“Truth is the most powerful weapon in the world. The responsibility and privilege of the journalist is to seek and find the truth – and tell the world about it – even when the world does not want to hear the truth.” Hazel Brannon Smith shared these words with her friends and colleagues of the National Federation of Press Women after being awarded its “Woman of Achievement” gold medallion at their national convention in 1971. Hazel had been unanimously selected by the judges who cited her newspaper career “as a living example of what all journalists strive for: an abiding courage and strength of character in the face of difficulty and opposition.” As the owner and editor of four rural Mississippi newspapers, her editorials and her front-page column “Through Hazel’s Eyes” served as her signature on unpopular causes, political corruption, and social injustice insisting on equal rights for all citizens.
Hazel began her career at the age of sixteen working on the small weekly newspaper in her hometown of Gadsden, Alabama. Having saved enough money to attend the University of Alabama, she went on to graduate in three years earning a Bachelor of Arts Degree with a major in journalism and a minor in political science in August of 1935.
Hazel was a smart, fashionable sorority beauty queen and an immensely talented young woman. She would learn from a college classmate of a newspaper, the Durant News that was up for sale in Durant, Holmes County, Mississippi.
Positioned in the center of the state, Holmes County was an agricultural area known as a top cotton producer. Agrarian innovations during the decade began to effect drastic changes to the county’s economy and population. In spite of the fact, Hazel had never been to Mississippi before, and her family thought it too far from home, she secured a loan of $3,000 for the down payment and purchased the paper in 1936. It may never have occurred to her at the age of 22, by becoming the owner and publisher of this small mortgaged newspaper shop she referred to as “held together with baling wire” that Hazel was on her way to becoming a maverick in Mississippi, a state for which she would develop much love. For the next eighteen years, her business and reputation prospered.
During those years, Hazel became a well-known and highly active weekly newspaperwoman in the United States. In 1947, she became a founding member of the Mississippi Press Women where she served first as Vice President, and then President along with helping the National Editorial Association as the state chairwoman. The Mississippi Teachers Association honored her in 1948 for contributions to the “betterment of race relations.” In 1952 she was named a Theta Sigma Phi National Headliner. The Mississippi Press Association cited her distinguished service to freedom of the press after a long hard won libel suit in 1955. In 1956, she was awarded the Herrick Editorial Award by the National Newspaper Association, and Southern Illinois University named her the “most courageous weekly editor in America” when they presented Hazel with the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Courage in Journalism Award in 1960. Hazel won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing in 1964 for her racial stance and in November 1965, Look Magazine referred to her as “the most vivid Deep South lady since Scarlett O’Hara of Gone with the Wind.” Her life would be the subject of a made for television movie, “A Passion for Justice: The Hazel Brannon Smith Story,” which premiered on April 17, 1994, on ABC-TV.
But the real story of Hazel Brannon Smith was not about her number of honors and awards.
What happens to Hazel through her often fiery 50-year career transformed her from Southern Conservatism to an outspoken advocate for civil rights.
She was the small-town newspaperwoman who knew how to tell the truth. She was not afraid to use that truth to fight those unbelievable injustices in an era when many of the more significant state papers defended segregation.
In the worst of times, Hazel refused to move or allow her voice silenced in spite of extremist hate groups in Mississippi, including those in Holmes County where she owned, edited and published not only the Durant News but also the Lexington Advertiser.
She grew the Lexington Advertiser into the major newspaper in Holmes County, where for four decades from 1943 to 1983 she remained a spirited woman of conscience.
Through her newspapers, she defended Federal law and equal justice. She spoke up in protest of liquor racketeers, gamblers, racial violence, bombings, burning of churches and the intimidation of decent members in her community. She wrote exposing political misconduct of authorities in Holmes County often condemning the scope of unbearable injustices she saw inflicted upon Black citizens in the county.
The tipping point for Hazel arrived in 1954. Two shootings in Holmes County turned her life around. In January after a gun battle between white law enforcement officers and Eddie Noel, an armed young 28-year old black man, occurred, a posse of 100 white men was called to apprehend him. Hazel used her front page to write the truth about the incident. That July, a 27-year old black farmer by the name of Henry Randle was accused by the sheriff of “whooping.” As Randle denied the charge, a blackjack bashed the side of his head, and he was ordered to “Get goin’.” Turning to run, Randle was shot in the back of the left thigh with a pistol. He had not violated any law. No arrest was made. Again, Hazel spoke out on the front page of her paper calling for the truth.
Hazel felt Holmes County had become a “different place” after the events. She wrote, “I felt that it was my responsibility as editor and publisher of the only two newspapers in Holmes County (at the time) to do everything possible to help improve the relations between races in all of our communities.”
The Eddie Noel case had made it evident to Hazel that citizens, “law-abiding and of good will” no matter their race, “must learn to live in the same community and help each other as we would any neighbor.”
In the editorial Hazel wrote following the Randle incident, she admonished the sheriff for violating “every concept of justice, decency, and right in his treatment of some people in Holmes County,” and called on him to resign. The editorial would earn her top editorial writing honors from the National Federation of Press Women and a $75,000 libel suit by the sheriff.
In the spring of that same year, the unanimous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court declared “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Hazel was keenly aware outlawing racial segregation in public schools only deepened the heightened fear and explosive tension in Holmes County.
Hazel became an unwavering voice for decency in the towns and communities where she fought to change society for the better. “It serves no good purpose to curse the U.S. Supreme Court,” she wrote in her Page One column following the court’s decision, “or any other court which exists to protect your individual rights and freedom. Without the rule of law and our courts, we have no rights as an individual or family to work, to live in peace with our neighbors and friends to be businessman or women or train for and practice a profession.”
She persisted to the principles of the First Amendment in the face of her own physical danger.
Beginning in 1954, the Mississippi White Citizens Councils would start an economic crusade against Hazel that lasted for more than ten years. Her husband (Walter Dyer Smith) would lose his position as Holmes County Hospital administrator in 1956 because Hazel “had been become too controversial a figure.” An 8-foot cross would be torched and burn on the front lawn of her home in 1960; during ‘Freedom Summer’ of 1964 an explosion would rip through the building housing the third newspaper in her chain, the Northside Reporter. In 1966 the FBI would warn her husband that a segregationist group had Hazel on its list and her life was in danger. The press room of the Advertiser would be set aflame and destroyed, and the newspaper plant and offices severely damaged by arson in 1967.
And yet Hazel persevered.
The advertisers boycott against her weekly newspapers and the frivolous legal suits filed against her drained and hampered her financial resources for the rest of her career. She encountered social ostracism from public officials, and civic and business leaders, even from some she had considered friends.
And Hazel continued to write the truth.
In a 1963 editorial, Hazel wrote an impassioned plea denouncing the White Citizens Council and its effect on freedom of the press in observance of National Newspaper Week. It was part of the collection of editorials Hazel submitted to the Pulitzer Prize advisory board for consideration for the 1964 award. The complete article and the entire collection can be read at http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/hazel-brannon-smith.
“If the white Citizens’ Councils have their way, the free press in Mississippi will be destroyed—and with it the liberty and individual freedom of all Mississippians—because a free press is the first and last defense of any free people.
The right to dissent from the Councils has already been lost by the average citizen of the state through wholesale intimidation and fear. Few people today dare speak their convictions publicly— especially if they are in conflict with Council ideas and objectives. Look around you and see if this is not true. Examine your own heart.
The hierarchy of rulers in this totalitarian-like organization permit no deviation from its official line—and those who believe in and stand for the traditional American concepts of human liberty, dignity, and decency, do so at their own peril…
An unrestricted flow of free information is absolutely necessary if the free people of Mississippi are to survive.”
Hazel took tremendous risks to perform what she believed was her professional duties providing her readers the vital information for their state’s survival.
The story of Hazel Brannon Smith is more than the sum of historical pages and references. In her memory, let us value and understand the power of a woman of conscience and courage.
She paid dearly for it.
To continue the story about Hazel Brannon Smith:
Maverick Among The Magnolias The Hazel Brannon Smith Story, John A. Whalen
Alicia Patterson Foundation http://aliciapatterson.org/
Newspapers.com https://www.newspapers.com