Author: Jeffery B. Howell
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496810805
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
Hazel Brannon Smith (1914-1994) stood out as a prominent white newspaper owner in Mississippi before, during, and after the civil rights movement. As early as the mid-1940s, she earned state and national headlines by fighting bootleggers and corrupt politicians. Her career was marked by a progressive ethic, and she wrote almost fifty years of columns with the goal of promoting the health of her community. In the first half of her career, she strongly supported Jim Crow segregation. Yet, in the 1950s, she refused to back the economic intimidation and covert violence of groups such as the Citizens" Council. The subsequent backlash led her to being deemed a social pariah, and the economic pressure bankrupted her once-flourishing newspaper empire in Holmes County. Rejected by the white establishment, she became an ally of the black struggle for social justice. Smith's biography reveals how many historians have miscast white moderates of this period. Her peers considered her a liberal, but her actions revealed the firm limits of white activism in the rural South during the civil rights era. While historians have shown that the civil rights movement emerged mostly from the grass roots, Smith's trajectory was decidedly different. She never fully escaped her white paternalistic sentiments, yet during the 1950s and 1960s she spoke out consistently against racial extremism. This book complicates the narrative of the white media and business people responding to the movement's challenging call for racial justice.
Hazel Brannon Smith
Author: Jeffery B. Howell
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496810805
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
Hazel Brannon Smith (1914-1994) stood out as a prominent white newspaper owner in Mississippi before, during, and after the civil rights movement. As early as the mid-1940s, she earned state and national headlines by fighting bootleggers and corrupt politicians. Her career was marked by a progressive ethic, and she wrote almost fifty years of columns with the goal of promoting the health of her community. In the first half of her career, she strongly supported Jim Crow segregation. Yet, in the 1950s, she refused to back the economic intimidation and covert violence of groups such as the Citizens" Council. The subsequent backlash led her to being deemed a social pariah, and the economic pressure bankrupted her once-flourishing newspaper empire in Holmes County. Rejected by the white establishment, she became an ally of the black struggle for social justice. Smith's biography reveals how many historians have miscast white moderates of this period. Her peers considered her a liberal, but her actions revealed the firm limits of white activism in the rural South during the civil rights era. While historians have shown that the civil rights movement emerged mostly from the grass roots, Smith's trajectory was decidedly different. She never fully escaped her white paternalistic sentiments, yet during the 1950s and 1960s she spoke out consistently against racial extremism. This book complicates the narrative of the white media and business people responding to the movement's challenging call for racial justice.
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496810805
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
Hazel Brannon Smith (1914-1994) stood out as a prominent white newspaper owner in Mississippi before, during, and after the civil rights movement. As early as the mid-1940s, she earned state and national headlines by fighting bootleggers and corrupt politicians. Her career was marked by a progressive ethic, and she wrote almost fifty years of columns with the goal of promoting the health of her community. In the first half of her career, she strongly supported Jim Crow segregation. Yet, in the 1950s, she refused to back the economic intimidation and covert violence of groups such as the Citizens" Council. The subsequent backlash led her to being deemed a social pariah, and the economic pressure bankrupted her once-flourishing newspaper empire in Holmes County. Rejected by the white establishment, she became an ally of the black struggle for social justice. Smith's biography reveals how many historians have miscast white moderates of this period. Her peers considered her a liberal, but her actions revealed the firm limits of white activism in the rural South during the civil rights era. While historians have shown that the civil rights movement emerged mostly from the grass roots, Smith's trajectory was decidedly different. She never fully escaped her white paternalistic sentiments, yet during the 1950s and 1960s she spoke out consistently against racial extremism. This book complicates the narrative of the white media and business people responding to the movement's challenging call for racial justice.
Hazel Brannon Smith
Author: Jeffery B. Howell
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496810821
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Hazel Brannon Smith (1914-1994) stood out as a prominent white newspaper owner in Mississippi before, during, and after the civil rights movement. As early as the mid-1940s, she earned state and national headlines by fighting bootleggers and corrupt politicians. Her career was marked by a progressive ethic, and she wrote almost fifty years of columns with the goal of promoting the health of her community. In the first half of her career, she strongly supported Jim Crow segregation. Yet, in the 1950s, she refused to back the economic intimidation and covert violence of groups such as the Citizens" Council. The subsequent backlash led her to being deemed a social pariah, and the economic pressure bankrupted her once-flourishing newspaper empire in Holmes County. Rejected by the white establishment, she became an ally of the black struggle for social justice. Smith's biography reveals how many historians have miscast white moderates of this period. Her peers considered her a liberal, but her actions revealed the firm limits of white activism in the rural South during the civil rights era. While historians have shown that the civil rights movement emerged mostly from the grass roots, Smith's trajectory was decidedly different. She never fully escaped her white paternalistic sentiments, yet during the 1950s and 1960s she spoke out consistently against racial extremism. This book complicates the narrative of the white media and business people responding to the movement's challenging call for racial justice.
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496810821
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Hazel Brannon Smith (1914-1994) stood out as a prominent white newspaper owner in Mississippi before, during, and after the civil rights movement. As early as the mid-1940s, she earned state and national headlines by fighting bootleggers and corrupt politicians. Her career was marked by a progressive ethic, and she wrote almost fifty years of columns with the goal of promoting the health of her community. In the first half of her career, she strongly supported Jim Crow segregation. Yet, in the 1950s, she refused to back the economic intimidation and covert violence of groups such as the Citizens" Council. The subsequent backlash led her to being deemed a social pariah, and the economic pressure bankrupted her once-flourishing newspaper empire in Holmes County. Rejected by the white establishment, she became an ally of the black struggle for social justice. Smith's biography reveals how many historians have miscast white moderates of this period. Her peers considered her a liberal, but her actions revealed the firm limits of white activism in the rural South during the civil rights era. While historians have shown that the civil rights movement emerged mostly from the grass roots, Smith's trajectory was decidedly different. She never fully escaped her white paternalistic sentiments, yet during the 1950s and 1960s she spoke out consistently against racial extremism. This book complicates the narrative of the white media and business people responding to the movement's challenging call for racial justice.
Hazel Brannon Smith
Hazel Brannon Smith
Author: Jeffery Brian Howell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781496810816
Category : Civil rights movements
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781496810816
Category : Civil rights movements
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Maverick Among the Magnolias
Author: John A. Whalen
Publisher: Xlibris
ISBN: 9780738849416
Category : Civil rights workers
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
When Hazel Brannon, newly graduated from the journalism school of the University of Alabama, said she wanted to "brighten her corner," her friends were hardly prepared for the denouement. Who would have expected that this "proper Southern young lady," as publisher of The Lexington Advertiser and three other weekly newspapers in darkest Mississippi, was to gradually renounce her racist views once she saw at first hand how the blacks were being mistreated? She called, in editorials and in her column, Through Hazel Eyes, for integrated schools, churches, libraries, public transportation and work places. She also demanded for blacks the right to vote, hold public office, serve as jurors and even to intermarry, an act which she had once branded as "a sin." For such apostasies, the editor, now Hazel Brannon Smith, was shunned by most of her former friends, harassed by lawsuits and subjected to smear attacks by the Ku Klux Klan, the white Citizens' Councils and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. A boycott was launched against her by the white power structure, a rival newspaper was established, one of her newspaper offices was dynamited, another torched by arsonists and a cross was burned on her lawn, Despite receiving economic aid from prominent journalists throughout the country to help keep her newspapers afloat, garnering the plaudits of important personages nationwide, winning a Pulitzer Prize and virtually every other prestigious journalistic award for her hard-hitting editorials, Mrs. Smith was always to be a prophet without honor among fellow whites in her own county. Maverick Among the Magnolias is the true, thrilling and touching story of a feisty, yet feminine, woman who not only witnessed and chronicled the civil rights struggles in her adopted Mississippi "through Hazel eyes," but, as Roy Steinfort of the First Amendment Center, Reston, Virginia, commented, "left a rich legend of courage for her journalistic survivors. Because of Smith's courage and contribution, Mississippi has changed for the better over the years. How many editors today would be willing to pay the price she did?"
Publisher: Xlibris
ISBN: 9780738849416
Category : Civil rights workers
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
When Hazel Brannon, newly graduated from the journalism school of the University of Alabama, said she wanted to "brighten her corner," her friends were hardly prepared for the denouement. Who would have expected that this "proper Southern young lady," as publisher of The Lexington Advertiser and three other weekly newspapers in darkest Mississippi, was to gradually renounce her racist views once she saw at first hand how the blacks were being mistreated? She called, in editorials and in her column, Through Hazel Eyes, for integrated schools, churches, libraries, public transportation and work places. She also demanded for blacks the right to vote, hold public office, serve as jurors and even to intermarry, an act which she had once branded as "a sin." For such apostasies, the editor, now Hazel Brannon Smith, was shunned by most of her former friends, harassed by lawsuits and subjected to smear attacks by the Ku Klux Klan, the white Citizens' Councils and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. A boycott was launched against her by the white power structure, a rival newspaper was established, one of her newspaper offices was dynamited, another torched by arsonists and a cross was burned on her lawn, Despite receiving economic aid from prominent journalists throughout the country to help keep her newspapers afloat, garnering the plaudits of important personages nationwide, winning a Pulitzer Prize and virtually every other prestigious journalistic award for her hard-hitting editorials, Mrs. Smith was always to be a prophet without honor among fellow whites in her own county. Maverick Among the Magnolias is the true, thrilling and touching story of a feisty, yet feminine, woman who not only witnessed and chronicled the civil rights struggles in her adopted Mississippi "through Hazel eyes," but, as Roy Steinfort of the First Amendment Center, Reston, Virginia, commented, "left a rich legend of courage for her journalistic survivors. Because of Smith's courage and contribution, Mississippi has changed for the better over the years. How many editors today would be willing to pay the price she did?"
Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism
Author: Jan Whitt
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761849556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Book Description
Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism: Hazel Brannon Smith and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement celebrates the contributions of the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing (1964). Owner and publisher of four weekly newspapers in Mississippi, Smith began her journalism career as a states rights Dixiecrat and segregationist, but became an icon for progressive thought on racial and ethnic issues. Though befriended by editors such as Hodding Carter Jr. and Ira B. Harkey Jr., Smith was a target of the White Citizens' Council and was boycotted by advertisers. During the civil rights movement, a cross was burned in her yard and one of her newspaper offices was firebombed. Before her death in 1994, she endured foreclosure, memory loss, and public humiliation, but she never lost faith in journalism or in the power of informed debate.
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761849556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Book Description
Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism: Hazel Brannon Smith and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement celebrates the contributions of the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing (1964). Owner and publisher of four weekly newspapers in Mississippi, Smith began her journalism career as a states rights Dixiecrat and segregationist, but became an icon for progressive thought on racial and ethnic issues. Though befriended by editors such as Hodding Carter Jr. and Ira B. Harkey Jr., Smith was a target of the White Citizens' Council and was boycotted by advertisers. During the civil rights movement, a cross was burned in her yard and one of her newspaper offices was firebombed. Before her death in 1994, she endured foreclosure, memory loss, and public humiliation, but she never lost faith in journalism or in the power of informed debate.
Birddogs and Tough Old Broads
Author: Pete Smith
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 149858246X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417
Book Description
Birddogs and Tough Old Broads: Women Journalists of Mississippi and a Century of State Politics, 1880s-1980s documents the professional experiences and observations of more than a dozen journalists, all women, all covering Mississippi state politics over the course of a century—from the 1880s, right after the end of Reconstruction (when newspapers were the primary source of information) to the 1980s, a time period marked by steady declines in both news revenue and circulation, and the emergence of corporate journalism, led by media conglomerates like Gannett. Pete Smith argues that the experiences of the women journalists reflect broader social, political, legal, and cultural struggles and changes in both the South and the nation during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The evolution of the modern-day political journalist, particularly for southern women who aspired to such a position, can be seen in their struggles and accomplishments.
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 149858246X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417
Book Description
Birddogs and Tough Old Broads: Women Journalists of Mississippi and a Century of State Politics, 1880s-1980s documents the professional experiences and observations of more than a dozen journalists, all women, all covering Mississippi state politics over the course of a century—from the 1880s, right after the end of Reconstruction (when newspapers were the primary source of information) to the 1980s, a time period marked by steady declines in both news revenue and circulation, and the emergence of corporate journalism, led by media conglomerates like Gannett. Pete Smith argues that the experiences of the women journalists reflect broader social, political, legal, and cultural struggles and changes in both the South and the nation during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The evolution of the modern-day political journalist, particularly for southern women who aspired to such a position, can be seen in their struggles and accomplishments.
Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism
Author: Jan Whitt
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761849564
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Book Description
Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism: Hazel Brannon Smith and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement celebrates the contributions of the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing (1964). Owner and publisher of four weekly newspapers in Mississippi, Smith began her journalism career as a states rights Dixiecrat and segregationist, but became an icon for progressive thought on racial and ethnic issues. Though befriended by editors such as Hodding Carter Jr. and Ira B. Harkey Jr., Smith was a target of the White Citizens' Council and was boycotted by advertisers. During the civil rights movement, a cross was burned in her yard and one of her newspaper offices was firebombed. Before her death in 1994, she endured foreclosure, memory loss, and public humiliation, but she never lost faith in journalism or in the power of informed debate.
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761849564
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 171
Book Description
Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism: Hazel Brannon Smith and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement celebrates the contributions of the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing (1964). Owner and publisher of four weekly newspapers in Mississippi, Smith began her journalism career as a states rights Dixiecrat and segregationist, but became an icon for progressive thought on racial and ethnic issues. Though befriended by editors such as Hodding Carter Jr. and Ira B. Harkey Jr., Smith was a target of the White Citizens' Council and was boycotted by advertisers. During the civil rights movement, a cross was burned in her yard and one of her newspaper offices was firebombed. Before her death in 1994, she endured foreclosure, memory loss, and public humiliation, but she never lost faith in journalism or in the power of informed debate.
Joe T. Patterson and the White South's Dilemma
Author: Robert E. Luckett Jr.
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496802705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Book Description
As Mississippi's attorney general from 1956 to 1969, Joe T. Patterson led the legal defense for Jim Crow in the state. He was inaugurated for his first term two months before the launch of the Sovereignty Commission—charged “to protect the sovereignty of Mississippi from encroachment thereon by the federal government”—which made manifest a century-old states' rights ideology couched in the rhetoric of massive resistance. Despite the dubious legal foundations of that agenda, Patterson supported the organization's mission from the start and served as an ex-officio leader on its board for the rest of his life. Patterson was also a card-carrying member of the segregationist Citizens' Council and, in his own words, had “spent many hours and driven many miles advocating the basic principles for which the Citizens' Councils were originally organized.” Few ever doubted his Jim Crow credentials. That is until September 1962 and the integration of the University of Mississippi by James Meredith. That fall Patterson stepped out of his entrenchment by defying a circle of white power brokers, but only to a point. His seeming acquiescence came at the height of the biggest crisis for Mississippi's racist order. Yet even after the Supreme Court decreed that Meredith must enter the university, Patterson opposed any further desegregation and despised the federal intervention at Ole Miss. Still he faced a dilemma that confronted all white southerners: how to maintain an artificially elevated position for whites in southern society without resorting to violence or intimidation. Once the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Meredith v. Fair, the state attorney general walked a strategic tightrope, looking to temper the ruling's impact without inciting the mob and without retreating any further. Patterson and others sought pragmatic answers to the dilemma of white southerners, not in the name of civil rights but to offer a more durable version of white power. His finesse paved the way for future tactics employing duplicity and barely yielding social change while deferring many dreams.
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496802705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Book Description
As Mississippi's attorney general from 1956 to 1969, Joe T. Patterson led the legal defense for Jim Crow in the state. He was inaugurated for his first term two months before the launch of the Sovereignty Commission—charged “to protect the sovereignty of Mississippi from encroachment thereon by the federal government”—which made manifest a century-old states' rights ideology couched in the rhetoric of massive resistance. Despite the dubious legal foundations of that agenda, Patterson supported the organization's mission from the start and served as an ex-officio leader on its board for the rest of his life. Patterson was also a card-carrying member of the segregationist Citizens' Council and, in his own words, had “spent many hours and driven many miles advocating the basic principles for which the Citizens' Councils were originally organized.” Few ever doubted his Jim Crow credentials. That is until September 1962 and the integration of the University of Mississippi by James Meredith. That fall Patterson stepped out of his entrenchment by defying a circle of white power brokers, but only to a point. His seeming acquiescence came at the height of the biggest crisis for Mississippi's racist order. Yet even after the Supreme Court decreed that Meredith must enter the university, Patterson opposed any further desegregation and despised the federal intervention at Ole Miss. Still he faced a dilemma that confronted all white southerners: how to maintain an artificially elevated position for whites in southern society without resorting to violence or intimidation. Once the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Meredith v. Fair, the state attorney general walked a strategic tightrope, looking to temper the ruling's impact without inciting the mob and without retreating any further. Patterson and others sought pragmatic answers to the dilemma of white southerners, not in the name of civil rights but to offer a more durable version of white power. His finesse paved the way for future tactics employing duplicity and barely yielding social change while deferring many dreams.
Mississippi Women
Author: Martha H. Swain
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820325033
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
Some of the women are well known, others were prominent in their time but have since faded into obscurity, and a few have never received the attention they deserve."--BOOK JACKET.
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820325033
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Book Description
Some of the women are well known, others were prominent in their time but have since faded into obscurity, and a few have never received the attention they deserve."--BOOK JACKET.