Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism

Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism PDF Author: Jan Whitt
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761849556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism: Hazel Brannon Smith and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement celebrates the contributions of the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing (1964). Owner and publisher of four weekly newspapers in Mississippi, Smith began her journalism career as a states rights Dixiecrat and segregationist, but became an icon for progressive thought on racial and ethnic issues. Though befriended by editors such as Hodding Carter Jr. and Ira B. Harkey Jr., Smith was a target of the White Citizens' Council and was boycotted by advertisers. During the civil rights movement, a cross was burned in her yard and one of her newspaper offices was firebombed. Before her death in 1994, she endured foreclosure, memory loss, and public humiliation, but she never lost faith in journalism or in the power of informed debate.

Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism

Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism PDF Author: Jan Whitt
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761849556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism: Hazel Brannon Smith and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement celebrates the contributions of the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing (1964). Owner and publisher of four weekly newspapers in Mississippi, Smith began her journalism career as a states rights Dixiecrat and segregationist, but became an icon for progressive thought on racial and ethnic issues. Though befriended by editors such as Hodding Carter Jr. and Ira B. Harkey Jr., Smith was a target of the White Citizens' Council and was boycotted by advertisers. During the civil rights movement, a cross was burned in her yard and one of her newspaper offices was firebombed. Before her death in 1994, she endured foreclosure, memory loss, and public humiliation, but she never lost faith in journalism or in the power of informed debate.

The Smell of Burning Crosses

The Smell of Burning Crosses PDF Author: Ira Harkey
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496824881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Journalist Ira Harkey (1918–2006) risked it all when he advocated for James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi as the first African American student in 1962. Preceded by a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court and violent, deadly rioting, Meredith’s admission constituted a pivotal moment in civil rights history. At the time, Harkey was editor of the Chronicle in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where he published pieces in support of Meredith and the integration of Ole Miss. In 1963, Harkey won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing after firmly articulating his advocacy of change. Originally published in 1967, this book is Harkey’s memoir of the crisis and what it was like to be a white integrationist editor in fiercely segregationist Mississippi. He recounts conversations with University of Mississippi officials and the Ku Klux Klan’s attempts to intimidate him and muzzle his work. The memoir’s title refers to a burning cross set on the lawn of his home, which occurred in addition to the shot fired at his office. Reprinted for the fifth time, this book features a new introduction by historian William Hustwit.

Hazel Brannon Smith

Hazel Brannon Smith PDF Author: Jeffery B. Howell
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496810821
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Hazel Brannon Smith (1914-1994) stood out as a prominent white newspaper owner in Mississippi before, during, and after the civil rights movement. As early as the mid-1940s, she earned state and national headlines by fighting bootleggers and corrupt politicians. Her career was marked by a progressive ethic, and she wrote almost fifty years of columns with the goal of promoting the health of her community. In the first half of her career, she strongly supported Jim Crow segregation. Yet, in the 1950s, she refused to back the economic intimidation and covert violence of groups such as the Citizens" Council. The subsequent backlash led her to being deemed a social pariah, and the economic pressure bankrupted her once-flourishing newspaper empire in Holmes County. Rejected by the white establishment, she became an ally of the black struggle for social justice. Smith's biography reveals how many historians have miscast white moderates of this period. Her peers considered her a liberal, but her actions revealed the firm limits of white activism in the rural South during the civil rights era. While historians have shown that the civil rights movement emerged mostly from the grass roots, Smith's trajectory was decidedly different. She never fully escaped her white paternalistic sentiments, yet during the 1950s and 1960s she spoke out consistently against racial extremism. This book complicates the narrative of the white media and business people responding to the movement's challenging call for racial justice.

Women in American Journalism

Women in American Journalism PDF Author: Jan Whitt
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252056477
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
In this volume, Jan Whitt tells the stories of women who have been overlooked in journalism history, offering an important corrective to scholarship that narrowly focuses on the deeds of men like Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. She shows how numerous women broadened the editorial scope of newspapers and journals, transformed women’s professional roles, used journalism as a training ground for major literary works, and led breakthroughs in lesbian and alternative presses. Whitt explores the lives of women reporters who achieved significant historical recognition, such as Ida Tarbell and Ida Wells-Barnett. Investigating the often blurry boundary between journalism and literature, she explains how this fluid distinction has actually limited how many scholars perceive the contributions of authors such as Joan Didion and Susan Orlean. Whitt also highlights the work of important novelists, including Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty, to shed light on how their work as journalists informed their highly successful fiction. This study also offers a survey of contributions women have made to the alternative presses, including the environmental press and civil rights activism. Whitt examines important figures in the early feminist press such as Caroline Churchill, editor and reporter for Denver’s Queen Bee, and Betty Wilkins of Kansas City’s Call. Finally, through newsletters, newspapers, magazines, and journals, she traces the history of the lesbian press and points out the ways in which it indicates that the alternative press is thriving.

Friends, Lovers, Co-Workers, and Community

Friends, Lovers, Co-Workers, and Community PDF Author: Kathleen M. Ryan
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498512968
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Friends, Lovers, Co-Workers, and Community analyzes how television narratives form the first decade of the twenty-first century are powerful socializing agents which both define and limit the types of acceptable interpersonal relationships between co-workers, friends, romantic partners, family members, communities, and nations. This book is written by a diverse group of scholars who used a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches to interrogate the ways through which television molds our vision of ourselves as individuals, ourselves as in relationships with others, and ourselves as a part of the world. This book will appeal to scholars of communication studies, cultural studies, media studies, and popular culture studies.

Rain on a Strange Roof

Rain on a Strange Roof PDF Author: Jan Whitt
Publisher: Hamilton Books
ISBN: 076185830X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
A scholar of Southern literature and culture, Jan Whitt has written a personal narrative about adoption, childhood abuse, and fifty years of searching for her family in rural Appalachia. A testament to the power of love and the resilience of the human spirit, Rain on a Strange Roof unflinchingly explores death and loss at the same time that it celebrates the transformative power of love and literature. An award-winning professor, Whitt teaches courses in American and British literature, literary journalism, media, and women’s studies. Quoting from films, novels, and short stories about the American South, Whitt weaves a narrative about the necessity for human connection and the desire for home.

Integration Now

Integration Now PDF Author: William P. Hustwit
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469648563
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Recovering the history of an often-ignored landmark Supreme Court case, William P. Hustwit assesses the significant role that Alexander v. Holmes (1969) played in integrating the South's public schools. Although Brown v. Board of Education has rightly received the lion's share of historical analysis, its ambiguous language for implementation led to more than a decade of delays and resistance by local and state governments. Alexander v. Holmes required "integration now," and less than a year later, thousands of children were attending integrated schools. Hustwit traces the progression of the Alexander case to show how grassroots activists in Mississippi operated hand in glove with lawyers and judges involved in the litigation. By combining a narrative of the larger legal battle surrounding the case and the story of the local activists who pressed for change, Hustwit offers an innovative, well-researched account of a definitive legal decision that reaches from the cotton fields of Holmes County to the chambers of the Supreme Court in Washington.

The Juke Joint King of the Mississippi Hills: The Raucous Reign of Tillman Branch

The Juke Joint King of the Mississippi Hills: The Raucous Reign of Tillman Branch PDF Author: Janice Branch Tracy
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1625849699
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
In the swamps and juke joints of Holmes County, Mississippi, Edward Tillman Branch built his empire. Tillman's clubs were legendary. Moonshine flowed as patrons enjoyed craps games and well-known blues acts. Across from his Goodman establishment, prostitutes in a trysting trailer entertained men, including the married Tillman himself. A threat to law enforcement and anyone who crossed his path, Branch rose from modest beginnings to become the ruler of a treacherous kingdom in the hills that became his own end. Author Janice Branch Tracy reveals the man behind the story and the path that led him to become what Honeyboy Edwards referred to in his autobiography as the "baddest white man in Mississippi."

Southern Studies

Southern Studies PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Southern States
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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Book Description
An interdisciplinary journal of the South.

The Jim Crow Routine

The Jim Crow Routine PDF Author: Stephen A. Berrey
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469620944
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
The South's system of Jim Crow racial oppression is usually understood in terms of legal segregation that mandated the separation of white and black Americans. Yet, as Stephen A. Berrey shows, it was also a high-stakes drama that played out in the routines of everyday life, where blacks and whites regularly interacted on sidewalks and buses and in businesses and homes. Every day, individuals made, unmade, and remade Jim Crow in how they played their racial roles--how they moved, talked, even gestured. The highly visible but often subtle nature of these interactions constituted the Jim Crow routine. In this study of Mississippi race relations in the final decades of the Jim Crow era, Berrey argues that daily interactions between blacks and whites are central to understanding segregation and the racial system that followed it. Berrey shows how civil rights activism, African Americans' refusal to follow the Jim Crow script, and national perceptions of southern race relations led Mississippi segregationists to change tactics. No longer able to rely on the earlier routines, whites turned instead to less visible but equally insidious practices of violence, surveillance, and policing, rooted in a racially coded language of law and order. Reflecting broader national transformations, these practices laid the groundwork for a new era marked by black criminalization, mass incarceration, and a growing police presence in everyday life.