Over twenty years ago now, your Hum Hub correspondent was on a committee that brought Pulitzer-Prize-winning Clemson alum Harry Ashmore back to speak at Clemson. Ashmore’s newspaper, The Arkansas Gazette won a Pulitzer for Public Service and Ashmore himself had won a Pulitzer for Editorial Writing, both in 1958, for his newspaper’s stance and his editorials against the segregationist activities in Little Rock, Arkansas, four years after Brown v. Board of Education.
I remember having lunch with him and Clemson History colleague Stephanie Barczewski at Clemson House. Back then, there was no wikipedia; in fact, we still accessed Clemson’s computers using Unix, telnet, and pine. Little did I know, then, that I would later be able to see a photo of Ashmore with Carl Sagan, or learn of Ashmore’s reporting trips to Vietnam. Nor did I know that Ashmore, a native Greenvillian, was living in Santa Barbara. He was clearly someone able to traverse many kinds of ostensible differences. A 2007 book review of a history of civil rights journalism told prospective readers of the book to “pay particular attention to Harry Ashmore, the liberal Arkansas editor who gained national attention during the 1957 Little Rock crisis.”
Twenty years after I helped bring him here, ten years after the New York Times told readers to pay attention to his role in the history of the American press, and nearly sixty years after his double Pulitzer, that same Harry Ashmore will be the subject of a lecture at Clemson, by a professor visiting from Emory University, a small private university a couple hours south from here.
To get ready for the upcoming talk, I’ve recently checked out from the Clemson University library a DVD of Ashmore’s 1996 presentation. A few minutes in, Ashmore says “this place is really I think uniquely situated to give somebody the kind of historic–anybody who thinks about it in the proper terms–the kind of historical memory and perspective that is required to understand the presidential election that is now taking place,” which I think has been true for lots of elections, before and since.
It seems fitting that Ashmore will be the subject of a talk less than a week after another presidential inauguration, as part of a series on Race and the University, on the very campus where he says he learned the historical lessons that served him so well in his successful journalistic career.
We here at the Hum Hub think that the lessons of history are always around us, always worth learning from, and always available for continued application to the present. What I can’t believe is that I have enough history here myself to have met someone then, here, who will be the subject of a lecture here, now. As I watched the DVD of Ashmore’s lecture, I realized how much I had learned from his appearance early in my time at Clemson. Before his remarks, he credited celebrated Clemson English professor John Lane (then deceased, but whose wife was in the audience), for revealing this history and these patterns to him as a student in the 1930s, 60 years before that talk–and, it must be said, 20 years before this upcoming talk.
