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Harold Eugene Martin was a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper editor and publisher who was also a director of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. During his career, Martin lived in the U.S. states of Alabama, New York, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee and Texas.
Martin won the Pulitzer in 1970 as the editor of the morning Montgomery Advertiser and the afternoon Alabama Journal. The Pulitzer Prize for Local Investigative Specialized Reporting recognized a series of articles that exposed the use by pharmaceutical companies of state prisoners as subjects in drug experimentation and as sources of blood plasma. Martin hired two detectives to help him gather the information, but he also had an inside source within the prison system. The revelations brought about a shakeup of the state corrections department under then rival Governors Albert Brewer and George C. Wallace, Jr.
At the Montgomery Advertiser, Martin also opposed Governor Wallace's segregationist policies. An irate Wallace cancelled state advertising in the newspaper by the public-owned liquor business, an action which may have cost the company as much as $500,000. "Harold Martin never flinched," recalled Ray Jenkins, the Advertiser's former executive editor.
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