Hazel Brannon Smith

Described as a flamboyant, headstrong, and sassy amalgam of Auntie Mame, Bella Abzug, and Scarlett O’Hara, Hazel Brannon Smith served for four decades as the editor and publisher of Holmes County’s Durant News and Lexington Advertiser. In 1964 she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, with the prize committee citing her “steadfast adherence to her editorial duties in the face of great pressure and opposition.” Her front page “Through Hazel Eyes” columns and editorials staunchly opposed the Citizens’ Council, Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, and racial violence during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s.

Born on 5 February 1914 near Gadsden, Alabama, Hazel Brannon attended public schools and began her newspaper career with the Etowah Observer while still attending Gadsden High School. After graduation, she enrolled at the University of Alabama, serving as an editor of the student newspaper before earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1935. The following year, she obtained a three-thousand-dollar loan and purchased the Durant News. After paying off the loan in four years, she acquired the Lexington Advertiser in 1943. She launched an editorial campaign against bootlegging and gambling in 1945, calling for the sheriff’s resignation for failing to enforce the law. In October 1946 she was cited for contempt of court and fined for violating a circuit judge’s gag order when she interviewed a trial witness; the Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the contempt conviction in 1947.

Despite skirmishes with local officials, her newspapers prospered, and she participated in the social life of Holmes County, sporting the stylish clothes and hats of a free-spirited southern belle and driving white Cadillac convertibles. She became engaged to a ship purser, Walter Dyer Smith, during a sea cruise in 1949, and they married in Lexington on 21 March 1950. Thereafter, her newspapers listed her as “Hazel Brannon Smith (Mrs. Walter D.)—Editor and Publisher.”

In May 1954 Smith reacted to the US Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional with a front-page column commenting that the court “may be morally right” even though “we know that it is to the best interest of both races that segregation be maintained in theory and in fact.” In July 1954 Smith reported that Holmes County sheriff Richard F. Byrd had shot a twenty-seven-year-old black man, concluding the story, “No charges have yet been filed against Sheriff Byrd in the shooting.” A week later, a signed editorial, “The Law Should Be for All,” asserted that the sheriff had “violated every concept of justice, decency and right” and called for his resignation. Byrd sued Smith for libel, and in October 1954 the Holmes County Circuit Court awarded the sheriff a ten-thousand-dollar judgment. The Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the libel conviction in November 1955. Time magazine’s 21 November 1955 edition featured the “good-looking, dark-haired” editor and the libel case in its press section.

Smith’s law-and-order editorials on race prompted reprisals. In January 1956 her husband was fired from his position as administrator of the county hospital. Anonymous circulars appeared in Holmes County declaring her an integrationist after her photograph and comments regarding her stance for “equal justice for all, regardless of race” appeared in the November 1957 issue of Ebony magazine. In January 1959 prominent businessmen and public officials with connections to the Citizens’ Council launched the Holmes County Herald in an effort to silence Smith and drive her newspapers out of business. She called the Herald’s backers “a kind of Gestapo to determine how people should think and act and pressure them into it.”

While the Herald siphoned advertising and subscribers from the Advertiser, Smith continued to editorialize against racial violence, the Citizens’ Council, and the Sovereignty Commission. She called the June 1963 assassination of Medgar Evers a “reprehensible crime against the laws of God and man” and compared the Citizens’ Council and Sovereignty Commission to a homegrown version of the Third Reich and “the Gestapo of Hitler’s Germany.” Smith continued to lose money and piled up substantial debt, mortgaging personal property and borrowing money to publish her newspapers and build a Greek Revival mansion on the outskirts of Lexington. Her husband died in November 1983, and she filed for bankruptcy in 1985, having amassed $250,000 in debt. Banks repossessed her home. The last edition of the Lexington Advertiser appeared on 19 September 1985. In declining health and penniless, Smith returned to Gadsden, where relatives cared for her.

Academic and popular accounts of Hazel Brannon Smith often erroneously described her as a conservative Dixiecrat segregationist who underwent a conversion in the mid-1950s to become a liberal champion of civil rights and martyr to the cause of press freedom. Her advocacy of law and order and denunciation of racial violence coexisted with repeated support for “our Southern traditions and racial segregation.” She vigorously denied being an “integrationist,” writing on 31 October 1957, “I have never, either in print or by spoken word, advocated integration of the races.” On 14 January 1965, seven months after winning the Pulitzer Prize, she reminded readers, “We had never advocated school integration at the time of the 1954 high court decision (nor since for that matter).” Hodding Carter of the Delta Democrat-Times observed in First Person Rural, “The supreme irony is that nowhere outside the Deep South would Hazel Brannon Smith be labeled even a liberal in her racial views. If she must be categorized, then call her a moderate.”

Smith died on 14 May 1994.

Alabama born and educated, Hazel Brannon Smith (1914-1994) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964, the first woman to receive the prize for editorial writing. Smith owned and edited four Mississippi weekly newspapers; during the 1950s and 1960s, she spoke out against violence and intimidation and in support of the law, freedom of speech, and improved education through those newspapers. Although Smith had supported segregation for much of her life, she became one of few white editors in the South who forcefully countered the prevailing resistance to the African American civil rights movement, despite lawsuits, threats, violence, and boycotts.

Hazel Freeman Brannon was born on February 5, 1914, in Alabama City, near Gadsden in Etowah County. She was the first of five children of Dock Boad Brannon, a wire inspector for Gulf States Steel and an independent electrical contractor, and Georgia Parthenia Freeman Brannon, an active Southern Baptist church member like her husband. Her transformation from a traditional segregationist to a supporter of 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration volunteers was influenced by her upbringing, in which she was taught to love everybody and respect and consider the rights of others. Although they supported segregation, the Brannons displayed civility in their personal dealings with African Americans. Her father greeted African American customers at the front door, contrary to custom. Her mother's Missionary Society work took her to black churches. Brannon early on showed the drive and flair that remained her hallmarks along with her strong moral code, independence, and outspokenness. She graduated from Gadsden High School in 1930, at age 16. She then went to work for the Etowah Observer, a weekly newspaper in her home county. She reported news, sold advertising, and decided that she wanted to own a newspaper. In 1932, she entered the University of Alabama (UA) in Tuscaloosa, where she became managing editor of the campus newspaper, the Crimson White. Smith studied under journalism professor Clarence Cason, who taught students to pursue the truth and urged them to stay and work in the South. She graduated in 1935.

Just out of college, at age 22, Brannon obtained a bank loan for a down payment on the Durant News, located in Holmes County, Mississippi. In 1936, she became its owner, publisher, and editor and made the struggling paper profitable. In 1943, she bought the Lexington Advertiser, in the county seat of Holmes County. In 1956, she bought the Northside Reporter in Jackson, Mississippi, and the Banner County Outlook in Flora, Mississippi. Her early years as a Mississippi newspaper publisher and editor brought financial success and found her mostly in harmony with the whites in predominately black Holmes County. She embraced segregation as best for both races and criticized Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal for abandoning the southern Democratic Party's white supremacist principles.

Early signs showed that Brannon would go her own journalistic way, however. In April 1943, when few newspapers in the country reported on African Americans unless they were involved in a crime, she featured a story on the front page about an African American civic group in Durant donating money to the local Red Cross. In addition, she urged the Holmes County police and courts in 1945 and 1946 to clamp down on illegal bootlegging and gambling.

In 1949, at age 35, Hazel Brannon met Walter Dyer Smith, a ship's purser known as Smitty, on an around-the-world cruise. The couple married in March 1950 at the First Baptist Church in Durant.

In 1954, the Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education declared segregated schools unconstitutional. This and a sheriff's shooting of a retreating African American man in Holmes County marked a watershed for Smith's views on race. After those events, her growing independence on racial matters and her criticism of violence in general and extremist groups in particular cast her against the Mississippi Citizens' Councils and their government supporter, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. In Holmes County, the Citizens' Council painted Smith as an integrationist and urged merchants and subscribers to boycott the Advertiser. In 1956, the council orchestrated the firing of Smith's husband from his job at Holmes County Hospital and in 1958 organized a competing weekly newspaper, the Holmes County Herald.

In 1960, Smith received the Elijah P. Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism from the International Conference of Weekly Newspaper Editors and Southern Illinois University. The award brought her national attention and sympathy, but in Mississippi Smith found herself the target of violence. In 1960, on Halloween, an eight-foot-tall cross was burned at Smith's home in Holmes County; Smith blamed local teens influenced by adults' hate. During Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964, when Smith welcomed civil rights workers at her home, an attacker threw a dynamite charge through the window of the Northside Reporter office in Jackson. Two years later, an investigator reported to a congressional hearing that Mississippi Klansmen discussed a proposal to "eliminate" Smith. The same year, her Jackson newspaper office was bombed, Smith received the 1964 Pulitzer Prize and reached the height of her national journalistic acclaim. In granting the award, the Pulitzer committee acknowledged the whole body of her work and her "steadfast adherence to her editorial duties in the face of great pressure and opposition." Smith was later defeated in two runs for the state Senate in Mississippi, in 1967 and 1971.

Brave in public, in private Smith was bereft when hometown friends abandoned her, and she even considered leaving Mississippi. The Lexington Advertiser survived during the 1950s and 1960s by selling papers outside Holmes County; contracting for print shop business with African American customers; receiving contributions from leading editors around the country and from African Americans in Holmes County; charging fees for her speeches; and refinancing her buildings, farm, and home. The Smiths' financial situation improved somewhat in the 1970s, and in the 1980s they sold land and borrowed money to build Hazel's dream house modeled on the mansion Tara in Gone with the Wind.

None of Smith's newspapers survived her. She sold the Northside Reporter in 1973. Its new owner changed the name to the Capital Reporter and closed that paper in 1981. She discontinued the Banner County Outlook in 1977. In 1982, Walter Smith died after a fall at the couple's home, and soon after Hazel began to show early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. The final edition of the Durant News and Lexington Advertiser, which had merged in the early 1980s, appeared in September 1985, and banks foreclosed on her property. In early 1986, Smith returned to Gadsden, Etowah County, to live with her sister. She had another moment in the national spotlight in 1994 when ABC-TV broadcast an unauthorized, fictionalized movie, A Passion for Justice: The Hazel Brannon Smith Story, but Smith, who was suffering from Alzheimer's and cancer, was unable to acknowledge the honor.

Hazel Brannon Smith died on May 15, 1994, at a Cleveland, Tennessee, nursing home where her niece and guardian worked. She is buried alongside family members in Forrest Cemetery in Gadsden. She was inducted into the Communication Hall of Fame at the University of Alabama in 1998. Smith was one of few white southern newspaper editors who dissented from the white majority view on racial matters, supported each other, and modeled journalistic independence to lead when government, business, and churches faltered.