country to a pinnacle of success and fortune in post-Civil War New Orleans, to found an empire that thrives today; whose bravura and identity as a patriarch, southern gentleman, risk-taker, robber baron, and mythic lover, were surpassed only by his business genius, by his power in growing sugar, marketing, land development, and plantation ownership, each an integral component of New Orleans and Louisiana economy and history. With keen insight and intimacy, Harkey captures the passions and obsessions that consumed General Levert, the fierce devotions and ego that fired his imagination and propelled him to succeed at all costs: He set out after the Civil War to build his fortune, letting nothing stand in his way, until an unexpected, unlikely event late in his life. Harkey gives us detailed drama of the Generals childhood on a sugar plantation; of his often ruthless, high-pressure business practice and conduct; of his love for his wife; of his prominence in New Orleans civic, financial and social life; and of the almost vengeful determination with which he cast himself as a money-hungry figure that gilded through elegant French Quarter restaurants, company board rooms, and plantation house parlors in search of the perfect business deal. Here also is a look at the sugar industry and the business of growing and manufacturing sugar in Louisiana from its earliest days beginning before the Civil War.
Traces the life and career of the influential surgeon who founded the South's largest independent medical center, and looks at his work as a researcher
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.
From his days as one of Alaska's earliest bush pilots through the years spent developing Wien Air Alaska with his brothers, Noel Wien built up a long list of firsts: he was first to fly commercially from Fairbanks to Nome and from Fairbanks to Seattle, first to fly from Anchorage to Fairbanks, first to fly and land beyond the Arctic Circle, and first to make a round-trip flight between Alaska and Asia. In this dramatic account of a flying hero, Pulitzer Prize winning author Ira Harkey describes Wien's experiences, and he establishes Wien's place in Alaska history. In the process, Harkey makes a valuable contribution towards an understanding of the Alaska of the recent past and the people who lived there.
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