ABSTRACT
"Alfred Brown, negro, was killed in an altercation with Lexington police on Yazoo Street Saturday night," reported the Holmes County Herald in a terse three-paragraph story. " The Advertiser's long and circumstantial account made it clear that the dead man, a mental patient who still wore the bracelet of the hospital from which he had just been released, was a victim of racist police. By 1963, the Advertiser's editor and publisher Hazel Brannon Smith had become notorious, driving the racist powers that be of the region to flights of apoplexy. As state Rep. Wilburn Hooker of Holmes County told the director of the State Sovereignty Commission, the state agency established to spy on civil rights organizations, she was "this female crusading scalawag domiciled in our midst." Hazel Brannon Smith endured more than 20 years of violence, ostracism and economic strangulation in the name, she said, of "telling the people the truth and defending their freedom."
