Harry Golden

Harry Lewis Golden (May 6, 1902 – October 2, 1981) was a Jewish-American writer and newspaper publisher.

Life and career

Golden was born Herschel Goldhirsch in the shtetl Mikulintsy, Ukraine, then part of Austria-Hungary. His mother was Romanian and his father Austrian.

In 1904 his father, Leib Goldhirsch, emigrated to Winnipeg, Manitoba, only to move the family to New York City the next year. For a time he worked as a newspaper seller on the Lower East Side, and could remember shouting out headlines about the Leo Frank case, which he later wrote a book about. He became a stockbroker but lost his job in the 1929 crash. Convicted of mail fraud, Golden served five years in a Federal prison at Atlanta, Georgia. In 1941, he moved to Charlotte, where, as a reporter for the Charlotte Labor Journal and The Charlotte Observer, he wrote about and spoke out against racial segregation and the Jim Crow laws of the time.

From 1942 to 1968, Golden published The Carolina Israelite as a forum, not just for his political views (including his satirical "The Vertical Negro Plan", which involved removing the chairs from any to-be-integrated building, since Southern whites didn't mind standing with blacks, only sitting with them), but also observations and reminiscences of his boyhood in New York's Lower East Side. He traveled widely: in 1960 to speak to Jews in West Germany and again to cover the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel for Life. He is referenced in the lyrics to Phil Ochs' song, "Love Me, I'm a Liberal": "You know, I've memorized Lerner and Golden." In 1974, he, William Calley of the My Lai Massacre, and other convicted criminals received a presidential pardon from Richard Nixon.