The bank foreclosed, took her newspaper and repossessed her fine brick mansion at the edge of town. A truck hauled away her furniture. Hazel Brannon Smith, bankrupt, ill and disoriented, left Mississippi on a cold rainy day in February.
Her leaving was hardly noticed.
The old campaign to banish her from Holmes County and silence her crusading newspaper–the firebombing, the advertising boycott, the death threats–had been mostly forgotten. But the Lexington Advertiser finally succumbed, like some veteran dying from lingering complications of an old battle wound.
Much has changed about this Delta farm town since those days in the 1950s and `60s when Smith won national respect and a Pulitzer Prize by standing up to a murdering sheriff, the White Citizens Council and a community that sanctioned racial injustice.
Now a black sheriff patrols Holmes County. A black man sits in the tax assessor`s office. Another is president of the county board of supervisors. The mechanism of segregation has been disassembled. Overt racism, the sort that once made the place so notorious, even in Mississippi, dimmed to an unsavory memory.
The reconciliation of Holmes County, however, never seemed to include the fiery white woman who turned her profitable weekly newspapers into money-losing publications crusading for civil rights. As the meanest racial conflicts subsided, she simply faded to an obscure figure, ostracized by whites, forgotten by blacks.
The final legacy of Smith`s civil rights involvement was only bankruptcy. On Jan. 26, Smith was nearly $250,000 in debt. The bank foreclosed, taking her last newspaper, her farm and her home.
A little more than 50 years after she arrived in Holmes County as a beautiful, flamboyant, independent publisher and editor, a younger sister drove her back home to Gadsden, Ala.
”She was a lonely lady. She endured a lot of rejection,” said Bruce Hill, editor of the Holmes County Herald, the newspaper whites formed in 1959 to drive Hazel Brannon Smith out of business. (”Well, that`s no secret. It`s true,” Hill said.)
”The truth put her out of business. That`s exactly right. The truth,”
said J.S. Travis, a black man with a shoe shop just off the old town square in Lexington, next to the plain, concrete-faced building that once housed the Lexington Advertiser. ”But I don`t think folks remember. I don`t think young blacks even know who she was.”
The front office of Smith`s weekly newspaper was littered with discarded newspapers stained brown from rain flowing through the collapsed roof, down tattered pieces of a dangling ceiling. Curling photographs of smiling people were piled on an old desk. A dead potted plant rose from a broken vase. A furled American flag lay in one corner. June hung half torn from a 1985 Holmes Bank and Trust calendar. The last edition of the Advertiser was printed Sept. 19.
”Now she`s poorer than I am,” said Willie Wylie, a black pressman who had worked for Smith at the Advertiser since 1941.
After she left Mississippi, the Links, a black women`s organization in Jackson, the state capital, gathered a number of civic leaders together to assemble a fund-raising project for Smith, who doctors say suffers from Alzheimer`s disease. A number of the people, most of them old civil rights activists, said they had simply lost track of Smith. ”I just hadn`t thought of her in years,” confessed Mary Hendricks.
But the memories warmed and they talked of the woman, a traditional southern belle, a beauty queen from the University of Alabama, an
ultraconservative Dixiecrat political activist who underwent such a marked evolution of conscience.
The managing editor of her college paper, Smith left Alabama in 1935 for Mississippi, in search of a newspaper to buy. With a $3,000 loan, she purchased the ailing Durant News in central Mississippi`s Holmes County, at the edge of the Delta. Three years later, it was solvent. By 1943, she was able to buy the larger Lexington Advertiser, in the county seat.
There was no hint of a civil rights activist, not even of a liberal. She was twice elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention but came as an old-fashioned states` rights Dixiecrat. But she was plenty noticeable. Damon Runyon, in 1940, described her as ”the prettiest delegate” at the convention.
”She was the sweetheart of the Mississippi press corps,” said William Minor, dean of the state`s journalists. She favored Cadillac convertibles
–bought one every other year–wonderful hats and flamboyant, stylish clothes. He still remembers her grand entrance at a press meeting in 1947 as she descended the winding steps of Biloxi`s Buena Vista Hotel, every head turned in her direction.
Her weekly columns, Through Hazel`s Eyes, were hardly liberal. She worried about communism. She defended Joe McCarthy. She once warned that a vote for Adlai Stevenson was ”a vote for integration.”
But she was nonetheless a crusader. Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, she implored an end to open gambling and liquor sales, which were illegal but practiced by approval of the local sheriff. She wrote, ”There are some sheriffs in office in Mississippi who have lied to every man, woman and child in their counties, but they have no more remorse than an egg-sucking dog.”
She was already unpopular with (now dead) Sheriff Richard F. Byrd when he was involved in an incident that set her on a dangerous new course. Witnesses to a rural bar shooting told her that Byrd had told a young black man to run and, without provocation, shot him in the back. A doctor`s examination of the body supported their report. She printed the story.
”That`s what changed her,” Minor said.
Byrd sued and a local, all-white jury awarded him $10,000. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the decision, but public opinion, among the whites of Holmes County, was unforgiving.
Holmes County had been a seat of rabid racism since slave revolts were brutally put down there before the Civil War. In the 1950s, some of the most outlandish racist statements uttered in the state legislature came from a pair of Holmes County delegates. In 1955, the White Citizens Council, an organization formed to fight integration that was particularly strong in Holmes County, condemned her. Merchants were urged to stop advertising in her newspaper.
Smith continued to write against ”rabble-rousing Negro baiting,” but her columns in the 1950s, from the retrospect of the `80s, seem awfully tame and conservative. She never advocated integration during that period, but gradually came to argue for blacks` rights to vote and a good education. ”You had to hold back,” Minor said. ”You couldn`t write what you thought.”
Minor added that part of Smith`s evolution toward open support of the civil rights movement was effected by the town`s whites. ”The community pushed her, they radicalized her because they didn`t leave her any place else to go–though she was never really a radical,” he said.
The more the white community attacked her, the more staunch Smith became. The founding of the rival Holmes County Herald by her white enemies cut off most of her advertising, but Smith persevered. She survived with sympathy and money from the North, where she became fairly well known as a lonely brave woman taking on Jim Crow.
”She was a brave and crusty woman,” said University of Mississippi history professor David Sansing. ”She had to be brave to do that in Holmes County.”
Her home was vandalized. The Advertiser office was firebombed. Minor said, ”I`m sure that if she had been a man, that they would have lynched her.”
”She was one of those people who wasn`t afraid of being hurt, and people were being hurt. We all knew people who were killed,” said long-time civil rights leader Aaron Henry.
Her fame peaked in 1964, when she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorials ”in the face of great pressure and opposition.”
The voting rights act soon followed. And blacks gradually began to win pieces of the political structure in a county 71 percent black. State Rep. Robert Clark, who in 1967 became the first black elected to the Mississippi legislature since Reconstruction, was an early supporter of Smith and rallied blacks to boycott white merchants who had boycotted the Advertiser.
But Clark and the black leadership broke with Smith. Clark complained that she never realized that blacks no longer needed whites to speak for them. ”It was almost like a child coming of age who no longer needs his mother,” said Bruce Hill. ”Hazel was a great help to blacks for a long time, but as they came into their own in Holmes County, they developed their own leadership. It was another era, and they didn`t need her. It wasn`t really rejection, but she didn`t understand.”
She struggled on with her newspaper, now reduced to the second, lesser publication in the second-poorest county in Mississippi. She sold some land holdings and borrowed money to keep going. And she borrowed money, probably foolishly, to finish Hazelwood, her grand, brick-columned house on a wooded hill at the western edge of town. It was modeled after Tara, of the movie version of ”Gone With the Wind.”
The one-time dazzler was increasingly cut off from Lexington society. ”I remember when she`d get a huge box of Christmas cards every year,” Wylie said. ”But the last few years, she got only one or two.”
Although Lexington had mellowed since those days of racial conflict, it didn`t seem to help in her case. Hill said she remained aloof. ”I think the community would have accepted her back, but she didn`t seem to want it.”
In 1983, her husband Walter fell off the roof of their home and died. Rose Tate, her longtime housekeeper, said Smith seemed to deteriorate after his death. She began to fade in and out. Her memory failed. Her financial failures began to escalate.
”These black people in Jackson are talking about raising money to help her,” Hill said. ”The sad part of it is, it`s too late. I think it`s too late for her to appreciate it.”
In Gadsden, her sister, Bonnie Geer, said that Smith had not yet come to terms with the loss of the Advertiser and Hazelwood, that, in the midst of the civil rights victories, she had lost everything. ”Now, I`d just as soon people forgot about her,” Geer said.
As Smith`s remaining possessions were cleared from the house, an old certificate was found amid the piles of newspaper and clutter in the den where she had written most of those tenacious Through Hazel`s Eyes columns. It was the 1964 Pulitzer Prize.
