Someone Had to Be Hated

This is a biography of Julian LaRose Harris (1874-1963), southern journalist and publisher. From his father, Joel Chandler Harris, the noted Georgia journalist and folklorist, Harris gleaned the ideals of racial tolerance and sectional reconciliation following the Civil War. After stints on the Atlanta Constitution and the New York Herald's Paris edition, as well as service in World War I, Harris and his wife Julia Collier Harris, herself an accomplished journalist and author, purchased the Columbus (Georgia) Enquirer-Sun in 1920. Here, for the next nine years, they battled the Ku Kux Klan, lynching, anti-evolution laws, prohibition, and corruption in government, and championed civil liberties, rights for women and blacks, the public education system in Georgia, and the underfunded University of Georgia. They were rewarded with the Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service in Journalism in 1926.

Unfortunately, Harris was a careless businessman, and due to indebtedness and the speculation of a trusted treasurer, he lost the Enquirer-Sun in 1929. He spent t