SMITH, Hazel Brannon

(b. 4 February 1914 in Alabama City, Alabama; d. 14 May 1994 in Cleveland, Tennessee), activist, newspaper publisher, editor, and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer in the South who increasingly opposed segregation through her four weekly southern newspapers.

Born Hazel Freeman Brannon, Smith was the eldest child of a middle-class Baptist couple, Dock Boad and Georgia Parthenia Brannon. Her father was a wire inspector for the steel industry who also owned his own small wiring company, Brannon Electric. Raised in Alabama, Smith was proud of her Confederate ancestry and, at a young age, was captivated by the mystique of the antebellum South. She even dreamed one day of being mistress of a Gone with the Wind–style mansion. Although the Brannons instilled in their children a respect for other races and religions, they accepted the typical southern way of life before the civil rights era as the norm: blacks were "different" and so were to be treated differently.

Considered by her mother to be too young to head off to university after her high school graduation at age sixteen, Smith took a job as an ad salesperson for the Etowah Observer, in Etowah County, Alabama. During her two years at the Observer, she became determined to one day own her own newspaper. She enrolled as a journalism student at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, where she worked on the Crimson–White. After graduating with a major in journalism in 1935, Smith sought a newspaper for sale and found the Durant News in Durant, a small town in Holmes County, Mississippi. The newspaper industry was struggling as a result of the Great Depression, but Smith borrowed $3,000 and became a committed publisher and editor at age twenty-two.

Smith's treatment of blacks in the paper fell in line with that of her peers in the South: news was separated into "white" and "colored" sections, though she avoided the use of derisive terms such as "darkies, "pickaninny," and "mammy." The paper contained mostly parochial items: announcements, city council meetings, county news, and obituaries. Smith was well liked among white society members and was elected secretary of the Holmes County Democratic Executive Committee. In time, however, in her own column, "Through Hazel Eyes," she prompted a minor furor by commending the work of a group supporting a venereal disease clinic. Smith raised eyebrows again when she suggested that the historically Democratic South would do well to establish a strong Republican Party, which she believed would put the South on a par politically with the other states of the Union. Her editorials exposing local gambling and bootlegging earned her the top award from the National Federation of Press Women. Smith was very clear about her future: acquisition of more newspaper properties would come before marriage and family. She would buy three more Mississippi papers: the Lexington Advertiser, Banner Country Outlook, and Northside Reporter in Jackson. She married Walter Smith in 1950.

The shift in Smith's civil rights awareness began in 1946, when she was held in contempt of court after interviewing the widow of a black man who had been whipped to death. Her life changed permanently in 1954 when she witnessed a Holmes County sheriff shooting a fleeing black man in the thigh. She wrote an editorial calling for the sheriff's resignation, and the sheriff won a $10,000 libel suit against her, which later was overturned by the state supreme court. The sheriff organized white citizens against Smith, and she came out against the White Citizens' Council as a racist and dictatorial group. The council supported the founding of a rival weekly, the Lexington Herald, and led an advertising boycott against her that would linger for the next three decades. Pressure from the council also cost Smith's husband his job as a hospital administrator.

Although Smith continued to speak out against unfair treatment of blacks, she was not an integrationist. In fact, when the Herald reported that an honor given Smith by the University of Southern Mississippi was awarded for her support of integration, she considered the charge a smear. She simply believed that blacks and whites should be allowed to live in peace, but separately. Still, a cross was burned in her front yard, and she was accused of involvement with black leaders, including Medgar Evers, the secretary of Mississippi's National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was portrayed as a shrewd, scheming woman who was trying to undermine Holmes County policies and tradition.

Smith was unsympathetic in 1961 after the arrest of the freedom riders, civil rights protestors who rode into Jackson. She preferred, she wrote, that they not ride to the South, yet she defended their right to do so as protected by federal law. She was unenthusiastic in 1962 when the student James Meredith attempted to integrate the University of Mississippi at Oxford, but she criticized Mississippi's governor for the bloodshed that ensued. Smith published an account critical of the police after the unprovoked killing of a black man in downtown Lexington. Again the police sued her for libel, and even her friends warned her against starting a riot by publicizing the matter. She brought the South to task for the murder of President John F. Kennedy, blaming southerners' election of bigots and extremists to leadership positions for fostering the atmosphere in which Kennedy was killed. "First Lincoln, Now Kennedy," the headline on her editorial read, "The South Kills Another President." Her editorial offices were firebombed after she appeared on a biracial panel in Washington, D.C., to discuss the case of three missing civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi. In addition to a slew of civil rights, public service, and journalism awards, Smith won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for her "steadfast adherence to her editorial duty in the face of great pressure and opposition."

By 1965, Smith and her papers were suffering for the cause. As racial tension and violence increased, she was $100,000 in debt. She mortgaged the plantation-style home of her childhood dreams and received donations from journalistic peers across the United States. She also had taken a radical turn from her 1954 statement that interracial marriage was a sin against God. In an interview with the Boston Globe, she said she supported the individual right to inter-marry, despite the fact that it violated Mississippi law. In the spirit of fair play, she allowed her facilities to be used to print black publications.

During the 1970s, Smith struggled to keep her newspapers alive as she faced the onset of Alzheimer's disease. Her husband died in 1982, and she printed the last edition of the Lexington Advertiser in 1985. She lost her home and died penniless in a nursing home in 1994 following a lengthy illness. A Passion for Justice: The Hazel Brannon Smith Story, a made-for-television movie starring Jane Seymour, was produced in 1994. Throughout the turbulent 1960s, Smith kept journalistic freedom clearly in view, once saying, "When I am no longer able to print the truth un-afraid, you are no longer able to speak the truth without fear."

Further readings on Smith include a biography by John Whalen, Maverick Among the Magnolias (2000), and David R. Davies, "Mississippi Journalists, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Closed Society, 1960–1964," a paper Davis presented at the 1994 convention of the American Journalism Historians Association. Obituaries are in the New York Times and the Washington Post (both 16 May 1994) and the Masthead (fall 1994).

Brenna Sanchez