Historical Marker
Hazel Brannon Smith
Lexington, Holmes County · Mississippi
Erected by Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 2022
Smith bought the Durant News in 1936 on a three-thousand-dollar loan. Her fight with local power began with a sheriff: after she reported his shooting of a Black man in 1954 and called for his resignation, he sued, won a ten-thousand-dollar libel judgment, and lost it at the state Supreme Court the next year. In 1959 businessmen tied to the Citizens' Council started a rival paper to drain her advertisers. She mortgaged her property to keep printing, filed for bankruptcy in 1985, and the last Lexington Advertiser appeared that September.
Where it stands
33.11182, -90.05294 · Directions
Worth the stop nearby
- Triangle Cultural Center — 28 miA 1904 school on Main Street in Yazoo City that survived the great fire of that May and now holds the county's historical museum, in a town rebuilt in brick on the same lots.
More markers nearby
- Holmes County Blues — steps away
- Bishop Charles H. Mason — steps away
- Lexington — steps away
- St. Paul Church of God in Christ — 0.6 mi