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• 1 2022-09-19T17:07:49-07:00 Legacy of an Unlikely Hero 20 plain 2024-10-29T14:09:48-07:00 More than 70 years ago, Harry Golden pioneered much of what works in this New Media world. A smart, accessible writer, Golden used his version of blog posts -- pithy essays often playing off news, quirky observations, or historical events -- to entertain, make trouble, and effect change. 
  
  Golden was a most unlikely hero who embraced countless contradictions: He tricked people out of money and reneged on promises. Yet the people Golden wronged continued to forgive him. He revered his pious Jewish mother, who spoke only a few words of English, and married a quick-witted Irish Catholic at a time when “mixed marriages” were discussed in whispers, as if such unions were serious illnesses. 
  
  He found fame, was discovered for the ex-felon he was, and found bigger fame. Women were drawn to him, a not-handsome, short, fat, cigar-smoking, bourbon-drinking know-it-all. He loved the ethics of the great journalists and eschewed objectivity. He was a Jew who believed the Black Christian clergy would lead America out of its racist past. He was a blatant self-promoter who loved nothing more than a quiet hero. He was a cool pragmatist and sharp political handicapper with a wide sentimental streak. 
  
  The poverty of the teeming Lower East Side did not defeat Golden; instead it imprinted the ideas and images that became his byword. He wrote often about antisemitism but positioned himself more as a comrade of the oppressed rather than a victim. 
  
  His fan base was broad and deep: Members of Congress and White House insiders, sweatshop workers, anti-Semites, movie stars, literary giants, Communists, segregationists, labor-union kingpins, cab drivers, Black ministers, white priests, journalists, prison inmates, Zionists, typesetters, prostitutes, and poets. His detractors, a much smaller group, were often charmed, even as they deplored his politics or wished he would just go away and be quiet. 
  
  The often-tardy Carolina Israelite, saddled with a name that no branding expert would ever endorse, delighted tens of thousands of readers for a quarter of a century and brought a stream of speaking invitations and assignments from top national magazines and newspapers. He sold millions of hardcover and paperback books around the world; the first five of them made the New York Times bestseller list (two at the same time), and even the later, less-popular books kept royalty checks rolling in for the rest of his life and then some.
  
  At first glance the most unlikely aspect of Golden’s many resurrections was his move to the South, which nurtured him in ways that no other place could have. “The South made me a writer,” Golden liked to say. He firmly believed that the changing of the South and the upheaval of its social order in the 1950s and 1960s made the entire country a better place. He relished the chance to chronicle the national reverberations of the South’s boycotts, lunch-counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides, voter-registration drives, marches, and pickets. 
  
  As the civil rights movement gathered steam, Golden accurately credited the African American churches for much of the progress; he placed the major events of the day in historical context and drew attention to individuals who advanced or stalled the cause. He pushed for better education and health care for Black folks and the poor. He alerted his audience to the very real economic penalties of segregation. 
  
  Golden, like nearly any productive and long-running activist, reached a point when his voice and message were less in demand. Beginning at the end of the 1960s and through the 1970s, progress, militancy and the weight of the war in Vietnam changed the civil rights movement, and those shifts coincided with his own decline, physically and as a writer. Golden wrote about the confusion and pain he felt, along with many others, Black and white, who had devoted years to the movement. 
  
  Golden's ability to communicate the everyday injustices and common needs of African Americans was a bridge that brought many white Americans into sympathy with, or at least some understanding of, the civil rights fight. Golden used his stories to convey a simple message: An individual's everyday acts of bravery or cowardice were of real consequence. 
  
  He never wavered in his conviction that an individual could force change in his or her own lifetime by standing up and speaking out against acts of hatred or ignorance. It wasn’t easy, he said, but it was the only way forward.
  
  --Adapted for this website by Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett from her book, Carolina Israelite: How Harry Golden Made Us Care about Jews, the South, and Civil Rights," published by The University of North Carolina Press, 2015, 2018. Other media: Audible, Braille.