“A” is for Ashmore, Harry Scott (1916-1998)

“A” is for Ashmore, Harry Scott (1916-1998). Author, editor, Pulitzer Prize winner. A native of Greenville, Ashmore graduated from Clemson. He began his journalistic career with the Greenville Piedmont and Greenville News. His editorials at the Charlotte (NC) News led to a job at the Arkansas Gazette in 1947. Ashmore won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorials opposing Arkansas Governor Orville Faubus’s attempt to stop the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. Ashmore’s 1954 book, The Negro and the Schools, summarized a massive Ford Foundation research project on the disparate biracial education system in the American South. After leaving the Gazette in 1959, he served as editor in chief of Encyclopedia Britannica. In the ten books he wrote, Harry Scott Ashmore discussed the changing attitudes in the South—including his own.