Arkansas Gazette

Born on a Long Island, New York farm, Woodruff was apprenticed to a Sag Harbor printer at the age of 14, and in 1818 headed west to work in Kentucky, Tennessee, and finally the newly created state of Arkansas, printing the first edition of the Arkansas Gazette in 1819.

Woodruff County, Arkansas is named after him.

In 1947 Ashmore was recruited to be the editorial writer at the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock, Arkansas. He soon became the executive editor at the paper, and gained a reputation as a moderate-to-liberal thinker. In 1951 Governor Sid McMath of Arkansas invited Ashmore to address the Southern Governors' Conference when it met at Hot Springs, Arkansas. Ashmore spoke to the governors on civil rights, a contentious subject in southern states, and newspapers around the United States reprinted the speech or excerpts from it.

Ashmore wrote the first of his eleven books in 1954. The Negro and the Schools was a report of a Ford Foundation study of segregated education in the South. It was published shortly before the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision ending school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. Chief Justice Earl Warren later told Ashmore that the book was used as a source while drafting the 1955 implementation ruling known as Brown II.

Also in 1954, Ashmore came to the aid of Orval Faubus, who was running for Governor of Arkansas. Francis Cherry, the incumbent, had tried to smear Faubus by revealing that he had attended Commonwealth College, a socialist school in Arkansas. Faubus at first tried to deny the charge, but Cherry produced documentary evidence. Unhappy with Cherry's tactics, Ashmore ghostwrote a speech for Faubus to respond to the charges. The speech was successful, and is credited with saving Faubus's political career. In 1955 Ashmore took a leave of absence for a year to work on Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign.

In 1957 the Federal courts ordered integration of the schools in the Little Rock School District, starting the Little Rock Crisis. Governor Faubus defied the court order, while Ashmore editorialized for compliance with the law. This ended the friendship between the two. Ashmore became a rallying point for moderates and liberals in Arkansas, and a figure of hatred for segregationists, who labeled him a carpetbagger.

In 1958 the Arkansas Gazette won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, For demonstrating the highest qualities of civic leadership, journalistic responsibility and moral courage in the face of great public tension during the school integration crisis of 1957. The newspaper's fearless and completely objective news coverage, plus its reasoned and moderate policy, did much to restore calmness and order to an overwrought community, reflecting great credit on its editors and its management. In the same year Harry Ashmore won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing, For the forcefulness, dispassionate analysis and clarity of his editorials on the school integration conflict in Little Rock.