Hazel Brannon Smith was almost certainly the most unpopular woman in Mississippi when she wrote an editorial in 1963 lambasting the racist White Citizens Councils in the Lexington Advertiser, a newspaper she owned.
“The hierarchy of rulers in this totalitarian-like organization permit no deviation from its official line – and those who believe in and stand for the traditional American concepts of human liberty, dignity, and decency, do so at their own peril,” she wrote in an editorial that was both poetic and dangerous.
