Ira B. Harkey Jr. (January 15, 1918 – October 8, 2006) was an American writer, professor of journalism, and editor and publisher of the Pascagoula Chronicle-Star in Mississippi from 1951 to 1963.
He graduated from Tulane University, where he was a brother with the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (Tau Lambda chapter), with an undergraduate degree in journalism in 1941 and then served aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hancock (CV-19) in the Pacific theater during World War II.
He later wrote of the existence of “a flat rule that Negroes were not to appear in photographs” at the Times-Picayune; it was a standard practice at the newspaper for African Americans to be airbrushed out of crowd scene images.
At the time, it was newspaper style convention to refer to white men and women with the "Mr." or "Mrs." honorific but this courtesy was never extended to blacks.
In December 1962, Harkey published a series of five articles titled "The Oxford Disaster...Price of Defiance" by Pascagoula lawyer and state legislator Karl Wiesenburg which showed Barnett had no legal basis for his actions.