The Chronicle Archive

In 1941, Pascagoula newspaper the Chronicle-Star, which die-hard Democrat Pizarro Kemp Mayers founded in 1854 as the Reformer, merged with another Jackson County, Mississippi paper for the third time. For a month, the title of this union with the Moss Point Advertiser (1909-1941) was the Chronicle-Star the Moss Point Advertiser, after which it became the Chronicle-Star Combined with the Moss Point Advertiser. Content of this 12–18 page weekly included a typical mid-century mix of news, general interest articles, editorials, advertisements, announcements, personals, and legal notices. Semi-regular columns carried local news for Moss Point, Ocean Springs, Pascagoula, and Van Cleave, plus other county towns. During the first half of the 1940s, the paper focused on updates from World War II battles. News about the local war effort included the construction of military vessels for the United States Navy at the Ingalls Corporation shipyard located where the Pascagoula River empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

After a three-year search for a suitable deep-south newspaper, native New Orleanian, World War II veteran, and former Times-Picayune writer, Ira Brown Harkey, Jr. purchased the Advertiser in 1949. Harkey reverted the title to the Chronicle-Star the Moss Point Advertiser, expanded the number of pages per issue, and in October 1957, he started publishing it twice a week. In 1961, the title was simply the Chronicle, and in 1962, it became a five-day-a-week daily. Devoted to equal civil rights for all citizens, Harkey revised the paper's policy in how it reported stories such as dropping the general use of race-related identifiers and eliminating segregation of African American news into a separate column. Harkey's harsh denouncement of the state government's belligerent response to the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, which declared school segregation illegal, prompted the local Ku Klux Klan to burn a six-foot cross in his front yard. Another hostile reaction occurred in the Fall of 1962 as a result of his editorials criticizing Governor Ross Barnett's defiance against the admission of the first African American student, James Meredith, to a state college, the University of Mississippi; local advertisers boycotted the newspaper and shots were fired at the Chronicle office. Despite circulation surpassing pre-boycott numbers and winning a Pulitzer Prize for those editorials, Harkey could no longer tolerate the local ostracism. He left the Chronicle in 1963 to pursue a master's degree in journalism and a doctorate in political science followed by a career as professor and guest lecturer at various colleges country-wide.

In June 1966, the Chronicle was purchased by William Jefferson Hearin, the owner of the competing Mississippi Press, also known as the Mississippi Press Register. The Mississippi version, a subsidiary of the Mobile Press Register (1929-current), contained the names of both merged papers for a little over two months before "Chronicle" was dropped from the title. The last print issue of the Mississippi Press was published in February 2023.