Hazel Brannon Smith

Ordinary people often perform the most heroic deeds in extraordinary times.

Hazel Brannon Smith never intended to be a civil rights champion. Born in Gadsden, Alabama, Smith attended The University of Alabama with Paul "Bear" Bryant, whom she admired and respected. A journalism graduate, Smith was vivacious, charming, and outspoken. She borrowed $3,000 and bought four weeklies in Mississippi and for more than a decade led a charmed life - a cozy small southern town existence, with trips to newspaper conventions in Biloxi and to San Francisco as a delegate to the Democratic convention.

In 1954, her life forever changed when she witnessed the unjustified shooting of a black man by a sheriff on a public street on the fourth of July in Holmes County, Mississippi.

Outraged, Smith criticized the sheriff in a front-page editorial and called for his resignation. The sheriff sued her and organized white citizens against her. Through three decades, she endured boycotts against her newspapers, a cross burning in her front yard, the bombing of one of her newspaper offices, and continued harassment against her and her husband, who was forced from his job as a hospital administrator.

The White Citizens Council made Smith a target, and she stubbornly fought back through her pen, her actions, and her sharp tongue. Smith attacked the bigots and defended those they oppressed. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for her "steadfast adherence to her editorial duty in the face of great pressure and opposition," but her papers only barely survived before she printed the last edition of the debt-ridden Lexington Advertiser in 1985.

"If ever the martyrs to a free press in America are assembled in Heaven, there is one thing I know: Hazel Brannon Smith will be in the front rank," wrote Mississippi political columnist Bill Minor.