Hazel Brannon Smith
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Hazel Freeman Brannon Smith, born 1914 in Gadsden, Alabama, was the owner and editor of four weekly newspapers in rural Mississippi and the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.
She described herself as "just a little editor in a little spot. A lot of other little editors in a lot of little spots is what helps make this country. It's either going to help protect that freedom that we have or else it's going to let that freedom slip away by default."
In 1930, she graduated from high school in Gadsen at the age of 16. Graduating from the University of Alabama in 1935 with a B.A. in Journalism, she went to Durant, Mississippi and bought the failing Durant News, making it such a success by 1943 that she purchased the Lexington Advertiser in the neighboring town of Lexington, Mississippi. She edited and published the Lexington Advertiser from 1943 to 1983. In 1956, she acquired the Banner County Outlook (Flora, Mississippi) in 1956 and the Northside Reporter (Jackson, Mississippi) in 1956.
Smith's editorials and her column ("Through Hazel's Eyes") focused on unpopular causes, political corruption and social injustice in Mississippi. Her opposition to the White Citizens' Council brought her the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1964 for her "steadfast adherence to her editorial duty in the face of great pressure and opposition."
She also received awards from the National Federation of Press Women (1946, 1955), the Herrick Award for Editorial Writing (1956), the Mississippi Press Association (1957) and the National Federation of Press Women. She was one of the subjects in the documentary film An Independent Voice (1973) about smalltown newspaper editors, and her life was dramatized in the TV movie A Passion for Justice: The Hazel Brannon Smith Story (1994) with Jane Seymour in the title role.
She died in Cleveland, Tennessee in 1994. Her 1945-1976 papers are available to researchers at the Special Collections department of the Mississippi State University Library. John A. Whalen wrote her biography, Maverick Among the Magnolias: The Hazel Brannon Smith Story, published by Xlibris in 2001.
