NEWSPAPER EDITOR

New Breed.

The winner of the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, Harry Ashmore, the editor of the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock, was part of the new breed of southern newspaper editors in the 1950s that eschewed the narrow racial conservatism of previous eras in favor of religious and racial tolerance. Ashmore, Jonathan Daniels of the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer, George Bingham of the Louisville Courier-Journal and Louisville Times, and Gene Patterson and Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution were at the forefront of editors who took controversial stands as spokesmen for an enlightened South.

Background.

Born in Greenville, South Carolina, and a 1937 graduate of Clemson College, Ashmore began his journalistic career that same year with the Greenville Piedmont. Following his service in the U.S. Army...