Birddogs and Tough Old Broads: Women Journalists of Mississippi and a Century of State Politics, 1880s-1980s (Women in American Political History) 1498582451, 9781498582452

Citation preview

Birddogs and Tough Old Broads

WOMEN IN AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY Series Editors: Pam Parry and David R. Davies Advisory Board: Maurine Beasley, Barbara G. Friedman, Karla K. Gower, Janice Hume, Margot Opdycke Lamme, and Jane Marcellus Women in American Political History focuses on influential women throughout the history of American politics. From the Colonial period through the Founding up to the present, women often have played significant and meaningful roles in politics, both directly and indirectly. Many of their contributions have been overlooked. This interdisciplinary series seeks to advance the dialogue concerning the role of women in politics in America and highlight their various contributions, including women who were elected and appointed to office and those who have wielded political power behind the scenes, such as first ladies, journalists, activists, and public relations practitioners. The series welcomes contributions from all methodologies and disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. Titles in the Series Birddogs and Tough Old Broads: Women Journalists of Mississippi and a Century of State Politics, 1880s–1980s By Pete Smith Vivian Castleberry: Challenging the Traditions of Women’s Roles, Newspaper Content, and Community Politics By Kimberly Wilmot Voss Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice, Edited by Lori Amber Roessner and Jodi L. Rightler-Mcdaniels Women Politicking Politely: Advancing Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s By Kimberly Wilmot Voss Ruby A. Black: Eleanor Roosevelt, Puerto Rico, and Political Journalism in Washington By Maurine H. Beasley Gendered Politics: Campaign Strategies of California Women Candidates, 1912– 1970 By Linda Van Ingen Press Portrayals of Women Politicians, 1870s–2000s: From “Lunatic” Woodhull to “Polarizing” Palin By Teri Finneman

Birddogs and Tough Old Broads Women Journalists of Mississippi and a Century of State Politics, 1880s–1980s Pete Smith

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Smith, Pete, 1970- author.  Title: Birddogs and tough old broads : women journalists of Mississippi and a century of state politics, 1880s-1980s / Pete Smith.  Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2023. | Series: Women in American political history | Includes bibliographical references and index. |  Summary: “Birddogs and Tough Old Broads: Women Journalists of Mississippi and a Century of State Politics, 1880s-1980s documents the experiences of women journalists covering Mississippi state politics over the course of a century. The evolution of the modern-day political journalist, particularly for southern women, can be seen in their struggles and accomplishments” —Provided by publisher.  Identifiers: LCCN 2023034705 (print) | LCCN 2023034706 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498582452 (cloth) | ISBN 9781498582469 (epub) | ISBN 9781498582476 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Women journalists—Mississippi— History—20th century. | Women in journalism—Mississippi—History—20th century. | Press and politics—Mississippi—History—20th century. | American newspapers— Mississippi—History—20th century. Classification: LCC PN4784.W7 S55 2023 (print) | LCC PN4784.W7 (ebook) | DDC 071.309922—dc23/eng/20230821 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034705LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc. gov/2023034706 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To the strong women who raised me—birddogs and tough old broads, all of them

Contents

Acknowledgements ix Introduction: “Larger Than Life”



1

Chapter 1: “My Own Beloved Land”



25

Chapter 2: “If This Is Treason, Make the Most of It” Chapter 3: “Raising Unshirted Hell”



51



Chapter 4: “Wrongdoing Uncovering”

103

139

Chapter 5: “A Kick-Ass Fun Time”



175

Chapter 6: “All Hell Broke Loose”



217

Chapter 7: “Go Get the Story”



265

Chapter 8: “I Think You Could Do This”



Conclusion: “There Is No Educator to Compare with the Press” Bibliography

303

329

343

Index 385 About the Author 405

vii

Acknowledgements

The goal of this book is to document the professional experiences and observations of more than a dozen journalists, all women, all covering Mississippi state politics over the course of a century—from the 1880s, right after the end of Reconstruction (when newspapers were the primary source of information) to the 1980s, a time period marked by both steady declines in news revenue and circulation and the emergence of corporate journalism, led by media conglomerates like Gannett. That Mississippi is at the center of this story is no accident. I’m a native of the state—my roots go back several generations on both sides (to the mid-nineteenth century)—and I know the history of this state, both the dark and the light, as well as anyone. The place often referred to as a “closed society” by both historians and journalists is a rich source of information about the intersection (“clash” may be a better word) between politics and journalism. The academic and popular literature abounds with stories about the history of the state, too, particularly the role its people played in the bloody fight for and against social and legal change during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras. This book offers that history but from the perspective of women journalists who recorded their observations and opinions on those and other matters of state importance—and I would have never finished it without the people I name in the following paragraphs. First, I want to acknowledge the women journalists I interviewed, all of whom patiently answered questions by phone, video, and email; a couple were reluctant at first—as journalists, they felt uncomfortable at the thought of being the subject of the story—but they came around and this book is much better because of their participation. To Nancy (Campbell) Albritton, Ronni (Patriquin) Clark, Ellen Ann Fentress, Jo Ann Klein, Johanna Neuman, Elaine Povich, Nancy Stevens, and Nancy (Weaver) Teichert, I want to express my deep appreciation for sharing their experiences with me, and now, with readers. I hope the book accurately captures your work and that you’re pleased with the results. ix

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I also want to thank my many friends and colleagues, particularly those in the Department of Communication and the College of Arts & Sciences at Mississippi State University, for their continued encouragement of this book and my research in general—they listened as I talked ad nauseum about this project, both its highs and its lows. And, I would be remiss if I failed to mention my students, who sat through countless tangents about this book and never failed to indulge my classroom shenanigans. I dedicated this book to “the strong women who raised me,” but this book is also for my students. They keep me young, and I’m a better person for the experience. I started this book during the 2017–2018 academic year, and I honestly did not know if I would finish it. The pandemic certainly didn’t help, and neither did the fact that I kept expanding the timeline in both directions. Many thanks to my editors, Drs. David R. Davies and Pam Parry, who never gave up on me or this story. They loved the idea from the minute I pitched it, and they never wavered in the belief that I could finish it and that it would be good. Thank you to Sara Noakes, associate acquisitions editor at Lexington Books, for her words of encouragement and positive emails as I wrote and edited the book in its final stages. This book would not have been completed without a much-needed fellowship awarded by MSU’s Institute for the Humanities during the spring 2022 semester. I want to thank Director Julia Osman, associate professor of history, and my “fellow Fellow” associate professor of history Alexandra Hui, for their helpful feedback of my manuscript and for their thoughtful remarks during our weekly meetings. This fellowship gave me the time and space I needed to finish the book, and I’m grateful to the Institute and the MSU College of Arts & Sciences for funding and supporting it. And, finally, I want to tell my family—my parents, Sara and Bob Dampeer; my sisters, Carol Smith Mayfield and Kelly Smith Hassell; and their children, Allie Stephens, Addison Mayfield, and Sarah McClain Hassell—how much I love them and how much I appreciate their unconditional love and support.

Introduction “Larger Than Life”

Journalist Ellen Ann Fentress remembers the first time she met Norma Fields, in the early 1980s, and the initial impression the longtime state capitol correspondent made on the young reporter. “She was larger than life,” Fentress said of Fields.1 Fields walked into the Jackson, Mississippi, office of the Capitol Reporter—a small weekly newspaper published within a stone’s throw of the Mississippi state capitol building—where Fentress, the Reporter’s newest hire by just a few months, greeted her eagerly.2 Fields was there to meet publisher and editor W. F. “Bill” Minor, whose column, “Eyes on Mississippi,” was a must-read for anyone wanting to know the goings-on at the Mississippi statehouse. The two were headed to the funeral of former hospital administrator Walter Dyer Smith, the husband of Hazel Brannon Smith, who, decades earlier, made her own mark as a publisher and journalist with her punch-in-the-gut critiques of Mississippi Jim Crow.3 Fields considered Smith a friend and admired her work, including her persistent attacks on the Holmes County Citizens’ Council in the pages of her newspaper, the Lexington Advertiser. “There are stories I wish I had written,” Fields said when asked to reflect back on her own career. “I wish I had taken time, some time, to drive up to Lexington and interview Hazel Brannon Smith, and I never did that and she died.”4 Before their first meeting, Fentress certainly knew who Fields was and admired her work—almost every journalist in the state knew Fields by either name or reputation, or both—but to meet her in person was something else. “To me, Norma was mid-twentieth century America,” Fentress said, “because every event that was happening in Norma’s career was happening to women overall.”5 At the time of their first meeting, Fentress and Fields were at opposite ends of the professional spectrum—one just arriving, the other, about to make her exit. Fentress had just graduated from Mississippi College, a small Baptist college located in nearby Clinton, and the job at the Reporter was her first.6 Fields, on the other hand, was a seasoned correspondent—a “tough old broad” as former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards once remarked 1

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to Mississippi Governor Cliff Finch after watching her at one press conference—who was just a few years short of retirement.7 Her career began in 1964, when Harry Rutherford, editor-in-chief of what was then called the Tupelo Daily Journal, hired her as a part-time stringer. She spent eight years covering some fourteen counties in northeast Mississippi before her promotion to part-time capitol correspondent in 1972. Rutherford named Fields the paper’s full-time capitol correspondent four years later, and she remained there until her retirement in 1988. In a full-time career that spanned over two decades, Fields exposed corruption in the Mississippi Highway Commission (now the Mississippi Department of Transportation) and brought to light several other problems of statewide importance.8 “When she was sent down to cover the state Capitol for the Journal, I, as correspondent for The Times-Picayune and unofficial ‘dean’ of statehouse reporters, was grateful to have her on board to birddog such agencies as the State Highway Commission,” Minor said. “The shenanigans of the highway gang became her passion and there’s no telling how much she saved taxpayers by catching things such as change orders or overruns on highway contracts.”9 Fields and Fentress had much in common, to be sure—both were lovers of the written word, part of what Fentress called a “southern storytelling tradition.”10 As full-time state capitol correspondents, they brought to bear issues that were otherwise marginalized or ignored altogether, including the women’s movement and domestic violence, and did so with a sense of urgency and passion defined by their familial histories and Southern roots. Both were native daughters who came from modest backgrounds—Fentress, the only child of older parents whose family called the rural Mississippi Delta home, and Fields, a native of New Albany, a small town in the northeast corner of the state, whose extended family owned farmland just outside of town.11 Both were raised to believe in and practice the basic principles of Christianity and were acutely sensitive to how those teachings played out against the social and racial injustices of the Jim Crow and civil rights eras— and Mississippi’s sorry place in both. “There was something about it, even as a young child, being like five or six years old, that I didn’t understand,” Fentress said in explaining the contradictions between the Christian principles taught by the adults around her and the racism she witnessed. “What was this blind spot? Why are we learning the words, ‘Jesus loves red and yellow, black and white’? It certainly wasn’t practiced, you know, by the adults in Mississippi.”12 Fields and Fentress used journalism, in part, as a means to explore and explain those contradictions. Both were fierce protectors of, and believers in, the First Amendment and its power to bring truth to the people. Their dedication to journalism, however, flew in the face of the expectations of Southern womanhood. Those expectations defined Southern (white) women,

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with exception, as modest and passive and dictated that their primary tasks include the rearing of children and the promise to “love, honor, obey” their husbands.13 Southern women were made, in other words, to be seen, not heard. “A woman is not supposed to have strong opinions,” Fields said. “As southern women, we’ve been taught from birth that we do not speak out in public.”14 They both came to journalism by rather unconventional routes—Fentress, a French major in college who had little professional experience as a journalist before talking Minor into giving her a chance, and Fields, who spent almost two decades as a wife and mother before landing her first assignment at age forty.15 Their careers would anchor a time period spanning almost two decades, from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, when they and several other women would challenge the patriarchal culture of state politics: Nancy (Yates) Stevens, who worked for The Clarksdale Press-Register, the McComb Enterprise-Journal, The Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, and the Commonwealth in neighboring Greenwood; Nancy Campbell (Albritton), who worked for the Daily Herald out of Biloxi and then the UPI news service; Elaine Povich, who replaced Campbell at UPI; and Ronni Patriquin (Clark), JoAnn Klein, Johanna Neuman, and Nancy Weaver (Teichert), all of The Clarion-Ledger, the state’s largest daily.16 That challenge would come in two forms. First, these women would go toe-to-toe with their male counterparts for “scoops” on the business and politics of the state government, thus defying newsroom seniority and male prerogative and contradicting longstanding stereotypes of women’s place in journalism. They would also investigate and report on topics that would enlighten readers to the political and social realties of the day, issues that in years past had gone unreported and acknowledged by many political leaders and journalists. Nancy Stevens graduated from the Mississippi State College for Women (MSCW) in Columbus with a degree in journalism and soon took a job as a general assignment reporter (writing feature stories and covering the city hall beat) and proofreader at the Press-Register in the Mississippi Delta town of Clarksdale. After a couple of years, she moved to Jackson to work as a general assignment reporter for the city’s afternoon paper, the Jackson Daily News, owned by the Hederman family (who also owned The Clarion-Ledger, the city’s morning edition).17 In the year she worked at the Daily News, she attempted to put much of her focus and free time on local feature stories with civil rights and the women’s movement angles—much to the detriment of her livelihood—including stories involving longtime state civil rights leader Aaron Henry and Rims Barber, a Chicago Presbyterian minister who moved to Mississippi to join the movement during the 1964 Freedom Summer.18 “The leaders of those groups would contact me directly by my newsroom desk phone about special events or meetings they were having and wanted me

4

Introduction

to cover, if possible,” Stevens recalled. “At one point I rode in a bus of civil rights workers headed to a rally as I recall, and I returned the next morning and wrote about it on the old bulky typewriters we reporters used.”19 Her bosses at the Daily News fired Stevens from the Daily News for insubordination, but she suspected otherwise. “I am positive that I was fired as a result of my reporting . . . which was no doubt too ‘liberal’ for the Hederman family newspapers,” she said.20 A few days later, she walked through the doors of the Jackson offices of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC) and registered a complaint against the Daily News— one of countless many that would be filed by women journalists in the early 1970s—possibly the first of its kind in the state of Mississippi.21 As the EEOC sorted out her case, Stevens embarked on a freelance career that included time at the Enterprise-Journal in McComb and two papers in the Mississippi Delta, the Commonwealth and The Delta Democrat-Times. She returned to the Press Register as well—a total of four newspapers over a six-year period. As the state capitol reporter representing readers of all four, Stevens reported on important issues like voter accountability in the state legislature, among other “wrongdoings” (as she put it) that she observed on the state capitol beat. “You can’t be a shrinking violet and be a solid reporter,” Stevens said.22 Reporters Nancy Campbell and Elaine Povich were no shrinking violets. Like many of her generation, Campbell—born in New Orleans but raised on the Mississippi Gulf Coast—came to journalism during the turbulent 1960s; as a student at the University of Mississippi beginning in 1967, she studied journalism and government and French, with hopes of making her mark in international journalism.23 The scars from campus riots of the early 1960s were still fresh, but the University of Mississippi was exactly where Campbell needed to be to witness the intersection of journalism and social change. She eventually transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, where she completed her degree in journalism and began a career that would include investigations of inmate abuse and neglect at the Mississippi State Penitentiary (“Parchman Farm”)—a state penal farm built on a former Mississippi Delta slave plantation.24 Elaine Povich came to the UPI from Bath, Maine. A Cornell University English major, she later claimed to spend more time at the student newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun, than anywhere else on campus.25 “I was hooked from the moment I set foot in the Sun’s newsroom,” Povich said.26 Inspired by her experiences as a student journalist, and by the events of Watergate, she arrived at the UPI’s Jackson bureau in 1975.27 Once in Mississippi, though, she discovered a steep cultural learning curve. “I was so young,” she said. “I also was a ‘Yankee’ who had never set foot in Mississippi prior to [1975].”28 Indeed, Povich discovered that even the slightest cultural difference could put her at a professional disadvantage. “I had to learn how to

Introduction

5

pronounce ‘Biloxi’ (like Lux liquid not like lox and bagels) and that Calvary Baptist [Church] was a thing (not cavalry),” she said.29 Both she and Campbell settled into their positions with the help of bureau chief Andy Reese, who had but two expectations for his reporters: that they be qualified and available.30 “I truly thrived there. Of course, it was a different time, and viewed by today’s lens, there was a lot of sexism.”31 The sexism on the state capitol beat came in different forms and occurred in various degrees. The comments or behaviors were often rather benign (but no less demeaning and annoying), as when state legislators, during interviews, called Fentress “little lady,” and, according to Fentress, “saw themselves as being polite to do so.”32 Or, the sexism took on a much more aggressive tone, as when one legislator, angry over one of Fields’s stories, threatened to “punch her out.”33 Even the design of state capitol building, constructed in 1903, suggested male prerogative and position, as any woman discovered when looking for the restroom before realizing it had been placed in what Fentress called the most “far-flung locations” of the building.34 Andy Reese was no progressive, to be sure, especially in regard to women’s rights—in fact, he was more than a little reluctant to hire Campbell, or any woman for that matter—but he always treated her and Povich with fairness and an even hand. As persistent as sexism was (and is) in Mississippi politics and on the state capitol beat, there were men, like Reese and Clarion-Ledger city editor Rea Hederman, who did their best to create work environments where women reporters (and, by extension, all reporters) could do their best work. Under the control of the first two generations of Hedermans—which included brothers Robert (“Bert”) and Thomas (“Tom”), and their sons, Robert Jr. (Bob) and Tom Jr.—both The Clarion-Ledger and the Daily News, between the 1920s and early 1970s, had been little more than a mouthpiece for the state’s Jim Crow system. This system included the state’s Citizens’ Councils, an open, statewide network of white, well-to-do community leaders, who, in the shadow of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, organized in the 1950s for one goal: to maintain white supremacy, what was causally referred to in Council literature as “states’ rights and racial integrity.”35 For much of the twentieth century, the Hederman family used their media interests—which, by midcentury, also included numerous small-town Mississippi papers and a Jackson TV station—and the power they welded from the pews of the First Baptist Church in Jackson, the city’s largest and most affluent place of worship, to show their unwavering support of white supremacy and the Jim Crow laws used to maintain it.36 “Washington is Clean Again with Negro Trash Removed,” read The Clarion-Ledger front page headline the day after the historic March on Washington.37 “They were Bible-quotin,’ Bible-totin’ racists,” Minor said of the Hederman family.38

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Introduction

Bob’s son Rea eventually joined the family business as Clarion-Ledger city editor, but he resented his family’s political and social views. After leaving the state for college, he came back home and took over a family-owned paper in Canton, just north of the Jackson city limits. He stayed there until 1973,39 when the family summoned him back to Jackson to help run The Clarion-Ledger. The second generation of Hedermans, Bob and Tom, was set to retire, and it was time for the third generation to take over the family business.40 Almost immediately, Rea made significant, dramatic changes to the paper. He insisted on using his own staff to cover the city hall and state capitol beats, thus ending the longstanding Hederman practice of running press releases or quoting the wire services verbatim when reporting on government business. The paper published more stories of social and legal importance—investigations of police brutality, for instance, as well as pieces on rural poverty, public education, and the state criminal justice system.41 Hederman also brought in more editors, increasing the overall staff from sixteen to over a hundred, and hiring a group of promising young journalists, many of them from places far removed from Mississippi.42 The staff became known around town as “Rea’s outside agitators.”43 “He was the first Hederman to actually write. The others never wrote a line,” Minor said in a 2011 story for the Jackson Free Press that focused on The Clarion-Ledger. “He revolutionized the coverage. They didn’t know what they had turned loose.”44 Veronica (“Ronni”) Patriquin (Clark) was one of Hederman’s first hires, in 1974, and as such, she represented the beginning of an important era in the history of The Clarion-Ledger. Raised in Monroe, Louisiana, Patriquin spent her summers with her maternal grandparents in Tupelo.45 She was not only familiar with the state, but she brought a wealth of experience with her to the paper. Before moving to Jackson, Patriquin worked for two Monroe newspapers, the News Star and the Morning World, before taking a job with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. By the time she arrived at The Clarion-Ledger, she had covered everything from sports to society for the “women’s pages” and was eager for more substantial stories.46 While at The Clarion-Ledger, Patriquin reported on a broad range of issues—from state teacher raises (or lack thereof) and healthcare to state income taxes and tax breaks. Like Campbell, her coverage of Parchman Farm is still a source of pride, as it helped lead to the firing of Parchman administrator Jack Reed and to some state-led prison reforms.47 In just two years, Patriquin became a reliable source for readers while helping to repair The Clarion-Ledger’s tattered image. “It was an exciting time to be there,” she said.48

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Reporter Johanna Neuman was a self-proclaimed outsider—indicative of the type of journalist Hederman wanted and needed for his (re)vision of The Clarion-Ledger. She was a tough, experienced reporter who brought a sense of honesty and professionalism to state political coverage—characteristics that any decent reporter should have but was in short supply among the old guard at the paper. Even so, she admitted to being out of sorts at first, “nervously looking over my shoulder to see who was following me,” she later said, as she drove across the Mississippi state line headed toward Jackson.49 Born in Los Angeles, Neuman attended Berkeley and the University of Southern California, where she received, respectively, a bachelor’s degree in communications and public policy and a master’s degree in journalism.50 She then edited copy for the Evening Outlook in Santa Monica before taking a job in 1973 covering the city hall beat for the Los Angeles Daily Journal. In 1975, she moved to Sacramento to cover the state capitol for the Journal, including the first term of Governor Jerry Brown.51 Inspired by the work of Southern journalists like Curtis Wilkie, Neuman decided three years later to head that direction to look for work.52 She interviewed in North Carolina but ended up in Mississippi after hearing through a contact at The Sacramento Bee that “a newspaper [there] was trying to turn itself around from a racist past to something better.”53 Her interview with Rea Hederman ran the gamut, from her favorite books to the rumor that Governor Cliff Finch’s recent bout with appendicitis was actually a gunshot wound suffered at the hands of his wife, Zelma, who recently confronted him about an extramarital affair.54 “I’ve been wanting someone to follow-up on that rumor,” Hederman told Neuman.55 JoAnn Klein came to The Clarion-Ledger in the mid-1970s, just as Hederman’s renovation was in full swing. A native of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Klein spent her youth bouncing around coastal towns in both Alabama and Florida. She graduated from Pensacola High School in 1967, and enrolled at The University of Southern Mississippi to study journalism.56 Writing came natural to her, as she discovered in the sixth grade. “I helped begin a school paper and was on paper staffs at every level of school,” she said.57 She took a job with the Jackson Daily News after graduation but didn’t stay long.58 She then worked for both the Daily Herald (in the Biloxi–Gulfport area) and the Montgomery (AL) Advertiser as a general assignment reporter before heading back to Jackson in the mid-1970s to The Clarion-Ledger.59 Between 1976–1980, Klein covered several political issues of statewide importance, including what became known as the “sixteenth section land reform”—one of the most contentious legislative debates of the modern era.60 As a requirement of statehood, both Mississippi and Alabama were obligated to set aside land, the sixteenth section in each town, to support public education. The land could not be sold or used for private purposes, as directed by the Continental

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Congress Ordinance of 1787 and several subsequent federal acts in 1803 and 1806.61 Section 211 of the Mississippi Constitution of 1890 also prohibited the sale of sixteenth section lands.62 To be sure, “instances of neglect and abuse of the land trust” started even before statehood; in the 1970s, the state legislature set out to debate reform measures, with Klein closely following and reporting on those debates.63 Hederman also hired Nancy Weaver, but her tenure with The Clarion-Ledger hit its stride just as his fractured. She did not cover the state capitol beat, but Weaver was in the early stages of an important story on public education reform—one in which Hederman initiated—when he suddenly left town.64 “He just vanished,” a friend told Wilkie, as recorded in Wilkie’s memoir, Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Historic Events That Shaped the Modern South. “There was no farewell, nothing.”65 For all of the paper’s success, Rea Hederman spent as much time and energy fighting his family over the changes he made than actually managing the changes—at least near and at the end of his tenure. Over time, those Hederman family battles took their toll on both Rea and his staff—he admitted to “[losing] a lot of blood” from constantly defending his editorial decisions, and personal life choices, to the family—while many of The Clarion-Ledger staff grew tiresome and mistrustful of the situation.66 Rea lost control of the paper, along with his marriage; in fact, the reason the Hedermans eventually ran him out of town, observers noted, had more to do with his extramarital affair and the break-up of his marriage than his editorial decisions. The family then sold both The Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News to Gannett, disgusted by the perceived scandal and its possible fallout.67 Many Clarion-Ledger reporters jumped ship before the sale went through, while others left before that, exhausted and frustrated that, near the end, they thought that Rea spent more time fighting with his family than running the paper.68 Nancy Weaver, however, stayed; she refused to let the behind-the-scenes turmoil get under her skin, and she had a story to finish— one that they hoped Gannett didn’t kill before the ink was dry on the bill of sale. “We were terrified,” Weaver told The Washington Post in 1983. “We talked about rushing it to print before the Gannett people got here.”69 That story, over a year in the making, would win the paper its first (and only) Pulitzer Prize.70 Hederman originally assigned Weaver and reporter Fred Anklam to examine the state of Mississippi public education; he envisioned a broad series supporting Governor William Winter’s hard push for education reform, which started in 1980, with the series covering such items as teacher pay, federal funding, local school revenues, and the effects of desegregation on state public education.71 To most everyone’s surprise, Gannett not only supported the story, but new editor Charles Overby decided to run the story just prior to the November 1982 legislative session. He

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also increased coverage when the debate in the state legislature intensified.72 Weaver remained concerned about the perceived bias of the timing, but the series meant widespread support for Winter’s measure’s nonetheless.73 “[The coverage] moved public education to the top of the public conversation,” Winter recalled. “It created a new set of priorities for the people and the legislature that still exist.”74 During their respective tenures at The Clarion-Ledger, Patriquin, Klein, Neuman, and Weaver would play a significant role in redefining coverage of state political issues. Of course, they did not get to define or choose most, if not all, of the issues and stories they covered—working a particular beat means investigating what’s in front of you, as defined by your presence around the people and issues that matter in that moment. However, the journalists in question did determine how they covered a story, and, when given a chance, made critical decisions on what ledes to chase (that otherwise might have been overlooked or ignored by their male counterparts). By the early 1990s, they, along with Stevens and Fields, had moved on to other professional opportunities or other phases of life. However, they left a lasting impact on news coverage in Mississippi and left a legacy of future women journalists in their wake. This book will tell their stories, including several chapters, 3 through 8, that will document their career struggles and accomplishments, the topics they investigated, and the political, social, and ideological circumstances in which they worked. This analysis will be part of a larger discussion of the role that journalism plays in the state political process and the role of women journalists in covering local and state politics in the modern age. Doing so begs many questions: What circumstances drew these women to journalism? What topics and issues did they cover? How did their reporting contribute to or shape public policy, or at least the discussion of local and state political issues? What influence, if any, did their presence in and around state government offices have on the perceptions of women journalists and the image of Southern womanhood—particularly the stereotypical, sexist perceptions held by many (if not most) members of state government? Recording the professional experiences of these journalists necessitates considering those who worked with, for, and against them. Those names include men who would assist and promote their work without those efforts coming across as patronizing or paternalistic. “The skills I learned from [Andy] have carried me the rest of my career. I covered Congress for decades and was the lead budget reporter for UPI, the Chicago Tribune, and Newsday,” Povich said.75 Reese, Hederman, and Minor, in particular, are important supporting characters in this story. As an elder statesman in Mississippi journalism, and as a longstanding agitator to those in power, particularly those who supported racial segregation, Bill Minor embodied the ideal characteristics of

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a first-rate American journalist: a strong sense of justice and equality and the wherewithal to publish his opinions with little regard to the consequences. Minor’s influence and his own work during his decades-long tenure covering Mississippi state politics, then, is due special consideration. A portion of the book’s timeline includes numerous state election cycles. Accordingly, the rising political careers of a (very) few women, including Lenore Prather, the first woman appointed to the Mississippi Supreme Court, will be given attention, as these careers mirrored important and similar turning points in the lives and careers of the journalists profiled in this book. Evelyn Gandy, Mississippi’s first woman lieutenant governor (1976–1980), will figure into the story as well. In fact, Gandy’s career is of particular importance, given the significance of her election and the time period in which it took place. As Mississippi (and the nation) debated the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), its voters elected a woman to one of the state’s highest posts. At the same time, a number of women covered that election, Gandy’s term in office, and her two failed attempts at securing the Democratic nomination for governor—the first in 1979, and the second, four years later. Did they see their own struggles in Gandy’s rise to power? That a woman should win state election in a Deep South state while several women covered state politics may be surprising. The last half of the twentieth century, to be sure, represented a period of significant change across many social, legal, and political fronts, including a swift rise in support of the ERA and other feminist causes, particularly among middle-class, affluent white women. This book will address the coverage and political debate surrounding the ERA and the second wave feminist movement in general, given that the movement had political implications for many professional women’s struggles and accomplishments. In an interview given just short of her retirement, Fields noted the significance of the second wave feminist movement and her place in it. “I’ve been adopted by the women’s movement as much as I’ve adopted it,” she said. “I didn’t come into this business as a feminist. I will go out of it as a feminist.”76 As the first woman journalist to cover the state capitol beat full-time, Fields is a central figure of the book; having the burden of being one of the “firsts” on her shoulders was a heavy one to be sure, but she became a steady and powerful figure that the other women on the capitol beat couldn’t help but notice. Fields’s arrival in Jackson in 1972 was an historic moment in state journalism and political history, and her retirement almost two decades later marked the end of one of the most interesting eras in the history of both. Accordingly, Fields’s place in that timeline will be given due attention in the book’s third chapter. Chapter 4 will analyze the career of Nancy Stevens, including her short and turbulent tenure at the Daily News and her groundbreaking lawsuit against the

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paper. A discussion of her decade long career as a freelance journalist will follow, including the state political issues she covered, some of the papers that employed her, and the other challenges she faced. Nancy Campbell and Elaine Povich, who covered Mississippi politics for UPI in the early and mid-1970s, will be given proper attention in chapter 5—including their adventures chasing stories at local watering holes like the George Street Grocery and the Patio Bar at the Sun-n-Sand Motor Hotel. Their recollections helped flesh out an important part of the state’s political and cultural history, as both establishments, and the lawmakers and journalists who frequented them, figure prominently into the business of state lobbying and legislation. “There was no social media and no 24-hour news cycle. Cable TV was still developing. Newspapers were strong. Talk radio was no force at all in Mississippi in that era,” longtime journalist Sid Slater wrote in 2019. “For about 40 years, the Sun-n-Sand was the epicenter of Mississippi government, politics, and lobbying.”77 Not long after Nancy Stevens abruptly left the Jackson Daily News, at least four women joined its sister publication and helped bring it, and many issues of state importance, into the light. Chapters 6 and 7 will bring their careers forward, including the role that Ronni Patriquin, Johanna Neuman, JoAnn Klein, and Nancy Weaver played in the emergence of The Clarion-Ledger as a credible observer of Mississippi political issues. The Hederman family conflict is an interesting and essential backstory that will be revealed in those chapters as well. Chapter 8 will examine Ellen Fentress’s career, including her life choices—from full-time journalist to full-time mother and back again—and her aforementioned relationship with Minor and his role in shaping her career. This chapter also will circle back around to Fields and examine the final years of her career. Her status as a senior political journalist will be highlighted, especially in light of the continued obstacles she faced. Fields’s relationship with Fentress will be discussed as well, as both women were the only reporters at the time covering the capitol beat year round (as the rest only covered the state legislature during its yearly session), so they got to know each other better than most of the other women on the beat. They also both struggled with important career and personal decisions during this time. They formed a tight bond as a result, one that deserves exploration. Fields, Stevens, Patriquin, Neuman, Klein, Weaver, Campbell, Povich, and Fentress were not the only women journalists who covered the Mississippi state political issues and goings-on during the latter half of the twentieth century, a period of time considered to be among the most important and interesting political eras in the state’s history. Others were asked to participate in this project but either declined, as they were uncomfortable being the subject of study, or because their professional and personal commitments would

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not allow them time to participate. A small list of other names could not be located or had passed away since their retirement, and a substantial enough record (in the form of personal papers, archival documents, or other primary and secondary sources) of their careers, at least outside of the articles they published, could not be gathered to warrant a thorough investigation. Still others may have been missed or overlooked, but I hope they know that their omission was not intentional. This final list of women journalists who covered the state capitol during the late twentieth century, then, is not meant to be an exhaustive one; rather, it is a representative sample of the women who walked the Mississippi capitol beat (or otherwise covered issues of state importance), and, accordingly, their experiences are symbolic of the larger group. Fields considered the 1970s and 1980s as the “golden years of Mississippi journalism” because of the “hotly competitive” nature of the reporters who covered state politics.78 To be sure, the patriarchal culture that defined Mississippi politics was much more challenging, even combative, than her statement reveals. The time period that Fields referred to includes a collection of social, political, and professional circumstances navigated by several women who, along the way, invaded hostile territory. The evolution of the modern day political journalist, particularly for young Southern women who aspire to such a position, starts with the experiences of these women. Previous scholarship on the subject reveals that many of the contributions of women to twentieth-century journalism have been limited, for the most part, to the women’s pages—the section of the newspaper that covered the “four Fs” (food, family, fashion, and furnishings).79 Beginning in the mid to late twentieth century, women journalists and editors attempted to expand, with some success, the scope of the women’s pages beyond the four Fs. Editors Vivian Castleberry and Dorothy Jurney are two such examples. According to journalism historian Kimberly Wilmot Voss, both Castleberry and Jurney remade the women’s pages of their respective newspapers into sections that would speak to the experiences and struggles of modern working women and those from marginalized communities. Castleberry, women’s pages editor for the Dallas Times Herald, addressed domestic violence and pay inequity, among other concerns;80 Jurney, women’s page editor at the Miami Herald, and later, the Detroit Free Press, focused on issues affecting underprivileged communities, such as inadequate housing.81 At the same time, women journalists and editors also endeavored to report more “hard news” issues (e.g., politics, the economy, crime) and find their byline on the front page—or at least in sections other than those labeled as “society.” Their attempts to advance their careers were met with disdain, if not outright resistance, by the men who supervised them. The career of Carol Sutton, the first woman to be named a managing editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal, spanned three decades.82 However, difficult circumstances

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defined her tenure according to Voss; upper management constantly scrutinized Sutton’s management style, including her choice of stories for the front page.83 As political correspondents, women journalists and editors faced blatant discrimination, and they had to work around the limitations placed upon them. Journalism historian Liz Watts’s research reveals that the first women hired by the Associated Press—Ethel Hasley, Margaret Buchanan, and Sallie Pickett—to staff their Washington and New York bureaus were only there to cover women athletes or the wives of politicians but never, in her words, “the most important assignments.”84 Decades later, many women who covered national politics were still relegated to so-called women’s angle. For instance, Associated Press reporter Ruth Cowan, according to journalism historian Linda Lumsden, covered First Lady Mamie Eisenhower while working in a political environment that remained hostile to women.85 To be sure, journalism historian Maurine Beasley’s research points to a number of women who, in the mid to late twentieth century, pushed back against the cultural hegemony that underappreciated women’s contributions to journalism and politics. Those names include Katherine Graham, publisher of The Washington Post; Helen Thomas, the first woman member of the National Press Club; Ethel Payne, who covered Washington for The Chicago Defender; and Marianne Means, political columnist for Kings Features syndicate.86 One goal of this book is to add to the existing research regarding women’s contributions to twentieth-century journalism, which has omitted the experiences of women state capitol and political reporters. To better appreciate their experiences, however, we must first dig even deeper into history of Mississippi journalism and politics, all the way back to the late 1880s and then forward through the middle part of the twentieth century, just before the arrival of Norma Fields to the Mississippi state capitol in the early 1970s. Chapters 1 and 2 will explore this timeline and the careers of three women whose efforts had less to do with reporting the truth and more to do with “work[ing] on a political landscape” to help maintain the Southern white hegemony of the late nineteenth century and early to mid-twentieth century.87 In that regard, the careers of Kate Markham Power, Florence Sillers Ogden, and Mary Dawson Cain offer an interesting and sharp contrast— politically, socially, and professionally—to the young “birddogs” who would follow behind generations later. Journalist and editor Kate Power, a member of one of Mississippi’s most influential nineteenth-century families—her father, J. L. Power, served as the cofounder and an editor of The Daily Clarion, a precursor to The Clarion-Ledger, before his election to secretary of state in 1890s—was the first woman journalist in the state to cover local and state politics. In the

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postbellum era, she used that position, and her family name, to champion a worldview built on the ideologies of white supremacy and Southern chivalry. Along the way, she pushed for state legislation that would benefit the state’s white, working class and underprivileged citizens and campaigned against woman suffrage, which she considered a threat to the strict ideals of Southern womanhood. Power’s career, including her style of journalism, the influence of her politics on her journalism, and her contributions to Mississippi journalism in the postbellum era, will be given attention in the first chapter. The chapter also will include an examination of her family’s political influence and its influence on state journalism. In fact, the history of The Clarion-Ledger and its sister publication, the Jackson Daily News, in the fight to sustain Jim Crow in the twentieth century can be traced in part to the legacy of J. L. Power, and his, and his daughter’s, devotion to the “Lost Cause” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The academic literature provides some details as to the career paths of nineteenth-century women journalists and editors from the Southern states. Historian Jonathan Daniel Wells documented the careers of numerous women writers of early- to mid-nineteenth-century literary periodicals, including: Sarah Hillhouse, who ran a four-page weekly, the Monitor, in northeastern Georgia; Mary Chase Barney of Baltimore, who began editing National Magazine, or Ladies’ Emporium, in the 1830s; and Caroline Gilman of Charleston, South Carolina, whose literary magazine, Southern Rose, earned her a favorable, regional reputation.88 The careers highlighted in Wells’s research foreshadows the accomplishments of the next generation of journalists and editors, Kate Power included. The women of the early nineteenth century, for instance, used their publications to advance specific political and social positions—what Wells calls “crusade journalism”—including the importance of a formal education for women, criticism of elected officials, freedom of speech and religion, and, as will be revealed here, the promotion of white supremacy.89 As this book focuses on the latter, the term “Lost Cause journalism” will be used in the next chapter to describe the work of women journalists who, like Power, believed in preserving the legacy of the Confederacy and all that it represented. Power was not alone in her beliefs, of course, or in the use of journalism to advance the Lost Cause. The career of Edith Pope, editor of the Confederate Veterans, a popular Southern regional magazine dedicated to former Confederate soldiers, represents another such example. Pope’s work on the Nashville-based magazine is notable for her efforts to “embrace change in order to attract a younger and more contemporary southern readership,” but her deep, lifelong commitment to the Confederacy, and her belief in the myth of white superiority, is indicative of “a postwar southern culture that was at

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once deeply concerned with perpetuating the old order while simultaneously creating a new one,” writes John A. Simpson, author of Edith D. Pope and Her Nashville Friends: Guardians of the Lost Cause in the Confederate Veterans.90 Similarly, Power’s so-called “crusade,” as the first chapter will document, included attempts to sustain the myth of white superiority, and, by extension, her family’s lofty position in the state’s social and political power systems. At the time of Kate Power’s death in February 1946, her family had long since sold their financial interests in the paper now known as The Clarion-Ledger, but there were at least two other women, Florence Sillers Ogden and Mary Dawson Cain, who used their journalism, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, to continue Power’s work with similar missions of their own. Their efforts, in the context of the dark days of Jim Crow and the emerging civil rights movement, will be given proper attention in chapter 2. By extension, several important questions, similar to those previously mentioned, will be addressed: What circumstances drew Ogden and Cain to journalism? What professional and personal similarities (and differences) exist between Power and Ogden and Cain? What specific rhetorical strategies did Ogden and Cain use to grow and maintain their readership? How did their journalism contribute to or shape discussion of local, state, and national political issues, particularly those related to Jim Crow? Florence Sillers Ogden, a columnist whose work appeared in the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times and The Clarion-Ledger, had a statewide audience and a run of more than three decades as a voice of “the old plantation class.”91 Ogden used the politics of white, Southern womanhood to speak to and mobilize voters, white club women in particular (but also white farmers from the Mississippi Delta), who feared federal intervention and the dismantling of white Southern hegemony.92 To mobilize white men, she focused on local economic issues, like the cotton economy.93 For good measure, she framed controversial national political issues, like immigration, as local threats to the racial status quo.94 “She shifted seamlessly between working with white women in the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and powerful white male landowners in the Delta Council, an economic lobby for the region’s cotton growers,” writes historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, author of Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy.95 Ogden spoke the political language of Delta cotton farmers because she knew it so well. She was born on a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta, “a member of the rural, black belt elite;”96 Mary Dawson Cain, meanwhile, was born in timber country, “somewhere between Pike County, Mississippi, and Burke, Louisiana, in the middle of the night,” according to local historian Gordon Cotton.97 She stayed in that area of southwest Mississippi, on the

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Louisiana boarder, all of her life, buying the Summit (MS) Sun in 1936 for $250.98 For the next half century, Cain’s journalism rallied support for states’ rights and, like Ogden, railed against what she called “increased federal encroachment” on state sovereignty. To be sure, whenever Cain or any like-minded Southerner spoke of “states’ rights” and “state sovereignty,” they implied that state governments had the right to enact and enforce laws that would deny equal rights to its Black citizens—and that the federal government was an enemy force attempting to impede that so-called “rights.” Cain had a laundry list of reasons as to why she resented the federal government—she opposed everything from prohibition to court packing to, most of all, the social security tax—and the fact that she was a proud racist was at or near the top. “I am so sick and tired of this annual yakety-yak over so called civil rights,” she announced in one of her front-page columns, dated June 1964.99 Her vocal opposition to a federal antilynching bill in 1936 typified both her racist views and her resentment of the federal government. She called the proposed legislation “a vampire born of sectional hatred, sired by cheap, vote-seeking politicians from heavily populated negro districts, fostered by political judases.”100 Ogden and Cain represent a form of journalism that I call “Jim Crow journalism”—the use of persuasive rhetoric (in the form of articles and opinion pieces) to support illegal and immoral acts of racial discrimination in the mid-twentieth century. McRae most recently highlighted their work in her book, which reveals, in the author’s words, “the story of grassroots resistance to racial equality undertaken by white women.”101 There was hope for the profession, to be sure, as represented by women like publisher and editor Hazel Brannon Smith, and, not far behind her, Norma Fields. Unlike Cain and Ogden, Smith, whose career also will be examined in the second chapter, wrestled with the conflict between her belief in racial segregation and her Christianity, which included the idea that all people should be treated with decency and respect. Hers was an “unlikely heroism,” according to biographer Jan Whitt, forged from her belief in the role that a small-town editor should play in her community.102 That her ideological beliefs clashed with her religious beliefs and her ideas on the role of journalism seemed, at times, of little consequence to Smith, who owned the Lexington (MS) Advertiser and three other local newspapers around the state. “There is little doubt that Smith was conflicted about race in the South,” writes Whitt. “She argued for segregation but supported equality before the law; she could not understand how the two beliefs could be contradictory.”103 In her book, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism: Hazel Brannon Smith and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, Whitt positions Smith as a flawed figure in our cultural and political history, a woman who was not

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afraid to admit her mistakes. That she became a reluctant heroic figure during the civil rights movement, Whit argues, was the result of “her ability to change her mind, to enlarge her circle, to argue for equality—first in small steps and later in great strides.”104 Journalism historian Susan Weill agrees that Smith was unique in that way, for she was the only woman editor in the state, who, at the time, supported civil rights legislation, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and attempted to persuade her readers to give it time to work. Similarly, her editorial and public opinions of Freedom Summer and the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman made her, Weill notes, an exceptional woman among other less exceptional white women journalists and editors in the state.105 Smith’s willingness to be a voice of reason, and her brand of what Whitt calls “activist journalism” certainly influenced Fields, who, in her own career, championed the truth and the need to tell it. In turn, Fields, who used her column to voice her own brand of activism and combined that voice with the skills of an investigative reporter, inspired many women featured in this book, a generation whose practice of “enterprise journalism” reflected a standard in the field during the mid to late twentieth century; journalists (and journalists-in-training) of the era, as noted by a 2009 article in Columbia Journalism Review, “were showing increasing skepticism about pronouncements from government and other centers of power.”106 In the first half of the twentieth century, there was an unspoken trust between reporters and those in authority. By the 1960s, however, “more newspapers began to encourage ‘accountability reporting’ that often comes out of beat coverage and targets those who have power and influence in our lives—not just government bodies, but businesses and educational and cultural institutions.”107 Case in point: Fields, Stevens, Patriquin, Neuman, Klein, Weaver, Campbell, Povich, and Fentress weren’t afraid to address issues that they felt were neglected, and they were not intimidated by the idea of holding elected officials accountable—when they witnessed, for example, abuses of power or unethical or illegal conduct. Like Smith, they practiced their “activist journalism” (to use Whitt’s term) in expressing their professional opinions in weekly political columns and editorials, but their professional experiences would be further enriched through the practice of “enterprise journalism”— the cultivation of primary and secondary sources to produce news stories of consequence to readers. Smith’s influence is such that she is presented in these pages as a transitional figure—a journalist who served as a bridge between the era of “Jim Crow journalism” (and the women who practiced it) and a time in which specific political, military, and social circumstances shaped the “activist journalism” and “enterprise journalism” practiced in the mid-twentieth century (and the women who practiced it). Politics has always influenced journalism

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to some degree, and the politics and journalism of Power, Ogden, Cain, and that of the younger women journalists featured in this book could not have been more irreconcilable; as the latter generation (Fields, Stevens, Patriquin, Neuman, Klein, Weaver, Campbell, Povich, and Fentress) symbolized many of the intellectual and political philosophies of the New Left, Power, Ogden, and Cain represented the white nationalist values and racism of the postbellum and Jim Crow eras. Indeed, as chapters 1 and 2 will establish, the journalism of Kate Power, Florence Ogden, and Mary Dawson Cain helped nurture the very racist and sexist power structures that Smith, Fields, and the others would be forced to confront. Smith would be the first woman journalist in the state to confront the hypocrisies of racial segregation and the intolerable policies and practices of Jim Crow. In doing so, she walked a difficult and dangerous path for a homegrown Mississippi journalist—and did so with little to no regard for her safety. In that way, Smith’s journalism had more in common with the work of journalists like Norma Fields—who came to understand through Smith how journalism could influence social change (and vice versa)—than women closer to her own age, Ogden and Cain, specifically. What other struggles, internal or external, did Smith face? How did her journalism influence local, state, or national debate surrounding racial equality in the Jim Crow South? As important as these and other questions are to this book, it seems as if Smith was unconcerned with the answers. “I flinch every time I am called a crusading editor,” Smith once said. “But an honest editor who would truly serve the highest and best interest of the people will not compromise convictions to support a popular cause known to be morally wrong just to incur popular favor or support.”108 Kate Markham Power may have taken exception with that statement. Or, at the very least, Power’s interpretation of the phrase “highest and best interest of the people” would have been dramatically different than Smith’s. The history of women journalists in the state of Mississippi begins with Power, whose “Lost Cause journalism” represented an attempt to sustain the Old South of her childhood, among other goals. NOTES   1. Ellen Ann Fentress, interview by author, October 17, 2017 [Hereafter abbreviated “Fentress interview.”].   2. Information on Fentress taken from Fentress interview. Information about the Capitol Reporter taken from Gregory Jaynes, “Weekly Paper in Mississippi is Praised but Shuts Anyway,” New York Times, October 5, 1981, http:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/1981​ /10​/05​/us​/weekly​-paper​-in​-mississippi​-is​-praised​-but​-shuts​-anyway​.html.

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  3. Fentress interview.   4. Norma Fields, interview by Lawrence N. Strout, February, 17, 2009, 14 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Strout interview.”]. Part of the Norma Fields papers, Special Collections Department, Mississippi State University Libraries, Mississippi State, MS 39762 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Fields papers.”].   5. Fentress interview.   6. Ibid.   7. Bill Minor, “Norma Fields Went After the News with ‘Hammer and Tongs,’” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, September 15, 2010, http:​//​www​.djournal​.com​/ news​/bill​-minor​-norma​-fields​-went​-after​-the​-news​-with​-apos​/article​_f2c2b028​-e7b0​ -5344​-9a67​-69d4e35db750​.html.   8. Ibid.   9. Ibid. 10. Fentress interview. 11. Fentress interview. Information about Fields taken from Strout interview, 3. 12. Fentress interview. 13. Margaret Ripley Wolfe, “The Southern Lady: Long Suffering Counterpart of the Good Ole’ Boy,” Journal of Popular Culture 11, no. 1 (March 1977): 18. 14. E.A.Q. Fentress, “Norma Fields: Deflating Egos Around the State,” The Clarion-Ledger, n.d., n.p. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 15. Background on Fentress came from the Fentress interview; background on Fields came from Strout interview, 11. 16. For the length of the project, I’ll be using the surnames that the journalists used at the time of their employment with their newspapers and/or how their names appeared in their respective bylines. The names in parentheses represent later changes to a journalist’s surname as the result of marriage. 17. Nancy Stevens, email message to author, November 29, 2019 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Stevens November 29 email.”]. 18. Nancy Stevens, email message to author, December 2, 2019 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Stevens December 2 email.”]. 19. Ibid. 20. Stevens November 29 email. 21. Ibid. 22. Stevens December 2 email. 23. “A. B. Albritton,” Retrieved from https:​//​www​.suessfuneralhome​.net​/obituary​ /5350008, accessed September 25, 2019. 24. For more information, see “The Lasting Legacy of Parchman Farm, the Prison Modeled After a Slave Plantation,” Innocence Project, accessed April 16, 2021, https:​ //​innocenceproject​.org​/parchman​-farm​-prison​-mississippi​-history​/. 25. Elaine Povich, email message to author, January 13, 2018 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Povich January 13 email.”]. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Elaine Povich, email message to author, January 9, 2018 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Povich January 9 email.”].

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29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ellen Ann Fentress, email message to author, March 13, 2016 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Fentress email.”]. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Information on the Hederman family was retrieved from Kathy Lally, “A Journey from Racism to Reason: Newspaper: The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., Was Once the Most Racist Paper in the United States, Until an Offspring of the Publishing Family Decided to Make the Paper—and His Family Name—Respectable,” The Baltimore Sun, January 5, 1997, http:​//​articles​.baltimoresun​.com​/1997​-01​-05​/ news​/1997005097​_1​_rea​-hederman​-clarion​-ledger​-mississippi. Information on the Citizens’ Council, and the quote, taken from Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954–64 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 11. 36. Bill Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family,” Washington Post, April 25, 1983, https:​//​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/archive​/politics​/1983​/04​/25​/the​ -tale​-of​-a​-pulitzer​-a​-paper​-a​-family​/2440bfeb​-b772​-4612​-8a10​-d0432844673c​/​?utm​ _term​=​.427bb17d8938. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Jason McLure and Ilenia Caia, “Fired by Family, Hederman Made New York Review Second Act,” Global Journalist, January 11, 2016, http:​//​globaljournalist​.org​ /2016​/01​/fired​-by​-family​-hederman​-makes​-new​-york​-review​-second​-act​/. 40. Ibid. See also Curtis Wilkie, Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Personal Events That Shaped the Modern South (New York: Scribner, 2001), 261–62. 41. McLure and Caia, “Fired by Family, Hederman Made New York Review Second Act.” 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Valerie Wells, “News Wars: The Rise and Fall of The Clarion-Ledger,” Jackson Free Press, September 7, 2011, http:​//​www​.jacksonfreepress​.com​/news​/2011​/sep​/07​/ news​-wars​-the​-rise​-and​-fall​-of​-the​-clarion​-ledger​/. 45. Ronni Patriquin Clark, email message to author, August 31, 2019 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Patriquin August 31 email.”]. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.” 50. This info was found on Neuman’s personal website, “Johanna Neuman: Bio,” accessed January 4, 2018. https:​//​www​.johannaneuman​.com​/johanna​-neuman​-bio​/. 51. Ibid. 52. Johanna Neuman, email message to author, January 25, 2018 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Neuman January 25 email.”].

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53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Jo Ann Klein, email message to author, January 27, 2019 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Klein January 27 email.”]. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Mack Cameron, “Sixteenth Section Lands,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, May 1, 2018, https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/sixteenth​-section​-lands​/. 62. Ibid 63. Ibid. 64. Kathleen Wickham, “Governor William Winter and the Clarion-Ledger: A Symbiotic Relationship During the Adoption of the 1982 Education Reform Act,” Southern Quarterly 54, no. 1 (Fall 2016): 69, 71; see also Wilkie, Dixie, 262, and Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.” 65. Wilkie, Dixie, 262. 66. Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.” 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. McLure and Caia, “Fired by Family, Hederman Made New York Review Second Act.” 71. Wickham, “Governor William Winter and the Clarion-Ledger,” 69. 72. Ibid., 71. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid., 72. 75. Povich January 13 email. 76. Fentress, “Norma Fields: Deflating Egos Around the State.” 77. Sid Salter, “Sun-n-Sand, An Irreplaceable Piece of Mississippi’s Political History,” Mississippi Heritage Trust, November 18, 2019, https:​//​www​.mississippiheritage​ .com​/elevation​-blog​/sun​-n​-sand. 78. Strout interview, 6. 79. The “four Fs” are defined by Kimberly Voss and Lance Speere, “‘More Than ‘Rations, Passions, and Fashions’: Re-Examining the Women’s Pages in the Milwaukee Journal,” American Journalism: A Journal of Media History 33, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 342. 80. Voss, “Vivian Castleberry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 110, no. 4 (April 2007): 515. 81. Voss, “Dorothy Jurney: A National Advocate for Women’s Pages as They Evolved and Then Disappeared,” Journalism History 36, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 16, 17. 82. Voss, “The Burden of Being First: Carol Sutton and the Courier-Journal,” American Journalism: A Journal of Media History 27, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 117, 120, 121, 127–29.

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83. Voss, 129–32. 84. Liz Watts, “AP’s First Female Reporters,” Journalism History 39, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 15. 85. Linda J. Lumsden, “The Essentialist Agenda of the ‘Woman’s Angle’ in Cold War Washington: The Case of Associated Press Reporter Ruth Cowan,” Journalism History 33, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 6. 86. For a more thorough account of their work, see Maurine H. Beasley, “Parties, Power, and Protest in the Sixties and Early Seventies,” Women of the Washington Press: Politics, Prejudice, and Persistence (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 131–78. 87. Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018): 17. 88. See Jonathan Daniel Wells, “A Voice of a Nation: Women Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South,” American Nineteenth Century History 9, no. 2 (2008): 165–182. 89. Christopher Daly, Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 122. 90. John A. Simpson, Edith D. Pope and Her Nashville Friends: Guardians of the Lost Cause in the Confederate Veterans (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), xi–xii. 91. The quote can be found in McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 5. Other information on Ogden can be found on page 65. 92. Ibid., 17, 62. 93. Ibid., 66. 94. Ibid., 64. 95. Ibid., 5. 96. Ibid. 97. Gordon Cotton, “Mary Dawson Cain: A Life ‘Cut Rose-Diamond-Fashion,’” Vicksburg Daily News, https:​//​www​.vicksburgnews​.com​/mary​-dawson​-cain​-a​-life​-cut​ -rose​-diamond​-fashion​/. 98. Susan Weill, “Hazel and the ‘Hacksaw’”: Freedom Summer Coverage by the Women of the Mississippi Press,” Journalism Studies 2, no. 4 (2000): 546. 99. For a most exhaustive list of Cain’s opposition to the federal government, see McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 72–73; Cain quote from Weil, “Hazel and the ‘Hacksaw,’” 546. 100. As told in Lisa Kay Speer, “‘Contrary Mary’: The Life of Mary Dawson Cain,” PhD diss., (University of Mississippi, 1998), 222. 101. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 4. Ogden and Cain were, however, just two southern women of many from the Jim Crow era who used their professional and social positions to promote racism and Jim Crow politics: Nelle Battle Lewis of North Carolina and Cornelia Dabney Tucker from neighboring South Carolina both took ink to paper in support of what McRae calls “the cause”—a fierce dedication to preserving school segregation and states’ rights.

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102. See Jan Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism: Hazel Brannon Smith and the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement (Lanham: United Press of America, 2010): 24. 103. Ibid., 41. 104. Ibid., ix. 105. As argued in Susan Weill, “Hazel and the ‘Hacksaw,’” 545–61. 106. Leonard Downie, Jr. and Michael Schudson, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” Columbia Journalism Review, November/December 2009, https:​//​ archives​.cjr​.org​/reconstruction​/the​_reconstruction​_of​_american​.php. 107. Ibid. 108. Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 23.

Chapter 1

“My Own Beloved Land”

In May 1893, journalist Kate Markham Power traveled by rail from Jackson to St. Louis and then on to Seattle. Her dispatches back home, including time spent at the Chicago World’s Fair, were published in pamphlet form as A Bunch of Letters from the Great Northwest and then in the Daily Clarion-Ledger, the newspaper co-owned by her father, publisher and printer J. L. Power.1 Soon after her departure, the Daily Clarion-Ledger announced that readers would be treated to a “weekly letter” from Power describing the sights and sounds of what many were calling the “White City” (because of the number of electric lights illuminating from the two dozen buildings and countless exhibits).2 “It will be the next best thing to seeing the marvels of the Fair, to read her notetaking,” one reader said.3 As part of the “Columbian press bureau,” she and other journalists from around the country recorded their visits to the World’s Columbian Exposition, a six-month celebration to mark the 400-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s great discovery.4 She was proud to represent her home state and her father’s newspaper, just as she had the year before, when she attended the National Press Association annual meeting in San Francisco on behalf of the Mississippi Press Association (MPA), of which her father was a founding member.5 “She has won her position in literature and newspaperdom by her talents and by hard work,” a notice in a June 1894 issue of the Daily Clarion-Ledger said. “She is like her father in close application.”6 Power had worked by her father’s side for years—as early as the 1880s, she served as a proofreader and occasional editor—and she took on more responsibilities at the paper beginning in the early 1890s as other professional interests took him away from his newspaper duties.7 Those responsibilities also included covering local and state issues for the Daily Clarion-Ledger, especially those policies that might affect the white citizens of the state. Along the way, Power used access afforded her by the family newspaper business—two syndicated columns, “Mississippi Matters” and the “Educational 25

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Bureau,” her work as a staff writer for its sister publication, the Jackson Daily News, as well as her own publication, Kate Power’s Review—to practice what I call “Lost Cause journalism.” As defined by Lloyd Hunter, professor of religion and history, the Lost Cause refers to as a “cultural religious longing” that took hold in the 1880s, a mix of “Protestant evangelicalism and Southern romanticism” that included embracing the Confederate past, creating formal rituals around that past, and speaking about it in mythical terms.8 The Lost Cause, says Hunter, came to represent the sacred “Southern way of life” and a “regional faith based upon Dixie’s wartime experiences.”9 By extension, Power practiced a form of journalism that also maintained the myth of white supremacy, specially by speaking only to the public policy needs of the white, underprivileged women of the state—widows, for instance, or those overburdened with the duties of work and home—orphans, or those citizens too ill or lame to help themselves, like the state’s Civil War veterans. Similarly, she publicized educational opportunities for white, working, and middle-class single women, as she drew attention to the importance of their work (in fields such as teaching) and the need to offer assistance in their educational pursuits. Power’s journalism also included a campaign against woman suffrage, as she saw the movement as a threat to traditional gender roles, specifically the divine sanctity of white Southern womanhood—the idea that women like Power were meant to serve as the moral guardians of the home and not participate in the immoral and distasteful acts, like voting, relegated to the public sphere. Rather, she insisted, woman’s public participation should be limited to maternalistic acts of charity (as Power defined her work on behalf of the aforementioned groups). Power often positioned herself as an “everyday woman,” but her background suggests otherwise. As a white, privileged daughter of the former Confederacy—one whose father was a decorated officer in the Civil War before being elected secretary of state—she understood all too well what woman suffrage could mean for white Southern hegemony that kept her family in comfort and power. Besides posing a threat to traditional gender roles, the vote would empower former slaves—a segment of the population that Power once called “the other race”—a consequence which Power and others in her social and economic circles could never abide.10 Accordingly, she used her newspaper columns and her own publication to campaign against any political issue that could upset the social order any further. At the same time, she worked to elevate political causes, like state-supported initiatives for the white, lower classes, that ultimately reinforced the Southern hegemony and her family’s place in it.

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“HOUSE OF HOSPITALITY” On a Sunday morning in November 1944, readers of The Clarion-Ledger came across a full-page ad for The Emporium, a locally owned boutique that styled itself as “Jackson’s Fashion Center.”11 At the top of the ad was a sketch of a single-story, wide-framed home, one of the original homes built according to the city’s “checkerboard plan.”12 Longtime Jacksonians probably recognized the address, 411 East Amite Street in downtown Jackson, directly in front of The Emporium, and perhaps the sketch of the home’s elongated front gallery and ornamental iron lattice work, as belonging to “the old Power home”—the longtime residence of J. L. Power and his family. “Five generations of the Power family have lived here,” the ad read. “Although the old Power home may someday give way to the demands of a growing and rapidly expanding business district, the legend that has made it famous far and wide as the ‘House of Hospitality’ will live on.”13 Indeed, the Power home, purchased in the late 1860s, became a social destination for “many distinguished guests” (as one news account noted) after the Civil War—including former Confederate President Jefferson Davis (known as a “close, personal friend” J. L. Power), Confederate generals, and a steady stream of local and state leaders, businessmen, and newspaper publishers.14 Deeply sympathetic to the Confederate cause—in December 1860, one Power publication announced that, should Mississippi vote for secession, then Jackson should be the capital of “our new Republic”—Power was one of two newspaper editors chosen to attend and record the 1861 state constitutional convention.15 His printing company also won the contract to print and distribute the convention proceedings statewide.16 Power established his “highly lucrative” printing trade a decade before, in the 1850s;17 his business was centrally located in downtown Jackson, as so many storefronts in the same area needed printing services. In this small but growing market—Civil War historian Jim Woodrick once described nineteenth-century Jackson as “having the look and feel of a rough frontier town”—Power quickly established a reputation as a trustworthy, loyal statesman and business owner who “closely identified with [Jackson’s] improvement and progress.”18 Understanding that newspapers and printing went hand-in-hand, in January 1860, Power and business partner J. B. Cadwallader founded the Weekly Southern Planter, which proclaimed a “[devotion] to practical information in agricultural, mechanics, science and art.”19 That same month, they started the Jackson Daily News, the first paper, the publishers bragged, to carry Jackson local news.20 Six years later, Power entered into a printing and newspaper partnership with publisher and editor Ethelbert Barksdale; Power &

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Barksdale would publish what was first called the Clarion (with Barksdale serving as editor) and the two would remain in business together until the 1880s, when Barksdale sold his interest in the firm and moved to Washington after being elected to the first of two congressional terms.21 At that point, Power entered into business with Robert H. Henry to publish and edit what was by then called the Daily Clarion-Ledger.22 Through their ownership of the city’s first self-proclaimed “local” newspaper and its first printing firm, the Power family assumed a place among the growing Southern “entrepreneurial middle-class,” made up of master artisans, independent, small business professionals, bankers, and storekeepers, defined by their wealth (both liquid assets and real estate) and high literacy rate.23 J. L. and Jane Emmaline Wilkinson Power had nine children total, but three died in infancy.24 Kate Power was born in September 1865, the second of six surviving children—and the first of three daughters. William (“Willie”), the oldest of the Power children, died in 1882, at age twenty-one, from an accidental gunshot wound. Willie was an editor of what was then called the Daily Clarion at the time of his death.25 With the exception of Emmie Power—who eventually moved to Columbus, Mississippi, and joined the faculty of the Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls (now the Mississippi University for Women) as an instructor of stenography—the remaining children, Kate, Joseph, Anabel, and George, lived and worked in Jackson.26 The Power children adored their father and mother. Most of the siblings, like their late brother Willie, gravitated to the family businesses or shared their father’s interest in civic service.27 Anabel, like Kate, wrote for the family newspaper (albeit not as frequently and much later in life than her sister Kate); George, an attorney, served almost two decades as clerk to the Mississippi House of Representatives; and Joseph served several terms as Mississippi secretary of state, from 1901 to 1926, a post J. L. Power first held in the 1890s before his death in 1901.28 But, when J. L. took seriously ill while campaigning for secretary of state in 1895, it was Kate, the New York World reported, who “[took] hold of his campaign” (all of which made her position on suffrage all the more complicated).29 An issue of The Illustrated Phonographic World reported on her successful efforts on her father’s behalf: She at once summoned her two sisters, Annabel (sic) and Emma, who are both expert stenographers and typewritists, and [drafted] letters to all of her father’s friends, announcing her father’s illness, and the fact that she had taken charge of his campaign. Then she drew up an address “To the Men of Mississippi” and sent it to the press. Next . . . she began a personal canvas of the state. She

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rode hundreds of miles in a buggy. Southern chivalry was aroused, and Colonel Power was nominated.30

J. L. Power eventually won the general election, and he gave much of the credit to his daughter—as did members of the press. “Miss Kate Markham Power, the dutiful and brilliant daughter of Col. J. L. Power, deserves great credit for the able and dignified manner in which she conducted the canvases for her father during his illness,” the New South (Ellisville Mississippi) reported in August 1895. “In the hour of extremity, it shows that a noble woman is always equal to any emergency.”31 Although the press gave credit to Kate for her work on her father’s behalf—“This is the first instance of a woman’s efforts in politics in the state,” the Weekly Democrat (Natchez, Mississippi) reported that same month—there was little expectation that she would (or could) make politics a permanent occupation.32 Indeed, the notion that any self-respecting, white, affluent women should win the vote, much less run for office, was an absurd notion in most social and political circles—particularly in the South, where suffrage was seen by many as a direct threat to the divine virtues of Southern womanhood. Indeed, if a public letter she wrote and published in the family newspaper, “To the Men of Mississippi,” is to be taken at face value, Kate Power wanted nothing to do with campaign politics. She used the letter to publicly apologize to voters for overstepping her bounds, thus giving due deference to the Southern hegemony that reminded women that they had no place in politics, what Power called “this unaccustomed work.” “I hope it is needless for me to say to the men and women of Mississippi, that this entrance into the political arena was distasteful to me, in the extreme,” Power said shortly after returning from her last campaign stop.33 Given her strict opposition to woman suffrage, it is not surprising that Power wrote that letter. She knew the persuasive power of journalism, and used it to her advantage. The letter, in fact, represents just one example of Power catering to audience expectations and perceptions—she is in this letter the personification of the traditional Southern woman. Power took great pride in that role to be sure and in the place she called home. On more than one occasion, in fact, she reminded her readers how relieved she is to be from “Dixie,” a place that appreciates traditional roles for women, “and where the women don’t need ‘elevating.’”34 Although Power had her reservations about women’s involvement in the political process, she reported (without any sense of irony, it seems) on political issues of state importance and openly supported reforms that she believed would improve the lives and well-being of its white citizens. In fact, after J. L. Power’s death in 1901, Kate took over his weekly column, “Mississippi

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Matters,” and used it and her own statewide syndicated column, “Educational Bureau,” as well as her separate contributions to the Jackson Daily News, to continue to report on the affairs at the state legislature, especially those issues related to public education and child welfare. “We have never used our pen to write any call that was not worthy, nor our columns for the listing of any but glad contributions to a meritorious fund,” Power once said.35 “TO BE UP AND DOING” The Powers may have been admired for their loyalty and service to the state of Mississippi, but, on a much deeper level, they were revered for who they were and what they represented: white privilege and power reminiscent of the antebellum South, a family whose social and political power had yet to reach its peak, even after the war, and whose assets remained largely untouched by the conflict. The fact that the family home on East Amite—a wide-framed, low-roof home with a long gallery supported by ornamental ironwork— wasn’t even purchased by J. L. Power until 1867 is indicative of the family’s financial stability.36 Moreover, the fact that the house became such an iconic part of downtown Jackson history—including the aforementioned ironwork that now adorns the courtyard of the Jackson Junior League’s downtown headquarters—speaks to the Power family’s historical position in Jackson white, affluent society.37 Indeed, a significant part of Kate Power’s identity was that of a Jackson socialite; she made the typical rounds a young woman of her social standing was expected to make—weddings, club memberships (like the “Young Ladies Cooking Club”), and receptions, to name a few—often with her sisters at her side.38 In that regard, Power fits historian Margaret Ripley Wolfe’s definition of the “southern lady”—a woman of refined etiquette, an elegantly dressed member of the white, Southern elite standing whose many virtues included that of “a natural teacher and a wise counselor to her family.” At the same time, Power, like many Southern women of her age, owed her financial stability to her father’s reputation. “Her relationship to men shaped the life of the southern lady,” Wolfe says, “of reality and imagination, from childhood to old age.”39 Power’s opinions about the role of women in the public and private spheres were influenced by the Southern hegemony that romanticized the Southern lady as a woman who needed protection and glorified the role that Southern men played in protecting her. Her concern for the future of Southern womanhood, ironically, had little to do with any personal ambitions or professional goals. Rather, Power based her definition of womanhood on her social standing and the use of her financial resources and social capital to care

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for the underprivileged. “It behooves those of us who hope great things of [the state’s] future, to be ‘up and doing,’” she wrote in February 1904.40 In truth, this ideology was a form of social maternalism that fulfilled affluent, southern women’s moral obligations without having to be directly involved in political or legal matters best left to men. “These women believed that any woman’s excursion into the public realm of society should be an extension of their traditional, nurturing roles,” according to historian Lauren Alexander Maxwell.41 Examples of Power’s thoughts of Southern womanhood, and by extension, her journalism—at least her perspective on the nurturing/supportive role that women should play in society—was on display during her coverage of the 1902 spring session of the state legislature, where appropriations to higher education were discussed, voted on, and passed.42 “Let every teacher go somewhere and add to his attainments and teaching power and do his upmost thus to promote the great cause of education,” she wrote that May, on the topic of postgraduate training for Mississippi’s white teachers.43 Power’s attention was not limited to the funding of public education. During that same 1902 legislative session, she gave her attention to the state surplus and knew exactly where the money should go: “What better use could be made of a goodly part of it than adding to the facilities of the State’s educational, humane and benevolent institutions—in building a home for veterans, in putting a state hospital on such a footing that our sick and wounded need no longer travel to New Orleans and Memphis at out neighbors’ expense?” she asked in one January 1902 column. “Some of it might be well invested in much-needed help for our orphan children.”44 The above argument was no doubt a sympathetic cry for aid to Confederate soldiers, and by extension, sympathy for the Lost Cause; Southerners found different historical, memorial, and educational ways to express their devotion to the Lost Cause, Lloyd Hunter explains, including the formation of and membership in the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.45 Southern women did their part in perpetuating the Lost Cause; some organized memorial organizations on behalf of fallen soldiers, while others took to the public schools to make sure that the Lost Cause would be taught to future generations.46 Still others, like Power, wrote about the Lost Cause in newspapers, magazines, and books, thus ensuring that the myth would be captured in permanent ink. Power’s nostalgia for the Lost Cause was evident in a piece she wrote on the 1909 spring commencement at what is now Tugaloo College, a learning institution for freed slaves and their children on the grounds of a former central Mississippi plantation. The article is full of Lost Cause implications, specifically her descriptions of the “romance” and “tragedy” of “this splendid old institution” that included a

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large mansion situated in “a great grove of forest trees” when it was one of the state’s largest plantations.47 It is no surprise then, that Power’s coverage of local and state affairs failed to mention the state’s former slaves, by now at the mercy of a failed federal reconstruction effort. As noted by education historian Christopher Span, freed blacks in Mississippi rejoiced at the promise of Reconstruction—particularly the opportunities to exercise full suffrage, own land, and take advantage of formal educational opportunities.48 Those opportunities were never fully addressed, of course; many Southern, white leaders, including those in Mississippi, openly and defiantly resisted Reconstruction. In May 1865, the delegates to the Mississippi Constitutional Convention met in Jackson to satisfy the first phase of the Reconstruction process: to nullify its ordinance of secession and abolish slavery. Instead, the Mississippi delegation chose to repeal secession (thus reserving the right to secede again). Rather than abolish slavery by ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, the delegates would only admit that the institution had been “destroyed.”49 Moreover, the delegates refused to consider Black male suffrage, in complete defiance of one of President Andrew Johnson’s requirement for readmission to the Union. Even so, Mississippi was readmitted that October. This process, historian Jason Phillips says, “proved how unconquered white Mississippians were.”50 Indeed, the Reconstruction era in Mississippi represented an opportunity for white state leaders to strengthen their commitment to white supremacy, even if it meant forsaking economic and political opportunities in the process. One month after being readmitted to the Union, state leaders passed the Mississippi Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, otherwise known as the “Black Codes.” These laws punished Black Mississippians for even the lightest transgression of Southern etiquette, prohibited them from owning guns, forced Black children to work in what amounted to indentured servitude for white planters until the age of eighteen, and retained the “full force” of the old state penal codes once used on the former slaves (by simply replacing the word “slave” with “freedmen”).51 As a respected businessman and state leader, J. L. Power made every attempt to maintain the antebellum status quo even before the state’s efforts to thwart Reconstruction began. For instance, on the eve of the Civil War, Power held founding membership in the “Minutemen militia,” whose goal was to protect Jackson from the “black Republicans” following Lincoln’s first election to the nation’s highest office.52 And, for the next four decades, Power used his considerable political influence to dismantle Reconstruction efforts, including using his publication to rhetorically push against any form of significant progress from the so-called “radical” Republican Party on behalf of the state’s freed men and women.53

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J. L. Power’s role in the maintenance of white supremacy also included engaging in the wholesale business of perpetuating the myth of the Lost Cause. In his 1889 book, The State of Mississippi: Its Resources and Progress. An Inviting Field for Immigration and Progress, Power romanticized a fictional harmony between former slaves and their masters: Well, it is suffice to say, that in Mississippi that whites and blacks dwell together in perfect harmony, and will continue to do so. They understand the relation they sustain to each other. The colored people have their own schools, their own churches, their own benevolent organizations, many of them their own homes, and their own farms, and they have not only the good wishes of the white people in everything that tends to their elevation and prosperity, but our substantial encouragement and support.54

Such rhetoric appears benevolent but was no less dangerous; these lies both excused and bolstered the ideology of white supremacy, which, in turn, bolstered the racist ideological, legal, and social structures of the Jim Crow era (by arguing that state power structures need not be tampered with). This time period stretched more than three-quarters of a century, with future generations of Black Mississippians subjected to immeasurable grief, pain, horror, and death if they dared step out of line; by the mid-twentieth century, Mississippi would garner the reputation as the “Closed Society” for good reason. “The striking parallel between people and events of the 1850’s and the 1950’s reminds us that Mississippi has been on the defensive against inevitable social change for more than a century,” wrote historian James W. Silver, in the now classic essay, “Mississippi: The Closed Society,” published in a 1964 issue of The Journal of Southern History, “and that for some years before the Civil War it had developed a closed society with an orthodoxy accepted by nearly everybody in the state. The all-pervading doctrine then and now has been white supremacy—whether achieved through slavery or segregation.”55 Of the many legacies and lessons left by J. L. Power, his allegiance to the Lost Cause is among his most enduring. One has only to study the career of his daughter, Kate, to understand the depth of the lessons learned. Like her father, she romanticized the cherished ideals of the antebellum era; during her 1892 West Coast travels as a member of the National Editorial Association, for example, Power described her emotions when she encountered Margaret (“Maggie”) Howell Davis Hayes, oldest surviving daughter of Jefferson Davis (who, at the time, was living out west with her husband, banker Joel Addison Hayes, Jr.) at a reception: I felt a glad rush at my heart at the sight of her sweet face, and when she clasped my hand, I felt no longer like a stranger. And my! how the “rebels” did rally around her when they learned of her arrival. To them she was the fairest thing

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in all that lovely land, and they paid glad homage to the beloved daughter of their chief.56

Power went on to describe for her readers Hayes’s appearance—her “slender figure” and her “great brown eyes,” her “crown of soft brown hair,” and the “great cluster of white carnations at her breast”—in a manner that, even thirty years after the end of the Civil War, made clear that Power longed for a time and place that she called “my own beloved land.”57 Power, like her father, would never publicly admit to the horrors of slavery or the destructive circumstances of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction eras. To do so would shatter the illusion of their “beloved land” and would force the Power family to face responsibility for their actions. Instead, Power chose a rhetorical strategy similar to that of her father’s—the use of benevolent, stereotypical language and imagery—when publicly mentioning the state’s Black population (and declaring that they were happy with the status quo). Time and again, when speaking of Mississippi’s freed men and women, Power would brag about their “old time loyalty” to their former masters, or she would describe them in such condescending terms as that “old time, genuine negro”—as if either was a compliment to their character. On other occasions, she would describe them as “loafing negro men,” or the “Vicksburg darkey” when she meant to characterize them in more negative, overtly racist terms.58 Some Mississippi newspaper publishers, editors, and journalists fanned the flames of racism, imagining the dangers of freed men and women to Southern whites, even decades after Reconstruction ended. Others pushed for better opportunities for former slaves, but only as a way to exert new control and authority over them.59 Still others, like J. L. and Kate Power, refused to acknowledge the harsh realities faced by the state’s former slaves, and instead used social codes of the day to describe and treat them with condescending tones (thereby thinly disguising their racism). In much the same way, Power’s rhetorical campaign against woman suffrage ignored the realities of the changing world; indeed, as the daughter of one of the state’s most well-regarded political leaders, she was downright hostile to the “Votes for Women” campaign. She was not alone. Others included members of the state’s planter class—a relatively small percentage of the population that controlled much of the state’s political and financial economy—the state textile and railroad industries, and members of the state’s growing entrepreneurial class, the businesses that provided services to, or, as in the case of the Power family, had close political or friendship ties to the planters.60 “Big agriculture and big business” combined their forces to oppose woman suffrage, primarily because they believed that an electorate composed

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of progressive white women and Black women voters threatened their efforts to reclaim the political and economic power they lost after the Civil War.61 Conservative Southern women like Kate Power, then, saw it as their duty to help maintain the so-called “southern way of life”—which included maintaining both white supremacy and traditional gender roles—and ensure that both would survive for the benefit of future generations of white Mississippians. The years since the Civil War brought significant and drastic changes to the South, and woman’s suffrage was yet another in a long list of grievances that southern women like Kate Power had tallied against the North.62 “Most white southerners were contemptuous of the women’s rights movement as one more unfortunate product of an inferior Northern culture,” writes historian Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, “an offshoot of abolitionism led by women with the same ‘naïve’ and dangerous belief in the equality of the sexes and disregard for vital social distinctions that characterized the abolitionists.”63 The North was the birthplace of both abolition and woman suffrage, and most white Southerners were as hostile to the latter as they were to the former.64 In fact, after the war, they were more intent than ever to preserve what they could of their culture from the “foreign influences from the North”—radical changes in the law that had threatened “white integrity” by giving freedmen the right to vote—a culture with little respect for traditional values, with women whose perceived radical conduct was a slap-in-the-face to respectable Southern women.65 Northern women, claimed influential Southern minister Albert Bledsoe, “despised the word of God and trampled underfoot the laws of nature as they eschewed their true mission.”66 For her part, Power considered the political and professional ambitions of urban women, especially those from the Northern states, to be egotistic and pointless. Hers was a sociological argument often used by those opposed to suffrage—that the “selfish women” who supported suffrage put their individual needs above dedication to the family. It was one of a few rhetorical arguments that Power would use in her antisuffrage campaign—another being biological, the idea that women are poorly suited for the physical and emotional strain that comes with public life (despite her own role in her father’s campaign for secretary of state).67 Her antisuffrage campaign began in the early 1890s, just as the votes for women movement gained traction in the South, and it continued for at least a decade or more.68 To drive her points home, Power used the aforementioned Jackson newspapers and columns and her own publication, Kate Power’s Review, to paint the suffrage movement as a hazard to the Southern lady’s “womanly tastes and qualities.”69

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“SHRIEKING SISTERHOOD” In the first editorial (dated September 1, 1894) of Kate Power’s Review, Power laid out a simple case for having her own weekly periodical: “There is room for this paper in Mississippi,” she said. “The women want it.”70 At first glance, then, the Review seemed like an attempt to tap into an emerging nineteenth-century consumer base—the white, professional middle-class “New Woman,” a late-nineteenth-century term used to describe a modern woman seeking, among many things, “various types of independence,” including “women’s right to political selfhood through the vote, to economic autonomy, and to prioritize intellectual or artistic expressions over domestic concerns.”71 The New Woman was part of a larger market, a class of Americans who provided “a new and important readership for magazines” nationwide, with publications like Ladies’ Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post reaching over a million subscribers in large cities and surrounding areas by the turn of the century.72 Rising literacy rates, an increase in density of the general population, particularly in urban areas, and cheap, affordable methods of printing and distribution, defined this so-called “magazine revolution” of the late nineteenth century.73 “[M]agazines and newspapers were limited to those who were educated, literate, and to those who had the disposable income to devote to subscriptions,” writes historian Jonathan Daniel Wells, regarding nineteenth-century Southern periodicals.74 Kate Power’s Review may have been Power’s opportunity to take part in that revolution (albeit on a much small scale), but the periodical was not the progressive call-to-arms that would speak frankly and honestly about the circumstances and conditions of the modern, middle-class reader (like Cosmopolitan, which billed itself as “timely, engaged in the world of current affairs.”).75 To the contrary, the Review served a more political and social conservative readership in Jackson and surrounding areas, including affluent middle- and upper-middle-class women, many of whom belonged to Power’s own social class. Power used her publication to offer a wide range of topics to her readers in what Wells called a “freewheeling” and democratic style indicative of postbellum era periodicals geared toward white women readers.76 Each issue contained approximately twelve pages of content, including at least one short story or poem every issue; a society column (“In Society’s Realm”); book reviews (“Book Chat”); various news items; and an editor’s note. In other words, the Review, like most Southern literature of the same type, was not radical in its content or approach—it, like most Southern periodicals, “reflected the values and customs of the southern society in which they were published.”77 For example, Power and the Review’s contributors spoke to

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readers about the damage suffrage could do to Southern womanhood, and by extension, the Southern hegemony that sustained it. Along the way, Power used the Review to expand her social influence, to have yet another distribution outlet for her political and social agendas, and to sharpen her skills as a journalist and editor. Women of Kate Power’s generation made up approximately 2 percent of all American journalists as of 1880 (around the time that Power started working for her father); twenty years later, that number stood at about 7 percent.78 Journalism was one of the few so-called “convenient occupation[s]” open to white married women in the postbellum era—because they were able to work at or close to home or enjoy a flexible schedule that did not take them away from their familial obligations.79 Some white women entered the field because they were widowed or because their family’s economic circumstances dictate that they work.80 Still others, like Power, found a place in the field because they had a familial connection, usually through a male relative, who owned a publication.81 The women in this last group, with exception, shared similar socioeconomic backgrounds: most of them were white, educated, and from affluent families.82 “Women became journalists, editors, and authors through careful planning or by happenstance,” Wells writes, adding, “by the 1880s, educated women were beginning to see journalism as a respected professional pursuit.”83 Kate Power used the Review to promote what she considered an educated woman’s perspective on Southern womanhood, including very specific views on woman suffrage. One editorial from the Review, for example, elaborated on Power’s version of the aforementioned New Woman. The piece described the New Woman as “doing a man’s work—supporting a woman—and doing it with all of a man’s sturdy independence and privileges—without letting go of her womanly tastes and qualities.” Furthermore, the argument continued, “She is not necessarily a woman’s rights woman—a member of the ‘shrieking sisterhood’ . . . clamoring for political power and recognition.”84 The logic here is that the New Woman didn’t need the vote or the political power that went with it—she was a woman who would never ignore her true calling for the sake of selfish pursuits. Another editorial from the Review, written by contributor Josie Frazee Cappleman, reflected a more biological point of view in her opposition to woman suffrage. Cappleman argued that a woman’s role in local and state politics should be reserved for positions that will not tax her physically and are in keeping with the “natural modesty and dignity of womanhood.” Those positions included work that would elevate the family or strengthen the moral fabric of society—education, social work, literature, and the arts—without putting women in direct contact with the “machinery of the state” and the

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“laborious, nerve-wracking, brain-tearing” activity that it took to run that machinery.85 Although Power did not write either of the aforementioned columns, the sociological and biological arguments against woman suffrage most certainly met with her editorial approval. In fact, she probably wanted her readers to hear the antisuffrage message from other like-minded women as a means of reinforcing the credibility of her arguments as a whole. “I thoroughly understand that it is well to print in one’s pages original matter, when that matter is good,” Power wrote in one issue of the Review, dated September 22, 1894. “But I am broad enough to understand that it is better—very much better—to put upon these same pages, an article from another woman’s pen, when that other woman says just what I want to say, but says it in a better, braver, clearer manner.”86 During this same time period, Power took up the antisuffrage cause in the Jackson newspapers as well, especially when she traveled on behalf of the newspapers or organizations to which she belonged. In fact, her visit to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—taken the same year that she represented the MPA in San Francisco—brought the issue of suffrage to bear. The entire experience, if Power’s correspondence back home is any indication, was one Power would not soon forget. “All my life I have heard it said that ‘Experience is the best teacher.’ If this be true, I can lay claim to a high-grade diploma, having graduated in several branches of Dame Experience’s school within the past twenty-four hours,” Power wrote in May 1893, a day after she first walked the fairgrounds.87 Billed as the “White City” because of the number of electric lights that illuminated from the two dozen buildings and countless exhibits, the Chicago World’s Fair drew international attention and traffic. Power was one of an estimated 70,000 visitors a day (over 27 million total) who walked through one square mile of exotic attractions and scientific wonders.88 Along the way, visitors may have caught their first glimpse of the electric light; many entered a 1,500-seat theater to watch moving pictures for the first time; they even may have had their first taste of the snack called Cracker Jack.89 Buffalo Bill, Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, and Thomas Edison, among other celebrities of the day, all made appearances, in what one observer called the “greatest event in the history of the country since the Civil War.”90 With this and other trips, Power experienced the excitement and privilege of travel. Sidomie Smith, author of Moving Lives: 20th Century Women’s Travel Writing, notes that long distance travel was not an option for most women, but rather a primary means to “affirm [male] masculinity through purposes, activities, behaviors, dispositions, perspectives and bodily movements displayed on the road, and through the narratives of travel.”91 To be sure, women—long associated with the sedentary activities of home (the one

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place where a woman’s femininity could be preserved and protected) and subjected to the stereotype that they were too frail and delicate to handle the rigors of the rail, or later, the road—did indeed travel, but their participation was relegated to the domestication of new communities, not the exploration of new territories.92 Women have recorded their travels as missionaries, for instance, for Christianity and the “evangelical goals” of the missionary fit within the confines of femininity. They also traveled as botanists—the collection and cultivation of plant life was an approved hobby for Victorian era women, even as they were being excluded from other forms of scientific study.93 For any woman of means and reputation, the modern age did bring new opportunities to travel and new modes of transportation (e.g. the train) to be sure, but individual journeys for pleasure or adventure, without family or chaperone, did not come without questions regarding the safety and appropriateness of the trip.94 Power was certainly no exception to these social codes—she often traveled with male colleagues or chaperones who knew her and her family well. Her dispatches usually took up large chunks of column space—since they were published on a weekly basis, she tried to fit in as much information as she could—and the topics she covered were just as broad. On occasion, though, she would focus on one topic, if she believed that subject warranted her singular focus and attention, including the “Woman’s Congress of Representative Women.” The Congress was a week-long event meant to voice the social, moral, and legal concerns of women in an international forum, and Power used the event to express her opposition woman suffrage. More importantly, she attempted to identify with potential working and middle-class readers. “I don’t ‘hanker after’ suffrage. I am glad to be an everyday woman and reside out of sight of the polls,” she told readers. “I am joyfully content that my privileges outweigh my ‘rights,’ for a woman cannot have both, you know, and I shall never object to leaning back and letting a man do most of my work.” She then reminded her readers how relieved she was to be from the South, a place that appreciates traditional roles for women, “where we don’t have congresses and things like that, and where the women don’t need ‘elevating.’”95 These statements reflected Power’s loyalty to the social codes of Southern womanhood (and her willful ignorance of the plights of countless other American women), just as it highlights the deep rift between two political camps at the Woman’s Congress, two very different perspectives on the future of American womanhood. One side (in which Power was firmly positioned) believed that women had a place in shaping the moral and social fabric of America’s landscape—especially as it pertained to charity, social welfare, and education—but ridiculed any mention of woman suffrage as a conduit for women’s equality. The other side insisted that no significant change or

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progress could happen until women obtained the legal right to shape political elections and legislation.96 “Though the Fair brought women together in new ways,” Stanford law professor Barbara Babcock writes of the event, “considerable strife marked the opening stages of their participation.”97 In fact, the two camps were not only divided by political differences of opinion regarding the role of women but also by divisions related to their own economic independence and social statuses. Many (but certainly not all) of the antisuffragists were, like Power, born or married into privileged social positions—or both. Meanwhile, many of the women who attended the Women’s Congress to support woman suffrage were defined by their devotion to both their professional occupations and their social and political activism. For the most part, they were educated, middle-class women from urban areas, dedicated to lifelong career pursuits over “wage work” meant to simply tide one over until marriage. They were advocates for the so-called “New South,” what Martin Ruef calls “an ideological foundation for a more modern region that valued cultural progress” and they recognized suffrage as essential to that progress.98 Maxwell adds, “Frequently, they were advocates of woman suffrage and political rights equal to those of their male peers.” As such, “they often made choices that were considered abnormal by society at large.”99 Power was among those who considered suffrage an “abnormal” choice. At best, she considered the grievances of the pro-suffrage women silly (especially since they could leave their jobs to spend hours on end at the Congress), their speeches too long, and their presence at the Congress a vain attempt at celebrity. In any case, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that Power recognized or acknowledged the irony or hypocrisy of her stance—why, for instance, she was so critical of other professional women who attended the Women’s Congress given her own presence there. Of course, Power disagreed with their political position on suffrage, but the divide seems much deeper than that. Power’s published remarks had much more to do with the fact that, like many (but certainly not all) Southern women of Power’s social standing, she recognized suffrage as a threat to cherished socioeconomic positions. “Economics, party loyalty, and prescribed gender roles worked to produce a distinctively southern antisuffrage movement,” historian Elna Green writes in Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question.100 Furthermore, Power’s categorical opposition to suffrage reflects the fact that she identified as a white woman of privilege first and as a professional woman second (“I am joyfully content that my privileges outweigh my ‘rights,’ for a woman cannot have both,” she said.). Moreover, she believed she was fulfilling her earthly mission by using her privileged position (and her journalism) to help the less fortunate; meanwhile, she saw the opposition’s commitment to suffrage as unnecessary and indulgent, as they took

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away from or altogether ignored the genuine work of true womanhood: to improve the lives and the livelihoods of the state’s working and middle-class white women and the underprivileged. In one editorial, she defended the working woman while criticizing the chaos brought by the urban, professional women in attendance: Then late, when the working women, who need and want this “intellectual elevation and emancipation,” came in, after a wearing day, and a hasty dinner, they had to brace themselves for innumerable rounds with the ubiquitous for the crushing of garments and the ruination of tempers, at each of the three or four entrances, before they got in; then to stand on already wearied feet through hours of speeches, in a gallery so far back, that not one word of the speeches was audible.101

Ironically, the Chicago World’s Fair gave Power the opportunity to test the limits society had placed upon all women, both in terms of travel, profession, and the free expression of political ideas. She was not alone in this adventure; as Wells notes, “Particularly after the women’s exposition at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, southern women considered themselves as members of the press on a par with men.”102 When Power returned from Chicago, she was more eager than ever to rejoin the ranks of the state’s white male editors. In fact, Power said as much in her first editorial for Kate Power’s Review, in which she gave a brief, modest introduction, as any Southern woman of means would do—lest she seem too arrogant—and made sure to thank her male supporters and investors, lest she alienate the powerful men who controlled newspaper publishing in the state—her father’s friends and allies in the MPA, for instance. “In raising my pen to-day to write my name among the newspaper men of Mississippi,” Power wrote, “it is with full knowledge of my undertaking, and a deep sense of importance, and were it not for the interest of my friends, and the loyal support of my ‘brothers in the quill,’ I would hesitate long before taking the step.”103 It is no surprise then that Power, as a notable representative of Southern periodical and newspaper culture, refused to acknowledge the role that the suffrage movement could have or did play in elevating those women she claimed to want to help. In that regard, Power’s career invokes John Marie Lutes’s description of nineteenth-century women journalists: “They qualify as professional pioneers, but they often appear to be looking backward than forward, clinging to tired nineteenth-century ideas about women’s roles.”104 Indeed, Power’s life of privilege—the life she enjoyed as the daughter of a well-respected business owner and former Confederate leader and statesman—protected her from having to experience the very circumstances that created the need for woman suffrage in the first place.

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On the surface, Power’s career stands as an example of the progress women made in the field of journalism in the postbellum South. She was the first woman journalist in the state to have her own publication, and the first woman to cover state politics. However, her career deserves a much deeper analysis than congratulatory remarks about being “first” provide. Like many white, women journalists and editors of her generation, Power’s rhetoric addressed the well-to-do white women of the state, as she discussed her ideas to aid its less fortunate white citizens. However, with the exception of condescending, stereotypical references to the state’s former slaves and their families, she all but ignored the almost 60 percent of the population made up of the state’s freed men and women and their needs and struggles in post-Reconstruction Mississippi. In fact, one significant legacy of the Power family, Kate included, to Mississippi journalism includes the role that their newspapers played in cultivating and sustaining the myth of the Lost Cause and the power of white supremacy. For her part, Kate Power was the first of a handful of women journalists whose work would help build and then sustain Mississippi’s reputation as a “closed society.” As the next chapter will reveal, a direct line can be traced from Power’s allegiance to the Lost Cause to the “Jim Crow journalism” of Florence Sillers Ogden, whose work appeared in The Delta Democrat Times and The Clarion-Ledger, and Mary Dawson Cain, publisher and editor of the Summit (MS) Sun. Like Power, Ogden was a strident supporter of the Confederacy and the myth of white superiority, and she was not above calling upon “the responsibilities of motherhood and womanhood” when defending her political values.105 “We, the women, have a big stake in these issues,” she once said of white women’s role in politics, and she made sure that her readers understood the dangers of liberal politics—most notably the civil rights movement—to the state’s Jim Crow system.106 Mary Dawson Cain used her newspaper to focus on the federal encroachment of states’ rights. By extension, she opposed most civil rights federal programs and policies; she broke with the Democratic Party over its support of federal antilynching legislation, and, years later, held membership in America First, a World War II–era anti-Semitic and isolationist organization.107 She used the Sun to support the Jim Crow politics of the state Citizens’ Councils and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, and she ran for governor twice, in 1951 and again in 1955—the first woman to do so—on a “States’ Rights movement” platform.108 “My whole platform is predicated on one idea,” she told the press during her first campaign, “a restoration to the people of Mississippi of their sovereign rights as citizens of Mississippi and the United States.”109 By contrast, Hazel Brannon Smith emerged as a conflicted, powerful journalist during this era, as evidenced by the changing nature of her political

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and social opinions as a journalist. She fancied herself a political moderate, but against the backdrop of Jim Crow, her journalism stood out as the work of a champion of equality and justice—a role she never wanted or acknowledged. In any case, as the following chapter will document, as Ogden and Cain worked to sustain Jim Crow, Smith’s “activist journalism” would come to symbolize a changing of the guard, so to speak, as she was the first woman journalist in the state to report the truth about the Mississippi’s morally flawed, illegal, and dangerous political, social, and legal systems. As a result, she became a heroic figure for a generation of women journalists, like Norma Fields, who carried on Smith’s work beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. NOTES 1. Susan Weill, “Women’s Press Organizations in Mississippi, 1894–Present,” in Women’s Press Organizations, 1881–1999, ed. Elizabeth V. Bert (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000), 301. See also, “Death of Col. Power,” Daily Clarion-Ledger, September 24, 1901, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/244164907; Kate Markham Power, A Bunch of Letters from the Great Northwest (Jackson: Daily Clarion, 1892), 2. Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS. 2. “World’s Fair Letters,” Daily Clarion-Ledger, May 20, 1893, 1. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/235281851​/​?terms​=kate​%2Bmarkham​%2Bpower. 3. Ibid. 4. Erik Larson, Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 4. 5. As noted in the Vicksburg Evening Post, May 11, 1892, 3 (no author and title). https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/201823105. For information on the founding of the MPA, see Mississippi Department of Archives and History, “Mississippi Digital Research Project,” by Julia Marks Young (Project Director). Grant application for the National Digital Newspaper Program, Division of Preservation and Access, National Endowment for the Humanities, 3. https:​//​www​.neh​.gov​/sites​/default​/files​/inline​-files​ /mississippi​_department​_of​_archives​_and​_history​_mississippi​_digital​_newspaper​ _project​.pdf. 6. As noted in the Daily Clarion-Ledger, June 27, 1894, 1 (no author and title). https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/235279808​/​?terms​=kate​%2Bmarkham​ %2Bpower​%2Bclarion​%2Bledger. 7. For more information on Kate Power’s early working relationship with her father, see William C. King, World’s Progress: As Wrought by Men and Women in Art, Literature, Education, Philanthropy, Reform, Inventions, Business and Professional Life (Springfield, MA: King-Richardson Publishing Company, 1896), 304. For information on J. L. Power’s professional pursuits outside of the Clarion, see “Death of Col. Power,” 1.

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8. Lloyd A. Hunter, “The Immortal Confederacy: Another Look at the Lost Cause Religion,” eds. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 186. See p. 210 (endnotes) for the “cultural religious longing” quote. 9. Ibid., 186. 10. “The Closing at Tugaloo.” Jackson Daily News May 25, 1909, 6. https:​ //​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/199820169​/​?terms​=kate​%20markham​%20power​ %20tougaloo​%20college​&match​=1. 11. “House of Hospitality,” The Clarion-Ledger, November 26, 1944, 7. https:​//​ www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/202683326. 12. Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, Mississippi: A Guide to the Magnolia State (New York: Viking Press, 1938), 217. 13. “House of Hospitality,” 7. 14. Mary Alice Bookhart, “Yesterday,” The Clarion-Ledger, January 19, 1947, 14. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/​?clipping​_id​=11220772​&fcfToken​=eyJhbGc iOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9​.eyJmcmVlLXZpZXctaWQiOjE4MjgzNjE2NCw iaWF0IjoxNTYwOTIzNDgxLCJleHAiOjE1NjEwMDk4ODF9​.lpynR5PcSaHKhGq​ _Q7GJQ4RoWM​-gy​_hw6ZlNljHOMa0. 15. As reported in the Vicksburg Daily Whig, December 19, 1860, 1. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/249751763​/​?terms​=our​%20new​%20Republic​&match​=1. 16. “Mississippi Digital Research Project,” 3. 17. “Death of Col. Power,” 1. 18. See Jim Woodrick, The Civil War Siege of Jackson Mississippi (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2016), 17; “closely identified with [Jackson’s] improvement and progress” quote from “Death of Col. Power,”1. 19. “The Weekly Southern Planter,” Weekly Vicksburg Whig, January 11, 1860, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/243871743​/​?terms​=weekly​%20vicksburg​ %20whig ​ % 20to ​ % 20practical ​ % 20information ​ % 20in​ % 20agricultural​ % 2C​ %20mechanics​%2C​%20science​%20and​%20art​&match​=1. 20. MDAH, Mississippi Digital Research Project,” 3. 21. See R.H. Henry, Editors I Have Known Since the Civil War (New Orleans: E.S. Upton Printing Co., 1922), 125. 22. Kathleen Woodruff Wickham, “Jackson Clarion-Ledger,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, July 10, 2017, https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/jackson​-clarion​ -ledger​/. 23. Martin Ruef, “The Human and Financial Capital of the Southern Middle Class, 1850–1900,” in The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R. Green, 202–228 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2011), 204–206, 210. Ruef notes that “literacy is considered to be a basic historical correlate of middle class existence.” See page 206. The Southern entrepreneurial class of this era had a literacy rate in the 90th percentile. See page 212. 24. Bookhart, “Yesterday,” 14. 25. Henry, Editors I Have Known Since the Civil War, 245. 26. See “Miss Power Returns” 5; “George Power: Funeral Today for Prominent Mississippian,” 9; “Society” 3; “Mrs. Jane Power Dead” 8.

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27. For short details on the career and circumstances of Willie Power’s death, see “Sad Accident,” The Memphis Daily Appeal, January 12, 1882, 1. https:​ //​ www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/168314646​/​?terms​=Willie​%20power​%20​%20accident​ &match​=1. 28. For more details on the careers of the Power siblings, see “Miss Anabel Power Services Friday,” The Clarion-Ledger (Jackson), January 1, 1959, 12. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/179649718​/​?terms​=Miss​%20Anabel​ %20Power​%20Services​%20Friday​&match​=1; “George Power: Funeral Today for Prominent Mississippian,” Hattiesburg American, December 8, 1943, 9. https:​ //​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/279284107​/​?terms​=george​%20power​&match​=1; “Miss Power Returns,” Daily Clarion-Ledger, September, 15, 1905, 5. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/215381007​/​?terms​=miss​%20power​%20returns​&match​=1; “Mrs. Jane Power Dead,” Jackson Daily News, January 14, 1910, 8. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/194320362​/​?terms​=jane​%20power​&match​=1; “Hon. Jos. Power Died Suddenly,” The Winona Times, April 9, 1926, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​ .com​/image​/304297690​/​?terms​=Hon​.​%20Jos​.​%20Power​%20Died​%20Suddenly​ &match​=1. 29. E. L. Miner, “He Owes It All To His Daughter,” The Illustrated Phonographic World, Vol. 11 (New York: E.L. Miner, September 1895–August 1896), 63. 30. Ibid. 31. “Kind Words,” Daily Clarion-Ledger, August 29, 1895, 7. https:​ //​ www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/244040625​/​?terms​=kate​%2Bmarkham​%2Bpower​%2BJ​.L​.​ %2BPower. 32. “Convention.” The Weekly Democrat, August 7, 1895, 1. https:​ //​ www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/235254738​/​?terms​=power​&match​=1. 33. Col. Power’s Thanks,” Daily Clarion-Ledger, August 8, 1895, 4. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/235801141​/​?terms​=kate​%2Bmarkham​%2Bpower. 34. Kate Markham Power, “Miss Power’s Letter,” Daily Clarion-Ledger, June 8, 1893, 7. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/249526228​/​?terms​=kate​%2Bmarkham​ %2Bpower. 35. This statement was part of a larger quote taken from Kate Markham Power, “Give Your Aid to a Very Worthy Cause,” Jackson Daily News, February 22, 1909, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/194313960​/​?terms​=kate​%2Bmarkham​ %2Bpower. 36. A Guide to the Magnolia State, 217. 37. Mississippi Department of Archives and History, “Historic Resources Inventory Fact Sheet,” accessed June 26, 2019, http://www​.apps​.mdah​.ms​.gov​/Public​/prop​ .aspx​?id​=11682​&view​=facts​&y​=728. 38. Mention of the “Young Ladies Cooking Club” can be found in the December 10, 1884 issue of the Clarion (Jackson), page 3 (no author or title). https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/263764502​/​?terms​=kate​%2Bmarkham​%2Bpower; see also, “Married,” Clarion, December 1, 1886, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /263764918; “Miss Belle Kearney,” Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger, January 31, 1895, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/244038953​/​?terms​=kate​%2Bmarkham​ %2Bpower; and page 3 of the February 9, 1887 issue of the Clarion, for mention of

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Power attending a reception of the K. M. Social Club in Kosciusko, MS (no author or title). https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/263764959. 39. Wolfe, “The Southern Lady,” 18. 40. Power, “Educational Bureau,” Granada (MS)Sentinel, February 13, 1904, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/466313194​/​?terms​=kate​%2Bmarkham​ %2Bpower. 41. Lauren Alexander Maxwell, “Constructions of Femininity: Women and the World’s Columbian Exposition.” 8–9. Undergraduate honors thesis. Butler University, 2009. https:​//​digitalcommons​.butler​.edu​/cgi​/viewcontent​.cgi​?article​=1041​ &context​=ugtheses. 42. Power, “Give Your Aid to a Very Worthy Cause,” 6. 43. Power, “Mississippi Matters,” The Canton Times, May 30, 1902, 3. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/366638209​/​?terms​=kate​%2Bmarkham​%2Bpower. 44.Ibid. 45. Hunter, “The Immortal Confederacy: Another Look at the Lost Cause Religion,” 186. 46. Ibid., 193; see also, Karen L. Cox, “Lost Cause Ideology,” Encyclopedia of Alabama, May 23, 2017, http:​//​encyclopediaofalabama​.org​/article​/h​-1643​/. 47. Power, “The Closing at Tugaloo,” 6. 48. Christopher M. Span, From Cottonfield to Schoolhouse: African American Education in Mississippi, 1862–1875 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 9–10. 49. Jason Phillips, “Reconstruction,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, April 15, 2018, https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/reconstruction​/. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. “Minutemen” and “black Republican” references from David T. Gleeson, The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2013), 70. For a list of John Power’s credentials, see James B. Lloyd, ed., Lives of Mississippi Authors, 1817–1967 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1981), 376. 53. “The Latest Radical Dodge—‘Intelligent Suffrage,’” Daily Clarion-Ledger, January 13, 1877, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/900774378​/. 54. J. L. Power, The State of Mississippi: Its Resources and Progress. An Inviting Field for Immigration and Progress (Jackson: n.p., 1892), 6. Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS. 55. James W. Silver, “Mississippi: A Closed Society,” The Journal of Southern History 30, no. 1 (1964): 30. 56. Power, “Mrs. Hayes,” A Bunch of Letters from the Great Northwest, 5. 57. Ibid. 58. See, respectively, Power, “Death of Mrs. A.Q. May,” Jackson Daily News, July 29, 1908, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/194305028​/​?terms​=kate​ %20markham​%20power​&match​=1; “The Closing at Tugaloo,” 6; “The Children in Our Parks,” Jackson Daily News, June 24, 1909, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/ image​/199797062​/​?terms​=kate​%20markham​%20power​&match​=1; “In the Social

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Realm,” Jackson Daily News, January 13, 1914, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/ image​/194347029​/​?terms​=kate​%20markham​%20power​&match​=1. 59. Span, From Cottonfield to Schoolhouse, 103. 60. Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 32. 61. “Big agriculture and big business” quote from Green, Southern Strategies, 55; 62. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3–4. 63. Ibid., 4–5. 64. Ibid., 4. 65. Ibid., 5, 17. 66. Ibid., 7. 67. Green points out that antisuffragists used several rhetorical arguments in their campaign, including those with theological, sociological, and biological roots. See Southern Strategies, 78–100, for the details of these various strategies. 68. Wheeler, New Women of the New South, 4. 69. Frances M. Benson, “The New Woman,” Kate Power’s Review, February 23, 1895, 3. Reel number 31313, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS. 70. Power, “To My Readers,” Kate Power’s Review, September 1, 1894, 4. Reel number 31313, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS. 71. Charlotte J. Rich, Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 1. 72. Quote from Wells, Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5. For mention of the broad circulation of and target audience for Ladies’ Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post, see Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in The Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post, 1880–1910 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 1–14. 73. For information on circulation numbers and the “magazine revolution” of the late nineteenth century, see Matthew Schneirov, The Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America, 1893–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 76–102. 74. Wells, Women Writers and Journalists, 4. 75. Schneirov, The Dream of a New Social Order, 87. 76. Wells, Women Writers and Journalists, 3. 77. Ibid. 78. Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner, and Carole Fleming, Women and Journalism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 15. 79. Joyce Appleby, Eileen K. Cheng, and Joanne L. Goodwin, eds., “Journalism,” Encyclopedia of Women in American History (New York: Routledge, 2002), 365. 80. Many of the names mentioned in this paragraph were profiled in Wells, “A Voice in the Nation.”

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81. Appleby, Cheng, and Goodwin, “Journalism,” 365. 82. Chambers, Steiner, and Fleming, Women and Journalism, 15. 83. Wells, Women Writers and Journalists, 10.   84. Benson, “The New Woman,” 3.  85. Josie Frazee Cappleman, “Women in the Field of Politics,” Kate Power’s Review, November 10, 1894, 6. Reel number 31313, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS.   86. Power, “Human Wear and Tear,” Kate Power’s Review, September 22, 1894, 5. Reel number 31313, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS.   87. Power, “World’s Fair Letter,” Daily Clarion-Ledger, May 25, 1893, 5. Reel number 31313, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS.   88. Larson, Devil in the White City, 5.   89. Ibid.   90. Ibid.   91. Sidonie Smith, Moving Lives: 20th Century Women’s Travel Writing (Minneapolis, 2001), ix.   92. Restrictions and stereotypes associated with women and traveling from Debbie Lisle, “Gender at a Distance,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1, no. 1 (December 1999): 71; see Smith, Moving Lives, 12, for statement on their limited participation in the “domestication of new communities, not the exploration of new territories.”   93. More information on women as missionaries can be found in Roberta Wollons, “Traveling for God and Adventure: Women Missionaries in the late 19th Century,” Asian Journal of Social Science 31 (2003): 55–71; the work of Victorian era women as botanists, specifically the career of Marianne North, was recorded in the research of Antonia Losano, “A Preference for Vegetables: The Travel Writings and Botanical Art of Marianne North,” Women’s Studies 26 (June 1997): 423–48.   94. Carolyn Kitch, “‘A Genuine, Vivid Personality’: Newspaper Coverage and Construction of a ‘Real’ Advertising Celebrity in a Pioneering Publicity Campaign,” Journalism History 31 (Fall 2005): 129.   95. Power, “Miss Power’s Letter,” 7.   96. Nancy F. Cott, Review of The Fair Women: The Story of the Women’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893 by Jeanne Madeline Weimann, New York Times, July 19, 1981, https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/1981​/07​/19​/books​/an​ -experiment​-of​-women​-1893​.html.   97. Barbara Babcock, “Women’s Rights, Public Defense, and the Chicago World’s Fair,” Chicago-Kent Law Review 87, no. 2 (April 2012): 482. https:​//​scholarship​ .kentlaw​.iit​.edu​/cgi​/viewcontent​.cgi​?article​=3843​&context​=cklawreview.   98. Ibid. See Ruef, “The Human and Financial Capital of the Southern Middle Class, 1850–1900,” 226, for quote.   99. Maxwell, “Constructions of Femininity: Women and the World’s Columbian Exposition,” 7. 100. Green, Southern Strategies, 125.

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101. Power, “Miss Power’s Letter,” 7. 102. Wells, Women Writers and Journalists, 10. 103. Human Wear and Tear,” 5. 104. Jean Marie Lutes, Front-Page Girls: Women Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 1. 105. Ann Ziker, “Florence Sillers Ogden,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, July 11, 2018, https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/florence​-sillers​-ogden​/. 106. Ibid. 107. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 73. 108. Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 160; “Mary Cain’s Rites Tuesday,” Enterprise Journal, May 7, 1984, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/319457233​/​?terms​=Mary​ %20Cain​%27s​%20Rites​%20Tuesday​&match​=1. 109. “Mary Cain’s Rites Tuesday,” 1.

Chapter 2

“If This Is Treason, Make the Most of It”

In August 1956, journalist Florence Sillers Ogden, referencing the Democratic Party’s adoption of civil rights as part of its national platform, said, “Nobody’s asked me, but there’s nothing about it I can accept. . . . If this is treason, make the most of it.”1 The stance was quintessential Ogden; she spent the lion’s share of her career railing against anyone who threatened the so-called “Southern way of life,” while using her influence to maintain those ideals that helped preserve it: the segregation of races and the myth of white superiority. “Yield, yield, yield. I am sick of yielding,” she wrote in her column, “Dis An’ Dat,” in May 1960. “You can lose a fight by retreating as well as by doing battle.”2 She chose the latter, as it was the only path she knew. Her family, members of the “rural Black Belt elite,” were used to resistance—Ogden recalled stories of how her grandmother, Matilda Clark Sillers, the sister to then Mississippi governor, Charles Clark (1863–1865), helped her family survive Grant’s march through the state.3 With federal troops approaching, she led the family to the woods, where, after stashing what valuables and ammunition the family could carry, they ate on sorghum molasses, sweet potatoes, and cornbread to survive. Before she fled, though, Matilda helped her niece, Mary Delia Montgomery, clear her house and hide the Montgomery family valuables, “down to the piano, the carpets, and the trunk where the silver was hidden.”4 Ogden’s political beliefs, and, by extension, her work as a journalist, were tied to her family’s “Delta-planter aristocratic” background—and its use of Black labor, both slave and sharecrop, to sustain its vast plantation and their cotton crop. Indeed, Ogden once recalled three important lessons she learned from her grandmother, as noted by historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae: “how to handle negroes, how to spend your money, and what to do to make cotton.”5 51

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Those lessons, in fact, influenced the Ogden family as a whole; as one of the wealthiest and politically connected white families in the state, the Sillers used their influence to help sustain the state’s Jim Crow system and their lifelong investment and belief in the myth of white superiority. Specifically, longtime Mississippi lawmaker Walter Sillers, Jr., Florence’s older brother, used his considerable influence—he served thirteen consecutive terms in the House, from 1916–1966, and spent two decades of that period as speaker—to sponsor the bill (passed with a vote of 129–2) that enacted the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission.6 And, as pressure mounted in the early 1950s to integrate Delta State Teachers College (and other all-white state colleges and universities), it was Sillers, Jr. who again used his power as house speaker to push through legislation that funded the Mississippi Vocational College (now Mississippi Valley State University) near the Delta town of Itta Bena. Sillers Jr.’s strategy was simple, yet effective, as explained by historian Benjamin O. Sperry: “The intention was that African Americans would settle for going there instead and would seek an education strictly to acquire a bluecollar trade, or to train for teaching.”7 His sister, meanwhile, used her column, which appeared in The Delta Democrat Times, and later, The Clarion-Ledger, to spread racist rhetoric, “Jim Crow journalism,” if you will, to reinforce views that supported white, Southern hegemony; white club women and Delta planters were among her primary target audiences, and she spoke to them about their respective roles in the “restoration of constitutional government to join hands in a movement to stem the tide of federal usurpation.”8 She often spoke in the coded language of white supremacy—“stem the tide of federal usurpation” and the “restoration of constitutional government,” and the like—but her message was clear: it was the responsibility of the white women of Mississippi, as much as the men’s, to maintain the ideological status quo regarding the separation of the races. “We are the great offenders. We are the ones who fail to exercise our right to franchise,” she wrote about women’s participation (or lack thereof) at the ballot box. “We, who have everything we hold dear at stake, sit supinely at home and do not lift a finger to help save our country from those who would destroy it.”9 In her fight to maintain the racial order of the day, Ogden’s rhetorical strategies were not limited to her persuading the white women of Mississippi to vote, and her column was not the only means by which she carried on her overall mission to maintain the separation of races (but it is the primary focus of this study). A number of organizations were important in that regard: the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), the Women for Constitutional Government (WCG)—an organization she helped found in 1962 in opposition to President Kennedy’s decision to send federal troops to restore order after mob violence broke out

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following James Meredith’s enrollment in the University of Mississippi— and, finally, the Delta Cotton Council (DCC)—an economic lobby for Delta cotton planters, the Sillers family included. These groups provided her the opportunity of social connection and the chance to build lasting political relationships. Her overall goal, according to McRae, was to “mobilize voters, white women in particular, to make electoral politics shape and sustain the system of Jim Crow.”10 Mary Dawson Cain of the Summit (MS) Sun joined Ogden in the both the WCG and in the fight to return so-called “sovereign rights” to the people of Mississippi. That fight included a broader attack on the federal policies that she felt threatened state sovereignty: prohibition and Social Security tax (and most, if not all, aspects of the New Deal). However, like her contemporary, Frances Ogden, Cain used her own brand of “Jim Crow journalism” to focus on the preservation of segregation and call for the massive resistance of civil rights platforms that shaped the social and legal changes of the midtwentieth century. “The best way to keep segregation,” she told an audience in August 1955, “is to avoid all laws on the subject, thus leaving nothing for the Supreme Court to hold unconstitutional.”11 Her attacks on the federal government included two campaigns for governor, the first in 1951, and the second, four years later. She held memberships in the Mississippi Federation of Women’s Clubs and the National and Mississippi Federation of Press Women, among other professional and civic groups.12 Like Ogden, she built a network of women across the state and out of state and became a loud and persistent voice in a mid-twentieth-century campaign to “restore lost freedoms” to the people of Mississippi—code language, no doubt, for maintaining white, Southern hegemony—and she believed that women had a role to play in that maintenance. “The dual role which businesswomen play, many of them being mothers and housekeepers, gives them an added insight into present day needs,” she told the McComb (Mississippi) Business and Professional Women’s Club in a March 1938 speech.13 To be sure, journalism was the primary means by which she ran her campaigns, electoral or otherwise, and it helped earn her a respectable reputation from state political leaders, particularly those of the states’ right variety (which were many). Both leaders of the state Citizens’ Councils chapters and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission appointed her to its speakers’ bureaus, meaning she traveled the state and nation to build the case for states’ rights and to counter the negative national press attention focused on her home state.14 After supporting Roosevelt in his first two elections, Cain, much sooner than Ogden, fell out with the Democratic Party, and Roosevelt specifically, after realizing the “danger of his leadership and his colossal, almost inhuman, egotism.”15 Calling his administration a “Raw Deal” for the American people, Cain, in a May 1944 editorial, also compared Roosevelt

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and his policies—everything from the “taxation of incomes” to the ”abolition of laws forbidding intermarriage of persons of different races”—to those of Hitler, saying that it was FDR’s wish “to see the South give up its cherished institutions and play directly into the hands of the federal government.”16 Cain’s most famous (or infamous) campaign against the federal government included resistance against the “taxation of incomes”; she earned the nickname “Hacksaw Mary” in 1953, after using one to saw through the padlock that federal officers from the Internal Revenue Department (IRD) used to secure the front door of her Sun newspaper office after she refused to pay Social Security employee taxes, $41.32 total, on herself and her one employee, niece Mary Lou Butler.17 “When the government threatened me,” she said to a Clarion-Ledger reporter in May 1955, in the middle of her second gubernatorial campaign, “I just wanted to see if they could put a person in jail for wanting to take care of herself in her old age.”18 The notoriety that scene brought Cain, who liked telling the press that she “stumbled into journalism” after a local newspaper published one of her poems in the 1930s, is an interesting episode in the career of a woman who once dared look into lens of an NBC television camera and say to a nationwide audience, “I think Mississippi has done wonders with our race relations. I think it has been a marvelous thing that our negros have come as far as they have. And I feel no sense of guilt, and I do not feel we need to apologize for what we have done for them.”19 Indeed, neither Cain nor Ogden would ever give so much as an inch to their opponents; so deeply embedded was their racism, and so unflinching was their support of the Jim Crow laws that sustained it, that they didn’t hesitate to support the use of force to maintain the “southern way of life.” “The problem with integration is the least part of the whole. It is but the match that lights the fire,” Ogden said in the aftermath of the integration of Little Rock High School in October 1957. “The whole basic structure of your free government is at stake. Will the people of the North and West, ‘Way Down East,’ stand by and let it burn?”20 By contrast, the “activist journalism” of Ogden and Cain’s contemporary, Hazel Brannon Smith, reveals a more complex thought process on race and matters of government and democracy; in fact, Smith’s opinions actually shifted as the civil rights movement met with the violence of white Southerners who could no longer abide the progress made by the movement. As Cain and Ogden condoned, even encouraged, violence as a means to hold the racial status quo, Smith demanded change because of it. “The laws of America are for everyone—rich and poor, strong and weak, black and white. The vast majority of Holmes County people are not rednecks who look with favor on the abuse of people because their skin is Black. Sheriff [Richard] Byrd has violated every concept of justice, decency,

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and right. He is not fit to occupy office,” Smith said in 1954, in response to Byrd shooting an unarmed Black man, Henry Randle, in the leg. His only crime, Smith reported, was landing in Byrd’s crosshairs (who already had a notorious reputation for abusing Black citizens in his custody), while in town looking for something to eat for dinner.21 The resulting legal battle between Byrd and Smith—he successfully sued her for libel, and she appealed the decision to the Mississippi Supreme Court— was one of the first such legal battles, but not the last, of her career.22 At that point, her career in journalism, like her views on the issue of race, evolved and ended up in a place that not even she could have imagined. Smith, like Cain and Ogden, was a supportive, loving daughter of the Old South. She believed, for much of her life, in the social, political, and legal institutions of white supremacy as much as anyone—but, like several Southern (male) journalists who bore first-hand witness to the inhumane violence that defined the civil rights struggles during the Jim Crow era, she believed there was a line that should not be crossed. “Hazel Brannon Smith was for many years the darling of the South. She charmed those around her. She wore stylish big hats. She drove a convertible. She was the guest in the homes of the upper-echelon in a hierarchical Southern town. She was intelligent and educated,” Smith biographer Jan Whitt writes. “But her white privilege couldn’t save her from seeing the community as it really was, couldn’t prevent her from confronting what lie beneath the system of manners and the finely manicured lawns of the white people of Holmes County.”23 This chapter chronicles the stories of these three women—Ogden, Cain, and Smith—and how two, Ogden and Cain, used their journalism to help sustain Mississippi’s “closed society” in the mid-twentieth century. They didn’t walk the state capitol beat, per se, but their opinions on political issues during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras were important nonetheless—if for no other reason because they helped bring to light the persistent and obscene nature of such arguments, laid open and bare in the public print. In other words, to best understand racism, we must study those who helped support its systems—and those, like Smith, who did their part in calling them out. In that regard, it is important to place Smith as a transitionary figure for women in Mississippi journalism, for she was one of the first women editors and publishers of the mid-twentieth century to take a principled stand against centuries-old racist ideologies and systems. In general, her brand of “activist journalism” was not unique among journalists with similar principles, but it is the fact that she was a Southern woman speaking out against the brutality and lawlessness of her own people that was (and still is) a remarkable feat that deserves continued attention. As has been noted, Southern women, historically speaking at least, were (and some say are) not supposed to have

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their own frank and controversial opinions, much less observations that dared publicly question the political, legal, and social structures and racial violence that supported white Southern hegemony. Hazel Brannon Smith, as noted in this chapter, had one foot firmly planted the in Old South, but she dared place the other one firmly in the direction of change—while pointing out the gaping flaws that existed in the South of her childhood as she took that step forward. Accordingly, she inspired the journalism of a generation of Southern women, Norma Fields for one, who, like Smith, was not afraid to risk their social standing and security to defy the cultural expectations of Southern womanhood. “I ain’t no lady,” Smith said quite simply, “I’m a newspaper woman.”24

Figure 2.1.  From L to R: Mary Dawson Cain (Summit Sun), Hazel Brannon Smith (Durant News and Lexington Advertiser), and Lois Anderson (Ripley Sentinel) attend the 1948 Mississippi State Fair as officers of the Mississippi Press Women, an organization whose membership included the few women editors and publishers in the state and the wives of men who owned and edited the vast majority of the state’s local newspapers. Source: Mississippi Press Association Collection, Manuscript Division, Archives and Special Collections, Mississippi State University Libraries.

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“CONCERNED WAS HER NATURAL STATE” In the days following her 1971 death, an editorial in The Delta Democrat Times, which carried her weekly syndicated column, “Dis An’ Dat,” paid tribute to the woman affectionately called “Miss Florence”: “[She] carried her feelings upon her sleeve, had the courage of her convictions and never hesitated when the time came to stand up and be counted,” columnist Brodie Crump said. “‘Concerned’ was her natural state, when it came to injustice, inequality, indifference, and inertia, and she often let go with both barrels of her pungent pen in ‘Dis An’ Dat . . .”25 The above statements are only partially true, of course, for Ogden never aligned herself with the fight for “injustice” or “inequality,” at least not in the way that really mattered; as in the case of most racists, Odgen’s version of injustice or inequality included attempts to sustain the political and legal status quo, and the Jim Crow laws that supported the climate that afforded her power and privilege. It is true, though, that Ogden did use her column to, as Crump put it, “let go with both barrels of her pungent pen” when she saw or heard something she didn’t like—specifically any attempts to alter the so-called “southern way of life” to which she was accustomed. In fact, for thirty years, Ogden used her “pungent pen” in the aid of white supremacy, from her full-throated support of Jim Crow and the state organizations that sustained it, to her pushback against what she called the “federal encroachment” of states’ rights (i.e., “constitutional rights”) and her support of Republican Party candidates, like Barry Goldwater, who she believed represented the best, and perhaps last, opportunity to preserve racial inequality. Ogden believed, too, that the women of Mississippi were a crucial element in that battle: “Where the men faltered, the women have led out for constitutional government,” she said in 1964. “They have been far ahead.”26 Her specific talking points shifted by time and political circumstances— from Mississippi Delta farm politics beginning in the 1930s to the fight against civil rights (e.g., school integration) starting in the 1940s, and, finally, her role in the state’s shift from Democratic to Republican Party “stronghold” beginning in the 1950s. The one constant that remained, however, was Ogden’s lifelong belief in the myth of white superiority and the strength of the planter class—and her conviction that she had a role to play in the defense of both. “Remember, you cannot win a battle without firing a gun. You cannot hit the ball with the bat on your shoulder. You cannot win an issue unless you vote,” she said in November 1955, as she advised readers against the dangers of a “world government” (and everything it would bring, from the destruction of the farm economy to the erosion of racial segregation).27

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Her first column appeared in the Democrat Times in the late 1930s; before then, she wrote for another local paper, the Delta Star, and used her membership in such organizations as the UDC to preserve and honor Confederate history.28 By extension, her earliest journalism reinforced the myth of the “Lost Cause”—as with Kate Markham Power, Ogden had trouble separating reality from romance. In March 1937, for example, the Democrat Times published a poem written by Ogden that romanticized two of the things she loved most in life: the Mississippi Delta and the Confederacy. Entitled simply “Dixie Land,” the poem openly revealed in the first stanza her love of the land—“When you come to the land where the chigger bugs bite; And the buzz of mosquitos goes the live long night”—just as the poem’s second stanza revealed the racist language of someone who envisions a world in which Black people are actually happy with their circumstances in the Jim Crow South: “While niggers are riding, their black faces beaming—You are in Dixie, down in Dixie Land.”29 More to the point, Ogden played a direct role in the DAR’s 1937 purchase of Rosalie, a plantation mansion in Natchez, a favor that should not be overlooked. On paper, organizations like the DAR served to commemorate and preserve historical sites and records related to American independence, but both its mission and the persuasive powers the organization used to carry it out, went much deeper than that. The mid-twentieth century was a golden age for the DAR—they had more than 2,000 active members and a portfolio that included nineteen radio stations. After Rosalie’s restoration, the DAR used the mansion as its headquarters; for her role, Ogden secured a firm position in the organization, and soon thereafter, her own weekly column in the local newspaper.30 In fact, it was Ogden’s belief in the virtues of the Lost Cause that fed her Jim Crow journalism; in one 1941 column, written after she returned from a visit to a Washington County plantation, Ogden described in rather romantic terms some of the items she discovered on the trip, including the ledger and notes left behind by one of the overseers. One statement in particular, though, symbolized her approval of both the Jim Crow social structure and her fondness of the plantation system that defined much of her family’s wealth and status: “A copy of the overseer’s rules might hang to advantage over every planter’s desk. Perhaps then we would not have to be subsidized.”31 Elizabeth Gillespie McRae notes that to help sustain support for Jim Crow, Southern white people often “spoke in the language of southern history to southern audiences.”32 True to form, Ogden, in both examples, used imagery and language to the benefit and promotion of racial segregation at the local level—including the belief that Black laborers, such as those who worked her own family’s land, were content with their stations. “I make them work and they like me,” she admitted in a 1936 column.33 At the same time, she spoke

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the language of the local Delta farming communities, particularly its planter class, who, beginning the 1930s, felt the pressure of rising property taxes meant to subsidize the state’s dirt farmers. Ogden was pro-farmer, but only as far as she did not have to pay out of her own pocket to support a system in which the Delta farming class didn’t benefit. “The fight [for] parity is a move to put the farmer on the dole, to make him a ward of the government,” Ogden said in August 1942 column.34 She considered the cotton crop essential to American life, and she embarked on a decades-long campaign to bring attention to the contributions and struggles of the cotton grower.35 “Don’t be a sap, cotton farmers,” she said in July 1939, just as the United States introduced an embargo that would eventually affect the shipment of many American raw materials. “Demand your rights. Speak up in meetings.”36 All of this is to say that Ogden’s columns, in between discussions of the local society events and news and notes about her family (of both there were many), had a sharp political edge, one that she used to wedge herself into matters of state economy (specifically the cotton crop) and any local, state, or national issue that she felt threatened the white power structure (such as the organized labor movement, which she believed carried with it the stink of Communism, as it threatened the planter class economy). “Those of you who do not believe that there is an under-current over this country to Sovietize America and make our hitherto sweet and peaceful land into a seething inferno like Europe had better keep a more watchful eye upon certain magazines that clutter the news stalls,” she wrote in October 1941.37 Her criticisms of the federal government to the contrary, Ogden was a loyal Democrat and supported both FDR and his New Deal through his three terms in office—especially when she believed FDR’s farm policies favored the Delta cotton farmer.38 She did criticize Eleanor Roosevelt’s February 1939 resignation from the DAR, and later, several of ER’s public appearances in which she broke the color lines to show her support for Black Americans— “She’s gone too far,” Ogden said after one of ER’s trips to Harlem—but, otherwise, as she told readers in 1939, “her actions do not affect our admiration for and loyalty to [the President].”39 A decade later, Ogden’s loyalties had shifted, as she could no longer belong to a political party that she believed supported so-called “un-American” causes and legal positions—specifically those that attempted to dismantle Jim Crow. The separation began after the publication in 1947 of To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President’s Commission on Civil Rights, the official 178-page report of the body created by President Harry Truman in 1946 to examine the condition of civil rights in the United States following the Second World War.40 In essence, the report led to the desegregation of both the federal workforce and the armed forces; in a speech before the

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Democratic Women of Mississippi, Ogden called the report “the most vicious edict in the history of our nation.”41 Ogden’s connections to Congress, specifically to longtime Mississippi lawmaker John E. Rankin (who would eventually serve sixteen terms in the US House of Representatives, between 1921–1953), confirmed the worst: “[The] President brings in crazy recommendations to wipe out all segregation in our schools, colleges, hotels, etc.,” Rankin reported to Ogden in December 1947.42 At the time, Rankin served on a number of influential committees that gave him enormous decision-making power; on the one hand, he served as coauthor of the bill that established the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and supported the Montgomery GI Bill. On the other, he proposed a House bill that would outlaw interracial marriage, and, during the Second World War, backed legislation for Japanese American internment camps (which Ogden also publicly supported).43 In other words, there wasn’t much that happened in Washington that Rankin didn’t know about, and Ogden was happy to relay any information she could get from him (or anyone else on Capitol Hill) to her readers. In the wake of Executive Order 9981, many leaders of the Southern faction of the Democratic Party, including Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright (1946–1952), formed the States’ Rights Party (commonly known as the “Dixiecrats”), and then subsequently nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina as a third-party presidential candidate in 1948 to run against President Truman.44 For her part, Ogden traveled around the state reminding women, in public speeches like the keynote address she gave before the State Women’s Committee (of the Mississippi Democratic Party), that “We, the women, have a big stake in the issues” before reminding the crowd of 800 that “segregation comes straight to us from our ancestors.”45 However, attacking Truman and his attempts to initiate an “irreversible process of ‘mongrelization’” was not enough.46 Four years later, she gave her full-throated support to the 1952 Republican ticket and General Dwight D. Eisenhower—in an October 1952 column, she presented more than a dozen reasons for her decision—so sure was she that the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson, would deny, as she mentioned in another column, the Democratic Party and “its own members the very thing it would give to any group or country—the right to follow the dictates of its own conscience.”47 She reminded the women of Mississippi what was at stake—the 1952 presidential election was one of the most important in history, she said, “a day that will go down in the history of the South.” “On that day,” she continued, “the South will turn its back on a party, and party leaders, who have betrayed every ideal for which it stands.” And, Ogden noted, this event will be led by women: “The women can carry this election for Ike. If they will, and I believe they will.”48

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For the next twenty years, until her 1971 death, Ogden would champion the GOP as the party of refuge for Southern Democrats. At the same time, she would use her weekly column to rail against the evils of the Democratic Party platform, including but not limited to policies related to integration and immigration, both of which she considered a threat to the constitutional rights of white Americans. Of the former, she said, in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, “the Supreme Court has rendered its decision to scrap the Constitution.” The Brown decision, Ogden argued, was a specific threat to the mothers of Mississippi, both Black and white, as it not only violates the autonomy of the states but their power and authority to decide the future of their children. “This is as important to the North as to the South,” Ogden said, “as vital to the Negroes as to the white people. Their freedom is at stake.”49 In speaking to readers, Ogden’s rhetorical strategy included couching her arguments in the language of conflict—she aligned the concept of freedom with state sovereignty while describing the Court’s actions in much more negative terms: “seizure,” “edicts,” “nullified,” and “discord and unrest.” Furthermore, she also accused the Court of jeopardizing the rights of white Americans by ruling that the “separate but equal” doctrine was illegal. In doing so, she attempted to convince readers that “equality” and “justice” are finite resources that cannot be uniformly distributed among a population. “Social gains cannot compensate any group, class, or section, for the loss of their constitutional rights under this Republic—a government which has given to the people more worldly goods, higher standards of living, more freedom and justice, than any nation in the history of all nations of the earth,” she said. “They are risking all of this to gain social privileges, which, after all, cannot be legislated, nor decreed.”50 Legal decisions like Brown threatened Ogden because her power as a white woman came, in part, from the role her family played as an enslaver of Black Americans—a role that she still took a great deal of pride in, as evident in her romantic descriptions of the “Old South”—and from her position as a syndicated columnist and an ardent supporter of Jim Crow. Brown threatened to take that power away, and Ogden was willing to do whatever she needed to do to maintain the status quo. She knew that education was an important and powerful tool in the fight for equality, so she attacked any attempt to provide equal access to educational resources. She argued against federal aid for public schools—as it gave the federal government the opportunity to brainwash children, she told mothers. And, the Brown decision, she reasoned, gave the government all the power it needed to shove the subject of civil rights down children’s throats, especially in such important matters as textbook selection.51 “These books should tell the truth, and show something of the development of the races,” she said in a March 1956 column, before adding,

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“there should be pictures showing jungle scenes and the comparable stage of development of the race which they are attempting to force into schools, churches and homes.”52 Ogden’s biological (and illogical) arguments aside, her disdain for other races and cultures was no more apparent than when she spoke against immigration, which, she believed, posed a threat to the heritage and history of the Mississippi Delta and the state as a whole. When she argued against immigration, we see in her rhetoric the DAR’s influence; she often referenced the organization’s racist ideology when speaking on the topic, and she often used her column to recruit on the DAR’s behalf.53 A March 1959 column, in fact, reads like a recruitment drive, as Ogden spoke directly to women, wives and mothers, who might find in the DAR a set of shared ideals, a similar mission—a message that is a mix of Lost Cause nostalgia and the maintenance of Jim Crow. “We respect our ancestors. It was theirs to bequeath to us a land of liberty. It is ours to try to hold it for our children and our children’s children,” she said. “This is, dear people, the main business of the D.A.R. of today.” Ogden argued that the DAR had grown beyond its role as a keeper of history; to be sure, they would still play a significant role in that regard—“to encourage the proper teaching of American history” in matters of education, for example—but with so much at stake, including the problem of immigration, the women of the DAR, Ogden wrote, were prepared to do their part. “This is why their Resolutions declare belief in the integrity of the races—each to their own kind; strict immigration laws,” she said, “and many other like issues.”54 The ills and dangers of immigration were issues Ogden preached on for some four decades. It was not some abstract issue to be debated by elected officials; immigration, she said, was as much a problem in the Mississippi Delta as it was in urban areas like New York City or coastal cities like Miami.55 The women of Mississippi, therefore, must be ever vigilant if and when the government “opens our doors to hundreds of thousands of Orientals and Africans,” as she predicted would happen if the Republican Party did not get and keep power in the upcoming 1964 presidential election: “They are determined to hold on to the Constitution and restore it to its proper place in government,” she said in one 1963 article. “As any husband can tell you, what a woman wants, she gets.”56 To that point, Ogden founded a new national organization, the WCG, in 1962, with the “preservation of constitutional government, free enterprise, the Christian faith, racial self-respect, and national sovereignty” as its primary goals.57 These goals may seem rather benign on the surface, but they are constructed with code language meant to symbolize more malignant ends. “Constitutional government,” for example, is code for “states’ rights,” which, of course, is a phrase often used by racists to symbolize their support

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for segregation and the Jim Crow laws that sustain its practice (e.g., state sovereignty over federal intervention); “Christian faith” is mentioned to symbolize a white, Judeo-Christian intolerance over other religious or ideological beliefs that may be practiced by “others”—less-than-desirable groups like immigrants, or, better yet, liberals who believe in and practice so called “un-American” political ideologies like communism (as Ogden and others like her often drew the connection between liberalism and communism and communism as a destroyer of Christianity); “racial self-respect” implies that Black Americans, despite the difficult and dangerous circumstances of living in a segregated society, should not look to government to help ease their burdens. Rather, they should have enough self-respect to work harder and do better to improve their circumstances. In reality, then, “racial self-respect” is a goal that allows supporters of racial segregation to evade the responsibility of their own malicious actions—in this case, the role that they played in supporting and sustaining segregation. “National sovereignty,” meanwhile, rejected America’s growing participation in global, geopolitical organizations like the United Nations. In fact, after first believing the UN was of little consequence, Ogden grew increasingly critical of the organization (especially as the Cold War escalated)—it was infested with the evil rot of Communism (much like the civil rights movement), she insisted, had too much influence over US foreign and domestic policy, and, closer to home, the organization’s focus on human rights and global participation threatened the survival of racial segregation and the mechanisms used to support it.58 At the local level, Ogden warned that the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s multicultural educational curriculum (e.g., teaching materials and textbooks) posed a threat to schoolaged children should the federal government choose to adopt it for public schools. “It would appear that social science textbook writers are more interested in the ‘virtues’ of the United Nations, the ‘evils’ of the free enterprise system, and the ‘benefits’ of World Government than they are the in the U.S. form of government and the Constitution,” Ogden said.59 She advised the mothers of Mississippi to take heed: “Parents who embrace the UNESCO should give careful study to the tenants of this organization before they endorse it. This I beg of you,” she said in a March 1955 article. “UNESCO is subtly dedicated to the destruction of true patriotism and love of country in your child. Is that what American parents want?”60 Ogden formed WCG because she had become so disillusioned with the state of political affairs—or rather, with what she perceived as elected officials’ inability or refusal to stop the “tyrannical abuse” of the federal government on the rights of the people.61 In an October 1962 article about the WCG, Ogden referenced the events surrounding the admission of James Meredith

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to the University of Mississippi as evidence of the need for the WCG. “It’s hard to believe that these abuses were inflicted by our own federal government,” Ogden told UPI reporter Cliff Sessions in reference to President John Kennedy’s decision to send federal and state law enforcement to Oxford (only after Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett had repeatedly refused to allow, and had intentionally blocked, Meredith’s enrollment). “[It’s enough] to break the heart of any true American woman.”62 The WCG issued a statement, a bill of grievances actually, condemning Kennedy and his administration for the violence that followed—a campus riot that ended only after 30,000 troops arrived in Oxford, but not before two civilians, including a French reporter, Paul L. Guihard, were killed and over 300 others injured.63 The members of the WCG were “highly incensed” by the “ruthless show of federal might and tyrannical abuse of the rights of the people and the state.”64 Ogden added, “Mississippi women are indignant and have a right to be.” She then indicated that those responsible, the Kennedy administration and the Democrats specifically, would be “repudiated at the polls” in the near future.65 To that end, Ogden and the WCG threw their support behind Republican Senator Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential election. To be sure, Ogden showed a bit of reservation at first—the question of civil rights was, she noted, “a major issue—THE major issue” that might keep Goldwater from winning the election. Goldwater must confront it, Ogden reasoned, and his position must make clear that “if Negroes hope to have a place in government they must look at the interests of the Nation as a whole, and not through the keyhole of special privileges for the Negro.”66 Goldwater’s civil rights record was tepid at best—he opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, much to Ogden’s delight—and she soon rallied to Goldwater’s side. To convince readers, she played on their (and her) emotional connection to the myth of the Lost Cause: “If our fathers should rise up out of their graves and take a look around, they wouldn’t recognize the party of their fathers,” she said of the Democrats. “I know exactly what my father . . . would do. He would vote for Goldwater. So would my two Confederate grandfathers.”67 Ogden’s political attraction to Goldwater was no accident. Goldwater’s campaign staff intentionally targeted the Deep South, for they knew he could not win the general election without it. He ultimately lost in November 1964 to Lyndon Johnson, of course—in fact, his was an embarrassing loss nationwide—but his “Operation Dixie” (the code name for his plan to win the Deep South) did secure, for future elections, a solid Southern bloc, five total states, for his party. (More details on the 1964 presidential election will be given in chapter 7.) In fact, four of those states, Mississippi included, had not voted Republican since before Reconstruction.68 “Mississippi stood her ground—valiantly,” Ogden said shortly after the election, taking some

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pride in the fact that her “ancestral town of Beulah went 100 percent for Goldwater—47 to 0.”69 Five years later, Ogden died, not long after the Supreme Court ruled in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education that the final pieces of the state’s segregated school system be dismantled. (More details about this decision also will be revealed in chapter 7.) The Court handed that decision down in 1969; by the next year, all of the state’s school districts were desegregated.70 In early 1970, Ogden, in typical overdramatic fashion, said, “Doomsday has struck. The time bomb has exploded on the schools of the South, while the schools of the North, East and West go on their merry ways, untouched.”71 Of course, Ogden ignored many relevant facts in making her point—public school systems in all other geographic areas of the country were, of course, subject to any Supreme Court’s decision regarding school desegregation. In fact, the 1970s saw significant public outcry to Court decisions, like Keyes vs. School District No. 1 of Denver, CO (1971), one of the first, but not the last, rulings that demonstrated that the issue of school integration was not just limited to the South.72 Even so, Ogden went to her grave believing that her logic was flawless and that her efforts, both as a journalist and community leader, were above reproach. If she made any mistakes, she believed, it was trusting the Democratic Party to right the ship, so to speak, and return itself to the party that her Confederate ancestors loved and supported. Ogden’s “Jim Crow journalism,” colored with strong hints of the Lost Cause, heavily influenced by the politics of white supremacy, said as much—right until the very end. “How can we keep our American concept of government, our ideals, our traits of character, our American look at this rate?” Ogden asked in response to federal immigration policy, in one of her final columns before her June 1971 death.73 “CONSERVATIVE EVERYWOMAN” In 1971, around the time of Ogden’s death, Mary Dawson Cain was in Washington for a meeting of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service (DACWS).74 The DACWS, founded in the early 1950s, served in an advisory function to the secretary of defense on matters related to the recruitment, retention, and treatment of women in the armed forces, among similar duties. The DACWS was a civilian committee, with members selected for their notoriety and success in their respective fields.75 Given her disdain for government management, and the federal government in general, Cain’s appointment was rather ironic, especially for those who knew of her role as a “vicious battler for the individual constitutional rights of American citizens.”76 Then again, she was, especially at the height of the Cold War, a

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champion of a strong American defense system as part of the ongoing battle against Communism; also, as a publisher and editor, she was quite well-aware of her power and influence, so she may have appreciated the appointment, as it symbolized respect for her role in defending the so-called “American way of life.” In other words, Mary Dawson Cain loved the spotlight. “The Jackson Daily News followed the story closely, and even featured a front page photograph of Cain by her newspaper office with her trusty hacksaw in hand,” historian Lisa Kay Speer said in describing the publicity Cain received after her infamous run-in with the IRD.77 Mary Dawson Cain spent nearly half a century building and sustaining a reputation based on her outright defiance of any federal law that she believed encroached on state sovereignty—in this case, the will of white citizens of the state of Mississippi to act in ways that would suppress or remove the legal rights of its Black citizens, and, in many cases, cause those citizens physical harm without fear of prosecution or reprisal. In that regard, she and Florence Sillers Ogden were similar, but their backgrounds could not have been more different. Ogden was a member of the Mississippi “Black Belt” elite; Cain was from a small community in southwest Mississippi, right near the Louisiana state line. Cain wasn’t born in the comfort and wealth of a family plantation but in a railcar, somewhere between Mississippi and Louisiana, one of six children. Her father, Charles, worked for the Illinois Central Railroad, and her mother often traveled with him, as she did the night Mary was born in August 1904.78 She used the details of her background to build what Elizabeth Gillespie McRae calls an “conservative everywoman” image.79 Like Ogden, Cain used her journalism to frame national political issues as problems of local concern—from prohibition to Social Security to segregation, Cain was direct, defiant, and deliberate in calling for the federal government to leave the people alone to govern for themselves. That directness came through in her editorials, of course, but also with her longtime involvement in state electoral politics, specifically her 1950s gubernatorial campaigns. She ran, twice, because she wanted to, in “plain, unmistakable English,” help unite the nation under the banner of states’ rights, a movement that, at its core, worked to sustain white supremacy and erode, if not outright eliminate, the rights of Black Americans.80 “I stand for what [Thomas] Jefferson did,” she said in March 1951, as she announced her first gubernatorial campaign. “[A] wise and frugal government . . . the right to labor to enjoy the bread it has earned.”81 Cain began referring to herself as a Jeffersonian Democrat as early as the late 1930s, a decade before members of the newly formed States’ Rights Party started using the moniker to signify that they were “true Democrats” and to separate themselves from what the party had become—an “instrument of reform” that had, through programs like the New Deal, created a welfare

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state for citizens, particularly Black and Brown Americans, who most certainly did not “earn their bread” but instead relied on the government dole, as Cain’s quote implied.82 That Cain herself was of Spanish descent—her great-grandfather, Juan Delagarza, immigrated to the United States from Pesquina, Spain, sometime in the nineteenth century—was a fact that she would conveniently ignore and hide in her public declarations about the virtues of racial segregation.83 “God made the white race, the black race, the yellow race, and other races to live among themselves,” she said in February 1952, “but the smart-alecks in Washington want to destroy God’s plan and have one big race of mongrels.”84 In both gubernatorial campaigns (and in the leadership roles she held organizations like the WCG), Cain encouraged, even challenged, Southern white women to acknowledge and use their political power at the ballot box. Like Florence Ogden, Cain recruited Southern white women (and women from outside the South as well) in her longtime fight against the federal government—a battle that began even before Ogden initiated her own gubernatorial campaigns—by convincing women that they were as capable as their husbands and fathers, if not more so, in determining the future of the white race. “Incredible as it may seem, God gave women [minds] too, and you might give us credit for being able to do at least a little [reasoning] for ourselves,” she said in response to religious leaders who were critical of women’s involvement in politics, particularly their work in helping to repeal the eighteenth amendment.85 It was in the late 1920s that Cain began her campaign against the federal government, over the issue of prohibition, and it would be one of the few times that she was out-of-step with most Mississippi white women. “I feel that the dry-club women of Mississippi would not hesitate to pillory me,” she said to Jackson Daily News publisher and editor, Fred Sullens, on the topic of her support for a repeal of the eighteenth amendment.86 Cain had little problem coming to terms with her Southern Baptist upbringing when it came to the issue of drinking—she simply believed that the church had no business in the business of politics. Furthermore, she and her husband saw no sin in social drinking (She once said that “God asked for temperance, not total abstinence”), and she publicly criticized religious leaders who preached prohibition from the pulpits.87 “I believe that God will hold to a strict accounting any man who has had a part in grossly misrepresenting his teachings,” she said.88 On a more practical level, she believed prohibition to be a failed measure— it had, she insisted, created a culture of semi-professional criminals and bred contempt for the law. “Before prohibition how many people could make home-brew?” she asked. And, legally, the federal government had no right to legislative the moral decisions of its citizens, she said. “The proper place for such a ridiculous law is the trash can!” she exclaimed in a March 1933 public

Figure 2.2.  “Let’s march—not forward to a Welfare State, but back to Constitutional government and American freedom. And I’m here to say it!” Mary Cain announced in her 1951 campaign for governor, an obvious dog whistle meant to attract white voters to her pro-segregation platform. Source: Mary D. Cain for Governor, June 1951, M195 Robert C. Waller Photographs, Special Collections, University Libraries, The University of Southern Mississippi.

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letter with the scandalous title, “Prohibition Should Have Been Raped,” which many local newspapers around the state and region published.89 Cain’s stance on prohibition raised her state and national profile—especially among fellow “wets” outside of the state—even if a majority of Mississippians disagreed with her on the issue.90 To be sure, even before she owned the Sun, she and her husband were well-connected and loyal members of the state Democratic Party—she became the publicity director for the women’s division of the state party in the 1930s.91 They also were devout FDR supporters—in her “Prohibition Should Have Been Raped” public letter, Cain said that Franklin Roosevelt was “the one thing that gives me hope for America today”—and, like most Southern Democrats in the early 1930s, supported the first New Deal programs.92 However, Cain’s affection for Roosevelt would fade soon after the 1936 presidential election. The progressive nature of the subsequent New Deal policies (like Social Security), along with Roosevelt’s support of specific anti-Jim Crow legislation (like an antilynching bill) and his unsuccessful attempt to expand the Supreme Court, was too much for Cain to tolerate.93 She began using space in her own newspaper (which she opened after almost two years editing a rival newspaper, the Summit Sentinel) to rail against the Roosevelt administration for its reckless social spending and support of legislation, like the aforementioned antilynching bill, that Cain believed undermined white hegemony and authority.94 In her public campaign against the federal government, Cain often used a backward logic in her opinions (as did many white Southerners who also supported racial segregation), expressing to readers, for example, that outsiders were to blame for social and racial unrest. Such was the case when she made any argument related to lynching legislation—Cain insisted that the Roosevelts were actually to blame for the increase in racial violence across the state in the 1940s.95 Eleanor Roosevelt, in particular, was the nation’s “ringleader of racial agitation” by publicly supporting Black Americans and changing them from people “who are by nature happy as the day is long” into a race of people looking for trouble.96 By extension, ER was putting their lives at risk. “There’s no use in anyone telling them differently,” she declared, “it only gets the poor Negroes in trouble.”97 Cain not only engaged in victim-blaming, but she drastically minimized the role of white Southerners as agents of the violent acts and instead pinned the blame on Black citizens who, pushed on by the Supreme Court and the federal government, dared question their place in a segregated society.98 In fact, if the lives of Black Southerners were as bad as some claimed, she asked, why do so many remain in the region? To answer that question, Cain would cherry-pick testimony to run in her column from local Black residents (men and women who were probably too intimidated to say otherwise) as proof

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that, in the words of one local Black man, “the Negro is not interested in social or racial equality.”99 Even so, Cain built a consistent case over the years as to why she believed that Black citizens did not deserve equal rights—and the consequences should the federal government intervene in a state’s right to determine such cases. She argued for the right of the states to determine the qualifications of its citizen voters—she was in favor of the poll tax—and any attempt by the federal government to remove such barriers would allow for “uncouth and ignorant” participation at the ballot box; of course, the phrase “uncouth and ignorant” referred to the state’s Black citizens, and Cain was direct when describing the consequences should the poll tax be removed.100 “The South is prepared to see bloodshed,” she argued in December 1942, “if federal officials were sent to open the polls to unqualified voters.”101 In other instances, Cain used her journalism to imply how dangerous and suspect she believed Black people to be and the consequences if the federal government forced integration on its citizens—as they did with the Brown decision. She buried news of Brown on page four of her newspaper, a symbolic gesture, of course, meant to convey her lowly opinion of the decision.102 In a subsequent column, however, Cain was more direct, suggesting that if the Southern leaders dared comply with the federal mandate, “evils far in excess of the Ku Klux Klan will rise again.”103 The implications of the remark were many, as it suggested that Black Mississippians would pay for the decision, especially those who followed it. Also, the comment suggested that another civil war was a possibility if Southerners were backed into a corner by federal authorities or state leaders who dared follow the decision. Cain also consistently played on the fears of her white readers in references to the danger posed to white school-aged girls who were forced to attend classes with Black school-aged boys. Specifically, Cain reinforced the stereotype of the sexually aggressive Black youth, particularly after the Brown decision, by increasing the space in her newspaper dedicated to violence crimes, like rape, against white women by Black defendants.104 In some cases, as with Emmett Till’s brutal murder, she even rationalized the violence, saying that while his violent death should be avenged, she could not understand why his mother allowed the “impudent young upstart” to come to Mississippi in the first place.105 Cain’s inflammatory remarks about Till—she blamed his lack of manners as one reason for his death, and even wondered in the days after the murder if authorities would even find a body, or if would “turn up in Chicago one day” unharmed—did much short- and long-term damage to the cause for racial equality.106 Her comments perpetuated the perceived inequalities between Black and white citizens (e.g., whites are more well-mannered than Black people), just as they cast blame on the victim(s) (i.e., Till and his mother) as a

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way of mitigating responsibility for the crime—a rationale white Southerners would continue to use for decades as a way of minimizing their own white guilt when confronted with that and similar cases. In doing so, Cain gave her readers more than one reason (and excuse) to continue to defy and resist, with frequent and deadly violence, the coming social, legal, and political changes brought on by the Brown decision and others like it. As biographer Lisa K. Speer said, “[Cain] personified, in word and deed, the mindset of massive resistance.”107 As evident from the legal battle with the IRD, which included a civil suit filed by the agency, she welcomed any opportunity to wrestle what she called the “8-armed octopus” of the federal government.108 Moreover, she looked forward to doing it in broad daylight—she loved the publicity that came from the fight. When faced with possible arrest for refusing to pay Social Security back taxes on herself and one other employee, her niece, Mary Lou Butler, she said that she would “go to jail before [I] will submit to this rape by the government;”109 when asked if the IRD would be so petty as to take the Sun for failure to repay, she publicly stated that it would happen “over my dead body.”110 In a widely publicized gesture, she then sold the Sun to her niece for one dollar to keep it out of government hands; and when served with the aforementioned civil suit, she fought the IRD all the way to Supreme Court. The Court refused to hear her case, leaving a lower court ruling from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to stand, which meant that Cain owed the money.111 However, even after a nineteen-month civil case that ended with the IRD garnishing Butler’s wages as an indirect means of collecting the back taxes, Cain remained publicly defiant.112 As of 1976, she still did not have a Social Security number and told a reporter for The Clarion-Ledger, “Now I have a CPA . . . do my tax returns. Every year the government writes me to say the returns are not complete.”113 To be sure, Cain’s fight against the government over Social Security was not just for show—regardless of the issue, she was consistent in her arguments that an individual should always have the right to refuse a government service—but she certainly didn’t shirk from the limelight, either. In fact, she used the attention to her advantage, as it helped her cultivate professional and political networks that stretched across the state and beyond. Those networks, many of them women’s organizations, were critical, she believed, in her fight to keep the social and racial status quo. “Women are nearly always fighting for country and for good,” she once said.114 In turn, many of those same organizations saw Cain’s professional experience as an asset to their own missions and goals; Cain stumped for many of the groups in which she held membership. She did not take every opportunity to serve in that capacity, to be sure, unless she was sure that the organization’s objectives aligned with her own. For example, in the 1930s, as she became

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more disillusioned with FDR administration, she called for the formation of a new party, one based on the values of a “Jeffersonian Democracy”— the advancement of “states’ rights,” including racial segregation. She then attempted to resign as publicity chair of the Mississippi Women’s Division of the Democratic Party, only to stay after party officials convinced her that the “national party was broader than one president.”115 Organizations like the statewide Citizens’ Councils and the WCG were more aligned with Cain’s political beliefs. She joined the Pike County White Citizens’ Council in 1956, the year of its founding, and mailed copies of their publication, Free Men Speak, as a supplement to her paper.116 In her columns, she praised members of the Citizens’ Council chapters for their work in maintaining what she considered positive race relations—the white citizen was, despite news that suggested otherwise, the “Negro’s best friend” because he did not place “unrealistic expectations of greatness” on Black people. And, in editorials carrying such titles as, “Do You Believe in Segregation? You Should Join the Citizens’ Council” and “What is the Citizens’ Council Doing?,” Cain worked as a one-woman recruitment committee, encouraging her readers to join and do their part to maintain racial segregation.117 The fact that members of the Pike County chapter granted membership to Cain speaks to her credibility among Southern white men, as most other council chapters in the state would not allow women to join, at least not at first.118 The invitation to join may have something to do with the fact that Cain was a popular and dynamic speaker, and getting her on the statewide Council speaking circuit may not have been possible without extending her membership. In fact, Cain and Florence Sillers Ogden were the only two women members of the Citizens’ Councils speakers’ bureau, an invitation the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission also extended to Cain.119 The role of public speaker, particularly for the Sovereignty Commission, provided Cain a unique opportunity to reach audiences outside of Mississippi, including white women’s clubs and organizations, and to accomplish two broad but interrelated goals: to help recruit conservative voters to the cause of racial segregation (if they weren’t already there) and to help explain the position of the Southern segregationist (so as to gain sympathy for the cause and help repair the negative image of the Southern states as portrayed in the national press).120 For instance, she recorded a speech on behalf of the Commission for the Federation of Women’s Clubs in Long Island to inform her audience on the importance of her home state’s “battle for racial purity.” The recorded speech, prepared after bad weather kept Cain from appearing in person, included her perceptions of the dangers of integrating the Black and white races: the rise of sexually transmitted diseases among Black Americans; Black-on-white citizen crime; and abuse of the federal welfare programs by Black citizens,

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among other topics.121 She repeated the latter topic in a speech in Boston, using racially coded language to ridicule those who she believed had “lost personal initiative and ‘married Uncle Sam.’” “They love those government checks,” Cain said to an estimated crowd of 600 people.122 Similarly, her roles as a charter member, state-wide president (two terms, 1964–1966, 1972–1974), and publicity chair of the WCG allowed for political outreach beyond the state level.123 Of course, WCG leaders did not neglect potential in-state audiences—Cain sent out WCG press releases to daily, weekly, and monthly newspapers to attract in-state supporters, among other strategies—but leaders recognized that the financial and political success of the WCG, and the far-right political movement as a whole, hinged on out-of-state contacts and financial support.124 That realization meant that Cain and other WCG state leaders had to leave the state to attract attention. In 1963, the WCG’s second year, women from fourteen states, four outside of the South, attended the organization’s first national meeting in Montgomery, Alabama—the result of a consistent publicity campaign that included filling mailboxes with various forms of literature (e.g., a newsletter, the Woman Constitutionalist, and pamphlets), a telephone party-line phone tree, and in-state members expanding their contacts outside of the state (strategies that Cain helped develop). That same year, with new chapters popping up outside of Mississippi, WCG held meetings outside the South as well, with Cain as one of the keynote speakers125; five years later, Cain, now serving as the WCG’s national chair, averaged several speaking appearances a week, bringing with her the WCG’s national message: that WCG “is not Republican or Democrat. We stand for CONSERVATIVE candidates.”126 To be sure, messages of white supremacy were a part of their campaign— speaking on behalf of the Mississippi WCG, Cain said that 1960s civil rights legislation was nothing more than an attempt by the federal government to “[place] illegitimate Negro children side by side in classrooms in the State with white children,” thus “[breaking] down MORALITY and the GENERAL WELL-BEING OF OUR PEOPLE.”127 However, Cain and other WCG leaders also reminded chapter leaders that WCG political messages, for the sake of the national growth of the organization, must be kept broad, and in keeping with the rise of political conservatism at the national level. Race is an issue, but not the only issue, WCG leaders reminded its members; all communication must include information about limiting the powers of the federal government in regards to educational standards (e.g., fighting against school system’s adopting UNESCO’s multicultural educational curriculum); the return of school prayer in public schools; the role of the national media in spreading the liberal/communist ideologies; and the role of the nation’s women—mothers and wives, in particular—in protecting their homes and

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families.128 “Women are capable of wielding unlimited power, especially when the welfare of their children is threatened,” WCG leaders said.129 For her part, Cain always believed that American women had not tapped their full political potential. In 1939, Cain told listeners of a local radio broadcast that women were using the franchise to echo their husbands’, fathers’, and brothers’ political choices. Moreover, she argued that more qualified women should run for office instead of following the “line of least resistance” with their politics.130 To be sure, Cain detested feminism; at the beginning of her career, she refused to support the ERA because she believed it would make women more masculine and upset the sanctity of the home.131 In the last decade of her life, her thoughts on the issue of equal rights for women had not changed. “They look like communists to me,” she said in a 1976 Clarion-Ledger interview when asked about the women’s movement. “I like for women to look like women, act like women or should I say like ladies.” And, like many women who refused to support the women’s movement, Cain simply believed that white women simply didn’t need feminism or the ERA. “Most [women] (who favor the amendment) want a crutch,” she said.132 Cain and the other organizers of the WCG believed that women didn’t need any special laws or considerations; they should only organize under a single mission (i.e., to foster and maintain a constitutional government) to realize their full political potential: to lead the nation and to protect the family. “If the men fail, we shall carry on,” the WCG literature read. “We are the mothers of men. We are the builders of the future. We have a duty to perform. Let’s be up and about it!”133 To that point, Cain believed she could run the state as well, if not better, than most of the men elected to public office. In March 1951, she announced her candidacy for governor, the first woman in the state to do so. With the slogan of “Let’s Be Free Again—Vote for Mary Cain,” she ran on a platform of “tax reduction and a return to the basic concepts of Americanism.”134 The latter half of that statement, “basic concepts of Americanism,” was ambiguous but could be easily interpreted by anyone paying attention. If not, Cain did it for them on subsequent campaign stops, in speeches, in press interviews, or in her own column. Quite simply, she decided to run for governor because she believed that elected officials were doing a poor job in securing the political and ideological interests of the white citizens of the state. For readers of Cain’s column, it was a familiar message, one she had been repeating since she disowned the FDR administration and the party that fostered it. “I believe Mississippians are sick of the welfare state imposed by the New Deal,” she said in a May 1951 interview. “They’ve been waiting for someone to say, ‘Let’s march—not forward to a Welfare State, but back to Constitutional government and American freedom.’ And I’m here to say it!”135

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Cain rolled out what even the staunchest of fiscal conservatives would call a radical plan to do a “thorough ‘cleaning up’ of politics in Mississippi.” It included, among its eighteen points, the following: a refusal of all federal grants-in-aid (including farm subsidies and unemployment insurance); ending lunchroom subsidies; a $28 million tax reduction; and an elimination of the state welfare roll.136 These particular points are mentioned above the other fifteen because Cain was the only gubernatorial candidate who campaigned on the idea of eliminating any and all aspects of what she called the “welfare state,” and she was the only candidate with several platform points that would, in total, have disproportionate effects on the state’s Black population. This statement doesn’t mean that Cain was any more racist than Hugh White, Ross Barnett, Paul Johnson, or the other six candidates running in the Democratic primary—that would be a tall order indeed—but it does suggest that, as one of the least experienced Democrats in the field, she may have felt as if she had nothing to lose in building a platform that not only focused on white voters’ concerns about big government and fiscal responsibility but also pandered to their (and her own) racism. One can be certain that Cain, when developing platform points that addressed gender equity (e.g., women serving on juries, “equal representation of the sexes on all Democratic committees from precinct to state level,” and the “appointment of qualified women to policy-making posts”), did not intend to include or accept Black women as applicants.137 Cain lost the Democratic primary—she came in fifth with almost 25,000 votes—but that was enough to encourage her to run again four years later.138 She proposed more uncanny ideas in 1955, including, in the wake of the Brown decision, the elimination of all state laws concerning the regulation of state schools, thus, she believed, negating the Supreme Court’s power to interfere in operations that Cain insisted should be left up to local school boards.139 “With no laws to attack,” she explained, “the Supreme Court would be helpless.” She added that her plan would save the state money—fighting a legal battle against the Supreme Court’s decision would prove costly, and it was one Mississippi was bound to lose. “The four men in this race say we’ll fight segregation all the way to the Supreme Court,” she said while on one campaign stop in Vicksburg. “That’s nonsense. The cards are stacked against us.”140 And, against Mary Cain as well. She came in last place in the 1955 Democratic Party primary, and she would not seek office again.141 However, for the next three decades she would continue to give her frank opinion on all matters political regarding state and national politics, especially in regard to matter of race and the federal government’s role in securing civil rights for all Americans. She did not have the patience and talent for nuance—she spoke in thinly veiled language that barely covered her disdain for Black Americans,

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at least those who weren’t, in her words, “the white man’s Negro”142; she was just as unforgiving to anyone who dared to diminish her power as a white Southern woman, and she used her journalism to recruit and organize other like-minded individuals. Her efforts to that end are evidence that journalism, in the words of journalism historians Sid Bedingfield and Kathy Roberts Forde, “is neither a neutral institution nor a neutral cultural product.”143 That statement defines the work of Hazel Brannon Smith, who, unlike Cain, dared to betray her lifelong beliefs regarding racial segregation once confronted with the brutality and immorality of the Southern response to the civil rights movement. Along the way, she became an unintentional agent of change, who, decades later, embodies the following passage regarding the role of journalists in times of great uncertainty. “Journalists engage deeply in the politics and culture of their communities, not merely as observers but as participants too,” Bedingfield and Forde write. “They have often used their status and influence to shape outcomes, particularly during transformative moments of heightened political and cultural tension.”144 “A WOMAN WHO HAS TO STRUGGLE LIKE THE REST OF US” In May 1994, Hazel Brannon Smith died at the Royal Care Nursing Home in Cleveland, Tennessee, where, in 1989, she moved to be closer to her nieces after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Two months earlier, doctors had diagnosed her with liver cancer145; in the days leading up to her death, Clarion-Ledger investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell noted the high price Smith paid for sharp criticism of Jim Crow and the politics of racial segregation in 1960s Mississippi: “The Citizens’ Council sponsored a rival newspaper and a boycott. Her home was repeatedly vandalized. Night riders tried to burn The Northside Reporter in Jackson, which she owned and later sold to [Bill] Minor in 1973,” Mitchell said.146 Smith was an unlikely hero in the struggle for civil rights, given her background and upbringing. Born Hazel Freeman Brannon in Gadsden, Alabama, in 1914, her family expected her to follow the social and regional middle-class customs of her day—marriage, children, and the life of a white, Southern housewife. Smith eventually did marry, but she also chose a much more unconventional path—she wanted to be a journalist and a newspaper publisher.147 The fact that she realized her professional ambitions in an era when women were labeled selfish for chasing self-fulfillment outside of the home is noteworthy; the fact that Smith used her newspaper to push back against the social customs and norms that conditioned her to regard Black Americans as inferior is extraordinary. “[They are] creating a virtual

Figure 2.3.  A proud Southern woman, Hazel Brannon Smith paid a high price for her criticism of the racial violence and political corruption she witnessed. “We are proud of Hazel Brannon Smith, and we’re proud of this stubborn profession to which she belongs,” her friend Hodding Carter, Jr. said. “We hope she stays in there, though sometimes we wonder why she wants to.” Source: Wilson F. “Bill” Minor Papers, Manuscript Division, Archives and Special Collections, Mississippi State University Libraries.

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reign of terror in many sections of the state,” she said in 1964 in reference to the Ku Klux Klan’s bombings of many Black churches around the state. ”We must either say we are with the bombers and the haters or that we are against them.”148 Smith’s views on matters of race did not always fall on the side of the righteous, and they were always complicated by her background and upbringing. A graduate of the University of Alabama, Smith, at least as a young college graduate, seemed more sorority girl than crusading journalist. She loved designer clothes, Cadillac convertibles, and big hats—she was still living the good life as a single woman in her early thirties when she met her future husband, Walter Dyer Smith (“Smitty”), on a cruise.149 He followed her back to Holmes County, Mississippi, where, for the previous fifteen years, she published and edited two newspapers, the Durant News and The Lexington Advertiser. Smith purchased the former in 1936 with a $3,000 loan and turned a failing newspaper into a profitable one in just a few years. She bought the latter in 1943, three years after paying off the loan she used to buy the News.150 Smith found early success as a publisher and editor because she focused on local news (over state and national news), community service, and her own column, “Knock, Knock” (later changed to “Through Hazel’s Eyes”) that tackled issues of local concern and soon became the most popular feature in the paper.151 Durant had a population of about 2,500 people when she moved there, and in just four years, Smith doubled the circulation (to 1,200 readers) and increased advertising revenue by giving locals a product that focused on their lives and experiences. Smith went door-to-door, business-to-business selling the advertising herself (a talent she first demonstrated at the Etowah Observer, located in Alabama City, Alabama, in a part-time position she took while in high school);152 Holmes County locals took to her immediately—she was too charming and beautiful to say “no” to, and one friend recalled that she could “sell ice to an Eskimo.”153 It was a remarkable turn-around, especially for a first-time owner and publisher, and even more remarkable given the advice Smith received from then Mississippi Lieutenant Governor (and journalist) Billy Snider: “Young lady, Durant has long been known as the graveyard of Mississippi journalism. If you can make a go of this newspaper, you can have anything you want in Mississippi journalism, or anywhere else for that matter.”154 Smith stayed local, however, and repeated the local-news-only formula with the Advertiser, the state’s second oldest newspaper and located in the county seat of Lexington. She also immersed herself in the community of 4,000 residents, building a strong social circle that continued to grow after she and Smitty married at the First Baptist Church in Durant in March 1950, and committing herself to local social, economic, and political causes.155 They

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were a fun couple to be around—they both loved to travel, socialize, and be the center of attention. “Hazel and Walter furnished the light comedy for the entire press group,” one columnist said about the couple after attending a party during the 1950 Mississippi Press Association annual meeting. “The spotlight tends to gravitate toward Hazel wherever she goes.”156 Her charm aside, Smith was known for speaking her mind—she demonstrated as much in her role as student editor of the Crimson and White, the student newspaper at the University of Alabama. When, for instance, the editor of the Reveille, the student newspaper at Louisiana State University, resigned when ordered to refrain from make critical remarks about Louisiana governor Huey P. Long, Smith and her staff published an editorial on free speech—one of the first, but not the last, times she would come out in support of the First Amendment.157 Smith’s time as a student at Alabama shaped her journalism career for decades to come; at the height of the Great Depression, university president George Denny challenged students to devote themselves to community and helping others, a lesson Smith clearly applied to her career as a newspaper owner.158 Likewise, Smith listened intently as Professor Clarence Cason, chair of the journalism department, reminded his students that their talents were needed in the South—he urged them to stay and help “one of the greatest underdeveloped regions in the country.”159 Cason believed the South needed its best and brightest to stay, if for no other reason to help shake the region loose from the illusion of the “glorified highly fictious past” under which many white Southerners continued to labor. Only then, he argued, could progress be made. “True loyalty to the South demands that we boldly grapple with the fact that our historical stereotypes have now and then been smirched with elements of cruelty and sham,” Cason said in his 1935 book, 90 Degrees in the Shade.160 It would take some time for Smith to take Cason’s views on race to heart, but his advice is perhaps one of the reasons why Smith was attracted to Holmes County, Mississippi; at the time, the county was “desperately poor,” according to one publication.161 Moreover, for much of the mid-twentieth century, from the 1930s to the 1960s, the county “seemed to be hit the hardest by the consequences of bootlegging, gambling, bribery and sometimes prostitution,” as noted in Janice Branch Tracy’s The Juke Joint King of the Mississippi Hills: The Raucous Reign of Tillman Branch.162 For her part, Smith hoped “to do what I could to promote a county in which everybody could live in peace and without fear.”163 That may sound somewhat idealistic, especially when considering Smith’s public support of racial segregation. However, there is ample evidence that, despite her early support of Jim Crow, Smith did believe in her role as “editor as citizen”—the journalist who is willing to offer criticism and commentary

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as a means of improving the community in which she also lives—to use one phrase from biographer Jeffrey Howell’s book, Hazel Brannon Smith: The Female Crusading Scalawag (which he credits to newspaper owner and editor Hodding Carter, Jr.).164 The lesson that “newspapers existed to serve the public welfare” came from Smith’s time on the University of Alabama’s campus.165 Howell explains further: In 1930 Alabama created the journalism major for the purpose of training young men and women to not only report the news, but to make a lasting contribution to society. The Crimson and White stated that the modern journalist should not merely print “the non-interpretive transcript of the minutia of the run of the mill news” but also be a journalist “capable of coping with perplexing problems of national and international economy.”166

Smith applied those lessons early on in her career, as evident in one early editorial published in the News, “The Venereal Disease Problem,” in which Smith discussed a problem that, in her mind at least, “was too serious to keep quiet about.”167 She received criticism for the piece—Southern ladies, she was told, were not supposed to talk about such topics, at least not publicly. Smith then allegedly fired back her famous quip: “I ain’t no lady, I’m a newspaper woman.”168 She also was not afraid to challenge the locals of Holmes County, as she did in one November 1940 editorial: “If every citizen of Durant was just like YOU, what kind of town would Durant be? Would it be vigorous, wide-awake and progressive or would it be dead in its tracks?”169 Smith’s dedication to the “editor as citizen” philosophy may lead one to think that she took on the battle against segregation much earlier than she actually did. In truth, an examination of the first two decades of her work as a journalist and editor reveals that she had more in common with Florence Sillers Ogden and Mary Dawson Cain, at least in terms of their political philosophies, than she did with journalists like Bill Minor. She was, as they say, a product of her time—a Southern woman from a modest, yet comfortable middle-class background who believed in and supported the racial status quo. As with most Southern families, the Smiths received lessons in morality and conduct from the local Baptist church—to treat each other with kindness and respect, for instance—but, at the same time, they learned and practiced the social etiquette that defined and supported the inequality of the races. “Born less than twenty years after Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), [Smith] did not escape her peers’ racial prejudices,” Howell says. “Though personal relationships between Southern whites and Blacks could be fluid, everyone in the Deep South knew there were myriad taboos that neither group dared to violate.”170 For example, Smith would often take trips with her mother, Georgia, to local Black Baptist churches to read Bible stories to young children—here

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she watched her mother practice the behavior she expected of her children, to treat others with kindness.171 Smith also had affection for the family maid, a Black woman named Lulu, but both knew that, in the words of historian Neil McMillen, “the forces of social habit and white opinion were in themselves usually sufficient that the races knew their place and occupied them.”172 For at least the first two decades of her journalism career, Smith put these lessons into practice, as when she published editorials that confirmed, rather than challenged, the South’s worst prejudices. Smith’s sympathetic piece on former Confederate president Jefferson Davis wasn’t just an attempt to pander to her readers—she believed what she wrote, just as she did when she praised the military intelligence of General Robert E. Lee in another editorial. “His textbooks are read by the British and are carefully studied by such professional soldiers as the Prussians,” Smith said of Lee in February 1944.173 By extension, Smith’s political beliefs included opposition and criticism of Roosevelt and his New Deal policies; like Ogden and Cain, Smith, by 1944, insisted that FDR’s reelection would “mean a death blow to every tradition held dear to Southern hearts and suicide for the Democratic Party.”174 She blamed the Roosevelts for the sorry state of race relations in the country— including their condemnation of the poll tax, FDR’s war-related executive order 8802, which prohibited racial discrimination in hiring workers in the defense industry, and various New Deal policies that, while helping white families who had suffered during the Great Depression, also improved the economic and political circumstances of Black Americans.175 “The whole nation will feel the impact of the revolution that is destined to sweep this country if present trends are allowed to continue,” Smith said in May 1944.176 The question is: how does one reconcile the aforementioned statements with the position that Smith would later take regarding the civil rights movement? The fact remains that Smith was a social and political conservative—and one not that far removed from Florence Sillers Ogden and Mary Dawson Cain in many respects. Smith opposed federal welfare programs; she rebuked the civil rights policies of Harry S. Truman and eventually supported Eisenhower’s candidacy and called on her readers to do the same.177 In fact, his election would produce, in her words, a “thorough housecleaning that will rid our government of all the pinks and reds and the pro-Soviet sympathizers that have been feeding at the expense of the American taxpayers for so long.”178 Similarly, she supported the witch hunt politics of Joseph McCarthy as a way to get rid of the “pinks and reds and pro-Soviet sympathizers” in government and other public sectors.179 Smith’s conservative beliefs also included strict support for the rule of law, including the state laws that maintained racial segregation. At times when her support for law and order clashed with her belief in the separation of the races—which she said was the best way to maintain racial harmony—she did

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her best to navigate those conflicts, even though she may have been blind to the obvious contradictions.180 For instance, of the Brown decision, she said that the Supreme Court may have been morally correct, but she still believed that it was in everyone’s best interest that racial segregation “be maintained in theory and in fact.”181 To be sure, her support of law and order did not always extend to her support of law enforcement—especially in cases in which she believed that they abused or neglected their role as society’s peacemakers. In 1943, Smith engaged in a public battle with local law enforcement after she criticized their efforts (or lack thereof) in cracking down on widespread bootlegging, illegal gambling (e.g., slot machines), and organized crime. “I began letting the people know something was wrong,” she said years later.182 After warning locals that she would print the names of anyone arrested for public drunkenness or similar offenses, she then took the sheriff to task. “In the newspaper, I called on the sheriff to enforce the law,” Smith continued.183 She also confronted Sheriff Walter Murtagh in his office and pleaded with him to do his job: “Walter, I have come on a mission that I don’t like, but one which I think that is absolutely necessary,” she said. “But you have sworn an oath to be the protection of this county and you are not doing that. Whether you are being paid off, that’s between you and them. But, my God, man, if you are not being paid off, won’t you please do something to stop this thing?” When she finished, Smith recalled that Murtagh “just looked at me and shook his head, as if to say, ‘how sorry I am.’”184 The wanton disrespect the law had for the Black citizens of Holmes County offended both Smith’s Christian beliefs and her steadfast convictions about law and order. More so, the lack of integrity, personal judgment, and professional duty on display in the Holmes County Sheriff Department was, she believed, an even more unforgiveable sin. In 1943, Murtagh ran his election campaign on a promise to enforce the state liquor laws, which, since 1908, prohibited the production and sale of alcohol, with the exception of medicinal purposes.185 Smith quickly learned, however, that he would not live up to those promises. “He just told people what they wanted to hear,” she recalled. In fact, she later remembered that “the bootleggers ran the county. They all had Cadillacs and I don’t think any of them had fewer than three cars. They spent more money than anyone else in Durant. And everyone knew about it, including the sheriff.”186 Smith knew then that she would have to try to clean up Holmes County without Murtagh’s help. In both the News and the Advertiser, she made a “declaration of war,” as she called it, exposing the depth of corruption and neglect in his office.187 “Don’t let anyone tell you that the prohibition law can’t be enforced,” she told readers in July 1947. “All it takes is a sheriff who wants to enforce the law . . . a sheriff who will make raid after raid until the bootlegger

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is broke. They will all fold and make a hasty exit from Holmes County if a man who means business is elected to the sheriff’s office.”188 The pressure she put on law enforcement, including the judicial system, eventually led to sixtyfour grand jury indictments for organized crime and another fifty-two for violation of state prohibition and gambling laws, the latter coming one day after Smith publicly called on Murtagh to either do his job or resign from it.189 She then publicly supported his opponent, former state lawmaker Ellis E. Wynn, in the 1947 election. Wynn won by more than 1,000 votes, prompting Smith to write in the Durant News, “This newspaper’s campaign of nearly two years now for better law enforcement in Holmes County has culminated in the election of a man for sheriff who has pledged himself to strict law enforcement. . . . Our faith in the people of Holmes County has been justified.”190 The aforementioned indictments and Wynn’s election may not have been possible without her, but Smith’s efforts had their consequences. In 1946, she faced a contempt of court charge stemming from a separate case involving a Holmes County Black man who had been beaten to death. A local white farmer, J. F. Dodd, accused the victim, Leon McAtee, of stealing a horse saddle from him. Law enforcement arrested McAtee for the crime but released him after the farmer dropped the charges. A week later, law enforcement found McAtee’s beaten and bloody body in a neighboring county; six white men, including Dodd, were arrested on suspicion of murder and later acquitted of the crime.191 The trouble for Smith started when she interviewed McAtee’s widow, Henrietta McAtee, outside of the courtroom, a violation of Circuit Court Judge S. F. Davis’s gag order. After a deputy reported seeing her talking with Mrs. McAtee, Judge Davis ordered Smith to appear before the bench the following day. She immediately apologized for violating the order, but Davis quickly turned the subject to Smith’s recent “great campaign for law and order,” as he put it. “I sympathize with you and am sorry you got in this mess, but you brought it on yourself,” Davis told Smith, just before he sentenced her to fifteen days in jail and a $100 fine (both suspended). “I have been around a long time and know the job. I don’t believe you can do it . . . I wished you had stayed out of this mess.”192 Davis’s lecture confirmed Smith’s suspicion that one day she would pay a price for her “great campaign for law and order.” “The judge clearly showed me he was punishing me not for contempt of court, but for my three-year crusade against the lawlessness of the local power structure,” she said.193 Smith appealed the ruling to the Mississippi Supreme Court;194 in the meantime, the decision made the rounds in the court of public opinion. Publisher and editor Hodding Carter Jr., who first met Smith at a Mississippi Press Association meeting some years before, initially had his doubts about whether or not Smith would be able to make a success of the Durant News; years later, he

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was one of the first to come to her defense.195 Speaking directly to Davis’s comments about Smith’s efforts to clean up Holmes County, Carter, in a November 1946 editorial, wrote, “And if a courageous young woman in a wide-open Mississippi county is willing to stick her neck out as a crusader, it would better befit the dignity of the bench for the judge to praise rather than mock her.”196 To be sure, Smith already had the respect of her peers before she decided to fight Davis’s ruling. Her fight against crime and corruption received much attention and praise from other journalists and editors in the state. “If Holmes County does not elect an honest and competent sheriff to restore law enforcement, it will be the fault of the people who let themselves be fooled regarding the candidates, or who fail to vote,” read an editorial from The Clarion-Ledger, just prior to the aforementioned 1947 Holmes County sheriff’s election. “The issue has been placed before them.”197 In April 1947, the Mississippi Supreme Court dismissed the circuit court’s contempt ruling, citing the First Amendment in its decision: “The function of the press is to keep these people informed of matters of public interest, even of the administration of the courts.” The Court also cited the need for the press to be accurate in its reporting of the news and that courts should provide reporters “reasonable means of getting the correct news,” which, in this case, the circuit court did not.198 For her part, Smith said it was important that she fight Davis’s ruling, given the unfair and biased nature of the contempt charge. “Wouldn’t we see a lot of improvement in general conditions, if all the laws of Holmes County were given the same attention by the sheriff’s office that the rules of Judge Davis’ court receive?” she charged in an October 1946 editorial, published after Smith decided to fight the charge.199 Afterward, she went after Davis in the press for the scolding he gave her some months before: “We think Judge Davis holds every law-abiding citizen in utter contempt for such an attitude,” she said, “and should either change his attitude immediately, or resign from the bench.”200 “As a magnet is attracted to steel,” Howell notes, “Hazel Brannon Smith was attracted to controversy.”201 In 1952, Smith found her next target: Holmes County Sheriff Richard Byrd. As she did with former Sheriff Murtagh, she took Byrd to task for allegedly aiding in the illegal distribution of alcohol; then, two years later, in July 1954, she publicly called on Byrd to resign after he shot an unarmed Black man, Henry Randall (also spelled “Randle”), in the leg after ordering him out of a roadside café for being too loud. Smith investigated, interviewing several witnesses along the way, and concluded that Randall’s shooting was unjustified.202 She then called on Byrd to resign, and, for the first time, made a public stand for the equal protection and treatment of Black citizens:

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The laws in America are for everyone—rich and poor, strong and weak, white and black and all the other races that dwell in our land. . . . This kind of thing cannot go on any longer. It must be stopped. The vast majority of Holmes county [sic] people are not red necks [sic] who look with favor on the abuse of people because their skins are black. . . . [Sheriff Byrd] has violated every concept of justice, decency, and right in his treatment of some of the people in Holmes county [sic]. He has shown us without question that he is not fit to occupy that high office. He should, in fact, resign.203

Byrd sued for libel, asking for $57,000 in damages and receiving $10,000.204 Smith appealed the case to the Mississippi Supreme Court, with her attorney arguing that the editorial in question was “substantially true.” Byrd’s attorney argued that Smith was guilty of spreading harmful rumors: “No disinterested person ever saw the alleged wound on Randall and we are convinced that no such wound was ever inflicted on Randall.”205 The Court ruled unanimously in Smith’s favor and said that the editor had “substantially recited the circumstances” under which Byrd shot Randall (through eyewitness testimony and Randall’s recollection of events). The Court also concluded that “substantial truth of a publication, made with good motives, and for justifiable ends, is a complete defense to an action of libel.”206 Smith’s press colleagues watched the case closely. Hodding Carter Jr. congratulated his friend in an editorial entitled, “Victory for Hazel Smith”: “We are proud of Hazel Brannon Smith and we’re proud of this stubborn profession to which she belongs. We hope she stays in there and pitches, though we sometimes wonder why she wants to.” Carter then called out “the persons who have tried to destroy her,” a reference perhaps to Byrd and his supporters but also many Holmes County residents, members of the Holmes County Citizens Council specifically, who believed Smith had gone much too far condemning Byrd for his violent act against a Black man.207 Thus began Smith’s internal struggle—how to balance her lifelong belief in racial segregation with her belief that the laws should apply equally to all, regardless of any (il)legal separation of the races; and, how to balance her reverence for law and order with her allegiance to journalistic integrity and truth. “I am a firm believer in our southern traditions and racial segregation, but not at the expense of justice and truth,” she told readers in November 1955.208 Those struggles started to catch up with her in latter part of 1955, as it did for anyone who came to her defense, including Dr. David Minter the medical doctor of the Providence Cooperative Farm (PCF), who testified on her behalf in the libel suit against her.209 Established in 1938 on Holmes County land, the PCF provided an opportunity for poor white and Black families (most of whom were sharecroppers) to live on and work the land for crops, sharing in both the profits and labor. It was the second such cooperative in

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the state, following the founding of the Delta Cooperative Farm in Bolivar County in the 1930s.210 In 1955, just one week after the brutal murder of Emmett Till, a white teenaged girl who lived on the PCF accused a group of Black teenaged boys of whistling at her. A. Eugene Cox and Dr. David Minter, witnesses to the Randall shooting interviewed by Smith, and the rest of the PCF staff, were then confronted by a large group of white Holmes County citizens, residents of the small community of Tchula (near the Farm) and ordered to leave the property.211 The citizens, fueled by the rhetoric of the newly formed Holmes County White Citizens’ Council, concluded that the Farm “exerted a bad influence on the community in general and upon African Americans in particular,” according to historian Fred C. Smith.212 Smith didn’t call the Council by name, but readers knew who she meant when she wrote, “No one speaks freely anymore for fear of being misunderstood.”213 This statement wasn’t the first and only attack against the Council and it would not be the last; she once refused membership in the Council and now she made statements against them, all the while calling for “good government and justice under the law regardless of race” in the aftermath of Emmett Till’s murder.214 This woman, Council members insisted, was not who she claimed to be: a champion of states’ rights, a supporter of racial segregation. They began throwing other labels at her—“nigger lover” and “integrationist” were just two—and organized an advertising boycott of her two Holmes County newspapers.215 In a public statement, Smith said, “We do not believe any of our policies now or in the past can be honestly condemned as not in the best interest of Holmes County and its southern traditions.”216 Hodding Carter Jr. also came to her defense, writing in one editorial, “the pettiness of mind that produces such pressures [are] becoming more apparently typical of Holmes County,” a reference to Smitty’s January 1956 firing from his job as hospital administrator of the Holmes County Community Hospital.217 A UPI story carried on the front page of the Democrat-Times contained a possible motive behind Smitty’s sudden dismissal: “A member of the hospital’s board of directors was quoted earlier as saying Mrs. Smith’s crusades were partially responsible for [his] firing.”218 Smitty’s firing hurt the family financially, of course, as did Smith’s legal battles against Sheriffs Murtagh and Byrd. Decades later, Smith recalled that “[the Citizens’ Council] really went to work on me,” and she was right.219 When the advertising boycott failed to drive her completely out of business, local Council members, including county attorney Pat Barrett and former state representative Edwin White, met to discuss the financing of a new local paper, to be called the Holmes County Herald. Although they claimed that the publication would be “non-controversial” and that their actions “are not against anybody” but rather an attempt to “just get

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a paper with an editor who thinks like we do,” those close to Smith knew otherwise.220 Hodding Carter Jr. reported that paper’s incorporation included thirty-five citizens selling $30,000 worth of stock at $35 dollars a share. The paper’s board of directors included twenty-seven Holmes County citizens, including local business owners, attorneys, and public officials, with Chester Marshall, Smith’s former managing editor of her two Holmes County newspapers, as the new editor.221 “So, if the State Supreme Court wouldn’t let the county’s ‘legal’ machinery punish her [Smith], then someone would find a way,” Carter said. “So, they ‘got even.’”222 Nonetheless, Smith refused to back down or stay quiet; if anything, the pressure only made her all the more determined to do her job. She continued her criticism of the Citizens’ Councils (Specifically, she praised a small group of Mississippi citizens who filed a federal lawsuit to halt the flow of state tax dollars to the Councils) and called for the disbandment of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the organization that helped funnel public money to the Councils. For Smith, the matter had little to do with race and everything to do with what she believed to be the improper use of state funds.223 “While members of the Sovereignty Commission may have had reason to believe the donations were within the law, as written by the state legislature, the fact remains the law itself is faulty and unconstitutional and should be wiped off the books at once.”224 The more Smith pushed, the more her enemies pushed back, and so forth. The economic pressure continued to the point that Hodding Carter Jr. even started a fundraising campaign to offset the advertising revenue losses and the loss of a county printing contract.225 At the same time, Smith’s critics continued to attack her publicly, calling in question her loyalty and patriotism. They labeled her a “fellow traveler” and a “suspicious and controversial character,” code-language, of course, for communism; at the same time, a Sovereignty Commission report made public revealed that onlookers spotted Smith “consorting with Negro integrationists” at the offices of the Mississippi Free Press, the four-page weekly founded by Medgar Evers. In hindsight, the report offered proof that the agency spied on Smith in the late 1950s (although the agency failed to disclose that Smith went to the Press office to deliver copies of the newspaper that she printed at her Lexington print shop).226 The one-time supporter of McCarthy’s communist “witch hunts” could now identify with those who had been unjustly labeled and attacked for trying to “promote goodwill and harmony between the races.”227 “It hangs like a dark cloud over us—dominating almost every facet of public and private life,” she said in reference to those citizens, including herself, who were targets of public attacks because of their shifting ideological beliefs.228 There were attacks of violence, too; a group of local high schoolers left a burning cross in her front yard and arsonists bombed the offices of three of her properties: the offices

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of the Northside Reporter and Advertiser, and her Lexington printing plant.229 “The FBI told my husband they had information that a segregationist group was ‘going to kill me,’” she recalled.230 Meanwhile, many of Smith’s colleagues recognized and rewarded her for her efforts to promote equality and fair play among the races. In 1961, she received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Prize for Courage in Journalism, given by the International Conference of Weekly Newspaper Editors (ICWNE), for showing courage against “the merciless attack of an organized pressure group parading under the name of a popular cause and which sought to silence her by means of reprisals against a member of her family, by means of personal vilification, by means of economic boycott against her newspaper business, and by means of encouraging the launching of an opposing newspaper.”231 Two years later, the same organization awarded Smith its Golden Quill Award for her “direct, passionate writing.”232 The next year, 1964, Smith won a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing for a series of editorials, five total, “for steadfast adherence to her editorial duties in the face of great pressure and opposition.”233 The cited works included a January 1963 editorial, “Is the Future Hopeless,” in which Smith supported the resignation of numerous University of Mississippi faculty members for the administration’s failure to punish “student offenders who have kept the campus in a turmoil since the entrance of James Meredith as a student”; a May 1963 editorial, “Arrest of Bombing Victim is a Disservice,” in which she took Holmes County Sheriff Andrew P. Smith to task for arresting a fifty-eight-year old Black man, farmer Hartman Turnbow, for firebombing his own home; a June 1963 editorial, “The Murder of Medgar Evers,” in which Smith called the murder of the civil rights leader “a reprehensible crime against the laws of God and man”; a September 1963 editorial, “Church Bombing in Birmingham,” in which she claimed that “there must be a special place in hell for anyone who bombs a church”; and an October 1963 editorial, “A Free Press and The Citizens’ Councils,” in which Smith again defended the free press. “The right to dissent from the Councils has already been lost by the average citizen of the state through wholesale intimidation and fear. Few people dare speak their convictions publicly—especially if they are in conflict with Council ideas and objectives,” she wrote. “Look around you and see if this is not true. Examine your own heart.”234 Her enemies couldn’t have cared less about her awards and public recognition, of course. The attacks continued through most of the 1960s—the threats were so frequent that she started sleeping with a gun—but those threats could no stop her from writing.235 In 1966, she commented on how proud she was of the conduct of Holmes County citizens when Black students integrated Lexington public schools that fall. She applauded them for the “courageous

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stand” they took in facing the reality of integration, while asking them to remember, in troubled times, what she called the “solution to any and all of our problems”: “Do onto others as you would have them do unto you.”236 By the end of the decade, Smith’s businesses were deep in debt—at one point she and Smitty sold some of their land for $150,000 to stem the tide. They also considered leaving Mississippi in the 1970s but eventually decided against it. Smith wanted to finish what seemed to be never-ending renovations of a fourteen-room Greek revival mansion she and Smitty owned right outside of Lexington. There they lived together until 1982, the year Smitty died from injuries he received when falling from a ladder, the same year they finished the renovations.237 Although she never fully recovered from his death, Smith later said she took comfort in seeing many of their “enemies” (as she called them) at Smitty’s funeral, “to express their sorrow at his death.”238 Around the same time, one of the high school students who burned a cross in her yard “came back to ask my pardon,” Smith said. “But the circle is now complete.”239 In 1985, a legal notice in the Holmes County Herald revealed that Smith had filed for bankruptcy.240 Soon thereafter, The Clarion-Ledger revealed the massive weight of her debt: $250,000, including a $34,000 printing bill.241 She sold the Northside Reporter in 1973 and discontinued the Banner County Outlook, which she had purchased in 1956, in 1977; meanwhile, the bank took any assets associated with the Durant News and Lexington Advertiser, which Smith merged in the early 1980s, along with her home.242 Smith moved home to Alabama where she lived until illness forced her move to the Royal Care Nursing Home. “She had a good life, and she had a bad life,” one of her nieces told Jerry Mitchell. “I want her to be remembered for her love and concern for other people. I think she was courageous.”243 Hazel Brannon Smith has been misidentified as a liberal supporter of racial integration and champion of civil rights. She was neither of those things, but rather, a reluctant activist forced into the role because she believed her neighbors refused to live by a few simple, but important rules: treat others with dignity and respect, fair play for all, tell the truth, accept change and learn from it. In that regard, she could not have been more different than her contemporaries, Florence Sillers Ogden or Mary Dawson Cain, both of whom used their journalism to support and sustain the state’s powerful Jim Crow system. Their work caused harm in ways that cannot be fully measured, yet they reaped the social, political, and financial capital from both their deeds and words. By contrast, Smith decision to simply tell the truth cost her so much, but perhaps that is why her story continues to inspire others—women like Norma Fields, who felt a connection to Smith and her mission: a journalist’s obligation to inform and help readers navigate the issues and problems of the day. “This is a world of change,” Smith once said. “The old ways of

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doing things will not suffice in this day and age. We cannot stop the clock. We ignore these facts at our own peril.”244 NOTES  1. Florence Sillers Ogden, “Civil Rights Plank Is Not for South,” The Clarion-Ledger, August 16, 1956, 19. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /179769913​/​?terms​=florence​%20ogden​%20If​%20this​%20is​%20treason​%20make​ %20the​%20most​%20of​%20it​&match​=1.  2. Ogden, “Summit Bust May Be Proved Blessing in Disguise to U.S.,” The Clarion-Ledger, May 22, 1960, 45. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/179782293​ /​?terms​=florence​%20sillers​%20ogden​%20yield​%20sick​%20of​%20yielding​&match​ =1.  3. Quote from McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 5; other information about Ogden from James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 36.   4. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 36.   5. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 67.   6. See Meredith Johnston, “Walter Sillers, Jr.,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, June 11, 2018. https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/walter​-sillers​-jr​/. Also, Benjamin O. Sperry, “Walter Sillers and His Fifty Years Inside Mississippi Politics,” Mississippi History NOW, November 2010. https:​//​www​.mshistorynow​.mdah​.ms​.gov​/issue​/ walter​-sillers​-and​-his​-fifty​-years​-inside​-mississippi​-politics.   7. Sperry, “Walter Sillers and His Fifty Years Inside Mississippi Politics.”   8. Ogden, “Call Issued to Women: Will Meet Here Tuesday,” The Clarion-Ledger, October 28, 1962, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180096673​/​?terms​ =restoration​%20of​%20constitutional​%20government​%20to​%20join​%20hands​%20a​ %20movement​%20to​%20stem​%20the​%20tide​%20of​%20federal​%20usurpation​ &match​=1.  9. Ogden, “Your Vote Is Important When Against World Government,” The Clarion-Ledger, November 20, 1955, 13. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /179730015​/. 10. Info on Ogden’s group affiliations from McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 5–6. Quote from p. 62. 11. Info on Cain’s background from McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 6. Quote from H. L. Stevenson, “State Voters to Pick One of 5 Defending Segregation, Tuesday,” The Delta Democrat-Times, August 1, 1955, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​ .com​/image​/12915523​/​?terms​=mary​%20dawson​%20cain​%20schools​&match​=1. 12. See McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 151. 13. “Women Should Understand Business, Says Mary Cain,” Greenwood Commonwealth, March 18, 1938, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/237713085​ / ​ ? terms​ = mary​ % 20cain ​ % 20The ​ % 20dual ​ % 20role ​ % 20which ​ % 20business​ %20women​%20play​%2C​%20many​%20of​%20them​%20being​%20mothers​%20and​

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%20housekeepers​%2C​%20gives​%20them​%20added​%20insight​%20into​%20present​ %20day​%20needs​&match​=1. 14. Lisa K. Speer, “Mary Dawson Cain,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, April 13, 2018. https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/mary-dawson-cain/. 15. “Blue Mountain Girl Shown Fallacy of New Deal in Article by Mary Cain Pointing Out Likeness to Communism,” The Yazoo City Herald, May 18, 1944, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/271344692. 16. Ibid. 17. Jay Milner, “Mrs. Mary Cain, Publisher, Crusade on ‘Aid,’” The Clarion-Ledger, May 22, 1955, 7. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/185649587​/​?terms​=mary​ %20cain​&match​=1. 18. Ibid. 19. See Milner, “Mrs. Mary Cain, Publisher, Crusade on ‘Aid’”; NBC quote can be found here: https:​//​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=qkRjPMovv0Y. 20. Florence S. Ogden, “Dis An’ Dat,” The Delta Democrat-Times, October 6, 1957, 17. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/22375060​/​?terms​=florence​%20ogden​ %20the​%20problem​%20with​%20integration​%20is​%20the​%20least​%20part​%20of​ %20the​%20whole​&match​=1. 21. Quote from Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith: The Female Crusading Scalawag, 81. Information about Randle taken from Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 33–34. 22. Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 81. 23. Ibid., X. 24. Ibid., 2. 25. Brodie Crump, “Miss Florence Had Character,” The Delta Democrat-Times, June 25, 1971, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/20993581​/​?terms​=florence​ %20sillers​%20ogden​&match​=1. 26. Ann Ziker, “Florence Sillers Ogden.” 27. Quote from Ogden, “Your Vote Is Important When Against World Government,” 13. 28. See McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 64. 29. “Dixie Land,” The Delta Democrat-Times, March 7, 1937, 9. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/238483928​/​?terms​=florence​%20sillers​%20ogden​&match​=1 30. Kevin Boland Johnson, “Guardians of Historical Knowledge: Textbooks Politics, Conservative Activism, and School Reform in Mississippi, 1928–1982,” Ph.D. diss., (Mississippi State University, 2014), 90–91. 31. Ogden, “Dis An’ Dat,” The Delta Democrat-Times, May 18, 1941, 4. https:​//​ www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/21059810. 32. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 17. 33. Ibid., 67. 34. Quote from Ogden, “Dis An’ Dat,” The Delta Democrat-Times, August 2, 1942, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/33961888​/​?terms​=florence​%20sillers​ %20ogden​ %20delta​ %20council​ &match​ =1. For more information on Ogden’s thoughts on the matter, particularly the farmers of the southern Mississippi “hill country,” see McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 68.

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35. As indicated in McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 67. 36. Ogden, “Dis An’ Dat,” The Delta Democrat-Times, July 30, 1939, 1. https:​ //​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/23594921​/​?terms​=florence​%20ogden​%20demand​ %20your​%20rights​&match​=1. 37. Ogden, “Dis An’ Dat,” The Delta Democrat-Times, October 12, 1939, 1. https:​ //​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/21071545​/​?terms​=florence​%20ogden​%20​%20certain​ %20magazines​%20that​%20clutter​%20the​%20news​%20stalls​&match​=1. 38. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 68–69. 39. Ogden, “Dis An’ Dat,” The Delta Democrat-Times, March 19, 1939, 1. https:​//​ www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/23574155​/​?terms​=florence​%20ogden​&match​=1. 40. For more information on To Secure These Rights, see Jon E. Taylor, Freedom to Serve: Truman, Civil Rights, and Executive Order 9981 (New York: Routledge, 2013). 41. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 131. 42. Johnson, “Guardians of Historical Knowledge,” 93. 43. For more information on John Rankin’s political career, see Albert Norman, “Mississippi’s Most Racist Member of Congress,” Greenfield (MA) Recorder, December 13, 2018. https:​//​www​.recorder​.com​/my​-turn​-norman​-21818864. For Ogden’s take on internment camps, see Ogden, “Dis An’ Dat,” The Delta Democrat-Times, January 10, 1943, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/23941273​/​?terms​=florence​ %20ogden​%20japanese​%20camp​&match​=1. 44. For more information on the founding of the States’ Rights Party, see Kari Frederickson, The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932–1968 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 45. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 132–33. 46. Ibid., 133. 47. See Ogden, “Dis An’ Dat,” The Delta Democrat-Times, October 26, 1952, 24. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/21583728​/​?terms​=florence​%20ogden​ %20eisenhower​&match​=1. Quote from Florence S. Ogden, “Dis An’ Dat,” The Delta Democrat-Times, July 22, 1952, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/21562089​/​ ?terms​=florence​%20ogden​%20democratic​%20party​&match​=1. 48. Ogden, “Dis An’ Dat,” The Delta Democrat-Times, October 19, 1952, 19. https:​ //​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/21582106​/​?terms​=florence​%20ogden​%20a​%20day​ %20that​%20will​%20go​%20down​%20in​%20the​%20history​%20of​%20the​%20South​ &match​=1. 49. Ogden, “Dis An’ Dat,” The Delta Democrat-Times, June 6, 1954, 7. https:​//​ www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/10396662. 50. Ibid. 51. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 117–118. 52. Ogden, “The People Speak and Back Legislation on Interposition,” The Clarion-Ledger, March 11, 1956, 8. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/179596944​ / ​ ? terms ​ = florence ​ % 20ogden ​ % 20there ​ % 20should ​ % 20be ​ % 20pictures ​ % 20of​ %20showing​%20jungle​%20scenes​&match​=1. 53. Johnson, “Guardians of Historical Knowledge,” 92.

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54. Ogden, “DAR Hats Help Dress Up Natchez’ Pilgrimagetime,” The Clarion-Ledger, March 8, 1959, 17. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180018058. 55. Ogden, “Immigration System, First Line of Defense, Needs a Peek,” The Clarion-Ledger, May 26, 1957, 10. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/179737018​/​ ?terms​=florence​%20ogden​%20immigration​%20miami​&match​=1. 56. Ogden, “Women for Constitutional Government Set Up Targets,” The Clarion-Ledger, January 13, 1963, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/185446517​ /. 57. Ibid. 58. See McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 141–42, 148–49, for more information on Ogden’s opinions on the United Nations. 59. Ogden, “Dr. Singer Reminds of Fleeing Freedoms,” The Clarion-Ledger, March 13, 1955, 15. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180087208​/​?terms​=It​ %20would​ % 20appear​ % 20that​ % 20social​ % 20science​ % 20textbook​ % 20writers​ %20are​%20more​%20interested​%20in​%20the​%20​%27virtues​%27​%20of​%20the​ %20United ​ % 20Nations​ % 2C​ % 20the​ % 20​ % 27evils​ % 27​ % 20of​ % 20the​ % 20free​ %20enterprise ​ % 20system ​ % 2C ​ % 20and ​ % 20the ​ % 20 ​ % 27benefits ​ % 27 ​ % 20of​ %20World​%20Government​%20than​%20they​%20are​%20the​%20in​%20the​%20U​.S​.​ %20form​%20of​%20government​%20and​%20in​%20the​%20Constitution​%20florence​ %20ogden​&match​=1. 60. Ogden, “Writer Finds Others, Too, Interested in U.S. Freedoms,” The Clarion-Ledger, August 26, 1962, 8. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/185652204​ /​?terms​=florence​%20ogden​%20Parents​%20who​%20embrace​%20the​%20UNESCO​ &match​=1. 61. Cliff Sessions, “State Women Protest ‘Tyranny’ at Ole Miss,” The Delta Democrat-Times, October 31, 1962, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/24075826​ /​?terms​=florence​%20ogden​%20Women​%20for​%20constitutional​%20government​ %20cliff​%20sessions​&match​=1. 62. Ibid. 63. For more information, see Debbie Elliot, “Integrating Ole Miss: A Transformative, Deadly Riot,” NPR, October 1, 2012. https:​//​www​.npr​.org​/2012​/10​/01​ /161573289​/integrating​-ole​-miss​-a​-transformative​-deadly​-riot. 64. Sessions, “State Women Protest ‘Tyranny’ at Ole Miss,” 1. 65. Ibid. 66. Ogden, “Conservatives’ Have Man but Civil Rights Is Issue,” The Clarion-Ledger, July 26, 1964, 7. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180530004​/​ ?terms​=florence​%20ogden​%20goldwater​&match​=1. 67. Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 103. 68. Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Votes in the South Changed American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 4. 69. Ogden, “A Bow to Majority Vote; Delta Serene for Autumn,” The Clarion Ledger, November 8, 1964, 7. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180081287.

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70. For more information on the Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education decision, see William P. Hustwit, Integration Now: Alexander v. Holmes and the End of Jim Crow Education (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 71. Ogden, “Judges’ Dissent Lauded on Integration Ruling,” The Clarion Ledger, February 8, 1970, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180052251​/​?terms​ =florence​%20ogden​%20schools​&match​=1. 72. Catherine L. Horn and Michal Kurlaender, “The End of Keyes—Resegregation Trends and Achievement in Denver Public Schools,” The Civil Rights Project, April 1, 2006. https:​//​civilrightsproject​.ucla​.edu​/research​/k​-12​-education​/testing​-and​ -assessment​/the​-end​-of​-keyes2014resegregation​-trends​-and​-achievement​-in​-denver​ -public​-schools. 73. Ogden, “Immigration Act Changing Today’s Face of America,” The Clarion-Ledger, May 30, 1971, 5. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180515835​/​ ?terms​=florence​%20ogden​&match​=1. 74. “Mary Cain in Washington,” McComb Enterprise Journal, August 29, 1957, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/318413828. 75. For more information on the DACOWITS, see the “About Us,” Defense Advisor Committee on Women in the Services, accessed June 10, 2022. dacowits.defense. gov. 76. Quote from “Proof that Compulsion is Not Necessary,” McComb Enterprise Journal, August 11, 1954, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/252067359​/​?terms​ =mary​%20cain​%20freedom​%20democracy​&match​=1. 77. Speer, “Contrary Mary: The Life of Mary Dawson Cain,” 3. 78. Ibid., 1. 79. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 6. 80. Quote from “Mrs. Mary Cain, Newspaper Editor, Will Be Candidate for Governor,” The Star-Herald, March 22, 1951, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /274120571. 81. Ibid. 82. Jack M. Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), 94. 83. Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 33. 84. “Mary Cain to Resist ‘8-Armed Octopus,’” The Clarion-Ledger, February 23, 1952, 10. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/179727010​/​?terms​=mary​%20dawson​ %20cain​%20race​%20segregation​&match​=1. 85. Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 64–65. 86. Ibid., 58. 87. Ibid., 62–63. The quote, “God asked for temperance, no total abstinence,” is from Mary Dawson Cain, “Prohibition Should Have Been Raped,” The Macon Beacon, March 31, 1933, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/362155693. 88. Cain, “Prohibition Should Have Been Raped,” 3. 89. Ibid., 2. 90. For more information on the history of prohibition in Mississippi, see Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 66–67. 91. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 73.

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  92. Ibid., 71; quote from Cain, “Prohibition Should Have Been Raped,” 2.   93. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 73.   94. For more information on Cain’s opposition to Roosevelt and the New Deal see McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 71–74; Cain’s work at the Sentinel is mentioned in Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 32.   95. Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 223.   96. Ibid., 223 and 9 respectively.   97. Ibid., 223.   98. Ibid., 10, 236. N99. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 113. 100. Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 224. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid., 230. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid., 234. 105. Ibid., 235. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid., 231. 108. Specifically, Cain named eight “arms” that citizens should resist in reference to the federal government: taxation, the “rotten dollar” of inflation, welfare expansion, public housing, tax-exempt cooperatives, foreign policy (or lack of it), and federal aid for education. See “Mary Cain to Resist 8-Armed Octopus,” The Clarion-Ledger, February 23, 1952, 10. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/179727010​/​?terms​=mary​ %20dawson​%20cain​%20octopus​&match​=1. 109. Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 178. 110. Charles B. Gordon, “Highest Court Denies Review of Cain Case,” McComb Enterprise Journal, June 7, 1954, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/252081318​ /​?terms​=mary​%20dawson​%20cain​%20dead​%20body​&match​=1. 111. Ibid. 112. Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 190–91. 113. Linda Sanders, “Silhouette: One-Woman Newspaper Fights Feds, Feminists,” The Clarion-Ledger, January 25, 1976, 8. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /180595528​/​?terms​=mary​%20dawson​%20cain​%20women​%20for​%20constitutional​ %20government​&match​=1. 114. “Mary D. Cain First Lady to Seek Top Job,” McComb Enterprise-Journal, May 3, 1951, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/252085304​/​?terms​=Women​ %20are​ % 20nearly​ % 20always​ % 20fighting​ % 20for​ % 20country​ % 20and​ % 20for​ %20good​&match​=1. 115. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 73. 116. Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 8. 117. Ibid., 232. 118. As noted in McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 177. 119. Speer, “Mary Dawson Cain.” 120. Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 232–33. 121. Ibid.

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122. “Editor Mary Cain Gets Ovation at Boston,” The Clarion-Ledger, July 5, 1964, 10. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180463038​/​?terms​=Editor​%20Mary​ %20Cain​%20Gets​%20Ovation​%20at​%20Boston​&match​=1. 123. Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 261. 124. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 209. 125. Ibid., 212. 126. Ibid., 210. 127. Ibid., 211. 128. Ibid., 208–12. 129. Ibid., 209. 130. Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 276–77. 131. Ibid., 277. 132. Sanders, “Silhouette,” 1. 133. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 209. 134. Campaign slogan from Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 4; Announcement and quote form “Mary Cain Announces in Race for Governor,” McComb Enterprise-Journal, March 12, 1951, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/252082228​/​?terms​=mary​ %20dawson​%20cain​%20governor​&match​=1. 135. “Mary D. Cain First Lady to Seek Top Job,” 2. 136. The information in the statement was taken from a photo caption of Cain, no title, from the McComb Enterprise-Journal, May 21, 1951, 3. https:​ //​ www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/252086225. 137. See photo caption from May 21, 1951, issue of the Enterprise-Journal for mention of these platform issues. 138. Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 5. 139. See Charles M. Hills, “Mrs. Cain Speaks on School Problems,” The Clarion-Ledger, June 3, 1955, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/185649817​/​ ?terms​=mary​%20cain​%20school​%20supreme​%20court​&match​=1. 140. Quote form “Coleman Tells Work on School Program,” The Clarion-Ledger, July 19, 1955, 12. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/185671833. 141. Speer, “Contrary Mary,” 7. 142. Ibid., 9. 143. Sid Bedingfield and Kathy Roberts Forde, “Journalism and the World It Built,” in Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America, eds. Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021), 1. 144. Ibid. 145. Jerry Mitchell, “Fighting Editor Hazel Brannon Smith Faces Last Battle,” The Clarion-Ledger, May 7, 1994, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/181977997. 146. Ibid., 17. 147. Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 11. 148. “State Women’s Cabinet Presents Timely Forum,” Hattiesburg American, September 23, 1964, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/277043075​/​?terms​ =creating​%20a​%20virtual​%20reign​%20of​%20terror​%20in​%20many​%20sections​ %20of​%20the​%20state​&match​=1.

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149. See Mitchell, “Fighting Editor Hazel Brannon Smith Faces Last Battle,” 17, and Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 19, 97. 150. Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 27–28. 151. Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 18. 152. Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 27–28. 153. Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 17. 154. Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 27. 155. Ibid. 156. Sister Susie, “Town Chatter,” McComb Enterprise-Journal, June 4, 1950, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/252085392​/​?terms​=hazel​%20brannon​ %20smith​%20walter​&match​=1. 157. Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 13. 158. Ibid., 12. 159. Ibid., 13. 160. Ibid., 14. 161. Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 27. 162. Janice Branch Tracy, The Juke Joint King of The Mississippi Hills: The Raucous Reign of Tillman Branch (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2014), 21. 163. Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 28. 164. Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 13. 165. Ibid. 166. Ibid., 12. 167. Ibid., 18. 168. Ibid. 169. “What’s Wrong with That?” McComb Enterprise-Journal, November 18, 1940, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/249365320​/​?terms​=hazel​%20brannon​ &match​=1. 170. Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 10. 171. Ibid. 172. Ibid. 173. For evidence of the Jefferson Davis editorial, see Ibid., 18; for General Lee comments, see Oliver Emmerich, “In the Headlines,” McComb Enterprise-Journal, February 3, 1944, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/249577621​/​?terms​=hazel​ %20brannon​%20confederacy​&match​=1. 174. Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 47. 175. Ibid., 41–42. 176. As quoted in, “Mississippi and the Fourth Term,” McComb Enterprise-Journal, May 11, 1944, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/249578526​/​?terms​=hazel​ %20brannon​%20roosevelt​%20new​%20deal​&match​=1. 177. See Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 31, for mention of Smith’s opposition to federal welfare; see Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 52, for mention of Truman. 178. Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 41. 179. Ibid.

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180. For a more detailed discussion, see Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 40–41. 181. Ibid., 40. 182. Ibid., 31. 183. Ibid. 184. Hazel Brannon Smith, “Looking at the South Through Hazel’s Eyes,” The Alicia Peterson Foundation, April 4, 2011. http:​//​34​.194​.215​.22​/stories​/looking​-old​ -south​-through​-hazel​-eyes. 185. Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 31. For more information on Mississippi’s liquor laws during this time period, see Ted Ownby, “Prohibition,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, April 14, 2018. https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​ /entries​/prohibition​/​#:​​~:​text​=It​%20passed​%20its​%20first​%20statewide​,repeal​%20its​ %20statewide​%20Prohibition​%20law. 186. Smith, “Looking at the South Through Hazel’s Eyes.” 187. Ibid. 188. “All Law Enforcement Requires is a Sheriff Who Means Business,” The Clarion-Ledger, July 17, 1947, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/185048591​/​ ?terms​=hazel​%20brannon​%20smith​&match​=1. 189. For more details on the indictments, see Mark Newman, “Hazel Brannon Smith: Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist,” Mississippi History NOW, March 2008. https:​//​mshistorynow​.mdah​.ms​.gov​/issue​/hazel​-brannon​-smith​-pulitzer​-prize​ -winning​-journalist, and Arthur J. Kaul, “Hazel Brannon Smith and the Lexington Advertiser,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, ed. David R. Davies (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 238. See Kaul, “Hazel Brannon Smith and the Lexington Advertiser,” 238, for evidence of Smith’s call for Murtagh’s resignation. 190. See “Law Enforcement Predicted by Fighting Holmes Editor,” The Clarion-Ledger, September 21, 1947, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /185470636​/​?terms​=hazel​%20brannon​%20ellis​%20wynn​&match​=1, for evidence of Smith’s support of Wynn; for election results, see “Ellis Wynn Elected Sheriff in Holmes,” The Clarion-Ledger, August 28, 1947, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​ /image​/185240684​/​?terms​=ellis​%20wynn​%20holmes​%20county​&match​=1; quote from “Hazel Out on Top,” McComb Enterprise-Journal, September 4, 1947, 2. https:​ //​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/252451688​/​?terms​=hazel​%20brannon​&match​=1. 191. Smith, “Looking at the South Through Hazel’s Eyes.” 192. Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 32. 193. Ibid. 194. Mark Newman, “Hazel Brannon Smith: Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist.” 195. For information on Carter and Smith’s first meeting, see Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 16. 196. “A Rebuke to a Judge,” The Delta-Democrat Times, November 8, 1946, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/34011965​/​?terms​=hazel​%20brannon​&match​ =1. 197. “All Law Enforcement Requires is a Sheriff Who Means Business,” 6.

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198. “State Supreme Court Finds Crusading Editor Not Guilty of Contempt,” The Delta Democrat-Times, April 7, 1947, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /23605526​/​?terms​=hazel​%20brannon​&match​=1. 199. “Headlines,” McComb Enterprise-Journal, April 28, 1946, 2. https:​ //​ www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/252094951​/​?terms​=Wouldn​%27t​%20we​%20see​%20a​ %20great ​ % 20improvement​ % 20in​ % 20general​ % 20conditions ​ % 2C ​ % 20if ​ % 20all​ %20the​%20laws​%20of​%20Holmes​%20County​%20were​%20given​%20the​%20same​ %20attention​%20by​%20the​%20sheriff​%27s​%20office​%20that​%20the​%20rules​ %20of​%20Judge​%20Davis​%20receive​&match​=1. 200. “Hazel Brannon Blasts Judge’s Jury Charge,” The Clarion-Ledger, April 12, 1947, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/186041085​/​?terms​=We​%20think​ %20Judge​%20Davis​%20holds​%20every​%20law​-abiding​%20citizen​%20in​%20utter​ %20contempt​%20for​%20such​%20an​%20attitude​&match​=1. 201. Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 96. 202. Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 33. 203. Ibid. 204. “Editor’s Appeal in Libel Case is Being Argued,” McComb EnterpriseJournal, October 10, 1955, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/252418922​/​?terms​ =hazel​%20brannon​%20smith​%20richard​%20byrd​&match​=1. 205. “Holmes Co. Suit Heard by Court,” Greenwood Commonwealth, October 10, 1955, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/253195230​/​?clipping​_id​=35969701​ &fcfToken​=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9​.eyJmcmVlLXZpZXctaWQ iOjI1MzE5NTIzMCwiaWF0IjoxNjYwNTIwMjczLCJleHAiOjE2NjA2MDY2NzN9​ .g34NCV3TH​-HesQWbjCCY1WtkiP3PJfsjyjIOgSxODJQ. 206. “Court Upholds Right of Freedom of Information,” McComb EnterpriseJournal, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/252419645​/​?terms​=substantially​ %20recited​%20the​%20circumstances​&match​=1. 207. “Victory For Hazel Smith,” The Delta Democrat-Times, November 9, 1955, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/33968427. 208. Kaul, “Hazel Brannon Smith and the Lexington Advertiser,” 243. 209. Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 96. 210. See Fred C. Smith, “Cooperative Farming in Mississippi,” Mississippi History NOW, November 2004. https:​//​www​.mshistorynow​.mdah​.ms​.gov​/issue​/cooperative​ -farming​-in​-mississippi. 211. Mark Newman, “Hazel Brannon Smith (1914–1994): Journalist Under Siege,” in Mississippi Women: Their Histories, Their Lives, eds. Martha H. Swain, Elizabeth Anne Payne, and Marjorie Julian Spruill (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 225. 212. Smith “Cooperative Farming in Mississippi.” 213. John Herbers, “Holmes County Political-Editorial Feud Now in Final, Deciding Round,” The Delta Democrat-Times, December 28, 1958, 1. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/21999432. 214. “The Case of Hazel Brannon Smith,” McComb Enterprise-Journal, January 9, 1959, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/252134402​/​?terms​=justice​%20and​ %20fair​%20play​%20hazel​%20brannon​%20smith​&match​=1.

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215. Jay Milner, “Is Holmes Controversy on Editor Smith Really Just Politics?” The Delta Democrat-Times, December 5, 1958, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/ image​/21996072. 216. John Herbers, “Woman Editor Spoke Out: Life of Paper at Stake,” Memphis Press-Scimitar, December 29, 1958, 16. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​ /image​/799585544​/​?terms​=We​%20do​%20not​%20believe​%20any​%20of​%20our​ %20policies​%20now​%20and​%20in​%20the​%20past​%20can​%20be​%20honestly​ %20condemned​%20as​%20not​%20in​%20the​%20best​%20interest​%20of​%20Holmes​ %20County​%20and​%20its​%20southern​%20traditions​&match​=1. 217. Quote from “Holmes County ‘Gets Even,’” The Delta Democrat-Times, January 11, 1956, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/23651323. The story on Walter Smith’s firing can be found here: “Hazel Smith’s Husband Fired Off County Job,” The Daily Herald, January 11, 1956, 20. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/742223310. 218. “Fire Lexington Editor’s Husband from Hospital Job,” The Delta Democrat-Times, January 11, 1956, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/23651269​ / ​ ? terms ​ = A ​ % 20member​ % 20of​ % 20the​ % 20hospital ​ % 27s ​ % 20board ​ % 20hazel​ %20smith​&match​=1. 219. Smith, “Looking at the South Through Hazel’s Eyes.” 220. Milner, “Is Holmes Controversy on Editor Smith Really Just Politics?” 1. 221. Herbers, “Holmes County Political-Editorial Feud Now in Final, Deciding Round,” 1. 222. Holmes County ‘Gets Even,’” 4. 223. “Editors Criticize Gift to Councils,” McComb Enterprise-Journal, January 16, 1961, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/318369590​/​?terms​=hazel​%20brannon​ %20smith​%20mississippi​%20sovereignty​%20commission​&match​=1. 224. Ibid. 225. Newman, “Hazel Brannon Smith: Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist.” 226. Kaul, “Hazel Brannon Smith and the Lexington Advertiser,” 255. 227. Herbers, “Holmes County Political-Editorial Feud Now in Final, Deciding Round,” 1. 228. Ibid. 229. Smith, “Bombed, Burned, and Boycotted,” The Alicia Peterson Foundation, April 4, 2011. http:​//​34​.194​.215​.22​/stories​/bombed​-burned​-and​-boycotted. See also, Kaul, “Hazel Brannon Smith and the Lexington Advertiser,”256, 258. 230. Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 45. 231. “Hazel Brannon Smith is Honored with Top Award,” The Clarion-Ledger, July 31, 1960, 14. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/179783524​/​?terms​=hazel​ %20brannon​%20smith​%20smear​&match​=1. 232. Garrett Ray Grassroots, “Hazel Brannon Smith Scholarship,” ISWNE: The International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors February 19, 2012. https:​ //​ www​.iswne​.org​/foundation​/scholarships​/hazel​_brannon​_smith​/hazel​-brannon​-smith​ -scholarship​/article​_c13a1142​-529e​-11e1​-bca7​-0019bb2963f4​.html. 233. As noted here: “Hazel Brannon Smith of Lexington (MS) Advertiser,” The Pulitzer Prizes, accessed June 20, 2022. https:​//​www​.pulitzer​.org​/winners​/hazel​ -brannon​-smith.

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234. Ibid (This page contains links to the editorials in question). 235. Kaul, “Hazel Brannon Smith and the Lexington Advertiser,” 256. 236. Ibid., 259. 237. Mitchell, “Fighting Editor Hazel Brannon Smith Faces Last Battle,” 17. 238. Smith, “Bombed, Burned, and Boycotted.” 239. Ibid. 240. Kaul, “Hazel Brannon Smith and the Lexington Advertiser,” 260. 241. Ibid. 242. Whitt, Burning Crosses and Activist Journalism, 28, 38. 243. Mitchell, “Fighting Editor Hazel Brannon Smith Faces Last Battle,” 17. 244. Smith, “Bombed, Burned, and Boycotted.”

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“Raising Unshirted Hell”

In August 2000, the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, based out of Tupelo, published a column from retired journalist Norma Fields. Fields worked for the Journal for twenty-four years (1964–1988), first as a part-time stringer covering some fourteen northern Mississippi counties, then, in 1972, as a political correspondent covering the state capitol in Jackson. The column was a blistering critique of her colleagues in the state capitol press corps for their failure to adequately address a bill that would raise the value of the legislature’s retirement plan to double that of full-time state employees. It was vintage Fields—direct and unapologetic. “Why, when the conference report was issued, did you not read it and find all those heinous provisions in it before it hit either the House or Senate floor?” Fields asked. “You should have been raising unshirted hell in the public print in time to stop its passage.”1 Fields, a self-taught journalist from New Albany, Mississippi, located in the northeast part of the state, was forty years old before she landed her first assignment. She worked to supplement her family’s income, which included five children, after her husband retired from the Air Force.2 Fields was a quick study of both state public policy and journalism and cultivated a style of reporting that was conversational, frank, and quick witted. As such, Fields and her style of journalism flew in the face of expectations regarding what Southern women should or should not say, the places they should or could not enter, and how they should act in public. That style, to be sure, was not unique to Fields, but rather, indicative of an era defined by sweeping social, political, and legal changes: a mix of activist and enterprise journalism, the former most present in her weekly political column (“The Political Arena”), like that of her idol, Hazel Brannon Smith, and the latter, through carefully cultivated source work and investigations of matters of state and public interest. In those daily news reports and in her weekly column, Fields covered topics and stories that were deemed inappropriate for women journalists of her era to cover (e.g., political corruption, ethics reform) or too politically volatile (e.g., social inequality) and did so in a distinctive voice and style that was 103

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antithetical to the expectations of Southern womanhood that was entrenched, and still is, in the region.3 Some of those topics included investigations of state government agencies like the Mississippi Highway Commission, state ethics reform, the battle to pass the ERA in the state legislature (and related issues concerning women’s rights), and coverage of important state elections, including those for governor. Along the way, she acknowledged the challenges she faced as a Southern woman covering the capitol beat. “There were so many male chauvinist pigs in the Mississippi legislature that it raised my heckles,” Fields said, “and I wasn’t going to be timid or put down or disturbed by anybody.”4 “THE GREATEST SURPRISE AND SHOCK OF MY LIFE” Fields spent the first years of her adult life married, managing a home, and raising five children—all the while periodically jumping between Air Force bases as her husband, Bob, advanced in his career as a pilot and officer.5 Those early years of motherhood were chaotic, but as her children grew older, she spent more time outside the home. In the early 1960s, she wrote a monthly gossip column, “Loose Ends,” for the back page of the BOW Beat— the Bergstrom Officers Wives Club newspaper, published at Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas, where Bob was stationed.6 Her BOW Beat column led to her writing news for the paper and a few press releases about the base for the Austin American Statesman. The job wasn’t much, but it afforded her a sense of pride and professional accomplishment. “I never made a penny at it—it cost me money—but I enjoyed doing it,” Fields said.7 Fields’s statement echoes that of other women journalists of the postwar generation, who found self-satisfaction in working outside the home, including Dallas Times Herald editor Vivian Castleberry.8 Castleberry’s career started in the women’s pages.9 Like many women journalists of her generation, she worked hard to expand the scope of the women’s pages beyond the four Fs into areas that would speak to the experiences and struggles of modern women.10 Domestic violence and pay inequity were just two of the issues that Castleberry addressed, but not without facing criticism from her superiors who insisted those topics were inappropriate for publication.11 In a 1976 message to the women of Dallas, Texas, Castleberry said, “Women must, if they are to remain happy and productive, anticipate the turning point of their lives and be prepared to make reasonably accurate veers in the right direction.”12 That advice contradicted the postwar rhetoric instructing women of their primary roles as wives and mothers. “‘Career woman’ became dirty words after the war ended,” historian Linda Lumsden states. “Pervasive postwar rhetoric that women could find true fulfillment only in

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home and motherhood encouraged women to relinquish the good jobs and independence they had achieved in World War II.”13 Fields bought into the rhetorical campaign, at least at first, as her life seemed tailor made for “true fulfillment only in home and motherhood.” Bob retired in 1963, and the family moved to Mississippi.14 Fields was born there on October 23, 1923, in Union County, in the northeast corner of the state, one of five children of Norman, a foreman at a golf club manufacturing plant, and Hope Wade Hamilton, a homemaker.15 One year later, the family moved to Memphis, and then, four years later, on to Nashville.16 The 1920s ushered in an era of economic prosperity for the city—the banks and insurance companies there, flush with cash, lured manufactures of all shapes and shades (e.g., golf equipment) to the area.17 Nashville’s population exploded during the decade, up 30 percent from 1920 to 1930, as the city found itself swelling from a large migrant workforce.18 So healthy was the city’s commercial economy, historian Robert Spinney says, that the Nashville Tennessean bragged in September 1930 that the city had escaped the worst of the Depression.19 “We were living in a Golden Age,” Rogers Caldwell, one of Nashville’s most affluent citizens, once said of that time period, “and none of us thought it would ever end.”20 Such statements were premature, of course. By 1934, Nashville’s unemployment rate peaked near 13 percent, a 10 percent increase from the beginning of the decade. Although Nashville and other Southern cities did not suffer the staggering unemployment rates as their northern counterparts—the Southern commercial economy did not rely so heavily on an industrialized marketplace or its massive labor force—the effects of the Depression were no less devastating.21 Indeed, the closing of two of Nashville’s largest banks, including Caldwell and Company, which served as the depository for the state of Tennessee, caused a chain reaction that shook the region.22 Eventually, 120 banks eventually closed across several Southern states, “[bringing] the hard times home,” as one publication noted, to Nashville’s working-class families, including its once vibrant migrant population.23 Many of those workers fled the city, either moving back to or in with close family or relatives or roaming nearby communities or states looking for a consistent (albeit hard-to-find) place to work, eat, and lay their heads. Norman and his family moved back to their native Mississippi in 1934, living on a small farm in a house owned by Norman’s mother, Minerva Drucilla Lee Hamilton.24 “We moved there dead broke,” Fields said years later.25 That statement is rooted in the memories of a young girl who recalled her parents “scratching around trying to find books and materials” for their children and who remembered that the family only ate what they could grow or raise, and, according to Fields “eked out a living somehow on a red dirt hill farm out in the east part of Union County.”26

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Like many children of the Great Depression, Fields was shaped by harsh economic circumstances; she quickly learned the necessity of independence, a strong work ethic, and the importance of doing more with less. Those characteristics described Fields’s grandmother as well—Minerva Hamilton was a strong personality, the matriarch of a large clan (including twelve children) who, Fields remembered, “could tell the biggest lies in the world and the funniest stories.”27 Family get-togethers, including Sunday dinners at Minerva’s house, defined many of Fields’s childhood memories.28 Fields graduated from New Albany High School in 1941, but she had neither the grades nor the money to go to college.29 With few options for employment in Union County, Fields took a civil service exam in the hopes of landing a government job, perhaps at the newly constructed Columbus Air Force Base, approximately ninety miles south of Fields’s home. Instead, her high scores on the exam, along with her proficiency in shorthand and typing, helped her win appointment to the Department of the Navy stenographer pool. With clothes her mother made—Fields was particularly proud of her new pleated, blue-and-white plaid wool skirt—and $125 her father borrowed from the Bank of New Albany Fields, now eighteen, moved to Washington, DC, in March 1942.30 Fields was excited about the move, but she was homesick for quite some time. Fields missed her parents and they missed her—her new home was a far cry from the small dirt farm in Union County, and all the changes overwhelmed her. “You’re too young to go that far off,” her father told her.31 Fields adapted as quickly as she could to her new circumstances—a quick learner with a strong work ethic, she moved from the stenographer pool to the radar training division, part of the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, where she found a permanent home. Her responsibilities included handling top secret material related to the development of radar technology;32 it was as close to a formal education as she would receive, an issue that bothered her for quite some time.33 Fields may have presented herself as a confident woman—and, in time, she was just that—but she was, at least for the first several years of her journalism career, insecure and timid about her lack of formal experience and education.34 “Norma was horrified at the idea of working outside the home after her years as a homemaker,” her friend and colleague Ellen Ann Fentress recalled.35 Bob, stationed nearby, reminded her of home. A native of Pontotoc County, Mississippi, just twenty miles or so from the Fields family farm, Bob’s family owned land that he would eventually inherit.36 It was a logical decision, then, for the family to return there once he retired. Bob’s retirement benefits were only half of his full-time salary, so Fields needed to supplement the family’s income. But, the possibility of finding work as a journalist was a far-fetched idea at best, she believed.37

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Like Curtis Castleberry, who supported his wife’s decision to work, Bob would play a pivotal role in Fields’s professional development.38 He insisted she drive to Tupelo, some thirty miles east, and apply for a job with the Tupelo (MS) Daily Journal (renamed the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal in 1973), then one of the largest newspapers in the state.39 Unknown to Fields, Bob arranged an interview for his wife with editor-in-chief Harry Rutherford—a decision both sexist and paternalistic, as it implied that his wife could not secure an interview without his help. It also exposes a time when a handshake between men—what amounted to a “good ole boy” social contract—reinforced a patriarchal social structure that kept them in power. It is unclear if Bob’s actions are the only reason Fields was hired. Rutherford had a paper to run and could ill afford to hire someone who showed little talent. Regardless, Fields was now a part-time stringer, but she wondered if she could, in her words, “cut the mustard.”40 “I HAD TO WORK HARD” As a part-time stringer, Fields covered several counties in northeast Mississippi, at least two a day, three or four days a week.41 Stringers also were responsible for editing their own copy, taking photos, and helping lay out the Sunday edition.42 Fields immediately felt out of place and over her head. “I had to start writing and taking pictures [and] that was the thing that scared me,” she said. “I didn’t know what [questions] to ask anybody.”43 Fields knew she had work to do if she wanted to be taken seriously. She polished her photography skills with an old family camera and called her sister—a former Journal stringer who worked for the Birmingham (AL) News at the time—to help teach her the finer points of newswriting.44 Fields also focused on her strengths—her work in Washington, DC, and her travel experiences as the wife of a career officer, for example—and less on her lack of education and experience, to build up her confidence. “Her Washington experience and travels as an officer’s wife opened her to a world beyond northeast Mississippi,” according to Fentress. “The exposure helped make her the independent thinker that she became.”45 A year into her job, Fields landed her first front-page story. It involved New Albany bank vice president Boyce Bryson, someone she knew well, and charges that he had absconded with two million dollars of his bank’s money.46 Fields was the first reporter on the scene when law enforcement found Bryson’s body in his car, a suicide by asphyxiation.47 This story challenged both her confidence and her skill set and brought her face-to-face with the realities of investigative reporting. “Well, it was one I will never forget,” Fields said. “I took pictures of the car and crawled off into the bushes and

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threw-up everything I had eaten for days; that’s the first time—I mean that, God—to have a dead body there before me that I had to write about.”48 With the exception of the Bryson story, Fields covered the type of stories expected of a part-time stringer: a profile of her hometown city engineer, escalating food prices and the difficulty of grocery shopping on a budget, and Christmas gift ideas for her readers.49 She spent part of one day taking photos of the Pontotoc, Mississippi, Christmas parade.50 She covered state audits of the Alcorn County school system and the Prentiss County clerk’s office, and she covered various county school board meetings.51 “My big news sources in those counties were the schools. I’d always go into the schools because they were always anxious to get publicity for their children.”52 Fields also covered more city council meetings than she could have ever imagined. These experiences proved invaluable in her career as a capitol correspondent—and not just because they taught her how to observe and report on official government business. The interactions with city leaders, as when Fields would approach them after meetings to ask follow-up questions, proved just as valuable; she discovered the depths of their sexism and how best to deal with it. In a 2009 interview, Fields described one such defining interaction from early in her career covering the Tupelo city government: I would go to city hall and cover the aldermen and I would be taking notes and all of a sudden, I would look up and all these guys—I’d see a quorum had disappeared off of that [dais]—and they had all gone into the men’s room. So, I went to the door of the men’s room and knocked on it and I said, “Gentlemen. I know there is a quorum of the Tupelo Board of Alderman in this room and if you don’t come out to conduct your business, I will be in there.” And, they came out. And I was very infamous for that.53

In this and similar moments, Fields also recognized the progress she was making as a professional journalist. “If I had done that straight out of high school in New Albany, I couldn’t have done it,” Fields said when asked to assess her interactions with Tupelo city leaders. “But I had worked in Washington [DC], I had traveled a good bit with my husband. I’d lived in Germany even and had traveled a good bit all over the world. I no longer had that little country girl timidity that a lot of people might have.”54 Fields’s comment echoes that of other women journalists and editors of her generation who discovered self-reliance in the midst of professional struggle and doubt. “My friends were career minded, there was that impetus that we should all be working women and have careers” longtime journalist and editor Dorothy Jurney said in a 1990 interview. “But nobody ever pointed out, or we were not smart enough to realize, that the horizons were not very high.”55

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To be fulfilled in her career, in other words, Fields would have to ignore the expectations of failure placed upon her (and other professional women)—societal norms set by deep-seeded cultural beliefs that limited her possibilities for success. Any path she charted would have professional risks involved, and, as a woman who aspired to cover hard news, Fields knew that she could not shy away from those obstacles if she were to be taken seriously. Of all the issues and stories she covered during the earliest years of her career, perhaps none were as controversial, or as dangerous, as a six-part series she wrote in January 1967 exposing the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan’s recruiting and retention tactics, its military-like organizational structure, and the interstate path in which the Klan’s funds traveled.56 Taken from a taped interview with an individual she called a “disgusted official of the Ku Klux Klan,” the series, with headlines like “Destroyer of Freedom,” “Klan Promises Phony,” “You Pledge Your Life,” was one of the first of its kind for the Journal—a front page investigative series that brought to light a dark and nasty subject that many readers refused to acknowledge.57 There were fantastic risks involved in this type of assignment—Fields and her family received many late-night phone calls and threats during its publication.58 Fields taught her children to shrug them off—they would take turns answering the phone in silly voices to throw the callers off—but they knew what was at stake.59 “The Ku Klux Klan had met a formidable foe. As kids, we didn’t get this so much from her articles in the paper as we did from the late-night, anonymous threatening phone calls we answered,” her children said in an obituary published shortly after her death. “We were a little scared for our mama, too, even though we knew, firsthand, how tough she was.”60 The family had reason for concern, of course. Although Klan membership dwindled considerably since the height of its power in the 1920s—and while internal conflict defined and distracted the organization during the 1960s— the Klan of the civil rights era was a desperate, violent organization.61 Its membership consisted of a younger generation who believed violence to be “the only remaining option” to stop integration.62 Furthermore, Mississippi was ground zero for a potential race war that this younger generation hoped to ignite and win. The Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, according to a 2014 report published by NPR, “became notorious because of how violent they were. Those groups killed and terrorized civil rights workers and Black people who tried to vote.”63 The Klan series was among her favorites, but covering the organization probably concerned Fields more than she let on.64 Women journalists have been frequently subjected to the paternalistic overtures of their editors and publishers, who have refused them certain assignments (e.g., the crime beat) for fear of putting them in harm’s way.65 Perhaps, then, Fields downplayed the risks for the benefit of her career—to show her editor how unflappable

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she was or to make a favorable impression. She once admitted, “I would have flown over the Tennessee Tombigbee Waterway if [editor] Harry [Rutherford] had wanted me to.”66 That statement could be interpreted in two ways: from the perspective of a journalist who was fond of her editor and wanted to make him proud, or from the perspective of a woman who loved her job and newfound sense of independence, and therefore, would take and complete any assignment to prove her worth. In fact, there is truth in both interpretations; as a woman in a male-dominated industry, it is a fact that Fields had to overcome significant obstacles to move up the ranks—from part-time stringer to full-time journalist to state capitol correspondent. “It was tough,” Fields recalled. “I had to work hard.”67 “LIKE THE DEW COVERS DIXIE” That hard work paid dividends for Fields’s career. In 1972, Rutherford assigned her to the state capitol beat, where she was expected to expand the Journal’s coverage of public education, a primary focus of publisher George McLean. McLean embraced what biographer Robert Blade called “an active, collaborative, socially aware Christianity, concerned as much or more with improving this world as securing a place in the afterlife.”68 He donated over a million dollars to northeast Mississippi public schools (as well as other community-based projects) in his lifetime and expected his newspaper to reflect his mantra: “There is no limit to what an organized community can do—if it wants to.”69 Fields’s earliest stories on the subject date back to at least 1965. That year, she wrote a story on educational obstacles facing the state and another that focused on then Secretary of State William Winter’s call to college student leaders to help the state meet that challenge.70 Fields saved her best work, though, for the bar-room brawl political environment of the Mississippi state capitol building. For the first four years (1972–1976), she covered the state legislature on a part-time basis—McLean, at first, wanted someone down there to watch the progress of a state highway bill whose passage would significantly improve the conditions of roads in north Mississippi—before her promotion to full-time state capitol correspondent and permanent move to Jackson.71 Fields believed that journalism should serve as an agent of change, but few people, certainly not the majority of the elected members of the state government, expected her work to have any significant influence on state policy. “Those [politicians] down [in Jackson] thought, ‘Aw we aren’t going to pay any attention to this woman, she just works for that damn little paper up in northeast Mississippi,’” Fields said.72 She used the arrogance of those

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who doubted her to fuel some of her best work, as when she reported on an unwritten rule that allowed all state government agencies to conduct meetings behind closed doors. These “executive sessions” (as they were formally known) were part and parcel of doing business in the state, from the smallest of small-town council meetings to the most powerful legislative committees.73 They were a slap-in-the-face to the public’s “right to know,” Fields believed;74 she also considered them professionally offensive. Her work on the issue actually began in 1969, before her arrival in Jackson, when Fields asked readers to take notice of the “executive session” rules that kept reporters out of city council meetings. “Few Mississippians, the capitol press contends, realize how much of the state’s business is conducted in secret closed sessions, thus rather effectively controlling the public’s right to know through a free press,” Fields wrote.75 For the next five years, she pressed the issue, exposing the hypocrisy of closed-door meetings at all government levels while aiding the call for formal legislation that would require public and press access to those meetings. Her coverage of the issue was actually a consequence of her attempts to record meetings while working as a part-time stringer, only to have the door shut in her face—literally. “As a reporter in Northeast Mississippi these past six years, the times have been legion that I’ve been invited out or locked out of meetings of boards of supervisors,” Fields said in December 1969, referring to her attempts to cover the Tupelo City Council.76 The practice continued once she got to Jackson. “I would walk into the rooms where [the legislators] had closed the doors and once they called the Sergeant at Arms to escort me out,” she said.77 Fields admitted to fighting a two-pronged battle: resistance from lawmakers who saw any formal legislation as a threat to their power and an apathetic public who seemed to take the democratic process for granted.78 Facing both problems head-on, Fields reminded her readers of their right “to know what any of your public officials are doing—or failing to do—in the public interest.”79 Also, she routinely confronted government officials who claimed it was their privilege to work behind closed doors, calling their actions— including lawmakers’ efforts to stall open meetings legislation—a “blatant and arrogant example” of abuse of power.80 In 1973, almost four years after she first investigated the issue, Fields reported on the slow progress of what was now called the “Freedom of Information” bill mandating that “the formation of public policy is public business and may not be conducted in secret”—including formal gatherings of any municipal, county, or state commission, agency, or government body.81 It had been a long haul just to get to that point; between 1969 and 1974, every single bill meant to provide for open meetings of one form or another died in committee.82 As Fields reported, they all fell victim to a

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“rueful paradox”: legislative committee members meeting in secret, casting secret votes on whether or not to abolish so-called “secret meetings.”83 In October 1974, Fields reported that open meetings legislation had finally gained significant political support, if only because constituents and readers now understood its importance. “By now Mississippians and their countrymen have seen a duly-elected President toppled due to secrecy (in this instance, ‘cover-ups’) in the high office in the land,” she wrote. “And they have seen many other things closer to home happen to them.”84 In the wake of Watergate, and with public support of Vietnam waning, the apathy that Fields first reported on in 1969 had been replaced by more vocal, public calls for government transparency. “[The bill] would be a step in the right direction toward restoring the public’s confidence in their elected officials,” she said.85 It is unclear if Fields always had an inclination toward the activist journalism and investigative reporting she practiced in this and other instances, or if she grew into the role. More than likely the latter is closer to the truth, given that she was so uncertain of her capabilities to do the job at first. Once she had the confidence, though, Fields’s consistent coverage of the state’s “executive sessions” helped keep the issue on the public agenda until the time was right for change. In 1974, for example, she revealed that the Board of Alderman in Tupelo, Mississippi, would hold two secret meetings per month and that the Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning, the body responsible for policy and financial management of the state’s public colleges and universities, was meeting behind-closed-doors as well.86 In other words, she reminded readers what was at stake during these “secret meetings” and the fact that they happened right under their noses and without the benefit of their attendance—or that of the press. “Though reporters were once again refused admittance to that meeting,” Fields wrote in reference to an October 1973 Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning meeting, “where it was incidentally noted afterward that the college board had decided to request $69 million in tax dollars.”87 In demanding that political leaders meet in public, Fields called attention to the people’s “right to know” and the role of the press in keeping them informed. She was a fierce protector of the First Amendment—like any good journalist, she insisted that for a democracy to function properly, those in power must be transparent and the press must be willing to hold them accountable. Accordingly, she was, at times, a detested figure in the state legislature. They resented what Fields wrote, and her, for writing it. While a few elected officials agreed with Representative Steve Holland, who once called her “an extremely positive element in state politics,” the vast majority sided with House and Ways Committee Chair Sonny Meredith who kept a file full of Fields’s articles and refused to take her questions.88

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By consistently exposing the illicit practices of the state’s political leaders, her readers became more informed; in turn, against the backdrop of Watergate and Vietnam, they began pushing for the proper legislation. The pressure finally paid off in April 1975, when Fields witnessed what she called an “historic session” of the Mississippi legislature. The state legislature passed the Mississippi Opening Meetings Law (to take effect on January 1, 1976) despite more than a dozen attempts by the opposition to amend it.89 Years later, Fields recalled the power of journalism to put and keep pressure on lawmakers to do the right thing. “When the bulldog’s looking in on them, they behave,” she said.90 Fields was that bulldog, as indicated by the pressure she put on government agencies to work within the law—especially when taxpayer money was at stake. Fields’s investigation into possible corruption at the Mississippi Highway Commission—the state agency responsible for road and highway management and fiscal oversight—began as early as 1971, when she reported that the prime investors of a privately-owned limestone company, the Magnolia Limestone Products, Inc., allegedly included one of three Commission supervisors.91 Given that Magnolia produced agricultural lime and road stone used in making asphalt for state highways, the possible conflict of interest caught Fields’s attention.92 Fields did not find any evidence of wrong-doing in that particular case, but her investigation of the Commission’s activities did not end there. Since Commission control fell to just three elected officials representing three state districts (northern, central, and southern), Fields understood what was at stake—the opportunity for corruption (e.g., stealing or mismanagement of funds) on a grand scale, with very little government oversight of one of the state’s most powerful agencies. “You know, the legislature would appropriate them money, the state, the federal government gave them millions each year,” Fields said. “[The Commission] never, during the entire time that I covered them, the auditor could never audit their books. Their books were in such a bad shape.”93 Fields, in her words, began covering the Commission “like the dew covers Dixie.”94 Her investigation ran the gamut—from reports of blatant absenteeism of one commissioner from Commission meetings, legislative meetings, and public community hearings, to another allegedly siphoning state funds earmarked for design and construction of bridges that would cross the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway.95 Fields’s coverage picked up steam in 1976 when highway commissioner (and director) E. L. Boteler suddenly resigned his post that July—which, she soon discovered, was tied to financial “irregularities” found in a state audit of commission books.96 In some two dozen articles published in August 1976, she provided a detailed timeline of events and circumstances for her readers—including

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the fact that Boteler embezzled $200,000 from the state in 1975, a portion of the total funds earmarked as payment to a New York-based engineering firm for their designs of two bridges that would connect to the TennesseeTombigbee Waterway.97 Fields stayed on the investigation—which eventually included investigations by the state attorney general and the Federal Highway Commission—with all of its twists and turns: statements by Boteler that he gave some of the embezzled funds to a fellow commissioner for a reelection campaign; a temporary freeze in state funding (via public bond sale) for the bridges until the aforementioned agencies completed their investigation; and accusations by three Mississippi-based engineers that the New York engineering firm had overcharged the state in consulting fees.98 “When it all came to light, it was a stunning sensation,” Fields wrote in an August 1976 column, “because most people who have known Boteler for years would have sworn he couldn’t have been touched with a ten-foot pole.”99 In the years during and following her investigation, which eventually led to Boteler’s indictment, trial, and guilty verdict, both readers and colleagues gave Fields credit for being the first, and most persistent, journalist to expose the Commission’s overall mismanagement and the financial corruption of two other commissioners: Sam Waggoner, indicted in 1988 on extortion charges and three counts of filing false tax returns, and Bob Joiner, indicted the same year on four counts of extortion, three counts of bribery, and four counts of tax evasion. Both later served prison sentences.100 Hers was a domino effect—the published stories also drew the attention of larger news sources and local news stations, thus further intensifying public and legal scrutiny of the Commission’s actions. Also, by keeping the story alive, Fields reinforced the role of the press as public watchdog, a hallmark of enterprise journalism, which she used in tandem with her growing role as an activist journalist. “SHE CHALLENGED EVERYBODY” Fields’s coverage of state government also included the tenures of five governors—William “Bill” Waller (1972–1976), Cliff Finch (1976–1980), William Winter (1980–1984), William “Bill” Allain (1984–1988), Ray Mabus (1988–1992), and the early years of Kirk Fordice (1992–2000), the latter two after her official retirement (but in her role as a freelance writer for the Journal).101 Waller, a former Hinds County district attorney, came into office at an interesting time in state history, as Mississippi found itself at a political crossroads. In fact, Waller had his hands full in the early 1970s trying to unify the state Democratic Party, then sharply divided between the “Loyalists” (those members with strong ties to the national party and its

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Figure 3.1.  Norma Fields (center) is pictured with former New York Times managing editor Clifton Daniel and reporter Francis McDavid (Starkville Daily News) in this undated photo. Fields was a role model for many women journalists covering Mississippi state politics. Source: University Archives Photograph Collection, Manuscript Division, Archives and Special Collections, Mississippi State University Libraries.

progressive platforms) and the “Regulars” (made up of former “Dixiecrats” who embraced Jim Crow and all the heavy baggage that came with it).102 For years, the Loyalists tried to distance themselves from their party’s seedy past—a reputation formed, in part, by the Jim Crow politics of the White Citizens’ Councils, the election of “Dixiecrat” Governors Ross Barnett and Paul Johnson (who, at one 1963 campaign rally, shouted to the crowd that the NAACP stood for “Niggers, Apes, Alligators, Coons, and Possums”), and the assassination of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers.103 Beginning in the late 1960s, however, the Loyalists’ strategy shifted from one of defense to offense; they were hell bent on taking their party back, and Bill Waller, they believed, was just the man to lead them. As Hinds County DA, Waller prosecuted Byron De La Beckwith, the man charged with Evers’s murder.104 Although a jury eventually acquitted Beckwith, Waller became the face of the Loyalist movement wing of the state Democratic Party, as signified by his campaign promise to remove the longstanding influence of the “Capitol Street Gang” (a label Waller coined in reference to the small but influential group of downtown Jackson bankers, lawyers, and other white collar professionals) from the governor’s mansion and “return it to the ‘people.’”105

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Fields’s introduction to Waller came during the 1971 Democratic primary for governor, what she called a “battle of the machines”—a reference to the state political powerbrokers (including longtime senator James Eastland, the Hederman family, and former governors Ross Barnett and Paul Johnson)—lining up to support either Waller or his opponent, Lieutenant Governor Charles Sullivan.106 Fields’s coverage of Waller included a variety of topics, the most controversial being the possibility of a Waller veto of legislation that would provide for a $30-million-dollar teacher raise.107 In a January 1975 article, Fields reported on the tug-of-war between the state legislature (who approved the measure) and the future governor, who had been endorsed by the Mississippi Association of Educators. “It is my proposal not to raise taxes and if the school teachers pay bills already go into law, then we’d have to raise taxes,” Waller said, before claiming that legislators were “in effect making the governor the scapegoat of the school teachers.”108 Years after her retirement, Fields recalled having the most fun covering Finch—“it was so easy to catch him or somebody he’d appointed in some kind of mischief,” she said. Finch was elected in 1976 by the efforts of a unified Democratic Party (joined together by the election of co-chairmen, one white, the other Black, to lead the Mississippi Democratic Party), specifically Black and rural white voters who, that same year, also carried the state for Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter (the last year the state would help elect a Democratic presidential candidate).109 Finch’s election helped pull state Democrats together, but his tenure as governor proved to be a “dismal failure,” marked by a series of critical political mistakes, personal behavior that irritated voters (including marital spats between Finch and his wife that often played out in the press), and, as reported by The New York Times, outright political corruption.110 “Finch . . . by Mississippi standards was regarded as a clown in his single term as governor,” Bill Minor recalled.111 Indeed, history would remember Finch as a “miserable governor,” and Fields was there to record as much of “good old Cliff” (as she called him years later) as she could.112 She reported on several controversial appointments Finch made during his first few months in office, including: the appointment of the headmaster of Magnolia Heights Academy, a segregated academy in Senatobia, as head of the Motor Vehicle Comptroller’s Office (the state office responsible for enforcing state fuel taxes, truck weight limits, and vehicle motor taxes); the appointment of a Finch relative as public safety commissioner; the appointment of someone to the state agricultural board, who then moved to Texas shortly thereafter; and, near the end of his first year in office, Finch’s delay in making several appointments to the State Board of Nursing, to the point that the Board was “completely inoperable” due to lack of warm bodies.113

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Fields was especially critical of the lack of diversity in Finch’s appointments, asking him at least once, for instance, when he was going to appoint the first Black woman to the state college board.114 And, she questioned what she called the “military-like organization” Finch had set up in the governor’s mansion—including the number of military personnel he had appointed to state offices in general—with the implication that both would “take away legislative power” from the state government.115 Fields was one of at least a dozen (or more) reporters covering his administration, and her investigations revealed little that could not be found in competing newspapers—but what is noticeable (and noted by her colleagues) is the intensity in which she covered Finch. “While Finch won’t be anymore ‘pacific’ than that, Waller identified the group as ‘the speaker of the House, the president pro tem of the Senate, and the chairman of the Appropriations,’” Fields said, in a column mocking Finch’s speech while reporting on a dual press conference held by Finch and former governor Waller.116 As much as Fields may have admired some state leaders, like William Winter, for their courage and political wisdom, the opposite easily annoyed her—inept leaders who she believed to be over their heads and out of their depth. Cliff Finch, Fields insisted, was one such leader. As a reporter, then, she believed it her duty to expose his weaknesses for the common good; indeed, by the time Finch’s term ended in 1980, close observers agreed that Fields had Finch’s number. “Cliff Finch’s life was made miserable by Norma in his 1976–80 term as governor,” Minor said.117 William Winter’s decision to run for governor again in 1979 (after losing to Finch in 1975) was just what the state Democrats needed—a political candidate who could offer stability after Finch’s so-called “disastrous and reckless performance.”118 Winter had a proven track record in Mississippi politics, having been elected to several state offices over the course of his career, which began in 1947: state representative, state tax collector, state treasurer, and lieutenant governor.119 Ironically, his opponent in the Democratic primary, Lieutenant Governor Evelyn Gandy, had a similar resume—including her election as the state’s first woman lieutenant governor (1976–1980)—but Mississippi voters were not about to elect a woman, no matter her qualifications, to the state’s highest office.120 The Winter campaign knew as much, portraying Gandy as a candidate too weak and delicate to handle the pressures of the job.121 The capitol press, Fields included, did its part, too, describing the longtime lawmaker in the most feminine, and, at times, condescending, of terms. “Perhaps we’ve all been wrong,” Fields wrote in a January 1978 column, in reference to what she considered Gandy’s repeated indecisiveness in her role as lieutenant governor. “Certainly, the tall, slender lady from Hattiesburg

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showed a good deal of spunk during the three-day debate on the 16th Section bill.”122 Winter twice faced defeat when running for governor—first in 1967, when he ran against state representative John Bell Williams, losing in the Democratic primary, and again, in 1975, losing to Finch and his “Working Man’s” campaign in the primary run-off—and he thought his career dead by 1979. Fields reported as much that May, claiming that “many thought he was through with politics” after his surprising 1975 loss, what was supposed to be “William Winter’s year” to take the governor’s mansion.123 Ironically, Winter’s general election victory four years later over Republican Gil Carmichael was in part helped along by the Finch’s failures as governor—Winter’s image as an articulate, professional, and experienced lawmaker was a welcome relief to weary, frustrated voters.124 “William Winter was such a good governor. He accomplished more than any (other governor) put together,” Fields said years later. “There was never any conflict anywhere. He just got things done.”125 Among Winter’s most noted accomplishments as governor was the passage of the Education Reform Act, a comprehensive package meant to attack what he believed to be two of Mississippi’s greatest weaknesses: a “lack of a strong economic base that will open up job opportunities, and too little appreciation for the essential education that prepares students for employment or college after high school,” according to an October 1983 Christian Science Monitor article.126 At the time, Mississippi’s high school drop-out rate stood at 42 percent; the goal of the Reform Act was to attack this problem at its root by creating a series of programs and incentives to encourage educational development at the earliest possible points, including: the establishment of public kindergartens, funds for statewide reading programs for elementary school students, an increase in state tax to fund public education, and pay raises for public school teachers.127 It was, by most accounts, the most important piece of state educational legislation before or since, pushed by a governor who, as a second term state legislator in 1954, watched as his colleagues passed, and voters ratified, a constitutional amendment abolishing public schools in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision (but state lawmakers never enforced it).128 If Winter brought stability to the state’s highest office, the candidacy of his successor, Bill Allain, brought an equal amount of scandal and gossip. In a November 1983 front-page story, Fields reviewed the circumstances for readers just days before the next election: sworn statements by two Black, male prostitutes revealing that Democratic gubernatorial nominee (and state attorney general) Allain had engaged them in “homosexual relations”; that Jackson police officers, in sworn statements, said they witnessed Allain talking to those same prostitutes while “trolling” the part of town they frequented; that three Republicans, all of whom supported (and contributed large

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sums of money to) his opponent, Delta business owner Leon Bramlett, paid for the investigation into these allegations; that Allain had passed a polygraph given privately in New Orleans “[proving] that he is not a homosexual” (and passed those results along to the press); that Allain refused to take any more such tests, despite Bramlett’s declaration that he would drop out of the race if Allain would take and pass three independent lie detector tests.129 Fields’s reporting on the issues spanned eight days, from the last Thursday in October to the first Friday in November, just four days before the Tuesday, November 8, election.130 Organized among her story drafts on the subject are a number of press releases from various parties, including several from Allain (written by former journalist and Allain spokesperson Jo Anne Klein), in which he categorically denied the accusations and alluded to legal action against those spearheading what he called “damnable, vicious, malicious lies.”131 His enemies issued public statements as well; Jackson attorney William Spell, one of three Republicans paying for the investigation, said his sources had “developed clear and convincing evidence that . . . Attorney General Bill Allain, over a period of years, frequently engaged in homosexual acts with male prostitutes.”132 Fields didn’t write a column on the scandal, but she kept in her personal papers two editorials written by the Daily Journal editorial staff. In one, published on October 28, three days after the scandal broke, the paper’s editorial board called the charges a “triple tragedy,” with Allain, both political parties, and Mississippi voters feeling the effects of “the disastrous affair.” “Mississippi’s national stature, under Gov. William Winter’s leadership, has made impressive gains. State government has been run efficiently, honestly—and with dignity,” the editorial read. “If the public scandal in this gubernatorial campaign is not resolved the gains of the past four years could be diminished considerably.”133 In a second editorial published one week later, the Journal editors agreed with a plan offered by Yazoo City business owner Owen Cooper (and eight other prominent business leaders), which called for both Allain and Spell to each take independent lie detector tests, with the results to be made public prior to the election. “An impartially-administered lie detector examination could keep discouraged voters participating in the political system,” the published editorial read, “and that is equal in importance to the real issues and Bill Allain’s guilt or innocence.”134 Fields, as indicated by her comments made during an October 25 press conference, the day news of the scandal broke, most certainly considered the scandal a “disastrous affair,” and like her editors and publisher, insisted that the voters of Mississippi deserve to know the truth and thus have this “dark cloud” removed from the state.135 So, on the afternoon of October 25, Fields, as was her method, broke with the usual polite, direct questions some reporters

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usually ask and went directly to the matter at hand. A Clarion-Ledger reporter documented her exchange with Spell, who called the press conference: Fields: Are you attempting to ruin this man? Are you trying to defeat him? Are you trying to get him to withdraw? What are you doing? Spell: We simply seek the truth, which I thought was a common objective that we had with the media. Fields: Well, that’s what I’m seeking from you. Spell: Believe me, what I’ve told you is the truth.136

Despite the charges, voters elected Allain with 55 percent of the majority, in part because he and his party, amid the accusations, mounted an aggressive campaign that included: state party leaders and people of note (including Allain’s ex-wife) coming to his defense in televised commercials and radio spots; more than 300 state Democratic Party leaders holding a rally in his honor; and, unexpectedly, TV and radio stations refusing Spell’s request to buy time to continue the accusations about Allain and respond to Allain’s public attacks on Spell and others who initiated the scandal; and Republican candidate Leon Bramlett’s campaign getting lost in the mix.137 In a January 1984 front-page article, Fields reported on the “sparsely attended” inaugural held on the grounds of the state capitol building.138 Twenty-mile-per-hour winds and icy rain were what the 600 or so attendees might remember that day, Fields said, and not Allain’s hurried speech in which he promised “cooperation and harmony moving forward.”139 Fields must have wondered if Allain’s tenure as governor would be tarnished by the accusations, but she never commented, in print at least, what she thought of the whole affair and the people involved. If her reaction at the October 25 press conference is any indication, she thought Allain treated unfairly; indeed, it was not that often, if at all, that Norma Fields stood up in a press conference and challenged someone on behalf of a political candidate or elected official. There were very few she respected, for sure, but perhaps her defense of Allain is much more straightforward: she knew the difference between right and wrong. “She challenged everybody, rich or a pauper,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal editor Joe Rutherford recalled.140 True enough, Fields’s journalism more often than not put her at odds with those in power. Without giving details, she once admitted to butting heads with Ray Mabus when he served on Winter’s staff—which then carried over into his own term as governor. “We just never got along. And, I had trouble with him the whole time.”141 To be sure, most of the state’s editors and journalists were impressed by his campaign against government corruption, and they supported Mabus’s decision to run for governor in 1987. As state auditor, he

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opened investigations into the use of government funds by many of the state’s elected officials, the result of which included an FBI undercover sting— “Operation Pretense”—sending fifty-seven state officials, many of them county supervisors, to prison.142 Even so, Fields was slow to sing Mabus’s praises, which raised the ire of his friends, including state representative John Grisham, who, in 1987, sent Fields a cautionary message after reading a September 1987 column in which she wondered if voters were “sold on the squeaky clean Mabus image.”143 “Just a few months ago, you were singing his praises!” Grisham said. “I wonder what or who changed your mind? One of your top virtues is independence. I trust you never lose it.”144 Of course, there would always be political leaders, almost all of them men, who felt the need to chastise Fields, if not outright criticize her, because she was a woman with an opinion. “[Norma and I] believed aggressive coverage by male reporters was met with less anger than if we, as female journalists, wrote something critical,” Fentress, who joined Fields in the capitol press corps in the early 1980s, recalled.145 Politics and journalism, certainly the mix of both, have historically been areas of male privilege and power; accordingly, many lawmakers perceived Fields’s presence in and around the state capitol as a slap-in-the-face to traditional gender roles. To aggravate matters, Fields thumbed her nose at the cherished ideal of the “southern lady,” which dictated that women of the mid-twentieth century be submissive and respectful in their words and deeds. Called everything from an “old battle-ax” to “cold-hearted” by her detractors at the capitol, Fields understood the root of their anxiety—and dismissed it. “I’m not in the business to make people like me. I’ve got a job to do, and I don’t particularly care who wins a popularity contest,” she said.146 Partly the result of her experiences as a statehouse reporter, Fields, in the 1970s and 1980s, embraced second-wave feminism and spoke out in support of the ERA. The irony was not lost on Fields—a woman born and reared in small-town Mississippi, who started adult life as an Air Force officer’s wife, was now, at the apex of her career, accepting, even campaigning for, a movement she thought she would never need or want. “I NEVER LET THEM TREAT ME LIKE A LADY” In March 1979, Fields, in one of several columns supporting the ERA, offered a brutal critique of the Mississippi lawmakers who, to that point, had refused to even consider a vote on the measure. “It is discouraging to some of us displaced homemakers who know there, but for the grace of God, go we, that the members of the Mississippi House really could not care less about our sisters who’re having a tough time putting food on their tables,” she wrote.147 This

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statement reveals more than just Fields’s appreciation for feminism or her distrust of many of the lawmakers she covered. Long before she came to the movement, Fields championed the “displaced homemaker,” the working wife or mother, as she most closely identified with her experiences—particularly her struggles to find peace between needing to work and the guilt of working away from home. “It seems that the worst moments at the hearthside were when I would call home—collect—out of sheer loneliness, mind you,” Fields admitted in a May 1972 column, in which she described her first year of covering the Mississippi legislature full-time while living apart from her family.148 Indeed, she was often critical of the feminist movement, at least at first, as she felt it out of touch with the realities of the “displaced homemaker.” In July 1970, for that very reason, Fields called out Betty Friedan’s nationwide women’s strike scheduled for that August. “Sorry, Betty baby, but August 26 falls on a Wednesday and I can’t strike that day,” Fields said tongue-incheek. “Now, if you’d call it on a Saturday . . . I wouldn’t have to go to the grocery store, mend torn bathing suits . . . or nag the kids to burn the trash.”149 Fields reacted to Friedan’s original plan—for a national work stoppage, in which women would refuse to cook, clean, or do any household chores in protest of what Time magazine called “the unequal distribution of labor,” an issue at the center of Friedan’s bestselling feminist call-to-arms, The Feminine Mystique.150 However, the idea evolved into a national march, the Women’s Strike for Equality March, with approximately 50,000 protesters marching down New York’s Fifth Avenue arm-in-arm, right as the end-of-the-work-day traffic tried to get out of the city.151 “The solidarity was completely exhilarating,” historian Joyce Antler, who participated in the event, told Time magazine.152 Circumstances and time changed her perspective on feminism. The sexism Fields encountered at the state capitol, which usually identified itself in at least a couple of different ways, certainly played a role. She was either met with open hostility—as when one legislator threatened her with physical violence after reading one of her columns about him—or she was patronized by lawmakers who treated her as a displaced Southern belle. At the same time, those experiences gave her the confidence to push back when they dismissed her with their condescension. “I never let them treat me like a lady,” Fields said.153 The “southern lady” image is a dated but powerful reference—so strong, in fact, that, according to historian Margaret Ripley Wolfe, it has prevented Southern women from reaching their full potential.154 In more modern times, for example, Southern women like Fields who dared transcend the image were met, as previously noted, with open contempt. “As southern women, we’ve been taught from birth that we do not speak out in public,” Cora

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Norman, retired director of the Mississippi Humanities Council, once said when explaining Fields’s open defiance of Southern values. “Those who defied the rules were branded obnoxious.”155 Family issues may have driven Fields toward feminism as well. By the mid-1970s, she was a divorced woman with grown children who could fend for themselves. With the freedom to focus solely on her career, Fields moved to Jackson and assumed the life of an independent, modern woman—an opportunity that afforded her time to reexamine her perspective on several issues, feminism included. Other women of the capitol press admired Fields’s strength and directness (even if they were, at times, intimidated), and they respected her work ethic and reporting skills. “She was a good role model, but mostly from a distance,” Elaine Povich, who joined the capitol press corps in 1975 as a member of UPI’s Jackson bureau, said. “I liked seeing her in the press room, and her confidence in her job gave me some as well.”156 That confidence was on display when Fields pressed Governor William Winter in the early 1980s to appoint, for the first time, a woman to the state supreme court. When Winter announced during a press conference that he would appoint a man to fill a vacant seat instead, Fields’s reply was noticed by her colleagues in the room: “She asked if there was not one qualified woman attorney in the entire state whom he might have considered,” Fentress recalled.157 As noted by political science scholar Diane Wall, Fields continued with “persistent queries” on the subject at future press briefings, chiding Winter for his “failure to appoint women to government positions.”158 Fields eventually wore Winter down, and he appointed the first woman, Lenore Prather, to the state’s highest court. As she had so many times in her career, Fields ignored the usual stop signs in her interactions with even the highest and most powerful of state political leaders—the polite deference that women were expected to afford men, especially in public, and the spoken and unspoken protocols that suggested the press give due reverence to political leaders and their spokespeople. Fields could play along, if need be, but more often than not, the sense of urgency she felt for certain political issues (like women’s rights), her preference for directness, and her lack of patience for canned political responses, dictated her actions during press conferences. “Norma was a formidable woman,” Povich said. “I was a little afraid of her, to be truthful. She was very good at what she did, and was serious and forceful [in press conferences].”159 Fields pushed for Winter to appoint a woman to the state supreme court because she believed that a woman’s best opportunity to hold a judicial bench position would come through appointment rather than election.160 And, more generally, she most certainly understood the power and pervasiveness of sexism, and used any opportunity afforded her to bring attention to it—as she did when, in November 1988, she commented on the search for the next president

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of the Mississippi University for Women, a state public university located in Columbus, and the fact that the Board of Trustees of State Institutions of Higher Learning had never hired a woman to lead the institution. “Since the college board adopted the new mission goals for MUW, it would appear failure to name a woman as its president would send the wrong message to perspective students,” she said. “There is a sensitivity issue here that the search committee should remember if the college board is really serious about MUW becoming a viable, thriving, prosperous university.”161 To be sure, Fields admitted to being a particularly strong and vocal critic of Evelyn Gandy. She called Gandy out in her column for not appointing more women to state political posts (as was within her power as lieutenant governor).162 This topic was important to Fields, and she wanted to make sure that her readers, particularly women, understood the necessity of women vying for and having equal representation in government and other professional positions. “One of the contradictions of modern life is, as more women enter the workforce, fewer and fewer women are seeking election to high office in Mississippi,” Fields wrote in one May 1978 column. “And, in a day when your garden variety male public official is not particularly sensitive to the problems of women, that’s a pity.”163 There is evidence that Fields’s support of Gandy diminished over time, and not just because she disagreed with her on issues of policy or political appointments. Her criticism became more pointed and personal; like many of her colleagues in the capitol press corps, Fields, as mentioned, thought Gandy acutely indecisive, unwilling to “rock the boat,” as Fields put it, when making political decisions as the head of the Mississippi Senate.164 Her remarks, though, often went beyond the usual sharp criticism that defined the journalist/politician relationship; they reeked of sexism, too, as when she questioned whether or not Gandy had the “stamina” or “backbone” for the job, or when she referred to Gandy’s physical appearance or facial expressions—as the woman, for example, who had an “ever-present smile on her face” when making the occasional assertive political decision.165 The media framing of women political candidates and leaders according to their images rather than the issues they support is a well-documented problem, to be sure, but on at least one occasion, Fields’s criticism of Gandy seemed to touch on a much deeper issue than just partisan politics: “Doubtless, it’s a lonely position Evelyn Gandy has achieved,” she wrote in January 1976, barely one month into Gandy’s tenure as lieutenant governor. “But it’s one she had ambitions for during the three decades she had been in public life. She must have known what the job would entail.”166 Fields later claimed to have a “great deal of respect for [Gandy],” but that respect, probably came in hindsight, long after Fields had first observed and critiqued Gandy’s overall job performance as lieutenant governor.167 At the

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Figure 3.2.  Both Evelyn Gandy (left) and Lenore Prather (right) achieved important “firsts” in Mississippi politics, and they used their influence to promote other women who aspired to a career in public service (as shown here in this February 1998 photograph). Source: Evelyn Gandy and Lenore Prather; February 16, 1998, mus_m67_1091p Edythe Evelyn Gandy Collection, Special Collections, University Libraries, The University of Southern Mississippi.

time, Fields’s public commentary revealed more resentment of Gandy than Fields probably intended; Fields worked hard to break out of her shell as a young reporter, so she admired and expected other career women, especially those in positions of political power, to follow suit. In other words, perhaps Fields thought that Gandy’s personality—the natural shyness and aloofness that, according to most accounts, Gandy portrayed in both in public and private—set women’s progress back, as it confirmed long-held traditional gender stereotypes regarding their inability to make firm decisions and withstand the pressure of public life. Ironically, it seems that Fields failed to realize her own sexism when it came to Gandy. In any case, Gandy’s refusal to publicly support the ERA (even though she privately agreed with the measure) annoyed Fields and may have served as a tipping point of sorts in her support of the lieutenant governor. Certainly, Gandy’s explanation as to why she did not support the legislation did her no favors. In 2009, Fields recalled what Gandy said about the issue: Our good friend Evelyn Gandy—God rest her soul—she made me so mad I could have shot her. . . . But she would not get behind the ERA and push it, and

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if she had, she could have passed it, but she wouldn’t . . . Her position was she just stayed out of it. . . . I would ask her “Are you for or against the ERA, Miss Gandy,” and I can’t remember the round-about way she would never answer that question—that’s why I can’t remember it. She would never answer the question, but she would go all the way around and about and she’d wind up by saying, “And look at you, Norma. You’ve got a good job, and I’ve got a good job.” Well, sure, but, my God, not everybody does.168

Gandy’s indifference toward the ERA was not uncommon for the time. For much of the 1970s, the ERA was popular and even enjoyed bipartisan political support; however, most people felt ambivalent toward its passage, seeing little reason to get involved in either supporting or stopping its passage.169 Even Phyllis Schlafly, leader of the successful STOP ERA campaign, initially believed the ERA to be “mildly helpful” at best, “innocuous” at worst.170 Fields was not of that mindset. So convinced of the necessity of the ERA, she cornered ERA opponent Betty Jane Long, longtime member of the Mississippi House of Representatives, in an attempt to persuade her to change her position. In 1973, the first year that the ERA supporters introduced the measure in both the state House and Senate, Long served as chair of the Senate Constitutional Committee, the subcommittee responsible for investigating and bringing the ERA to the floor for a vote. A decade later, however, the bill had yet to make it out of committee—giving Mississippi the distinction of being the only state to fail to bring the ERA to a legislative vote.171 “[O]f course, the legislature would not touch it with a 500-foot pole,” Fields admitted years after the ERA’s failure. “[E]ven the women in there didn’t want it.”172 Fields covered the ERA as it bounced around Long’s committee, from year to year, with “a great deal of hope,” at least at first, that the legislation would eventually make it to the floor for a formal vote.173 In March 1976, the committee voted 4–3 against bringing the measure out for consideration, the closest it would come to seeing the light of day.174 The reasons for the ERA’s failure were then made clear to Fields by another ranking committee member who said that “Mississippi is in good shape as far as equal rights are concerned.”175 Defiantly, Fields continued to press the issue in her weekly column, even when she knew it was not meant to be, thus exercising the type of activist journalism once used by Hazel Brannon Smith. “Can you believe it? The Legislature that has declined for years to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, a descendant of legislatures that never ratified the women’s suffrage amendment, is now about to go to great lengths to see that we get equal rights,” Fields said sarcastically in one column that included a list of legislative

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actions that Fields believed worked against women’s best interest, including efforts to kill state funding for the Committee on the Status of Women. “My goodness, I can’t wait to see what wonderful things the predominately male Mississippi legislature is going to do for us women next, can you?”176 So, when Fields approached Long for help in pushing the bill out of committee, she did so knowing that the ERA was all but dead, and that she was asking an outspoken critic of the measure for help. Indeed, it was an unusual, and some would say, certainly unethical, request for Fields to make of anyone; years later, she admitted her conversation with Long was a last-ditched move to save legislation that, in fact, never had a chance of passing: I don’t, did not ever, except this one time, meddle in legislation. You know, no matter how much I was for or against anything I just wouldn’t say anything about it. But I did that one. I thought, “Here is the time to make these guys put up or shut up.” And, I went to Representative [Betty Jane] Long, from Meridian, the woman’s been [in the legislature] a long time, and I said, “Hey, you know something? This bill’s coming up where you’re to vote whether to allow women, you know, where you’re to ratify this amendment.” And I said, “Why don’t you put a floor amendment in adding the Equal Rights Amendment to it.” I said, “I’ve looked it up, and it’s not against the rules.” And she said, “Norma get away from me. I’m not going through with that.” And she wouldn’t—it just would have been the perfect way to make those [politicians] take a stand one-way or the other.177

Fields’s journey toward feminism and the ERA, and her frustration with the latter’s lack of progress, had as much to do with how she thought the men of the Mississippi legislature governed as it did with the sexism she witnessed in and around the state capitol building. In March 1976, she reported on a “no-fault” divorce bill (which would finally allow for “irreconcilable differences” in a divorce) that barely passed the state senate, and, according to Fields, “faced an uncertain future in the House.”178 In June 1977, she reported on a rape shield law passed by the legislature that would give the (mostly male) judges in the state discretion over how much of a victim’s history would be allowed at trial.179 And, three years later, when lawmakers killed a measure that would have provided vocational counseling and training for unskilled women workers, Fields made sure her readers knew about it.180 With these and similar stories, Fields gave her readers a glimpse into the slow grind of the legislative process, while also providing them with information on social and political issues that might otherwise go unpublished. Her critics, meanwhile, accused her of political bias and of making unwarranted personal attacks on lawmakers with whom she disagreed. “She’s a political crusader hiding behind the First Amendment,” one ranking lawmaker said at the time. “Her objective is to report the news that she wants as she wants

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it.”181 In truth, Fields was more of a supporter of truth than she was of a believer in journalistic objectivity. She framed the following quote from a New York Times reporter as a reminder of what was important: “The founding fathers did not give us a license, a privilege that is held at the convenience of the government. . . . They imposed on us a duty, a responsibility to assert the right of the American people to know the truth and hold those who govern them into account.”182 Accordingly, she used her weekly column to publish what she considered the harsh truths of Southern politics: the enduring nature of the patriarchal, “good ole boy” network and the depths of its moral and financial corruption, and, indirectly, the social contradictions and conflicts of Southern womanhood. If any elected official got in her crosshairs, she treated them as collateral damage in that week’s opinion piece, as she did when she accused longtime Representative Mary Ann Stevens of “wear[ing] more gold around her neck than most of us ever see in our lifetimes” after Stevens failed to support legislation for (partially) state-funded women’s shelters.183 For her part, Fields freely admitted she was not objective, nor was she trying to be, about certain issues, women’s equality chief among them. Not one to mince words, she supported the ERA for one simple reason: “I was convinced we needed it,” she said.184 Fields insisted on the ERA for the same reason she believed that more women should run for political office: to give them a fighting chance against what she called the “preferential treatment given to white males” in comparison to the “small gains in the marketplace, the office buildings” that women have struggled to realize.185 Just one year before her death, Fields admitted that she took the ERA’s defeat as a personal one. “[It] was just one of the most frustrating things that I’ve ever, that I ever covered in the legislature,” she said.186 Perhaps Fields was frustrated with how she had been treated during her tenure at the state capitol. Or, perhaps, as a woman who started her journalism career writing for an Air Force base newsletter before becoming the first woman to cover the Mississippi state capitol, she wanted the path to be a little easier for the next generation of women. In retrospect, then, it probably did not surprise anyone who knew her that Fields eventually embraced feminism. After all, as the first woman in the modern age to walk the Mississippi state capitol beat, she reported on issues and people historically reserved for male journalists in the most masculine of public spaces—the state capitol building. Her presence there and her work flew in the face of conventional thought regarding the “proper place” for Southern women—the idea, for instance, that women should be passive observers of the world, not active participants. When Ellen Ann Fentress once described her as “subtle as a wrecking ball and mild-mannered as an atomic bomb” (in reference to her confrontational

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styles of activist and enterprise reporting), she meant it as a compliment, for she admired Fields’s confidence in ignoring longstanding cultural ideals.187 Like the woman she admired, Hazel Brannon Smith, Fields believed that journalism should and can act in the people’s best interest; just as her enterprise and activist journalism shed light on the need for the ERA and like-minded legislation, her enterprise reporting carefully but directly brought out evidence of corruption and the need for reform. She would not be the last woman to walk the corridors of the state capitol or other state buildings, nor would be the last to use her pen to speak to the need for change. Likewise, the women who came behind her, including Nancy Stevens, who respected Fields as much as Fields respected Smith, had little to no patience for convention. Stevens went as far as to challenge the legality of her own firing from the Jackson Daily News, all the while embarking on a successful freelance career for no less than four newspapers in the span of a decade. NOTES   1. Norma Fields, “Capitol Press Corps Chastised for ‘Dropping Ball,’” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, August 6, 2000, https:​//​www​.djournal​.com​/opinion​ /hed​-norma​-fields​-capitol​-press​-corps​-chastized​-for​-dropping​/article​_36edaecb​-3fee​ -57f9​-95c4​-73af2900f000​.html.   2. Norma Fields, interview by Lawrence N. Strout, February, 17, 2009, 3–4 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Strout interview.”]. Part of the Norma Fields papers, Special Collections Department, Mississippi State University Libraries, Mississippi State, MS 39762 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Fields papers.”].   3. Fields’s column was published most Tuesdays but would occasionally appear on other days as well. She started writing the column in the mid-1960s, not long after she was promoted to the full-time staff. The column was known as the “Northeast Corner” until 1972, the year Fields was promoted to state capitol correspondent. The column was then renamed “The Political Arena.”   4. Strout interview, 6.   5. Ibid., 2.   6. Ibid.   7. Ibid., 3.   8. Voss, “Vivian Castleberry,” 529–30.   9. The “four Fs” are defined by Voss and Speere, “‘More Than ‘Rations, Passions, and Fashions,’” 342. 10. Voss, “Vivian Castleberry,” 515. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 529. 13. Lumsden, “The Essentialist Agenda of the ‘Woman’s Angle’ in Cold War Washington,” 4. 14. Strout interview, 3.

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15. A portion of this information, specifically the occupation of Fields’s father, was taken from Norma Fields, interview by Elizabeth Payne for the Northeast Mississippi Women’s History Project, October 5, 2005, 1 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Payne interview”]. The rest was taken from “Norma Fields,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, September 15, 2010, http:​//​www​.djournal​.com​/news​/obituaries​-sept​/article​ _2d4505d9​-c4d6​-5e75​-ab2f​-9b448880cb12​.html. 16. Payne interview, 1. 17. Robert G. Spinney, World War II and Nashville: Transformation of the Homefront (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998), 2. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. “The Great Depression in Tennessee,” n.d., http:​//​www​.teachtnhistory​.org​/File​ /TN​_Great​_Depression​.pdf. 24. Payne interview, 1, 3. 25. Ibid., 1. 26. Ibid., 1 (“scratching around”); 3 (raising food and “eked out a living”). 27. Ibid., 4. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 6. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Fentress email. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Strout interview, 3. 37. Fentress email. 38. See Voss, “Vivian Castleberry,” 522. 39. Strout interview, 3. Founded in the 1870s as the Tupelo (MS) Journal, the bi-weekly paper struggled financially until publisher George McClean purchased it in 1934. Until that time, it was a bankrupt publication with only 500 subscribers; when McClain’s died in 1983, its circulation had topped 33,000, with total assets of over $20 million. For more information on the Journal, see “George McClean Dead; A Mississippi Publisher,” New York Times, March 2, 1983, http:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​ /1983​/03​/02​/obituaries​/george​-mclean​-dead​-a​-mississippi​-publisher​.html. See also, Robert Blade, Tupelo Man: The Life and Times of George McLean, A Most Peculiar Newspaper Publisher (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi), x, 57. 40. Strout interview, 5. 41. Ibid., 4. 42. Blade, Tupelo Man, 192. 43. Strout interview, 4. 44. Ibid.

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45. Fentress email. 46. Strout interview, 5. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. See Fields, “New Albany Engineer Is Man of Many Parts,” Tupelo Daily Journal, July 18–19, 1964, no page number; Fields, “Think Shopping Is Tough Here? Try Buying Groceries in New England,” Tupelo Daily Journal, September 18, 1964, no page number; Fields, “Nobody’s Average: (Or Why Aunt Minnie Swapped Xmas Dress,” Tupelo Daily Journal, December 9, 1965, no page number. Articles retrieved from Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. Information about Fields’ covering school board meetings taken from Strout interview, 4–5. 50. Strout interview, 4. 51. See, respectively, Fields, “State Auditor Makes Suggestions to Alcorn County School Leaders,” Tupelo Daily Journal, August 18, 1964, no page number, and Fields, “Minor ‘Discrepancies’ Found in 1963 Chancery Clerk’s Records,” Tupelo Daily Journal, October 9, 1964, no page number. 52. Strout interview, 4. 53. Ibid., 6. 54. Ibid. 55. Voss, “Dorothy Jurney,” 14. 56. Fields, “Klansman Says Discipline Strict in Hooded Order; Believes All Money Now Going to Tuscaloosa,” Tupelo Daily Journal, January 26, 1967, no page number. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 57. See Fields, “Many Join Klan Because It’s Easy, Then Are Too Terrified to Sever Membership,” Tupelo (MS) Daily Journal, January 24, 1967, no page number; Fields, “Klansman Says Discipline Strict in Hooded Order”; and Fields, “Sounds Great But Never Fulfilled; High Caliber Citizens Avoid Hooded Society,” Tupelo (MS) Daily Journal, January 23, 1967, no page number. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 58. For mention of Fields’s thoughts on the Klan series, see Fentress, “Norma Fields: Deflating Egos Around the State.” For evidence of the threats made against Fields and her family, see Chris Elkins, “Norma L. H. Fields,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, September 15, 2010, http:​//​www​.djournal​.com​/news​/obituaries​-sept​/ article​_2d4505d9​-c4d6​-5e75​-ab2f​-9b448880cb12​.html. 59. Chris Elkins, “Norma L. H. Fields.” 60. Ibid. 61. Information regarding Klan membership in the 1920s taken from Gene Demby, “Why the KKK Is Reaching Out Beyond White Folks,” NPR, November 12, 2014, https:​//​www​.npr​.org​/sections​/codeswitch​/2014​/11​/12​/363511888​/why​-the​-kkk​ -is​-reaching​-out​-beyond​-white​-folks; for further reading about the Klan’s internal conflicts, see Stanley Nelson, Devils Walking: Klan Murders Along the Mississippi in the 1960s (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2016), 21. 62. Nelson, Devils Walking, 23. 63. Demby, “Why the KKK Is Reaching Out Beyond White Folks.”

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64. Fentress, “Norma Fields: Deflating Egos Around the State.” 65. Bernadette Barker-Plummer, “News and Feminism: A Historic Dialog,” Journalism & Communication Monographs 12, no. 3/4 (Autumn/Winter 2010): 151. 66. Strout interview, 5. 67. Ibid., 8. 68. Blade, Tupelo Man, 19. 69. Ibid., x. 70. See Fields, “Mississippians Returning from Afar Like Our People; Education Seen as Biggest Weakness,” Tupelo Daily Journal, January 20, 1965, no page number; Fields, “Degrees Said Needed for Few Jobs,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, December 16, 1977, no page number. Fields, “Winter Urges Students to Help Create Atmosphere for Progress,” Tupelo Daily Journal, December 11, 1965, no page number. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 71. Strout interview, 6. In the early 1970s, McLean was instrumental in the passage of a $600 million highway program designed to build four-lane state highways for the areas of the state that did not have access to the interstate system. See Blade, Tupelo Man, 197. For more information on McLean’s push to improve Mississippi’s roads and highways, see pp. 195–98. 72. Strout interview, 6, 8. 73. As noted by Fields in the following articles: “Public Apathy Helps Keep Politics Secret,” Tupelo Daily Journal, December 13–14, 1969, no page number; “Chance Said Slim for Passage of Freedom of Information Bill,” Tupelo Daily Journal, December 31, 1969, no page number. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 74. Fields, “Dialogue Sometimes More to Point Than Unit Questions,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, October 30, 1973, no page number. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 75. Fields, “Public Apathy Helps Keep Politics Secret.” 76. Ibid. 77. Strout interview, 6. 78. Fields, “Freedom of Information Bill Gaining Steam This Year,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, August 28, 1973, no page number. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 79. Fields, “Public Apathy Helps Keep Politics Secret.” 80. Fields, “2 Groups Join Ranks on Open Meeting Call,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, October 15, 1974, 2. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 81. Fields, “Political Reforms Package Said Step in Right Direction,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, December 11, 1973, no page number. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 82. As Fields noted in the following articles: “Freedom of Information Bill Gaining Steam This Year”; “2 Groups Join Ranks on Open Meeting Call”; “Political Reforms Package Said Step in Right Direction.” 83. Fields, “2 Groups Join Ranks on Open Meeting Call.” 84. Ibid.

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85. Fields, “Political Reforms Package Said Step in Right Direction.” 86. Fields, “2 Groups Join Ranks on Open Meeting Call.” 87. Fields, “Dialogue Sometimes More to Point Than Unit Questions.” 88. Fentress, “Norma Fields: Deflating Egos Around the State.” 89. For more information on the law and similar legislation that was passed after 1975, including the Mississippi Public Records Act of 1983, see “Brief Overview of Mississippi’s Freedom of Information Statutes,” Mississippi Center for Freedom of Information, accessed July 13, 2018, http:​//​mcfoi​.org​/handbook​.html. For more information on various legislative attempts to amend the Open Meetings Law, see a corrected, unpublished, and untitled rough draft by Fields. The draft is dated January 14, 1975. The quote “historic session” was taken from the story lede. The attempts to amend the bill was taken from the first page of the draft. Fields papers, box 2, “manuscripts of articles written by Fields” folder. For the exact date when the Open Meetings Law was to take effect, see letter from then Lieutenant Governor William Winter to Fields and journalist Bill Minor, dated April 18, 1975. He attached a copy of the new law to his letter. Fields papers, box 3, “Open meetings: correspondence, articles, legislation and other materials, 1976–80” folder. 90. Strout interview, 8. 91. Fields, “Rumors of Conflict of Interest Over Limestone Plant Untrue, Say Officials,” Tupelo (MS) Daily Journal, January 9–10, 1971, no page number. Fields papers, box 2, “manuscripts of articles written by Fields” folder. 92. Ibid. 93. Strout interview, 12. 94. Ibid., 8. 95. See Fields, “What’s Happened to Hershel Jumper?” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, October 2, 1973, no page number. Fields papers, box 2, “manuscripts of article written by Fields” folder, and “Boteler, Convicted of Stealing Highway Funds, Dead at 96,” Mississippi Business Journal, March 22, 2016, https:​//​www​ .djournal​.com​/mbj​/news​/government​-politics​/boteler​-convicted​-of​-stealing​-highway​ -funds​-dead​-at​-96​/article​_9f1570a3​-eccf​-5e52​-8c16​-2fd9392bcfc5​.html. 96. Fields, “Boteler Resigns Post as Highway Director,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, July 24–25, 1976, 1. See also, Fields and Harry Rutherford, “Boteler ‘Irregularities Found,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, July 26, 1976, 1. Microfilm, Special Collections Department, Mississippi State University Libraries, Mississippi State, MS 39762. 97. Fields, “Boteler Indictment Charges $200,000 Embezzled,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, August 28–29, 1976, 1. Microfilm, Special Collections Department, Mississippi State University Libraries, Mississippi State, MS 39762. 98. See, respectively, Fields, “Jackson Paper Claims PEER Told Boteler Paid Jumper $125,000,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, August 12, 1976, 1, 14; Fields, “Tenn-Tom Bridge Funding Delayed,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, August 11, 1976, 1, 10; Fields, “Tenn-Tom Bridge Consultant Fee Excessive,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, August 13, 1976, 1, 18. Microfilm, Special Collections Department, Mississippi State University Libraries, Mississippi State, MS 39762.

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  99. Fields, “Some Observers Think Boteler Case Mainly Smoke Screen for a Bigger Game,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, August 21–22, 1976, 12. Microfilm, Special Collections Department, Mississippi State University Libraries, Mississippi State, MS 39762. 100. Waggoner ended up pleading guilty to extortion and three counts of filing false tax returns. See “Sam Waggoner Dies at 88,” WLBT.com, November 1, 2010, https:​ //​www​.wlbt​.com​/story​/13425331​/sam​-waggoner​-dies​-at​-88​/. For more information on the Joiner case, see James R. Crockett, Operation Pretense: The FBI’s Sting On County Corruption in Mississippi (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 123, 128. 101. Strout interview, 9–10. 102. Jere Nash and Andy Taggart, Mississippi Politics: A Struggle for Power, 1976–2008 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 32. 103. Ibid., 22. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., 22, 31–32. 106. Fields, “Governor’s Race Gearing into Possible Battle of Machines,” Tupelo Daily Journal, August 11, 1971, no page number. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 107. Fields, Unpublished draft of article, January 15, 1975. Box 3, “Politics” folder. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibid., 6, for Fields’s quote. For more information on unification of the Mississippi Democratic Party, see Nash and Taggert, Mississippi Politics, 32, 58, 116. 110. Quote from Nash and Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 80; remarks about the “corruption and mismanagement” of the Finch administration was made by his gubernatorial opponent William Winter. See page 90. For information regarding Finch’s marriage, see Bill Minor, “Musgrove Divorce? What Would Have Thought It?” Clarksdale Press Register, June 27, 2001, http:​//​www​.pressregister​.com​/article​ _e90f27b3​-4563​-593a​-9b63​-032c21c568dc​.html. The New York Times piece in question reported, “His term as Governor was also marred by a three-year Federal grand jury investigation into his administration. Some of his key appointees and aides were indicted, although Mr. Finch was not implicated in any wrongdoing.” See “Charles (Cliff) Finch Dies at 59; Governor of Mississippi in the 1970s,” New York Times, April 24, 1986, https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/1986​/04​/24​/obituaries​/charles​-cliff​-finch​ -dies​-at​-59​-governor​-of​-mississippi​-in​-1970​-s​.html. 111. Bill Minor, “Politics Is Full of Clowns and Foolishness,” DeSoto Times-Tribune, May 26, 2014, http:​//​www​.desototimes​.com​/opinion​/editorials​/politics​-is​-full​-of​ -clowns​-and​-foolishness​/article​_e5680221​-bd2d​-5d7e​-acb1​-6b1052a361e1​.html. 112. The quote, “miserable governor,” from Nash and Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 88; “good old Cliff” from Strout interview, page 7. 113. See, respectively, Fields, “Senatobia Headmaster Acting Motor Comptroller,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, May 28, 1976, 2; “Finch Names Distant Relative Public Safety Commissioner,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, June 16, 1976, no page number; “Finch Says Counce Not Necessarily In,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, May 26, 1976, no page number; Unpublished draft of article,

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“Nursing Board,” October 15, 1976. All found in Fields papers, box 1, “Finch, Cliff: General 1975–79” folder. 114. Fields, Unpublished draft of article, “Finch Appointments,” August 12, 1976. Fields papers, box 1, “Finch, Cliff: General 1975–79” folder. 115. Fields, “Finch Changes on Military Lines,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, May 18, 1976, no page number. Fields papers, box 1, “Finch, Cliff: General 1975–79” folder. 116. Fields, “Gubernatorial Succession Top Tune,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, October 11, 1977, no page number. Gandy (Edythe Evelyn) Collection (Hereafter abbreviated as “Gandy Collection”), box 26, scrapbook 1, McCain Library & Archives, The University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS. 117. See Minor, “Norma Fields Went After News with Hammer and Tongs.” 118. Nash and Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 90. 119. Ibid., 88. 120. Over the course of her career, Gandy held the following state positions: state assistant attorney general, state treasurer, and commissioner of public welfare. For more on Gandy’s “political disadvantages,” see Nash and Taggart, 90. 121. Ibid., 90–91. 122. Fields, “Gandy Shows Spunk on 16th Section Bill,” Tupelo Daily Journal, January 31, 1978, no page number. Gandy Collection, box 31, scrapbook 1. 123. Fields, “Winter Gubernatorial Bid Seen,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, May 29, 1979, no page number. Gandy Collection, box 36, scrapbook 1. Mention of Finch’s “Working Man” campaign also can be found in that same article. 124. According to Nash and Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 90. 125. Strout interview, 10. 126. Luix Overbea, “Education Reform Tops List of Progress for Mississippi Governor,” The Christian Science Monitor, October 3, 1983, https:​//​www​.csmonitor​.com​ /1983​/1003​/100346​.html. 127. Ibid. 128. Nash and Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 16, 145. 129. Fields, “Allain Says He Passed Test; Prostitute Questioned,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, November 4, 1983, 1. Fields papers, box 1, “Allain, Bill: Sex charges, articles, other materials, 1983–85” folder. Additional info can be found here: E. R. Shipp, “Mississippi Race Roiled by Homosexuality Charge,” New York Times, November 2, 1983, https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/1983​/11​/02​/us​/mississippi​-race​ -roiled​-by​-homosexuality​-charge​.html. 130. See, specifically, Fields, “Allain Publicly Accused of Homosexual Acts,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, October 27, 1983, 14; “Allain Lie Detector to Be Private,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, October 28, 1983, 1, 18; “Jackson Attorney Denies Allain, Bramlett Tainted,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, October 29–30, 1983, 1, 14; “Police Swear to Seeing Allain in Ghetto,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, November 2, 1983, 1, 14; “Bramlett Says He’ll Withdraw If Allain Passes Tests,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, November 3, 1983, 1, 16. All can be found in the Fields papers, box 1, “Allain, Bill: Sex charges, articles, other materials, 1983–85” folder.

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131. “Statement by Bill Allain,” press release, October 25, 1983, 1. Fields papers, box 1, “Allain, Bill: Sex charges, articles, other materials, 1983–85” folder. 132. “Statement of William E. Spell,” October 25, 1983, 1. Fields papers, box 1, “Allain, Bill: Sex charges, articles, other materials, 1983–85” folder. 133. All quotes in this paragraph from “Mississippi Tragedy,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, October 28, 1983, 6. Fields papers, box 1, “Allain, Bill: Sex charges, articles, other materials, 1983–85” folder. 134. “People Deserve Answers,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, November 4, 1983, 6. Fields papers, box 1, “Allain, Bill: Sex charges, articles, other materials, 1983–85” folder. 135. Quotes from “Mississippi Tragedy.” 136. Fields exchange with Spell was first published in an October 26 issue of the Clarion-Ledger by reporter Cliff Treyens. The exchange was repeated and retrieved from Nash and Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 155. 137. Ibid., 155–60. 138. Fields, “Allain Takes Oath,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, January 11, 1984, 1. Fields papers, box 1, “Allain, Bill: Sex charges, articles, other materials, 1983–85” folder. 139. Ibid. 140. Joe Rutherford, “Former Journal Capitol Correspondent, Fields, Dies at 86,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, September 14, 2010, http:​//​www​.djournal​.com​ /news​/former​-journal​-capitol​-correspondent​-fields​-dies​-at​/article​_83e36a31​-e4ac​ -5edb​-98c8​-70ce7c14d441​.html. 141. Strout interview, 10. 142. Nash and Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 197. 143. Fields, “Is Mabus the Teflon Candidate of 1987?” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, September 22, 1987, 12A. Fields papers, box 2, “Mabus, Ray [1987 Campaign]: General, 1987” folder. 144. Ibid. (Grisham’s handwritten note can be found atop the aforementioned Fields column, which he sent back to her.) 145. Fentress email. 146. Fentress, “Norma Fields: Deflating Egos Around the State.” 147. Fields, “Equal Rights in Mississippi,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, March 20, 1979, no page number. Bobby G. Richardson collection, Special Collections Department, Mississippi State University Libraries, Mississippi State, MS 39762 [Hereafter abbreviated “Richardson collection”]. Richardson served on the Mississippi Highway Commission as Commissioner of the northern district between 1976–83. 148. Fields, “Covering Salons a Lonely Chore,” Tupelo Daily Journal, May 24, 1972, no page number. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 149. Fields, “Saturday Best Day for Feminist Strike,” Tupelo Daily Journal, July 17, 1970, no page number. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 150. Sascha Cohen, “The Day Women Went on Strike,” Time, August 15, 2015, http:​//​time​.com​/4008060​/women​-strike​-equality​-1970​/. 151. Ibid.

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152. Ibid. 153. Strout interview, 8. 154. Wolfe, “The Southern Lady,” 25. Also referenced in Smith, “A Lady of Many Firsts,” 419. 155. Fentress, “Norma Fields: Deflating Egos Around the State.” 156. Povich email. 157. Fentress email. 158. Diane Wall, “A Woman of Many Firsts”: The Honorable Lenore Prather,” Southeastern Political Review 28, no. 3 (September 2000): 536. 159. Povich email. 160. For more on this topic, see Wall, “A Woman of Many Firsts,” 536, 546. 161. Fields, “Board Looks for a Qualified Man—Or Woman,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, November 15, 1988, 12A. Fields papers, “Board of Trustees of Sate Institutions of Higher Learning: Article, schedule, reports, 1988” folder. 162. Fields, “Fewer Women Seeking High Office Posts,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, May 2, 1978, no page number. Gandy Collection, box 30, scrapbook 1. 163. Ibid. 164. The lieutenant governor of Mississippi presides over the senate body, but only votes when a tie has to be broken. For quote, see Fields, “The Suspense of No Suspense at All,” Tupelo Daily Journal, January 19, 1976, no page number. Gandy Collection, Box 31, scrapbook 1. 165. “Stamina” and “backbone” from Fields, “The Suspense of No Suspense at All.” Mention of Gandy’s proverbial “backbone” (or lack thereof) was also referenced in Fields, “Gandy Shows Spunk on 16th Section Bill.” “Ever-present smile” quotes also from Fields, “Gandy Shows Spunk on 16th Section Bill.” 166. Fields, “The Suspense of No Suspense at All.” 167. Strout interview, 14. 168. Ibid., 14–15. 169. Eric C. Miller, “Phyllis Schlafly’s ‘Positive’ Freedom: Liberty, Liberation, and the Equal Rights Movement,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 278. 170. Schlafly’s quotes from Carol Felsenthal, The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1981), 276, quoted in Miller, “Phyllis Schlafly’s ‘Positive’ Freedom,” 278. 171. Marjorie Julian Spruill and Jesse Spruill Wheeler, “The Equal Rights Amendment in Mississippi,” Mississippi History Now, March 2003, http:​//​www​.mshistorynow​ .mdah​.ms​.gov​/articles​/226​/the​-equal​-rights​-amendment​-and​-mississippi. 172. Strout interview, 14. 173. Ibid., 15. 174. Fields, “ERA Killed, Marijuana Decriminalization Lives,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, March 10, 1976, no page number. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 175. Ibid. 176. Fields, “Equal Rights in Mississippi.” 177. Strout interview, 15.

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178. Fields, “No Fault Divorce Bill Narrowly OKd,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, March 10, 1976, no page number. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 179. Fields, “Woman Tried More Often Than Rapist,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, June 8, 1977, 2. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 180. Fields, “Equal Rights in Mississippi.” 181. Fentress, “Norma Fields: Deflating Egos Around the State.” 182. Ibid. 183. Ibid. 184. Strout interview, 14. 185. Norma Fields, letter to the editor, Jackson (MS) Daily News, November 18, 1980, 7B. Fields papers, box 2, “manuscripts of articles written by Fields” folder. 186. Strout interview, 15. 187. Fentress, “Norma Fields: Deflating Egos Around the State.”

Chapter 4

“Wrongdoing Uncovering”

In 1973, Nancy Stevens was at her desk in the offices of the Jackson Daily News working on a story when a city editor, with instructions from longtime state editor Jimmy Ward, approached her. “[He] told me to give him the story I was working on,” Stevens said. “I told him that I was almost through writing the story. Then, he looked at me and said, ‘You’re fired.’”1 Just a couple of years into her career, Stevens then faced an important decision, one that could have life- and career-altering implications: what could and should she do about her firing from the Jackson Daily News, if anything? She believed she had a strong sexual discrimination case against the paper and its management: “I am certain that being a female had much to do with my firing,” Stevens recalled decades later. “I’m certain that sticking to non-controversial feature stories, especially for women reporters, was what they expected from us women.”2 However, the decision to simply move on to the next job was certainly the easier choice—one that many women in the 1970s, faced with a similar set of circumstances, made (and continue to make). That option certainly crossed Stevens’s mind; after all, nothing good might come from filing a complaint with the EEOC, especially against a Hederman-owned newspaper. Stevens probably considered the fact that, with the Hederman family’s deep connections and reputation for petty paybacks, her career would be in jeopardy when they caught word of possible legal action against one of their publications and its management. Given Stevens’s support of the civil rights movement, which was anathema to Jimmy Ward’s beliefs, and the types of stories she investigated—the ongoing civil rights struggles in the state was of particular interest—and given the Hederman family reputation for dishonesty and bigotry, Stevens had every reason to worry. “In a very racist state, they were the standouts,” journalist and editor Hodding Carter III once said of the Hederman family.3 To be sure, the Hedermans, known to be what one observer called a “private but powerful clan” rarely discussed their political views, or much else related to the family, 139

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in the open; for much of the twentieth century, family patriarchs and cousins, Tom and Bob Hederman, chose political surrogates, like racist Governor Ross Barnett, whom they helped elect, and the managers of their various media outlets, to do their dirty work.4 “They were the thought-control experts of their time,” Bill Minor once said of the Hedermans.5 Fred Sullens, longtime editor of the Jackson Daily News, and Jimmy Ward, who replaced Sullens in the late 1950s, were two such mouthpieces of the Hederman media empire. In fact, the Daily News was, in the words of historian John Tisdale, a “benchmark of extreme racism” (along with The Clarion-Ledger)—and Sullens, its cartoonish, bigoted, moody editor.6 “Human blood may stain Southern soil in many places because of this decision,” he wrote about Brown vs. Board of Education, “but the dark red stains of that blood will be on the marble steps of the United States Supreme Court building.”7 Sullens, the son of a Union soldier, came to Mississippi to write for R. H. Henry at The Clarion-Ledger. His bigoted political opinions soon found a wide readership, and readers followed him to the Jackson Daily News, which he purchased in 1907.8 In fact, his views and opinions were those of a majority of white people in the state—readers celebrated his unwavering passion for the so-called “southern way of life”—and, decades later, they reveled in such legendary stories as Sullens breaking his cane over the back of Governor Paul Johnson in the early 1940s during a physical confrontation over the then governor’s moderate views on race (and the fact that Johnson had once successfully sued Sullens for libel).9 Even Tom and Bob Hederman, Sullens’s onetime rivals, could not deny his passion for their mutual cause and the persuasive effect he had on readers. A decade after the confrontation with Johnson, when the cousins bought the Jackson Daily News—after attempting what can only be described as a hostile stock takeover—Sullens retained his position as editor until his death in the late 1950s.10 “Y’all may think I prostituted myself,” Sullens announced to the Daily News staff, when, after an expensive court battle to keep the Hedermans at bay (along with other financial loses), word came that he finally sold the paper. “If so, then I’m the highest paid he-whore in Mississippi.”11 Ward, a Sullens protégé, took over editorial responsibilities of the Daily News after his death. During his decades-long tenure at the paper, Ward made sure the Daily News was, in Ward’s words, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers’s “greatest enemy”12; Ward used his front-page column, “Covering the Crossroads,” to remind readers that civil rights leaders like Evers and Martin Luther King, Jr. were hell-bent on destroying the peaceful co-existence between black and white people in the state.13 He used ridicule to marginalize and dehumanize the movement’s leaders, often portraying them as

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opportunists looking, in the words of historians David R. Davies and Judy Smith, to “enrich themselves at the expense of the black population.”14 So influential was Ward in helping maintain the state’s “Magnolia Curtain”—a phrase once used to describe the role that some newspapers played in maintaining the myth of white superiority—that, upon his death in 1984, the state legislature passed resolutions applauding his career.15 To be sure, Ward was not working alone; he was part of a larger political and ideological statewide network—made up of other journalists and newspaper editors and publishers, politicians, business owners, and other influential white citizens—whose goal was to maintain white supremacy against the growing threat of social change. “He did what was popular at the time,” William S. Spell, Jr., a former Daily News reporter, once said. “I think Ward reflected the attitude of the state.”16 So, in the middle of this sad mix of bigotry and news propaganda, sat Nancy Stevens, a young and ambitious reporter, just a few years removed from college, whose only goal at that point in her career was to do good work. She believed, perhaps naïvely, that any “good work,” even for a Hederman paper, included a thorough investigation and an accounting of timely issues— the ongoing women’s movement and civil rights conversations, for example. Accordingly, she took advantage of what she called a “good bit of leeway” she thought she had at the Jackson Daily News to chase such stories.17 To be sure, her coverage of the election of Bolton mayor Bennie Thompson, the town’s second Black mayor, and the election of five Black alderman to the Bolton city council, made it to print, as did her story on the 1973 Mississippi Women’s Day Symposium, among others related to race or the ongoing women’s movement.18 Around the same time, she was in contact with state civil rights leaders and working those and other sources for stories related to local boycotts and marches.19 It was one thing to report on the election of a Black mayor to a small Mississippi town; it was quite another to report on the movement Jimmy Ward considered a threat to civilized society, and its leaders, “social gangsters” and “human freaks.”20 In fact, once those pages started hitting Ward’s desk (with no sign of stopping), and once word got to him that she was making friendly with the likes of state civil rights leaders Aaron Henry and Rims Barber, the situation escalated. He sent another editor to fire her for insubordination, but she knew that explanation to be, in her words, “a contrived ‘reason’ to fire me.”21 It was that mindset that led her to the EEOC, just over a year after being hired at the paper. In the time between Stevens being fired (sometime in September–October 1973) and the time it would take her case to reach its conclusion, she still needed to work—and work she did, as a freelance journalist for as many as ten newspapers over the next decade or so, including The Vicksburg Post, The Daily Sentinel-Star, out of Grenada, and, occasionally, Bill Minor’s

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Capitol Reporter. However, she spent the most time at the McComb (MS) Enterprise-Journal (1974–1976), and three Mississippi Delta newspapers: Greenville’s Delta Democrat-Times (1974–1977), the Greenwood Commonwealth (1974–1977), and The Clarksdale Press Register (1974– 1980).22 As a freelance reporter, she worked for a few of the state’s most interesting (and controversial) editors, Hodding Carter III and John Emmerich to name two, both sons of publishers and editors. Along the way, Stevens would hit her stride early in her career by covering (and, in her own column, giving her opinion of) the type of issues she thought important, such as those related to equal rights for women and the ongoing civil rights struggle, while also tracking voting patterns on these and other issues in the state legislature, thus keeping readers informed of the actions of their elected officials. In that respect, Stevens hoped her investigative skills lived up to those of her colleague Norma Fields, whom she watched carefully and admired. “She uncovered wrongdoings with a passion,” Stevens said of Fields. “I guess you could say my ‘wrongdoing uncovering’ was essentially reporting ‘back home’ on the legislators’ voting records which hopefully had some impact on [readers].”23 In doing so, she followed in the steps of her parents, Ford Webster Yates, an engineer, and Annie Ford Smith Yates, a music teacher—both of whom Stevens described as “community leaders and progressive trailblazers in Vicksburg and well beyond.”24 “WHAT’S GOING ON” Nancy Lee Yates Stevens was born in 1948, the middle of three children, including a sister, Linda, and brother, Ford Jr. She was raised in Vicksburg, where her father, a graduate of Mississippi State College (now Mississippi State University), worked as an engineer for the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Stevens’s mother graduated from Blue Mountain College, in the northeast part of the state, not far from Tupelo. Annie was an English and music major and “a gifted musician,” according to her daughter. She taught music lessons and stayed involved in many civic organizations—the PTA, the local garden club, and the First Baptist Church—as she raised her three children.25 The Yates family was, in fact, the picture of an ideal family, at least until 1958, when Stevens’s father died of a heart attack while bird hunting in the woods outside of Vicksburg.26 Ford’s death was a blow from which the family would never completely recover—Annie never remarried, “because she knew that no one could ever take his place,” Stevens recalled. Then, in 1971,27 Stevens’s younger brother, Ford Jr., died, in a one-car accident, handing the

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Yates family another inconceivable tragedy.28 Annie remained devoted to her remaining children and her civic causes, using both as a way to cope with the death of her husband and only son. “Well into her 80s, she chose to volunteer each Sunday at a men’s rescue mission in Vicksburg,” Stevens said.29 Stevens was a recent college graduate at the time of her brother’s death. At Mississippi State College for Women (MSCW) in Columbus, she majored in journalism, chosen because of her lifelong interest in writing and reading— Annie took her children to the local library on a regular basis—and because of her interest in, as she put it, “‘what’s going on,’ whether local, the U.S., or the world.”30 Stevens parlayed those interests into part-time work, writing feature stories and taking photos for MSCW public information. Her work both in and out of the classroom caught the attention of journalism department head and professor Ray Furr, who also served as MSCW’s director of public information. Furr had connections to numerous newspapers around the state, so his attention and approval was important. “He was very involved,” Stevens said. “Today that might be considered sexist that he himself jumped in to help his ‘girls’ land their first jobs, but we all thought it was great to have his support.”31 Stevens landed her first job at The Clarksdale Press-Register, an exciting accomplishment that her mother felt deserved a reward: Stevens’s first car, a new Simca, decorated with a green and white hounds-tooth vinyl top. She drove into the Clarksdale city limits in style and settled into her new home, a former downtown hotel converted into apartments, with mostly senior citizens as residents, who took Stevens under their wing while she adjusted to her new home and job.32 Under publisher and editor Joseph (“Joe”) Ellis, Jr., she worked as a general assignment reporter and proofreader, covering the Coahoma County courts, the Clarksdale city government, and police department. Along the way, she learned the importance of finding and working her sources. “I found that working at a newspaper of that size, which also included doing some of my own photography—although the Press-Register had two full-time photographers—turned out to be a very positive move for me,” Stevens said.33 She stayed at the Press-Register almost two years before marrying and moving to Jackson, where she applied for a similar position for the Jackson Daily News.34 Her experiences with a Hederman-owned paper, however, would be drastically different from the time she spent at the Press-Register. “A BLESSING IN DISGUISE” The very legislation that would protect women like Stevens in the workplace was just a few years old when she began her professional career. The

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1964 Civil Rights Act, specifically Title VII of the law, prohibited workplace discrimination on the basis of one or more protected categories, including sex, race, and religion.35 And, as noted in Equity on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace, it “laid a new legal foundation for women’s rights to work,” including the creation of the EEOC, the office that would interpret and investigate sexual discrimination claims in the workplace.36 To be sure, the EEOC had an inauspicious start, as the agency, which included five commissioners appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, was swamped with claims—thousands of complaints from women in various workplace sectors in the first year alone—with no precedent and rather vague guidelines by which to determine the case outcomes.37 In effect, “workplace sex equality thus had to be invented,” historian Katherine Turk notes.38 One issue that the EEOC faced was a complete lack of organization and leadership.39 Another was in the design of Title VII itself—lawmakers put racial discrimination front and center, the result of a mutual understanding between civil rights leaders and lawmakers as to the need to address the widespread problem of racial discrimination in the workplace—but tacked on sexual discrimination as a last minute effort. Furthermore, lawmakers considered racial and sexual discrimination as interchangeable parts of the whole, without widespread agreement and understanding among various parties, including women’s rights organizations, as to the complex issues and problems women faced in the workplace—or how to apply the provisions of Title VII in regards to sex.40 “Neither the legislators who passed Title VII nor the president who signed it into law offered any guidance to the EEOC as it struggled to define sex equality in light of state laws, advocates’ lack of consensus, and the long-standing gendered division of labor,” Turk said.41 The progress the EEOC made in those early years, then, was a matter of fits-and-starts but subsequent federal legislation, like the Equal Opportunity Employment Act, passed in 1972, and an amendment passed two years later, gave the Commission broader license to apply its powers to local and state governments, among other benefits.42 Nancy Stevens was an early beneficiary of these legal additions, but not the first journalist, of course, to file suit with the EEOC. In 1970, a group of forty-six women, including journalist Lynn Povich, who documented the experience in her book, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace, filed a sexual discrimination lawsuit against Newsweek. Specifically, their claims included widespread sex segregation in both hiring and promotion—women at the magazine worked in the mailroom, as researchers and secretaries, while men were hired as reporters and editors.43 “It was an exhilarating moment for us,” Povich wrote, “and a shocking one for Newsweek’s editors, who couldn’t have been more surprised if their own daughters had risen up in revolt.”44

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Lynn Povich, the daughter of journalist Shirley Povich and cousin to Elaine, and the only woman writing for Newsweek at the time, helped organize the suit, which was months in the making.45 “We had been secretly strategizing for months,” Povich said, “whispering behind closed doors, congregating in the Newsweek ladies’ room, and meeting in our apartments at night.”46 There was strength and numbers, to be sure, but the moment could have easily overwhelmed the participants. Still, the women, as Povich stated, “were nervous, excited, and resolute,” driven by the steadfast notion that their lawsuit was part of a larger moral issue—the idea that the male editors and journalists at Newsweek not only knew about the discrimination against women at the magazine, but they outright condoned it as part of their hiring and promotion practices.47 “I thought if this is illegal and it’s going on here, then I should do something to correct it,” Newsweek researcher Judy Gingold, the so-called “ringleader” of the lawsuit, recalled.48 The women of Newsweek filed not one, but two, complaints against the magazine, with the results coming in the form of two “Memorandums of Understanding” between the plaintiffs and the defendant: the first, part of a “good faith effort” in which Newsweek agreed to interview and hire more women for reporting and writing assignments, and, after that memorandum did not stick, a second one with more specific promises in regards to the number of women the magazine would hire as reporters (one-third of the staff by the end of 1974) and promote to oversee an editorial section (one by the end of 1975).49 “Though the lawsuit never made it to court, it had immediate and lasting effects,” Povich said, including the fact that it encouraged other women to come forward, according to attorney Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represented the Newsweek plaintiffs.50 To that point, women at The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press filed similar suits—thus proving that what happened at Newsweek was not an isolated set of incidents but rather the widespread sexual discrimination that had long defined the industry.51 “We were protesting a system in which all but one of the writers and editors were men and the women clipped newspaper stories, checked facts and did research— lower-paying jobs without much opportunity to move up,” Lynn Povich said. “In our job interviews, we were told: ‘Women don’t write at Newsweek. If you want to be a writer, go someplace else.’”52 Stevens’s decision to bring her case to the EEOC was, as Judy Gingold said, driven by a sense that what had happened to her was a legal and a moral wrong. This belief gave Stevens the inner strength to talk about her case with the agency. Once Stevens told her story, she found the support she needed and provided the EEOC its lawful motivation to listen and possibly act on her behalf. “As I recall, that was all the EEOC needed to know to come to the conclusion that I had been unfairly fired from my job,” Stevens said.53 In

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fact, the Equal Opportunity Act of 1972, passed just a year before Stevens filed suit, allowed the EEOC to not only investigate charges but to file as the plaintiff in reported cases, if the agency saw that the evidence warranted such a move.54 “As a result, the focus of the EEOC’s mission shifted from mere investigation and conciliation to litigation against private employers,” EEOC attorneys Anne Noel Occhialino and Daniel Vail state in a 2005 history of the agency, published in the Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal.55 Before the EEOC agreed to take her case, of course, the agency initiated a formal investigation. If her case had no merit, or if the EEOC believed there was not enough evidence to warrant the agency’s involvement, then the agency would have issued Stevens a “Dismissal and Notice of Rights,” meaning that she could still file a lawsuit in state or federal court but without the EEOC’s support. On the other hand, if the EEOC found sufficient evidence to back up her claims, then both Stevens and the Jackson Daily News would have received a “Letter of Determination,” which was (and is) the EEOC’s official declaration that the agency believed discrimination took place.56 To be sure, even when a letter of determination was issued, there was still no guarantee of a positive resolution on Stevens’s behalf—or that a conclusion, good or bad, would be reached quickly. In 1972, the year before Stevens complained, the EEOC registered almost 33,000 charges of racial and sex discrimination against employers; the next year, that number rose to almost 49,000, Stevens’s complaint included. Moreover, the average time it took for the EEOC to process each filing was almost three years by the mid-1970s, as the EEOC five commissioners originally had to make the final determination on all cases before they issued letters of dismissal or determination.57 To help with the case backlog and to streamline the process, the EEOC eventually gave its district office directors—who originally made the first determination on cases before forwarding the ones with merit to the EEOC headquarters—the authority to make the final determination in cases in which there was precedent, thus leaving the EEOC commissioners the task of reviewing unique cases in which there was an absence of case law to support them.58 Historically speaking, once the EEOC made its determination in cases like Stevens’s, the law required that all parties sit down with EEOC representatives and settle the case, a voluntary process called conciliation. If the parties reached an agreement during conciliation, the case ended with a contractual settlement. Otherwise, the EEOC decided if a court battle was warranted, a decision based on a number of factors, including the significance of the case and the legal issues that defined it.59 In any case, the EEOC, then and now, encouraged conciliation over litigation, certainly given the management and organizational issues the agency faced in the 1970s—and given the fact that a long legal battle, especially in cases like Stevens’s, which involved a single plaintiff, was not in the plaintiff’s best interest (at least statistically speaking).

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In 1972, for example, the EEOC filed just five lawsuits out of some 124 cases approved for filing. The next year, the year of Stevens’s complaint, the agency approved 116 cases for lawsuits—a noticeable jump, but still not enough to put the odds in Stevens’s favor.60 For Stevens, conciliation led to a settlement of several thousand dollars, the exact amount she cannot recall and the EEOC will not reveal.61 There was no publicity about the case—which may have worked to Stevens’s advantage, as many male editors may have been reluctant to hire any woman who filed a sex discrimination complaint with the EEOC. In her correspondence about the case, Stevens did not recall many details of the case either, other than the fact she reached a settle with the Jackson Daily News. These gaps in information, then, lead to at least one interesting and necessary question: Why did the powers-that-be at the Jackson Daily News agree to conciliation? After all, the Hedermans certainly had the resources to fight any potential lawsuit, and given what we know about the political views of editors like Jimmy Ward, the managers of the Jackson Daily News more than likely would not have been agreeable to conciliation in a federal civil rights complaint. According to Stevens, the types of stories she pursued were of the kind that Ward, and his employers, detested—including her attempts to cover civil rights leaders like Aaron Henry and Rims Barber. Both were the type of men that Ward considered “idiotic agitating nitwits” and “abnormal animals,” hell-bent on instigating violence and mayhem in their support of racial integration, which Ward believed would lead to the breakdown of law and order in the country.62 “It will take a long time to erase their filthy-minded lies,” he wrote in response to the civil rights demonstrators in the early 1960s.63 Ward spent more than a decade dehumanizing men like Henry and Barber for their efforts in organizing civil rights marches, boycotts, and protests around the state. Stevens, on the other hand, covered them and their work as heroic, because, as she recalled, she thought she had the “leeway” to do so (or perhaps because she knew men like Henry and Barber were newsworthy and, therefore, she hoped her coverage would get passed her editors without incident). If Stevens’s EEOC complaint was common knowledge among Bob or Tom Hederman, they may not have been interested in any kind of legal battle, given the negative publicity it might have drawn and the family’s inclination toward privacy and stability within the family and its corporate brand. “As a family, the Hedermans were by nature averse to change, and their habits reflected a discomfort for those who stepped outside the order,” historian Willard T. Edmonds writes.64 Also, the Hedermans may have simply wanted to brush the entire incident under the rug, so to speak, especially given that at least one of their flagship papers, The Clarion-Ledger, was undergoing

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significant editorial changes at the time that could also affect the Jackson Daily News. Rea Hederman, a member of the family’s third generation, took over the role of Clarion-Ledger city editor in August 1973, replacing Charles Smith, who was promoted to news editor. Nevertheless, everyone knew the paper was Hederman’s to run, regardless of title or seniority.65 Rea’s father, Bob Hederman, served as publisher and had been in that role for the last quarter of a century, and their cousin, Tom, served as editor (and co-owner) for just as long (as detailed in chapter 6). Rea’s father wanted his son back home to help run the family flagship newspaper, just as Bob and Tom did when their fathers, Robert Michael (also known as “Bertie”), and his younger brother, Thomas Martin (“T. M.”) Hederman, died in the 1940s, after they ran the family business for over twenty-five years, beginning in the 1920s.66 Rea came home, reluctantly so at first; he left Mississippi after graduating from Mississippi College where he majored in finance. He then attended the University of Virginia for his MBA and then the University of Missouri for a master’s degree in journalism. He then worked for Business Week and the New York Times.67 A mix of family loyalty and shame brought him back, and he wanted to make the best of his time here, which meant, in the case of his new position at The Clarion-Ledger, turning the paper from a banner for white supremacy—with a reputation as “really a terrible paper, about a bad a paper as you can get,” according to journalist and native Mississippian Lew Powell—to a respectable newspaper that could make a difference in the Jackson community and state as a whole.68 “[He] promptly changed it 180 degrees, revitalizing its news coverage and editorial policies, losing most of his staff and having to retrain the newsroom,” his childhood friend, the novelist Richard Ford, said.69 Hederman made the kind of changes (which are given attention in chapter 6) to The Clarion-Ledger that the EEOC would have appreciated, had they noticed—and perhaps they did—since the Hederman publications might have been on the agency’s radar after Stevens’s complaint. To be sure, Hederman had no control, editorial or otherwise, over the Jackson Daily News, and there is no evidence that the EEOC investigated The Clarion-Ledger, or that any such complaint had been filed by a Clarion-Ledger employee. However, there is confirmation that Rea knew about what happened to Nancy Stevens. The two had a connection that few outside family circles knew about: Stevens’s mother was a first cousin of Bob Hederman’s wife, Sara Smith Hederman. Rea and Nancy saw each other not long after her case had been settled. “He apologized to me,” she recalled, “and I thanked him for the kind gesture.”70 Stevens never worked for another Hederman publication, and Rea did not offer her the job. However, she applauded the changes he made at The

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Clarion-Ledger but was ready to move on to other opportunities—and they came, one after another. “My firing from the  Jackson Daily News was a blessing in disguise,” Stevens said.71 Her work soon included the title of full-time capitol correspondent for four daily newspapers—the Greenwood Commonwealth, the McComb (MS) Enterprise-Journal, Greenville’s Delta Democrat-Times, and the first paper she worked for, The Clarksdale Press Register—that couldn’t afford or did not see it necessary to hire their own individual full-time capitol correspondents.72 This position proved to be an important part of Stevens’s career, as she covered important issues for all four newspapers, and got to work with two people, Norma Fields and Bill Minor, whose journalism she admired and respected. “From the day I was fired, I was fortunate to embark on my capitol bureau reporting for quite a few years,” Stevens said. “I had my own desk in the top-floor press room at the state capitol, working alongside the late Norma Fields, and journalism giants including Bill Minor, and the bureau chiefs of both AP and UPI.”73 “MY CAREER REALLY TOOK OFF” In late 1973, Stevens gave a speech to the Jackson chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). As a general assignment reporter for Jackson Daily News, Stevens had, on occasion, the opportunity to cover the Mississippi legislature, so the organizers asked her to give those in attendance advice on how to lobby state lawmakers to consider taking up the ratification of the ERA in the upcoming 1974 legislative session. Regardless of strategy, Stevens warned, the chances were slim to none that the Mississippi legislature would consider the ERA for serious debate. “From watching them and talking with them last session, it seemed to me the ERA was the big topic of some good laughs in groups of legislators,” Stevens admitted to her audience, “and the subject for a lot of jokes and kidding around with each other, and sometimes with the women who were working so hard for it.”74 She then advised the audience that “consistent contact” was one persuasive strategy that might, as she put it, “shock them into reality about certain things.”75 Also, she said, attempts should be made to get the lawmakers to state on the public record how they felt about ERA ratification, or even how they intended to vote if or when the measure made it out of committee. Stevens also recommended that a questionnaire be sent to the legislative ratification committee, which would decide to release the measure for a floor vote, as to their opinions and intentions. Had she not been fired recently, she said, “I . . . could have assured the results a place in the Daily News, at least, that is if I wasn’t caught first.”76

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Stevens’s tongue-in-cheek comment was more truth than exaggeration; the Jackson Daily News was no place for a young reporter who believed, as she did, that the modern journalist should follow and report on timely issues and problems with focus, passion, and honesty. She would perhaps find a more suitable environment at the Greenwood Commonwealth and the McComb Enterprise-Journal, where she began working as a freelance capitol correspondent in January and June 1974, respectively. John Oliver Emmerich, Jr. published and edited the Commonwealth, just as his father, J. Oliver Emmerich, edited and published the Enterprise-Journal before him.77 The elder Emmerich, who died in 1978, evolved into a moderate voice among Mississippi editors during the turbulent 1960s. “It is just a matter of human dignity,” he told Jet magazine in 1961, when asked his opinion of voting rights for Black Americans.78 To be sure, a few of his contemporaries labeled him a political “moderate” on the issue of race, but an examination of his public record as publisher and editor, which originally included support for the Dixiecrat platform of states’ rights, reveals that any movement on his part was less of a forward leap toward moderation, and more of a personal regret of some of his racist views mixed with a practical understanding of what needed to be done for the state and its people to move forward, both economically and politically. “Emmerich was neither an arch-conservative on the race issue nor a flaming liberal,” Davies said, “but an avowed segregationist softened by a belief in fair journalism.”79 Ebony reporter Carl T. Rowan first met Emmerich in 1955, when he visited McComb right after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. According to Rowan, Emmerich was combative when asked about the landmark case, finally telling Rowan that “it’s not my fault . . . that the Negro is only a century away from the jungle. I say that’s just not enough time to civilize people.”80 That statement would not have surprised anyone who read Emmerich’s editorials in the 1950s (and, in the previous decade, when he first purchased the two local papers that would merge to form the Enterprise-Journal); back then, he routinely questioned the motives of the movement and its leaders, while criticizing, with the exception of voting rights and anti-lynching legislation, attempts to legislate civil rights issues. He did as much with the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the first federal law of its kind, which created the United States Commission on Civil Rights and the civil rights arm of the Justice Department.81 “When the bill becomes law,” an August 1957 editorial in the Enterprise-Journal read, “many injustices will result despite the fact that the bill is proposed as a humanitarian measure.”82 A few years later, several Freedom Riders attempted to integrate the McComb bus station in November 1961, and Emmerich offered his offices to so-called “out-of-town newspaper men” who covered the event.83 A white mob attacked the journalists and then hunted down Emmerich, angry that he

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befriended his press colleagues, as many in the crowd blamed the press for bringing trouble to town with them; they shattered the Enterprise-Journal’s front office window before one of the locals attacked Emmerich, who fell to the ground after being struck on the head.84 “The editor, who recently urged the state to stop police brutality, the double-standard of justice and give Negros ‘fair’ job opportunities and the right to vote,” the Jet article revealed, “was beaten in McComb, where five Freedom Riders were attacked and 13 students were jailed for supporting sit-in demonstrations.”85 The next year, Emmerich took a published stand on James Meredith’s integration of the University of Mississippi, calling for peace and agreeing that the university should remain open.86 Two years later, he asked his readers to exercise maturity and restraint during the 1964 Freedom Summer, even though he held the project and its goals in contempt: “May we on Sept. 1 look back on the summer of 1964 and be able to truthfully say, ‘We met a crisis with maturity. We did not panic. We exercised restraint. We upheld the dignity of the law. We met a challenge intelligently.’”87 In both instances, Emmerich’s readers met him with resistance and violence. In 1962, for instance, locals organized a circulation boycott of the Enterprise-Journal after he criticized Governor Ross Barnett for his attempts to block Meredith’s admission; two years later, following his comments about Freedom Summer, a fire bomb damaged the Enterprise-Journal’s office space and the home of managing editor Charles Dunagin. Local racists then burned a cross on Emmerich’s front lawn, and another in front of his office—on the very night his mother died—after he denounced the arson.88 Still, he persisted in his criticism, insisting that Mississippi had, in its history, witnessed “one failure after another—from the Southern Manifesto to interposition, to nullification, police power, massive resistance, economic pressures, school closings, the Senate filibuster, and terrorism. Each of these roads ended in failure.”89 In 1971, Rowan interviewed Emmerich again, and this time, found him to be “more of a man and less a racist than he led me to believe that day in 1955.”90 In the time between the two encounters, Emmerich had seen and experienced enough racial violence and tension that he had come to regret much of what he referred to as his “cotton-patch” mentality, an ideology which, as Davies notes, “demanded conformity resistance to change, racial prejudice, and a rationalization of southern traditions.”91 Like his contemporaries Hazel Brannon Smith and Hodding Carter, II, Emmerich was what historian Anthony Newberry calls a “fair play segregationist”—one who was disgusted by racial violence but who refused to accept or support most federal positions on racial equality.92 Even so, his position on racial equality slowly evolved because violent events of the 1960s demanded his attention, and because he believed that journalism had an essential role to play in

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helping maintain order in turbulent times. “This must be the case sometimes,” Emmerich remind readers, “if the editorial page responsibly is keeping up with the changing times.”93 Stevens was emblematic of that statement, which is probably one reason why Emmerich’s son, John, hired her in January 1974. The younger Emmerich had just purchased the Commonwealth, part of a growing newspaper business that would eventually include more than a dozen newspapers, including the Enterprise-Journal (which he inherited at his father’s death) and The Clarksdale Press (purchased from Joe Ellis in 1986).94 He started his career as a reporter for the Enterprise-Journal before leaving in 1963 to work for The Baltimore Evening Sun, and later, The Minnesota Tribune and The Houston Chronicle.95 He came back home a decade later and moved to the Mississippi Delta, a decision that put him in the middle of a place that had, in his words, “the highest rate of everything bad, like teen pregnancy, and the lowest rate of everything good, like income.”96 To complicate matters, the region, according to archaeology professor Amy L. Young, “was one of the deadliest battlegrounds in the Civil Rights movement,” as former Commonwealth editor Edgar Thatcher Walt found out the hard way.97 Walt joined the Commonwealth in 1962, just prior to James Meredith’s integration of the University of Mississippi. He praised Governor Ross Barnett for his “unflinching stand on principle” in response to the crisis; the state should build a statue in his honor, Walt said, to match “Governor Barnett’s shrine in American history [that] is already sculpted.”98 To be sure, Walt, a Greenwood native, drew a faint line at racial violence, especially when it cut so close to his own (literal) front lawn. In one editorial, he rapped the local Klan on the knuckles for cross-burning, but that was enough to put him and his family in their crosshairs.99 The family received death threats and were physically intimidated at the Leflore Theatre in downtown Greenwood. After the latter incident, they had no sooner returned home when someone set off an explosion on their front lawn. Walt recalled that in just a short period of time he stayed up all night at least twice with a shotgun resting in his lap. After overhearing of a plot to kill him, Walt and his family left town. “Desperately trying to maintain a system of black suppression,” journalist John Herbers recalled in his memoir, Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist, “white segregationists created a world rife with rumor, fabrication, and paranoia.”100 John Emmerich would be much harder to run out of town. Like his father, he believed in a moderate but compassionate approach when navigating difficult times, but he didn’t scare easily. According to those who knew him best, Emmerich used common sense and directness in dealing with others, those he liked and those he didn’t, and believed that a good newspaper started with a strong editorial voice—which is why he retained control over the editorial

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page as publisher. And, perhaps most importantly, Emmerich believed that a newspaper should lead the community.101 Accordingly, Emmerich hired Stevens to be the eyes and ears of his readers in the capital city. In fact, in many issues of the Commonwealth, Stevens’s byline rested above a column that included a tally of legislative votes on bills that pertained or could affect the Delta region. Stevens believes this to be one of her lasting contributions to Mississippi journalism—keeping a careful watch of the voting patterns of lawmakers.102 To be sure, her research often went beyond a tally of legislative votes. For example, in January 1975, just ahead of that year’s legislative session, the Commonwealth published a survey, the results of which came from responses Stevens gathered from Delta-area lawmakers, in which she asked their opinions on issues that were expected to come before the 1975 session.103 For readers of both papers, the Commenwealth and the Enterprise Journal, Stevens also analyzed and summarized a national report, compiled by the Citizens Conference on States Legislatures, comparing the frequency of Mississippi legislative sessions to the other forty-nine states.104 “I hope I helped to keep their constituents informed in a way they’d not previously been,” Stevens said.105 She felt lucky to have such a position with both papers, especially given what happened at the Daily News, and she took great pride in the fact that she had her own desk in the state capitol building, located in the top floor press room right next to Norma Fields and Bill Minor. Stevens admired them both, especially Fields, who she described as “one-of-a-kind,” the type of “hard-hitting journalist” whose enterprise journalism work rivaled only that of Bill Minor.106 Stevens knew both Minor and Fields by reputation, and it was quite the career moment, Stevens thought, for her to be working alongside both of them. In later years, she would occasionally freelance for the Capitol Reporter, which says something about what Minor thought of Stevens’s work.107 She and Fields got to know each other well; at the time, they were the only two women working full-time in the capitol press room. Stevens watched Fields work—in press conferences and on the phone—and, as busy as Stevens was, she could not help but notice the difference Fields made as a reporter roaming the halls of the state capitol building. “She was a strong example for me as a young reporter,” Stevens said of Fields, “but it was hard to top her, especially with the important investigative work she accomplished.”108 In much the same way that Smith inspired Fields, Fields, in turn, motivated Stevens, indirectly at least, to do her best work. Stevens, to be sure, said she never broke the kind of stories Fields did—corruption at the state highway commission, for example—but, whether or not she realized it, Stevens and Fields had common ground in their coverage of the ERA and related topics. Indeed, Fields did not find feminism in the mid-1970s, but Stevens was

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already there. Almost forty-five years later, Stevens reflected on the progress women have made—and the failure of the ERA’s passage played in that progress: “It’s hard to believe that those ‘old days’ weren’t really all that long ago. We’ve still got a way to go, however, as evidenced by our still mostly male-dominated elected officials.”109 Stevens covered the ERA and related issues because she believed the topic deserved attention. She included in that coverage a July 1974 speech by lawmaker Martha Griffiths, who, at the time, had served twenty years in the United States Congress and was an ardent supporter of equal rights for women. She played a significant role in the inclusion of the sexual discrimination clause in Title VII in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and as women fought for ratification of the ERA, Griffiths spent much of her time traveling the country lending her support for the amendment.110 “She called the federal government ‘the real discriminator’ against women by its unfair pension and tax laws and laws regarding children and education,” Stevens said of Griffith’s speech before a conference of the Governor’s Office of Education and Training and Center for Manpower Studies.111 Perhaps one of the more interesting opinions about the ERA that Stevens recorded during her time on the state capitol beat was that of Hazel Brannon Smith. By 1977, the year she covered Smith’s appearance at a National Federation of Press Women meeting in Biloxi, the veteran editor and publisher was battle-tested and weary—having survived death threats, bombings, and arson—and she felt the financial strain of it all. On the stage, though, the sharp-worded journalist was ever-present, reminding her audience (in racially charged undertones) that “the slaves have been free a long time but women still aren’t free.” After telling the audience of 300 women that their sex must demand the ERA be ratified in Mississippi—Smith called the arguments against the ERA “an insult to the intelligence of the women of America.”112 Stevens also covered a gathering of the Jackson chapter of NOW at Millsaps College, 300 women total, whose intent was to celebrate the fifty-fourth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and to approve a resolution urging the 1975 Mississippi legislature to ratify the ERA. She interviewed a small cross-section of attendees—including a housewife and a minister, a psychiatrist and an advertising executive. In the previous two years, as mentioned, the legislature refused to even bring the measure out of its committee; Stevens saw her coverage as timely and necessary to inform the public on an issue that few if any reporters in the Delta region covered—information, she said years later, “which hopefully had some impact on them.”113 To that end, Stevens wrote a four-part series on the role of women in state politics. Included in that series was an accounting of the number of women who were currently serving, circa mid-1970s, in the state legislature. The point

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was to give the reader perspective about the possible increase or decrease in women’s participation in the decisions of the state government—at least since the passing of the nineteenth amendment, which gave new voters the power to elect the first women to the state legislature.114 Stevens’s answer was simple and straightforward: “Mississippi could conceivably have fewer women lawmakers in the 1976 legislature than in history since women’s suffrage was granted,” she reported in September 1975.115 Stevens made this comment after she witnessed sixteen total women from both parties lose their primary races in August 1975, with only two moving on to the general election that November, where they joined four other women who ran unopposed in their primaries.116 In a follow-up piece, Stevens investigated the challenges that these six women faced, not the least of which was the fact that their opponents were men, many of whom were business owners with strong financial and political support for the campaigns in their respective communities.117 The only significant change in the statehouse, at least in regards to women’s political roles, Stevens noted after witnessing voters elect only two of the aforementioned women candidates—with no women elected to the state senate—was the new face in the chambers come January 1976. “But the Senate situation, though void of women, will be somewhat ironic since its presiding officer will be the newly-elected Lt. Gov. Evelyn Gandy, the first woman in Mississippi history to hold the second highest post,” she said.118 As clarification of that statement, she followed with context that painted a broader picture of the challenges women faced when legislation benefiting them rested on the approval of an almost all-male body of lawmakers—many of them hostile or indifferent toward equal rights. For example, an article from one issue of the Commonwealth, from May 1976 (which also appeared in the other newspapers), revealed the financial and political problems confronting the state’s Commission on the Status of Women, including the cold shoulder given by the 1976 Mississippi legislature. “The women are ruled against,” Stevens quoted Mary Castleberry, commission secretary, as saying, “but other commissions are funded.”119 “A BUNCH OF N---ER-LOVING YANKEEFIED COMMUNISTS” Stevens’s work for both the Enterprise-Journal and the Commonwealth continued when she started freelancing for another Delta paper, Delta Democrat-Times, in November 1974, just in time for the 1975 legislative session. The paper’s longtime publisher and editor, Hodding Carter Jr. (known as “Big Hodding” to his friends), was, for decades, a reasoned voice calling

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for human dignity and fairness in the treatment of Black Mississippians in what has been called “one of the most tormented regions in the South.”120 To be sure, Carter was no liberal; as his friend, the writer Josephine Haxton, whose pen name was Ellen Douglas, said, “He really was a very conservative man. He just didn’t think people ought to lynch each other.”121 Carter was indeed against lynching but also opposed federal antilynching legislation; he supported desegregation of schools but only at the college level, as he noted when he wrote in affirmation of James Meredith’s entrance into the University of Mississippi; and he routinely denounced the NAACP for what he called its “angry racism,” while also referring to the white citizens councils as the “uptown Klan.”122 Carter thought the Klan full of cowards and bullies—and said so publicly. “Masked men breed trouble—only men who are ashamed of their deeds need to hide their identity,” he once said.123 Carter’s hard stand against racial violence was not just for the benefit of Black Mississippians. In 1945, amid the height of racial discrimination against local Nisei who fought bravely for their country during the Second World War, Carter wrote: It is so easy for the dominant race to explain good and evil, patriotism or treachery, courage or cowardice in terms of skin color. So easy and so tragically wrong. Too many have committed that wrong against the local Nisei, who by the thousands have proven themselves good Americans, even while others of us, by our actions against them, have shown ourselves to be bad Americans.124

This and similar editorials garnered Carter a national reputation and a Pulitzer Prize the next year but also plenty of backlash.125 United States Senator Theodore Bilbo, a former Mississippi governor, said he was of a good mind to go to Greenville and give Carter a “skinning” for accepting an award from “a bunch of n---er-loving Yankeefied communists.”126 Carter struck back in another editorial, calling Bilbo a “reckless, intolerant villifier.”127 And, years later, in response to his consistent editorial attacks on the citizens’ councils, the Mississippi legislature passed a resolution condemning Carter in an 89–19 vote as a “willful n---er-loving editor.” Again, he shot back, determined to have the last word: “I hereby resolve by a vote of 1 to 0 that there are 89 liars in the state legislature.”128 The Carter family was subjected to much worse than legislative condemnations, of course—burning crosses on their front lawn and death threats, so many, in fact, that wife and mother Betty once took to sitting with a shotgun across her lap.129 In fact, in 1962, Carter, who took to keeping a loaded gun in his desk at the Democrat-Times, retired from the paper, exhausted from the constant stress and strife of the job, especially as the civil rights movement picked up in intensity, and already in declining health. He joined Tulane

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University as a writer-in-residence, and his son, Carter III, and Betty, who for years was with her husband step-by-step in running the Democrat-Times, took care of the paper.130 The younger Carter (hereafter referred to simply as Carter) started working for the family paper in 1959, three years before “Big Hodding’s” retirement, but until that point Carter didn’t think he would end up back in Greenville at all. Eager to not be known as “Little Hodding” for the rest of his life, he wanted a life as a foreign service officer and to move as far from Greenville as he could get.131 The first stop on that journey was Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Diplomacy. However, with the fear of McCarthyism still looming in the late 1950s, and given his family’s politically moderate reputation, a foreign diplomat discouraged him from following through with his original career goal. He joined the Marine Corps in 1957, thinking it was the next best thing to a career abroad, but the love of young woman, Peggy Ainsworth of New Orleans, brought him back home. He married, and the couple returned to Greenville, where he joined the family business, first as a reporter, and then, when “Big Hodding” retired, in various positions over the next few years: chief editorial writer, managing editor, associate editor, and associate publisher.132 In 1961, Carter won the Sigma Delta Chi award for Editorial Writing, with the judges citing his work for being “moderate in tone, factual in content”133; indeed, more often than not, the younger Carter, ever the business owner, remained just as judicious as “Big Hodding” in his support of civil rights—at least in the beginning of his career. Like his father, Carter believed in treating others with human dignity and respect, which is one reason why both father and son gave the struggle their support, but they both disapproved of economic boycotts as a means to draw attention to civil rights issues.134 “There is nothing democratic, fair or sensible about economic boycotts. They are two-edged swords which destroy more than their intended targets,” a July 1963 editorial read. “Yet the same small handful of Negro youths who have participated in the recent demonstrations in Greenville have apparently decided that boycott is an appropriate weapon in their struggle. We trust this will be a decision quickly forgotten.”135 Carter would remain critical of economic boycotts for the collateral damage they could do to his hometown and the surrounding area, but his direct involvement with the civil rights movement picked up momentum after the murders of Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Neshoba County. That watershed moment—along with his coverage of the 1964 Republican convention (in which it became clear that Barry Goldwater’s nomination was a legitimate threat to pull white, conservative Mississippi Democrats to the 1964 Republican ticket)—changed Carter’s perspective on the movement and what was at stake if it failed.136 “For the first time in 28 years, a clearly

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identified conservative will take on a representative of the clearly defined liberal party,” he said in July 1964 editorial, just days after the Republican national convention ended.137 Carter realized he could no longer be a passive observer of the movement; he also had to reconsider his place in the Democratic Party if he were to take a more active role, at least at the state level, just as the state party long ago reconsidered the Carter family’s place with them. “To the regular Democratic party ranks, Hodding’s father represented everything they hated—namely the very idea of desegregation,” one Mississippi Democrat close to the Carter family told The Washington Post in 1977.138 Conversely, the younger Carter could no longer accept, or find acceptance, in a state party whose conservative white leadership continued to embrace the ideology of racism. As the state party remained mired in the past, fighting back against the national party’s civil rights platforms, Carter moved to do his part to save the state party from itself. He first became involved with the Mississippi Young Democrats (MYD) in the mid-1960s, but the organization stalled when national Democratic Party leaders, in an attempt to appease the powerful white, racist conservatives of the state party, like Jim Eastland, refused to financially support the MYD’s efforts to grow and diversify.139 With Aaron Henry—who, as president of the state NAACP, earlier broke ties with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) (and cofounder and vice chair, Fannie Lou Hamer) to join Carter and other white political moderates in their efforts take back the state party—Carter then founded Mississippi Action for Progress (MAP), a non-profit organization set up to receive federal grant funds from Project Head Start, a federal program initiated by the Johnson administration as part of his publicly announced “‘unconditional war’ on poverty.”140 The goal of Project Head Start was to provide underprivileged school children and their parents, via federal funds delivered through local organizations like MAP, with the educational, workforce, and community tools—job training, medical care, educational initiatives, balanced meals, and the like—that would translate into independence from local white employers as well as a sense of self-dignity and worth.141 In Mississippi, the term “underprivileged” meant poor Black residents in rural areas like the Mississippi Delta; indeed, the federal government sent the bulk of Project Head Start grant money earmarked for the state there, which translated into fifty Head Start centers in the program’s first year, 1965, with another 120 over the following two years.142 MAP, run by middle-class white and middle-class and working-class Black organizers with political connections to the federal government, would challenge and eventually win federal grant money over rival Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), run by local Black political organizers, including leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

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(SNCC) and the MFDP. Conservative congressional leaders were reluctant to give the CDGM more money, despite the fact that the CDGM started and organized the lion’s share of the Delta region’s head start centers between 1965–1967. Lawmakers, including Mississippi Paul Johnson and Senator John Stennis, didn’t care about the CDGM’s record, a group founded by so-called “race agitators” and “communists” of SNCC; now that there was a more politically tolerable organization to award grant money, lawmakers refused to give another dime to a “leftist organization” whose goal it was to create jobs for “young troublemakers.”143 As a result, MAP’s emergence and take-over of the region’s Head Start program continued a political turf war between the Black establishment leaders of MAP (e.g., Henry) and the MFDP leadership that began at the 1964 Democratic national convention in Atlantic City. At the convention, many Black middle-class members of the MFDP broke off from the larger MFDP group in disagreement over the MFDP leadership’s refusal to accept a compromise that would give the organization two delegate seats at the convention.144 “Everybody that would compromise in five minutes was the people with a real good education,” MFDP co-founder and vice-chair Fannie Lou Hamer said in recalling the split, “but the little folks told them no, they weren’t going to take it and they meant business.”145 There would be time for regrets later, but for now, too much was at stake, Carter and other MAP leaders believed, as they saw an opportunity to use MAP’s growing political and economic stability to create an honest-to-goodness biracial and socioeconomically diverse political coalition. This coalition was one made up of Black and white power brokers like Henry and Carter, along with a large voting bloc of working and middle-class locals attracted to the cause by what MAP had thus far achieved. Their goal was to wrestle control of the state Democratic Party from the “states’ rights” faction that had run the party (in the ground, critics would say) for too long.146 Their plan came to fruition just prior to the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago, when the state credentials committee decided to seat a new biracial delegation, the “Loyalist Democrats of Mississippi” at the national convention instead of the more conservative “Regular Democrats” that had long represented the state party. A 1977 Washington Post profile piece on Carter described the delegation battle as such: “The result was one of the bloodiest credentials fights in the history of Post-Civil War Southern politics, which ended only when the Loyal Democrats had unseated the regulars to give Mississippi its first racially mixed delegation.”147 For his part, Carter, who served as cochair of the Mississippi convention delegation, told a UPI reporter that the actions of the Loyal Democrats were not intended to “separate but rather to unite our people. Our goal is not a party or a state polarized on racial grounds but solidly bound together across racial lines.”148

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Even so, state Republicans seized the opportunity to invite dissatisfied “Regulars” to desert the party that betrayed them and support Richard Nixon, the GOP’s candidate for the 1968 presidential election.149 Such invitations were a foreshadowing of things to come, as the GOP would, over the next decade or so, welcome new conservative members from across the state, including many former “Regulars,” who, in the words of Mississippi governor (and “Regular”) John Bell Williams, felt “shocked and disappointed but not surprised” by the events in Chicago.150 Stevens, a Loyalist Democrat herself, took great pride in working for Carter—she respected what she referred to as the “progressive stance” the family paper took on state and national political issues during the 1960s and 1970s.151 At times, she thought her columns and news articles to be too progressive even for his taste, but she was pleased to see that Carter ran most of them—including a story about Greenville city council member Sarah Johnson, who spoke at a governor’s conference in July 1974 on women’s impact on the economy.152 Under the headline of “Women: Coalition is Urged,” Stevens wrote of the obstacles blocking Johnson’s career path: “being black, poor and a woman.” Stevens also recorded mention of Johnson’s role in the Delta region’s civil rights movement during the 1960s and her thoughts on the role of women in local politics—part of wider coverage that Stevens provided to readers on the intersection between gender and politics.153 A story Stevens wrote on the obstacles keeping women from entering local and statewide political races—taken from a survey given to women who attended the International Women’s Year conference in Jackson in July 1977—is a perfect example of the kind of information that readers may not have seen if Stevens did not make it a priority on her beat.154 Of course, Stevens’s coverage of the state capitol was not limited to stories pertaining to women’s issues—as did most capitol beat reporters, she covered a variety of issues affecting specific communities, from education and ethics, to highways and elections—but she also made a point to emphasize certain topics that gave under-represented groups a voice. For example, Stevens also reported on issues related to the ongoing battle for racial equality in the state, as she understood that her work would be read by people who lived in towns and areas most affected by that struggle. “I keep going back to the stories I wrote with my connections to some of the civil rights workers and leaders,” Stevens recalled of her work during this time period. That body of work included interviews with Aaron Henry, a native of Clarksdale, who she was still in touch with when she went back to the Press-Register in January 1974.155

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“BE TOUGH AS A JOURNALIST” Like many of his contemporaries, publisher and editor Joseph Ellis, a states’ rights supporter, was suspicious of the civil rights movement and the federal government—and the leadership of both.156 He set a strict editorial policy that limited coverage of civil rights events—like Freedom Summer, which he referred to as an “invasion”—to the interior pages, but as journalism historian Susan Weill noted, “he had few opinions to offer his readers” on the issue of racial equality.157 He would frequently publish guest editorials on the subject and only occasionally reveal his thoughts on the matter—at least in print.158 What editorial record does exist shows that Ellis’s opinions were perhaps not that far removed from Emmerich’s or “Big Hodding” Carter’s; that is, Ellis, while firm in his support for many of the Jim Crow policies that ruled his state (and the men, like Governor Ross Barnett, who enforced them), he also drew the line at the use of violence as a means to an end. “The emotional forces of violence, defiance and mass hysteria which have been unleashed in Mississippi by the obstinate stupidity of politically-motivated national and state leadership on opposing sides of the controversy will be difficult, if not impossible, to check and control,” he said in reference to the federal and state responses to Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi.159 By the time Meredith came to campus, Ellis had been running the Press-Register for about fifteen years. A native of Clarksdale, he was a former naval officer and a World War II veteran with a degree in journalism from Washington and Lee University. In a town (and state) full of Southern Democrats, Ellis was a Republican, which struck journalist Curtis Wilkie, who worked for Ellis, as more than a little odd. “At the time, the Republicans could have held their county caucus in a bathroom stall,” he said. “The few I knew were moderately conservative, pro-business mavericks who seemed to enjoy their powerlessness.”160 Ellis never questioned many of the Jim Crow customs of his hometown and state; as a member of a well-to-do family who belonged to the town’s upper-class “cut-glass set,” it would have been improper to do so.161 At the same time, however, Ellis detested what Wilkes called the “blatant bigotry” on display, much of it from a rather “uncouth crowd” of whites—the working class and poor—that took the phrase, “keep the n---er down” to heart.162 As Ellis stated in his 1964 editorial, “With Dignity and Restraint” (regarding Freedom Summer), “While there is much to resent in this summer-long program, there is nothing to fear and, most certainly, nothing to justify intemperate action or reaction on the part of any citizen of Clarksdale, the Delta or Mississippi.”163 In other words, in the 1960s, Ellis would just as soon battle with Clarksdale Mayor W. S. “Kat” Kincaide, a “Regular Democrat” and

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member of the town’s working class (and elected by them), as he would the NAACP for boycotting the town’s white-owned businesses.164 He did both. His was a battle on two fronts—one to stop the encroachment of the civil rights movement on his hometown, albeit in as dignified fashion as possible, and another, an equally important fight against a class of white citizens who threatened, or so Ellis believed, his social circle’s standing in the community. “Kat Kincaide wore khaki shirts, cursed, and scratched his ass in public,” Wilkie stated, “and Joe’s crowd feared he would put the city under his crass dominion.”165 Ellis ran the Press-Register for forty years before selling to Emmerich—and in that time, he hired a generation of journalists and editors who went on to have their own distinguished careers: Ray Mosby, publisher and editor of the Deer Creek Pilot in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, who referred to Ellis simply as “Boss”; Bob Lewis, who spent much of his career with the Associated Press, and who recently recalled an important piece of advice from Ellis: “Don’t tell me what you think, Tell me what you know”; and, Wilkie, who remembered Ellis as an “intelligent, nervous man who chained smoke cigarettes and drank countless cups of overcooked coffee.”166 Ellis was a complicated man navigating complicated circumstances— Wilkie remembered one episode in which Ellis “exploded” when a progressive-minded managing editor attempted to sneak front-page coverage of Freedom Summer behind Ellis’ back, but Wilkie also was there to witness Ellis taking a stand against the so-called town “segregationist establishment” when he spoke out against a city-approved redistricting plan meant to fight a federal desegregation order. “He quarreled with old friends, and I could overhear hissing behind the partition shielding Joe’s desk,” Wilkie said. “Sometimes the office air was rent with the sound of flying papers and notebooks that Joe sailed across the room.”167 Stevens rejoined the Press-Register staff in January 1974, just a few short years after these battles. One of the first stories she followed, published at the end of her first month on the job, was about a private meeting between Henry and then Governor Bill Waller. The point of the meeting, Stevens noted, was to discuss matters related to the selection of delegates for the next DNC meeting. While there, Henry also took exception with an earlier comment Waller allegedly made in which he said that the NAACP did not represent the majority of Black Mississippians. In response, Henry told Stevens that, while it may be true that the NAACP might not speak for all Blacks, “We represent a d--- sight more than anybody else.”168 She continued to follow Henry’s movements through 1974, particularly his role as chair of the State Loyalist Democratic Party and his attempts to unify with the so-called “Regulars” ahead of the next gubernatorial election.169 At the same time, she tracked similar stories related to the civil rights

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struggle, such as an attempt by Black parents to desegregate the state schools for the blind—institutions, according to the families’s attorney, Melvin Leventhal, that had been defying the historic 1954 Supreme Court ruling for two decades. “This is absolutely a segregated and dual system,” he said to Stevens. “It’s scandalous and incredible.”170 Such was the trend for the next several years; of course, Stevens covered the typical legislative issues and the men who ran them through senate and house sessions, as all capitol beat reporters do and did, but as indicated by a written record of her time at the Press-Register, the struggle for racial equality was never far from her mind. For example, she once covered the Welfare Rights Organization, a Yazoo City-based group formed with the goal of bringing awareness to the plight of Black citizens and the poor. The group set up picket lines in front of the Yazoo City High School during a visit to the area from President Jimmy Carter, and they made sure that Carter received a report published by the Mississippi Council of Human Relations that supported their cause: the county had no Black elected officials, despite the fact that Black residents made up over 50 percent of the population; 42 percent of county residents lived below the poverty line, with Yazoo City’s median income among the lowest in the state.171 At the state level, Stevens reported on a late 1970s state redistricting battle in the Mississippi legislature, the product of a successful 1965 civil rights lawsuit claiming that the apportionment of the Mississippi legislature was unequal and discriminatory to Black voters. Both federal courts and the Supreme Court ruled that the state had to provide “adequate black representation,” as Stevens put it, and their plans had to meet with the Justice Department’s approval, per the 1965 Civil Rights Act.172 Stevens kept an eye on the case to see how any new redistricting proposals would affect Coahoma County.173 Stevens worked for no less than four newspapers at once over a total of six years during a period of time when state leaders, newspaper publishers and editors, and civil rights leaders were navigating the ground-breaking civil rights legislation of the previous decade and the significant social, political, and legal changes that followed. She played a role in helping readers navigate those changes—first, by building relationships with civil rights leaders like Aaron Henry, which allowed her easier access to sources and information, and second, by making sure the movement stayed in the headlines (even if that meant that all of her published stories about civil rights and related topics that appeared in the Press-Register were relegated to the interior pages).174 Although Stevens refused to believe that her enterprise journalism was on par with Norma Fields or Bill Minor, hers was important and necessary work nontheless, shaped in part by her own simple advice: “be focused,

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learn and read as much as you can about your assignments prior to writing your stories, [and] be tough as a journalist.”175 Journalists Nancy Campbell (Albritton) and Elaine Povich lived up to that statement. In the early and mid-1970s, they covered state politics for the UPI’s Jackson bureau, the first women to do so. Both women were drawn to journalism by the Watergate scandal and the potential excitement of the newsroom, even if they came from two different worlds—Campbell a native of the state who came to Jackson by way of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and Povich, never having been south of Richmond, Virginia.176 NOTES   1. Stevens November 29 email.   2. Stevens December 2 email.   3. Wells, “News Wars.”  4. The quote “a private but powerful clan” taken from Willard T. Edmonds, “Resisting the Civil Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of the Southern White Press,” PhD diss., (Florida State University, 2014), 125. See pp. 139– 40 for more information on the Hederman family. https:​//​fsu​.digital​.flvc​.org​/islandora​ /object​/fsu:​252824​/datastream​/PDF​/view.   5. Lally, “A Journey from Racism to Reason: Newspaper.”  6. John Tisdale, “Medgar Evers (1925–1963) and the Mississippi Press,” PhD diss.,  (University of North Texas, 1996), 42. https:​//​digital​.library​.unt​.edu​/ark:​​/67531​ /metadc278976​/m1​/50​/​?q​=benchmark​%20of​%20extreme​%20racism.   7. Susan Weill, “Fred Sullens,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, August 15, 2018. https:​ //​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/fred​-sullens​/.   8. Ibid.   9. Edmonds, “Resisting the Civil Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of the Southern White Press,” 142, 147. 10. Wells, “News Wars: The Rise and Fall of The Clarion-Ledger.” 11. Susan Weill, In a Madhouse’s Din: Civil Rights Coverage by Mississippi Daily Press, 1948-1968 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002): 6. 12. Tisdale, “Medgar Evers (1925–1963) and the Mississippi Press,” 108. 13. See David R. Davies and Judy Smith, “Jimmy Ward and the Jackson Daily News,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, ed. David R. Davies (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 91, for mention of Ward’s column; “a bunch of racial agitators” taken from p. 101. 14. Ibid., 102. 15. “Magnolia curtain” taken from Davies and Smith, “Jimmy Ward and the Jackson Daily News,” 106. Details regarding the resolutions taken from p. 107. 16. Ibid., 108. 17. Email, Nancy Stevens to author, January 20, 2020 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Stevens January 20 email.”].

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18. See Nancy Stevens, “Bolton Fetes Black Mayor and Council,” The Clarion-Ledger, September 2, 1973, 10B. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /184397475​/​?terms​=nancy​%20stevens​&match​=1. Stevens, “Women’s Day Recalls Suffrage Anniversary,” The Clarion-Ledger, August 26, 1973, 1. https:​ //​ www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/184417194​/​?terms​=nancy​%20stevens​&match​=1. Although Stevens was employed by the Jackson Daily News, her work also appeared in The Clarion-Ledger (with a byline credit to Stevens as “Daily News Staff Writer.”). 19. Stevens November 29 email. 20. See Davies and Smith, “Jimmy Ward and the Jackson Daily News,” 93 and 91, respectively. 21. Stevens November 29 email. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Stevens December 2 email. 26. “Heart Attack Claims Life of Ford Yates,” The Magee Courier, January 16, 1958, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/260578934​/​?terms​=Ford​%20Yates​ &match​=1. 27. Stevens December 2 email. 28. “Four Killed in Highway Smashups,” The Clarion-Ledger, September 19, 1971, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180949896​/​?terms​=Ford​%20Yates​&match​ =1. 29. Stevens December 2 email. 30. Information about Annie Stevens’ influence on her daughter’s choice of profession taken from Stevens December 2 email. Quote from Stevens November 29 email. 31. Stevens December 2 email. 32. Stevens January 20 email. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Annie Noel Occhialano and Daniel Vail, “Why the EEOC Still Matters,” Hofstra Labor and Employment Law Journal 22, no. 2 (2005): 672. 36. Katherine Turk, Equity on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 1. 37. The number of EEOC commissioners and the confirmation process taken from Occhialano and Vail, “Why the EEOC Still Matters,” 673. 38. For the number of charges the EEOC received during its first year, see Occhialano and Vail, “Why the EEOC Still Matters,” 674. For more information on its pattern of disorganization and other issues, see Turk, Equity on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace, 5, 13. 39. Turk, Equity on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace, 4. 40. Occhialano and Vail, “Why the EEOC Still Matters,” 674. 41. Turk, Equity on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace, 14. 42. Occhialano and Vail, “Why the EEOC Still Matters,” 677.

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43. Marama Whyte, “Newswomen in Revolt,” History Today 67, No. 5 (May 2017). https:​//​www​.historytoday​.com​/newswomen​-revolt. 44. Lynn Povich, The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued Their Bosses and Changed the Workplace (New York: PublicAffairs, 2012), 3–4. 45. See “Newsweek’s Women Revolt,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 9, 2012. https:​//​www​.inquirer​.com​/philly​/living​/20121209​_Newsweek​_s​_women​_rebel​ .html. 46. Povich, The Good Girls Revolt, 4. 47. Ibid., 5. 48. Ibid., 56. 49. “Newsweek’s Women Revolt.” 50. Ibid. 51. Whyte, “Newswomen in Revolt.” 52. Povich, “Women in the Workplace: How ‘Good Girls’ Fight Back,” Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2012, http:​//​articles​.latimes​.com​/2012​/oct​/07​/opinion​/la​-oe​ -povich​-newsweek​-discrimination​-gender​-20121007. 53. Email, Nancy Stevens to author, December 3, 2019 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Stevens December 3 email.”]. 54. Turk, Equity on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace, 14. 55. Occhialano and Vail, “Why the EEOC Still Matters,” 677. 56. This information taken from “What You Should Know: The EEOC, Conciliation, and Litigation,” U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. eeoc.gov. 57. Occhialano and Vail, “Why the EEOC Still Matters,” 677–78. 58. Ibid., 678. 59. “What You Should Know: The EEOC, Conciliation, and Litigation.” 60. Ibid. 61. Stevens November 29 email. 62. Davies and Smith, “Jimmy Ward and the Jackson Daily News,” 91. 63. Ibid., 93. 64. Edmonds, “Resisting the Civil Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of the Southern White Press,” 139–40. 65. As Rea Hederman’s childhood friend, the writer Richard Ford said, “[He] was summoned by his father to come run the Clarion-Ledger in 1970.” Quote from “Introduction of Rea Hederman by Richard Ford,” Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. https:​//​www​.ms​-arts​-letters​.org​/richard​-ford​-introduction​-of​-rea​-hederman​.html. 66. Kathleen Wickham, “Hederman Family,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, July 11, 2017,  https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/hederman​-family​/. 67. “Introduction of Rea Hederman by Richard Ford.” 68. Lally, “A Journey from Racism to Reason: Newspaper.” 69. “Introduction of Rea Hederman by Richard Ford.” 70. Stevens November 29 email. 71. Stevens December 3 email.

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72. Info on the papers Stevens worked for was taken from the Stevens November 29 email. Information about the reasons why she split her time between the three different papers taken from Stevens December 3 email. 73. Stevens January 20 email. 74. Stevens December 3 email. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Weil, In a Madhouse’s Din, 5, 7. 78. “Believes in Human Dignity,” Jet, December 12, 1961, 6. 79. Davies, “J. Oliver Emmerich and the McComb Enterprise-Journal,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 112. 80. Carl T. Rowan, “South of Freedom,” Ebony, August 1971, 135. 81. For Emmerich’s views on such issues, see Davies, “J. Oliver Emmerich and the McComb Enterprise-Journal,” 114; for information on the 1957 Civil Rights Act, see, David A. Nichols, A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 168. 82. “Gov. Coleman and the McComb Mass Meeting,” McComb Enterprise Journal, August 29, 1957, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/252128159​/​?terms​ =When​%20the​%20bill​%20becomes​%20law​&match​=1. 83. Quote from Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 467. 84. Rowan, “South of Freedom,” 135. 85. “Believes in Human Dignity,” 6. 86. Rowan, “South of Freedom,” 135. 87. Oliver Emmerich, “The People and the Invasion,” McComb Enterprise-Journal, May 29, 1964, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/318329092​/​?terms​=We​ %20met​%20a​%20crisis​%20with​%20maturity​.​&match​=1. 88. Ted Ownby mentions the bombing of Dunagin’s home in J. Oliver Emmerich Sr.,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, August 14, 2018. https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​ /entries​/j​-oliver​-emmerich​-sr​/. For information on Emmerich’s response to the violence in McComb, see Rowan, “South of Freedom,” 135–36. 89. Rowan, “South of Freedom,” 136. 90. Ibid., 135. 91. Davies, “Oliver Emmerich and the McComb Enterprise-Journal,” 114. 92. As quoted in, John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 67. 93. Oliver Emmerich, “I Don’t Always Agree with What You Write,” McComb Enterprise-Journal, September 28, 1964, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /318418242​/​?terms​=This​%20must​%20be​%20the​%20case​%20sometimes​&match​=1. 94. See “Emmerich Assumes Duties as Editor, Publisher,” The Greenwood Commonwealth, September 17, 1973, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/315949980​ /​ ?terms​ =john​ %20emmerich​ &match​ =1. See also, “Press Register Sold to Mississippi Publisher,” The Clarksdale Press Register, December 20, 1986, 1. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/315949980​/​?terms​=john​%20emmerich​&match​=1.

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  95. “Emmerich Assumes Duties as Editor, Publisher,” 1.   96. Quote from Amy L. Young, “Sad Song in the Delta: The Potential for Historical Archaeology in the I-69 Corridor,” in Time’s River: Archaeological Synthesis from the Lower Mississippi Reiver Valley, eds. Janet Rafferty and Evan Peacock (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2008), 395.   97. Ibid.   98. Weil, In a Madhouse’s Din, 83.   99. John N. Herbers, Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2018), 194. 100. Ibid. 101. See Tim Kalich, “Community Shocked, Saddened,” The Greenwood Commonwealth, February 26, 1995, 1, 7. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/237801341. 102. Stevens November 29 email. 103. Stevens, “Money Matters, As Usual, Top Legislative Issues,” The Greenwood Commonwealth, January 7, 1975, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/249354702​ /​?terms​=nancy​%20stevens​&match​=1. 104. Stevens, “State Lawmakers Average 66 Days a Year,” The Greenwood Commonwealth, December 30, 1975, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/260339719​ /​ ? terms ​ = nancy ​ % 20Citizens ​ % 20Conference ​ % 20on ​ % 20States ​ % 20Legislatures​ &match​=1. 105. Stevens November 29 email. 106. Email, Nancy Stevens to author, January 19, 2020 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Stevens January 19 email.”]. 107. Stevens January 20 email. 108. Stevens January 19 email. 109. Stevens January 20 email. 110. Stevens, “Martha Griffiths Says People Must Get Involved,” McComb Enterprise-Journal, July 19, 1974, 5. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/318277161​/​ ?terms​=Martha​%20Griffiths​&match​=1. For more information on Griffiths’s role in the inclusion of the sexual discrimination clause in Title VII in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, see Samuel Walker, Presidents and Civil Liberties From Wilson to Obama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 300. 111. Stevens, “Martha Griffiths Says People Must Get Involved,” 5. 112. Stevens, “‘Slaves Free for Long Time, Women Aren’t’—Journalist,” The Greenwood Commonwealth, June 6, 1977, 9. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /259250598​/​?terms​=hazel​%20brannon​%20smith​%20nancy​%20stevens​&match​=1. 113. Stevens November 29 email. 114. See, respectively, Stevens, “Ranks of Women Leaders Always Small, Likely to Dwindle,” The Greenwood Commonwealth, September 8, 1975, 1. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/249554300​/​?terms​=nancy​%20stevens​&match​=1; Stevens, “Two Female Candidates Won Legislative Races,” The Greenwood Commonwealth, September 11, 1975, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/249554502​/​?terms​ =nancy​%20stevens​&match​=1; Stevens, “Six Women to Face Election Opposition,” The Greenwood Commonwealth, September 16, 1975, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​ .com​/image​/249554827​/​?terms​=nancy​%20stevens​&match​=1; Stevens, “Mississippi

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Women Legislators from 1924 Term to Present,” The Greenwood Commonwealth, September 17, 1975, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/249554886​/​?terms​ =nancy​%20stevens​&match​=1. 115. Stevens, “Mississippi Women Legislators from 1924 Term to Present,” 3. 116. Stevens, “Two Female Candidates Won Legislative Races,” 3. 117. Stevens, Six Women to Face Election Opposition,” 3. 118. Stevens, “Evelyn Gandy to Preside Over All-Male Senate,” The Greenwood Commonwealth, November 9, 1975, 5. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /249557449​/​?terms​=nancy​%20stevens​%20to​%20hold​%20the​%20second​%20highest​ %20post​&match​=1. 119. Stevens, “No Money for Women’s Commission,” The Greenwood Commonwealth, May 30, 1976, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/263308678​/​?terms​ =nancy​%20stevens​%20Mary​%20Castleberry​&match​=1. 120. Quote from Young, “Sad Song in the Delta: The Potential for Historical Archaeology in the I-69 Corridor,” 395. Carter’s nickname taken from Willie Morris, Yazoo: Integration into a Deep Southern Town (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2012), 184. 121. As quoted in James Dickerson, Dirty Secret: The True Story of How the Government, the Media, and the Mob Conspired to Combat Integration and the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 61. 122. For Carter’s views on lynching and the integration of schools, see Aram Goudsouzian, Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), 111. For Carter’s thoughts on Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi, see Ira Harkey, The Smell of Burning Crosses: An Autobiography of a Mississippi Newspaperman (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), xvi. Quotes related to the NAACP and the Citizens’ Councils taken from Dittmer, Local People, 67, and Jerry Mitchell, Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2020), 76. 123. Ann Waldron, Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1993), 224. 124. Full text of the piece can be found here: https:​//​en​.wikisource​.org​/wiki​/Go​ _for​_Broke. 125. Reference to Carter’s Pulitzer taken from Ginger Rudeseal Carter, “Hodding Carter Jr., and the Delta Democrat-Times,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, ed. David R. Davies (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 274. 126. Bill Steigerwald, 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South (Gulford, CT: Lyons Press, 2017), 154. 127. Waldron, Hodding Carter, 159. 128. Quote about Carter and details of vote from Waldron, Hodding Carter, 245. Carter’s response taken from Wilkie, Dixie, 125. 129. See Michael Newton, White Robes and Burning Crosses: A History of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2014), 132, and “Journalist Betty W. Carter Dies at 89,” The Washington Post, March 3, 2000. https:​//​

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www​.washingtonpost​.com​/archive​/local​/2000​/03​/08​/journalist​-betty​-w​-carter​-dies​-at​ -89​/97bda761​-de57​-4bd7​-a339​-a30f566076b4​/. 130. “Loaded gun” reference taken from John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 563; Carter’s retirement and health concerns taken from Dickerson, Dirty Secret, 61; Betty Carter’s role in the family newspaper taken from “Journalist Betty W. Carter Dies at 89.” 131. “The ‘Conveyer Belt’ for Foreign Policy,” The Washington Post, December 1, 1979. https:​//​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/archive​/politics​/1979​/12​/01​/the​-conveyor​ -belt​-for​-foreign​-policy​/24825310​-ec24​-4c20​-b3ac​-b5365d81761b​/. 132. See Eva Walton Kendrick, “Hodding Carter, III,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, April 13, 2018. https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/hodding​-carter​-iii​ /; Vincent M. Mallozzi, “Two Journalists Walk into a Reunion,” The New York Times, November 9, 2019. https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2019​/11​/09​/fashion​/weddings​ /two​-journalists​-walk​-into​-a​-reunion​.html; Nancy Collins, “Hodding Carter: Smart, Eager and Catching on at State,” The Washington Post, September 17, 1977. https:​//​ www​.washingtonpost​.com​/archive​/lifestyle​/1977​/09​/17​/hodding​-carter​-smart​-eager​ -and​-catching​-on​-at​-state​/3ffd4d70​-eb8c​-485a​-8175​-7f55464de657​/. 133. Brodie Crump, “Congrats to the ‘Little Boss’ and Garden Clubs; Tracking a Goddess,” The Delta Democrat-Times, April 24, 1961, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​ .com​/image​/21547688​/​?terms​=hodding​%20carter​%20moderate​%20tone​%20factual​ %20content​&match​=1. 134. For Hodding III’s views on the strategy of economic boycotts, see Mark Newman, Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2004), 98. 135. “An Irresponsible Weapon,” The Delta Democrat-Times, July 11, 1963, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/21228130​/​?terms​=We​%20trust​%20this​ %20will​%20be​%20a​%20decision​%20quickly​%20forgotten​&match​=1. 136. Collins, “Hodding Carter: Smart, Eager and Catching on at State.” 137. “A Clear Choice Remains,” The Delta Democrat-Times, July 20, 1964, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/33949140​/​?terms​=liberal​%20party​&match​ =1. 138. Collins, “Hodding Carter: Smart, Eager and Catching on at State.” 139. Crespino, In Search of Another Country, 210. 140. Mention of Henry resignation from the MFDP can be found in Lisa Anderson Todd, For a Voice and the Vote: My Journey with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 340. Details of the formation of MAP and its receiving Project Head Start funds can be found by reading Ted Ownby, “Mississippi Action for Progress (MAP),” Mississippi Encyclopedia, April 14, 2018. https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/mississippi​-action​ -for​-progress​/; “unconditional war on poverty” quote taken from Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1993), 225. 141. For more information on the origins and growth of Project Head Start, read Maris A. Vinovskis, The Birth of Head Start: Preschool Education Policies in the

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Kennedy and Johnson Administrations (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1–7. See also Ellen B. Meacham, Delta Epiphany: Robert F. Kennedy in Mississippi (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2018), 68. 142. The number of Head Start centers taken from Crystal R. Sanders, “More Than Cookies and Crayons: Head Start and African American Empowerment in Mississippi, 1965–1968,” The Journal of African American History 67, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 592. 143. See Ownby, “Mississippi Action for Progress (MAP).” See also Kenneth T. Andrews, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 61. 144. Frederick M. Wirt, Politics of Southern Equality: Law and Social Change in a Mississippi County (New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Publishers, 2008), 141. 145. Quote taken from “Democratic Party Loyalists and Freedom Democrats Face Off in Mississippi Primaries.” https:​//​snccdigital​.org​/events​/democratic​-party​ -loyalists​-freedom​-democrats​-face​-off​/. 146. Crystal R. Sanders, A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 158. 147. Collins, “Hodding Carter: Smart, Eager and Catching on at State.” 148. “Nixon Bloc, Loyalist’s Woo State’s Regular Democrats,” The Delta Democrat-Times, August 22, 1968, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/34014602​ /​?terms​=separate​%20but​%20rather​%20to​%20unite​%20Our​%20people​.​%20Our​ %20goal​%20is​%20not​%20a​%20party​%20or​%20a​%20state​%20polarized​%20racial​ %20grounds ​ % 20but ​ % 20solidly ​ % 20bound ​ % 20together​ % 20across​ % 20racial​ %20lines​%20hodding​%20carter​&match​=1. 149. Paul Pittman, “Mississippi GOP Comes of Age in Miami,” The Delta Democrat-Times, August 13, 1968, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/34014357​ /​?terms​=regular​%20democrats​%20nixon​%20republicans​%20mississippi​&match​=1. 150. “Most Regs Cancelling,” The Clarion-Ledger, August 22, 1968, 16. https:​ //​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180993703​/​?terms​=This​%20is​%20far​%20enough​ &match​=1. 151. Email, Nancy Stevens to author, November 30, 2019 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Stevens November 29 email.”]. 152. Stevens January 20 email. 153. Stevens, “Women: Coalition is Urged,” The Delta Democrat-Times, July 18, 1974, 12. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/34115697​/​?terms​=Women​%3A​ %20Coalition​%20is​%20Urged​%20nancy​%20stevens​&match​=1. 154. Stevens, “IWY Conference in Retrospect,” The Delta Democrat-Times, July 14, 1977, 12. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/34070935​/​?terms​=nancy​ %20stevens​%20International​%20Women​%27s​%20Year​&match​=1. 155. Stevens December 2 email. 156. Ellis’s support of states’ rights and criticism of the civil rights movement taken from Susan M. Weill, “Mississippi Daily Press in Three Crises,” in The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement, ed. David R. Davies (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 33.

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157. For Ellis’s editorial policy, see Wilkie, Dixie, 175, and Francoise N. Hamlin, Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 138; Ellis’s reference to Freedom Summer as an “invasion” taken from Hamlin, Crossroads at Clarksdale, 138. “[H]e had few opinions to offer his readers” quote taken from Weill, In a Madhouse’s Din, 87. 158. Weill, In a Madhouse’s Din, 9, 33. 159. Ibid., 88. 160. Wilkie, Dixie, 115. 161. Ibid., 116. 162. Ibid. For quotes, see pp. 121 and 116, respectively. 163. Ibid., 136. 164. Ibid., 116. 165. Ibid. 166. See, respectively, Ray Mosby, “Reminisce About a Great Newspaperman,” The Natchez Democrat, April 29, 2021. https:​//​www​.natchezdemocrat​.com​/2021​/04​ /29​/reminisce​-about​-a​-great​-newspaperman​/; Bob Lewis, “Don’t Tell Me What You Think, Tell Me What You Know. Media Bias, Real and Perceived, Is a Threat,” Virginia Mercury, February 1, 2021. https:​//​www​.virginiamercury​.com​/2021​/02​/01​/dont​ -tell​-me​-what​-you​-think​-tell​-me​-what​-you​-know​-media​-bias​-real​-and​-perceived​-is​-a​ -threat​/; and, Wilkie, Dixie, 116. 167. Wilkie, Dixie, 148. 168. Stevens, “Henry Meets Waller on Plans for Primaries,” The Clarksdale Press Register, January 31, 1974, 14. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/315116339​ /​?terms​=Governor​%20Bill​%20Waller​%20We​%20represent​%20a​%20d​-​-​-​%20sight​ %20more​%20than​%20anybody​%20else​&match​=1. 169. See, for example, Stevens, “Henry Lauds Loyalists’ ‘Desire’ to Unify Party,” The Clarksdale Press Register, June 11, 1974, 8. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /315279042​/​?terms​=aaron​%20henry​%20governor​%20regular​%20democrats​&match​ =1. 170. Stevens, “Attorney Raps Blind School Plan,” The Clarksdale Press Register, January 31, 1974, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/318286134​/​?terms​=melvin​ %20leventhal​%20This​%20is​%20absolutely​%20a​%20segregated​%20and​%20dual​ %20system​%20blind​&match​=1. 171. Stevens, “Yazoo City’s Poor Blacks Get Message Across to Carter,” The Clarksdale Press Register, August 29, 1977, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/ image​/315750984​/​?terms​=Welfare​%20Rights​%20Organization​%20jimmy​%20carter​ %20nancy​%20stevens​&match​=1. 172. See, for example, Stevens, “Legislature Works on Redistricting,” The Clarksdale Press Register, June 20, 1977, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/315598381​ /​?terms​=adequate​%20black​%20representation​%20supreme​%20court​&match​=1. 173. See Stevens, “County Delegation Votes Against Plan,” The Clarksdale Press Register, October 31, 1977, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/315546910​/​ ?terms​=redistricting​%20nancy​%20stevens​%20coahoma​%20county​&match​=1.

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174. An examination of Stevens’s stories for the Press-Register found on the Newspapers.com data revealed that her coverage of the civil rights movement and related stories was relegated to the paper’s interior pages. 175. Stevens December 2 email. 176. Ibid.

Chapter 5

“A Kick-Ass Fun Time”

Around the time that Nancy Stevens came to Jackson to cover the state capitol beat, Elaine Povich, a recent college graduate from Bath, Maine, arrived in town. The UPI’s Jackson bureau was small, but a job there was a fine opportunity for any young journalist—especially one willing to pick up and move over 1,000 miles to parts unknown and unseen. “It was a bit like moving to a ‘foreign’ country, largely because I felt I didn’t speak the language,” Povich said.1 Povich originally applied for a job with UPI’s New York bureau—like many of her generation, the political turmoil of the 1970s inspired her toward journalism, and New York City, the so-called “media capital of the nation,” was one the most exciting places to observe and report the news.2 Her assignment to Jackson was a surprise, but as Povich recalled, not totally unexpected, given how competitive and crowded the market was during the Watergate era. “[Watergate] was so attention-getting that many were attracted to the idea that journalism could really make a difference, and that this would be a career path that could be rewarding and meaningful,” Stephen Burgard, director of the Northeastern University School of Journalism, said in a June 2012 interview. “What you got was a lot of bright and capable people choosing journalism as a career.”3 In truth, the market was too flooded with young hopefuls, most of whom aspired to be the next Woodward and Bernstein.4 “That’s why we couldn’t get a damn job. It was crazy. Honest to God, everybody and their brother wanted to be a journalist,” Povich said.5 Watergate, as well as the social politics of the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism and the raging war in Vietnam, sparked new interest in enterprise journalism— and both Nancy Campbell and Povich wanted to be a part of it. Povich stayed at the UPI Jackson bureau for three years, but she made an impression, and was impressed, during her short time there. As a protegee of bureau chief Andy Reese, she learned the ins-and-outs of capitol news reporting, and in general, honed basic enterprise skills that served her well during her career. “[Andy] showed me how to lead a legislative story and sent me to 175

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cover the [state] budget commission—a daunting task if there ever was one, but one that he viewed as very important,” Povich said.6 Povich was not the first woman reporter hired by and assigned to the UPI’s Jackson office: Nancy Campbell arrived—by way of the Biloxi, Mississippi, Daily Herald—three years prior to Povich. In 1973, she left the Herald (where she covered the state capitol beat), a newspaper she had worked at since high school, over what she called a “money issue;”7 the moment she realized just how much less she earned than her male colleagues, Campbell left, without a second thought, for a better opportunity. “I’ve got to look out for myself,” Campbell told herself. “So, I did.”8 An independent spirit served Campbell her entire life, giving her the courage to trust her instincts and never regret any decision thereafter.9 In that regard, Campbell is not a unique figure in this story, as many of the women who were interviewed for this project also admitted to having a sense of independence that carried them through their careers. Povich, for instance, recalled how a similar attitude helped her. “It’s that ‘sink or swim’ thing that really determines whether or not you can do this job,” she said.10 As with Povich, the events of Watergate, the Vietnam War, and various episodes of the modern civil rights movement inspired Campbell toward journalism— and her bend toward social justice.11 She made the decision to be a journalist much earlier in life, but the social and political events of the mid-twentieth century certainly helped inform her decision to focus on government reporting. “I was truly smitten with government coverage,” Campbell recalled.12 Any reporter with her workload would have to enjoy government coverage—or she would burn out quickly. During her tenure as a full-time reporter at the Herald, Campbell covered the municipal governments of every major town along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Her efforts helped inform readers across the region on a number of issues of vital importance, including stories on economic development and similar topics related to rebuilding efforts in the years after Hurricane Camille. At the same time, she and journalist Hank Klibanoff would share coverage of the state legislature when it was in session. When in Jackson, she continued to keep her eye on any issue that touched on her home, no matter if it was a “splashy” front page story or something that might have gotten buried in the back half of the paper. When Campbell moved to the UPI in 1973, the types of stories she tracked broadened a bit, as the news service was obligated to more than one newspaper or circulation area. “It’s the whole circus,” Campbell recalled. “You just don’t do one [beat].”13 However, when pressed on what stories or topics seemed most important at the time, she remembered and still takes pride in her coverage of legislative reform efforts at Parchman Farm (which Clarion-Ledger reporter Ronni Patriquin, as noted in the next chapter, also followed closely). To be sure, Campbell, when asked to put her career in

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perspective, said that there was nothing “flashy” or “sensational” about the work she did. Rather, she believed the value of her journalism lies in the fact that it symbolizes the kind of “bread and butter” work expected of local and state government reporters.14 The culture of government reporting for both Campbell and Povich included similar introductions to the Mississippi legislature “good ‘ol boy” network and an entrenched sexism that permeated the halls and committee meeting rooms of the state capitol building. They both watched it spill out into the local bars and restaurants of downtown Jackson—like George Street Grocery and the Patio Bar at the Sun-n-Sand motel—that lawmakers made their after-hours second home. Both Campbell and Povich shrugged off most of what she saw and heard and stayed the course, filing stories of state importance; for Povich, the list included a series that exposed a savings and loan scandal at one of Mississippi’s state-chartered banks, and several others documenting Cliff Finch’s controversial term in office. She covered the Jimmy Carter presidential election and the funeral of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, among other historic events of the mid-1970s.15 Both women came from different cultural and regional backgrounds—one claimed Mississippi from birth, while the other made it her home, albeit for a short time. “I was a stranger in a strange land for a while,” Povich said.16 To be sure, their respective personal histories eventually brought them to a similar place—a passion for journalism and for covering local and state issues of social and political substance. For Campbell, at least, her mission was a personal one: “I had this profound sense of responsibility about Mississippi around that time,” she said. “It was a rich journalistic atmosphere.”17 “STRIKING OUT ON MY OWN” Nancy Campbell was one of six children, all daughters, the product of her mother’s two marriages. Campbell was stuck in the middle—a typical middle-child, if you will, trying to find her way. “I was the kid in the middle who couldn’t go with the older ones and didn’t really have a lot in common with the younger ones,” she remembered.18 Born in Gulfport, Campbell moved with her family to nearby Biloxi when she was ten, where she found a group of friends and eventually discovered what she thought would be a lifelong career pursuit: medicine. In high school, she took three years of Latin “just trying to get myself ready for [medical school],” she said.19 She discovered journalism almost by accident, or at least by circumstance. Her friends talked her into working at the school newspaper, and she agreed; it’s an extracurricular activity, she thought, something to add to the resume in preparation for medical school.20 That “something to do that was fun”

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activity turned into a glorified full-time job;21 Campbell served as editor of The Warrior, named in relation to the school athletic teams name, the Indians, and she instituted a number of changes to the paper: printing the paper instead of mimeographing it; selling the paper (for twenty-five cents) instead of distributing it for free; and including ads from local Gulf Coast businesses. “That was fun. That was a kick in the behind,” Campbell said.22 Povich, meanwhile, remembered her childhood in Bath, Maine, as “a typical small town upbringing.”23 She walked to school every day—she lived within a stone’s throw of her elementary, middle, and high schools— and her family owned and ran a small clothing store chain, Povich’s Men’s Shop, a central Maine business staple dating back to the early twentieth century.24 Povich’s, according to local folklore, served a more significant cultural purpose as well: “Most of the Jews who came to Bath in that half-century 1886–1935 provided goods and merchandise that would have been more difficult to attain without the convenience of those shops,” Bath native Nathan Cogan said in a September 2009 oral history. “Bluntly stated, the small shops of the Jews became a vital and necessary component of a town moving from the self-sufficiencies of 19th century independent farming and living and local trading to a 20th century economy.”25 The Povich family name and their time in Maine goes back further than their business interests. In the late 1870s, Elaine Povich’s great-greatgrandfather, Simon Povich (née Petracovich), and his son Nehemiah (later Nathan), left their native Lithuania, then Russian territory, to avoid Nathan’s forced service in Alexander II’s army.26 In addition to stories involving the kidnapping and subsequent inhumane treatment of his own soldiers, there is evidence that the Czar may have required his Jewish subjects to convert to Greek Orthodoxy or face execution.27 Father and son traveled in steerage with other immigrants, arriving after a long trip in Boston, but Simon’s decision to move to Maine (as opposed to staying in Boston) was based on a simple business decision: peddling was one of the only means of making a living, and the license to do so was much cheaper in Maine than any other nearby state.28 Also, Maine was close enough to Boston to buy merchandise—pens, stationary, and other odds and ends— before striking out to the rural parts of the state to sell the goods.29 “After building up a following and making many friends they were frugal and soon began to save some money,” Nathan’s daughter, Dorice Povich Mench, said in an October 1972 interview with the Bath Jewish History Archive.30 Elaine Povich came from strong family stock; her family helped build Bath and Bar Harbor commercial interests, Bath’s first synagogue, Beth Israel Congregation, and a “poor farm” to feed and shelter the poor and homeless. The first and second generations pushed their children and grandchildren toward assimilation—although not at the expense of their Jewish

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identities—while becoming productive, successful citizens in the process. For the later generations in particular, a formal education was a central theme to that success and living the “American Dream.”31 The Povich family, in that regard, was not all that different from most of the Jewish families of the area. According to one Povich family history, “education was paramount. . . . While non-Jews dropped out of high school, Jewish boys went on to college. The Smith family produced two doctors; the Levines produced three dentists; the Poviches produced many lawyers and an internationally famous sportswriter, Shirley Povich.”32 Povich inherited her love of knowledge from her dad, described by his daughter as an “intensely curious individual,” a man with broad intellectual interest in a number of subjects, including history (his chosen major at the University of Maine), politics, and travel.33 By extension, books were the defining feature of the Povich home, as were family conversations about Don’s time in the merchant marines, including his trips to Africa, Gibraltar, and the North Atlantic. The stories were a point of pride, of course, but Don also used them to prepare his children for their own adventures. From these stories, his daughter came to appreciate her father’s wanderlust and his willingness to experiment with life.34 “From him, I got curiosity, which is the thing you need to be a journalist,” Povich recalled about the imprint her father made on her chosen career path. “And the other thing about my dad that I inherited was an ability to try anything.”35 When the time came for Elaine to choose colleges, Don and Janice decided to turn those campus visits into a series of family road trips. The first stop was Syracuse University, a 450-mile one-way trip, but at the top of Povich’s list because of its competitive journalism program (her chosen major by this point). Her parents, however, had other reasons for choosing Syracuse. The university’s Hillel rabbi was a family friend (who actually married Don and Janice when they were students at the University of Maine).36 No doubt, Povich’s parents wanted their daughter to have a familiar face nearby, especially one of significant cultural and religious influence. Also, having a chapter of Hillel International, the world’s largest Jewish campus organization, nearby also may have influenced the family’s visit.37 Having a group of young people that their daughter could turn to, one with a shared cultural bond and advised by a spiritual leader who they knew well and trusted, may have tempered some of the anxiety that Don and Janice felt as their daughter prepared to take her first significant step toward independence. The Poviches were a close, “very traditional” family, Povich recalled, especially in their observance of Jewish religious customs and practices.38 The ways of the “Old World” still held sway over the family, even in the modern age of personal choice and freedom.

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Nancy Campbell’s choices were not defined by religion or culture, but they were influenced by family. Her mother attempted to talk her out of going to medical school but not because she was excited that her daughter had found journalism. Her reasons were much more pragmatic. “She was a professional woman also, and she said at that time, which was in the late ’60s, society was not set up for a working professional woman,” Campbell said. “There were no daycares, unless you were wealthy enough to have a live-in housekeeper or somebody who came in every day, a domestic worker. And she said, ‘Nancy, I know you so well. I know you want to have children. And I know you want to excel at a profession, and you can’t do both. Basically, in this day and time, you can’t do both.’”39 Such was the advice given to generations of women, like Campbell’s mother, who found themselves torn between the roles of “wife” and “mother” and the yearning for non-traditional responsibilities. For some women, the choice to have both, and the perception that they were sacrificing the traditional for the non-traditional in the process, came with a great deal of shame and guilt. As a result, some of the mothers of the previous generation, like Nancy Campbell’s mother, did what their mothers had done and cautioned their daughters to tread lightly on whatever path they chose—or risk the consequences. However, in the decade following Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, as second-wave feminism gained traction, the women of Campbell’s (and Povich’s) generation wanted what many of their mothers believed they couldn’t have: the freedom of making choices and taking risks without the guilt and shame. Campbell, for instance, decided earlier on what she would do: Regardless of the consequences, she was only interested in “doing for myself and striking out on my own.”40 The freedom to “strike out on [their] own” had eluded women for generations, but Don Povich wanted his daughter to have choices and to experience the benefit of her own decisions. On the way home from Syracuse to Bath, he asked the family, “Hey, we’re an hour from Ithaca. Why don’t we drive down and see what Cornell looks like?” he asked. The family, “always up for another hour’s drive,” Povich recalled, made their way down Interstate 81, sixty or so miles south of Syracuse.41 Povich was “blown away,” recalling almost fifty years later that it was the most beautiful college campus she had ever seen. “I was just fascinated by the place,” she said.42 Cornell’s Ivy League status was a far cry from the small-town school she attended in Bath, and Povich, like many young women her age and of her generation, wondered if she had the stuff it would take to make a go of it. “I’m thinking, ‘I’ll never get in here, but what the hell,’” she recalled.43 Povich got accepted to Cornell, as well as Syracuse and Boston University.44 She choose Cornell, despite the fact that it did not have a journalism program, because her acceptance had been such a longshot, in her

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opinion, and the accomplishment of getting into an Ivy League school, could not be ignored. “The choice came down to, ‘This is the best school I got into. We should really give this a shot,’” she recalled.45 She could always transfer, she thought, if the school did not live up to its first impression. Above all else, Povich had choices and the freedom to make her own decision.46 Accordingly, she struck out for Ithaca in 1971, the latest in a long line of Povich family members to go out and find her place in the world. She would find it in downtown Ithaca, just a short distance from the Cornell campus. “Lucky for me, I discovered the Cornell Daily Sun,” she said. “And that for me was the absolute lock. It locked me to Cornell, [and] it locked me to my career.”47 Campbell chose to attend the University of Mississippi, but for all the wrong reasons, she recalled. “I went there because all of the Biloxi football players had gotten scholarships and we were all caught up in all the social [scene], and I was away from home,” she said.48 To be sure, Campbell was already looking for “something challenging to do” by her senior year in high school—she had already fulfilled her requirements for graduation at that point—and the choices she made from that point on could have forced the realization that she was not meant to follow the path of the typical college student and the “drinking, partying atmosphere,” as she called it, that came with that lifestyle.49 For instance, Campbell took a job with the Daily Herald during her first semester of high school—medical school was still her first option, to be sure—where she did the typical stringer work expected of a woman journalist (in training) at the time: writing obituaries, covering local social events, including just about every wedding and funeral in town. After graduation, she covered city hall and began having what she called “a kick-ass, fun time.” She would then work her way up to covering the state capitol for the Herald, practically a one-woman bureau for the paper. Medical school might have still been an option, but Campbell was already leaning in another direction, whether she realized it or not. “I was getting to do things I never dreamed I’d be able to do,” she said of her first newspaper job.50 “MY MAJOR WAS THE CORNELL DAILY SUN” Journalism runs in the Povich bloodline. Eva’s (Elaine’s grandmother) younger brother, Shirley Povich, is considered one of the most successful sports journalists of the twentieth century.51 At a teenager, Shirley worked for The Washington Post (after coming to the attention of publisher Edward B. McClean, who was a regular at the Bar Harbor golf course where Shirley caddied).52 He started out as a copyboy at age sixteen; three years later, the Post named him sports editor, the youngest in the country at the time for such

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a large newspaper market.53 His career lasted seventy-four years—from Babe Ruth to Mark McGuire—and his journalism, some 15,000 weekly columns in all, described in the Post at the time of his death as “literary yet earthy, opinionated yet generous, topical yet filled with historical perspective, and a pleasure to read.”54 Shirley’s son, Maury, answered the call, too. “I have always had ink stains because of my genetics,” he told Forbes contributor Jeryl Brunner.55 Before tabloid television defined his career—the kind of dog-and-pony show that put him in company with the likes of Jerry Springer—Maury paid his dues as an assistant to longtime NBC sports broadcaster Bob Wolff. He then spent the earliest years of his career as “street reporter” in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, covering several significant national events, including both the assassinations of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.56 Elaine Povich joined the staff of the Daily Sun in 1971, at the end of the first semester of her freshman year.57 She stayed until graduation and became so obsessed with the paper that she did not join any other campus groups or get involved in any other extracurricular activities. “I like to say that my major was the Cornell Daily Sun,” she said.58 She wrote at least three dozen articles over a two-year period (1972–1974), starting with the campus housing and dining beat—a “fertile mine,” Povich recalled, because “there wasn’t enough housing and the dining sucked.”59 That beat taught her how relevant seemingly mundane subject matter could be to readers. “Those stories got well-read, and students were very interested in those topics,” she said.60 Not all of Povich’s local stories carried the same weight or got the same response from readers as those related to campus housing and food, of course, but like many young journalists of her generation, she was eager for the kind of work that would make a difference. “It was also the early 70s, the height of the anti-war movement and Watergate, making journalism even more enticing,” she said.61 Indeed, Povich was inspired by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s dogged coverage of the Watergate scandal, and she was eager to do her part in reporting the crisis to the Cornell student body.62 In December 1973, she covered the campus visit of then presidential candidate George McGovern, who told the audience of 2,000 that Nixon should face the consequences of his actions: “If we are going to recover our faith in our political processes and free system, we must demand that justice be done, even in the highest levels of government. One institution (to do this) is Congress, and the remedy is the constitutional powers of impeachment.”63 A few months later, in March 1974, she covered the campus visit of journalist Matt Cooney, who covered Watergate for Westinghouse Broadcasting.64

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Like Campbell, Povich had the opportunity at a young age to work for a local newspaper. As an intern at the Rochester (NY) Times-Union, Povich helped put together a special “Nixon to Resign” issue in August 1974, shortly before she headed back to Cornell for her senior year.65 Specifically, she was assigned to one of the desk editors and helped to put together a “doubletruck” (which refers to a pair of facing news pages, with information stretching across both) of background on Nixon—what Povich called a “two-page retrospective” on the Nixon presidency.66 This task included sifting through all of the wire copy on Nixon, making recommendations on what copy to use, and helping to layout the double-truck. “It was an all-hands-on-deck situation [that night],” Povich said, “and even the lowly interns got to play a role.”67 Later that night, after the issue was put to bed, many of the staff went to dinner and then to a bar across the street to watch Nixon’s resignation on TV. She was thrilled to be a part of it all—“It was quite a day,” she recalled— but no place or experience was quite like the Daily Sun newsroom.68 “I was hooked from the moment I set foot in the Sun’s newsroom” she said. “I loved the people, the atmosphere and the urgency of it.”69 Povich spent four years building a portfolio of “hard news” stories to take with her on interviews for internships and full-time positions. Her resume also included a stint as copy editor, night editor (meaning she ran the paper one night a week), and, during her senior year, news editor.70 That said, her career, and Campbell’s, was not atypical of other women who got their first taste of journalism at their college or local newspapers. Women accounted for the majority of journalism students in the 1970s and have made up at least 60 percent of the journalism student body since the early 1980s. Moreover, this number coincides with an increase in enterprise journalism during the era—a result, in part, of women’s increased participation in “hard news” journalism, including a 3 to 5 percent gain in women news managers by the mid-1970s.71 “The stories about women and newspaper journalism are more complex than a mere telling of the numbers suggests since they are, not surprisingly, connected to broad societal trends,” longtime journalist Christy Bulkeley wrote.72 To be sure, this increase in numbers did not translate into equal pay or consistent promotions, if any at all.73 What the Herald paid Campbell when she returned to the paper as a full-time reporter after college is proof enough of that fact. Campbell left in protest—“I was terribly offended by being short sheeted by my hometown paper, when I had worked so hard for them,” she said—but not all women could or did leave their positions.74 Job opportunities for women journalists were scarce, especially on hard news beats, and many did not have both the experience and education that Campbell had gained at such a relatively young age.

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Campbell transferred to the University of Texas at Austin after her sophomore year and switched her major to journalism (with an emphasis in government reporting). The transition to journalism from medicine had been a long time coming, and Hurricane Camille served as a final catalyst for the change.75 In August 1969, Camille, with 175-mile per hour winds and a twenty-four-foot storm surge, slammed into the Mississippi Gulf Coast near Bay St. Louis. It flattened nearly everything in its path and caused over 250 deaths and approximately 1.4 billion (1969) dollars in damage across multiple states.76 Journalists across the Gulf region were pressed into action, Campbell included. Just days earlier, Campbell was hospitalized, recovering from a recent tonsillectomy; the day before Camille hit, her father, “flipped out” from the news of the approaching hurricane, checked his “sick as a dog” daughter out of the hospital. The family planned to ride the hurricane out at the family home in Bayou View, a Biloxi inland neighborhood they prayed would offer some safety and protection from the storm. They were wrong. The storm ripped off the garage roof, as water rushed in through the back kitchen door. Soon enough, the family car was underwater. Campbell, in nothing but a T-shirt and cut-off denim shorts, and her father and grandmother, who couldn’t swim, waded through five feet of water to a neighbor’s house some distance away from the rising waters.77 “It was devastating,” Campbell recalled. “I can remember snakes passing by my legs on the way out [of the house] while the wind is howling and the trees are falling. The house was flooded and ruined.”78 Even so, Campbell made her way to the Herald in the next couple of days, determined to provide what she described as “the back-up help” she knew the reporters and editors needed.79 She worked the phone lines, taking tips, “sounding like a frog,” she said, and helped edit stories. She was proud of the work the paper did that week: “They did not miss a day of publication. [They] had it printed in Columbia, South Carolina, and flown in every day.”80 The fall semester would be delayed by at least a month, but Campbell wouldn’t remain at the University of Mississippi much longer. In her words, she was “totally psyched for a journalism career,” but “I wanted to do it somewhere else.” She now dreamed of a career at The Dallas Morning News, and attending school at one of the best journalism programs in the country. “At Texas, the sky’s the limit. There is no end to the money they put into their educational programs. They did not treat us like students. They treated us like professionals,” Campbell said.81 That experience included covering politics for the campus newspaper, The Daily Texan, and interning at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where she got her first taste of the Austin state capitol beat as a “basic flunky doing a little bit of everything” for the paper. “We covered gubernatorial campaigns. We covered urban problems in Houston, went down there for two weeks. It

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was an exhilarating educational experience,” Campbell remembered of her time in Austin and the surrounding areas.82 Despite gaining much-needed experience in college covering legitimate hard news stories, most college-educated women journalists, as noted in the previous chapter, were still relegated to “soft news” beats, like the “women’s pages,” or to the role of research assistant—glorified fact checkers—when hired to full-time positions. To add insult to injury, many had to endure the persistent, yet unwanted, sexual advances and jokes from their male colleagues and supervisors, while their complaints about their treatment and requests for serious assignments were dismissed or outright ignored. Povich had a similar experience in college: When I was a student journalist, women were just breaking into parts of the business in large numbers (i.e., not the “women’s” pages, but hard news and sports). I was the AP stringer in Ithaca, NY (Cornell) and was required to cover sports as well as news. I was the second woman allowed in the press box (one had preceded me the year before), but it was not easy. When I introduced myself to the sports information director and explained that I was to cover football and hockey, he looked me up and down—twice—and sputtered: “But, but, but, you’re a girl!” He eventually allowed me to do the job. But I was not allowed near the locker rooms. I was paid $10 a game by the AP, and I gave $5 to a guy reporter friend to get the quotes from the locker room for me.83

Povich’s experiences recall the obstacles women faced trying to break into sports journalism—and the lengths they traveled in trying to do their jobs. American sports culture had long refused women’s participation in covering athletics because, the industry believed, they lack the most basic knowledge of the rules of male-dominated sports like baseball and football. “Is she serious?” Leigh Montville of the Boston Globe wondered aloud when he heard about a federal lawsuit filed by Sports Illustrated (and parent company Time, Inc.) on behalf of one of its journalists, Melissa Ludtke, after Bowie Kuhn, Major League Baseball Commissioner, barred her from entering the New York Yankees locker room during their run through the 1977 World Series. “Did she ever spit in a baseball glove? Was her life absolutely dominated by sports when she was a kid?”84 (It was.) Moreover, the press box was a place of male privilege and prerogative; reporters were vocal, of course, in their opposition to having someone like Ludtke sitting beside them. “I suppose the fact that this was an all-male world was what made it so exciting to me at first. And now that it’s being invaded and eroded it’s much less attractive,” Jerome Holtzman of the Chicago Sun-Times said. “The press box used to be a male preserve—that was its charm. I’d rather not have a woman as a seatmate at a World Series game. It wouldn’t be as much fun.”85

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In 1977, Ludtke won that federal lawsuit against Kuhn, American League president Leland McPhail, and three New York City officials; in Ludtke v. Kuhn, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that the league’s policy barring women reporters from its clubhouses violated Ludtke’s civil rights under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.86 “On the basis of the undisputed facts, plaintiff Ludtke, while in pursuit of her profession as a sports reporter, was treated differently from her male counterparts (other properly accredited sportswriters) solely because she is a woman,” the opinion read.87 The fact that Ludtke’s employers initiated and supported the lawsuit should not be ignored. For professional women to be successful, they must possess decision-making and management power—and have the support of powerful men who understand and appreciate equal opportunities for women. To that point, Campbell and Povich’s fruitful careers at the UPI can be attributed in part to their bureau supervisor, Andy Reese, who helped them navigate unknown and intimidating territory: covering Mississippi politics. “He was phenomenal,” Povich said. “I absolutely hit the lottery when I got Andy as my first boss.”88 “I DECLARED THE COAST TO BE MY PEACE CORPS” Andrew Jackson Reese, Jr., was a no-nonsense, chain-smoking, native son of Mississippi. His father, Andy, was a multi-sport athlete from Tupelo who gave up a Vanderbilt football scholarship to play professional baseball for the New York Giants. In just four seasons, he earned the nickname “Handy Andy” to describe his talents as a utility player, which included four infield positions and all three in the outfield. Injury cut his pro career short, so “Handy Andy” came back home to Tupelo to raise a family (while continuing a minor career with the Memphis Chicks for another decade).89 His namesake, born in 1932, took to journalism like his old man took to baseball. After spending the first few years of his career in Florida, Reese Jr. joined UPI’s Jackson bureau in the 1960s as its capitol beat reporter.90 Given his intimate knowledge of the state, however, there wasn’t as much of a learning curve. “He was formed by [Mississippi]. He knew that state—good, bad, and ugly,” Povich said.91 Reese’s gruff personality was on full display in his first meeting with Nancy Campbell when he told her that “he did not want to hire a woman. He said so out loud. He knew the minute he hired me, he said, ‘I know [you] would do great work, but I also know [you’ll] get married within the year. And there I’ll be stuck.” Nancy Campbell was dating her future husband, A. B. Albritton, Jr., at the time, and it actually took him talking to Reese to

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convince him that marriage “wasn’t going to happen” anytime soon. “He was very old-fashioned,” Nancy recalled.92 To be sure, the newspaper industry was packed with “old-fashioned” editors like Andy Reese—and long before he stepped foot in a newsroom. For much of the twentieth century, as journalism historian Norman P. Lewis notes in his study of the Bulletin, the official organ of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, “editors saw women as sex objects and housewives . . . unsuited for newsroom roles beyond the women’s section.”93 Similarly, historian Cindy Elmore writes that, at the height of the women’s movement in the 1970s and 1980s, women journalists were more likely to be “identified according to marriage or motherhood” by their colleagues and supervisors than by their professional accomplishments.94 In time, Reese revealed himself to be a kind and supportive colleague and supervisor; he was, according to Campbell, a “workhorse of the highest order” and expected the same from his reporters.95 At the same time, he was generous with opportunities, as Campbell learned early in their relationship. Almost immediately, she found herself reporting on issues and stories that she still insists she may not have had the chance to cover had it not been for Reese. “I found Andy to be very, very supportive,” Campbell recalled. “And I had a very dear relationship with him.”96 These particular recollections of Reese reinforce the idea that the progress of women journalists hinged, in part at least, on their relationship with their supervisors and editors—and the willingness of those in power to provide opportunities for talented women who had very little opportunity to progress beyond the stereotypical workplace roles without support. Beyond the perception that women journalists were not as talented as men, and thus had no business covering news beyond the women’s pages, or that hiring women to cover hard news was a waste of time because they would forsake their careers for marriage, the fact remains that many male editors of this era embraced paternalism by refusing to send their female reporters on specific assignments or assign them specific beats (e.g., crime) for fear of putting them in harm’s way.97 Paternalism implies that women are too fragile to handle the rigors of hard news reporting, including the physical environments they are asked to investigate, and are better suited for the “soft news” beats defined by the “four Fs”; accordingly, such attitudes perpetuated the longstanding attitude that “hard news” journalism is a patriarchal endeavor—“men talking to men,” as journalism scholar Bernadette Barker-Plummer has called it—with little to no room for women’s participation.98 To his credit, Reese pushed aside his initial reluctance to hire a woman reporter. Both Campbell and Povich agreed that he also eventually ignored the aforementioned traditional tropes regarding women and journalism, choosing instead to focus on the quality of the work that his reporters produced and

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their willingness to go anywhere at any time. Povich added that this mindset was, in part, the result of Reese having the “immense fortune” of marrying an independent woman: “[That marriage] broadened his outlook,” Povich said. As the manager of a small news bureau, Reese knew better than to spend too much time on any issue that didn’t add value to the work of his bureau. “There was no time to mess around and say, ‘You can’t do this,’” Povich said. “You were available. The thing needed to be done. You went and did it.”99 She elaborated on Reese’s mindset: UPI was not big enough to have time to worry about who was covering what. We had five people. We ran a seven-day-a-week, eighteen-hour-a-day bureau (12 hours on Saturdays and Sundays.). We didn’t have time to worry about who was going where. We had time to worry about who could cover what, you know? Who was free? Who wasn’t busy at that instant?100

Indeed, as both Campbell and Povich soon discovered, Reese had just two basic criteria that he demanded his reporters meet: a strong work ethic and to be available to go whenever and wherever needed. In return, Povich remembered, Reese was a good teacher whose patience and guidance in teaching the particulars of Mississippi political culture was invaluable to the young women he hired. “He really took me under his wing and taught me the ways of the legislature and how to cover lawmaking,” she said.101 At the time Reese offered Povich the UPI job, the only knowledge her parents had of Mississippi was what they had read in the newspaper or seen on TV.102 These impressions left them wary, to say the least, about letting their daughter go to the place that the University of Mississippi history professor James Silver had called the “closed society” in his 1963 presidential address to the Southern Historical Association.103 “I think they had visions of anti-Semitism [with] the not-so-ancient history about James Cheney and [Michael] Schwerner, and, you know, all that [happened with them],” Povich recalled. “They had visions of anti-Semitism and violence in Mississippi. They were a little skeptical about letting their first-born, 22-year-old daughter go to Mississippi all by herself, where she’d never been and didn’t know anybody.”104 Don and Janice Povich’s fears were not without merit. Student activists Cheney and Schwerner, along with fellow activist Andrew Goodman, were abducted and murdered in June 1964, outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, as they made their way to the community of Longdale, right outside of Meridian, to talk with members of a congregation whose church had recently been torched. The husk of their car was found in a nearby Neshoba County swamp just a few days after their disappearance, and their bodies, in an earthen dam some two months after that; all three men had been shot at close range.105

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That Schwerner and Goodman were both Jewish and roughly the same age as their oldest daughter was not lost on the Povich family. And, the fact that the murders were committed by members of White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan—and that local law enforcement had conspired in the crime—was enough, one would think, to make Don and Janice attempt to persuade their daughter not to take the job.106 But, according to their daughter, that’s not what they did. In particular, Don possibly recognized that his daughter had a touch of the wanderlust, too, so he knew he had to (reluctantly) let her go—or, at least, let it be her decision. In that moment, Don sat his daughter down on the family piano bench and asked her if she had any other job offers, any at all, other than the one in Mississippi. After being assured by Povich that there were no other offers, he says, “Well, I think you really have to do this.”107 Campbell, meanwhile, felt the call to come back home after she graduated from the University of Texas. As much as she wanted a job at The Dallas Morning News, she convinced herself that Mississippi needed her. The Gulf Coast region was still rebuilding in the aftermath of Camille, and she felt the urge to do her part, both as a native daughter and a reporter, “because my hometown [almost] had been wiped out,” she said. “So, I declared the coast

Figure 5.1.  Elaine Povich interviews a Civil War reenactor in this mid-1970s photo. Source: UPI photographer photo credit: Carey Womack, UPI. Used with permission of Elaine Povich.

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to be my Peace Corps. And I went back to the Sun Herald, and I’m not sorry that I did.”108 She made the most of her time at the paper “cover[ing] one of everything” as the region continued a massive rebuilding project stretching from Bay St. Louis to Pascagoula and everywhere in between.109 For example, she reported on economic development, infrastructure issues, and related issues of the Gulf Coast region that came before the city governments of the region.110 Campbell’s work ethic and talent did not go unnoticed, as she was soon working the state capitol beat for the Herald. She was the first woman at the paper to cover statewide politics, and she had a young partner to “tag team” (as she called it) the capitol beat: Hank Klibanoff. Years before he and Gene Roberts won a Pulitzer Prize for The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, published in 2006, Klibanoff, a native of Florence, Alabama, came to the Herald in May 1972 with a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern, with his “hair on fire” and an eagerness, Campbell recalled, to get “the best stories of anybody.”111 That same summer, Campbell would meet the young man she would one day marry, A. B. Albritton, who covered the capitol beat for the Memphis Commercial Appeal.112 However important that meeting was to their future, marriage was not on Nancy’s mind when she was promoted to covering capitol beat. She was now the “Bay Bureau Chief” and would split her time in Jackson with Klibanoff (with each spending two weeks of the month in Jackson when the state government was in session).113 She, Klibanoff, A. B. Albritton, Bill Minor, and Norma Fields would form tight bonds, as they saturated the region with news coverage of the Mississippi state legislature during the early 1970s (with Fields and A. B. covering the beat for north Mississippi, Klibanoff and Nancy covering the beat for south Mississippi, and Minor covering the state capitol for the Times-Picayune). “You know, we were all a tight group of people. I mean, yes, there was a certain pride in beating each other, but it was not to the blood,” Campbell said.114 Campbell’s coverage of the state capitol yielded stories not that different from those covered at the local level. Many were related to the continued efforts to rebuild and even expand after Camille—stories related to infrastructure and economy, including development of a Gulf Coast coliseum/ convention center; a degree granting institution for the gulf area with ties to The University of Southern Mississippi; construction of a $3 million park; the development or reconstruction of area highways; and loan forgiveness for businesses hard-hit by Camille.115 During the two weeks that she was not in Jackson covering state government, Campbell continued to cover the city and county governments of the Gulf Coast region. The experience of covering both was invaluable; Campbell

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would receive what she called “a Ph.D. level course in southern politics” from the moment she stepped in the Capitol building.116 Unfortunately, that course also included lessons in sexism and patriarchy—from having to get permission from the House speaker for access to the House floor, to the so-called “scandalous” way she came dressed for work; her short mini-skirts and long hair drew both attention and irritation from onlookers. Even Norma Fields “let [her disapproval] be known,” as the senior (and only other) woman reporter at the state capitol.117 Of course, Fields’s response to Campbell’s dress reveals an interesting social dynamic that existed between Fields and many of the younger women statehouse reporters—the generation gap was never more apparent than in moments in which “tough old broads” like Fields expressed her disapproval in the dress or appearance of one of the younger women in the press pool. She may have held progressive views on a number of political and social issues, but Fields was still of the mindset that a woman should look “respectable” (i.e., dress like a “lady”) in the workplace—an ironic stance given her proclamations that she never allowed the lawmakers to “treat [her] like a lady.”118 Or, Fields could have simply wanted the younger women to be spared the indignity of the unwanted advances, comments, and stares from lawmakers— a form of maternalism, for better or worse, that the women probably never asked for or wanted. And, it’s important to note that Fields was probably of the mindset that young women like Nancy Campbell had a responsibility to dress in a manner that would not draw unwanted attention from men. Or, both can be true. Fields never revealed her intention in scolding Campbell for how she dressed, and with the exception of Ellen Ann Fentress, Fields did not have a substantive relationship, working or otherwise, with the younger women that provided an opportunity for them to ask. Most admired her work from a distance. “She enjoyed the bad-ass reputation she had,” Campbell said of Fields.119 As Campbell settled into her role as capitol beat reporter for the Herald, she watched Fields and used what she saw to her advantage, including Fields’s confrontational, no-nonsense approach: As I think of how did I approach [lawmakers] who would have despised Norma, [I think] that actually worked to my benefit. Because I was not going to ruffle the waters and I was not going to piss people off. I was then, and still am to some extent, a firm believer in being courteous and being civil and being kind. And once you sit down and meet somebody on that level, that you’re a young girl with long hair doesn’t hurt, but I will deny to the day I died that I played it to my advantage, but be that as it may.120

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Like many women of her generation, Campbell decided that the circumstances of the interaction would dictate how she handled herself in the moment: Would she directly confront the person? Would she ignore it, considering it just another unwanted and uncomfortable part of doing business at the state capitol building? Or, would she minimize the advance with an ad lib or off-handed humorous comment meant to diffuse the situation? All tough decisions made in the flash of an instant, and all situations that both she and Elaine Povich found themselves in from time to time. “WHAT WAS SAID IN THE GEORGE STREET, STAYED IN THE GEORGE STREET” In 1976, the drive from Bath, Maine, to Jackson took Povich down I-95, a highway that stretched the entire length of a majority of eastern United States, hugging much of the coastline along the way. She probably got off somewhere between South Carolina and Georgia, crossing the length of Georgia and Alabama into Meridian, Mississippi, and then Jackson. She soon found her first apartment—a one-bedroom on Northside Drive, within walking distance of downtown Jackson—and set about the enormous task of acclimating to her first full-time job in a new region of the country.121 Povich’s challenge was twofold: She had to grasp the daily routine and responsibilities of covering the Mississippi political scene (among other stories), while also assimilating into a culture that she knew very little about— one that was about as far away from her own as Maine was from Mississippi. The two were tightly intertwined; to fail at the latter would undermine her credibility in attempting the former. “I was blind in both eyes,” Povich said.122 In fact, being a “Yankee” journalist was as much a stigma in and around the state capitol building, if not more so, than being a woman. In the eyes of state lawmakers and other political leaders, Povich had the misfortune of being both. “Girl, where you from?” then Fayette, Mississippi, mayor Charles Evers, Medgar’s brother, asked Povich once during a phone interview. “Well, Mr. Mayor,” Povich replied, “I’m calling you from Jackson.” After a long pause Evers asked again, “Girl, where you really from?” Povich knew what was coming next, but she knew she had to play along. “Well, I’m originally from the state of Maine.” “Maine?!” Evers shouted in disbelief. “Got-damn Yankees comin’ down here, tryin’ to tell us what to do!”123 This exchange is indicative of the type of conversation Povich had with many local and state officials when she first met them—one meant to size her up, perhaps intimidate her, and give her a dose of good ‘ol fashioned “Southern pride.” By extension, the exchange, Evers’s display of “Southern pride” included, signified the resentment and distrust of all things “Yankee”

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that bound state Republicans, Democrats, and political independents—Black and white, man and woman. The Civil War was a century gone, but the emotional hangover was still there. Everything moved in surreal motion for Povich, at least at first, as she struggled to get a handle on the culture shock—that nagging feeling of “being plucked out of a place and dropped in an unfamiliar spot,” as she put it.124 The cultural differences—including language, food, geography, attitudes, history, and even the weather—would have been overwhelming without help from a new group of colleagues and friends. Jim Young, the Commercial Appeal’s capitol beat reporter, became a good friend and a teacher of Mississippi geography and history, helping Povich distinguish between the Delta towns of Greenville and Young’s hometown of Greenwood.125 And, since bars like the George Street Grocery—a frequent haunt for reporters and lawmakers alike—didn’t serve bagels and lox, Povich had to try new dishes, like red beans and rice, which she learned to love. “I ate a lot of red beans and rice. You have to understand—I was a wire service reporter. . . . [I]n my first, second, and third years of work, I was making $150 bucks a week,” Povich explained. “I loved the fact that it was cheap and filling.”126 George Street Grocery was the unofficial watering hole for state lawmakers in the 1970s and 1980s, but its historical and cultural significance can be traced back much earlier than that. Built in 1910 as a community market, the property became home to a local brothel and “the city’s finest prostitutes” sometime in the 1920s.127 Designed in the late Victorian/Italianate style of architecture—popular in the United States beginning in the mid- to late nineteenth century—the George Street exterior, including its brick façade and square block shape, may not have looked like a popular house of ill repute.128 The second story, though, contained a number of bedrooms and living spaces—not uncommon for small commercial, two-story block buildings of the era—and a front, second-story iron balcony that ran the length of the brick building, providing a bird’s-eye view of potential clients as they walked up to the front door. Iron and wood defined much of the interior, but it was decorated in a highly ornamental fashion, especially the second-floor living quarters, no doubt to showcase its large rounded windows, wood-paneled doors, and brick drip molding.129 From the 1930s to the 1950s, parts of the building also housed, at different times, a local dance school and, ironically enough, the Jackson chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.130 For the most part, though, George Street Grocery (also known over the years by at least two other names: Nickel Grocery Store and A-1 Food Store) served a distinct purpose—that of the only local market for the residential neighborhood cut by four major roads running through north downtown Jackson: North State Street, Fortification Street, West Street, and High Street.131 That neighborhood of middle class and well-to-do families

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included Christian and Chestina Welty and their three children: Eudora, Edward, and Walter.132 Years later, Eudora, in her autobiographical story, “The Corner Store,” which appeared in a 1975 issue of Esquire magazine, paid tribute to her childhood haunt—and to a time and place before interstate travel and chain supermarkets drew shoppers away from the unique sights and smells of the local market: Ceilings that measured more than twelve feet in height (defined by crossbeams and wood planks that make up the second story floor), floor-to-ceiling shelves, wood barrels of flour, brightly colored candy in glass jars lined up across the width of the countertop, and the scent of fresh molasses, kerosene oil, and licorice, among countless other goods, filling the air.133 George Street Grocery, Welty recalled, “sold not too much of any one thing, but a lot of things.”134 The market closed in 1973 but soon reopened as a local pub, a great place in downtown Jackson to get some southern home-cooking for lunch or dinner and a stiff drink come happy hour.135 With the new owners using the building’s colorful history to their advantage, George Street quickly became one of downtown Jackson’s most popular night spots, no doubt helped by the fact that the state capitol building was just a block or two away.136 When the state legislature was in session, George Street became one of the downtown bars lawmakers and reporters frequented on a near nightly basis. In fact, it was not uncommon to see members of both groups sitting together, deep in both conversation and alcohol; the lines that separated journalist and politician during the day blurred come sundown.137 “It was just the place that everybody went,” Povich said, “and unlike today, when there is such a distance between reporters and office holders, we all drank at the same table.”138 Some of the most influential men in state government were George Street regulars, including C. B “Buddie” Newman, who, in 1976, assumed the position of speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives—that chamber’s senior-most officer.139 Newman had his own table at George Street, a rather large one, Povich recalled, “because he liked to have an audience.”140 Passers-by would see Newman “holding court” with both members of the capitol press corps and “his pals, some pretty powerful people in state government” at his table, Povich said.141 The son of a Mississippi state lawmaker, Newman got his first taste of politics in 1938, as a seventeen-year-old page for the House of Representatives.142 He won his first state election less than a decade later, in 1947143; his friendships with influential men like Walter Sillers Jr. at the time of his election, and years later, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, paid dividends. Sillers appointed Newman to the powerful Ways and Means Committee, the body responsible for making recommendations to the House on all bills related to raising state revenue. Newman would eventually chair this committee in the mid-1960s, and, around the same time, work alongside Barnett to oppose

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James Meredith’s 1962 admission to the University of Mississippi.144 Thirty years later, her views on racial integration had not changed. Black Americans “should have an opportunity to vote. They should have an opportunity for an education, but I would be lying to tell you today if I believe they ought to go to school together,” Newman said in an oral history recorded by the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at The University of Southern Mississippi. “And I don’t think they ought to marry [white people].”145 Politicians like Newman, sons of white privilege and power, were generally unfazed by most challenges to their authority—so long had they been in power that they believed little could knock them from their lofty positions. While they often formed friendly relationships with members of the capitol press pool, most state lawmakers did not appreciate or fully understand the role of the press in the political process. In other words, Newman had little concern that anything he said or did at his table would damage his career— especially in the 1970s, when he was at the height of his power. “He was an old-school [politician] and ran [the capitol] with an iron fist,” Povich recalled. “And everybody kow-towed to Buddie because he had to do it his way.”146 Even so, the relationship between members of the capitol press pool and the lawmakers they covered was such that when both groups walked in George Street, there was an unspoken understanding that, as Povich said, “what was said in the George Street, stayed in the George Street.”147 To be sure, reporters understood that they were always on the clock—Povich left George Street more than once to cover a breaking story—but George Street, for better or worse, became a temporary reprieve from the grind of statehouse reporting. “Everybody would relax and drink and tell stories,” Povich recalled. “You learned things as a reporter, [but] maybe nothing you could put into print.”148 These recollections bring a few concerns to mind, chief among them the perceived blurring of ethical and professional lines. At what point did reporters decide which conversations should or should not be reported? How were professional lines maintained the next day at work and thereafter? According to Povich, there were at least two important unwritten rules that journalists followed when they walked through George Street’s front doors: First, friendships with members of the state legislature were absolutely prohibited. “You could drink with these guys,” she said, “but they weren’t your friends. They were the people you covered.”149 Secondly, a reporter was always on duty, even when they’re not. As men like Newman got busy “putting on a show” for the crowd around them, Povich watched and listened carefully. At other times, she and other reporters would sit and talk with lawmakers, eager to get their thoughts on different topics, whether that be hard news topics or silly statehouse gossip. Those conversations were genuine, to be sure, and she enjoyed her time at George Street, but the journalist in her would never allow for her guard to be down

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completely. She may have never formally recorded or reported on anything she saw or heard at George Street, thus keeping to the unofficial mantra, “what was said in the George Street, stayed in the George Street,” but Povich kept a mental record of many of those interactions, and used them to her advantage. “You learned, I think, about the people a little bit and kind of what made them tick,” Povich said when asked about her social interactions with state policy makers. “so if you did have to go to them with something really serious, then you can use what you had learned about them as people to learn how question them.”150 Lawmakers took full advantage of the “what was said in the George Street” unwritten rule; both the bar and the capitol building, according to Povich, was the scene of “a lot of crazy, sexist stuff,” most of which she “brushed off”—for example, the times in which a lawmaker, spotting her in the press seats at the front of the House chamber, passed her a note in the middle of the session.151 “It just was what it was and I, like a lot of women, just put up with it,” she said.152 Povich admits, though, much of what she experienced, whether it happened at George Street, in the capitol building, or while on assignment, would be considered grossly offensive by today’s standards.153 The second-wave feminist movement may have galvanized millions of Americans in the 1970s, but as Norma Fields pointed out in her weekly column, most of the members of the Mississippi legislature were not among their numbers. When a ranking member of the Senate Constitutional Committee told Fields that “Mississippi is in good shape as far as equal rights are concerned,” he meant that the state legislature had no intention of passing any measure that would threaten the hegemony of male privilege and power.154 Their rhetoric on the House and Senate floors spilled out into social venues like the George Street Grocery in a different way but with the same message—through demeaning jokes and unwanted advances, lawmakers again made their stance on equal rights crystal clear. The fact that Povich and other women, in her words, “[put] up with it,” shows the pervasiveness of sexism in just about every aspect of American culture and life—our attitudes, behaviors, and language—and how unprepared most professional women were to deal with it. To be sure, there were women who chose confrontation over “putting up with it,” as Campbell’s experiences at the Sun-n-Sand Motor Hotel demonstrate. A stone’s throw away from the state capitol building, the Sun-n-Sand was another familiar and frequent destination for Mississippi lawmakers. Built in 1960 by R. E. “Dumas” Milner, who owned a hotel on the Mississippi Gulf Coast by the same name, the Sun-n-Sand looked every bit the part of a mid-century American motel—from its Las Vegas—style Googie sign (a space-age architectural design for signs, defined by their distinctive sharp edges and angles and bold colors) and metal screens that defined its exterior,

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to the Polynesian-style décor on the inside.155 An endless supply of bologna and crackers was always within a hand’s reach, as was a good, stiff drink prepared by mixologist Rudolph “Cotton” Baronich at the bar affectionally called “Ye Olde Sand Box.”156 When in town, any number of state legislators staying at the hotel might be hosting a sardine party at the outdoor pool in the back of the hotel—if they weren’t playing cards, making deals, or taking part in any number of “bull sessions” in the dining room or at an adjacent bar called the Patio Room.157 As noted by longtime Mississippi journalist Sid Salter, the Sun-n-Sand was, all at once, “the epicenter of Mississippi government, politics, and lobbying” and a place that “smelled like a goat and was not in danger of making the cover of Southern Living.”158 Campbell was a frequent visitor to the Patio Bar; like Povich, she knew it (and the Sun-n-Sand in general) was one of the places that a journalist could, in Salter’s words, “develop serious sources if a journalist could earn [lawmakers’] trust and respect.”159 The only way to do that was to sit down with them, have a drink (or two), watch, listen (“Play deaf, dumb, and blind,” Campbell said), and follow a few well-established rules: Keep “off-the-record” conversations “off-the record”; don’t misquote; and don’t walk in with the intent to play “gotcha games” with lawmakers. As in the case of the George Street Grocery, “What’s said in here, stays in here,” state representatives Mike Mills and Billy McCoy reminded Salter during one of his first visits to the Sun-n-Sand.160 What Campbell knew about Mississippi politics as a young journalist, she learned in the Patio Bar “at the feet of the “Biloxi-Gulfport-Pass Christian delegation,” she said. Three state senators (who shall not be named) were among the usual suspects she joined for drinks after that day’s session and before she turned in the next day’s copy. They considered Campbell one of their own—one senator, in fact, had been a classmate of Campbell’s mother— so she was privy to many discussions regarding state legislation, including what she described as the delegation’s “various maneuverings, the legislative tricks that they were planning the next day, that would keep the bill from being introduced.”161 In a recent interview, Campbell recalled the influence those conversations had on her reporting: They kind of took me under their wing. It was to their ever-loving advantage, because I was the mouthpiece for their constituents. But, I also, as the night wore on, learned everything about everything, about everybody. I learned what was coming up next. And, I could play deaf, dumb and blind, but I got the finest scoops that way you could ever imagine.162

To be sure, the meetings were not without their challenges and frustrations, especially in an atmosphere once described by an Associated Press reporter

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as “a sort of tacky fraternity house for generations of Mississippi lawmakers.”163 The elected officials were usually much older than your typical college student but no less brazen in their attitudes and behaviors—especially after having more than a few drinks. On one particular night, Campbell felt one senator’s hand on her knee; it slowly moved up her leg, unnoticed by everyone else at the table. Campbell waited for a break in the conversation, “just a couple of minutes when it was my turn to talk,” she said, and turned and looked at him. “What do you think my mother would say if she could see where you hand is now?” His reaction, as Campbell recalled, was one of disgust. “He was mortified,” she said. “He got up, grabbed his jacket, and I never saw him again in there.”164 The fact that Campbell chose to handle the situation as she did is a reflection of how comfortable she felt around men who knew her well (and perhaps how little patience she had for wandering hands—or both). It should be noted, however, that her reaction, as empowering as it was in the moment, was not indicative of how many women in her position could have or would have reacted. Campbell insisted that she has no regrets for embarrassing the lawmaker, despite the fact that he was angry at her and that there could have been professional repercussions for what she did.165 (“Don’t burn your sources” was another unwritten rule of the relationship between Mississippi lawmakers and reporters).166 “I wouldn’t have cared if there had been [consequences],” she insisted. “He had completely crossed the line, and I embarrassed the shit out of him. And, I’m not sorry that I did.”167 Perhaps she would have reacted differently, if at all, had she not been at a table with men who knew her so well and who “fell out on the floor” laughing at their colleague’s embarrassment.168 Povich recalled one incident in particular that explained why women reporters did not often confront their aggressors. Her story demonstrates why Campbell’s reaction remains exceptional for its time: A member of the House (whose name escapes me) called my apartment very late one night in a highly inebriated state and allowed that he could tell that he had not woken me up because he could see that my light was on. I was pretty scared, and was ready to call the cops if he knocked on the door. But he didn’t. The next day, he carried on as if nothing had happened the night before. So did I. I suspect my reaction would be different today, but I was young and didn’t want to make waves.169

Youth and inexperience convinced Povich to not “make waves”; after months of searching, she also felt she was fortunate enough to have her job and did not want to do anything to jeopardize her progress, including her access to sources and information. So, like a countless number of women

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before and after her, she moved on. There was too much work to do, too many stories to report. Almost half a century later, we are just now at a place where we are acknowledging the damage that sexism, sexual harassment, rape, and other forms of sexual assault has done and continue to do, but even in the age of #metoo, there is still significant resistance to cultural change. For women of Povich and Campbell’s generation, sexism was acknowledged but rarely confronted, particularly in the Deep South, where men in power often disarmed their targets with their southern drawls and polite terms of endearment: “darlin,’” “sugar,” and “little lady,” chief among them. “NO TIME TO MESS AROUND” Perhaps the biggest story that Campbell reported during her tenure at the UPI, or at least the crisis that she recalls most vividly, involves events at Parchman Farm, the state penal farm built in the early 1900s on a 20,000-acre plantation in the Mississippi Delta, and the state government’s efforts to implement corrective measures, both temporary and permanent.170

Figure 5.2.  In this undated photo, Nancy Campbell (Albritton) (far left) is shown at the Hancock County Airport waiting for “someone important . . . I have no idea who,” she said years later. Source: Daily Herald. Used with permission of Nancy Albritton.

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The history of Parchman is intertwined with a century of violence, punishment, and forced labor that followed the Civil War. The state’s economy, once driven by slave labor, and its infrastructure, torn apart by the battles of war, lay in ruins. Its white population was no better off; more than a third of Mississippi soldiers died in battle or of disease—one quarter of white men over the age of fifteen were dead—and 20 percent of the state budget was used for artificial limbs to patch up the survivors.171 Farms were attended to by women, the wounded, and the aged, if they were tended at all. “Desperate planters and farmers struggled simply to survive,” historian David Oshinsky writes in Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. “The slaves had been freed; their currency was worthless; their livestock and equipment had been stolen by soldiers from both sides.”172 In the wake of such desperation, state lawmakers enacted the first of the “Black Codes,” which gave authorities the power to arrest Black citizens for even the slightest transgression, with swift and severe punishments.173 Oshinsky notes that in the aftermath of the Civil War, the state was “moving toward a formal—and violent—separation of the races” that included codifying a system of forced Black labor and obedience meant to repair Mississippi’s economic and political systems.174 The roots of Parchman, in other words, grew from the sustained belief that emancipation was an immoral fiction, and the Civil War, an illegal act of aggression from a foreign power.175 Accordingly, Mississippi lawmakers used any means necessary to restore the southern hegemony of the antebellum era—Parchman Farm played a significant role in the economic and ideological struggle for social order. “For the state of Mississippi, Parchman was ‘a giant money machine: profitable, self-sufficient and secure,’” as noted on the website of The Innocence Project, whose mission is to exonerate the wrongly convicted and work toward criminal justice reform.176 To be sure, there were (il)legal controls, such as the state’s “prison leasing system,” known as the state “Pig Laws,” already in place decades before Parchman was even built. These laws, passed in 1874, were an end runaround, so to speak, of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and indentured servitude. The “Pig Laws” allowed the state to make an exception to the Amendment, specifically for “punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”177 Just three years after the Pig Laws were passed, the number of state prisoners rose from just under 300 to approximately 1,100; on average, the state made about nine dollars a month for each prisoner. “[The state] needed a workforce,” Olinsky writes. “The best workforce and the cheapest workforce they could get were convicts who were beings arrested for largely minor offenses.”178 Parchman Farm, named after the family who originally owned the plantation, simply provided the state a more centralized location and means for its

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profit-through-forced-labor system.179 Parchman’s 20,000 acres provided the land necessary to grow cotton and other crops to be sold at market, with the state reaping profit from fifteen-hour days of hard labor. In just two years, Parchman had earned the state $185,000 in profit, almost five million by today’s estimates, at the expense of a labor force that was 90 percent Black, men, women, and children who worked some days in 100-degree heat and under the nose of armed guards.180 “It was legalized torture,” the staff of The Innocence Project report on their website.181 Circumstances were no better by 1971, when inmates filed a class-action suit against the prison superintendent, its board, and the Mississippi governor, claiming that the conditions at Parchman violated their civil rights. As a federal judge ordered a formal investigation into Parchman, journalists from all over the state, (including Ronni Patriquin and Nancy Campbell), conducted their own investigations.182 Campbell’s reporting was part of a larger effort by the Mississippi press to uncover the details of the prison’s culture of abuse, mistreatment, and neglect of inmates. In fact, the UPI had already filed many stories related to the lawsuit when Campbell took over the investigation, including one about the state House of Representatives passing a bill that dissolved Parchman’s infamous “trusty system.”183 Under this system, prisoners, many of whom had been convicted of the most violent offenses, were selected to supervise other prisoners—and given firearms and permission to use violence to help maintain order. “The whole situation at the penitentiary will make you sick if you halfway look into it,” Representative Stone Barefield of Hattiesburg, who introduced the bill, told the press.184 Campbell followed the reform efforts closely during the 1973 and 1974 legislative sessions. For example, in November 1973, she filed a report detailing allegations that prison guards had acted as an “organized ‘goon squad’” to brutalize inmates. The story also revealed related information about staffing issues—the fact that a minimum of about 140 guards were needed for Parchman to run smoothly, but even after Governor Waller mobilized approximately forty members of the Mississippi Highway Patrol to help, the prison still had less than 100 guards on staff (due to the record number of civilian guards who had recently quit). The situation was “explosive” enough that a district judge considered reinstating, at the prison’s request, the now-abolished trusty system.185 During the next two legislative sessions, elected officials debated a number of reform measures related to the crisis, and Campbell was there to document them. Her reports included at least two profile pieces of the newly appointed prison superintendent, Jack K. Reed, in November 1973, and, just two months later, a story on Governor Bill Waller’s steady support in him—despite some criticism of Reed’s performance from other prison officials early on in his tenure.186 She covered the details of a legislative bill (and revisions to the bill)

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that would abolish the Mississippi Penitentiary Board (which had long ruled over the prison) and give the governor full authority to appoint and remove a director of corrections. A revision to the bill killed efforts to decentralize Parchman by creating a regional prison system that would have included facilities in the Gulf Coast region and in Hinds County.187 “I think Mississippi has to make a choice between running a 22,000-acre farm and having a corrections system,” an official with the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards, who helped formulate the original plan, said when authorities removed the regional prison system measure.188 Campbell followed the fits and starts of prison reform, just as state lawmakers drew lines in the sand, with some arguing that abolishing the board and giving the governor full authority would “create ‘some kind of czar under the governor,’” as noted by Representative Tommy Campbell of Yazoo City.189 Others, like Bob Anderson of Wesson, argued that reform may not happen if there was not an authority figure, like a director of corrections, “to call the shots.”190 Anderson also summarized the feelings of most lawmakers in saying, “Nothing we do can be worse than what we have.”191 The battle to reform Parchman would continue for some time after Campbell left the UPI, and Ronni Patriquin’s coverage on behalf of The Clarion-Ledger (as detailed in the next chapter) would be important in documenting those efforts. A year later, Nancy Campbell and A. B. Albritton married and Nancy moved to Memphis, where A. B. continued his work for the Commercial Appeal, and Nancy took a job with the UPI’s Memphis bureau.192 Andy Reese, meanwhile, would recall a conversation he had with A. B. around the time he hired Nancy: “She’ll marry you within the year,” Reese said, “and there I’ll be stuck.”193 But he wasn’t. Nancy Campbell changed Reese’s perspective on women as professional journalists as much as he helped shape her journalism career. Elaine Povich came to the UPI some months after A. B. and Nancy left for Memphis, and Reese soon cut her loose to cover one of the biggest scandals in the financial history of the state: the 1976 savings and loan crisis. On Monday, May 10, 1976, Povich, from a window in her office building, could look down and see a line forming in front of the Bankers Trust Savings & Loan Association building, which also housed the UPI bureau.194 Once the crowd got big enough to look like trouble, Povich left to go find out if what she and her colleagues were seeing was really happening—that customers were making a run on one of the state’s largest financial institutions. She also followed up with members of the state Board of Savings & Loan Association and State Auditor Hamp King, who chaired the board, to see what they knew of the situation.195 Three days later, on May 13, 1976, Povich’s first report appeared in newspapers around the country. The details: an investor in the Bankers Trust

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Company, the parent company of the Bankers Trust S&L (which operated fifty branches around the state and controlled $230 million in assets), filed a lawsuit in Hinds County Chancery Court claiming the company was insolvent and demanding the company buy back $80,000 in stock;196 “a substantial number of depositors,” having caught wind of the lawsuit, visited numerous branches to demand full withdrawal.197 As a result of the public reaction of May 10, the board ordered a thirty-day moratorium against all customer withdrawals to protect the company’s “sound asset structure.”198 However, the damage was done, as customers removed more than six million dollars in one day, and the moratorium stretched far beyond that one month period. “It was a little scary—the financial underpinnings of the state charted savings and loans were in big trouble at that point,” Povich said.199 Less than a month later, Povich reported that executives admitted that their company was indeed insolvent—a significant problem given that the S&L deposits comprised over 90 percent of the company’s total assets. As a result, both the S&L division and the company fell into receivership, followed by a number of S&L employee layoffs.200 Weeks later, in August 1976, Povich reported the court-appointed receiver filed a lawsuit accusing the Bankers Trust Company board of directors of voting to pay more $300,000 in stock dividends in 1974 and 1975 from “pretend and fictitious surplus or net profits” despite recorded losses of more than five million dollars.201 A Memphis attorney, representing several customers, then filed a class-action lawsuit the following month against both S&L and Bankers Trust Company executives, claiming “gross mismanagement and negligence” of bank funds (in which many former and present board members used their positions for “unjust [personal] enrichment”) and “fraudulent conduct” by misleading customers, shareholders, and bank customers, as to the company’s financial state of affairs.202 When Governor Cliff Finch called a special session of the Mississippi legislature early the next year, Reese’s current capitol beat reporter was on vacation. So, he called out to his youngest and newest hire. “Povich! Go to the capitol and find out what they’re doing,” he ordered. However, having just joined the Jackson bureau, Povich had barely stepped foot in or around the state office buildings in downtown Jackson and “didn’t know anybody.”203 Regardless, she knew the opportunity to prove her worth as a reporter may not come around again, so her sink-or-swim mentality kicked in. “A lot of times you get thrown into stuff that you don’t have any idea [about]. This was the epitome of being thrown into something that I knew nothing about.”204 On February 11, Povich reported on the passage of a “massive” bill to regulate the S&L banks in the state.205 This story was among the first she would file while working the capitol beat, but it also represented the culmination

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of months of reporting of one of the state’s most significant financial crises. Years later, she reflected on what that coverage did for her confidence as a young journalist. “To say that the learning curve was steep was to say that, you know, that climbing the Matterhorn is just another mountain. It was huge,” Povich admitted. “So, I was very proud of myself for being able to figure this out and hold my own and write stories.”206 At the same time, Povich recognized Reese’s help in her coverage of this issue, and consequently, her growth as a reporter—particularly in the context of what he taught her about Mississippi politics and culture. He was instrumental in pointing out to her who she should (or shouldn’t) interview regarding the banking crisis, and he was a patient tutor in explaining the structure of the state banking system.207 Reese was more than just an editor to Povich (and Campbell); he was an historical and cultural encyclopedia on all things Mississippi. Povich, in particular, knew very little about the state’s social, political, and economic history when she was hired, and Reese was able and willing to fill in those important contextual gaps. Also, Reese afforded her the opportunity to cover a variety of social and political issues outside of her frame of reference, including the funeral of civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer. When she walked into the crowded Williams Chapel—what she remembered as a “tiny, white wood, clapboard” Baptist church in Ruleville, Mississippi—on March 14, 1977, the young Jewish woman from Maine was immediately taken aback at the sight. “I had never seen anything like this,” Povich said.208 Povich, who had never attended a Southern Black Baptist church service before, saw a cultural celebration befitting the woman considered to be the emotional center of the state civil rights movement. Povich, who walked in with Hodding Carter III, publisher of the Delta-Democrat Times, squeezed into the small church that was “filled to overflowing,” she recalled, with around 400 people in attendance.209 She looked around the room, surprised to see raw emotion filling the church pews, churchgoers fainting in the aisles, and an overall “exuberance” in the room that stood in sharp contrast to the displays of grief and regret that usually hung over most white funeral services.210 “It was so emotional because of who she was and because of the people who were in that church. I mean, it was unbelievable,” Povich said. “I remember filing that story and hoping to hell that I’d done it justice.”211 Povich’s story included as many observations as she could afford to give—she quoted then UN Ambassador Andrew Young’s eulogy and described several important moments from the service, as when Young led the congregation in the singing of Hamer’s favorite hymn, “This Little Light of Mine.”212 She also provided important historical and biographical details about Hamer’s life and work—the fact that Hamer, a sharecropper, was thrown off a Mississippi Delta plantation because she tried to register to vote;

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her efforts in coordinating state voter registration drives, and her work as a founder of the Freedom Democratic Party.213 “It was one of those stories . . . [that] is such an event that you just hope to heck you can make some sense of what it was like in that place.”214 During her time with the UPI, Povich would report on a number of stories of state, regional, and national significance. Take, for instance, the time she rushed out into the middle of the night, October 20, 1977, to one of the most important nonpolitical stories of her career. “I’d never seen anything like that,” she said years later.215 On that night, Povich was at the George Street when she and other reporters got wind of a small plane crash just outside of Gillsburg, Mississippi, located in the southwest part of the state. She called Andy Reese at home and asked to go, but for the first time since she joined the UPI staff, Reese hesitated to say “yes.”216 It was dark, she would be driving alone, and the crash, allegedly involving the Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, happened in a remote, wooded area in Amite County, Mississippi. Still, Povich pressed Reese. “Do you know how to get there?” Reese asked over the phone. “Yes,” Povich said. Do you have money?” he asked. “Yes, I have money,” Povich said.217 Lynyrd Skynyrd had just released their fifth studio album, Street Survivors, five days before the crash, and were in the first month of a four-month promotional tour. That tour included stops in Greenville, South Carolina; Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where they were scheduled to play in front of a raucous student crowd at LSU, and, eventually, Madison Square Garden, the band’s dream destination. The band was three hours into a flight from Greenville to Baton Rouge—via a thirty-year old “rickety” plane with a sketchy track record—when their twin engine aircraft ran out of fuel and fell 4,500 feet to Earth.218 Back in Jackson, reporters at George Street scrambled to get on the road. Povich ran out the front door and into her powder-blue Mustang II to go “down into the wilds of southwest Mississippi to cover a plane crash all by myself in the middle of the night.”219 She barreled down I-55 South, going anywhere between 90 to 100 mph, depending on whether or not her car was traveling up or downhill, she recalled. Less than an hour after she left George Street, Povich took Exit 8 toward MS-Highway 568, traveling west another five to ten miles in the dark, down two-lane roads, before seeing blue lights in front of a roadblock set up by the Mississippi Highway Patrol. She was relieved the state map that she kept in her car’s glove box had served her so well. “Did I know where the hell I was going?” Povich asked, before revealing that she lied to Reese when he asked if she knew how to get to Gillsburg. “No.”220 The crash would claim band cofounder and lead singer Ronnie Van Zandt, guitarist/vocalist Steve Gaines, and his sister, backup singer Cassie Gaines,

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along with assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick and both pilots. The other twenty passengers sustained serious injuries as the plane split apart, clipping trees before hitting the earth nose-first 200 yards from an open field that the pilots tried to reach during an emergency landing.221 The impact caused the tail, cockpit, and wings to tear away from the fuselage, which ripped open as it skidded to a stop just a few minutes before 7:00 p.m. The first responders, nearby locals who rushed to the scene in their pick-up trucks and four-wheelers, would find a heap of bodies and debris, with survivors crying and screaming out for help. “Folks were all mashed together,” local Dwain Easley said of the crash site and the survivors he helped rescue. “We’d move one and there would be another one laying there.”222 The crash happened two miles off of MS-Highway 568, “in the middle of nowhere,” Povich said. “We had to hike across a plowed field to get there. We couldn’t drive anywhere near there.”223 Povich walked through the soft, muddy soil and then waded through a shallow creek in the dark and in a skirt and four-inch heels.224 By the time she got there to witness the “awful” scene, there was, according to Rolling Stone magazine, “a hive of activity”—teams from the National Guard and Coast Guard working to secure the scene, medical personnel from Forrest County General Hospital working to stabilize the survivors, and helicopters buzzing overhead, their searchlights cutting into the pitch black night.225 Those searchlights provided Povich her first glimpse of the “gory details” of the crash, a scene she would just as soon forget, one that she is still hesitant to discuss in full detail.226 Like the journalism of Norma Fields, Povich’s journalism highlighted a number of political issues that may have otherwise gone uncovered, many of which were related to women’s political equality, their strides in workplace equality, their health, and their reproductive freedom.227 Povich also covered election night, 1976, and witnessed the state award Jimmy Carter the electoral votes he needed to win the presidency; the growing heroin trade in the state; the state budget commission; and the legislative debate over the death penalty.228 But, in hindsight, it was the funeral of a dirt poor sharecropper turned political activist that left the most lasting impression of Povich’s time in Mississippi. “I understand that I was extremely lucky to be in [the church] at all because there were so many people clamoring to get in who couldn’t get in,” she said. “I took that, you know, as a really amazing [experience].”229 When Povich left the state a year after Hamer’s funeral, she left a more well-rounded, polished enterprise reporter. Her time at the UPI’s Jackson bureau afforded her the experience she needed to cover national politics, so when she felt she was ready, she requested a transfer to UPI’s Washington, DC, bureau.230 Povich would spend another decade there before transferring to the Chicago Tribune, but she never forgot her time in Mississippi—the culture and its people, the steep learning curve she conquered, but, most of all,

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the stories she covered, and the people who shared in a difficult but rewarding experience.231 “I adapted and found a wonderful group of friends and fellow reporters to hang out with,” Povich said of her time down South. “They were both male and female, and many were also from somewhere else. They were a combination of natives and imports, and we had a very fun time.”232 Povich’s story is very similar to that of Johanna Neuman, who came to Mississippi by way of California. Like Povich, she came to Jackson because she needed a job; and, like Povich, she felt like, and was perceived as, the proverbial outsider. Again, like Povich, Neuman was young but experienced, yet unsure of the place described as the “closed society.” However, like Povich, Mississippi, and its people, surprised her. As part of editor Rea Hederman’s efforts to rebuild The Clarion-Ledger and its reputation, she, along with journalist Ronni Patriquin—who was certainly no stranger to the South, having been raised in Louisiana—would earn her stripes covering Mississippi politics. “My experiences in Mississippi loomed large in my life and in my career,” Neuman later said.233 Ronni Patriquin, like Campbell, was a daughter of the Deep South. Raised in Louisiana, she made Mississippi home, albeit for a short period of time, while she worked for Rea Hederman at The Clarion-Ledger. Her no-nonsense personality was similar to that of Norma Fields, and she needed it, as she investigated the goings-on at Parchman Farm and, with Johanna Neuman, brought Hederman the first wave of stories that would help remake the image and reputation of his family’s paper. “I never thought I would go to work for The Clarion-Ledger or any of the Hedermans,” Patriquin said.234 NOTES 1. Povich email. 2. Quote from Maury Klein, “When New York Became the U.S. Media Capital,” City Journal, Summer 1996, https:​//​www​.city​-journal​.org​/html​/when​-new​-york​ -became​-us​-media​-capital​-11973​.html. 3. Matt Collette, “3Qs: How Watergate Changed Journalism—and the Nation,” News@Northeastern, June 13, 2012, https:​//​news​.northeastern​.edu​/2012​/06​/13​/ watergate​-burgard. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid.   6. Povich email.   7. Nancy (Campbell) Albritton, video interview by author, May 13, 2021 [Hereafter abbreviated “Albritton video interview.”].   8. Ibid.   9. Ibid. 10. Povich email.

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11. Albritton video interview. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Povich email. 16. Ibid. 17. Albritton video interview. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Povich email. 24. Povich provided the information about walking to school every day. For more information on the history of Povich’s Men’s Shop, see Doris Povich Mensh, “Story of the Povich Family,” Bath Jewish History, October 15, 1972. https:​//​www​ .bathjewishhistory​.org​/story​-of​-the​-povich​-family​/. 25. Nathan Cogan, “Memoir of Bath 1886–2009: Recollections of My Family and the First & Second Generation Jewish Immigrants 1886–1960,” Bath Jewish History, September 13, 2009. https:​//​www​.bathjewishhistory​.org​/memoir​-of​-bath​-1886​-2009​/​ ?rq​=cogan. 26. Mensh, “Story of the Povich Family.” See also “The Povich Family,” Documenting Maine Jewry, Accessed September 7, 2018, 40. https:​//​mainejews​.org​/docs​/ Risen​/PovichFamily002​.pdf. 27. Mensh, “Story of the Povich Family.” See also “The Povich Family,” 40. 28. See Mensh, “Story of the Povich Family,” for information on how Simon and Nathan arrived to America. For information on peddling and the cost of a license to peddle in Maine, see “The Povich Family,” 40. 29. Mensh, “Story of the Povich Family.” 30. Ibid. 31. Elaine Povich, phone interview by author, January 21, 2019 [Hereafter abbreviated “Povich phone interview.”]. 32. “The Povich Family,” 44. 33. Povich phone interview. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. For more information on Hillel International, see https:​//​www​.hillel​.org​/. 38. Povich phone interview. 39. Albritton video interview. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid.

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45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Albritton video interview. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Ira Berkow, “Shirley Povich Dies at 92; Washington Sports Columnist,” The Washington Post, June 7, 1998, https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/1998​/06​/07​/sports​/shirley​ -povich​-dies​-at​-92​-washington​-sports​-columnist​.html. 52. Mensh, “Story of the Povich Family.” 53. Ibid. 54. Berkow, “Shirley Povich Dies at 92.” 55. Jeryl Brunner, “Success Secrets from Maury Povich as He Celebrates 20 Years As Host of the Maury Show,” Forbes, February 8, 2018, https:​//​www​.forbes​.com​ /sites​/jerylbrunner​/2018​/02​/08​/success​-secrets​-from​-maury​-povich​-as​-he​-celebrates​ -twenty​-years​-as​-host​-of​-the​-maury​-show​/​#5551170d6ceb. 56. Ibid. 57. Povich email. 58. Ibid. 59. Povich phone interview. 60. Povich phone interview. 61. Povich email. 62. Ibid. 63. Elaine S. Povich, “McGovern Calls for Impeachment,” The Cornell Daily Sun, December 7, 1973, 1. https:​//​cdsun​.library​.cornell​.edu​/. 64. Povich, “Watergate Correspondent Talks on Reporter’s Responsibilities,” The Cornell Daily Sun, March 25, 1974, 6. https:​//​cdsun​.library​.cornell​.edu​/. 65. Povich email. 66. Povich phone interview. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Povich email. 70. Povich phone interview. 71. Christy Buckeley, “A Pioneering Generation Marked the Path for Women Journalists,” Nieman Reports 56, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 60. https:​//​niemanreports​.org​/ articles​/a​-pioneering​-generation​-marked​-the​-path​-for​-women​-journalists. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 61. 74. Albritton video interview.   75. Ibid.  76. Brian Bloom, “‘Everything Was Gone.’ Hurricane Camille, Mississippi’s First Monster Storm, Turns 50,” Clarion-Ledger (Jackson) August 14, 2019, https:​ //​www​.clarionledger​.com​/story​/news​/2019​/08​/14​/hurricane​-camille​-survivors​-tell​ -their​-stories​-50​-years​-later​-katrina​-mississippi​/1955733001​/.   77. Albritton video interview.

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  78. Ibid.   79. Ibid.   80. Ibid.   81. Ibid.   82. Ibid.   83. Povich email.   84. Emma Baccellieri, “The Everlasting Legacy of Melissa Ludtke, Who Dared to Join the Boys Club of the Baseball Press,” Sports Illustrated, September 28, 2018, https:​//​www​.si​.com​/mlb​/2018​/09​/28​/melissa​-ludtke​-lawsuit​-anniversary.   85. Ibid.   86. Barbara Baker, “Melissa Ludtke’s Lawsuit Opened Door for Female Sports Journalists 40 Years Ago, but There Still Is A Long Way to Go,” Newsday, September 29, 2018, https:​//​www​.newsday​.com​/sports​/columnists​/barbara​-barker​/melissa​-ludtke​ -barker​-mlb​-suit​-1​.21301114.   87. Ludtke v. Kuhn, 461 F. Supp. 86 (S.D.N.Y. 1978), https:​//​law​.justia​.com​/cases​ /federal​/district​-courts​/FSupp​/461​/86​/2266331​/.   88. Povich phone interview.  89. Ashley Elkins, “HED: Handy Andy and the Mississippi Mudcat,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, April 9, 1997, https:​//​www​.djournal​.com​/lifestyle​ /hed​-handy​-andy​-and​-the​-mississippi​-mudcat​/article​_f9da8aec​-8319​-52b5​-807d​ -6924fa128fa6​.html.   90. Ibid. See also, Elkins, “Obituaries: Tuesday, Feb. 3, 1998,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, February 3, 1998, https:​//​www​.djournal​.com​/news​/obituaries​ -tuesday​-feb​-3​-1998​/article​_d8d68050​-4e9f​-5851​-9cf8​-ab09900fafb9​.html.   91. Povich phone interview.   92. Ibid.  93. Norman P. Lewis, “From Cheesecake to Chief: Newspaper Editors’ Slow Acceptance of Women,” American Journalism 25, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 33.   94. Cindy Elmore, “Two Steps Forward and One Step Back: Coverage of Women Journalists in Editor & Publisher 1978 through 1988,” American Journalism 20, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 43.   95. Albritton video interview.   96. Ibid.   97. Bernadette Barker-Plummer, “News and Feminism: A Historic Dialog,” 151.   98. Ibid.   99. Povich phone interview. 100. Ibid. 101. Povich email. 102. Povich phone interview. 103. Republished as James W. Silver, “Mississippi: The Closed Society,” The Journal of Southern History 30, no. 1 (February 1964): 3–34. 104. Povich phone interview. 105. William Silver, “Mississippi Burning: The Life and Death of My Cousin, Andrew Goodman,” Miami Herald, June 20, 2014, https:​//​www​.miamiherald​.com​/ opinion​/op​-ed​/article1967458​.html.

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106. Povich phone interview. 107. Ibid. 108. Albritton video interview. 109. Quote from Albritton video interview. 110. See, for example, Nanci Campbell, “Glascock Reports on Garment Plant Progress,” The Daily Herald, July 13, 1971, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/ image​/742994939​/​?terms​=nanci​%20campbell​&match​=1. Accessed August 15, 2021; Campbell, “Pass Officials Approve Computerizing of Taxes,” The Daily Herald, October 20, 1971, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/742792448​/​?terms​=nanci​ %20campbell​&match​=1; Campbell, “Candidates Say Gambling Will End,” The Daily Herald, July 13, 1971, 15. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/742994970​/​?terms​ =nanci​%20campbell​&match​=1; Campbell, “Area Study of Water, Sewer, Drainage Is Underway,” The Daily Herald, January 10, 1971, 29. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/ image​/742744896​/​?terms​=nanci​%20campbell​&match​=1; Campbell, “Hancock Officials Decline Action on Zoning Authorization,” The Daily Herald, November 2, 1971, 13. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/742990320​/​?terms​=nanci​%20campbell​ &match​=1. 111. Biographical information on Klibanoff can be found here: https:​ //​ mentalhealthjournalism​.org​/advisors​/hank​-klibanoff​/. The quotes in the sentence were taken from the Albritton video interview. 112. Albritton video interview. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid. 115. See, for example, Campbell, “Board Again Requests Sand Beach Restoral,” The Daily Herald, August 16, 1972, 39. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /742711247​/​?terms​=nanci​%20campbell​&match​=1; Campbell, “Economic Development Group Approved by Legislature,” The Daily Herald, April 29 1972, 11. https:​ //​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/742721751​/​?terms​=nanci​%20campbell​&match​=1; Campbell, “Gulf Coast Legislators Come of Age Successfully,” The Daily Herald, May 7 1972, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/742710542​/​?terms​=nanci​ %20campbell​&match​=1. 116. Albritton video interview. 117. Ibid. 118. Strout interview. 119. Albritton video interview. 120. Ibid. 121. Povich phone interview. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid. 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid. 127. Darren Schwindaman, “The Bitter Hooker,” Jackson Free Press, May 23, 2007, http:​//​www​.jacksonfreepress​.com​/news​/2007​/may​/23​/the​-bitter​-hooker​/. Accessed February 13, 2019.

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128. Information on the style and structure of the George Street Grocery can be found on the property’s National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination Form. See Carolyn E. Wray, “George Street Grocery,” National Register of Historic Places Inventory/Nomination Form. Lorac, Inc., Madison, MS, September 29, 2009, 2 [Hereafter abbreviated as “George Street Grocery.”]. 129. Ibid., 3–5. 130. Ibid., 7–8. 131. See page 1 of “George Street Grocery” for a list of George Street’s former names. See page 8 for the bar’s geographic boundaries. 132. See page 8 of “George Street Grocery” for a brief biography of the Welty family and their relationship to the George Street Grocery. The names of Welty’s brother’s taken from Suzanne Marrs, “Biography,” The Eudora Welty Foundation, accessed February 13, 2019. https:​//​eudorawelty​.org​/biography​/. 133. See “George Street Grocery,” pages 4–5 for a description of the bar’s interior, and pages 8–9, for a description of the sights and smells that Welty recorded in “The Corner Store.” 134. “George Street Grocery,” 9. 135. For information on when the George Street closed, or rather, when it was converted from a market to a bar/restaurant, see “George Street Grocery,” 7. 136. Povich phone interview. 137. Ibid. 138. Ibid. 139. Charles Bolton, “C. B. ‘Buddie’ Newman,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, July 17, 2017. http:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/cb​-buddie​-newman​/. See also, Nash and Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 131. 140. Povich phone interview. 141. Ibid. 142. Nash and Taggart, Mississippi Politics, 193. 143. Bolton, “C. B. ‘Buddie’ Newman.” 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid. 146. Povich phone interview. 147. Ibid. 148. Ibid. 149. Ibid. 150. Ibid. 151. Ibid. 152. Ibid. 153. Ibid. 154. Quote from Fields, “ERA Killed, Marijuana Decriminalization Lives,” Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, March 10, 1976, no page number. Fields papers, box 1, “clippings written by Fields” folder. 155. For mention of Milner and his hotel businesses, see Sid Slater, “Remembering Sun-n-Sand’s Glory Days: Power Brokers, Bare Feet and Laughter,” Clarion-Ledger (Jackson), July 5, 2019. https:​//​www​.clarionledger​.com​/story​/news​/politics​/2019​/07​

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/05​/sun​-n​-sand​-jackson​-razed​-remembering​-glory​-days​-sid​-salter​-column​-legislators​ -lawmakers​-mississippi​/1656099001​/. Salter also mentions the hotel’s Polynesian décor in “Sun-n-Sand.” More information on the exterior of the hotel can be found by reading Kendra Parzen, “Demolition Begins at the Sun-n-Sand Motor Hotel,” National Trust for Historic Preservation, February 4, 2021. https:​//​savingplaces​.org​ /stories​/demolition​-the​-sun​-n​-sand​-motor​-hotel​#​.YRC12dNufFo. The history of the Sun-n-Sand, including its founding and architectural style, is also documented in Seyma Bayram, “A Colorful Past: Can the Sun-n-Sand Be Saved?” Jackson Free Press, December 11, 2019. https:​//​www​.jacksonfreepress​.com​/news​/2019​/dec​/11​/ colorful​-past​-can​-sun​-n​-sand​-be​-saved​/. 156. See Sid Slater, “Sun-n-Sand” for mention of food; see Bayram, “A Colorful Past” for Baronich’s story; the nickname of the Sun-n-Sand bar came from Emily Wagster Pettus, “Under the Capitol Dome—Analysis,” Meridian Star, May 25, 2009. https:​//​www​.meridianstar​.com​/archives​/under​-the​-capitol​-dome​-analysis​ /article​_06a2cdfd​-e5d8​-549f​-a8ac​-5003009691d3​.html. Information on Baronich taken from Bayram, “A Colorful Past: Can the Sun-n-Sand Be Saved?” 157. Mention of the sardine parties and the approximate number of lawmakers who stayed at the Sun-n-Sand came from Pettus, “Under the Capitol Dome.” The rest of the information in this sentence came from Salter, “Sun-n-Sand.” 158. Salter, “Sun-n-Sand.” 159. Ibid. 160. Albritton quote from Albritton video interview; the remaining information in the passage came from Salter, “Sun-n-Sand.” 161. Albritton video interview. 162. Ibid. 163. Pettus, “Under the Capitol Dome.” 164. Albritton video interview. 165. Ibid. 166. Salter, “Sun-n-Sand.” 167. Albritton video interview. 168. Ibid. 169. Povich email. 170. Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery, 1–2. 171. Ibid., 12. 172. Ibid. 173. The Lasting Legacy of Parchman Farm, the Prison Modeled After a Slave Plantation.” 174. Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery, 13. 175. Ibid., 16. 176. “The Lasting Legacy of Parchman Farm, the Prison Modeled After a Slave Plantation.” 177. Ibid. 178. As quoted in “The Lasting Legacy of Parchman Farm, the Prison Modeled After a Slave Plantation.” 179. Ibid.

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180. Ibid. 181. Ibid. 182. Ibid. 183. “House Kills Trusty System,” The Delta Democrat-Times, February 5, 1971, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/20963242​/​?terms​=UPI​%20house​%20kills​ %20trusty​%20system​&match​=1. 184. Ibid. 185. Campbell, “Waller Mobilizes MHP,” The Delta Democrat-Times, August 12, 1973, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/21454710​/​?terms​=Waller​%20Nanci​ %20campbell​&match​=1. 186. Campbell, “New Superintendent: ‘I Am a Realist,’” The Delta Democrat-Times, November 29, 1973, 12. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/21482561​/​?terms​ =Waller​%20Nanci​%20campbell​%20jack​%20reed​&match​=1; Campbell, “New Prison Head Mixture of Compassion, Savvy,” South Mississippi Sun, November 29, 1973, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/737114824​/​?terms​=Nanci​%20Campbell​ %20jack​ %20reed​ &match​ =1; Campbell, “Gov. Waller Backs Reed,” The Delta Democrat-Times, January 17, 1974, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/34057810​ /​?terms​=Nanci​%20Campbell​%20jack​%20reed​%20waller​&match​=1. 187. See “House Passes Prison Bill by 46 Votes,” The Delta Democrat-Times, February 14, 1974, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/34061514​/​?terms​=prison​ &match​ =1; Campbell, “House Approves Face Lift for Prison Administration,” South Mississippi Sun, February 14, 1974, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /737037271​/​?terms​=prison​&match​=1. 188. Campbell, “Plan Is Valid Concept,” The Delta Democrat Times, January 4, 1974, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/34056314​/​?terms​=Nanci​%20Campbell​ %20plan​%20is​%20valid​%20concept​&match​=1. 189. Campbell, “House Approves Face Lift for Prison Administration,” 1. 190. Ibid. 191. Ibid. 192. Albritton video interview. 193. Ibid. 194. Povich phone interview. 195. Elaine Povich, “Withdrawals Are Halted by Mississippi S&L,” St. Petersburg Times, May 12, 1976, 13B. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/318573778​/​?terms​ =Withdrawals​%20Are​%20Halted​%20by​%20Mississippi​%20S​%26L​%22​%20elaine​ %20povich​&match​=1. 196. Ibid. See also Povich, “Bankers Trust Admits Its Insolvency, Gets Receiver,” Greenwood Commonwealth, June 9, 1976, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /237367551​/​?terms​=​%22Bankers​%20Trust​%20Admits​%20Its​%20Insolvency​%2C​ %20Gets​%20Receiver​%22​%20elaine​%20povich​&match​=1. 197. Povich, “Withdrawals Are Halted by Mississippi S&L,” 13B, and Bankers Trust Admits Its Insolvency, Gets Receiver,” 6. 198. Povich, “Withdrawals Are Halted by Mississippi S&L,” 13B. 199. Povich phone interview. 200. Povich, “Bankers Trust Admits Its Insolvency, Gets Receiver,” 6.

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201. Povich, “Financier Mum on Fraud Suit,” Greenwood Commonwealth, August 6, 1976, 5. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/237367345​/​?terms​=greenwood​ %20elaine​%20povich​&match​=1. 202. Povich, “Bankers Trust S&L Hit by $100 Million Lawsuit,” Delta-Democrat Times, September 9, 1976, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/22830751​/​?terms​ =elaine​%20povich​%20bankers​%20trust​&match​=1. 203. Povich phone interview. 204. Ibid. 205. Povich, “House Okays Massive Bill to Regulate S&L Firms,” Greenwood Commonwealth, February 11, 1977, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /260660208​/​?terms​=elaine​%20povich​%20greenwood​&match​=1. 206. Povich phone interview. 207. Ibid. 208. Ibid. For more information about the White Chapel church and the service itself, see Thomas A. Johnson, “Young Eulogizes Fannie L. Hamer, Mississippi Civil Rights Champion,” The New York Times, March 21, 1977, 30, https:​//​www​.nytimes​ .com​/1977​/03​/21​/archives​/young​-eulogizes​-fannie​-l​-hamer​-mississippi​-civil​-rights​ -champion​.html. 209. Quote from Povich phone interview; details of service from Johnson, “Young Eulogizes Fannie L. Hamer, Mississippi Civil Rights Champion,” 30. 210. Povich phone interview. 211. Ibid. 212. Povich, “Civil Rights Leader Was One of the Best,” Shenandoah Evening Herald, March 21, 1977, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/77010956​/​?terms​ =elaine​%20povich​%20Civil​%20Rights​%20Leader​%20Was​%20One​%20of​%20the​ %20Best​&match​=1. 213. Ibid. 214. Povich phone interview. 215. Povich phone interview. 216. Ibid. 217. Povich email and Povich phone interview. 218. For details, see Jordan Runtagh, “Remembering Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Deadly 1977 Plane Crash,” Rolling Stone, October 20, 1977. https:​//​www​.rollingstone​ .com​/music​/music​-features​/remembering​-lynyrd​-skynyrds​-deadly​-1977​-plane​-crash​ -2​-195371​/. 219. Povich phone interview. 220. Ibid. 221. “Members of Rock Band Die in Crash,” United Press International. October 21, 1977.  https:​//​www​.upi​.com​/Archives​/1977​/10​/21​/Members​-of​-rock​-band​-die​-in​ -crash​/6301508383316​/. 222. Runtagh, “Remembering Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Deadly 1977 Plane Crash.” 223. Povich phone interview. 224. Ibid.

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225. “Awful” quote taken from Povich telephone interview. The rest of the information in the paragraph taken from Runtagh, “Remembering Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Deadly 1977 Plane Crash.” 226. Povich phone interview. 227. See, for example, Povich, “Votes Have No Sex,” The Delta-Democrat Times, January 19, 1976, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/22759384​/​?terms​=elaine​ %20povich​%20Votes​%20Have​%20No​%20Sex​%20​&match​=1; Povich, “Free Abortion Clinic Sees Steady Patient Load Rise,” Delta-Democrat Times, June 13, 1976, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/22800652​/​?terms​=elaine​%20povich​%20Free​ %20Abortion​%20Clinic​%20Sees​%20Steady​%20Patient​%20Load​%20Rise​&match​ =1; Povich, “Family Planning Assistance is Still State-Wide Short-Stock,” Greenwood Commonwealth, August 9, 1976, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/237367413​/​ ?terms​=Family​%20Planning​%20Assistance​%20is​%20Still​%20State​-Wide​%20Short​ -Stock​&match​=1; and, Povich, “Woman Joins Corrections Panel,” Delta-Democrat Times, September 5, 1977, 12. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/34087951​/​?terms​ =Woman​%20Joins​%20Corrections​%20Panel​&match​=1. 228. See Povich email for mention of her work covering the state budget commission. For the other two topics see Povich, “House Studies Death Penalty,” Greenwood Commonwealth, January 24, 1977, 10. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /238385898​/​?terms​=House​%20Studies​%20Death​%20Penalty​%20elaine​%20povich​ &match​=1. Accessed August 16, 2021. And Povich, “State Heroin Use Nearing ‘Epidemic’ Proportions,” Delta-Democrat Times, July 27, 1976, 1. https:​ //​ www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/237374044​/​?terms​=elaine​%20povich​%20State​%20Heroin​ %20Use​%20​&match​=1. 229. Povich phone interview. 230. Povich email. 231. Ibid. 232. Ibid. 233. Email, Johanna Neuman to author, January 9, 2018. 234. Ronni Patriquin Clark, phone interview by author, November 21, 2020 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Patriquin phone interview.”].

Chapter 6

“All Hell Broke Loose”

As a child, Ronni (Wilds) Patriquin (Clark) would hide her portable radio under the covers so she could listen to her favorite program past her bedtime. Airing on NBC in the late 1940s, The Big Story was a weekly anthology series that dramatized true crime stories. Each week, a different lead character, usually a journalist, set out to solve the mystery. The program only lasted for two seasons, but Patriquin heard enough to know that she wanted to do what the people on that radio show did every Wednesday night.1 Patriquin’s family’s connection to the Louisiana state political scene certainly influenced her decision to follow a career in political reporting. Her great-grandfather, Richard “Uncle Dick” Wilds, served as a Louisiana state representative from 1928–1940; Patriquin loved and admired the man she called “Daddy Grand,” and she wanted to be a part of his world.2 “We got along famously because he said I had spunk,” she said. “He loved that at three or four I had tried to climb the Christmas tree. He talked about the legislature whenever we were together.”3 Patriquin came from an affluent political and social background. Her father, Charles Wilds, was born in Natchez, Mississippi (and raised in Louisiana), and his family owned a number of plantations in and around the area. He went to medical school in St. Louis, where he met Patriquin’s mother, Marie Perabo, a Tupelo, Mississippi, native who also attended college just outside the city.4 The couple married there and had Ronni in 1943. After the war, the family moved to Monroe, Louisiana, close to the rest of Charles’s family, where he practiced medicine for the next two decades. Ronni grew up in Monroe, the center of a loving, southern progressive family who taught her and her four younger siblings to respect all people, including the Black family servants.5 Even so, Ronni learned some hard lessons about race relations as a young girl in the Jim Crow South; the injustices she saw and heard outside of her family home during this time “always pissed me off,” she said, and helped shape her political and social perspectives, as well as the type of stories she 217

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would chase as a young reporter.6 “I grew up being much more liberal on race relations [than many Southern people], and it [eventually] came to a head,” Patriquin recalled.7 Johanna Cathy Neuman was born in Los Angeles, the granddaughter of immigrants from Austria-Hungary (on both sides of the family) and Russia (on her mother’s side).8 From her parents, Evelyn Zimachow Neuman, an economics graduate from Brooklyn College, and Seymour Neuman, an accountant who eventually owned his own Beverly Hills accounting firm, she learned the value of a higher education, “the need to have a career, to make something of our lives beyond the daily choices of existence.”9 Johanna was shy as a child, and she turned to reading and writing early in life; journalism became a form of expression for a young woman who was too shy to talk about herself but liked to ask after other people’s lives and experiences.10 To help pay her college expenses while at Berkeley, Neuman worked for the Long Beach edition of the Compton (CA) Herald-American and the Santa Monica Evening Outlook (at different times during her college career).11 By the time she graduated from the University of Southern California with a master’s degree in journalism, it was the year of Watergate—“Every young journalist I knew wanted to be either Bob Woodward of Carl Bernstein. Sam Ervin was holding hearings and I could not pull myself from the television to go search for work,” she recalled—and she landed the city hall beat at the Los Angeles Daily Journal, a legal newspaper.12 She gravitated toward the politics and gossip found in government buildings—the environment reminded her of family dinners and countless debates with her father over party politics and political issues.13 Neuman, in fact, would make her professional reputation covering the American political landscape—everything from the politics of city halls and government mansions to the political stumping unique to the Neshoba County Fair—for such newspapers as the Los Angeles Daily News and USA Today. In her time at The Clarion-Ledger (1976–1979), the self-proclaimed “Yankee (albeit from the West)” would put the Jackson political establishment on notice with her coverage of the state legislature and governor’s mansion, particularly the political hypocrisies of the Cliff Finch administration (which other colleagues, like Norma Fields, also pointed out).14 Before joining Rea Hederman’s team at The Clarion-Ledger between 1974–1976, Ronni Patriquin worked for several papers in the southeast—the Monroe (LA) News Star, the Monroe Morning World, the Mobile (AL) Press Register, the Shreveport (LA) Journal, and the Gannett News Service—and covered several issues of political and social significance: prison abuse and corruption within state government agencies, for instance.15 Along the way, she would gain the reputation of a no-nonsense reporter, a hell raiser, if you

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will—a hard-nosed personality crafted out of the reality of her life, including the observations of her childhood, and, later, her experiences as a single mother and working woman. “I WAS ALWAYS A GOOD SCENE CREATOR” Johanna Neuman’s maternal grandfather, Joseph Zimachow, was born in Russia in 1882, as documented by a New York 1940 census record.16 The Zimachows raised five children, including Johanna’s mother, Evelyn, in Brighton Beach, a small, shoreline community on the southside of Brooklyn.17 The Zamichows were poor, as were most of the Russian Jewish families that crowded the shoreline towns of Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, Coney Island, and Sea Gate, collectively called “Gravesend.”18 Nevertheless, in the early twentieth century, Brighton Beach, a twenty-block area between Coney Island and Manhattan Beach, became a thriving political, religious, and cultural center for Jewish families, many having escaped either political and religious persecution in Eastern Europe or the crowded tenements of New York’s Lower East Side.19 New York Times journalist Edward Lewine explained the attraction to this area of the city as such: “But rents were cheap. The shopkeepers could communicate with the new residents in Yiddish and Polish. And the immigrants from seaside cities of Odessa and Leningrad appreciated the shore atmosphere.”20 Even so, the Zimachow family’s circumstances were less than ideal. As Johanna recalled, the family was so poor that Evelyn (and, more than likely, some of her siblings) were sent to ask neighbors to borrow rent money.21 Raised in a traditional Jewish household, in which patriarchal rule dictated family life, Evelyn’s father told her that a higher education was not a suitable goal for women. She didn’t listen. Evelyn routinely escaped to one or more of the area’s public libraries, and she eventually borrowed money from her older siblings to attend Brooklyn College in the late 1930s.22 The Zimachow family moved to Brooklyn when Evelyn was a teenager, and she remained there until after she married Seymour Neuman in 1946.23 Seymour was born in Chicago, the youngest of four children to Henry and Rose Neuman, both born in Austria-Hungary in the 1880s.24 Henry and Rose both immigrated to the Midwest by the first decade of the twentieth century, and, as indicated by Seymour’s 1942 draft card, the Neuman family relocated to Brooklyn sometime after Seymour’s 1908 birth.25 Seymour eventually served as an air navigator during the Second World War, and Evelyn worked for the US Army after graduating from college before taking a job with Bell Labs as a statistician.26 However, as did many women of

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the Greatest Generation, Evelyn sacrificed her career for motherhood after the birth of daughters, Johanna and Hildie, but she never let go of her belief in the importance of education to a successful life. After the family moved to Los Angeles in the 1950s—Seymour believed the warm climate would be better for his allergies and the business climate better for his career—Evelyn dedicated much of her free time fundraising and developing educational resources for Jewish community schools and centers; her leadership in the Los Angeles area Jewish community is well-documented, and much of her effort went to supporting adult education courses in the area. Evelyn believed extension classes were necessary “to bring meaning to modern life,” as she told the North Hollywood Valley Times in 1967.27 Evelyn made sure her daughters understood the role of education to “bring meaning to modern life”; television was a weekends-only treat, as the Neuman daughters spent most of their time after school doing homework or, as their mother did, making frequent trips to the nearest public library.28 Evelyn had high educational standards for her girls, and their goals and professional accomplishments became her own. “I think they made her feel whole, as if the circle had been completed from her own interrupted career to ours,” Johanna recalled.29 Similarly, Ronni Patriquin’s mother was an educated woman, a math major at Maryville College (now University), just a few miles outside of St. Louis.30 One might wonder why a young woman from Tupelo might choose to go to school so far away from home, but a quick read into the school’s history reveals possible motives. Maryville was and is part of the Society of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic organization for women, founded in France by Saint Madeline Sophie Barat at the beginning of the nineteenth century.31 An advocate of educating women from all socioeconomic backgrounds, Barat once said, “For the sake of one child, I would have founded the Society.”32 As a devout Catholic, Marie Pearabo, then, may have been attracted to Maryville’s history, religious mission, and its excellent academic reputation. Marie also had family in St. Louis, which made the move all the more possible.33 The move to St. Louis also could have been motivated by Marie’s wish to escape the aftermath of a deadly 1936 tornado that struck Tupelo just a month before her graduation from high school;34 so destructive was the storm that the F-5 tornado that struck Lee County still ranks as the nation’s fourth largest. The number of dead and injured, over 200 and 700, respectively, is probably a gross undercount, given that the tornado struck the Gum Pond district, where a number of Black residents lived (and were not counted in the official totals).35 “[My mother] was always terrified of the weather,” Patriquin recalled. “When I was growing up, if we were under a tornado watch or warning, she’d grab all us kids—there were five of us—and we’d have to get under a heavy old table in the den.”36

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In 1943, after Marie and Charles married, they left St. Louis. Charles went to basic training and Marie and her oldest child, Ronni, followed him around from base to base before he finally shipped overseas.37 As a member of the US Army Medical Corps and a physician in “Patton’s Army” (the Seventh United States Army), Charles saw major combat duty in five major European campaigns. He treated the wounded during the Allied liberation of France and its invasion of Germany, and he was there at the liberation of the Ohrdruf concentration camp in central Germany—an event he rarely mentioned and never discussed with family.38 The Wilds were “strong Catholics,” according to Patriquin, and their religious faith helped shape their liberal views on race relations and other sociopolitical matters. “[St. Matthews] Catholic church on Monroe Street was always open to anybody who came in for mass, whether they be black or white,” Ronni said.39 For the Wilds, religion was the great equalizer for young Ronni and her family, but what she saw outside the safety of the family home and the church congregation, however, shocked and confused her. Patriquin vividly recalled the first time she realized that most people in Monroe did not share the Wild family’s progressive views on race. Just as Marie’s experience with the 1936 Tupelo tornado and Charles’s experiences during the war lingered with them both, the following episode stayed with Ronni for a long time: First thing I ever knew about race relations or problems was once when my grandmother in Tupelo’s maid took me for a walk. It was a real, real hot day, and there was a Rexall pharmacy two blocks away. So, we went to the pharmacy, because she had been told I could get an ice cream, and when he gave me the ice cream, I said, “Well, Lula wants some, too.” I was about three, maybe. And I just didn’t understand why he wouldn’t offer her some, give her some right away, and I created a bit of a scene, but I was always a good scene creator.40

Patriquin would spend much of her career making “a bit of a scene,” as both she and Neuman challenged the state political establishment with enterprise journalism that questioned authority and exposed corruption at the highest level of state government. As did her colleagues, Neuman exposed the shenanigans of Mississippi Governor Cliff Finch (1976–1980), the so-called “accidental governor,” as Patriquin’s focused her attention on corruption at Parchman Farm and within the state park system.41 Both came to The Clarion-Ledger with prior experience as investigative reporters, but that experience did not come easy—as both women were confronted with sexism on the hard news beat and found ways to deal with it. “It gets my blood boiling to think about it,” Patriquin said. “You had to weave your way through this maze of prejudice.”42

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“I STARTED TO JUST CHANGE MY NAME TO ‘LITTLE LADY’” Like many women journalists of her generation, Patriquin’s career started in the society pages of a local newspaper.43 Her journey there, however, wasn’t a straight line. She married right after high school (despite her parents’ best efforts to send her away to Maryville for college) to a college senior, for one simple, honest reason: “Because good Catholic girls didn’t get laid until they got married, and I think I was about ready to get laid. He was really good-looking and we got along.”44 She enrolled at Louisiana State University (LSU), but left after just two semesters. Her marriage lasted longer, for several years in fact, and produced two children; it would have ended sooner had a Louisiana divorce not been, in Patriquin’s words, such a “long and arduous” process for Catholics at that time.45 As simple as the reasons were for marriage, Patriquin admitted that the reasons for divorce were just as obvious (at least to her): “When we were dating and in college and engaged, all we talked about were football games and parties and class and stuff like that. We didn’t talk about the important things in life.”46 Patriquin’s job as a society editor for the Monroe News Star didn’t last nearly as long—just about six months. She got pregnant with her second child, a son, and was forced to quit once she started showing (as was the customary rule for women journalists of the era). She worked in the position just long enough, Patriquin said, to realize that “I would never want to do a woman’s page again.”47 The job was also enough for Patriquin to realize that she needed to go back to school. In 1964, she entered Northeast Louisiana State College (now University of Louisiana—Monroe) as a political science major, with minors in journalism and American history.48 She also worked for the campus newspaper, the Northeast Louisiana Pow-Wow, as a sports reporter.49 The position, which included her own weekly column, gave her the professional, positive experience she needed— one that many journalists would have envied—even as it set up a false sense of security. A woman journalist as sports reporter was that rarest of unicorns—as of 2010, they still only made up 12 percent of all sports writers—a fact that Patriquin faced when she began applying for off-campus newspaper jobs.50 “The college newspaper was more in tune with what should be than the outside world was,” she said.51 To that point, Patriquin applied for two open positions at the Monroe Morning World—one covering hard news, the other sports. The news editor sent a firm message: “[I don’t] want a woman in [my] newsroom.” The sports editor said much the same: “There are no ladies in [press] boxes.”52 Indeed, that mantra also extended to locker rooms, at least until 1978 when Sports

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Illustrated journalist Melissa Ludtke filed a federal lawsuit against Major League Baseball and then MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn for denying her access to locker rooms after games.53 Patriquin’s experience when trying to break into the news industry, then, was indicative of most, as she and countless other women experienced (and still experience) a “locker-room mentality that [thrived] in many newspaper and television sports departments [and made] them as unwelcoming to women as many university athletic departments,” researchers Marie Hardin and Stacie Shain note in their study of the professional identities of women sports journalists.54 “I was getting nowhere,” Patriquin recalled about that early job hunt.55 In fact, it was only after she used her family’s influence—her grandfather knew the father of the publisher of the Morning World—that the editor eventually hired her as a general assignment reporter.56 Even so, her time at the Morning World was difficult at best, as Jack Gates, the executive editor, made sure that Patriquin knew her place. For example, Gates expected Patriquin to cover student demonstrations and sit-ins at nearby Grambling College, an historically Black college, by phone. She went to campus, anyway—“I come from a hard-headed family on both sides,” she admitted—and Gates called her in his office when she returned. “Little lady,” he said, “you’ve been spotted talking with black men at Grambling.”57 Gates’s decision, like those of many white male editors at the time, was paternalistic, sexist, and racist. He felt obligated to “protect” Patriquin from any perceived harm that might come to her by visiting the HBCU campus and interviewing Black male students—a mindset shaped by the age-old racist stereotype that Black men are sexually aggressive by nature and will sexually assault any white woman if given the opportunity. Furthermore, Gates would have never put such conditions on a white male reporter, as paternalism was and is as much about prohibiting someone from doing their job as it is about “protection.” The paper’s managing editor followed suit, keeping Patriquin out of the newsroom as much as possible, and even resorted to adding an “E” to the end of “Ronni” so as not to make it too obvious that a woman reporter was on staff.58 Patriquin resented how she was treated, and left after just a year. “It was ‘little lady’ this, and ‘little lady’ that,” she remembered. “I started to just change my name to ‘little lady.’”59 She could have quit, of course, but she needed the money. So, like many women journalists who found themselves in similar positions, she made the decision to “smile and play the little lady” as long as she could. “That was, to me, the only thing I could do,” Patriquin said.60 Johanna Neuman always felt comfortable in newsrooms, but that does not mean that her male colleagues were comfortable having her there or

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that they even wanted her there. On one occasion, an editor directed her to take a long, written psychological exam when she applied for a job at a North Carolina newspaper (perhaps the Charlotte Observer); the “humiliating experience” of the exam was followed by an interview in which she was asked to remove her coat, which she politely refused to do because she was wearing a coatdress.61 “The interview went downhill from there,” Neuman recalled. On another occasion, an editor, after reviewing her work, told her that he believed she lacked the killer instinct needed to go after stories with a reporter’s aggression.62 Neuman never publicly complained about any such mistreatment, only to friends, and she still managed to adopt an optimistic attitude about her place in the newsroom. “Because of my family premium on learning, because of my mother’s insistence on achievement and my father’s love for the profession, I always told myself that merit would win out,” she said.63 Her optimism could easily be confused with naivete, but she believed her optimism was what helped her “barrel through” tough times—those instances in which she experienced double-standards in job interviews, or, as happened on numerous occasions, had male colleagues or rivals “undercut” her, in her words.64 One such incident happened during Neuman’s employment with the Los Angeles Daily Journal. She landed the city hall beat after her graduation from USC, and she cut her teeth on profiles of city council members. Her longform pieces were the perfect context for “The Hall,” as it was called, which Neuman also described as a “gossipy place of protected fiefdoms.”65 In fact, Neuman’s pieces caught the attention of one longtime Los Angeles Times beat reporter, who reminded her that “he had the place locked up, sources in thrall to him, and not to expect any scoops.”66 As intimidating as the encounter was, it still did not shake Neuman’s optimistic attitude. “I was stunned but took it in my stride,” she said. “I just believed, have always believed, that if I was thorough in the gathering of facts and told their story in a powerful way, I would succeed.”67 Indeed, Neuman’s work, including a piece on John S. Gibson, Jr., a president of the Los Angeles City Council in the 1970s, impressed her editors enough that they sent her and colleague Bill Seimer to Sacramento to cover state capitol building politics.68 As part of a two-person capitol bureau, much of her work there focused on criminal justice, including one series that led to the revelation that State Controller Kenneth Cory had made illegal political appointments in exchange for campaign contributions, a violation of California state law, as well as appointing friends and relatives to key positions in his administration.69 She and Seimer also broke a similar story about financial irregularities of then senate president pro tem Jim Mills.70

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Vergil Meibert, longtime capitol bureau reporter for the Oakland Tribune, described Neuman and Seimer as “two enterprising young reporters” for their coverage of the California state government.71 As much attention these and other stories brought Neuman, she was uneasy “in the milieu of hurtling public figures toward exposure.”72 From Neuman’s time at the Compton Herald-American (as a one-woman bureau for the Long Beach community) she did everything from write and edit stories and headlines to take photos. Her three-year tenure (1972–1975) at the Daily Journal, by contrast, gave her the political experience she wanted and needed. “I was ready for the big time,” she told herself.73 Ronni Patriquin, meanwhile, tried to go home again. After leaving the Morning World, she applied for a general assignment position at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but the executive editor offered her what he probably offered any woman who applied for a position with his paper: the women’s pages.74 “I’m not a women’s page reporter,” Patriquin said. “I don’t want a woman in my newsroom,” the editor replied, after repeating more than once that the only reason he agreed to interview Patriquin is because he was being pressured to hire a woman. “I just left,” she recalled years later. “I was not going to have anything to do with his games.”75 The Post-Dispatch interview was enough to convince Patriquin to take a break from print journalism. She worked in TV journalism in Baton Rouge for a bit, covering the 1973 Louisiana Constitutional Convention, but she was not happy doing broadcast journalism. “I don’t think I was that good at it,” Patriquin admitted.76 She left her TV post in 1974, when her then husband got a job in Jackson. Patriquin started collecting unemployment benefits shortly thereafter, but she remained determined to find a job in print journalism in her new hometown. “I wanted to get back to newspapers,” she said.77 The opportunity presented itself after she applied for a job at The Clarion-Ledger.78 Two years later, Johanna Neuman joined her there in what Neuman called “this experiment in importing new standards of journalism.”79 For his part, Rea Hederman was willing to make that commitment, to the determent of over fifty years of the Hederman brand of “journalism”— which, according to journalist and editor Hodding Carter III, was about as “undemocratic and immoral as any extant”—and covering local and state political issues with the same ethos that defined the careers of Norma Fields and Bill Minor, among other battle-worn Mississippi journalists.80 “The story of the Hederman family and the Clarion-Ledger newspaper should have been written by Faulkner,” journalist Kathy Lally wrote in a 1997 Baltimore Sun story. “It is a tale of a man burdened by ancestry. Family loyalty and duty are stained by revulsion toward the past.”81

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“BONE-DEEP RACISTS” Rea Hederman was born in Jackson in 1945, the son of Bob Hederman and Sara Smith Hederman and heir to a “pro-segregation and rabidly racist” media empire.82 The Hederman family’s ownership of The Clarion-Ledger and, later, the Jackson Daily News, among other media properties, dates to the 1890s, when Bertie and his younger brother, T. M., traveled from their small farm in Hillsboro, Mississippi, with their mother, Susan, and two sisters, to Jackson looking for work. Their father, Martin, who worked in construction, fell to his death while working on the steeple of the Hillsboro Baptist Church, and the farm, some years later, could soon no longer sustain the family. Once in Jackson, they worked for their cousin, R. H. Henry, or “Cousin Hi” (business partner to J. L. Power), as apprentices.83 In 1888, Henry and Power joined forces, merging their papers, the State Ledger and the Daily Clarion, and started a new printing business. “He named the firm, and I named the paper,” Henry said, “the firm being R. H. Henry & Co., and the paper, The Clarion-Ledger.”84 By 1898, the Hederman brothers, eighteen and sixteen, respectively, had proven their worth and reputation as hard-working and ambitious young men. They purchased Henry’s printing equipment to start their own firm, naming it Hederman Brothers, located on Capitol Street, before moving to at least two other locations near The Clarion-Ledger offices.85 And when Henry retired in 1912, the brothers took over management of the paper, before taking full control of it a decade later.86 In that time, Hederman Brothers printing shop and its owners would rise together. “Mr. Hederman . . . is a young gentleman of sterling Christian manhood,” read Bertie and Jennie Belle Taylor’s 1907 wedding announcement, “popular with business and personal associates, and richly deserves the rare prize he has won.”87 To the white Jackson business and professional establishments, the Hederman brothers were seen as prudent businessmen who gave generously to civil and philanthropic causes. They gave their money and time to the First Baptist Church in Jackson—they sat on the church’s Board of Trustees at various points as early as the 1920s.88 Also, Bertie and T. M., from their seats on the first pew, cultivated their influence over local and state political matters, all for the maintenance of the state’s white power structure and their place in it. “The Hedermans asserted their moral authority through their newspapers and their control of the First Baptist Church, the most powerful congregation in Jackson,” Lally said.89 No political matter was too small or petty, if T. M. and Bertie thought it deserved their attention. They lobbied in favor of state laws prohibiting the sale of alcohol (as both were teetotalers), which remained well into the 1960s, and supported primary elections and

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state funds for agricultural schools, from which the statewide community college system grew.90 In ideological matters related to race, meanwhile, the brothers used their social and political influence, and the reach of their growing newspaper and printing businesses, to cater to the state’s “basest and most provincial tendencies.”91 In fact, from the time they purchased The Clarion-Ledger in the early 1920s until Bertie’s death in 1944 and T. M.’s in 1948, the brothers worked to reinforce the newspaper’s reputation as the “Thunderer”—a name the paper earned decades before for its staunch support of the succession, and, after the Civil War, as an enemy of carpetbaggers and Reconstruction.92 They did so by openly supporting and helping to elect candidates for the state’s highest offices who supported segregation and the enforcement of Jim Crow, while using their newspaper to ridicule and dehumanize the state’s Black citizens—when and if they were mentioned at all. “Lust Led Negro into Hotel Room, Sheriff Asserts,” read one 1936 front-page Associated Press headline, which highlighted a story of a hotel bellboy who went to a “petite” white woman’s hotel room to “ravish her and killed her when she screamed at his entrance.”93 “The Hederman editors were obsessed with [Black violent] crimes, and they combed the wires for stories of blood and terror,” historian Willard T. Edmonds writes of the Hederman press. “Accounts of good whites trying to do what is right ran alongside portrayals of black killers, thugs and rapists. It was a tormented view of the world, and it reflected the tortured mindsets of the Hederman opinion makers.”94 All of Bertie and T. M.’s sons, five in all, worked in the family businesses in some respect; Arnold Hederman, one of T. M.’s sons, became sports editor of The Clarion-Ledger, and Zach and Henry Hederman, two of Bertie’s sons, worked at the printing company.95 Bob and Tom Jr., meanwhile, stepped in after the deaths of their fathers to fill their roles—Bob served as publisher and Tom Jr., editor of the family’s growing media empire, which, by the 1950s, included the Jackson Daily News, at least six weeklies, and a local TV station.96 More than that, though, Bob and Tom continued their father’s battle against what T. M. once called “an equality of conditions which will lead this country into a destroying mediocrity.”97 The family’s views on race, and class for that matter, were rooted, in part, in the ways of the state’s Piney Woods region.98 With its rolling hills and thin soil that is a mixture of sand and clay, the region, which begins about twenty miles north of the state coastal region and stretches through the southern edges of the central part of the state, is perfect for longleaf pine trees and wild underbrush but not so much for farming. The Piney Woods economy, what there was of it, was built through timber, small farming, livestock and nose-tothe-grindstone hard work; the planter class was all but absent from the region, as was the need for slave labor. Most of the white farmers and labors in the

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Piney Woods region, like the Hedermans, were poor and resented the wealth and privilege of the planters in other areas of the state, like the cotton-rich Delta region.99 “The Hedermans were disdainful of the planter class, which they viewed as elitist and undeserving, and for the Delta notion of noblesse oblige the Hedermans held nothing but contempt,” Edmonds states.100 That contempt was well-bred long before Bertie and T. M. Hederman were born. The social and agricultural politics of the Piney Woods also created much indifference toward the Civil War; in Jones County, for instance, many residents wished to stay in the Union, and many young men in the Piney Woods region who were drafted wondered why they were fighting a war that would only benefit the planter class.101 With the slave population largely absent from both the land and economy, there was even some sympathy in the region for the plight of the slaves—feelings that were reinforced by the dirt farmer’s resentment for the planter class and the fact that Black people were not an economic threat to the whites in the Piney Woods region.102 On the other hand, as Edmonds states, many white families from the region, like the Hedermans, felt a “dangerous disconnect” with Black people, much the result of a lack of interaction between the two races. “The Hedermans felt no obligation toward black citizens of Mississippi,” Edmonds notes. “They saw no reason to treat African Americans with anything but scorn.”103 They held similar feelings for anyone or any institution that supported the social, legal, political, and economic equality of Black people, or, in general, for anyone who got in the way of their plans to control the state’s political economy. Indeed, the petty grievances that the Hedermans reserved for slights against them, and the payback for those who walked into their crosshairs, was the stuff of social gossip and city legend. For example, they attacked one Jackson mayor in the pages of The Clarion-Ledger because he refused to help lower the tax assessment on a piece of Hederman land.104 The Hedermans built a social and political network that they trusted without question, one that not only helped maintain that white hegemony in the state but ensure the Hederman family’s place at the top (or very near) of its power structure. They supported the campaigns of Mississippi governors Ross Barnett (1960–1964) and Paul B. Johnson Jr. (1964–1968), among other loud and vocal supporters of Jim Crow. They shared a church pew with Barnett at the First Baptist Church, but the Hederman cousins and Barnett also shared the same bigotry—“There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived integration. We will not drink from the cup of genocide,” Barnett said in his 1962 statewide radio and TV address regarding his decision to try to block James Meredith’s enrollment in the University of Mississippi, a line carried in the Hederman press.105 In fact, Barnett ran his 1959 gubernatorial campaign on a platform of segregation, and the Hedermans filled their newspapers with propaganda

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meant to reinforce that ideology. “Don’t Like Mixing, But We’ve Got It,” read one Clarion-Ledger headline during Meredith’s attempts to integrate the University of Mississippi. “Negro Student Meredith Is Trying to Force Admission,” read another headline from the episode.106 In all, The Clarion-Ledger carried almost ninety stories in just a one-month period on Meredith’s integration alone.107 The crisis at the University of Mississippi during the fall of 1962 is but one example of how the Hedermans used their newspapers to carry “bitter and emotional arguments against racial change.”108 The Hedermans were not the only members of the white political establishment who fought to maintain the racial and social status quo, of course, but they were perhaps the most powerful and politically connected. Bob Hederman once remarked that his family “served as colonels on the staff of Governor Ross Barnett,” but a more accurate statement is that Barnett served at the behest of the Hederman cousins.109 In fact, Barnett ran for governor twice, once in 1951 and again in 1955, but it was only after the Hedermans publicly backed him, after Barnett publicly declared that he would defend Mississippi against the federal enforcement of Brown v. Board of Education and similar attempts to destroy the so-called “Southern way of life,” that the state’s white population elected him.110 More to the point, his election only came with the support of the Hederman family, the aid that their publishing and television empire gave his campaign, and the Hederman connections to both the associated network of White Citizens’ Councils and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state agency that operated from the 1950s to the 1970s with the intent of protecting Mississippi from “federal encroachment” to destroy the state’s Jim Crow system.111 According to Edmonds, the Sovereignty Commission was a “ghost branch of government in Mississippi, one with considerable influence over the governor, the Legislature, the courts and the press. Both had strong ties to the Hederman newspapers.”112 Specifically, the methods of this “ghost branch” were many: voter intimidation, blackmail, and media propaganda, among others. For their role, the Hedermans used their papers to publish Sovereignty Commission “secret files” that contained “tantalizing facts, allegations and innuendoes,” much of it collected through illegal and unethical means (or both), of political enemies—political moderates who ran against candidates who supported segregation, or, in many cases, anyone who spoke out against the status quo and in favor of racial equality.113 For example, John Salter, a Tugaloo College (then Tugaloo Southern Christian College) sociology professor, was often a target of both the Sovereignty Commission and the Hederman papers for his civil rights activism. “Salter has been a leader in racial agitation in the Jackson area and has been arrested twice during the current series of racial demonstrations,” read one line from a June 1963 Clarion-Ledger story under the headline, “John Salter Probe Asked.”114

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In later years, so tight was the connection between the Hedermans and the Sovereignty Commission that few believed that The Clarion-Ledger or the Jackson Daily News would be anything more than, in the words of one Jackson Free Press journalist, “a mouthpiece of a racist system.”115 Moreover, even fewer would have believed that a Hederman would have actually turned the paper from Jim Crow mouthpiece to an award-winning respectable newspaper—especially one whose journalistic objectives represented such a drastic departure from the previous generations. “They weren’t hypocrites,” journalist and editor Hodding Carter III said about the Hedermans in a 1983 interview with The Baltimore Sun. “They believed it. They believed blacks were the sons of Ham. The Hedermans were bone-deep racists whose religion 120 years ago decided that question.”116 Rea Hederman never intended to move back home or go into the family business. According to that same 1997 Baltimore Sun piece, he returned because he felt like he could not escape his family’s reputation and the damage done to his own. “Everywhere he went, he would say later, the lowly reputation of the Hederman press haunted him,” Lally reported.117 A half-century of family political and ideological baggage followed Rea around, and he wanted and needed to do something to “repudiate the entire family record,” Hodding Carter III told the Jackson Free Press in a 2011 story about the history of the Hederman family and The Clarion-Ledger.118 Rea came home in 1970, but he did not immediately join the family flagship newspaper. Instead, he edited the Canton Times that the family also owned. Three years later, he took over the job as city editor for The Clarion-Ledger with the family’s approval—at least at first.119 The decisions and changes he ultimately made, and the results he produced, caused much division within the Hederman ranks—particularly in the board room, where seven family members from the second and third generations held seats.120 “The family was so close-knit that rather than bring the disputes out in the open, the Hedermans, while opposing him, let young Rea have his way,” Washington Post journalist Bill Prochnau revealed in a 1983 story about the family.121 The changes Rea made were many, including an increase in editorial staff from sixteen to twenty-five and almost 300 new staff members total, many of them journalists, over the next several years.122 Both Johanna Neuman and Ronni Patriquin represented the particular type of reporters that Rea knew he needed, and wanted, for his plan to succeed: outsiders with few, if any, familial or political ties to the area, so they could not be bought or sold like cattle at the state fairgrounds; talented, hard-nosed journalists, many of them women, who he could trust to do their jobs and whose only loyalty was to the truth.123 “I would do anything [Rea] asked,” Neuman said decades later, “because he was a great editor with a great vision, one who stood by his reporters even when they made life more difficult for him.”124

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“REA’S OUTSIDE AGITATORS” Neuman was drawn to Mississippi because of the state’s rich storytelling tradition. She came down South to see what she could learn from the state that nurtured the work of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty—two Mississippi natives whose work gave the impression of an eccentric region of the country.125 “A writer’s material derives nearly always from experience,” the writer William Maxwell once said when asked about Welty’s career—and Neuman was eager for new experiences.126 “As for journalists, the field was rich with talent—Tom Wicker and Curtis Wilkie were among my favorites. I suppose I hoped their tradition of storytelling would stick to my soul,” she said.127 A self-described “absolutist” who, at the time, saw little wiggle room in life for moral ambiguity, Neuman arrived having already made up her mind, or so she thought, about Mississippi and its people.128 If Wicker and Wilkie brought her South, the state’s violent and bloody racial history, much of which she had seen on TV as a teenager, had her on the defensive when she first arrived. As she drove in from California, though, Neuman was struck by the vivid colors of the Mississippi countryside—but she refused to be taken in by its beauty.129 Indeed, she almost expected the violence she watched on TV to greet her as soon as she crossed the state line, “a scene [that] would feature sheriffs’ black boots poised on the throats of civil rights workers.”130 Neuman ended up staying in Mississippi for much longer than she anticipated, for three years (1976–1979), working the state capitol beat for The Clarion-Ledger before moving to the nation’s capital to cover politics for the paper.131 She and Ronni Patriquin joined publisher Rea Hederman’s staff as part of his efforts to “clean house”—that is, remove all doubt that his paper was not the same as the one that his family had owned and ran for two generations.132 That meant, among other decisions, hiring a new staff, many of whom would have little to no geographic ties to the area or owe any political favors to the Hedermans and establishing a workplace culture defined by honesty, trust, and accuracy—the tenants of twentieth century enterprise journalism that earlier generations of the family had ignored.133 Given the paper’s “notoriously racist” past, and the public notoriety of the Hederman name, Rea Hederman faced an extremely difficult rebranding effort.134 Patriquin was perhaps a bit more cynical—at least at first. Nevertheless, she sat down with managing editor Charles Smith for an interview. “I want you to meet the publisher’s son,” he told Patriquin. “Oh, God—I’ve known publisher’s sons,” she thought in that moment.135 Nevertheless, she sat down with Rea Hederman as he explained his (re)vision for The Clarion-Ledger and Patriquin’s possible role in it. They talked about the paper’s sordid history and that of the Hederman name. Rea told Patriquin that his father, Bob,

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would remain as publisher and that his uncle, T. M., would soon retire as editor. Rea would eventually assume full editorial control over the paper, starting with his role as city editor. Patriquin followed up with what she recalled as a “very blunt conversation about my feelings about civil rights and the responsibility of newspapers.” Rea agreed with everything that Patriquin said. “It was one of the shocks of the century,” she remembered, “that a Hederman was determined to cover race and a number of other important things.”136 Patriquin started on the first day of January 1974, just a few months into Hederman’s tenure as city editor. In a recent interview, she could not recall or understand how Rea Hederman was able to keep his family at bay as he instituted the significant changes that he did.137 However, it was no small task to be able to manage a paper and the politics of one of the most notorious families in the state’s history. Rea certainly felt the pressure from family members when he made a decision, editorial or hiring, particularly those of the second generation—his father’s brothers or cousins—but, overall, he resisted their advice (or, perhaps, warnings). “[The Hedermans] were able to keep their footing against some seismic change, but not all,” Lally reported.138 So, change happened and progress continued, perhaps because any protests from family members or anyone remotely connected to them—in the past, one call to a Hederman would have killed a story or editorial decision immediately—did not have the same effect they once did.139 As noted in the Jackson Free Press piece on the Hedermans and their flagship paper, social attitudes slowly evolved and the civil rights movement and subsequent federal legislation dismantled much of the state’s white power structure—thus giving Rea enough room to operate without significant pressure from outside forces like the Citizens’ Councils (which had lost much of their influence by the 1970s) and the Sovereignty Commission (which shut down in 1973).140 Rea had room to operate, too, simply because, for a family as guarded and private as the Hedermans, there was too much potential risk that any family disagreement would go public. Almost immediately, Rea began increasing the staff of The Clarion-Ledger, and Ronni Patriquin was among the first hired. The paper was off to a fresh start, but so too was Patriquin. “I was starting over,” she recalled, “and covering the state capitol at the same time.”141 Nevertheless, she dove right in and reported on a number of issues: state retirement pensions, nutrition and hunger (what might be called “food insecurity” today), and mental health, among other issues.142 However, there were at least three stories (or series of articles) that Patriquin recalled as being most resonant. The first included a series of reports regarding legislative reform of the Mississippi School for the Deaf, a state public school founded in 1854 for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Patriquin informed readers of the school’s “deplorable problems” and legislation meant to address them.143 The second came

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in a series of approximately ten articles, in which Patriquin (and colleague Barbara Mueth) reported on corruption within the state park system, exposing millions of dollars in missing funds from the Mississippi Parks Commission, money appropriated to the Commission by the state legislature during its 1972 session, as well as a number of mismanagement and leadership issues.144 For example, in the course of just over a year, Patriquin and Mueth exposed $55,000 in missing construction funds earmarked for a new swimming pool and roads at Percy Quinn State Park, located in McComb. They investigated allegations of missing funds at Quitman’s Clarko State Park— money originally meant to pave roads—and Hattiesburg’s Paul B. Johnson State Park—money earmarked for new comfort stations.145 “I don’t even remember all of the state parks that were having problems,” Patriquin said, “but we found some hanky panky going on with them.”146 The noise that Patriquin and Mueth made could not and would not be ignored. The Mississippi Parks Commission pointed the finger at the Mississippi Highway Commission in a public complaint, alleging that the Highway Commission added tens of thousands of dollars to the costs of the Percy Quinn State Park road project and that work went unfinished.147 The state legislature launched an investigation into the individual state parks named in the various allegations, and, by extension, the Parks Commission itself. Also, the State Building Commission, the agency responsible for regulation of all state building projects, placed a moratorium on state park projects until the conclusion of the investigation. “It’s time to cool it down and stop for a while,” one state official said.148 The report of the Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER) committee, the body responsible for evaluating all state agency work, revealed “mismanagement and inefficiency” by the Parks Commission in a number of areas, including the quality of some construction projects and the fact that poor accounting and auditing practices and poor inventory review and overall management accounted for the aforementioned missing funds. The PEER committee held both the Parks and the Building Commissions responsible for the inadequacies.149 Other consequences followed, including the firing of Lloyd King, the superintendent of the Percy Quinn State Park, where many, but not all, of the “mismanagement and inefficiency” issues occurred; the resignation of Dr. John King, executive director of the State Parks Commission in 1974; and the firing of Bill Barnett, hired shortly thereafter, but fired a year later.150 Patriquin’s coverage helped draw attention to the mismanagement and leadership issues within the individual state parks and the Mississippi Park Commission. By extension, her work was responsible, at least partially, for calls that the Commission be reorganized—if not abolished altogether. A bill introduced during the 1976 legislative session did just that, with state parks

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eventually falling under the Department of Natural Resources before merging with the Mississippi Game and Fish Commission.151 Similarly, her investigation into Parchman helped bring statewide attention to a number of inmate abuses and allegations of illegal activity by prison administrators. One article, for example, highlighted allegations that former Parchman Superintendent John Collier (who resigned before Patriquin arrived at The Clarion-Ledger) profited from illegal contracts between the prison and his cotton farm, a violation of state law.152 Years later, she mentioned more of Collier’s abuses in an interview: “He had a farm . . . and he would take county employees and they would come to his farm and do work for him,” Patriquin said. “We had the information, we had copies of things that he had thought were long buried.”153 Just as the UPI’s Nancy Campbell worked to expose safety issues at Parchman related to inadequate staffing—the prison was well short of the minimum number of guards needed to reasonably secure the premises— Patriquin’s coverage highlighted the same problems from slightly different angles. For example, she exposed evidence of overcrowding at Parchman, a poorly kept secret to be sure, including what one federal judge deemed to be inadequate living conditions. “If I remember correctly, one of [Judge William Keady’s] rulings were that [Parchman administrators] had to provide personal space [in each cell] of 50 square feet. Now, that’s not much space for each inmate, but it was better than what they had.”154 At the same time, Patriquin’s presence at Senate Corrections Committee meetings brought to light the efforts made by some lawmakers, including Chair Corbet Lee Patridge, to push for statewide prison reform—and to hold prison officials and other political leaders accountable for the sorry state of affairs. “It would seem to me that there is the smell of politics in the air as well as spring,” Patriquin quoted Patridge as saying in a March 1974 article.155 The job was intense to say the least—Patriquin made so many trips to Parchman over a two year period that prison guards would just wave her through the front gate when they saw her driving in—and she followed every possible lead.156 She read and followed up on letters sent to her by the family members of inmates, she crawled through prison dumpsters, she confronted prison officials (and they confronted her in return), and she relied on inside sources to fill in the gaps.157 Deputy Warden (and head of security) George Morgan was, in Patriquin’s words, a “very, very important” person in that regard. Morgan, the third most senior prison administrator, defied Reed’s orders (Morgan’s friend and superior), whose leadership came under heavy fire as both Patriquin and Campbell’s coverage exposed his ineptitude (e.g., charges ranging from public drunkenness to filling prison jobs with unqualified personnel). “Jack Reed brought [in] a number of his people, and they took over the prison. And it became, I guess, in their minds, it was theirs to

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do with as they pleased,” Patriquin stated. But [Rea] sent us to Parchman, and that was it—it was all over for them.”158 In fact, Patriquin would later claim that her reporting directly led to Reed’s demise. On Monday, May 17, 1976, Patriquin reported that Reed fired Morgan the previous Friday without notice because Morgan gave Patriquin “carte blanche” to interview inmates in the maximum security wing that same day without Reed’s approval. The same story recounted details of a brief conversation between Patriquin and Reed that same Friday, in which she reminded Reed that he had approved her visit, even going as far as Reed telling Morgan to “take her any place she wants to go.” Patriquin then quoted Reed’s response for readers: “Well, Babe, he should know what I tell you and what is so ain’t necessarily the same thing. Do you hear me, Babe?” The article then gave readers details of what happened near the end of Patriquin’s Friday visit and afterwards. “When the meeting between Reed, Morgan, and reporters broke up at 9:30 PM,” she wrote, “Reed said he was going home to drink ‘the beer I bought this afternoon.’ Two hours later he called Morgan and fired him.”159 The following day, Tuesday, May 18, a front-page story written by Patriquin revealed that Reed gave Morgan and his family one day to move out of their home, which was located on prison property. The article also included Morgan’s response—he threatened legal action—and the first reaction from Governor Finch, who, in a press conference the following Monday, expressed his concern with the firing (and that of another prison official from two months earlier) and promised a swift investigation into the matter.160 The next day, in fact, a front-page Clarion-Ledger headline read, “Reed Dismissed as Supervisor of Parchman,” and provided the details of the Governor Finch’s decision to fire Reed.161 “Jack Reed was playing such games,” Patriquin recalled. “And George [Morgan] was doing what he was supposed to do. And, he was a good guy because he defied Jack Reed and did the right thing.”162 Half a century later, Patriquin remains proud of her work, but the Parchman investigations stand out. “We were trying to cover these prisoners as real human beings,” Patriquin recalled. “I thought, and still think, that when you commit a serious crime and you’re sent to the penitentiary, that shouldn’t be a death sentence in the way you’re treated.”163 Along with Nancy Campbell’s reporting, Patriquin’s stories revealed the ongoing systemic mistreatment and professional incompetence at one of the South’s most notorious prisons—and they were two of the first reporters in the state to do so. “We were covering [Parchman] as it should be covered,” Patriquin said. “And it was the kind of stories that the Hedermans would have never touched before Rea came along.”164 The Parchman series was among the last big stories that Patriquin would work on before she left The Clarion-Ledger in 1976. She moved back to

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Louisiana that fall, following her then husband who had taken a new job in Baton Rouge just a few months before. The decision was a difficult one— being forced to make a choice between work and family is an experience that women in Patriquin’s position have in common. “Well, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back [to Louisiana]. I had to work it out,” she said. “I went and talked to a counselor and worked it all out.”165 Neuman was driving into town just as Patriquin left. By the time she left three years later, her portfolio would eventually include substantial coverage of Governor Cliff Finch, including his run for the United States Senate in 1978 and corruption within his administration; the United States Senate campaign of civil rights activist Charles Evers; and many humid, August summers at the Neshoba County Fair, “Mississippi’s Giant House Party,” watching candidates for various political offices “stump” in front of generations of fair-goers.166 “STAINED HISTORY” The aforementioned list isn’t intended to imply that Neuman had an easy time of it; she was far away from home, and the cultural and regional differences alone were enough to make her want to quit on her first day of the 1976 legislative session.167 Like any young reporter, she had to learn to adapt quickly to her new environment—a new city, a new job, a new life—and it was difficult at first. She was homesick, and shy and insecure enough to complain to her managing editor shortly after she arrived that she wasn’t sure how useful she would be. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for lawmakers to tell their aides to avoid Neuman completely—the “Yankee” troublemaker (from the West, no doubt) who, according to town gossip, was there to stir up dirt.168 Neuman recently recalled the beginning of her career with The Clarion-Ledger: The first few months were a blur, but I remember distinctly the first day at the state capitol the following January. I was sitting at the press table when the President Pro Tem of the Senate, I believe his name was Alexander, began to speak. He was soft-spoken, with a deep Delta accent. I noticed the pens of my colleagues go into overdrive as he outlined his goals for the session. Mine was stilled. I understood perhaps one third of what Senator Alexander had to say. So, I went back to the newspaper and told the managing editor—newly arrived from the University Missouri Journalism School—that he would have to ship me back to California, because I did not speak the language, and would not be of use to him here.169

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The cultural barrier was never more distinct than the first time Neuman experienced the Neshoba County Fair, “Mississippi’s Giant House Party.” For better or worse, the fair is a timeless cultural experience; as one longtime observer once said, “It’s a place where there is comfort in knowing that tomorrow will be little changed from today.”170 For generations, families have used the cabins for annual family reunions, week-long social gatherings, and a place to renew old friendships—but there is a dismal history that looms over “Mississippi’s Giant House Party,” one that highlights the state’s longstanding racial and class lines, and it cannot be ignored or forgotten. “Indeed, in Neshoba County, the love of whiteness—veiled as it is in the language of family, community, ‘the old days,’ and a conveniently undefined ‘we’ and ‘our’—is not dead, but has become instead the love that dares not speak its name,” American Studies Professor Trent Watts writes.171 Neuman was aware of some of that history as she anxiously made the one hour and fifteen minute drive from Jackson to Philadelphia for the first time. “As you might imagine, I was frightened even to drive to Philadelphia, given its stained history, but I did,” she said.172 That “strained history” goes back to at least the 1890s, ten years after white locals formed the “Neshoba County Stock and Agricultural Fair Association” and bought land eight miles outside of Philadelphia, Neshoba County’s seat, and built the first cabins.173 In the 1930s, the second generation incorporated the Neshoba County Fair under state law, making the Fair a private, nonprofit organization owned by local white shareholders.174 The cabins became part of their private property, which eventually included 150 acres of Neshoba County land and numerous wood cabins, ultimately 600 in all, dotting the landscape. The cabins, two-and-three stories each, one just as colorful and unique as the one next to it, would be passed down from one family generation to the next, or they were sold as private property, with prices eventually ranging from $60,000–100,000.175 In that sense, cabin ownership became a critical part of both the fair-going social experience and its white privilege; for many, especially those with legacy ties to the Fair property, or at least ties to one of the families, “the cabins and the relaxed living they encourage—strangers may find themselves invited inside for supper, or at least a drink—are seen by long-time fairgoers as a key to the fair’s meaning.”176 However, for many others—particularly Black or underprivileged white residents—the cabins, and, by extension, the fair itself, held a different meaning: a reminder of longstanding socioeconomic and racial inequities. “It was tough if you couldn’t afford a cabin, or weren’t invited to one for a week,” journalist and editor Donna Ladd, who was born and raised in Neshoba County, writes. “Throughout my childhood, the Neshoba County Fair loomed as a symbol of the class differences between us and those who could afford to stay there.”177

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The privileged whiteness of fairground property ownership—as one observer recently noted, “[There are] no blacks in the cabin unless they are working for somebody”—is but one defining symbol of the fair’s complex social and racial history.178 There are others, including symbolic references to the Confederacy in the form of flags and racially coded homemade campaign signs that marginalizes Black political candidates and their supporters. However, it is the fair’s annual political stump speeches, which date back to the 1890s, that have perhaps most distinctly defined the social and racial hegemony of the fair-going experience—and that of the county and state itself.179 Here, standing shoulder-to-shoulder under large tents, generations have gathered to hear the persuasive rhetoric of dozens of political candidates and elected officials. Just outside the shadow of the Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner murders of Freedom Summer 1964, many, like Governor Ross Barnett, preached the virtues of segregation and a Jim Crow “Southern way of life.” Others, like presidential candidate Ronald Regan in 1980 and Governor Kirk Fordice in 1995, have, in more modern times, used the racist code language of “states’ rights” and “Never Apologize! Never Look Back!” to win audience (and voter) approval.180 “But the story of the Neshoba County Fair since the 1960s,” Watts states, “reveals the powerful influence that the rhetoric of whiteness wields in shaping contemporary Mississippi culture.”181 No elected official, in modern times at least, has epitomized that rhetoric more than Barnett. To his dying breath, he preached and believed in the myth of white superiority, achieving what one observer called “folk hero” status among longtime fairgoers. One 1960s fair appearance, in which he offered the crowd an off-key version of “Are You from Dixie?” while picking at his guitar, comes to mind. A decade later, in his 1978 fair speech, he railed against public school busing, shouting to the crowded tent, “Who cares about racial balance?” As late as the 1980s, in fact, he remained one of the fair’s most popular speakers, if not the most popular. “Our problem with Ross Barnett,” one late 1970s fair organizer said, “is that they just love him so much, we have a hard time getting him off the stage.”182 In August 1977, Neuman arrived in time to catch Barnett’s appearance, a keynote address before yet another packed house. Neuman recently recalled that she expected to see the “imposing figure” she had read so much about but instead saw “an old man probably in his late 70s, weak in walking and difficult to hear,” with “skin so thin he looked extremely white” at center stage. Even so, Neuman watched as Barnett worked the crowd, warning them what would happen if longtime senator James (“Jim”) Eastland retired: Ted Kennedy, who Barnett hated with a passion, would take control of the powerful Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil Rights.183 “This was wonderful, the governor said sarcastically, because Kennedy was a good mamma’s boy,

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and a great swimmer,” Neuman wrote. “The crowd erupted in foot stomping cheer. I sat frozen, horrified by this reference to Chappaquiddick.”184 This episode was not Neuman’s first time to experience Mississippi’s “strained history,” as she called it, but it was one of the most memorable. The next day, August 5, her article appeared in The Clarion-Ledger, providing readers with the political punchline of the aforementioned joke: “And the only time he went right,” Barnett said in reference to Ted Kennedy, “was when he drove off the bridge with Mary Jo.”185 Back at The Clarion-Ledger offices, Neuman waited for what she thought would be reader outcries at the insensitivity of Barnett’s remarks. None came. “It was as if readers just shrugged it off, ‘Ah there goes Ross again, what a character,’” she said. “I was still seeing the world in moral terms, they in personal ones.”186 Neuman left Barnett’s speech in shock and dismay, her preconceived notions of the South partially confirmed. However, she continued to follow Rea Hederman’s vision, part of which meant that she would investigate state political issues not covered during previous Hederman eras—and investigate them from entirely new angles. These stories included, among others, the United States Senate campaign of Charles Evers—a campaign that the Hederman elders would have never covered in The Clarion-Ledger of old, at least not in a way that did not ridicule or otherwise marginalize Evers and his supporters. However, in covering these campaigns, Neuman provided for her readers (and herself) a window (or perhaps a mirror) into a more diverse campaign slate and electorate. “You need somebody (in office) that looks like you and talks like you and has suffered like you,” she quoted Evers as saying at one campaign stop.187 “GAME LITTLE CRITTER” Neuman’s time on the campaign trail with Charles Evers offered such an opportunity. Charles Evers, unlike his younger brother, never expected or intended to take his place. Before Medgar’s assassination in 1963, Charles was far removed from the movement that defined his brother. Both graduated of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University), but they took two drastically different paths as adults. As Medgar engaged in civil rights field work through the NAACP, Charles took a path that included numbers-running and prostitution and a bootleg whiskey racket in two different states.188 “But he has not come to his present controversial eminence without a .38 pistol in his belt and a switchblade in his pocket,” Paul O’Neil of Life magazine said in 1971 profile of Evers’s, who had, two years before, been elected the mayor of Fayette, Mississippi. “[He] has not

Figure 6.1.  Former Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, guitar in hand, was a popular attraction at the Neshoba County Fair long after he left office. “Our problem with Ross Barnett,” one 1970s Fair organizer said, “is that they just love him so much, we have a hard time getting him off the stage.” Joanna Neuman covered one of Barnett’s appearances at “Mississippi’s Giant House Party.” Source: Wilson F. “Bill” Minor Papers, Manuscript Division, Archives and Special Collections, Mississippi State University Libraries.

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done so, in fact, without bootlegging in Mississippi, running whorehouses in the Philippines and dropping policy for the Mafia in Chicago.”189 Evers was living in Chicago when he received the news of his brother’s death; he came back home “with murder in his heart,” O’Neil noted, prepared to take revenge on the white man, any white man, for taking Medgar’s life. His brother’s voice, however, pulled him back. “That’s not the way, Charles, that’s not the way,” the voice in Charles’s head said over and over. Charles then picked up his brother’s work as NAACP field secretary, registering approximately 250,000 Black voters in Mississippi in the late 1960s with the help of college students from the North that he recruited.190 “He organized registration drives for Black voters, economic boycotts against white businesses and challenges to the state’s white Democratic Party structure,” The New York Times reported on the occasion of Evers’s August 2020 death.191 In 1968, he ran Robert Kennedy’s Mississippi presidential campaign and was a member of the state’s first integrated delegation to the Democratic convention that year.192 By the time Neuman caught up with Evers, he had been elected mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, a town of 1,600 residents, tucked in the southwest corner of the state. He became the first Black mayor in Mississippi since Reconstruction—the vast majority of Fayette was Black but voter intimidation kept the mayor’s office all white; he served four terms, and cemented his civil rights legacy by dragging Fayette (and southwest Mississippi) into the twentieth century by bringing in millions of dollars in economic development to that part of the state.193 “Hands that picked cotton can now pick the mayor,” Evers said in response to his work to redistrict Fayette so the town would no longer live under the strict segregation city codes of the past.194 Evers ran as an independent for governor in 1971, the first Black man in the state to run for that office, but Democrat William Waller defeated him. Three years later, the IRS indicted him for tax evasion, citing $160,000 of unreported income. The trial ended in a mistrial. Now, six years later, he was back, running again as an independent for the seat left vacant by Senator Jim Eastland’s retirement.195 In an August 1978 article, Neuman pointed out the historic nature of this election and what was at stake. “If history is any guide,” she wrote, “Charles Evers and Henry Kirksey, both black independent candidates in the race for U.S. Senate, are in for the fight of their lives.”196 Eastland was the state’s political kingpin of racial segregation and his place in the Senate, which he held for almost four decades, the primary seat of resistance to what many Southerners referred to as the “Second Reconstruction,” the two-decade period between the late 1940s and 1960s that defined the civil rights movement.197 Politically speaking, he was a powerful throwback to the “Bourbon Democrats,” a faction of the Democratic Party that held power during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Defined in part by

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their generational wealth and devotion to the planter class (and the merchant and professional classes that supported them), Bourbons prided themselves as “Southern gentlemen,” social conservatives known for what they would consider a more dignified approach to white supremacy.198 In other words, they were paternalistic in their support of the white lower classes, like the state’s dirt farmers, and decried any sort of violence as a means of furthering the cause of white supremacy. Instead, they used their political and social capital to create and enforce Jim Crow legislation, thus keeping the heel of their boots firmly pressed the necks of Black citizens. Eastland may have shared the same political ideology of the Bourbons, but he claimed to identify less with the wealthy cotton farmers of the Mississippi Delta region, where he was born in November 1904, and more with the “ginners or farmers, peckerwood sawmill operators or poultry producers” of the state, including those in Scott County, where he was raised.199 There, in Forest, the county seat, his father, Woods Eastland, built a personal injury law practice and eventual career as district attorney. Woods also owned over 2,000 rich Delta acres and a family plantation, first acquired by his father, Oliver Eastland, in Doddsville. Even so, Jim Eastland was raised among the dirt farmers of Scott County, not far from the Hillsboro community where his grandfather, Hiram, settled before the Civil War.200 Like most Southerners, Jim Eastland learned to idolize the mythology of the “Lost Cause” and to blame the North for trying to destroy the “Southern way of life.” He knew well the story of Sherman’s March and how it drove his great-grandfather Hiram off the family farm in Hillsboro. Eastland’s mother, Alma, taught him the same stories—“firsthand reports of Yankee brutality and bitter and one-sided, often misguided, even hysterical accounts of ‘Negro rule’ during Reconstruction.” Alma was a political force in her own right; as president of the Scott County chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy, she built a cultural history of the Confederacy that celebrated states’ rights and the superiority of the white race. As her son gained political power, he would continue Alma’s fight against what she saw as the tyranny of the federal government.201 Over the course of almost four decades as a United States Senator, Eastland secured a reputation of, as one NAACP spokesperson described it, “a mad dog let loose in the streets of justice.”202 He possessed what civil rights activist Aaron Henry called a “master-servant” relationship with his Black constituents—he presented himself as a benevolent overseer who claimed to have their best interests in mind, all the while using his political power to disfranchise them at every turn.203 As chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil Rights, he led a massive effort to keep 1960s civil rights legislation from seeing the light of day—“He liked to joke that he had special pockets made in his pants to carry around all the bills he wouldn’t let come up for

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a vote,” journalist Julian E. Zelizer writes—all the while publicly decrying any attempts at racial equality as un-American.204 “Eastland became the most visible spokesman for a coordinated, region-wide effort to undermine public support for the movement by linking civil rights to communism,” historian Chris Myers Asch states.205 Eastland, for example, once declared during one Senate speech that the Communist Party was using the civil rights movement to “exploit the Negroes and their problems for the benefit of the party’s objectives.”206 Of course, Eastland had close allies in his rhetorical campaign, including members of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission and the Hedermans, who used their newspapers to support Eastland’s rhetorical campaign against the dangers of a movement meant to, in Eastland’s words, “promote and foster discontent of every possible kind.”207 Eastland’s power and influence, by the 1970s, had diminished, much the result of changing political and social climates. As a founder of the Dixiecrats, he was not able to, nor did he have the energy to, shift his views on race quickly enough to win Black voters.208 For decades, many white Southerners, seeing the progressive evolution of the national Democratic Party from a party that supported segregation to one that eventually embraced racial equality, bolted for the Republican Party.209 In the 1970s, the Republican Party lured many remaining Southern political leaders using the “Southern strategy” politics of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, both lifelong Republicans who created a path to the White House by appealing to Southern white voters who did not support the civil rights platforms of the Democratic Party.210 However, Eastland remained loyal to the Democratic Party, even if he detested their progressive policies and ideology. Finally, in 1978, he announced his retirement, after seeking the advice of civil rights leader Aaron Henry as to whether he should seek yet another term. Henry told him that his chances of winning the Black vote in Mississippi, which now was crucial to his re-election, were “poor at best.”211 By the time Eastland made his announcement, The Clarion-Ledger had undergone as many changes as his beloved Democratic Party. Under the first two generations of Hedermans, The Clarion-Ledger, like everything else in the state, was a segregated newspaper. In fact, the Hedermans distributed a special “colored section” to the segregated parts of the state, and, in all additions of the paper, Black citizens were referred to “negro” with the lower-case “n” and were refused the respect titles of “Mr.” and “Mrs.” when their names appeared in print (as such titles were reserved for white citizens). Such decisions were customary of most Southern newspapers, as they indicated Black citizens second class status, and, as Patronik notes, “worked to play down any black accomplishments and avoided printing content that would run counter to white notions of superiority.”212 However, under Rea Hederman,

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Clarion-Ledger reporters were, in Ronni Patriquin’s words, “determined to cover Black people in the same manner you would cover white people.”213 Of course, skeptics had a hard time accepting the difference between The Clarion-Ledger of the Jim Crow era and Rea Hederman’s Clarion-Ledger. “To my great embarrassment Evers . . . often asked me to rise during rallies that more often resembled church meetings, saying The Clarion-Ledger, referred to locally as The Clarion-Liar, had a new generation, a new attitude,” Neuman recalled.214 On the other hand, the paper’s 180-degree turn was so noticeable that locals referred to Rea Hederman’s Clarion-Ledger as a “foreign newspaper,” and his brash, young news staff as “Rea’s outside agitators.”215 Neuman and her coverage of Charles Evers certainly fit both descriptions. As part of a team of reporters who blanketed readers with coverage of the senate race, Neuman shadowed Evers as he traveled around the state looking for an historic upset in the Democratic primary. In all, she wrote more than a dozen articles about Evers and his campaign, including pieces about his campaign platform and the progress he made as Fayette mayor. One full-page spread, which appeared in the September 24 issue, outlined the progress of Fayette under Evers’s leadership, including plans for a new health care center, the construction of a new International Telephone & Telegraph plant (with an expected 150 workers and an annual payroll of $1.2 million), and a $60,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to go towards a Commercial Chemical Co. plant.216 In at least one article, Neuman provided space for Evers’s campaign platform, which included such conservative measures as support for prayer in public schools and opposition to much of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” domestic agenda—including TNAF aid (commonly known as “welfare”) created by The Food Stamp Act of 1964 and The Social Security Amendments of 1965 and 1967. “Welfare is a joke,” Evers told Neuman.217 By giving the self-proclaimed “renegade Democrat” a wide news platform, Neuman allowed readers to see the political differences between Evers and his brother, as he attempted to widen his base in hopes of gaining white votes (which included the support of Jimmy Swan, a former segregationist gubernatorial candidate, and Hattiesburg business owner H. R. “Red” Morgan, who managed Swan’s campaign). “I like what the man says,” Morgan told Neuman in July 1978. “I think he can do more for us.”218 In contrast, Neuman also highlighted Evers’s popularity within the Black communities of the Mississippi Delta, among other regions of the state, and the role that celebrities like Mississippi Delta native B. B. King and boxing champion Muhammad Ali played in Evers’s campaign. “I will (hold) as many as necessary,” King said, when asked by Neuman if he planned to continue to help Evers raise money by playing a benefit concert.219

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Neuman’s coverage was thorough—she went deep inside Evers’s camp and interviewed aids and supporters and cross-examined his campaign with other independent candidates like fellow civil rights activist and Tougaloo College professor Henry James Kirksey. She reported on what some referred to as Evers’s “strict, dominant” leadership style and how it often caused friction with those around him.220 She went deep into his background to reveal stark differences between the Evers brothers. “Medgar was a different kind,” Charles told Neuman. “Medgar was very sweet and very soft, very kind and very understanding. I was the rude one. Had they known him, they never would have killed him.”221 She reported on the campaign’s financial difficulties and provided an honest account of Evers’s chances in an historic primary—which, as many predicated, he lost. “As for Evers, his chances are seen as generally worse this year against Democrat Maurice Dantin and Republican Thad Cochran than in his race for governor in 1971,” Neuman wrote. “Seen as worse, that is, by almost everyone but him.”222 And, she brought to print an issue that had rarely, if ever, been seen in a Hederman paper: an analysis of the Black vote, specifically its potential influence on the 1978 senate race.223 Traveling from one end of the state to the other—from the Mississippi Delta down to Jackson and then Hattiesburg and then back up to Tupelo— Neuman saw parts of Mississippi and met people she would not have otherwise encountered. The Evers campaign experience left an impression, as did her experience reporting of Governor Cliff Finch, the self-billed “working man’s friend.”224 Other reporters who covered Finch’s term as governor agreed that the antics of his administration ran the gamut from the silly to the surreal; no rumor seemed to far-fetched, no lead too outrageous to follow. Finch entered Mississippi politics in 1960 as a member of the House of Representatives. A native of Panola County, Finch, the oldest of five children, enlisted in the Army and served in Italy during World War II. He attended the University of Mississippi as both an undergraduate and law student, graduating with a law degree in the late 1950s. He served one term in the House of Representatives before his election (and re-election) as district attorney of the 17th circuit court district in 1964 and 1968. Before his run for governor in the mid-1970s, Finch first ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor in 1971.225 Four years later, he ran for governor amid a shifting political landscape that defined the state, beginning in the early 1970s. Much the result of federal civil rights legislation—like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimination at the voting booth (e.g., Jim Crow literacy tests)—and massive voter registration drives, particularly in areas with historically high Black populations, like the Mississippi Delta and in Jackson, political candidates were able to successfully tap into the economic and political concerns of a significant voting bloc.226 Johanna Neuman recalled such a moment from

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the mid-1970s while reporting on Charles Evers’s congressional campaign. A registration drive was held for Evers at a local church, and Neuman watched as the audience, both white and Black, became swept up by the speaker at the front of the room—a “frail Fannie Lou Hamer,” she remembered, working near the end of her life to get Black voters to the polls.227 The political changes were already happening before Neuman arrived in Mississippi, however. As historians Tip H. Allen Jr. and Dale A. Krane note, a wave of neopopulism shaped state politics from the beginning of the decade, as political candidates attempted to speak the language of the working class and respect the line of Black voters that organizers like Hamer brought to the polls. In 1971, gubernatorial candidate William Waller, former supporter of segregation and lifelong Democrat, appealed to Black voters by openly rejecting the Jim Crow ideology still embraced by party rivals like Jimmy Swan, who lost to Waller in the Democratic primary that year.228 He refused the racially charged language of many of his political contemporaries and campaigned on his record as a Hinds County prosecutor, which included the 1964 unsuccessful but vigorous prosecution of Byron De La Beckwith, the man who assassinated Medgar Evers.229 At the same time, Waller, a self-proclaimed “redneck,” won conservative, white, rural voters over with catchy slogans like “Waller Works” and by railing against state career politicians—whom he branded the “Capitol Hill Gang”—like the Democratic primary and general election front-runner, Lieutenant Governor Charles Sullivan, protégé to then Governor John Bell Williams. Those same rural voters rallied to his side, in part, because they were scared stiff that Charles Evers might emerge victorious in the Democratic gubernatorial primary—not that the reasons mattered to Waller in victory.230 “(My candidacy was successful) because of my desire to offer the people an alternative to the do-nothing, hold-onto-what-you-have machine and to give ordinary citizens an opportunity to participate in their government,” he wrote in his memoir, Straight Ahead: The Memoirs of a Mississippi Governor.231 Finch used a similar campaign strategy, drawing upon his own childhood growing up on what has been described as “one of the poorest farms in Panola County.”232 His family taught him the importance of hard work at an early age; they needed his help plowing fields, even before he was old enough to attend school. He used his original five county voting base that elected him district attorney to launch a state campaign for state representative in 1960, his unsuccessful bid for lieutenant governor in 1967, and then for governor almost a decade later.233 In the latter campaign, Finch drew upon his own background to tap into the growing populist movement sweeping through the state. And, like Waller, he did so by appealing to Black voters (despite having backed Ross Barnett’s attempts to block James Meredith’s entry into the

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University of Mississippi in 1962) and, in what would be a significant voting bloc, rural, working-class whites from around the state.234 Neuman was not living in Mississippi when Finch launched his campaign, but other journalists were watching. Norma Fields, for example, reported that “the working class people showed missionary zeal and ran the Finch campaign like he was a candidate for county supervisor.”235 The campaign tactics Finch used to win voters over—and eventually besting Democrat William Winter in the primary and Republican Gil Carmichael in the general election—may seem unconventional in hindsight, but they clearly worked. In contrast to Carmichael’s issue-oriented campaign, Finch instead saturated the campaign trail with the image of the hard-working man from Panola County. He set aside one day a week to do manual labor, for example, including bagging groceries at local markets to working a bulldozer. At the same time, he used the colloquiums of the everyday worker and called for more jobs for the poor and uneducated.236 “That man digging a ditch or blacktopping the road feels like the government has forgotten them,” he told the press while on the campaign trail.237 Neuman covered Finch during his first year in office, joining a large pool of reporters who had already been tracking the growing problems of his new administration. For her part, Neuman reported on everything from questions about Finch’s spending and other financial matters—in December 1976, for example, she filed a story asking questions about the possible misuse of federal grant money, and in early 1978, she reported on Finch’s attack on the State Tax Commission over his proposed plan for $20 car tags.238 Other investigations into Finch’s administration during 1977, initiated by several Clarion-Ledger reporters (Neuman included), included what Neuman called “a series of upheavals in state government under Finch.”239 In the course of one year, Finch replaced or demoted (or attempt to replace or demote) the heads of several state agencies or committees, including the state Air and Water Pollution Control Committee; the Criminal Justice Planning Agency; and the entire membership of the state Commission on the Status of Women.240 Neuman and other reporters questioned the reasons for those decisions, the manner in which they were conducted, and why Finch appointed certain individuals given their public records. For example, in December 1977, Neuman reported that Finch appointed former Citizens’ Council member R. C. Bradshaw as acting head of the Mississippi Surplus Property Procurement Committee. “There are two or three people that I have replaced,” Finch said to the press in defense of his decisions. “You might want to say fired or shot or whatever it is—I don’t know if any are dead yet—but they have been replaced.”241 In fact, part of the story of Finch’s tenure as governor included his relationship with the state capitol press—or lack thereof. As Neuman and other

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reporters continued to question and report on a number of controversial (even head-scratching) decisions, everything from Finch’s foreign travel (with an ever-growing and changing entourage, which added to growing concerns about his spending), to his proclamation of “Ten Four Day” to draw “public attention to the men and women acting as members of organized groups or as individuals who use their citizens band radios for the public good”—Finch took personally the continued scrutiny from reporters of his administration.242 Neuman and her colleagues were there to record every pot-shot he took at the capitol press pool. “Do you want me to stay here behind a desk and go to sleep or do you want me to go out and work?” Finch asked as he challenged one reporter’s questions about his increased travel expenses.243 The tension escalated between the press and Finch into the next year, as reporters from The Clarion-Ledger (among other newspapers) continued their coverage of his troubled administration. For example, as journalist Bob Zeller followed Finch’s efforts to minimize the damage of a nationwide savings and loan crisis to state financial institutions, Neuman reported on his decision to campaign for Jim Eastland’s senate seat during the third year of his gubernatorial term.244 Neuman and other reporters were called to a press conference at the Jackson Ramada Inn, scheduled for Friday, March 24, for what they anticipated would be Finch’s announcement of his senate campaign. Two days after Eastland announced his retirement, Finch announced his candidacy, but what Neuman and other reporters experienced when they arrived at the hotel resembled, in Neuman’s words, more a “pep rally for Finch supporters” than a traditional press conference. With an estimated 400 in attendance, Neuman watched as Finch made his way to the front of the room, “doublebarrel handshakes” all the way, as a band played “Riding with Cliff Finch.” Neuman described the homemade song to readers as a “country-and-western refrain that evokes hootenanny images and square dance themes.”245 The scene was quintessential Finch; in fact, Neuman revealed to readers that one reporter said to Finch, as the hoopla died down, “We didn’t know the circus was coming to town. We didn’t know you’d be performing with trained seals.” As Neuman said, that remark “set the tone” for a long Q&A session with Finch that lasted well over an hour, as the governor and the press resumed their adversarial relationship. “Maybe I’m not quite as dumb as some of you might think,” Finch replied to one reporter, who told the governor that he should come better prepared to answer questions related to national and international issues.246 In a crowded campaign field, Finch wanted and needed to stand out, but his lack of preparation, and his contentious relationship with the press, exposed many questions that followed him over the next several months: Would he continue working as governor as he campaigned? What role would Lieutenant Governor Evelyn Gandy play in running the state government

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over the coming months while Finch campaigned? What did Finch’s campaign schedule look like, and how would it conflict with his duties as governor? It was, Neuman stated, a morning in which Finch “traded information and insults with reporters.”247 Over the next several months, Neuman followed Finch’s campaign seeking answers to those and other questions. One significant concern involved accusations that a Finch associate, state bank comptroller Jimmy Means, allegedly attempted to extort senate campaign contributions from bankers on Finch’s behalf. “Some of the more than two dozen bankers contacted said they were approached on a friendly basis by Means and asked for the maximum $1,000 per person contribution,” Neuman wrote in an article published in May 1978. “Others said they were warned: ‘You know the governor keeps a list . . . and if he doesn’t win for Senate, he’s going to be governor for two more years.” Several bankers told Neuman that Finch had Means “under his thumb,” because Means knew that his appointment as bank comptroller rested with the governor, so Means did as Finch instructed.248 Both Means and Finch categorically denied the accusations to Neuman. “There’s no way in the world that Jimmy Means could force anybody to do anything,” Finch told Neuman a couple of days after the story broke.249 Even so, Neuman’s probe into the allegations that Means was, in her words, “warning [the bankers] that without [Means and Finch] their branch expansion applications might be rejected,” prompted the FBI to open a months-long investigation of its own.250 Neuman’s work also led, indirectly at least, to separate federal investigations into allegations of bank fraud by Means and at least one other Finch administrator, Mississippi Employment Commission Director Edgar Lloyd. Federal grand juries eventually indicated both Means and Lloyd; after trial, they were sentenced to sixteen and twenty-two months in prison, respectively.251 Finch, meanwhile, lost in a primary runoff to district attorney Maurice Dantin, who received 65 percent of the vote and seventy-three of eighty-two counties.252 Voters knew far less about Dantin than they did Finch, which probably played into Dantin’s favor; the seemingly countless investigations into his administration did not help Finch’s campaign, and his attempts to recapture the neo-populism of his 1975 gubernatorial campaign—including one TV ad that attempted to link Dantin with “cigar-smoking, scotch-drinking” career politicians (e.g., Jim Eastland)—failed.253 “Finch has been the only issue in either primary,” Mississippi State University political science professor Joseph Parker told Neuman at the time. “It’s a pretty sound renunciation of either Cliff Finch the man or of Cliff Finch who tried to use the governor’s office as a stepping stone.”254 Neuman considers her coverage of the Finch administration, especially the Jimmy Means investigation, to be the most important of her time in Jackson.

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It led to federal investigations of two Finch administrators and got the attention of state lawmakers, who introduced a bill during the 1979 session that would require future senate confirmation of two specific gubernatorial appointments: the state bank comptroller and the state banking board.255 Her work certainly impressed Rea Hederman, who sent her to the nation’s capital in 1979 to open a Clarion-Ledger news bureau. The move had “deep consequences for the arc of my life,” she admitted years later, as it gave her experience and opportunities that otherwise may not have been available.256 For the next two years, until 1981, she covered Congress, specifically the movements of Mississippi’s two senators, longtime Democrat John Stennis and newly elected Republican Thad Cochran, as well as the state’s House of Representatives members, and she wrote a weekly column, “Neuman’s Notebook,” for The Clarion-Ledger.257 She brought her reputation as a skilled enterprise reporter with her, someone who wasn’t afraid to anger those in power. For example, when she questioned whether Stennis was losing his influence after the November 1980 elections (that saw Republicans gain control both the Senate and White House), she found herself in the crosshairs of the state’s longest serving elected official in Washington and one of the most powerful men on Capitol Hill. However, Stennis wasn’t the only one irritated with Neuman. Representative David Bowen of Cleveland, for instance, resented that Neuman had published his travel records. “The seven members of the Mississippi delegation were not, on the whole, pleased with my work,” she recalled. In fact, Rea Hederman traveled to Washington in an attempt to negotiate a truce between Neuman and the so-called “Mississippi delegation.” He met an angry Bowen, who, according to Neuman, “actually pounded on his desk” and demanded Neuman be fired. “No one was angrier [at me] than Bowen,” she recalled.258 An exchange between Stennis and Hederman, overheard by Neuman, perhaps best summarizes Neuman’s time with The Clarion-Ledger. As she left Stennis’s office so that he and Hederman could talk privately, Neuman heard Stennis refer to Neuman as a “game little critter.”259 With one down home, patronizing phrase, Stennis revealed one reason he and other lawmakers were upset with Neuman: the fact that a woman got the best of them. Neuman was not the first journalist to question their performances and motives, but she was probably one of the first women to do so. So, they summoned her male editor to take her back home. Their plans did not go as expected, however. Once outside of earshot, Hederman looked at Neuman, and said, “You must have hit a sore spot. Now it’s time to bore in.”260 That particular exchange also revealed the bond between Hederman and his reporters. “I knew then that I would forever be loyal to Rea Hederman,” Neuman said when recalling that moment with him. Hederman met his goal of remaking The Clarion-Ledger’s reputation by hiring a band of fearless

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journalists, many of them women, who were unafraid to carry out his vision. In Neuman’s case, she exposed the political agents of Jim Crow and followed the campaigns of Black candidates representing the New South. Furthermore, she played a role in dedicating space and time to analyzing the importance

Figure 6.2.  Longtime Mississippi senator John C. Stennis (pictured here) once referred to Johanna Neuman as a “game little critter” in a conversation with Clarion-Ledger editor Rea Headerman. Source: Wilson F. “Bill” Minor Papers, Manuscript Division, Archives and Special Collections, Mississippi State University Libraries.

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of the Black vote in a state election (with national implications). The former helped legitimize the political voices of Black candidates, the latter, their supporters. A self-proclaimed outsider, Neuman came to Mississippi with preconceived notions about the state (most of it based on the dark days of Jim Crow and the civil rights struggle) and left with what she called “more tolerance for difference.”261 She learned to love the state and its people, and wanted to do her best by them while there. She did so having successfully challenged political officials, like Cliff Finch and Jimmy Means, who abused voter trust. The war of words between the press and Finch gave the public good copy to read, but it demonstrated the importance of the Fourth Estate. Without those watchful eyes, including journalists like Neuman, many elected officials would surely run amok; many do so anyway, but imagine what they could and would do if no one is watching. To that point, Ronni Patriquin exposed financial and political corruption within the state park and penal systems. The time she spent at Parchman brought to light the depth of inmate abuse and neglect; a prison sentence at “the Farm” was akin to the death penalty, for Black prisoners in particular, and Patriquin helped expose what amounted to a de facto plantation system. Her investigation into the state penal farm, in fact, reminded people the human costs and dark legacy of “the Farm.” Patriquin’s coverage marked the first time a Hederman paper had ever touched upon the issue of race and crime with any sense of credibility—the days of the old Hederman news empire were over—and it was a sign of things to come. Journalists like Jo Ann Klein and Nancy Weaver, two more of Rea Hederman’s “outside agitators,” would continue the fight that Ronni Patriquin and Johanna Neuman helped initiate. NOTES 1. Patriquin email. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Patriquin phone interview. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid.   8. In her January 15, 2018, email to the author, Neuman provided an eight-page autobiographical sketch to the author containing background information on her family, including her mother’s side, the Zimachows [Hereafter abbreviated as “Neuman unpublished autobiography.”]. Information on her father’s family, the Neumans, was

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taken from a genealogical search of Seymour Neuman family on the website Ancestory.com A similar search also was conducted for additional information on Marilyn Zimachow Neuman’s family [These searchers will hereafter be cited as “Zimachow Ancestry search” and “Neuman Ancestry search,” respectively.].   9. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Patriquin email. 16. The census record in question can be found by logging into Ancestory.com and completing a search for the background record of Evelyn Abagail Zimachow. 17. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 18. Neuman discussed her family in the unpublished autobiography. For information on the Gravesend communities, see Fatima Shama, “Little Odessa—Brighton Beach, Brooklyn,” Little NYC, accessed December 1, 2021. https:​ //​ eportfolios​ .macaulay​.cuny​.edu​/littlenyc​/little​-odessa​-brighton​-beach​-brooklyn​/. 19. Ibid. See also, Edward Lewine, “From Brighton Beach to America; The Wave of Immigrants Began 25 Years Ago. Soon Russian Filled the Streets. Now the Tide Is Ebbing,” New York Times, March 14, 1999, https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/1999​/03​ /14​/nyregion​/brighton​-beach​-america​-wave​-immigrants​-began​-25​-years​-ago​-soon​ -russian​-filled​.html. 20. Lewine, “From Brighton Beach to America.” 21. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Neuman Ancestry search. 25. The draft card was discovered during the aforementioned Ancestry search of the Neuman family, specifically “Seymour Neuman.” 26. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 27. A search of the Newspapers.com website revealed numerous articles from Southern California in which Evelyn’s philanthropic efforts (in regard to education and other matters related to the Jewish faith) are revealed. The direct quote came from “VJCC Adult Courses Begin,” Valley Times, January 21, 1967, 4. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/580836672. 28. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 29. Ibid. 30. Patriquin phone interview. 31. For more information on Maryville University, see the following link on the university’s website: https:​//​www​.maryville​.edu​/alumni​/history​-maryville​-university​ /. 32. For more information on Barat, see the following link on the Society’s website: https:​//​rscj​.org​/key​-figures​-in​-our​-history.

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33. In her interview with the author, Patriquin mentioned that her mother’s family, or many of them, lived in St. Louis. 34. Ibid. 35. Walker Fortenberry, “Tupelo Tornado of 1936,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, August 3, 2020. https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/tupelo​-tornado​-of​-1936​/. 36. Patriquin phone interview. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. “Accidental governor” quote from Neuman unpublished autobiography. See the autobiography and the Patriquin phone interview for details of the stories both women followed when they covered the Mississippi state capitol. 42. Patriquin phone interview. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Patriquin email. 49. Patriquin phone interview. 50. Tracy Everbach and Laura Matysiak, “Sports Reporting and Gender: Women Journalists Who Broke the Locker Room Barrier,” Journal of Research on Women and Gender 1, no. 1 (March 2010): 4–5. 51. Patriquin phone interview. 52. Patriquin email. 53. See Katie McInerney, “40 Years After a Historic Court Decision, Are Female Sports Journalists Treated Equally,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 25, 2018. https:​//​www​.inquirer​.com​/philly​/sports​/female​-sports​-journalists​-ludtke​-kuhn​ -claire​-smith​-espn​-awsm​-20180925​.html. 54. Marie Hardin and Stacie Shain, “‘Feeling Much Smaller Than You Know You Are’: The Fragmented Professional Identity of Female Sports Journalists,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 23, no. 4 (October 2006): 324. 55. Patriquin email. 56. Patriquin phone interview. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid.

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67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. See also John Berthelsen, “Cory Appointments Linked to Political Payoffs,”  Sacramento Bee, July 5, 1975, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /620652323​/​?terms​=kenneth​%20cory​%20johanna​%20neuman​&match​=1. 70. See Virgil Meibert, “Who’s to Kick Around,” Oakland Tribune, July 13, 1975, 36.  https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/717181149​/​?terms​=johanna​ %20neuman​&match​=1. 71. Ibid. 72. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 73. Ibid. 74. Patriquin phone interview. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 80. Carter quote from Lally, “A Journey from Racism to Reason.” 81. Ibid. 82. Quote from Sheelah Kolhatkar, “Rea! Genius Loves Company,” Observer, September  25, 2006. https:​//​observer​.com​/2006​/09​/rea​-genius​-loves​-company​/.  Background information on Rea Hederman can be found at Lally, “A Journey from Racism to Reason.” 83. As quoted in Edmonds, “Resisting the Civil Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of the Southern White Press,” 142. “Cousin Hi” taken from Billy Skelton, “History of Paper, State Intertwined,” The Clarion Ledger, May 31, 1987, 12AA. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/184898621. 84. Quote from R. H. Henry, Editors I Have Known Since the Civil War, 156. Information on the merger taken from Henry, 70. See also Wickham, “Jackson Clarion-Ledger.” 85. Wickham, “Hederman Family.” Additional information about Bertie and T. M. Hederman, including their ages, taken from Skelton, “History of Paper, State Intertwined,” 12AA. 86. See Wickham, “Jackson Clarion-Ledger” and Skelton, “History of Paper, State Intertwined,” 12AA. 87. “Quiet Home Marriage,” Jackson Daily News, June 20, 1907, 8. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/214734230​/​?terms​=Hederman​%20Brothers​&match​=1. 88. For example, T. M. Hederman was elected as early as January 1929. See “First Baptist in Excellent Shape,” Daily Clarion-Ledger, January 9, 1929, 9. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/202522569​/​?terms​=first​%20baptist​%20church​%20T​.M​.​ %20Hederman​&match​=1. Bertie was elected at least two years earlier. See “Deacons Ordained at Baptist Church,” Daily Clarion-Ledger, December 22, 1927, 7. https:​//​ www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/202446579​/​?terms​=Hederman​%20deacons​&match​=1.   89. Lally, “A Journey from Racism to Reason.”   90. See Skelton, “History of Paper, State Intertwined,” 12AA.

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  91. Ibid.   92. Ibid.   93. “Lust Led Negro Into Hotel Room Sheriff Asserts,” Daily Clarion-Ledger, August 11,  1936, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/202452578​/​?terms​=negro​ %20lust​&match​=1.   94. Edmonds, “Resisting the Civil Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of  the Southern White Press,” 171.   95. Wickham, “Hederman Family.”   96. Skelton, “History of Paper, State Intertwined,” 12AA.   97. “T. M. Hederman Jr. Heads Press Assn.,” Jackson Daily News, June 9, 1963, 1, 16A.  https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/185663896​/​?terms​=T​.M​.​%20Hederman​ &match​=1.   98. Edmonds, “Resisting the Civil Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of the Southern White Press,” 175.  99. Ibid., 170–71. For more information on the region, see Charles Reagan Wilson, “Piney Woods,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, July 11, 2017. https:​ //​ mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/piney​-woods​/. 100. Edmonds, “Resisting the Civil Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of  the Southern White Press,” 176. 101. Ibid., 171–72. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid., 172. 104. Michael Alexander Patronik, “Written in Black and White: A Content Analysis Newspaper Coverage of the Desegregation of Three Flagship Public Southern Universities,” Master’s thesis, (University of Mississippi, 2011), 122. https:​//​egrove​ .olemiss​.edu​/cgi​/viewcontent​.cgi​?article​=1222​&context​=etd. 105. For more information on the Hedermans support of Barnett, see Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family,” and Edmonds, “Resisting the Civil Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of the Southern White Press,” 6. Quote from Gene Wirth, “Gov. Barnett Interposes Self Against Federals,” The Clarion-Ledger, September 14, 1962, 20. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /180493979​/​?terms​=cup​&match​=1. 106. See, respectively, Edmund Noel, “Don’t Like Mixing, But We’ve Got It,” The Clarion Ledger, October 10, 1962, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180094323​ /; “Negro Student Meredith is Trying to Force Admission,” The Clarion Ledger, June 28, 1962, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/179728568​/​?terms​=meredith​ &match​=1. 107. Patronik, “Written in Black and White: A Content Analysis Newspaper Coverage of the Desegregation of Three Flagship Public Southern Universities,” 128. 108. Edmonds, “Resisting the Civil Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of the Southern White Press,” 126. 109. As quoted in Patronik, “Written in Black and White: A Content Analysis Newspaper Coverage of the Desegregation of Three Flagship Public Southern Universities,” 116. Despite Hederman’s quote, most observers, like Bill Minor, believed the opposite to be true. See Lally, “A Journey from Racism to Reason.”

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110. A typical quote used to describe segregation in the state. For example, see Edmonds, “Resisting the Civil Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of the Southern White Press,” 13. 111. For more information on the Hedermans’ relationship with the Sovereignty Commission and the Citizens’ Councils, and how those relationships benefited Ross Barnett, see Patronik, “Written in Black and White: A Content Analysis Newspaper Coverage of the Desegregation of Three Flagship Public Southern Universities,” 114–118. The phrase “federal encroachment” taken from p. 76. 112. Edmonds, “Resisting the Civil Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of the Southern White Press,” 133. 113. The quote “tantalizing facts, allegations and innuendoes” taken from Edmonds, Resisting the Civil Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of the Southern White Press,” 136. See the same for more information on the relationship between the Sovereignty Commission and the Hedermans. 114. For more information, see Edmonds, “Resisting the Civil Rights Movement: Race, Community and the Power of the Southern White Press,” 136. For actual quote and headline see, “John Salter Probe Asked,” The Clarion-Ledger, June 16, 1963, 11. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/185677226​/​?terms​=john​%20salter​ &match​=1. 115. Wells, “News Wars: The Rise and Fall of The Clarion-Ledger.” 116. Lally, “A Journey from Racism to Reason.” 117. Ibid. 118. Wells, “News Wars: The Rise and Fall of The Clarion-Ledger.” 119. “Introduction of Rea Hederman by Richard Ford.” 120. Prochnau, The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.” 121. Ibid. 122. Ibid. 123. Information about Hederman’s “plan” was taken from a few sources, including the Neuman unpublished autobiography. See also Lally, “A Journey from Racism to Reason”; McLure and Caia, “Fired by Family, Hederman Made New York Review Second Act”; Well, “Newspaper Wars: The Rise and Fall of The Clarion Ledger.” 124. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 125. Neuman mentions the influence of Welty and Faulkner in the unpublished autobiography. 126. William Maxwell, forward to One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression by Eudora Welty (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 3. 127. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid. 132. Ibid. 133. Ibid. 134. “Notoriously racist” quote from McLure and Caia, “Fired by Family, Hederman Made New York Review Second Act.”

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135. Patriquin phone interview. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid. 138. Lally, “A Journey from Racism to Reason.” 139. Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.” 140. Wells, “News Wars: The Rise and Fall of The Clarion-Ledger.” For information on when the Sovereignty Commission, including when it shut down, see Yasuhiro Katagiri, “Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, July 11, 2017. https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/tupelo​-tornado​-of​-1936​/. 141. Patriquin phone interview. 142. See, for example, Ronni Patriquin, “Plan for State Workers Raise Gets Mixed Legislative Reaction,” The Clarion-Ledger, January 17, 1975, 6. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/185658652​/​?terms​=ronni​%20patriquin​%20teacher​&match​ =1; Patriquin, “Task Force on Nutrition Urged,” The Clarion-Ledger, April 18, 1975, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/186052527​/​?terms​=ronni​%20patriquin​ &match​=1; Patriquin, “Whitfield Renovation Hearing Held,” The Clarion-Ledger, October 2, 1975, 7. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180973706​/​?terms​=ronni​ %20patriquin​%20education​&match​=1. 143. For more information on MSD legislation, see Patriquin, “Living Conditions at Deaf School Shocking, Solons Study Finds,” The Clarion-Ledger, March 19, 1974, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180446544​/. The date of the opening of the Mississippi School for the Deaf and the school’s mission taken from Thomas John Carey, “Mississippi School for the Deaf,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, July 11, 2017. https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/mississippi​-school​-for​-the​-deaf​/. 144. See, for example, Barbara Mueth and Patriquin, “Swimming Area Funds Use Questioned at Percy Quinn,” The Clarion-Ledger, September 10, 1974, 1, 10. https:​//​ www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/183579009. 145. Ibid. See also Barbara Mueth and Patriquin, “Mystery Shrouds Parks Road Funds, Bathroom,” The Clarion-Ledger, September 13, 1974, 1, 6. https:​ //​ www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/183584470​/​?terms​=ronni​%20patriquin​%20Clarko​%20State​ %20Park​&match​=1. 146. Patriquin phone interview. 147. Patriquin, “Parks Unit Unhappy Over Percy Quinn Costs,” 1. 148. Quote from Patriquin, “Defer Parks Contracts, PEER Prober Advises,” The Clarion-Ledger, July 16 1975, 1.  https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180967528​ /​?terms ​=ronni​%20patriquin​%20it​%27s​%20time​%20to​ % 20cool​ % 20it​ % 20down​ &match​=1. 149. Patriquin, “PEER Panel Finds Parks ‘Mismanaged, Inefficient,’” The Clarion-Ledger, June 15, 1975, 1, 14. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/183583623​ /​?terms​=mismanagement​%20and​%20inefficiency​&match​=1. 150. See, respectively, Patriquin, “Parks Panel Fires Percy Quinn Superintendent,” The Clarion-Ledger, July 13, 1976, 5B. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /181142881; Patriquin, “PEER Panel Finds Parks ‘Mismanaged, Inefficient,’” 14; Patriquin, “Meredith Named to Run State Park System,” The Clarion-Ledger,

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July 29, 1975, C4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/181038745​/​?terms​=ronni​ %20patriquin​%20bill​%20barnett​%20state​%20parks​%20commission​&match​=1. 151. Patriquin, “Senate Panel Oks End to Vehicle Office,” The Clarion-Ledger, April 2, 1976, 1D. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180975171​/​?terms​=ronni​ %20patriquin ​ % 20state ​ % 20park ​ % 20Mississippi ​ % 20Game ​ % 20and ​ % 20Fish​ %20Commission​&match​=1. 152. Patriquin, “New Prison Controversy May Break Over Collier,” The Clarion-Ledger, April 5, 1974, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180203393​/​ ?terms​=John​%20Collier​%20ronni​%20patriquin​%20cotton​&match​=1. 153. Patriquin phone interview. 154. Ibid. 155. Patriquin, “Patridge Blasts Waller Inaction on Prison Bills,” The Clarion-Ledger, March 27, 1974, B1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180472123​/​?terms​ =Patridge​&match​=1. 156. Patriquin phone interview. 157. Ibid. 158. Ibid. 159. Patriquin, “Parchman Superintendent Fires Security Chief,” The Clarion-Ledger, May 17, 1976, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180995245​/​ ?terms​=ronni​%20patriquin​&match​=1. 160. Patriquin, “Ex-Parchman Assistant Given One Day to Move Family Out,” The Clarion-Ledger, May 18, 1976, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /180997703​/​?terms​=ronni​%20patriquin​&match1. 161. Patriquin, “Reed Dismissed as Supervisor of Parchman,” The Clarion-Ledger,  May 19, 1976, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/181000088​ /​?terms​=Reed​%20Dismissed​%20as​%20Supervisor​%20of​%20Parchman​&match​=1. 162. Patriquin phone interview. 163. Ibid. 164. Ibid. 165. Ibid. 166. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 167. Ibid. 168. Ibid. 169. Ibid. 170. Trent Watts, “Mississippi’s Giant House Party: Being White at the Neshoba County Fair,” Southern Cultures 8, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 38. 171. Ibid., 46. 172. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 173. Watts, “Mississippi’s Giant House Party,” 41. 174. Ibid. 175. Ibid; the number of cabins mention in this sentence was taken from page 38. 176. Ibid., 38. 177. Donna Ladd, “Of Sin and Politics,” Jackson Free Press, July 28, 2004. https:​ //​www​.jacksonfreepress​.com​/news​/2004​/jul​/28​/of​-sin​-and​-politics​/. 178. Watts, “Mississippi’s Giant House Party,” 50.

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179. For mention of the campaign signs, see Ladd, “Of Sin and Politics”; Watts mentions the Confederate flags in “Mississippi’s Giant House Party,” 50; a history of first political stump speech, and subsequent speeches, can be found on p. 44. 180. See Watts, “Mississippi’s Giant House Party,” 46–50, for more information related to the Neshoba County civil rights murders and Barnett, Reagan, and Fordice’s legacy to the fair. 181. Ibid., 46. 182. All information related to Barnett taken from Watts, “Mississippi’s Giant House Party,” 47–48. The 1978 quote about Barnett was taken from page 48. 183. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 184. Ibid. 185. Johanna Neuman, “Barnett, Finch Shine Onstage,” The Clarion-Ledger, August 5, 1977, 2C. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/181064223. 186. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 187. Neuman, “Evers: Blacks Should Vote for Independents,” The Clarion-Ledger, May 29, 1978, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/183555374​/​?terms​=talks​ %20like​%20you​%20and​%20has​%20suffered​%20like​%20you​%20charles​%20evers​ &match​=1. 188. Paul O’Neil, “A Black Governor for Mississippi?” Life, May 14, 1971, 59. 189. Ibid. 190. Ibid., 60. 191. Robert D. McFadden, “Charles Evers, Businessman and Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 97,” The New York Times, July 22, 2020. https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/2020​/07​ /22​/us​/charles​-evers​-dead​.html. 192. Ibid. 193. McFadden, Charles Evers, Businessman and Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 97”; the information regarding Fayette’s economic growth, and Evers’s role in that growth can be found at Neuman, “Charles Evers: Fayette’s Strict, Dominant Father,” The Clarion-Ledger, September 24, 1978, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /180587617​/​?terms​=johanna​%20neuman​%20charles​%20evers​&match​=1. 194. McFadden, “Charles Evers, Businessman and Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 97.” 195. See McFadden, Charles Evers, Businessman and Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 97,” for mention of Evers’ 1971 gubernatorial run; information on Evers’ tax problems and trial was taken from Thomas A. Johnson, “In Six Years, Evers Has Lifted Mississippi County to Prosperity,” The New York Times, December 29, 1975. https:​ //​www​.nytimes​.com​/1975​/12​/29​/archives​/in​-six​-years​-evers​-has​-lifted​-mississippi​ -county​-to​-prosperity​.html. 196. Neuman, “Independents—Fighting a Losing Battle for Votes?” The Clarion-Ledger, July 10, 1978, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180561094​/​ ?terms​=johanna​%20neuman​%20charles​%20evers​%20kirksey​&match​=1. 197. The second reconstruction defined in Wilfred Codrington III, “The United States Needs a Third Reconstruction,” The Atlantic, July 20, 2020. https:​//​www​ .theatlantic​.com​/ideas​/archive​/2020​/07​/united​-states​-needs​-third​-reconstruction​ /614293​/. For mention of Eastland’s opposition to the second reconstruction, see

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J. Lee Annis, Jr., Big Jim Eastland: The Godfather of Mississippi (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 4. 198. Colbert I. King, “The Bourbon Democrats Rise Again,” The Washington Post, April 20, 2012. https:​//​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/opinions​/the​-bourbon​-democrats​ -rise again/2012/04/20/gIQA9cvXWT_story.html. 199. See Annis, Jr., Big Jim Eastland, 15–20, for more information on the Eastland family’s Delta region roots, and page 20 for Jim Eastland’s birth. Quote from page 5. 200. Ibid., 16–18; for similar information about the Eastman family tree, also, Chris Myers Asch, The Senator and the Sharecropper: The Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 35–37. 201. Annis, Jr., Big Jim Eastland, 16. 202. Maarten Zwiers, Senator Jim Eastland: Mississippi’s Jim Crow Democrat (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 1. 203. Maarten Zwiers, “James O. Eastland,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, May 25, 2018. https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/james​-oliver​-eastland​/. 204. Julian E. Zelizer, “50 Years Ago, Americans Fired Their Dysfunctional Congress,” The Atlantic, January 21, 2015. https:​//​www​.theatlantic​.com​/politics​/archive​ /2015​/01​/50​-years​-ago​-americans​-fired​-their​-dysfunctional​-congress​/384688​/. 205. Asch, The Senator and the Sharecropper, 209. 206. Ibid. 207. For more on Eastland’s connection to the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, see Asch, The Senator and the Sharecropper, 152–53; for more on his relationship with the Hedermans, see Edmonds, “Resisting the Civil Rights Movement,” 137; for more on the Hedermans role in discrediting the civil rights movement, see Wells, “News Wars.” 208. As journalist Tim Dickinson notes, “By the 1970s Eastland was firmly on the wrong side of history.” The quote was part of an article on then presidential candidate Joe Biden, whom Eastland befriended in the 1970s. See Tim Dickinson, “Biden Rejects Calls to Apologize for Praise of Segregationist,” Rolling Stone, June 19, 2019. https:​//​www​.rollingstone​.com​/politics​/politics​-news​/why​-did​-biden​-praise​ -racist​-senator​-booker​-deblasio​-850220​/. For more information on the formation of the Dixiecrats, see Alonzo L. Hamby, “1948 Democratic Convention: The South Secedes Again,” Smithsonian Magazine, August 2008. https:​//​www​.smithsonianmag​ .com​/history​/1948​-democratic​-convention​-878284​/. 209. Dov Grohsgal and Kevin M. Kruse, “How the Republican Party Emerged,” The Atlantic, August 6, 2019. https:​//​www​.theatlantic​.com​/ideas​/archive​/2019​/08​/ emerging​-republican​-majority​/595504​/. 210. Ibid. 211. Zwiers, “James O. Eastland.” 212. For a discussion of these issues, see Patronik, “Written in Black and White,” 116–17; quote from page 117. 213. Patriquin phone interview. 214. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 215. Prochnau, The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.”

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216. See Neuman, “Charles Evers: Fayette’s Strict, Dominant Father,” 3. 217. See Neuman, “Evers Opens Up with Characteristic Fervor,” The Clarion- Ledger, July 17, 1978, 3, 4E, for a discussion of Evers’ political platform. Quote from  page 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/179947000​/​?terms​=johanna​ %20neuman​%20charles​%20evers​&match​=1. 218. Neuman, “Morgan Joins Evers,” The Clarion-Ledger, July 20, 1978, 3. https:​ //​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/179948107​/​?terms​=johanna​%20neuman​%20charles​ %20evers​%20H​.R​.​%20​%22Red​%22​%20Morgan​&match​=1. 219. Neuman, “Evers Elicits Campaign Support from Mississippi Celebrity,” The Clarion-Ledger, September 6, 1978, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /179979944​/​?terms​=johanna​%20neuman​%20charles​%20evers​%20b​.b​.​%20king​ &match​=1. 220. See Neuman, “James Kirksey: Loner, ‘He Pricks Our Conscience,’” The Clarion-Ledger, October 1, 1978, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/179985952​ /​?terms​=Henry​%20James​%20Kirksey​%20johanna​%20neuman​&match​=1; quote from “Charles Evers: Fayette’s Strict, Dominant Father,” 3. 221. Neuman, “Charles Evers: Candidate for the U.S. Senate,” The Clarion-Ledger, October 29, 1978, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180612635. 222. Neuman, “Independents—Fighting a Losing Battle for Votes?” 3. 223. Neuman, “The Black Vote: It Could Play the Kingmaker Role,” The Clarion-Ledger, October 29, 1978, 8. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180612805. 224. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 225. David G. Sansing, “Charles Clifton Finch,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, April 14, 2018.  https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/charles​-clifton​-finch​/. 226. The work of Charles Evers’s in black voter registration was previously discussed. See O’Neil, “A Black Governor for Mississippi?” for reference. For mention of Finch’s taking advantage of the political climate and his attempts to lure the state’s white, working-class voting bloc, see Charles C. Bolton, William F. Winter and the New Mississippi: A Biography (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 174. 227. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 228. Tip H. Allen, Jr. and Dale A. Krane, “Class Replaces Race: The Reemergence of Neopopulism in Mississippi Gubernatorial Politics,” Southern Studies 19, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 185. 229. “William Waller, former Mississippi Governor, Prosecutor,” Portland Press Herald, December 1, 2011. https:​//​www​.pressherald​.com​/2011​/12​/01​/william​-waller​ -former​-mississippi​-governor​-prosecutor​_2011​-12​-01​/. 230. See Allen, Jr. and Krane, “Class Replaces Race,” 185, for a list of Waller’s campaign tactics. See also, Adam Ganucheau, “In Governor’s Race, Waller Replicates Father 1971 Strategy That Landed Him in the Governor’s Mansion,” Mississippi Today, April 30, 2019, for mention of those same tactics, as well as the connection between Sullivan and Williams. https:​//​mississippitoday​.org​/2019​/04​ /30​/in​-governors​-race​-waller​-replicates​-fathers1971​-strategy​-that​-landed​-him​-in​-the​ -governors​ -mansion​ /. For mention of the white vote in the Waller/Evers race,

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see Wayne Grimsley, James B. Hunt: A North Carolina Progressive (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2003), 70. 231. As quoted in Ganucheau, “In Governor’s Race, Waller Replicates Father 1971 Strategy That Landed Him in the Governor’s Mansion.” 232. Cecil L. Summers, The Governors of Mississippi (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1980), 141. 233. Ibid., 143. See also Sansing, “Charles Clifton Finch.” 234. Allen, Jr. and Krane, “Class Replaces Race,” 188. 235. Fields was quoted in James Saggus, “Finch’s Dinner Pail Serves Up the Votes,” The Clarion-Ledger, August 31, 1975, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /181056332​/​?terms​=norma​%20fields​%20cliff​%20finch​&match​=1. 236. Allen, Jr. and Krane, “Class Replaces Race,” 186. 237. As reported by Jack Elliot, “Candidates Battling Down to Wire,” The Clarion-Ledger,  November 2, 1975, 8. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /180970115​/​?terms​=Candidates​%20Battling​%20Down​%20​&match​=1. 238. Neuman, “Problem with Federal Grant Called a ‘Misunderstanding,’” The Clarion-Ledger, December 7, 1976, 27. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /181135520​/​?terms​=johanna​%20neuman​%20cliff%20finch%20grant&match=1; Neuman, “Two Figures Cloud $20 Car Tag Plan,” The Clarion-Ledger, January 24, 1978, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/183538567​/​?terms​=johanna​ %20neuman​ % 20Two​ % 20​ % 20Figures​ % 20Cloud ​ % 20 ​ % 2420 ​ % 20Car ​ % 20Tag​ %20Plan​&match​=1. 239. Neuman, “Bradshaw Named Head of Surplus Commission,” The Clarion-Ledger, December 22, 1977, C6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /181042392​/​?terms​=johanna​%20neuman​%20cliff​%20finch​%20a​%20series​%20of​ %20upheavals​%20in​%20state​%20government​&match​=1. 240. See, respectively, Neuman, “Finch’s Overhaul Removed Five Directors,” The Clarion-Ledger, July 21, 1977, 1, 1D. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /181068006​/​?terms​=You​%20might​%20say​%20to​%20say​%20fired​%20or​%20shot​ %20or​%20whatever​%20it​%20is​%20I​%20don​%27t​%20know​%20if​%20any​%20are​ %20dead​%20yet​%20but​%20they​%20have​%20been​%20replaced​%20cliff​%20finch​ &match​=1, and Neuman, “Finch to Replace All Members of Women’s Panel,” The Clarion-Ledger, June 21, 1977, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/181071250​ / ​ ? terms ​ = Commission ​ % 20on ​ % 20the ​ % 20Status ​ % 20of ​ % 20Women ​ % 20johanna​ %20neuman​&match​=1. 241. Neuman, “Finch’s Overhaul Removed Five Directors,” 1, 1D. 242. See, respectively, Neuman, “Finch Entourage Head for Japan for $15,000,” The Clarion-Ledger, August 24, 1977, C2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /180453100​/​?terms​=johanna​%20neuman​%20cliff​%20finch​%20trade​&match​=1; Neuman, “Finch Proclaims CB Day,” The Clarion-Ledger, September 27, 1977, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180623861​/​?terms​=public​%20attention​ %20to​ % 20the%20men%20and%20women%20acting%20as%20members%20 of%20organized%20group%20or%20as%20individuals%20who%20use%20 their%20citizens%20band%20radios%20for%20the%20public%20good&match=1.

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243. Neuman, “Finch Gives His Side at Press Conference,” The Clarion-Ledger, April 21, 1978, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/183542910​/​?terms​=want​ %20me​%20to​%20go​%20out​%20and​%20work​%20johanna​%20neuman​%20cliff​ %20finch​&match​=1. 244. See Bob Zeller, “Finch Asks U.S. to Help S&Ls,” The Clarion-Ledger, June 13, 1976, 1, 20. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/181231161​/​?terms​=cliff​ %20finch​%20savings​%20and​%20loan​&match​=1; Neuman, “Finch Joins Senate Scramble,” The Clarion-Ledger, March 24, 1978, 1, 18. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​ /image​/183170049. 245. Neuman, “Finch Joins Senate Scramble,” 1. 246. Ibid., 18. 247. Ibid. 248. Neuman, “Pressured for Finch Contributions, Bankers Say,” The Clarion-Ledger, May 17, 1978, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/183535378​/​ ?terms​=johanna​%20neuman​%20cliff​%20finch​%20senate​%20campaign​&match​=1. 249. Neuman, “Finch, Means Deny Pressure,” The Clarion-Ledger, May 18, 1978, 3.  https:​ / /​ w ww​ . newspapers​ . com​ / image​ / 183536981 ​ / ​ ? terms ​ = johanna​ %20neuman ​ % 20cliff ​ % 20finch ​ % 20There ​ % 27s ​ % 20no​ % 20way​ % 20in​ % 20the​ %20world​ % 20that​ % 20Jimmy​ % 20Mean​ % 20could​ % 20force ​ % 20anybody ​ % 20to​ %20do​%20anything​%2C​&match​=1. 250. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 251. For two stories of the investigation into Means and Lloyd, see David Bates, “State Agrees to Means Withdrawal, Giving Him Job Until Successor Named,” The ClarionLedger, March 30, 1979, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/181083427​/​ ?terms​=edgar​%20lloyd​%20jimmy​%20means​&match​=1; for the story of their prison sentences, see Nancy Weaver, “Means, Lloyd Sentenced on Fraud Counts,” The Clarion-Ledger, September 12, 1981, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /185207424​/. Jo Ann Klein, “Dantin Beats Finch in Landslide,” The Clarion-Ledger, June 28, 1978, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180628676. 252. Klein, “Dantin Beats Finch in Landslide,” 1. 253. Quote from David Bates, “Tuesday Ends a Contest of Styles, Personalities,” The Clarion-Ledger, June 25, 1978, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /180599067​/​?terms​=finch​%20cigar​-smoking​%2C​%20scotch​-drinking​&match​=1. 254. Neuman, “Opinions Vary for the Runoff Defeat of Cliff Finch.” The Clarion-Ledger, June 29, 1978, 5. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180636034. 255. “Capitol Clips,” The Clarion-Ledger, January 19, 1979, 6. https:​ //​ www​ .newspapers ​ . com ​ / image​ / 180991490​ / ​ ? terms​ = banking ​ % 20commission ​ % 20bank​ %20comptroller​&match​=1. 256. Neuman unpublished autobiography. 257. Ibid. 258. Ibid. 259. Ibid. 260. Ibid. 261. Ibid.

Chapter 7

“Go Get the Story”

In May 1979, Nancy Weaver received an invitation fitting of her promising career. Her editor, Rea Hederman, asked Weaver and ten other Clarion-Ledger reporters and editors to travel with him to receive the 1978 print media and grand prize Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism.1 Members of the press pool assigned to cover Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign established the award to “honor outstanding reporting on issues that reflect Robert Kennedy’s concerns, including human rights, social justice, and the power of individual action in the United States and around the world.”2 Hederman’s staff, specifically Weaver and reporters Fredric Tulsky and Don Hoffman, won for their series, “North Mississippi Justice,” published in December 1978. It offered a detailed account of “unexplained deaths, murders and judicial abuse in north Mississippi;”3 Marshall County, located among the top row of Mississippi counties that border Tennessee, was the epicenter of the investigation. Weaver, Tulsky, and Hoffman traveled to the county of about 25,000 to look into a number of unexplained and unsolved deaths of several Black men dating back to the 1960s. The reporters included as the focus of their year-long investigation questions of how and why the county judicial system failed the victims.4 “White suspects arrested in connection with some of the deaths were never brought to trial,” Weaver, Tulsky, and Hoffman explained to their readers. “Official documents regarding some of the deaths have disappeared and law enforcement agencies, the courts and even grand juries have been compromised to the detriment of the very people they are designed to serve.”5 The series, a multipage spread in the December 11 issue exploring race, the Marshall County economy, and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in north Mississippi, among other angles, begged the question, “Is there justice for the poor in North Mississippi?”6 It was as deep and thorough an examination that ever appeared in the paper, as it exposed the problems of accountability, race, police brutality, and corruption in a county whose population once included 265

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almost as many slaves as white residents. “If you want to kill a man, do it in Marshall County,” one resident told The Clarion-Ledger team.7 Hundreds of interviews and county state and federal records helped pull the series together, which included profiles of a half dozen victims, all Black men, from 1963–1975: James Edward Garrett, Butler Young, Ernest Richmond Jr., Clyde Stanbach, L. T. Campbell, and Garfield Perkins.8 Even today, Weaver is still impressed by the resources Hederman provided his reporters—certainly when compared to the current environment, in which newspapers struggle just to pull together what’s needed for the smallest of local stories. “The amount of space [that] we got for stories, to write these long pieces—that sort of thing wouldn’t happen today,” she said. “I mean, we got a chance to really delve deeply into topics and report on them at length.”9 The fact that a Hederman paper received any legitimate journalism award, among over 600 other entries to boot, must have been quite the shock to most longtime Jackson residents; the fact that the award in question had a Kennedy’s name on it must have been downright amusing—especially for anyone who could appreciate the irony of a Hederman receiving, and accepting, anything from the Kennedys without having to be held at gunpoint.10 “The paper, established in 1837 and owned for most of this century by the Hederman family of Jackson, had lashed out almost daily against the Kennedys for their opposition to segregation and the South’s racial policies,” New York Times journalist Ernest Holsendolph wrote in 1979.11 One such headline was par for the course: “Robert Kennedy, Jackass Compared,” greeted Clarion-Ledger readers on the morning of September 2, 1962, and underneath, a response to the Kennedy administration’s decision to aid Meredith’s integration of the University of Mississippi.12 Seventeen years later, Hederman planned to not only accept an award for the family paper, but he took almost a dozen reporters with him. Most of the Hedermans were indignant at the thought—not so much at the subject matter of the series but at the amount of embarrassment and gossip Rea’s trip might cause—with at least half of the clan telling him in one “mine field” of a board meeting that he must refuse the award.13 In reply, Hederman paid for the trip out of his own pocket and made sure that it ended up on the page one of the May 27, 1979, Metro section.14 “The Clarion Ledger, The 1978 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award,” the headline of page 1B shouted.15 And, there, in all their glory, were photos of Rea, Nancy Weaver, and a slew of other employees on the front lawn of Hickory Hill, the Kennedy home in McLean, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC. In the company of Ethel Kennedy, Robert’s widow, and his younger brother, Senator Ted Kennedy, Clarion-Ledger staff enjoyed what reporter Johanna Neuman referred to as “an informal atmosphere, where dogs romp and run freely, children eek and run freely and buck-teeth smiles spread as wide as the acreage.”16

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The “North Mississippi Justice” series was not the only award-winning series that carried Weaver’s byline. Three years later, she and reporter Fred Anklam did a sweeping series on the state public education system, published in conjunction with Governor William Winter’s push for public school reform. The series would win The Clarion-Ledger its one and only Pulitzer.17 Before the Kennedy Award and the Pulitzer, between 1977–1983, Weaver wrote about the living and working conditions of farm workers in the Mississippi Delta, as part of Hederman’s ongoing commitment to cover issues related to race and poverty, and like several of her colleagues, the progress (or lack thereof) of the women’s movement.18 On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to Weaver’s assignments, but they fit hand-in-glove with what Rea Hederman wanted. “Go find good stories,” he instructed his reporters, orders that Weaver took to heart. “I think [Rea] wanted to write about the stories that were important for Mississippi to know, what people needed to know, and to make the state better,” she said.19 Jo Ann Klein shared that vision, too. Beginning in 1976, and for the next four years, Klein, like Weaver, covered topics that had long been ignored by the elder Hedermans and their editorial staffs. The debate over “sixteenth section” land reform, one of the most cantankerous in the history of the state legislature, landed in her lap, as did coverage of the state’s public education system during the civil rights era. Around the same time, Klein and others covered the federal indictment of longtime lawmaker Bill Burgin, as well as Lieutenant Governor Evelyn Gandy’s decision to remove him from power (in her role as president of the state senate). Near the end of her tenure with The Clarion-Ledger, Klein covered state election politics as well, specifically Thad Cochran’s senate campaign, and witnessed presidential candidate Ronald Reagan’s speech at the 1980 Nashoba County Fair (a turning point for him in the 1980 election).20 That story would be an important transition for Klein as well, as she left for a position with Representative Wayne Dowdy’s congressional office. “In journalism, that’s what you do,” Klein said. “I mean, you go where the work is, whether you’re a young reporter starting out or you were more established in your career.”21 Like Campbell and Povich of the UPI, Weaver and Klein came from different backgrounds—one born in Mississippi and raised in the South, the other, learning to love and appreciate the state for many reasons, including the fact that, in Weaver’s words, the state is “really is a unique place.”22 Weaver eventually moved on, first to The Denver Post and then The Sacramento Bee, where she worked until health concerns forced her retirement.23 However, her experiences at The Clarion-Ledger made her a better reporter, she insisted, than when she first arrived. “So many good reporters got their start under [Rea Hederman’s] leadership and I am grateful for the experience,” Weaver said.24

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As productive and transformative as The Clarion-Ledger appeared, the growing tension between Rea and his family, and his own personal issues that spilled over into the newsroom, eventually created a culture of mistrust at the paper. Halfway through Weaver’s public education series investigation, Hederman left town, and his family made the decision to sell both The Clarion-Ledger and its sister paper, the Jackson Daily News.25 Klein was gone, too, by this point, but Weaver was still on staff, working and waiting to see what would happen.26 In the meantime, it was business as usual; there were stories to chase, regardless of who owned and ran The Clarion-Ledger. Even so, the loss of Hederman could not be ignored, as it was as much a defining moment for the paper and its staff as the day he took over as city editor. “I have a photograph of people in the newsroom sitting there looking so dejected when we heard,” Weaver recalled. “It was just . . . it was very tough.”27 “I WAS ALWAYS A WRITER” When asked about her career, Jo Ann Klein speaks proudly of the fact that she has been a journalist since the sixth grade. From that point on, at every opportunity, she found her way to the newsroom. “I was always a writer,” she said. Klein was the editor of the Pensacola High School newspaper, where she graduated in 1967, and then, at USM, she became one of the first women to edit The Student Printz, the campus newspaper, a few years later. Like most college newspaper editors at the time, she covered campus protests and student unrest—Mississippi was a hotbed for political issues in the 1960s, and Klein was there to see much of it. “Every year that I was at the Printz, there was always protest,” she said.28 One in particular still stands out—a May 1970 student protest on the USM campus in response to the campus shootings at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University), a historically Black college located in the capital city—the largest, in fact, in the state.29 On May 7, members of the all-white Mississippi Highway Patrol and the Jackson police force, responding to what historian Nancy K. Bristow, author of Steeped in the Blood of Racism: Black Power, Law and Order, and the 1970 Shootings at Jackson State College, calls “a second night of unrest” on campus, fired 150 rounds for twenty-eight seconds on Alexander Hall, a women’s dorm on campus.30 Two were killed and a dozen more injured. In the aftermath, there were many unanswered questions: What actually brought police to campus? (Reports claim that students and local youths were throwing rocks at passing drivers.) Why were students protesting? (Some say unrest about the Vietnam War, others say anger about the Kent State campus shootings several days before, and still others, rumors

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that Charles Evers and his wife had been killed.) And, most importantly, why did officers fire on the dorm? (They claimed a sniper was inside, but a federal report from the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest concluded that the actions were an “unreasonable, unjustified overreaction” by the officers.31) “The event continues to leave a mark on campus,” NPR journalist Whitney Blair Wyckoff reported in May 2020, fifty years after the tragedy. “Even today, passers-by can see the bullet holes in the women’s dorm.”32 As with the Kent State shootings, anger and frustration spread through other college campuses, including USM. Klein and Printz managing editor Jack Elliot (who would later work for Rea Hederman at The Clarion-Ledger) followed the crowd through campus until they reached the southeast edge of campus, the side closest to Highway 49, and the President’s House (now the Ogletree House), home to USM president William David McCain. “They wanted to make some noise,” Klein recalled. “The president wasn’t there. He was out of town. But I think it was Julian Bond who was supposed to speak on campus and canceled after what happened at Jackson State.”33 That event reinforced her decision to make journalism a career. “[The students] wanted their voices heard, and I was proud to be there to cover it,” Klein said of the student march at USM. However, after graduating from USM, Klein discovered the path to that first job could be difficult—especially for a woman. She attempted to get an interview for a reporting job at a TV station in Pensacola only to be told that women were only hired for secretarial positions. Klein recalled a similar situation in Meridian, when she and two young male colleagues from The Student Printz applied for jobs at The Meridian Star. When Klein discovered and asked why her friends were both offered higher paying positions than she, she was told that, in her words, “I might get married and pregnant.”34 Klein’s experiences mirrored that of countless women journalists; prior to federal legislation like the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, newsrooms and the managers who ran them were frequently hostile to pregnant women.35 As feminist scholar Bernadette Barker-Plummer notes, “women who became pregnant were expected to leave their jobs permanently after the first few months of pregnancy. Daily child-care responsibilities were a direct drawback.”36 In Klein’s case, as in the case of countless women on the job market, news managers refused to wait that long—they assumed that all women wanted to get married and have children and were only working until their marriage prospects came through or improved (as Andy Reese once believed prior to hiring Nancy Campbell). It was better, then, to not risk hiring women who would end up leaving sooner than later, most news managers believed.

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Weaver, by contrast, cannot recall any noticeable sexism in either her job interviews or in the newsroom—but she recalled one incident in a recent interview: I was on the Gulf Coast, and I had gone to dinner with somebody who was recommended to me as somebody who would be a good source of information for what was going on in the county. We had dinner and he didn’t give me much information, and I thought it turned out to be a waste of time. But the minute we were in the parking lot, he had me up against the car, and I’m thinking, “If I yell for help, he’s the one they’re going to believe, not me because he was a well-known citizen and I’m a nobody.” So, I just had to get out of there, using my wits about me.37

In those moments, Weaver remembered why she got involved in the women’s movement in the first place, both as a journalist and as a woman who believed in equal rights. In November 1977, she traveled to Houston, Texas, with the Mississippi delegation of the National Women’s Conference, a four-day event held at a jam-packed Sam Houston Coliseum and organized by the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year. President Gerald Ford created the Commission in acknowledgment of the United Nations proclamation of 1977 as “International Women’s Year.”38 The goal of the conference, as Weaver noted in a November 1977 article, was to debate the ERA and related measures, like federally funded day care, with 2,000 delegates, conservative and liberal, pro-ERA and anti-ERA alike, from the fifty states. Each individual measure would be voted on by the body at large, with the end result the adoption of over two dozen planks (called the “National Plan of Action”) for presidential candidates, lawmakers, and their respective parties to consider.39 Weaver closely followed the selection of the Mississippi delegation; “Delegates-Elect: 20 Whites, 6 Men, All Conservatives,” one headline read, a description that could have been used to characterize most of the delegates from the Southern states.40 She attended their meetings and interviewed them as to their objections to the ERA and related issues, and then she followed them to Houston, where she provided readers with a first-person view of the conference. “That [trip] was a real eye-opener, I’ll tell you,” Weaver recalled.41 Indeed, as Weaver recorded her observations of the Mississippi delegates and the conference as a whole, she quickly understood, if she did not before, that she also was witnessing the growth of paleoconservative politics—a mix of (white) national populism, Christian fundamentalism, and social conservatism.42 Their leaders, including the likes of Pat Buchanan and lawyer, political speaker, and Stop-ERA founder Phyllis Schlafly, were vocal and loud in their calls to end the ideological policies and practices of the “New Left.” For

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example, they called for an end to social welfare programs (like Johnson’s “New Society” domestic agenda) and federal government regulation (considered an attack on the free market and “states’ rights”). Conservatives leaders also pushed back against social movements (like the civil rights and feminist movements, both considered part of a so-called growing Communist agenda) and the ERA (legislation that supported, among other so-called “Godless” choices, abortion and gay and lesbian rights, both an afront, paleoconservatives insisted, to traditional family roles and values).43 “Women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit of society,” Schlafly wrote in February 1972.44 Schlafly, whose efforts eventually stopped ERA ratification cold in its tracks, did not attend the conference—she called it the “Federal Financing of a Foolish Festival by Frustrated Feminists” after learning that Congress appropriated five million dollars for the event—but instead set up what was called a “Pro-Life, Pro-Family” counter-rally, also 15,000 strong, just a few miles away.45 “The American women do not want ERA, abortion, lesbian rights, and they do not want child care in the hands of government,” Schlafly shouted to what she called a large “God-fearing” crowd.46 “As the rally came to an end,” historian Marjorie Wheeler notes in her book, Divided We Stand: The Battle over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics, “conservative women leaders—astounded by their success in drawing such a large and passionate crowd to Houston to protest federally funded feminism—declared that this was just the beginning of a new ‘pro-family movement,’ one based on ‘family values’ as opposed to ‘women’s rights.’”47 With over 15,000 observers in attendance at the Women’s National Conference, not including the 2,000 state delegates, along with thousands of conservatives attending Schlafly’s counter-rally at Astro Arena, Houston, then, became ground zero for a clash of two polarized (and polarizing) political ideologies: paleoconservatism and liberal feminism—with their followers, all from diverse backgrounds, professional and personal experiences, and clubs and organizations, coming from every conceivable direction.48 “As delegates and spectators crammed themselves into overbooked hotels across the city,” journalist Dianna Wray writes in a 2018 piece for Houstonia magazine, “a Harris County Republican official complained the conference was bringing ‘a gaggle of outcasts, misfits and rejects’ to Houston.”49 For her part, Weaver recalled her experience in Houston to be “one of the greatest challenges she faced” as a young reporter. “Well, one of the members [of the Mississippi delegation] was the wife of a Klansman,” she recalled, a fact that she could not and did not mention in her correspondence to readers—at least not without evidence.50 However, Weaver did verify the fact that the national conference organizers had criticized the Mississippi

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delegation because, in her words, the delegation was not “representative of black and poor women in Mississippi.” In response, Eddie Myrtle Moore, the Mississippi delegation chair, insisted that it was a “pro-family, pro-God, pro-country” organization.51 “They believe they represent a majority of American women,” Weaver said in 1977, “and that the conference is being controlled by a radical minority of feminists.”52 The kind of work the organizers of the National Women’s Conference put in was not lost on young women like Jo Ann Klein, who, with college degree in hand, first entered the workforce in the 1970s, eager for their first professional opportunities. At the same time, Klein admitted the difficulty of trying to take advantage of the legal dividends brought by the second-wave feminist movement; on the one hand, much of the federal legislation granting women entry and access to places and opportunities previously closed had been on the books for several years by the time Klein started applying for postgraduate jobs, and she remained appreciative of the progress. However, it was something else to be on the job hunt and experience just how slow that same legislation was at changing cultural attitudes toward women in the workplace—if they changed at all. Moreover, there were countless young women, who, like Klein, certainly appreciated the feminist movement (even or especially if they were not directly involved in it) but did not know or understand the newfound power the fight for equality had given them in the workplace and on the job market—the power to not only recognize discrimination but to have access to the legal resources to fight it. There were no educational classes for young professional women to take or feminist leaders to go with them on interviews to instruct them on how to navigate the job market in light of the significant, yet relatively slow-moving legal and cultural changes brought by the feminist movement. Young professional women like Klein, then, were left to figure it out on their own, not knowing if they did not get a job because they were not qualified or because they were victims of sexual discrimination. And, even if they knew that the former was the case, as Klein did on more than one opportunity, what recourse did they have that wouldn’t take years to fight and that did not leave them with black marks on their professional reputations—that of “troublemaker” or “instigator”? Klein explained further: We didn’t know you would have a right to sue somebody about something like that [not getting a job because of sexual discrimination]. Of course, I don’t even know what the status of the laws were then to know if we had a right. But I can remember being angry about it. I was angry, for example, because I wasn’t offered more money [than men who were interviewing for the same job], even though I had, I thought, more credentials. But then after I thought about it for a while, I convinced myself, “Well, I don’t really want to work there anyway.”

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I think a lot of the feminist political activism was just starting in that period of time, too. I mean, today, there would be hell to pay. But then as I’ve said, we didn’t even know what our recourse would be. It was like, “Move on to the next thing.” So that’s what we did.53

Klein’s first job after college was with the Jackson Daily News as a general assignment reporter, but she didn’t stay very long (only a month or two, she recalled). She moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast—a locale that reminded her of Pensacola—and took a position with The Daily Herald.54 “I think the coast had a certain allure to it,’ Klein said. [The Daily Herald] was an up-and-coming paper, too, even though it had been around for a while. There were a lot of young people on the paper.”55 To that point, journalist Ellen Ann Fentress, who worked at the Herald in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, recalled that Herald management hired many young, hungry reporters to try to offset its reputation as an “old time” newspaper with a staff of journalists who had worked for the paper for years. By the early 1980s, several of those young reporters, like Fentress, went to work for what she called the “upstart” South Mississippi Daily Sun, which served as the Gulf Coast region’s morning edition. The Sun’s management, according to Fentress, allowed its reporters to do more systemic reporting on social issues, like public education funding, rather than, in her words, “focusing on just attending a certain meeting and reporting on that.”56 Klein would stay at the Herald for almost three years and “covered a little bit of everything,” as she recalled, and worked as a copy editor for a period of time. After a stint at the Montgomery Advertiser, Klein came back to Mississippi to work on her master’s degree at USM. She then worked in public relations in the Atlanta metro area, but quickly realized, she said, “that I hated that [job]—I was not meant to be in public relations.” Klein applied for a job at The Clarion-Ledger, where she walked the education beat—which frequently took her to the state capitol building—before she covered the state legislature and state elections on a regular basis.57 Klein’s roots in the state—her mother’s family were longtime residents— served her well as she navigated the details of each story she researched and published.58 Conversely, Nancy Weaver, like Povich and Johanna Neuman, came to Mississippi by way of somewhere else—in Weaver’s case, Bloomington, Indiana, where she was born to working-class parents. (Her father worked maintenance at Indiana University, and her mother, a housewife, whom Weaver recalled had “a couple of years of Christian college education,” eventually went to work as a file clerk on campus.) “She was very encouraging of me,” Weaver said of her mother, Jane. “Watching me drive out of the driveway and drive to Mississippi must have been so hard for her.”59

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Weaver left for Mississippi just one year after her college graduation from Indiana University. “One of my goals when I left college was to travel around the country and work and live in different places,” she recalled when asked why she sent her resume to a newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi, after seeing a Clarion-Ledger employment ad in Editor & Publisher. “It was in the South and I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ve never been down there.’” Weaver brought some experience with her, having worked her way through college with internships at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, the St. Petersburg Times, and The Herald-Times in Bloomington (including an extra year there after her college graduation).60 At least one of those internships paid dividends, as the Clarion-Ledger managing editor and fellow Indiana University graduate, Steve Fagan, remembered Weaver from her time at the Courier Journal—he worked for the parent company’s afternoon edition, The Louisville Times, one of the first stops on his long and distinguished career that also included the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, among other daily newspapers.61 Fagan, who Rea Hederman had hired in 1977, called Weaver to come down to Jackson for an interview. “She’s good,” Fagan told Hederman. “Let’s get her down here.”62 “A CULTURE AND A SOCIETY ALL ITS OWN” Of the memories that resonate with Nancy Weaver when asked to recall her time at The Clarion-Ledger, those that come to mind include Rea Hederman as an “involved editor” in the newsroom, “leaning over looking at the stories that were getting ready to go to press,” and “talking with reporters and hearing about stories.” The depth of Hederman’s involvement with his family paper resonated with his staff, from his consistent presence in the newsroom to the amount of space that he reserved for their stories, especially those that exposed some wrongdoing—from racism and police brutality to political corruption and poverty. For her part, Weaver investigated the working and living conditions endured by Mississippi Delta farmhands. “I spent a lot of time on the Mississippi Delta backroads,” Weaver said. “I met some wonderful people there; that story was important to me.” Indeed, her work in the Mississippi Delta only confirmed Weaver’s instincts that coming to Mississippi was the right move: “[Mississippi] is a culture and society all its own that I knew nothing about. I was just excited to be someplace totally different,” she said. “I’ve gone back several times to visit and it really is a unique place.”63 Part of Mississippi’s “uniqueness,” unfortunately, includes a history of class and racial subordination as indicated by Weaver’s (with photographer Paul Beaver) year-long investigation. In December 1980, a multipage spread (approximately two dozen pages, in fact) entitled, “Mississippi Delta: Empty

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Hands in a Fertile Land,” exposed the “scores of impoverished black and white farm workers toiling in cotton and soybean fields, preforming tasks familiar in the Delta for hundreds of years—chopping, hoeing, picking.”64 Weaver reported that workers still “tied to the land,” and thousands of displaced workers, as many as 52,000 since 1950, who were replaced by machinery and who lacked the training and skills to get jobs in other industries, perhaps represented “Mississippi’s greatest dilemma.”65 Her examination revealed deplorable living conditions, which included “unsanitary conditions in these run-down houses and outhouses [that] have contributed to contaminated food and water and a multitude of health problems, especially for children,” Weaver said. She interviewed scores of farm workers, both current and former, farm owners, and federal officials, and came to the following conclusion: “Unable to compete against the machinery and pesticides that have replaced them in the fields and lacking training for other jobs, thousands of farm workers have left the Mississippi Delta region,” Weaver said of displaced workers. “They have departed for dubious futures in the North, in the more industrialized areas of the South and in some of Mississippi larger cities.”66 Hederman and reporters like Weaver felt that the type of in-depth, enterprise journalism represented by “Mississippi Delta” essential if the paper was to be taken seriously after years of being the mouthpiece for the likes of the White Citizens’ Councils and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. Even so, it took time for some onlookers to appreciate the “new” Clarion-Ledger—and to trust that Rea was a Hederman in name only. “[People] remain leery and think the Jackson newspaper is just putting on a new coat of paint on the same old building,” syndicated columnist Wayne Weidie wrote in October 1974, not long after the young Hederman took over his family’s flagship newspaper. “One North Mississippi editor says the Hedermans are still playing their old game for political and financial power, and the innovations of Rea Hederman are only being used to distract the public’s attention.”67 Some observers, the so-called white “old-guard conservative readers,” as well as some political leaders, resented the changes, and not just those at The Clarion-Ledger, but the significant social and legal changes of the mid-twentieth century in general—and they detested the idea that the Rea Hedermans of the state were trying to make them feel guilty for events of the past. “That doesn’t sell with me. I don’t think I’ve treated them that badly,” longtime Mississippi lawmaker David Halbrook once said, when asked about the state’s Black citizens.68 Hederman, though, was serious about changing things—and he did so by not just hiring new talent but by “[leaving] the racist old columnists to molder quietly in the corners of the newsroom,” according to one source.69 The list of people that Hederman wanted to get rid of included what one newly hired editor called “a small and awful” staff who came to work and spent more time

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playing cards in the newsroom than they did chasing stories.70 And, under Hederman’s growing influence (both within the family business and within the family), similar changes were soon underway at the smaller Jackson Daily News. Longtime journalist Robert Gordon, who cut his teeth covering the civil rights movement—a mob attacked him while covering the desegregation of the Granada, Mississippi, schools for the UPI—became managing editor of the Daily News in 1977. “Bob was significant at the time because he was part of that battalion of Southern reporters who decided to tell the civil rights story honestly,” Hank Klibanoff once said about Gordon’s work as a journalist. “That may sound simple, but back then it wasn’t.”71 A few of the old-guard Hederman reporters were still hanging around the Daily News offices, like Daily News editor Jimmy Ward, who used his daily column to pander such racist tripe as the link between licking food stamps and sickle-cell anemia, and, in general, launch attacks against what he perceived as the Communist influence on most aspects of American life.72 In fact, Ward continued right up until his death in 1984 to grouse about days gone by, as he watched the “radical shake-up” from within the Hederman family news empire, with Rea Hederman leading the charge, much to Ward’s dismay. “Ward was feeling increasingly threatened by Rea’s liberal encroachments and his growing power base within the Hederman family,” James Dickerson, author of Dirty Secret: The True Story of How the Government, the Media, and the Mob Conspired to Combat Integration and the Vietnam Antiwar Movement. “The news division of the Jackson Daily News was thriving under managing editor Robert Gordon’s leadership, and whether by design or default, the editorial pages were Ward’s last stand against the new order.”73 Ward may have still held the title of editor, one Boston Globe article revealed, but it was in name only, for “more and more of the daily control of the newspaper’s operation has been turned over to Gordon.”74 Gordon removed any doubt as to the truth of that statement in May 1980, when he fired Jackson Daily News copy editor James Quinn after an investigation into a state neo-Nazi ring revealed Quinn to be the head of it.75 Quinn threatened a lawsuit against the Daily News, while at least one reader couldn’t believe that someone of Quinn’s beliefs had actually been fired from a Hederman newspaper. “Twenty years ago,” the reader said, “y’all would have been slapping [Quinn] on the back.”76 However, editors like Quinn and Ward were on the way out, replaced by leaders who fostered what one reporter called a “new climate of aggressive journalism,” as indicated by JoAnn Klein’s coverage of the state’s progress in integrating its public education system.77 In September 1977, for example, she reported on the progress of the desegregation of the Greenville Separate School District after the United States Civil Rights Commission praised the

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District’s “outstanding efforts” that resulted in “few discipline problems and improved education for Greenville students.”78 Circumstances to date were not as smooth as the article implied—at least in most other parts of the state. In 1966, for example, white residents in Granada, Mississippi, attacked Black school children who enrolled in the state’s “freedom of choice” plan, enacted by the (all-white) Mississippi legislature “enabling students to choose which school they wanted to attend and enabling some black students to attend white schools, if they dared,” Jackson Free Press journalist Arielle Dreher reported in November 2017.79 And, in 1969, the same year that the Supreme Court ruled that all Mississippi public schools must immediately desegregate (after years of legal stalls and delays following the Brown vs. Board of Education decision), white citizens in Yazoo County attacked a group of Black citizens for signing an NAACP petition to integrate their schools. “Mississippi had no intention of integrating its schools,” Dreher said, as evident in the twenty-year period between the Brown decision and the Greenville District’s plan, when state leaders did everything in their power to resist the high court’s order to integrate its public schools with “all deliberate speed.”80 “The legislatures of eight Southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia—also enacted ‘interpositions’ resolutions that denounced Brown as an ‘illegal encroachment’ on states’ rights and declared it ‘null, void and of no effect,’” a report on the “Segregation in America” website (published by the Equal Justice Initiative) noted.81 In other words, the Greenville District was an anomaly in the state, and an obvious one at that. Even so, a federal survey, “The Coleman Report,” concluded that if integration had any hope of succeeding in Mississippi, Greenville was the place. That fact was based, in part, on Greenville being “an unusually diverse community of blacks, whites, Chinese, Creoles, Jews, as well as immigrants from Lebanon and Syria.”82 With 12,000 school-age children in the district, administrators, in the mid-1960s, voted to allow students the choice to transfer to other schools within the system. At first, only about 150 Black students chose to attend the former all-white school (and no white students chose to attend the former all-Black school). Almost 2,000 white students eventually left the public school system for the newly established segregated academy, the Washington School, one of several such segregated academies in the state.83 “White flight” to the Washington School would result in a resegregated school district, making the success story portrayed in Klein’s story seem woefully outdated. “The story of Greenville would have been very different if that school had never opened,” civil rights activist Bob Boyd said in 2016. “I’ve been watching two generations of families and kids, and all the re-segregation. Now every white family that can afford it sends their kids [to the Washington School].”84

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Perhaps the biggest story that Klein worked on while at The Clarion-Ledger pertained to the legislative debate over the state’s sixteenth section trust lands (e.g., farm and timber, industrial and commercial lands). The Northwest Ordinance of 1785 earmarked every sixteenth section of land in every state to be leased for public school funding and maintenance, but, as Klein reported in December 1977, “the law did not provide a method of renting the lands or collecting money from them.” As a result, she said, the issue of the sixteenth section lands was “the center of a number of battles that have lasted nearly two centuries.”85 The latest battle, circa 1978, concerned the question of who had the authority to lease the lands for revenue and the fees that could be charged for each lease.86 Leading up to the 1978 legislative session, “that issue became a big fight,” Klein said, as lawmakers discussed a reform bill that would shift control of the sixteenth section lands to local school boards (away from county supervisors), would require a greater transparency in the reporting of revenues, and give formal supervision of the lands to the state superintendent of education, among other measures.87 What ensued was a heated partisan battle in which those in favor of reform believed too little had been accomplish to stop “the well-known 150 year history of 16th section land abuse” and opponents—who filed almost three dozen amendments in the course of just a few days—argued that the bill in question gave too much power to one individual (the state superintendent).88 Opponents also argued that the bill needed to be vetted through the education committee, the logical place for a bill that would decide how revenue for state public education would be managed. However, Lieutenant Governor Evelyn Gandy assigned it to the judicial committee because, as a supporter of the bill, she wanted to keep the education committee from gutting it as they had in previous years.89 Also, in a year before the next gubernatorial election, in which Gandy hoped to be a candidate, she listened to the advice of powerful allies, such as the Jackson League of Women, who asked her to understand “the responsibility she has to school children and all the people of Mississippi and takes steps to carry out that responsibility.”90 Klein recalled that Gandy fought to keep the bill largely intact, which meant doing what she could to keep longtime lawmaker, Senator Bill Burgin, a vocal opponent of sixteenth section land reform (and a member of the education committee), from blocking the bill (as he had in the past).91 “Bill Burgin . . . has been tagged as singlehandedly defeating attempts at 16th section land management,” one Clarion-Ledger reader said in a letter to the editor.92 In fact, after the Senate Judicial Committee released the bill for a vote, Gandy, in her role as lieutenant governor (and president of the senate), cast a tie-breaking vote in the chamber to officially pass a senate version of

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the bill.93 The move escalated talk that Gandy’s name would indeed appear on the ballot for governor; even so, the press could not help but to comment on her “prim” and “saccharin-sweet” image.94 “Even though I think people thought she was weak,” Klein recalled, “I think she was quite strong. She knew how to delegate to people who would get things done. She was just always so highly regarded from an ethical point of view.”95 In the next year, she would get an opportunity to solidify her so-called image when a federal grand jury indicted Burgin—“a larger than life person in the Senate,” Klein called him—on charges of conspiracy and extortion.96 “Back in the 1970s, Big Bad Bill Burgin was at once the single most feared state legislator AND one of the most successful and best-paid attorneys in the state,” Bill Minor wrote on the occasion of Burgin’s death in 2002.97 Klein covered the Burgin story and reported that Gandy temporarily removed him from his position as chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee in light of what she called “a most serious situation”; weeks later, Gandy used her authority as lieutenant governor to remove him from some key senate posts before his trial and eventual conviction.98 Burgin resigned his senate seat shortly thereafter, just before the 1979 legislative session would convene the following month and just after a jury convicted him of conspiracy to defraud the federal government.99 Meanwhile, Gandy otherwise left little room for criticism, as public speculation continued as to her future political plans. “Her willingness to step forward and oppose some of her powerful colleagues will no doubt be remembered as the election year heats up,” Rea Hederman said in a February 1979 Clarion-Ledger editorial.100 In the months before the Burgin scandal broke, he was deeply involved in the battle over sixteenth section reform during the 1978 session, as both the House and Senate debated separate reform bills, with state representatives, for example, jockeying to include revisions to the House bill that would financially favor their districts, at the expense, House colleagues argued, of other equally-deserving districts in the state.101 In the Senate chamber, following a successful House-Senate joint committee negotiation, Burgin threatened anyone who voted for the final revised reform bill—including lawmaker Cecil Summer of Iuka, who Burgin threatened by telling Summer that he would use his power in the appropriations committee to kill a bill that would be financially beneficial to Summers’s district.102 “Senator Bergen was just a powerhouse, as you would imagine, just a political powerhouse,” Klein said, “and ran [the appropriations] committee very, very strongly until he got in trouble.”103 In the end, in fact, it was Gandy who, in the months before Burgin’s indictment, got the best of him (and others who opposed sixteenth section land reform). As Klein reported in an April 1978 article, she made at least two power moves that not only neutralized Burgin but ensured that the bill would

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make it to the governor’s desk for signature. First, Gandy assigned the bill to the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by her political protegee, Carol Ingram, a native of Hattiesburg (like Gandy)—which kept Burgin from gutting the bill as chair of the Senate Education Committee. Then, as mentioned, hers was the deciding vote against a Senate floor measure, authored by Burgin, that would have gutted the latest revision of the bill. As Klein, without a trace of irony, noted at the time, the scene was a remarkable, “breathtaking pause” in an already dramatic political story.104 “But Burgin doesn’t lose often,” she said. “He’ll remember 1978 for this one, whether it has any bearing on his future or not.”105 “JUST WORK THE SOURCES” In 1981, Clarion-Ledger reporters Nancy Weaver and Fred Anklam were, in Anklam’s words, given “an assignment stunning in its simplicity and powerful in its significance.” The two were tasked with investigating the state’s public education system—to “find out what’s wrong with public education in Mississippi and what needs to be done to fix it,” Anklam recalled years later.106 Rea Hederman decided to investigate the state of the Mississippi public education system because he believed in the vision of William Winter, the state’s newly elected governor, and because he knew that Winter’s reform efforts made for a damn good story. Winter believed that public education was key to the state’s economic progress. The issue was a consistent one for Winter—he made it part of his 1975 gubernatorial platform—and he made a public commitment to overhauling the state’s public education system after winning the 1979 gubernatorial primary (beating Evelyn Gandy). A product of the Grenada County system, Winter’s interest was not just political—he knew from experience and observation the desperate, and historical, state of affairs.107 “William Winter was a third-grader when he first became aware of the disparity between schools attended by white students and those attended by his black playmates in Grenada County,” historian Kathleen Wickham says, “but it was not until he became governor in 1980 that he was in a position to make changes in the state’s commitment to education.”108 According to Wickham, Mississippi’s public schools, well into the latter half of the twentieth century, still operated under the 1896 Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which established the legality of “separate but equal” public schools. Of course, the Brown v. Board of Education decision overturned Plessy a half century later, but not until 1970 did state officials finally start to comply, under the force of law and threat of consequences, with a federal decision (the third since the Brown decision) that ordered that the

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state dissolve its “separate but equal” school systems.109 That 1969 Supreme Court decision, Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, followed a similar one from the previous year, Green v. County School Board, that struck down the “freedom-of-choice” plans—popular in many public school districts across the Southeast—as a legal and effective method of school integration.110 In protest (and some say panic), white residents—particularly those who lived in school districts like in the Mississippi Delta region or populated counties like Hinds (Jackson) or Kemper (Meridian), where the children of Black residents would soon make up a majority of the student body—enrolled their children in already-established segregated academies (with unique enrollment standards and tuition costs that would guarantee the exclusion of Black students) or in majority-white schools in other districts.111 Many prosegregation parents believed that this strategy would force the federal government to rethink its most recent desegregation order because many districts would be left with an all-Black student bodies.112 However, the (il)logic of this line of thinking—that the federal government would reconsider its order to desegregate because of the possibility of all-Black school districts—was never really put to the test. As historian Charles Bolton notes, 91 percent of the state’s school-aged population attended public schools by 1979. In his words, “public schools continued to flourish in much of the state” for several reasons: socioeconomic status (meaning that many white families simply couldn’t afford the expense of sending their children to segregated academies); a relatively small percentage of Black students enrolling in majority-white schools, so the mass outrage that the pro-segregation crowd expected never really came to pass; and, in most school districts, white school leaders maintaining their control of school boards. This control had different implications for majority-Black school districts than majority-white school districts. In the latter, Bolton noted, “[white school leaders] were able to pursue policies that preserved as much white supremacy in public education as possible.” In the former, most white officials, whose children were now attending segregated academies, simply made little to no effort to maintain or improve a system in which they no longer had a vested interest.113 Such instances of “white flight,” as already noted, were most evident in areas in which the Black population was historically higher (e.g., the Delta region) than in other areas of the state. Over time, these same areas suffered the devastating economic aftereffects of white flight, particularly a depleted tax base and decaying infrastructure. “It’s very likely we’ll have an all-black system, and that will be bad as long as the whites control it,” one Holmes County teacher said in the first days of the 1969 federal desegregation order. “I expect they will try to make the system as rotten as they can.”114

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In the early 1970s, there were 125 segregated academies in the state, despite the fact that most of the white children in the state still attended public school. Although their enrollment numbers were relatively small, the segregated academies had both the political and economic support of the state’s white power structure.115 Two Jackson-area banks, for example, bankrolled the first of what eventually would be more than a dozen Citizens’ Councils schools in the area, providing $600,000 total in loans, while the state legislature subsidized those same schools (and others around the state) by legalizing a private school voucher program that provided a $185 (soon increased to $240) yearly voucher for any child who wanted to enroll. Former governor Ross Barnett even held a fundraiser for a library for the first Jackson-area Council school, so convinced was he and other white, racist powerbrokers that school-aged children in urban areas were more vulnerable to the evils of integration than anywhere else.116 “What we’re going to wind up with eventually, is a private school [system] for the white kids and a state-subsidized system for the n—s,” one Mississippi lawmaker admitted to The New York Times in 1970.117 The state’s Citizen Councils did their best to persuade white families that integration would render their public schools—Council literature referred to them as “government schools”—“a hopeless loss, infected by the lethal virus of race mixing.”118 In truth, many (if not most) white families probably agreed but kept their families in public school because they knew they had little choice; as Bolton stated in his book, The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870–1980, many whites “objected to the principle of school integration and how it had been forced on the state,” but once the historical reality of school desegregation finally settled in decades after the federal government first initiated it, those same white citizens of Mississippi listened to William Winter, now in his second bid to win the state’s highest elected position.119 In his 1979 gubernatorial bid, Winter initially pushed economic, not education reform, but that soon changed, as he eventually crafted an education reform package that would enact the following: state-funded public kindergartens, pay increases for all public school teachers, a reorganization of the state Department of Education, reading aids, and stricter state requirements for teacher certification.120 “The greatest impediment to a good and fair society—a society of equal opportunity—rests on having people be well-educated,” Winter said years later, a sentiment he echoed many times on the campaign trail.121 The campaign for public education reform continued after his election victory in November 1979 and included a number of strategies to win biracial, public support: the hiring of an educational consulting firm, the State Research Associates (SRA), to assist with the public relations efforts, including a full-blown media campaign; the formation of a “Speakers’ Bureau” to train

Figure 7.1.  Nancy Weaver (Teichert) covered former Mississippi Governor William Winter’s (pictured above) historic plan for the state’s public education system for The Clarion-Ledger in the early 1980s. “Just work the sources,” editor Rea Hederman told her. Source: Wilson F. “Bill” Minor Papers, Manuscript Division, Archives and Special Collections, Mississippi State University Libraries.

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gubernatorial aides on the scores of speaking events and community meetings the Winter administration would host in the next following year, particularly in areas around the state where support for education reform was low (First Lady Elise Winter would spoke at over forty such events); the formation of a nonprofit organization, Mississippians for Quality Education, which managed donations from the business community to support the campaign; and countless meetings between Winter and state lawmakers, especially those opposed to education reform (which included some of the state’s most influential elected officials); and, at Governor Winter’s urging in his first joint address to the state legislature, the formation of a legislative task force, the Special Committee on Public School Finance and Administration (also known as the “Blue Ribbon Committee”), whose recommendations would, according to historian Kathleen Wickham, form the “blueprint for reform.”122 For the first two years of his tenure, however, Winter’s reform plans generated only modest success, if that; in fact, lawmakers failed to adopt most of the proposed reform measures during legislative sessions. Facing the final year of his first (and, by state law, only) term in office, Winter and his staff refused to believe that his time in office would end in failure, so between June and December of 1982, Winter gave over eighty speeches touting his education proposals; his staff, wife, and supporters gave another 300 or so. Then, the administration held nine town hall forums during the same period; the massive turnout—3,000 at the Oxford forum alone, surprised even Winter.123 He later recalled that one of his aides, Dick Molpus (one of several young men, the so-called “Boys of Spring”—including future Mississippi governor Ray Mabus—who helped orchestrate Winter’s education agenda) said, “We’ve tapped into something as far as public opinion is concerned that no one was fully aware of.”124 The groundswell of support convinced Winter to call a special legislative session for December 1982 for the distinct purpose of making good on his plans for education reform—a decision that critics saw as a waste of time and money, a last-ditch effort by Winter to salvage his political career and legacy. “It was perceived as a folly and an embarrassment to myself and the legislature,” Winter later said of his decision, especially given the fact that, as critics pointed out, the 1983 regular session was just a month out from the special session.125 Winter knew that, just as he knew that a special session would give him a captive audience and more control over the outcome—and garner the attention of the press. “Winter was genuinely concerned about the status of public education, and he was willing to sacrifice his political career to get it approved,” one reporter said. “Being a history buff, he was certainly concerned about his legacy, but he was willing to sacrifice some personal goals to get it passed.”126

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The plan to win support for education reform had always included drawing the attention and support of news media, a role that Rea Hederman was more than willing to play. Two years before the 1982 special session, just after the formation of Winter’s “Blue Ribbon Committee,” Hederman first imagined a series, what would eventually unfold in eight parts, eventually called “Mississippi Schools: Hard Lesson,” to investigate the state of public education—and he assigned two of his best reporters to what he knew would be the story of the year.127 Anklam’s experience covering educational and political issues for central Mississippi area put him in a position to know the “key players” (as Anklam put it) in the state’s public education system to get the series off the ground. Hederman selected Weaver because of her reputation as a tough-nosed investigative journalist. “We found that we made a good team,” Anklam said.128 To his point, the two organized the series around their reporting strengths— Weaver, Anklam noted, “spearheaded the project” by organizing their reporting into topics that she thought should be covered. Anklam, in turn, used his connections to teachers and administrators to arrange interviews and site visits with schools, both public and segregated, all over the state.129 Their travel plans were mapped out carefully, and education experts at the state’s public universities were consulted to make sure that Weaver asked the right questions, in the right way, and that that no topic or person remained overlooked or uncovered. “I marveled as [Nancy] found a 1960s Life magazine article about a public school superintendent who left his job during desegregation to start a private academy,” Anklam said years later. “She tracked him down, still teaching at that academy. He was one of our first interviews.”130 As Anklam and Weaver crisscrossed the state, meeting with parents, teachers, and administrators in over 150 school districts (arriving at forty of those unannounced), they carefully recorded not only what they heard, but what they saw—the state of Mississippi public education was right in front of them, and the differences were stark: “[I] took [Nancy] to see crumbling public school buildings, private schools that sucked support and resources from public ones, the impact in textbooks and resources of low state financing levels which local authorities could supplement—or not,” Anklam said.131 From Weaver’s perspective, the series hinged on cultivating those sources that Anklam introduced her to—“Just work the sources” was her professional mantra—and to make careful observation of what she saw and heard and put those observations into perspective for readers. “All reporters on [the Clarion-Ledger] staff were expected to think big,” Anklam said. “Yet the scope of our challenge was monumental.”132 The challenge was monumental because no other newspaper to that point had attempted an investigation of this type and scale—an examination of the state’s school systems just a few years after a string of federal desegregation

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orders and in the face of an historic (and some would say, controversial) political agenda to enact education reform. “We were not working in a vacuum. Since taking office in 1980, Winter had pushed for education reform, symbolized by his bid for state-financed kindergartens,” Anklam said. “Winter saw improving education as the key step in bringing home better jobs and a better life for Mississippians.”133 Rea Hederman believed that, too, but he would not be around to enjoy series publication, which began in November 1982 and stretched into the next month as the state legislature began its special session. The growing tension between Hederman and his family came to a head in the early 1980s, in between the time when Hederman first conceived of the series and its publication two years later. At first, the ongoing battles between Rea and the rest of the Hederman family—over his accepting the Robert F. Kennedy award, for example—were manageable and went unnoticed by most of the staff. “I always felt [Rea] was in control,” Weaver said. “I didn’t notice [anything at first].”134 However, as indicated by a 1983 Washington Post story about Hederman and The Clarion-Ledger, staff members would later claim that there were subtle signs that the pressure of dealing with the Hedermans—seven held board seats and they watched Rea’s decisions at the flagship paper with a careful eye—started showing in the newsroom. “Outside of the board room, Hederman met some suspicious stares from some of his recruits,” journalist Bill Prochnau reported. “Whenever he shook his head on a story idea, some of his own northern rebels thought he had caved in to the family.”135 The situation between Rea and his family had been tenuous since he took over the reins of the flagship paper—the fact that one Hederman changed the culture of The Clarion-Ledger to the point that, in light of much attention and celebration, the family’s sins of the past were, finally and totally, the subject of public fodder. “But the subject [of the paper’s success] seemed awkward because any praise of Rea’s work implied disapproval of the regime of his father, Bob Hederman, and other members of the family,” journalist Curtis Wilkie observed.136 At first, Rea seemed to handle the tension with his family as well as he could, given the circumstances, but over the course of several years, the wear and tear began to show in the newsroom—or not. Managing editor Robert Gordon admitted to Prochnau that, by 1981, he began seeing less and less of Rea; what started out as sixteen-hour days in the newsroom dwindled, seven years later, to twice a week, then once a week, then, finally, once every two weeks. “Then one day he came in and told me, ‘I’ve lost a lot of blood downstairs in the boardroom. Now it’s your turn,’” Gordon told Prochnau.137 Hederman soon disappeared from the newsroom altogether, with staff members sharing rumors of where he was—some rumors had him

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as close as downtown Jackson, others as far as New York. “[The staff] began calling him Howard Hughes Hederman,” Prochnau said. “Behind the board room doors, the rest of the tightly knit family was beginning to unravel.”138 Rumors circulated about the reason(s) for Hederman’s disappearance—did his defiance in taking the Robert Kennedy Award push the family too far? Hodding Carter III said years later that he had heard that the family ran Rea off because of, the Jackson Free Press reported, “his hard, honest look at Mississippi.”139 “It was like walking every day into a mine field,” Prochnau reported. “In board meetings [Rea] faced his family, whose politics remained as rigid as ever.”140 Bill Minor, who had always kept a close (and critical) eye on the Hedermans, disagreed. The reason for Rea Hederman’s mysterious absence, he told Prochnau, was much more salacious: Rea left his wife for another woman, a photographer and editor he hired from his alma mater, the University of Missouri. They were in love, with plans for marriage. With the exception of Rea’s parents, the potential scandal was too much for the rest of the family, described as “pious, amen-pewed Baptists.” “You have to understand the family,” Minor said. “It took a small miracle for them to choke down the Kennedys. No miracle would let them choke down a divorce and scandal.”141 By early 1982, Hederman was all but a ghost in the newsroom. Meanwhile, Weaver and Anklam marched forward with their research, unaware, Weaver said, of what was happening behind the scenes. “I never had any conversations with him where he would talk about any of that or notice anything because for me, you could walk into his office and you could talk to him.”142 Perhaps, too, Weaver was simply too busy to notice Hederman’s absence, given that she was on the road with Anklam tracking down and interviewing sources. The next memory she recalled, in April 1982, included the family’s formal announcement of the sale of the paper to Gannett for $110 million.143 The sale also included nine other Hederman newspapers. As Gannett built its newspaper empire, including the launch of USA Today in 1982, the Hedermans simply wanted to be done with it all, and as Rea told The Washington Post the next year, “to avoid dealing with each other.” Rea’s father, Robert, stood by his son, as did one or two other family members, but the rest of the family remained eager to sell the family business and be rid of it—and Rea Hederman. “It’s an irrevocable split,” Rea said at the time. The silly irony of the Hedermans selling their newspaper empire and all but disowning one of its own because of the perceived scandal of an extramarital affair and impending divorce may have been lost on the family—or perhaps they didn’t care—but not to the observers who watched as the “Faulknerian Southern” drama unfolded.144 Rea moved to New York, having used his share of the sale to finance his purchase of The New York Review of Books, determined to put the sordid

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family drama behind him.145 Weaver and Anklam, as one might expect, were, in Weaver’s words, “terrified” about what would happen to their education series with Hederman gone and Gannett soon taking over editorial control of the paper.146 To their surprise, Charles Overby, the newly appointed Gannett editor (as of June 1982), gave his full support to their work and encouraged them to continue. The decision surprised some, according to Wickham, given the fact that most new editors hesitate on publishing controversial pieces until they are more comfortable in their new roles. But, to his credit, Overby had his eye out for something that would allow Gannett to make a statement; Clarion-Ledger reporter Cliff Treyans told Wickham that Overby’s decision also met with the new editor’s personal and professional ideals and goals: “After the Hedermans’ long history, I think Charles Overby had a deep desire to change the image of the paper.” Anklam later elaborated on Overby’s decision: “Overby was an education advocate and excited about our series. He talked regularly with Winter’s staff about the governor’s plans. When Winter decided he’d call a special session on education, Overby told us he was holding our series till just before that session for maximum impact.”147 That decision troubled Weaver because of the perception that the newspaper could be “taking sides” in the debate.148 “We talked about rushing it into print before the Gannett people got here,” Weaver told The Washington Post.149 Governor Winter had concerns as well—The Clarion-Ledger had come such a long way from its past, he thought, and he was a fan of Rea Hederman’s vision (and Rea Hederman), and now, in light of the sale to Gannett, “here we go again.”150 If anything, Overby’s aggressive plan to publish the series just prior to the special legislative session put The Clarion-Ledger front and center in the education reform debate. All told, the paper published sixty-three news articles, forty-one editorials or columns, and eighty-one letters to the editor on the subject, more than any other newspaper in the state.151 Specifically, Weaver and Anklam focused on the following areas: an overview of the state’s public education system, including everything from dropout rates to accreditation and funding issues (November 28); the effect of school desegregation on the public school system, specifically the effect of white families taking their children out of the system in light of the federal desegregation orders (November 29); the economic effect on the state as a result of a poorly educated workforce (November 30); issues related to teaching, including pay and certification, such as evidence that Mississippi teacher salaries ranked last of all fifty states and the District of Columbia (December 1); school financing, specifically how much the state spent on public education per student (December 2); school consolidation, which could affect funding and the allocation of resources (December 3); and, Winter’s goals of the special session (December 4).152 As Wickham noted in her study of

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The Clarion-Ledger’s role in the passage of what would eventually become known as the 1982 Education Reform Act, “The common theme throughout the stories dealt with money—or rather the lack of it—to teach teachers, to teach students, and to pay teachers adequate salaries.”153 There was another theme, as a Clarion-Ledger cartoonist explained to Wickham: “Public education is always racial in Mississippi. There was never any debate over public support before desegregation. Then it became a problem.”154 To that point, Weaver reported in a November 29, 1982, article (with the title, “Race Remains a Factor in School Choice”), “But race undeniably remains a factor. Other than schools run by some churches, including the Catholic and Episcopal churches, most so-called ‘private academies’ are all-white, their officials claiming that no blacks have ever applied.” To make her point, Weaver interviewed Bernard Waites, who was Superintendent of Wilkinson County Public Schools between 1968–1975. He told Weaver that he sent his daughter to a private school when Wilkinson County integrated in 1970. “There was no way I was going to send her out to a school with 2,700 black kids,” he admitted.155 However, the Weaver/Anklam series was just the first part of The Clarion-Ledger’s coverage, with the second being its coverage of the special session, and the third, a series of published editorials.156 Anklam and Cliff Treyens, who covered the state legislature for The Clarion-Ledger, walked the halls during the special session, and, under Overby’s direction, paid close attention to how lawmakers voted in various subcommittees and reported to readers the next step each bill would take that made it out of a subcommittee. Anklam and Treyens also were present in the gallery as the Senate took its final vote on the historic legislative package.157 Weaver wasn’t there, but she believed that one reason that an education reform package made it that far was because there were state lawmakers, many of whom were loyal to Winter and Gandy, who believed it was time for the state to support progressive change. “They had a lot of young members of the House and the [Senate] who were pushing and ready for reform,” she said.158 Anklam, meanwhile, credited those elected officials who were first against the reform package but later changed their mind—and he believed that the work of The Clarion-Ledger staff, including its editors, made a difference. “Repeatedly, the paper’s editorial page urged readers to contact their legislators about their votes. When the House passed a bill that first week, the newspaper published a Hall of Shame, listing on the editorial page the name of those who voted no. Names of senators were added when that bill was voted on the next week.”159 However, the significant role that Weaver and Anklam played in raising public awareness and knowledge of the issues at hand should be noted as well. They covered important and controversial inter-related topics—race,

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education, money, politics—that had long been ignored by all involved: the news media, politicians, educators, and the public at large. Their work was part of the reason why The Clarion-Ledger won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service, with Weaver, Anklam, Treyens, editorial director David Hardin, state editor Lee Cearnal, and Overby formally cited as part of the reform package team.160 For her part, Weaver said at the time of the award, “We were flabbergasted. It was a hard story to write and the thought of winning never entered our minds.”161 More recently, she said, “You write these stories and you educate people and you see things, good things happened after we covered the Education Reform Act. And you think that you’ve done good and you’ve helped improve things.”162 As the education reform series was first being developed, Jo Ann Klein made the decision to leave journalism for politics. In 1980, Danny Cupit, then chair of the state Democratic Party, reached out to Klein to see if she would be interested in becoming the party’s executive director. She said no—at first—but Cupit kept at her until she finally agreed. Klein had voted Republican in the past, a fact that Cupit appreciated, and he respected her work as a journalist. In turn, Klein liked Cupit, and she recognized that the Democratic Party was in the middle of a political transformation. Klein’s interest in politics went beyond journalism, too, and she was looking for a new challenge. “I learned a great deal about politics and government when I worked for [Cupit],” Klein said.163 One of her last stories for The Clarion-Ledger took her to the Neshoba County Fair.164 In August 1980, Ronald Reagan, after winning the Republican Party presidential nomination, opened his campaign there, with a speech that harkened back to the days of Jim Crow. In front of 15,000 fair-goers, he gave his full-throated support of “states’ rights,” a not-so-subtle dog-whistle to voters who still clung to the ideologies of racial segregation and white superiority. “I believe in states’ rights,” Reagan told the crowd. “And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”165 In reply, civil rights activist Andrew Young, in a Washington Post guest editorial, asked, “What ‘states rights’ would candidate Reagan revive? Do the powers of state and local governments include the right to end voting rights for black citizens?”166 In a larger sense, Reagan’s speech was part of a “Southern strategy” devised by Republican leaders to continue to recruit disaffected Southern Democrats to the GOP. Many left the party as early as the 1930s and 1940s, already disgusted with most of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” policies, and then, the final straw, President Truman’s To Secure These Rights report. The power base of the newly formed Dixiecrats nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, hoping that his third-party nomination would be enough

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Figure 7.2.  “We were flabbergasted. It was a hard story to write and the thought of winning never entered our minds,” Nancy Weaver (Teichert) said at the time she and The Clarion-Ledger team won the 1983 Pulitzer for Meritorious Public Service for their series, “Mississippi Schools: Hard Lesson.” Source: Nancy Weaver (Teichert).

to at least give Republican nominee, New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, the victory. That did not come to pass; in fact, the Democrats reclaimed both the House and Senate in 1948 after losing both to the Republicans two years before. Southern Democrats, like John C. Stennis and Jim Eastland,

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gained seniority in the party—which gave them long-standing and considerable influence over both ideology and policy over the long term—but the Democratic Party of the mid-twentieth century now had enough northern liberals to make some noise, to “do something meaningful about civil rights,” journalist Bruce Bartlett writes.167 Both political parties, then, made significant ideological changes in the middle of the last century, with one courting a progressive voting base— including young, idealistic voters, minorities, and white, established liberals—to continue the policy work of FDR and Truman, and the other, seeking a new voting bloc, both popular and electoral, among Southern (and some would say, racist) conservatives. For instance, Senator Barry Goldwater, in seizing the Republican nomination in 1964, told his campaign organizers to “go hunting where the ducks are”; as mentioned in a previous chapter, he knew, despite his efforts in rallying Western Republicans to his side, that he could not win the White House without help from the Deep South. (Thurmond, in kind, officially became a Republican that same year, disgusted as he was with the direction of the Democratic Party and realistic that his fellow Dixiecrats would never win the White House.)168 As noted in Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields’s, The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics, “Goldwater’s ‘Operation Dixie’ set in motion the partisan alignment of the white South.”169 During his presidential bid, Goldwater, despite a moderate record on civil rights, suffered an embarrassing loss nationwide. However, in Southern states, like Alabama, where he not only won the vast majority of white votes but the endorsement of the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, Goldwater’s dog whistles obliged editors like Hodding Carter III to warn readers to not “walk down dead-end streets, waving our tattered banners in defiance. No one is going to walk with us anymore.”170 Southern whites didn’t listen, as the passage of federal legislation, like the 1965 Voting Rights Act, only aggravated their collective (and historic) desperation. “Though several generations removed, the memory of Confederate disenfranchisement during postwar military occupation, and the resulting election of hundreds of former slaves and freemen to local, state, and even national office, made the threat to white power anything but abstract,” Maxwell and Shields state.171 Accordingly, Thurmond courted Richard Nixon in an attempt to strengthen the Republican Party’s base in the South, as Thurmond saw in Nixon a relatively moderate candidate who could give voters an alternative to the likes of Goldwater (who seemed unelectable) and third-party Dixiecrat candidate George Wallace (also unelectable). More importantly, Maxwell and Shields note, Nixon would “prevent any additional erosion of the Southern white way of life”—or so Thurmond hoped.172 As Thurmond helped secure Nixon’s party nomination for the 1968 presidential election, the Nixon staff adopted

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a rhetorical strategy that hinged on subtle racial coding as a way to appeal to Southern white voters; “law and order,” for example, was code for putting an end to the civil rights and antiwar demonstrations and a “return to the racial status quo,” among other translations. This strategy brought Nixon into the “sweet spot” of white Southern Democrats, a safer alternative to men like George Wallace.173 A decade later, Goldwater Republican Ronald Reagan made his second bid to secure the presidential nomination. To win, he too adopted the “Southern strategy” in hopes of pulling Southern votes away from President Jimmy Carter, who carried the entire Southern region in the 1976 campaign.174 Republican strategist Lee Atwater, who counted Thurmond as a mentor and Nixon as a hero, was the key architect of Reagan’s Southern strategy, the latest in a line of key aides intent on “trading on southern white racial hostility for votes;”175 just as Goldwater used the threat of federal intrusion on the issue of civil rights to lure white votes, Reagan proclaimed “states’ rights” as a way to not only tap into ideological and historical notions of white superiority but also the sense of alienation (us vs. them) white voters felt, brought on originally by civil war and federal reconstruction. Just as Nixon offered an opportunity to take back the “Southern way of life” in his calls for “law and order,” Reagan, with Atwater’s help, constructed a rhetorical campaign based on carefully coded language to disguise racial resentment and white privilege, while touching on economic issues meant to pull in working class white voters who were frustrated by the policies of the Carter administration. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you cannot say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like . . . forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract,” Atwater revealed to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis in a then anonymous 1981 interview. “Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”176 It is no coincidence, then, that Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Neshoba County, just miles from the spot where searchers discovered the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Klein was there in August 1980, listening and watching as Reagan stirred the crowd with a pledge to make sure that the federal government did not interfere with “state’s rights and people doing as much as they can for themselves.”177 In an article published the day after Reagan’s speech, Klein told readers that Reagan spoke in “conversational tones” and had the crowd “in the palm of his hand” by “[singing] the familiar Mississippi theme song of state’s rights and local government control.”178 Recalling Reagan’s appearance forty years later, Klein said recently that those themes “helped a lot of Mississippians finally decide

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that they really were Republicans instead of Democrats. Things changed politically [in the state] from that point on.”179 Klein continued to see changes in her career as well. In 1981, she took a position as US Representative Wayne Dowdy’s press secretary, where she remained for two years. She then joined gubernatorial candidate Bill Allain’s campaign staff, where she helped navigate one of the most interesting and controversial episodes in state and election history. Allain then appointed Klein as press secretary after his 1984 election, a position she held for the length of his term in office, a period of time she called “quite an interesting time in my life.”180 In 1983, Nancy Weaver moved on to The Denver Post, and then, two years later, The Sacramento Bee. The former newsroom reminded her of The Clarion-Ledger, with an editor “who pushed us to do important hard stories” and “let us run with our ideas.”181 She stayed for twenty-five years, but in hindsight, her time in Mississippi remains unique and special. “That’s why Mississippi interested me—as a place with a history and a lot of good stories to be written.”182 Ellen Ann Fentress, a native to the state, would agree: “I think I always wanted to be a writer. I always loved word and story,” she said. “I still live in Mississippi and I want to tell Mississippi stories.”183 NOTES  1. Nancy Weaver Teichert, video interview by author, April 9, 2021 [Hereafter abbreviated “Teichert video interview.”]. See also “The Clarion-Ledger: The 1978 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award,” The Clarion-Ledger, May 27, 1979, 1B. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/181080660​/​?terms​=robert​%20kennedy​ %20hederman​&match​=1.  2. Quote taken from the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights website: https:​ //​rfkhumanrights​.org​/awards​/book​-and​-journalism​-awards​/book​-and​-journalism​ -awards​-2023.   3. See “The Clarion-Ledger: The 1978 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.”   4. Ibid.  5. Fredric N. Tulsky, Nancy Weaver, and Don Hoffman, “North Mississippi Justice,” The Clarion-Ledger, December 11, 1978, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/ image​/181080188.   6. Ibid.   7. Ibid.   8. Ibid., 2–5.   9. Teichert video interview. 10. As journalist Bill Minor once remarked, “You have to understand the family . . . it took a small miracle for them to choke down the [Kennedy Award].” See Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.”

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11. Ernest Holsendolph, “Newspaper and TV Station in Jackson, Miss., Reflect Decade of Change,” The New York Times, June 17, 1979. https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​ /1979​/06​/17​/archives​/newspaper​-and​-tv​-station​-in​-jackson​-miss​-reflect​-decade​-of​ -change​.html. 12. “Robert Kennedy, Jackass Compared,” The Clarion-Ledger, September 2, 1962, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180452627​/​?terms​=Robert​%20Kennedy​%2C​ %20Jackass​%20Compared​&match​=1. 13. Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.” 14. Ibid. 15. See “The Clarion-Ledger: The 1978 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.” 16. Ibid. 17. The full story is told in Kathleen Woodruff Wickham, The Role of The Clarion-Ledger in the Adoption of the 1982 Education Reform Act: Winning the Pulitzer Prize (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 2007). 18. Teichert video interview. 19. Ibid. 20. Jo Ann Klein, phone interview by author, February 26, 2019 [Hereafter abbreviated “Klein phone interview.”]. 21. Ibid. 22. Teichert video interview. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.” 26. As revealed in both the Teichert video interview and the Klein phone interview. 27. Teichert video interview. 28. Klein phone interview. 29. Scott Jaschik, “Steeped in Blood and Racism,” Inside Higher Ed, May 12, 2020. https:​//​www​.insidehighered​.com​/news​/2020​/05​/12​/author​-discusses​-book​ -jackson​-state​-shootings​-1970. 30. Ibid. See also, Whitney Blair Wyckoff, “Jackson State: A Tragedy Widely Forgotten,” NPR, May 3, 2010. https:​//​www​.npr​.org​/templates​/story​/story​.php​?storyId​ =126426361. 31. Jaschik, “Steeped in Blood and Racism.” 32. Wyckoff, “Jackson State.” 33. Klein phone interview. 34. Ibid. 35. Laura B. Weiss, “‘Landmark Bill’ Expands Pregnant Working Women’s Rights,” The Clarion-Ledger, December 4, 1978, 19. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​ /image​/181020053​/​?terms​=1978​%20Pregnancy​%20Discrimination​%20Act​&match​ =1. 36. Barker-Plummer, “News and Feminism: A Historic Dialogue,” 152. 37. Teichert video interview. 38. Ibid. See also Eileen Shanahan, “Ford Sets Up Unit on Women’s Year,” The New York Times, January 10, 1975. https:​//​www​.nytimes​.com​/1975​/01​/10​/archives​/ ford​-sets​-up​-unit​-on​-womens​-year​-panel​-to​-promote​-us​-role​-in​.html.

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39. Dianna Wray, “The 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston Was Supposed to Change the World. What Went Wrong?” Houstonia, January 30, 2018. https:​//​www​.houstoniamag​.com​/news​-and​-city​-life​/2018​/01​/1977​-national​ -womens​-conference​-houston. 40. Weaver, “Delegates-Elect: 20 Whites, 6 Men, All Conservatives,” The Clarion-Ledger, November 17, 1977, 17. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/ image ​ / 181012554​ / ​ ? terms ​ = 20 ​ % 20Whites ​ % 2C ​ % 206​ % 20Men​ % 2C​ % 20All​ %20Conservatives​&match​=1. 41. Teichert video interview. 42. Dylan Matthews, “Paleoconservatism, the Movement That Explains Donald Trump, Explained,” Vox, May 6, 2016. https:​//​www​.vox​.com​/2016​/5​/6​/11592604​/ donald​-trump​-paleoconservative​-buchanan. 43. Ibid. See also Euan Hague and Edward H. Sebesta, “Neo-Confederacy and Its Conservative Ancestry,” in Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction, eds. Euan Hague, Heidi Beirich, and Edward H. Sebesta (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 26. 44. Phyllis Schlafly, “What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?” Iowa State University: Archives of Women’s Political Communication, January 1, 1972. https:​ //​awpc​.cattcenter​.iastate​.edu​/2016​/02​/02​/whats​-wrong​-with​-equal​-rights​-for​-women​ -1972​/. 45. See Spruill, Divided We Stand, 9, for the nickname Schlafly gave the National Women’s Conference. For the number of people who attended what was called “Pro-Life, Pro-Family” rally, see Wray, “The 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston Was Supposed to Change the World.” 46. Spruill, Divided We Stand, 12. 47. Ibid. 48. Wray, “The 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston Was Supposed to Change the World.” 49. Ibid. 50. Teichert video interview. 51. Weaver, “Delegates-Elect: 20 Whites, 6 Men, All Conservatives,” 17. 52. Teichert video interview. 53. Klein phone interview. 54. Ibid. 55. Ellen Ann Fentress, interview by author, October 9, 2019 [Hereafter abbreviated “Fentress 2019 interview.”]. 56. Ibid. 57. Klein phone interview. 58. Ibid. 59. Teichert video interview. 60. Ibid. 61. Teichert video interview. 62. Email, Nancy Weaver Teichert to author, March 24, 2021 [Hereafter abbreviated as “Teichert March 24 email.”]. 63. Ibid.

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64. Weaver and Paul Beaver, “Mississippi Delta: Empty Hands in a Fertile Land,” The Clarion-Ledger, December 17, 1980, 2. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /184828369. 65. Ibid., 2, 6. 66. Ibid., 6. 67. Wayne W. Weidie, “More on Newspapers,” The Clarksdale Press Register, October 17, 1974, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/315168750​/​?terms​=new​ %20coat​%20of​%20paint​%20on​%20the​%20same​%20old​%20building​&match​=1. 68. Marcel Dufresne, “Exposing the Secrets of Mississippi Racism,” AJR Archives, October 1991. https:​//​ajrarchive​.org​/article​.asp​?id​=1311​&id​=1311. 69. Adam Nossiter, Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1994), 202. 70. Ibid. 71. “Former Clarion-Ledger Editor/Reporter Who Covered Civil Rights Dies at 69,” The Meridian Star, July 1, 2007. https:​//​www​.meridianstar​.com​/former​-clarion​ -ledger​-editor​-reporter​-who​-covered​-civil​-rights​-dies​-at​-69​/article​_a1b94a64​-dec3​ -5717​-845e​-36fb4a651cb9​.html. 72. See Nossiter, Of Long Memory, 83. 73. Dickerson, Dixie’s Dirty Little Secret, 206. 74. James Young, “Changing Times at Mississippi Paper,” Boston Globe, May 23, 1980, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/428221000​/. 75. Patrick Larkin, “ACLU Chief Says Group Won’t Aid Fired Nazi,” The Clarion-Ledger, May 13, 1980, 1B–2B. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /185204123​/​?terms​=James​%20Quinn​%20robert​%20gordon​%20fired​&match​=1. 76. Young, “Changing Times at Mississippi Paper,” 3. 77. Ibid. 78. Jo Ann Klein, “Greenville Desegregation Planned Praised,” The Clarion-Ledger, September 7, 1977, 17. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/181054683​/​?terms​=jo​ %20ann​%20klein​%20greenville​&match​=1. 79. Arielle Dreher, “How Integration Failed in Jackson Public Schools from 1969 to 2017,” Jackson Free Press, November 15, 2017. https:​//​www​.jacksonfreepress​ .com​ / news​ / 2017​ / nov​ / 15​ / how​ - integration​ - failed​ - jacksons​ - public​ - schools196/#:~:text=In%20the%20capital%20city%2C%20the,white%20schools%2C%20 if%20they%20dared. 80. Ibid. 81. “Massive Resistance,” Segregation in America, Equal Justice Initiative, accessed May 2, 2022, https:​//​segregationinamerica​.eji​.org​/report​/massive​-resistance​ .html. 82. Lynnell Hancock, “The Anonymous Town That Was the Model of Desegregation in the Civil Rights Era,” The Hecinger Report, October 3, 2016, https:​//​ hechingerreport​.org​/anonymous​-town​-model​-desegregation​-civil​-rights​-era​/. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Klein, “16th Section Land, Many Headaches,” The Clarion-Ledger, December 20, 1977, 6. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/181033028​/​?terms​=The​

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%20Northwest​%20Ordinance​%20of​%20jo​%20ann​%20klein​%2016th​%20section​ %20land​&match​=2.   86. Ibid.   87. Klein phone interview.   88. “16th Section Issue,” The Clarion-Ledger, January 28, 1978, 8. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/183541854​/​?terms​=150​%20year​%20history​&match​=1.   89. Lil Shows and Fran Leber, “Civics Lesson,” The Clarion-Ledger, March 1, 1978, 14. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/183533546​/​?terms​=evelyn​%20gandy​ %20committee​%2016th​%20section​&match​=1.   90. Lil Shows, “Letters,” The Clarion-Ledger, January 24, 1978, 6. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/183538598​/​?terms​=evelyn​%20gandy​%2016th​%20section​ %20land​&match​=1.   91. Klein phone interview.   92. Lil Shows, “Letters,” 6.   93. Lil Shows and Fran Leber, “Civics Lesson,” 14.  94. Neuman, “Miss Gandy,” The Clarion-Ledger, April 17, 1978, 3. https:​ //​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/183538344​/​?terms​=evelyn​%20gandy​%20governor​ %20candidate​&match​=1.   95. Klein phone interview.   96. Ibid; for the Burgin federal charges, see Bob Zeller, “Burger, Lambert Face Arraignment,” The Clarion Ledger, September 3, 1978, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​ .com​/image​/180583197​/.   97. Bill Minor, “Greed Was Burgin’s Downfall,” The Greenwood Commonwealth, October 9, 2002. https:​//​www​.gwcommonwealth​.com​/archives​/greed​-was​-burgins​ -downfall.  98. Klein, “Gandy Calls on Senate Panel to Help Decide Burgin’s Fate,” The Clarion-Ledger, December 9, 1978, 8. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /181060312​/​?terms​=a​%20most​%20serious​%20situation​&match​=1.   99. Newman, “Burgin Resigns from State Senate,” The Clarion-Ledger, December 30, 1978, 1, 12. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180644193. 100. “Senate’s Chance to Remove Doubt,” The Clarion-Ledger, February 12, 1979, 20. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/180145150​/​?terms​=bill​%20burgin​ %20gandy​&match​=1. 101. Klein, “House Passes 16th Section Revision Bill,” The Clarion-Ledger, March 8, 1978, 1, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/183545618​/​?terms​=Jo​%20Ann​ %20Klein​%20House​%2016th​%20section​&match​=1. 102. Klein, “Land Bill Passage Includes Drama,” The Clarion-Ledger, January 28, 1978, 1, 14. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/183541750. 103. Klein phone interview. 104. Klein, “Burgin Lost a Big One This Session,” The Clarion-Ledger, April 4, 1978, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/183538892. (“Breath taking pause” from this story). For similar details, see also, Jo Ann Klein, “Burgin’s Defeat Memorable,” The Clarion-Ledger, April 9, 2022, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /183544831. 105. Klein, “Burgin’s Defeat Memorable,” 16.

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106. Fred Anklam, “On Winning the Pulitzer Prize,” Issuu, accessed May 4, 2022, https:​//​issuu​.com​/mrmagazine123​/docs​/meekschoolissuu​/s​/11108716. 107. Wickham, “Governor William Winter and the Clarion-Ledger,” 64. 108. Ibid., 63. 109. Ibid., 64. 110. Charles C. Bolton, “The Last Stand of Massive Resistance: Mississippi Public School Integration, 1970,” Mississippi History Now, Mississippi Department of Archives and History and the Mississippi Historical Society, accessed May 4, 2022,  https:​//​www​.mshistorynow​.mdah​.ms​.gov​/issue​/the​-last​-stand​-of​-massive​ -resistance​-1970. 111. Ibid. 112. Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All:: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870–1980. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 179. 113. See Bolton, “The Last Stand of Massive Resistance,” and The Hardest Deal of All, 179–80. 114. Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All, 178. 115. See Randolph Hohle, Race and the Origins of Neoliberalism (New York: Routledge, 2015), 183. 116. Ibid., 181. 117. “Private Academy Backlash,” Starkville Civil Rights, Mississippi State University Department of History and Mississippi State University Libraries, accessed May 5, 2022, https:​//​starkvillecivilrights​.msstate​.edu​/wordpress​/backlash​/. 118. Michael W. Fuquay, “Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi, 1964–1971,” History of Education Quarterly 42, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 163. 119. Bolton, The Hardest Deal of All, 218. 120. Wickham, Governor William Winter and the Clarion-Ledger, 63, 65, 77. 121. Donna Ladd, Dustin Cardon, and Ronni Mott, “Evers, Winter: Mississippi Moving Forward, But . . . ” Jackson Free Press, September 28, 2012. https:​//​www​ .jacksonfreepress​.com​/news​/2012​/sep​/28​/evers​-winters​-mississippi​-moving​-forward​ -but​/. 122. Quote from Wickham, “Governor William Winter and the Clarion-Ledger,” 65; the previous information in the paragraph was taken from Bolton, William F. Winter and the New Mississippi, 221–222. 123. Wickham, “Governor William Winter and the Clarion-Ledger,” 67. 124. Ibid., 68. 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid., 72. 127. Ibid., 69, 74; see also, Teichert video interview, and Anklam, “On Winning the Pulitzer Prize.” 128. Anklam, “On Winning the Pulitzer Prize.” 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid. For more information on the topic, see “Press: New South at the Clarion-Ledger,” Time, May 2, 1983. https:​//​content​.time​.com​/time​/subscriber​/article​ /0​,33009​,953872​,00​.html.

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132. Quotes from Teichert video interview and Anklam, “On Winning the Pulitzer Prize.” 133. Anklam, “On Winning the Pulitzer Prize.” 134. Teichert video interview. 135. Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.” 136. Wilkie, Dixie, 261. 137. Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.” 138. Ibid. 139. Wells, “News Wars.” 140. Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.” 141. Ibid. 142. Teichert video interview. 143. Ibid. 144. Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.” 145. Ibid. Also, Teichert video interview. 146. Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.” 147. Anklam, “On Winning the Pulitzer Prize.” 148. Wickham, “Governor William Winter and the Clarion-Ledger,” 71. 149. Prochnau, “The Tale of a Pulitzer, a Paper, a Family.” 150. Wickham, “Governor William Winter and the Clarion-Ledger,” 71. 151. Ibid., 73–74. 152. Ibid., 73–77. 153. Ibid., 75. 154. Ibid., 74–75. 155. Weaver, “Race Remains a Factor in School Choice,” The Clarion-Ledger, November 29, 1982, 12. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/183624236​/​?terms​ =Bernard​%20Waites​%20race​%20remains​%20factor​&match​=1. 156. As explained in Wickham, “Governor William Winter and the Clarion-Ledger.” See also, Anklam, “On Winning the Pulitzer Prize.” 157. Anklam, “On Winning the Pulitzer Prize.” 158. Teichert video interview. 159. Anklam, “On Winning the Pulitzer Prize.” 160. Del Stover, “Clarion-Ledger Wins Pulitzer Prize,” The Clarion-Ledger, April 19, 1983, 1, 10. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/184594989. 161. Ibid., 1. 162. Teichert video interview. 163. Klein phone interview. 164. Teichert video interview. 165. “Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba County Fair Speech,” The Neshoba Democrat, April 8, 2021. https:​//​neshobademocrat​.com​/stories​/ronald​-reagans​-1980​ -neshoba​-county​-fair​-speech​,49123. 166. Daniel S. Lucks, Reconsidering Reagan: Racism, Republicans, and the Road to Trump (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020), 146.

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167. Bruce Bartlett, “The Western Origins of the ‘Southern Strategy,’” The New Republic, June 29, 2020. https:​//​newrepublic​.com​/article​/158320​/western​-origins​ -southern​-strategy. 168. Ibid. 169. Maxwell and Shields, The Long Southern Strategy, 360. 170. Ibid., 4. 171. Ibid., 5. 172. Ibid., 6. 173. Ibid. 174. Ibid., 10. 175. Ibid., 37. 176. Rick Perlstein, “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy,” The Nation, November 13, 2012. https:​//​www​.thenation​.com​ /article​/archive​/exclusive​-lee​-atwaters​-infamous​-1981​-interview​-southern​-strategy​/. 177. Jo Ann Klein, “Reagan Wows Crowd at the Neshoba Fair,” The Clarion-Ledger, August 4, 1980, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/184403296​/​?terms​=jo​ %20ann​%20klein​%20ronald​%20reagan​%20neshoba​%20county​%20fair​&match​=1. 178. Ibid. 179. Klein phone interview 180. Ibid. 181. Teichert video interview. 182. Ibid. 183. Fentress 2019 interview.

Chapter 8

“I Think You Could Do This”

Before she was a journalist, Ellen Ann (Quinn) Fentress was a French major without a plan. She had always loved storytelling; she grew up in a family of devoted newspaper readers and loved reading the newspaper, too. She also had a talent for writing, but the Mississippi College junior had not seriously considered a career as a journalist—nor did she have the necessary degree or training for it. Fentress needed, in her words, a “nudge,” and it arrived one day by mail: a message from her father, David Peel Quinn, scrawled at the top of a newspaper clipping. It read, simply, “I think you could do this.”1 David Quinn rarely went a day without reading The Wall Street Journal, and he routinely clipped out stories that he liked and shared them with his daughter. That day he sent her a feature article on Associated Press Hall-of-Fame journalist Walter Mears.2 As a political correspondent, Mears won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1976 presidential campaign.3 David Quinn, according to Ellen Ann, “was as worried as he should have been” that his only child, a French major, approached the back half of her college education with hardly an idea of what she wanted to do with her degree. “I didn’t seem to have a plan,” Fentress said. “I thought about getting a teacher’s certificate, but I didn’t follow through on that.”4 The note was the nudge she needed. “It was like, ‘Blow me away with a feather,’” Fentress said of her reaction to her father’s message.5 In fact, the message confirmed to Fentress what she already knew: that she loved the printed word and the rich Southern tradition of storytelling. “I guess I always grew up valuing a story, and that’s part of being human . . . the joy of the story and that you keep up with the newspaper and you read,” she said.6 However, the Mears feature story held a deeper meaning for Fentress. She believed her father was telling her that Mears’s story could serve as a blueprint for her own—that journalism could serve a gateway to see the world and to tell its stories. “Getting out of college in Mississippi, that was the only way that I could figure out how you could possibly write, was to work a newspaper.”7 303

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She did just that, first at the Capitol Reporter with Bill Minor, then she moved to The Daily Herald, and, finally, The Sun, also in Biloxi.8 While at the Capitol Reporter, from June 1978 to August 1979, she broke a story about Mississippi Power & Light’s (MP&L, now Entergy) use of Agent Orange as a herbicide in the late 1970s—a direct violation of the federal ban on its use.9 Fentress also brought to light a sexual discrimination suit against the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) and the unethical billing practices of Watkins & Eagar Law Firm, which was involved in the suit for several years.10 “[Bill] gave me some good stories,” Fentress said.11 Her prior experience at the Capitol Reporter helped when she made the transition to the Mississippi Gulf Coast newspapers and the life of a daily newspaper reporter. At the Daily Herald, she worked as a general assignment reporter, but she also covered the circuit court, the Harrison County and Long Beach school systems, and the Navy Construction Battalion, part of the United States Navy Construction Force, located in Gulfport.12 She stayed at the Herald for only a year before moving to the Sun, where she first covered the education and court beats before winning the assignment of state capitol reporter in 1982, one of a handful of full-time correspondents in the press room (along with Minor and Norma Fields).13 Her knowledge of the intersection between state politics and the health of Mississippi’s public education system served her well, and like Fields, Fentress also focused on issues that related to women’s equality. Accordingly, Fentress was representative of a generation of women journalists who, beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s, began their careers at small-town local newspapers, where editors didn’t have the luxury of a large news staff or the budget to fill their newsrooms with all-male reporters (who would have commanded higher salaries). The duties of motherhood and family eventually pulled her away from her capitol beat desk in the late 1980s; it would be several more years before she would have the time and energy to commit to journalism.14 In the early 2000s, Fentress would eventually find her way back to her story telling roots as a freelance journalist—her later essays with The New York Times, Oxford American, and The Atlantic, among others, would reaffirm her interest in Southern culture and its progressive politics—race and women’s issues, in particular—with a keen eye toward stories that revealed “how big truths pulse in individual life stories.”15 Her interest in and commitment to progressive issues, Fentress would say, was “inevitable,” part of the wholesale rejection of a strict conservative upbringing that included a primary and secondary education at Pillow Academy (in Greenwood, Mississippi)—one of countless segregated academies founded in 13 different Southern states in response to the Brown vs. Board of Education decision—and four additional years at a small-town college, Mississippi College, which had been founded by the Southern Baptist

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Convention.16 Her emancipation may not have occurred as it did had she not answered an ad from Bill Minor—he was looking for a new reporter to join his Capitol Reporter staff. Soon thereafter, Fentress met Norma Fields, who became a steadfast friend and colleague. Although Minor gave her the onthe-job training she needed, Fields taught Fentress, among other important lessons, to “bring a [woman’s] experience to the coverage.”17 “SUCH A COSMOPOLITAN NEWSPAPER” During her junior year in college, Fentress had begun writing movie reviews for The Mississippi Collegian, Mississippi College’s student newspaper. One year later, as editor, Fentress kept up with local events with regular visits to the campus library, where she would read copies of the Jackson papers during study breaks. On one such visit, Fentress ran across the Capitol Reporter.18 The typical issue ran less than 20 pages, but it was the paper’s progressive tone and that of its publisher and editor impressed Fentress. “I became absolutely fascinated to know that there was such a cosmopolitan newspaper, not only in Mississippi [but] Jackson . . . ” she said.19 Bill Minor purchased the small, struggling Northside Reporter in from Hazel Brannon Smith in 1973, and hired a small staff to run it so he could focus his attention on his duties as capitol correspondent for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. When that newspaper closed its Jackson bureau in 1976, Minor elected to stay in Jackson and with the paper now renamed the Capitol Reporter.20 With the goal of establishing a new citywide publication—a paper that would come out “weekly but never weakly,” as Minor put it—to challenge the “monopoly-run Jackson dailies” owned by the Hederman family, Minor would bring to light “corrupt politicians, discreet businessmen, Ku Kluxers, underworld figures, and assorted other miscreants . . . ”21 In that regard, the Reporter was an extension of its publisher—a man described in a 1978 a profile piece (written by LSU journalism professor James S. Featherston) as a “true Mississippi muckraker” shaped by the hard times of the Great Depression and the rural landscape of eastern Louisiana.22 His father, Jacob, was a linotype operator who struggled to keep a job. Indeed, Minor told Featherston that if not for President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, an eight-year federal employment program that put over eight million unemployed Americans to work, the family may not have survived.23 “It was a struggle, a bad struggle,” he said.24 Given his father’s professional and personal struggles—which included bouts of alcoholism—Minor swore off newspapers, but his high school English teacher helped re-ignite his interest.25 He took a job with his hometown newspaper, the Bogalusa (LA) Enterprise, after his 1939 graduation,

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before putting himself through Tulane University and earning a journalism degree four years later.26 After serving in the Navy during the Second World War, Minor worked the Times-Picayune city desk for a year before arriving in Jackson—where he quickly established his lifelong reputation as a “fierce journalistic watchdog” of the local and state political establishment.27 “Thomas Jefferson had men like Bill Minor in mind when he declared that if he had to choose between a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, he would take his morning paper,” Featherston says, quoting columnist Jack Anderson in a 1978 copy of the Nieman Reports.28 In other words, Bill Minor was exactly the type of editor Fentress wanted to work for, and the Capitol Reporter, exactly the kind of newspaper she wanted to call home. The week of her college graduation, she saw just such an opportunity—an ad in the Capitol Reporter calling for an editor of the paper’s “Arts” section.29 She immediately phoned Minor and then went in for an interview just a couple days after her graduation. “I didn’t get [the job],” Fentress recalled, “but I began writing freelance pieces for the newspaper.”30 The work was slow but steady, as Fentress spent the summer reviewing works that included a book on gnomes, a collection of short stories, and the latest novel by historian Shelby Foote.31 She reviewed a summer film festival produced at New Stage, the local non-profit professional theatre company, and tested a recently published vegetarian cookbook.32 Her freelance work kept her on Minor’s radar, and he hired her by the end of the summer. “I guess I just wouldn’t go away,” she said. “And, I was cheap.”33 Indeed, her new job at the Reporter didn’t even pay enough to cover her basic living expenses—at least not at first. To make ends meet, Fentress worked as a hostess in a downtown Jackson restaurant.34 It was a balancing act that she and other women journalists of her generation would perform— splitting their time, talents, and energy between the professional careers they loved and the jobs they needed. Despite making up a majority (60 percent by 1984) of the graduates from college and university journalism programs, women who entered the field during the 1970s and 1980s faced a “stubbornly wide” pay gap in comparison to men.35 Furthermore, women graduates were less likely than men to land entry level positions or be promoted to a higher rank. They fared slightly better at local, smaller newspapers or in the magazine industry.36 Journalism historian Gwyneth Mellinger, in her book, Chasing Newsroom Diversity: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action, noted, “Owners of smaller newspapers were not more enlightened but pragmatic, they concluded, noting that talented women cost less than talented men and were, therefore, the better value for papers of limited means.”37 The above statement, then, confirms and explains Fentress’s experiences as a young journalist. In a 2019 interview, she summarized that experience,

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while also speaking to the circumstances of other women journalists covering the Mississippi state capitol in the 1970s and 1980s: We had remarkable careers in Mississippi because it was the small pond, and also don’t underestimate how cheap and underpaid we were. [Our editors] were willing to give responsibility in a way that a big, prestigious national paper wouldn’t because they were too cheap to pay someone the wages to do any better. So, we got all this exposure that other people would take them years to get.38

Indeed, working for a small publication, for Bill Minor in particular, was akin to a college education in journalism and Mississippi politics. Fentress was a relative newcomer to journalism, but that didn’t matter to Minor. He taught her everything she needed to know about being a journalist for a small weekly newspaper—including front-page editorial decisions—and provided her with access to sources who might have otherwise ignored her interview requests or who she might not have known to contact.39 “I would just step into a great story,” Fentress said. “It was wonderful to almost get inside his head and watch [the newspaper come together] early on—kind of like color-by-numbers. I didn’t have a journalism degree, but it was on the job training, ‘journalism-by-numbers.’”40 Fentress’s relationship with Minor, then, is another example of the role that some male editors played in the building of the careers of the women journalists in the mid- to late twentieth century—especially given the shortage of women for young journalists like Fentress to emulate. As mentioned, Norma Fields would fill that void later in Fentress’s career, but in more personal, friendly ways. In the meantime, Fentress (and her peers) worked at the mercy and privilege of male supervisors—the best of whom provided women journalists the opportunity to polish their technical skills while opening many a professional door for them along the way. Even so, Fentress was realistic when asked what benefit Minor received by affording her that first opportunity: “[The paper] was full of young people because we were cheap. We had this opportunity to do these things that had there been more money, there would have been other people who would have wanted these jobs—and they would have had them. But since there was no money, [the jobs] went to whoever came through the door.”41 At best, theirs was a symbiotic relationship—with one running his paper on a shoestring budget and needing cheap labor, and the other, willing to work on the cheap to gain experience. In August 1978, Fentress moved from covering the arts to covering local news events—whatever leads Minor put in her lap and told her to chase. “The Capitol Reporter and ‘beats,’ no—not a concept. You just did what you did,” Fentress said. “There were some very good stories that landed in my lap.”42 The issues she covered in those first few months

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Figure 8.1.  Ellen Ann Fentress, pictured here (second from left) with publisher Bill Minor and other Capitol Reporter staff members, remained realistic about why Minor hired her right out of college. “I guess I just wouldn’t go away,” she said. “And I was cheap.” Source: Ellen Ann Fentress.

included an interesting mix of local news events—a city prohibition on beer sales at the annual state fair, an examination of statewide child adoptions, and the discovery of a lost Miss America pageant trophy at an auction house, for example—but Minor soon started pulling Fentress into stories that would perhaps hold more significant political implications for readers.43 One such story involved an investigation of MP&L’s (now Entergy) use of the toxic 2,4,5-T chemical on transmission line rights of way (strips of land used to construct and maintain power lines). After being tipped off by an Adams County tree farmer (and future Mississippi lawmaker and attorney) Ayres Haxton—who discovered evidence of the company spraying the herbicide on his property—Fentress launched an investigation into the use of a chemical that was a major ingredient in Agent Orange. Moreover, the chemical had already been banned by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and was on the radar of both the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) and the Sierra Club.44 “It was a story that won a national prize [from the National Federation of Press Women] about this still going on in Mississippi,” Fentress said. “It was one of my first [for the paper], so I thought we’d just do national-winning stories every week.”45

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Similar investigations followed—including an examination into Grand Gulf, a newly constructed MP&L-owned power plant, located near Port Gibson, Mississippi. Specifically, Fentress documented a federal legal battle over serious structural issues following a recent tornado—with parties fighting over just how much damage was done and who would pay for those damages.46 One week later, Minor and Fentress also reported on a proposed chemical waste dumping ground in Scott County. Their investigation uncovered the fact that two of Governor Cliff Finch’s closest allies facilitated the land deal for the proposed site.47 With Minor’s guidance, she continued to uncover corruption from both the private and public sector, including a federal employment discrimination lawsuit by Black American workers at Mississippi Industries for the Blind, a nonprofit group that helped the blind and visually-impaired gain much-needed training and employment to lead more independent lives.48 She also led an investigation into the law firm that defended the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) against a six-year-old equal-pay discrimination suit filed against by three women (two PhDs and a physician). Fentress examined charges that the Fuselier, Ott, McKee & Flowers law firm, in defending the state of Mississippi, had collected about $300,000 in fees with little effort made to settle or move the cases forward.49 “I was proud that we brought that to light,” Fentress said.50 The stories described above were possible because of at least one important lesson that Minor taught Fentress: the importance of cultivating and respecting sources, especially in a relatively small, but politically active city like Jackson. “I think I learned the journalism of Mississippi,” Fentress said, when asked to recount the time working at the Capitol Reporter, “and that relationships with people are so important.”51 She said that Minor taught her to “have a wide variety of contacts, treat every person as an important person, because they will be—they will come back in your life in Mississippi.”52 This and other lessons would serve Fentress well as she moved on to her next opportunities, first with the Daily Herald, the city’s long-standing afternoon paper, and then, the Sun, the emerging “upstart” in the area.53 “I loved being at the Capitol Reporter with Bill,” Fentress said, “and I felt like I had learned a lot there . . . [but] I was hungry. I wanted to move along.”54 “TRIAL BY FIRE” Fentress moved to the Mississippi Gulf Coast in August 1979 and joined a newspaper staff that included statehouse reporter Lloyd Gray, longtime Daily Herald employee Jimmie Bell, who joined the newspaper in 1946 at age twenty-one, and at least two other women journalists, Regina Hines and

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Figure 8.2.  The Capitol Reporter was just one of numerous papers around the state covering political corruption, including stories involving former Mississippi Governor Cliff Finch, the “workingman’s candidate.” Source: Wilson F. “Bill” Minor Papers, Manuscript Division, Archives and Special Collections, Mississippi State University Libraries.

Marie Langlois, both of whom, like Fentress, covered local events along the Gulf Coast region.55 Fentress’s first story, dated September 5, summarized the most recent Harrison County School Board meeting—indicative of the types of stories Fentress would file while at the Daily Journal.56 Just one week in, Fentress faced her first significant challenge, what she remembered as a “trial by fire”: Hurricane Frederic, which struck the Gulf Coast area in August 1979, with 12- to 15-foot storm surges that caused more dollar damage than any other hurricane to date.57 The newspaper staff spent the night at the publishing plant two blocks away from the Biloxi beach, sleeping on the floor, before emerging the next day to survey the damage.58 The first news event that Fentress covered, then, was a similar one that Nancy Campbell covered a decade prior, and a familiar one to Mississippi Gulf Coast residents—especially those who were around to remember Hurricane Camille. “All I had to my name after Camille were the clothes on my back and a one-week-old Cadillac,” longtime Gulf Coast resident and business owner Joseph Baricev said after Camille made landfall in August 1969.59 Fentress filed three stories in the days following Hurricane

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Frederic—one giving details of a local hospital evacuation, part of The Daily Herald’s “Hurricane Edition” published two days after landfall, another on local hurricane disaster relief efforts, and a third giving readers tips and warnings when selecting a contractor for home repairs.60 Those repairs would take months, and as the Mississippi Gulf Coast recovered, Fentress settled into her new position. Over the next year, she worked many assignments on the education and circuit court beats, covering the courts in Biloxi and Gulfport, the Harrison County and Long Beach public schools, and the Naval Construction Battalion Base (or “Sea-Bee Base”) and Port of Gulfport.61 The stories she covered on those beats were less provocative than her work at the Capitol Reporter—including a profile piece on American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and a story about the city of Long Beach attempting to annex additional land—but it was exactly the type of work she wanted and needed as a young reporter.62 “That [job] was exactly what I was looking for in my career,” Fentress said. “It was more of a structured daily reporter job, and it gave me the experience I needed.”63 Fentress stayed with the Daily Herald for a year before moving over to the Sun in August 1980. Fentress explained the reason for the move: “The Daily Herald . . . was the ‘old-time’ afternoon paper, with a lot of the people that had been career [reporters] with the [newspaper] through the years. A lot of the [younger] people . . . that had come in [the area], like I had, were actually working for the Sun, so I think was ready to get over to that side.”64 Fentress also moved to the Sun because she would be able to shift from court reporting to broader investigations that allowed her to report on systemic changes in the Gulf Coast educational system.65 One such story came after she received a tip from elementary school teacher Maryann Graczyk, who asked Fentress to investigate the classroom conditions in the Harrison County school system. “She called me and said, ‘You want a story? I want you to come out to my [class]room right now.’ It was in September or October, [and] we looked at her thermometer and it was like nearly 100 degrees in her classroom,” Fentress recalled. “She asked, ‘How can they learn?’”66 Fentress’s story on the lack of air conditioning helped force the issue with the Harrison County the school board, which eventually agreed to a bond issue, which voters passed.67 “It’s one of the stories I’m proudest of,” Fentress said.68 Her time at the Sun also included coverage of other state agencies, including state mental health services. In September 1980, for example, Fentress reported on the financial struggles (in the way of federal cutbacks) and the “ayatollah of indifference” from public leaders plaguing mental health services.69 Three months later, she and Associated Press reporter James Saggus informed readers of a Mississippi Medicaid Commission plan to reduce

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Medicaid benefits by $28 million over a six-month period in light of a “major deficit” threatening the program.70 These experiences taught her a valuable lesson regarding Mississippi politics: “All the issues in Mississippi are usually under funding. When things are wrong in education, it’s because how the public schools are choked,” Fentress said. “The same can be said for many of our public services.”71 Young reporters like Fentress looked for any opportunity afforded them to report the news—chances born from stingy editors and a generation of women who had little to lose—even when they knew they were being taken for granted. It’s well-worn story. “Throughout women’s connections to commercial media, women journalists have had to negotiate their own needs to maintain hard-sought jobs with decisions on how much to accommodate to the messages of the craft that has discounted their work as much as it has the work of women in general,” journalism educator Patricia Bradley writes in Women in the Press: The Struggle for Equality.72 Fentress’s opportunities were the result of hard-fought battles waged by women at several national magazines and newspapers (as noted in previous chapters). “It was a heady time for women in journalism,” journalism educator Kristin Grady Gilger and editor Julia Wallace write in There’s No Crying in Newsrooms: What Women Have Learned about What It Takes to Lead. “Newsrooms that had been closed to women or that hired women in only the lowliest jobs were forced open, and, for the first time, women in large numbers saw the possibility of advancement, or building real careers as reporters and editors and producers—and perhaps even as executives.”73 The progress was slow. Women who advanced far enough to find their names on the mastheads of their respective publications, for example, were more the exception than the rule.74 Moreover, few if any newspapers or print media organizations were concerned enough about lack of diversity and opportunities for women of color in the newsroom to do anything about it. Newspaper publisher Nancy Hicks Maynard, first hired by the New York Post in the late 1960s as a “copy girl” and reporter, recalled just how lonely the newsroom could be for women of color, telling Mellinger that “white women had greater access to newsrooms than non-whites of both genders, who were still trying to get through the newsroom door.”75 Significant issues indeed, but still enough opportunities for young white women like Fentress to make the kind of career that their mothers and grandmothers did not have, all the while covering significant social issues—such as the intersection between policy and education—that their mothers and grandmothers could not cover. “The stories about women and newspaper journalism are more complex than a mere telling of the numbers suggests since they are, not surprisingly, connected to broad societal trends,” Christy Bulkeley wrote in a 2002 Nieman Report. “The 1960’s and 1970’s were, in

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addition to the decades of increasing women’s presence in news staffs, years of stunning news coverage of civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, assassinations, resignations and all the related and mostly unprecedented works of the democracy—in short and in journalism terms, great news years.”76 That experience on the education beat put Fentress in the best position to replace Lloyd Gray, who left the Daily Herald to work as a Mississippi assistant secretary of state under Secretary of State Ed Pittman.77 Fentress arrived in Jackson in time to cover the 1982 spring legislative session. One of the first stories she filed as the Sun capitol bureau chief included information on the progress of William Winter’s attempts to overhaul the state’s public education system. Specifically, Fentress wrote about what Gulf Coast lawmakers considered to be a failure on the legislature’s part to fund, at least at first, some important items on Winters’s public education agenda: public kindergartens and teacher pay raises, to name a couple.78 Indeed, many of the stories Fentress filed during the early 1980s were related to Winter’s plans for public education, including debates about how to improve the state’s public schools and how those attempts fell short, particularly when it came to greater funding for schools.79 Fentress’s coverage of social issues and policies extended to the many challenges of modern womanhood, from the battle over the ERA and the lack of women in state leadership positions, to the state capitol’s “good ‘ol boy” network and cases of outright discrimination that hindered women’s progress.80 In 1984, for example, Fentress reported that women in the state were more educated and made up more of the state’s workforce than their male counterparts, yet they made almost $15,000 less annually.81 She then used her political column, which appeared regularly in in the Sun, to routinely offer an honest critique on the current state of affairs: “The good ole boy is one commodity in which Mississippi stands as the nation’s No. 1 producer,” she said in August 1984.82 As one of only two women covering the state capitol on a full-time basis—Nancy Stevens had left by the time Fentress came along—Fentress saw firsthand how difficult it was for a woman to break into the “good ‘ol boy” network of state politics. Evelyn Gandy’s election as the first woman lieutenant governor, as noted in a previous chapter, was a watershed moment for the women of the state, particularly for those who aspired to professional and elected roles that had previously eluded them. However, Gandy’s two failed campaigns for governor, the first in 1979 and the second four years later, brought to bear the sexism still evident in Mississippi politics from all sides—from the voters and in the press, in particular. “Mississippi is not ready for a woman governor,” veteran publisher John Emmerich noted shortly after Gandy lost the 1983 state Democratic Party nomination in a runoff to then state attorney general Bill Allain. “Evelyn Gandy, with 35 years in

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public office, was the most politically experienced of the five gubernatorial candidates. But for the second time in a row, she led the first primary only to lose out in the runoff.”83 In the weeks that followed, the state press speculated as to the reasons for her defeat. These type of postelection evaluations come with the job, but Gandy’s defeat in both 1979 and 1983 brought a deeper, flawed scrutiny than with most election losses between two men. After the results of both primaries, the press, with few exceptions, blamed the losses on everything from Gandy’s lack of toughness on the campaign trail to her physical appearance. Or, some reporters, though not all, refused to believe that sexism had much, if anything, to do with her losses. “The fact that Miss Gandy is a woman and would have been the first ever nominated had she won had no visible effect on the outcome,” the Greenwood Commonwealth reported in August 1979.84 However, in 1979 at least, many in the press agreed that she would have at least one more opportunity, in 1983, to get elected to the state’s highest office—if she wanted it. “At this stage, most of the so-called political experts would suggest that while Gandy could again reach the second primary [in 1983], she would fall in the second as she did in 1979,” columnist Wayne Weidie noted in December 1982. “It may be very foolish for anyone to underrate Evelyn Gandy.”85 Despite Gandy’s best efforts to both acknowledge the criticism from her first campaign and live up to the expectations of her second—in advance of her 1983 campaign, she hired a Washington, DC, media firm to remake her image, which included a new wardrobe, hairstyle, and lessons on being more assertive in her public engagements—the state media’s observations of her second gubernatorial campaign were, at best, skeptical, patronizing, misogynistic.86 “She displayed new eyeglasses, more stylish than the old, a new hairdo and an uncharacteristic directness in dealing with reporters,” a column from the Sun noted.87 And, they were no less critical in her defeat, as many pegged Gandy’s loss once again on, as Emmerich noted, her lack of “dynamic, creative or innovative leadership” (forgetting, perhaps, how they praised her during the Bergin affair).88 Or, to put it another way, Allain beat a “less dramatic, somewhat old-fashioned gracious lady.”89 An examination of the press coverage of Gandy’s three-decade political career reveals a much longer history of stereotypical news frames, including those that unfairly critiqued her physical appearance (by constantly commenting on height, weight, dress, or her facial features as legitimate campaign concerns); her manner of speaking (by saying, for instance, that she was too meek and soft-spoken in addressing the press, the public, and her colleagues); and the use of such feminine titles as “lady,” that served as both a backdoor compliment to her Southern upbringing and as a label to remind voters that the political arena was no place for a woman.90 For example, under the headline,

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Figure 8.3.  Journalist Bill Minor once said of Evelyn Grandy (see here campaigning for governor in 1983): “If she weren’t a woman, she would have been elected governor.” Source: Evelyn Gandy speaking during her campaign for governor; 1983, mus_ m367_1029p Edythe Evelyn Gandy Collection, Special Collections, University Libraries, The University of Southern Mississippi.

“On Bloody Tuesday, The Lady Falters,” Jackson Daily News columnist Orley Hood, in an editorial published the morning after the 1983 Democratic primary, most vividly captured the collective sentiment regarding Gandy as a gubernatorial candidate. Hood used masculine sports imagery to describe the primary loss, calling it “a vile, pull-no-punches, blood-thirsty alley fight,” and Gandy, “The Lady” (as Hood called her) a fighter out of her league, unable to keep up with Allain’s “jabs.”91 Indeed, with a few exceptions, the postelection press commentary in both the 1979 and 1983 gubernatorial Democratic primaries both directly or indirectly blamed Gandy for the loss—either by suggesting she had too many personality flaws (by saying, for instance, that she simply wasn’t tough enough for the state’s highest office), or by implying that, her image “make-over” to the contrary, she simply did not do enough to sway voters who refused to accept her so-called “quiet type of leadership.”92 These news frames helped promote the aforementioned negative perceptions of Gandy, a fact the press failed to acknowledge. Furthermore, on a deeper level, their blind spots fed the double-standard that judged, and still judges, women with political ambitions in ways that their male counterparts are not. In fact, much

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of the academic literature in the area of politics and news framing reveals that men are often framed according to political issues while women are often critiqued based on their images—their marital statuses, physical appearances, or specific personality traits (e.g., being “too soft” for politics, or portrayed as a “bitch” for being too aggressive).93 In the case of Gandy’s campaign, many reporters, who, like Emmerich, claimed that she lost because voters did not like her leadership style, failed to take their observations to its most logical conclusion: the fact that perhaps Gandy’s personality or leadership style wasn’t the biggest problem that influenced her loss, but rather, the cultural biases that kept, and still keeps, many voters and members of the press, men and women alike, from fully accepting women as true political equals to men. In other words, many of the analyses of the late 1970s/early 1980s Mississippi voter as someone who was unwilling to accept an “somewhat old-fashioned gracious lady” like Gandy stopped short of acknowledging that those same voters would not have elected any woman to the state’s highest office, regardless of her political strengths or the weaknesses of her male opponents. In fact, with the exception of a few early 1980s editorials, it would take decades for most in the state press to acknowledge this last point, as Bill Minor did in December 2007, on the occasion of Gandy’s death. “If she weren’t a woman, she would have been elected Governor,” he admitted. “She was a victim of the syndrome in Mississippi that women would not be elevated to high political office. Apparently, lieutenant governor is the ceiling.”94 It’s certainly true that the state press pool at the time was made up of (mostly) men who were products of their time, and as such, some might say that it would be unfair to use the benefit of hindsight to critique their professional judgements of Gandy. However, both of her bids for governor were made during the height of the second-wave feminist movement, when the deep-seated cultural problems related to sexism in professional and political circles were finally being exposed and discussed—to a limited degree, at least. Any reporter who cared to offer Gandy a fairer examination of her candidacy for governor had plenty of time and space to acknowledge the sexism that corroded Mississippi politics and journalism—as this June 1983 editorial in the Waynesboro (MS) Wayne County News did. “But the oldest and meanest problem for Miss Gandy, one which persisted in whisper campaigns,” it read, “is that a woman cannot handle the job for governor.”95 For her part, Fentress, in at least one column, offered an analysis of Gandy’s 1983 runoff defeat that went deeper than most of those previously mentioned. Under the headline, “A Woman’s Place in Politics,” Fentress wrote about the implications of Gandy’s loss to the people of Mississippi, its women in particular: “Another generation will pass before Mississippi voters have a chance to vote for or against another female gubernatorial candidate.”

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Fentress said.96 In fact, Gandy’s defeat, she argued, was symptomatic of a bigger illness, as evidenced by the small number of women, three total, serving in the state legislature as of 1983. By comparison, the 1950s saw seven women elected to the statehouse, an “apex” Fentress said, that the state had not seen up to that time.97 Fentress’s piece offered a few systemic reasons for the lack of progress, including the fact that so few women, relative to men, run for office (For example, in the most recent election cycle, twenty-three women campaigned for congressional office, in comparison to 398 men.), and that once elected, women found themselves at the mercy and power of their male colleagues.98 “In the past, one woman legislator recalled months of silent treatment from her desk mate upon arrival at the capitol,” Fentress reported. Moreover, women remained shut out of any significant committee assignments. “For the most part,” Fentress wrote, “once women arrived at the Legislature, they never wielded power.”99 Fentress stated that the blame should be shared by women, too, especially those legislators who spoke with “ladylike pride” when they mentioned that they refused to participate in off-the-record “crucial midnight sessions” at such hotels at the Sun-n-Sand, unless they were assured of having a “proper male escort.” Fentress added that women should share the blame for the current political climate because of their reluctance or refusal to run for office and to form any type of formal political caucus “to make its voice heard” at the statehouse once they got there. “It’s going to be hard to be too sympathetic over the next four years if one half of the state’s population wails over its underrepresentation,” Fentress said.100 Fentress’s career had come full circle. She worked alongside her mentor, Bill Minor, in the press room, and Norma Fields, who she had met a few years before when Fields stopped by the Capitol Reporter office. Minor and Fields knew each other well—Fentress said they talked by phone just about every day—but Fentress only knew Fields by reputation.101 That would soon change, however. “I think she got a real kick hearing that I was going to be the new [Daily] Herald person to replace Lloyd [Gray] . . . because she had been in this room full of men,” Fentress recalled. “She liked this idea that there was going to be another woman up there.”102 “YOU’RE THERE UNTIL YOU FINISH” As the only women working full-time on the capitol beat by the mid-1980s, Fentress and Fields became quick friends, bound by ties of motherhood, womanhood, and journalism, and the political and social issues that influenced all three roles. Both were passionate about many of the same issues,

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particularly those social policies that could affect women’s health and well-being. Both reporters, for instance, extensively covered efforts to fund a state network of domestic violence shelters, to be paid for through a new fee on state marriage licenses (which were issued through the state circuit clerk offices).103 “That was a classic, almost cartoon of a battle because [the state] did not want to give up any money,” Fentress recalled.104 Or, as she wrote at the time, “It was easier to brush off females in the past who wanted the Equal Rights Amendment and state funding for battered women’s shelters when they could be labeled as unwashed misfits.”105 Like Fields, Fentress would bring to life many of those issues in her coverage of the Mississippi state legislature—from a perspective unfamiliar to their male colleagues. “There was a need for the voice of women [on the capitol beat],” Fentress said.106 Despite the gap in their ages, Fields saw much of herself in Fentress, especially in regard to Fentress’s attempts to balance work and marriage and her perspective on the role of journalism in a modern society. In turn, Fentress saw in Fields someone she admired. “I think Margaret Mead said that there is this thing in life, from sociology and in anthropology, the ‘post-menopausal woman.’ She has this authority in a civilization that younger women don’t have,” Fentress said. “And so, I think [Norma] was coming into it. She knew things.”107 Fentress liked how Fields, in her words, “went for it” when interviewing state lawmakers and elected officials, never afraid to challenge what she considered the unfair policies and practices of state government, particularly as they related to the issue of equality, or to call lawmakers out for their hypocrisies.108 Take, for instance, an exchange Fentress witnessed between Fields and Secretary of State Ed Pittman, in which, Fentress recalled, “Ed was trying to impress on her how many women he had hired to work for him, and [Norma] said, ‘When someone tells me that they have an all-woman work force, what I see is a very underpaid workforce.”109 “I’ve got to pick up the pace,” Fentress told herself after watching Fields that day.110 Near the end of Fields’s career, Fentress did a feature story on her colleague. By this point, the mid-1980s, she was as an important, and controversial, a figure around the statehouse as Bill Minor, and Fentress wanted to capture the essence of her friend and colleague’s career. Both women were at a professional crossroads, as Fentress—after giving birth to her first child in 1985, a daughter, Mary Word Fentress—took an eight-month leave of absence from her job.111 She returned the next year but struggled finding the balance between a job that consumed so much of her time and energy and her growing family.112 Fentress went to Fields for advice. The two usually met over lunch, several times a week, part of an almost seven-year working friendship that extended beyond the state capitol building.113 In that time, Fentress leaned on Fields

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and got to know the woman behind the “tough old broad” seen in and around the state capitol. “She was ahead of her time,” Fentress said. “And one of the things that made her ahead of her time was in the way that she was an older woman who had lived.”114 Accordingly, Fields’s advice, both personal and professional, came wrapped in different packages—some beautifully gift-wrapped with kind words and sage advice, and a few, delivered with the bluntness of a tightly wrapped mail bomb. On one such occasion, Fields told Fentress, after Fentress complained about the sexist behaviors of some of the lawmakers, that she needed to toughen up and demand that they stop their patronizing pats on the shoulder and nicknames, like “sweetheart” and “dear.” “If [you] don’t have the backbone to tell them to quit doing that,” she said to Fentress, “maybe [you] deserve to have everybody calling [you] ‘cupcake.’” The next time they spoke, though, Fields apologized, realizing that what worked for the “tough old broad” did not necessarily work for her young friend. “I’ve been thinking about what you said and no woman deserves that,” Fentress said. “Of course, you don’t deserve that just because you’re not speaking up.”115 Fentress listened to Fields’s advice regardless of delivery. In fact, among the most important professional lessons she learned from Fields was “not to come in and just cover [a story] like a white man would. The point is to bring our experiences [as women] to the coverage—and that’s what Norma did, and that’s what I wanted to do.”116 Fields suffered through some personal changes of her own during this time, and Fentress believed that, in particular, Fields’s divorce from her husband Bob in the 1970s may have changed how she approached both her work and personal life. “She was awakened at that point, I think,” Fentress said, “and her political columns began to reflect that fact. A lot of the people said, “Okay, on her [news] coverage, she’s down the line. She’s pretty fair. But it’s that column, whoa, that column.”117 According to Fentress, the divorce left Fields with very few options financially, at least outside of her salaried job; in fact, until the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974—which prohibited credit card companies, banks, and similar financial institutions from discriminating on the basis of sex, race, national origin, age, or marital status—single women, divorced women, and widows had very little options regarding financial independence. They could not apply for a credit card or home or car loan in their own names, and they needed a man’s cosignature to establish any type of credit.118 (Case in point: the car that Fields drove to and from work every day, even after her divorce, was in her husband’s name.)119 Furthermore, Mississippi divorce laws at the time made a clean, permanent separation difficult and expensive, given that the state did not allow for a “no-fault divorce” option for either spouse—which meant that a woman had to prove one of twelve different grounds (e.g., adultery, impotence, criminal conviction with jail time) to be

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granted a divorce, or she had to have the approval of her husband.120 The experiences of a divorce and having to sort out a new independent, financial path for herself, Fentress said, changed Fields’s perspective as both a woman and reporter. “She was embarrassed that she once wrote a column ridiculing Betty Friedan [and the Women’s Strike for Equality],” Fentress recalled. “And like so many other women, she reevaluated her life’s assumptions, and she found a second life.”121 Among their many conversations, Fentress and Fields talked about being working women in the 1980s and the illusion of “having it all,” and both agreed that it difficult at best, impossible at worst.122 “I was very lucky because I did not start as a journalist until I was 40 years old and my children were far able to take care of themselves,” Fields told Fentress one day over lunch.123 Even so, she empathized as she listened as Fentress talked about the exhaustion she felt working a news beat that had no real start or stop time— “You’re there until you finish [the story],” Fentress said—and the guilt of having a newborn daughter who she did not get to put to bed most evenings. “She [agreed] that doing both at full force would be difficult,” Fentress said.124 Fields then offered her young friend the following advice: “You know, I think if you stop and think about it long enough you can work that out for yourself.”125 Fentress did make the decision to eventually leave full-time journalism to work freelance. “She supported me,” Fentress said of Fields. “She said, ‘You can take up where you left off professionally at any time.’ Her words proved true.”126 As her children grew up and grew more independent, Fentress slowly started a freelance career, writing feature stories in the Catfish Journal and Mississippi Business Journal, one of a few outlets in the state that published the kind of longform journalism she wanted to do at that stage of her life.127 Fentress eventually graduated to The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Oxford American, among other national publications, carving out a niche in Southern culture and politics.128 In 2015, she produced a documentary film, Eyes on Mississippi, about the career of her mentor, Bill Minor.129 Most recently, she launched The Academy Stories, an online project funded by the Mississippi Humanities Council featuring first-person, longform stories from Southern segregated academy alumni (like Fentress) recounting their personal experiences as students.130 Fentress sees this project as a reckoning of sorts, an attempt to explore “how the effort to skirt school desegregation affected both black and white residents at the time and in the present day,” as The Washington Post reported in 2019. Fentress believes the project has at least one other value as well.131 “In a small market like a Mississippi, you’re going to have to make it yourself,” she said of her limited opportunities as a freelance journalist.132 That comment brings to mind a piece of

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advice Norma Fields gave her years ago: “She told me to go for it,” Fentress said. “She and Bill [Minor] inspired me to pick up the pace.”133 Fentress recalled the time she spent with Fields as rewarding and influential. That there were women like Fentress and Fields roaming the halls of the state capitol annoyed many lawmakers—“It got people’s goats,” Fentress said, “to be called up short by a woman reporter”—but both women knew their jobs were too important to worry too much about the obvious double standards. “It wasn’t just about joining the men’s club. It was about having our voices there. And this is something that [Norma] and I were very passionate about,” Fentress said of her time covering the Mississippi state capitol.134 For her part, Fields, two decades after her own retirement, recalled Fentress and her work with great fondness and respect. “She was a marvelous little young journalist that I hope I mentored her some,” Fields said in an interview just a year before her death in 2010. “I have a great deal of respect for her for what she did.”135 NOTES   1. Fentress 2019 interview.   2. Ibid.   3. John Maxwell Hamilton and George A. Krimsky, Hold the Press: The Inside Story of Newspapers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1996), 56.   4. Fentress 2019 interview.   5. Ibid.   6. Ibid.   7. Ibid.   8. Ibid.   9. Ibid. For information on the restrictions on the use of Agent Orange, see the following report from the Institute of Medicine and the Committee to Review the Health Effects in Vietnam Veterans of Exposure to Herbicides: Veterans and Agent Orange: Health Effects of Herbicides Used in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999), 39. The publication can be found on the National Library of Medicine website at this address: https:​//​pubmed​.ncbi​.nlm​.nih​.gov​/25144022​/. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. For information on the Navy Seabees, see “Naval Construction Battalion Center.” Gulfcoast.org. https:​//​www​.gulfcoast​.org​/listings​/naval​-construction​ -battalion​-center​/527​/. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. Information on Fentress’s career, including some of the publications that have published her work, taken from her own professional website. See “Ellen Ann Fentress.” http:​//​www​.ellenannfentress​.com​/about​.php.

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16. Fentress 2019 interview. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. James S. Featherston, “Beleaguered Bill Minor,” Nieman Reports, Winter 1978, 22. 21. Ibid. “Weekly but never weakly” quote from page 20; “monopoly-run Jackson dailies” quote from page 22; “corrupt politicians, discreet businessmen, Ku Kluxers, underworld figures, and assorted other miscreants” quote from page 21. 22. Ibid., 21–22. 23. Ibid., 21. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 21–22. 27. Ibid., 22. 28. Ibid., 21. 29. Fentress 2019 interview. 30. Ibid. 31. See, in order, Ellen Ann Quinn, “Wee Life: The Gnome Book,” Capitol Reporter, June 22, 1978, 7. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS; Quinn, “Clinton Writer Receives National Acclaim,” Capitol Reporter, June 8, 1978, 6. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS; Quinn, “September, September: Foote’s Return to Fiction,” July 13, 1978, 7. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS. 32. See Quinn, “New Stage Film Festival Opens Tonight,” Capitol Reporter, July 27, 1978, 5. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS; Quinn, “Marx Brothers,” Capitol Reporter, July 27, 1978, 5. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS; Quinn, “The Vegetarian Epicure,” Capitol Reporter, August 3, 1978, 8. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS. 33. Fentress 2019 interview. 34. Ibid. 35. Suzanne Franks, Women and Journalism, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 8. 36. Ibid. 37. Gwyneth Mellinger, Chasing Newsroom Diversity: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 70. 38. Fentress 2019 interview. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid.

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43. Ibid. For information on the two local stories mentioned, see Ellen Ann Quinn, “Beer Crackdown at Fair This Year,” Capitol Reporter, August 24, 1978, 1. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS; Quinn, “The Case of the Vanishing Miss America Trophy,” Capitol Reporter, August 31, 1978, 1. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS, and Quinn, “‘Gray Market’ Dominates Adoptions,” Capitol Reporter, November 9, 1978, 1. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS. 44. Ibid. See also Quinn, “MP&L Sprays Viet Jungle Defoliant,” Capitol Reporter, August 24, 1978, 1, 12. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS. 45. Fentress 2019 interview. For more information about the award, see “Quinn Wins Award,” Capitol Reporter, June 22, 1979, 1. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS. 46. Quinn, “Grand Gulf Nuke Plant Structurally Unsafe?” Capitol Reporter, April 5, 1979, 1, 12. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS. 47. Quinn, “Who Was Behind Scott County Chemical Dumping Ground?” Capitol Reporter, April 12, 1979, 1, 12. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS. 48. See Quinn, “Black Blind Workers File Suit,” Capitol Reporter, January 19, 1979, 1, 6. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS. 49. See Quinn, “Med Center Dodges Sex Bias,” Capitol Reporter, August 2, 1979, 1, 14. Reel number 19291, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS. 50. Fentress 2019 interview. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. For information on Bell, see Kate Magandy, “Sun Herald’s Jimmie Bell Remembered as a Newspaperman,” Biloxi Sun Herald, June 27, 2017, https:​//​www​ .sunherald​.com​/news​/local​/counties​/harrison​-county​/article158422954​.html. 56. Quinn, “School Board to Sell Woolmarket Buildings,” The Daily Herald, September 5,1979, B1. Reel number 603352, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi State University, Department of Special Collections, Starkville, MS. 57. “Trial by fire” quote from Fentress 2019 interview. For information on Hurricane Frederic, see Leigh Morgan, “Remembering Hurricane Frederic, 40 Years Later,” AL.com, September 12, 2019. https:​//​www​.al​.com​/hurricane​/2019​/09​/remembering​ -hurricane​-frederic​-40​-years​-ago​-today​.html. 58. Fentress 2019 interview. 59. Kim Chate, “50 Years Ago, Hurricane Camille Roared into Mississippi, ‘Wiped Out’ Entire Coast,” The New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 16, 2019, https:​//​www​ .nola​.com​/news​/article​_59e4830e​-bf94​-11e9​-bdf2​-fb8bb8e51268​.html.

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60. See Quinn, “The Spirit of Hospital Evacuation: ‘Let’s Get at It,’” The Daily Herald, September 14, 1979, A6; Quinn, “Coast Residents Should Be Wary of Fly-By-Night Contractors,” The Daily Herald, September 21, 1979, B1. Reel numbers 603352 and 604670, Microfilm Collection, Mississippi State University, Department of Special Collections, Starkville, MS. 61. Ibid. 62. Ellen Ann Quinn, “Granddaddy of Blues Boosters Heads College Folklore Program,” The Daily Herald, September 25, 1979, 11. https:​ //​ www​ .newspapers​ .com​/image​/743428754​/​?terms​=ellen​%20ann​%20quinn​%20Alan​%20Lomax​&match​ =1; Quinn, “Annexation Petition Filed,” The Daily Herald, September 29, 1979, 13. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/743432899​/​?terms​=ellen​%20ann​%20quinn​ %20annex​&match​=1. 63. Fentress 2019 interview. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Ellen Ann Quinn, “Mental Health Needs More Funds: Dollar,” The Daily Herald, September 17, 1980, 12. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/737447290​/​?terms​ =ellen​%20ann​%20quinn​&match​=1. 70. Ellen Ann Quinn and James Saggus, “Medicaid Cut: State Commission Votes to Reduce Benefits by $28 Million in Next Six Months,” The Daily Herald, December 31, 1980, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/737483265​/​?terms​=ellen​%20ann​ %20quinn​&match​=1. 71. Fentress 2019 interview. 72. Patricia Bradley, Women and the Press: The Struggle for Equality (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005), xvii. 73. Kristin Grady Gilger and Julia Wallace, There’s No Crying in Newsrooms: What Women Have Learned about What It Takes to Lead (Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield, 2019), 4. 74. Mellinger, Chasing Newsroom Diversity: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action, 98. 75. Ibid. 76. Bulkeley, “A Pioneering Generation Marked the Path for Women Journalists.” 77. “Lloyd Gray to Address MSU-Meridian Graduates,” meridian.msstate.edu, December 15, 2015. https:​//​www​.meridian​.msstate​.edu​/news​/2015​/12​/07​/lloyd​-gray​ -address​-msu​-meridian​-graduates​/. 78. Fentress, “Coast Lawmakers Call ‘82 Session Frustrating,” The Sun, April 7, 1982, 12. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/737835025. 79. Fentress 2019 interview. 80. See, for example, Fentress, “Gulfport Pastor Uses the Bible, Statistics in Blasting Abortion,” The Sun, January 18, 1982, 12. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /737804528​/​?terms​=equal​%20rights​%20amendment​%20fentress​&match​=1; Fentress, “Mississippi’s Women Take Little Interest in the Passage of ERA,” The Sun,

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August 28, 1984, 1. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/737808726​/​?terms​=women​ %20​%20fentress​&match​=1. Fentress, “Good Ole Boyism Must Be Memorialized,” The Sun, August 5, 1984, 15. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/737794811​/​?terms​ =women​%20educated​%20fentress​&match​=1; Fentress, “Discrimination Alive, Well in Mississippi,” The Sun, October 14, 1984, 15. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /737819828​/​?terms​=discrimination​%20fentress​&match​=1. 81. Fentress, “Mississippi Women Know More, But Paid Less Than Males,” The Sun, April 4, 1984, 9. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/737456704​/​?terms​ =women​%20​%20fentress​&match​=1. 82. Fentress, “Good Ole Boyism Must Be Memorialized,” 15. 83. John Emmerich, “What the Voters Were Saying Last Tuesday,” Greenwood Commonwealth, August 28, 1983, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/263179283​ /. 84. “William Winter Makes Remarkable Comeback,” Greenwood Commonwealth, August 29, 1983, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/262153383​/​?terms​=evelyn​ %20gandy​%20no​%20visible​%20effect​&match​=1. 85. Wayne Weidie, “Underrating Evelyn Gandy May Be Foolish,” The Enterprise-Tocsin, December 2, 1982, 4. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​ /314332117​/. 86. “Woman Favored in Miss. Race,” Tyrone Daily Herald, August 2, 1983, 3. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/10000567​/​?terms​=evelyn​%20gandy​%20new​ %20image​&match​=1. 87. “Gandy Has Straw Woman to Attack,” The Sun, May 19, 1983, 10. https:​//​www​ .newspapers​.com​/image​/737782744​/​?terms​=Gandy​%20Has​%20Straw​%20Woman​ %20to​%20Attack​&match​=1. 88. Emmerich, “What the Voters Were Saying Last Tuesday,” 4. 89. Ibid. 90. Smith, “A Lady of Many Firsts,” 407–26. 91. Orley Hood, “On Bloody Tuesday, the Lady Falters,” Jackson (MS) Daily News, August 24, 1983. Gandy Papers, box 43, scrapbook 1. 92. Emmerich, “What the Voters Were Saying Last Tuesday,” 4. 93. See, for example, Diana B. Carlin and Kelly L. Winfrey, “Have You Come a Long Way, Baby? Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Sexism in 2008 Campaign Coverage,” Communication Studies 60, no. 4 (September–October 2009): 326–43; Yasmine Dabbous and Amy Ladley, “A Spine of Steel and a Heart of Gold: Newspaper Coverage of the First Female Speaker of the House,” Journal of Gender Studies 19, no. 2 (June 2010): 181–94; and Karrin Vasby Anderson, “‘Rhymes with Blunt’: Pornification and U.S. Political Culture,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14, no. 2 (2011): 327–68. 94. Dan Davis, “Friends Recall Gandy as a ‘Steel Magnolia,’” Hattiesburg (MS) American, December 25, 2007, 10A. Gandy Papers, vertical file, scrapbook 1.   95. “Dirty Tricks,” Waynesboro (MS) Wayne County News, July 28, 1983. Gandy Papers, box 40, scrapbook 1.   96. Fentress, “A Woman’s Place in Politics,” The Sun, August 28, 1983, 46. https:​ //​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/737778031​/​?terms​=fentress​%20evelyn​%20gandy​ &match​=1.

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  97. Ibid.   98. Ibid.   99. Ibid. 100. Ibid. 101. Fentress 2019 interview. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid. See, as an example, Fentress, “Appropriations Panel Skips Over Battered Women’s Shelter Funds,” The Sun, March 22, 1984, 12. https:​//​www​.newspapers​ .com ​ / image ​ / 737470503​ / ​ ? terms​ = EAQ​ % 20Fentress ​ % 20appropriation ​ % 20funds​ %20battered​&match​=1. 104. Fentress 2019 interview. 105. Fentress, “State Women May Twist Legislative Arms,” The Sun, February 5, 1984, 53. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/737456532​/​?terms​=EAQ​%20Fentress​ %20shelter​&match​=1 106. Fentress 2019 interview. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid. 111. A notice of her leave of absence appeared at the end of the following column: “Charles Evers Is Back and Brassy as Ever,” The Sun/The Daily Herald, May 5, 1985, 13. https:​//​www​.newspapers​.com​/image​/737828837​/​?terms​=ellen​%20ann​ %20fentress​&match​=1. 112. Fentress 2019 interview. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid. 118. Samantha Rosen, “How Ruth Bader Ginsburg Paved the Way for Women to Get Credit Cards,” Time, November 13, 2020. https:​//​time​.com​/nextadvisor​/credit​ -cards​/ruth​-bader​-ginsburg​-credit​-card​-legacy​/. 119. Fentress 2019 interview. 120. Geoff Pender, “Divorce in Mississippi Difficult, Costly,” The Clarion-Ledger, February 17, 2017. https:​//​www​.clarionledger​.com​/story​/news​/politics​/2017​/02​/18​/ divorce​-antiquated​-laws​/97862130​/. Information on the types of grounds for divorce in Mississippi was taken from the Justia website, https:​ //​ law​ .justia​ .com​ /codes​ / mississippi​/2013​/title​-93​/chapter​-5​/section​-93​-5​-1​/. 121. Fentress 2019 interview. 122. Ibid. 123. Strout interview, 11. 124. Fentress 2019 interview. 125. Strout interview, 11. 126. Fentress email. 127. Fentress 2019 interview.

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128. Fentress email. See also https:​//​www​.ellenannfentress​.com​/. 129. Ibid. 130. Vanessa Williams, “A White Southerner Confronts Her Schooling at a Segregated Private ‘Academy’ and Challenges Others to Do the Same,” The Washington Post, November 8, 2019. https:​//​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/nation​/2019​/11​/08​/white​ -writer​-confronts​-her​-schooling​-segregated​-private​-academy​-challenges​-others​-do​ -same​/. 131. Ibid. 132. Fentress 2019 interview. 133. Ibid. 134. Ibid. 135. Strout interview, 11.

Conclusion “There Is No Educator to Compare with the Press”

This book included a relatively small but representative sample of women journalists, most of whom walked the state capitol beat, all of whom covered issues of significant political importance. On a larger scale, the goal was to not only document their contributions to Mississippi statehouse reporting but to record evolutionary shifts in the practice of journalism within the context of state politics and history. Of course, this is not the first such project to recognize the emergence of “activist journalism” in the mid-twentieth century or the post-Watergate focus on enterprise reporting, both as a means of exposing government and civilian corruption. However, this book is the first to record these and at least two other trends (“Lost Cause journalism” and “Jim Crow journalism”) over the course of an entire century, with an emphasis on statehouse reporting, state political issues, and the changing roles of women in the field of journalism. To that point, this book also documented a darker history in state politics, one that includes journalism that celebrated state-supported racism and everything that came with it: violence, lies, corruption, and immoral and illegal behavior. It is not enough to say that Kate Markham Power, Florence Sillers Ogden, and Mary Dawson Cain were women of their time—they held beliefs and made conscious choices that most, but not all, of their contemporaries made, but they went the extra mile and used their social and professional positions to perpetuate the illusion of white superiority, with dangerous consequences for Black citizens and their supporters. “While they toiled outside the attention of the national media (for the most part), white women took central roles in disciplining their communities according to Jim Crow rules and were central to massive resistance to racial equality,” Elizabeth Gillespie McRae notes.1 “The past is never dead,” William Faulkner said, “it’s not even past.” That statement is certainly true when reviewing Ogden and Cain’s work within the context of the resurgence of white nationalism in mainstream politics and 329

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journalism. The election of white nationalists like President Donald Trump, Senator J. D. Vance, and Representatives Marjorie Taylor Green, Paul Gosar, and Lauren Boebert, among many others, demonstrate that the racism and bigotry that has defined much of the American story still lives and breathes in just about every cultural and political institution of the so-called “greatest country on Earth.” The political power amassed by the white nationalist movement, and the unpatriotic actions of many voters and followers in the last several years has been, in part, the result of the coordinated efforts of countless “talking heads” (we dare not call them journalists) who have used their place on broadcast television, cable news network programs, and social media platforms to distribute patently false information about the validity of local, state, and national elections and push ideological agendas not that far removed, if at all, from those promoted by the likes of Florence Sillers Ogden and Mary Dawson Cain. Given the state of affairs, are there journalists, like Hazel Brannon Smith, who are currently willing to take significant risks to tell the truth, defend the First Amendment, and take on powerful elected officials who use their positions to promote such ideological fallacies as the myth of white superiority? Smith is a significant figure in the history of American journalism and Mississippi politics because she accepted that myth for much of her life only to admit its moral failings, and those of her own community—and then she used her journalism to shine the light of truth on that and other big lies. There were other Southern women journalists who, in learning of her courage, realized that they, too, could use their talents to speak truth to power. “[Smith’s] willingness to challenge the status quo in Mississippi, a state known for its benighted ways, makes her story important,” biographer Jeffrey B. Howell writes in Hazel Brannon Smith: The Female Crusading Scalawag.2 The scholarship on Smith is notable, but this project is the first to place her as a transitionary figure in women’s history and American journalism history—an important distinction that places her between the “Jim Crow journalism” of racists like Ogden and Cain and the important work that would define the careers of many of the women featured in this book. Indeed, Smith’s “activist journalism” served as a template for other journalists to follow—at least one daughter of the South, Norma Fields, took the lessons of Smith’s career to heart; the fact that Smith was a complicated, imposing figure probably made her all the more attractive to Fields. Just as Smith was late to acknowledge that segregation was not, in fact, “the best solution for harmony between the races,” as she believed for much of her life, Fields came to the realization that the women’s movement was not, as she once insisted, a waste of time that failed to acknowledge the burdens of working women and mothers—the “displaced homemaker” that Fields so often championed.3 That both women not only admitted that they had been wrong

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but publicly acknowledged their ignorance and used their role as journalists to support social change shows a strength of character absent in most of the elected officials they covered. It could be inspiring, yet intimidating, for Fields’s colleagues to watch her work. Her attendance during press conferences, for example, was often described as a master class in how to put pressure on elected officials to answer questions beyond the standard boiler-plate responses. While men like Edwin Edwards wondered aloud who the “tough old broad” was, her colleagues drew encouragement from that toughness. “Well, I think it was just a matter that she was there,” Jo Ann Klein said. “In that period of time, we weren’t thinking, ‘Oh, we’re women covering something.’ But it was still nice to see that somebody had been there before us. . . . She helped open more doors because there was a woman there when I got there.”4 The women who followed behind Fields were themselves “birddogs”; stories of their talents and persistence, and the results of their efforts, have not been published together, if at all—until now. In an era in which women faced legal, social, and ideological barriers in reaching their full potential, they were left to prove their worth time and again. When given the opportunity, they demonstrated that women journalists were, in fact, as intelligent, courageous, and tough as their male colleagues (and, in many cases, more so). They felt enormous pressure to not only do the job well but to do it with as few mistakes as possible, given the perception that women reporters could not and should not investigate “hard news” stories, political or otherwise. That pressure followed them into future jobs and opportunities beyond the Mississippi state capitol. Jo Ann Klein certainly felt it as a key member of gubernatorial candidate Bill Allain’s staff, especially in light of the allegations that he had solicited transgender prostitutes just prior to the general election. “It was one of those things that you just kept working on it, working on it, working on it,” Klein, whose many tasks during the campaign included crisis management response, said. “You don’t realize until the campaign’s over how tired you are. It was like that. We circled the wagons. There was just a group of us who surrounded the candidate and tried to take care of him and be sure that we were there and available to respond to anything.”5 Klein and the other women of her generation were hard workers and talented reporters with few role models in front of them. Even so, like many women of their generation, they accomplished many “firsts” (as Nancy Stevens did when she filed her EEOC complaint), filed important stories of state political consequence, and walked the halls of the statehouse with their backs straight and their chins held high. Each of the women interviewed were eager to impart advice on young women who aspire to a career in journalism. Some of the advice is relatively simple, yet essential—Nancy Stevens, for example, said that background research is still important to a good story and

Figure C.1.  Jo Ann Klein worked on then-Mississippi gubernatorial candidate Bill Allain’s staff when he faced allegations that he had solicited transgender prostitutes. “We circled the wagons,” Klein said. Source: Jo Ann Klein.

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students should be prepared going into interviews and be tough once they get there.6 Other remarks, including the advice from Ellen Ann Fentress, relate more to the disruptive changes brought on by technology—and how future journalists should navigate them: “We had remarkable careers in Mississippi because it was a small pond,” Fentress said in reference to how she and other women journalists were able to find success at relatively early points in their careers. “Also, don’t underestimate how cheap and underpaid we were, and [the editors] who were willing to give responsibility in a way that big, prestigious, national papers wouldn’t because they were too cheap to pay someone the wages to do any better.” Now, Fentress added, young women may have more options because of the digital news landscape. “I think you got to make the jump. That was what I would tell a young woman if she were my mentee is that you can’t just stay in this pond now. And you don’t have to because of this digital world.”7 At the same time, the digital landscape has made for an uncertain and unstable job market, to say the least, and disrupted a centuries-old model of how news is collected, distributed, and financed. The financial (in)stability of the local newspaper is not a specific result of the digital environment—circulation and revenue have been on the decline for decades—but the shrinking profit margins have forced newspaper publishers to make substantial cuts in their staffs and journalists (and journalists-to-be) to be creative and flexible in their professional choices. “I would tell [young women] that they are going to have a rough go of it given the state of the industry now,” Ronni Patriquin said. “I would advise them to find a niche that they can make themselves essential to a beat whether it’s science, business, [or] the environment.”8 In April 2022, the Pew Research Center issued a report on the state of state house reporting, and the results, specifically the number of journalists that newspapers currently commit to the state capitol beats, are important to note given what is at stake. “From voting rights and redistricting to abortion and public education, state capitols across the United States are at the epicenter of the nation’s key public policy debates,” the report read. “This has been especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic, as state capitol buildings became ground zero in the debate over mask and vaccine mandates and other pandemic policies.”9 Given the obvious need for statehouse reporters, the Pew Center recently documented the following trend: a decrease in the number of full-time state capitol reporters by a two percent margin in the last eight years, from 904 in 2014 to 811 in 2022, but an 11 percent increase in the number of part-time journalists, from 688 to 911, during that same time period.10 Furthermore, these numbers are not consistent across all states, with sixteen states,

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Mississippi included, recording a decrease in the overall number of statehouse reporters, both part time and full time.11 These results reflect the roller coaster, up-and-down shifts that have defined newsrooms over the last three decades. Between 1998 and 2014, the number of full-time and part-time reporters declined, with 2003–2009 representing the largest downshift—several years marked by a national recession, and newspapers, like most other industries, faced cutbacks, layoffs, and closures.12 In fact, the number of statehouse reporters, both full time and part time, has been shrinking since the end of the last century, according to Capitolbeat, the national association of statehouse reporters. “The sad truth is statehouse numbers have been dropping since the ’90s. We’re sort of a canary in a coalmine,” a spokesperson for the organization, said.13 Perhaps, then, Norma Fields was on to something when she referred to the 1970s as the “golden years of Mississippi journalism”; during this decade, and into the 1980s, most statehouses, Mississippi’s included, were abuzz with journalistic activity. An informal count shows that as few as fifteen full- and part-time journalists (perhaps more), both men and women, worked the Mississippi statehouse beat during its so-called “golden years.” This number doesn’t include journalists who, like Nancy Weaver, were not assigned to the capitol beat but whose investigations had direct political implications for readers. Statehouse reporting, according to a recent Poynter article, is usually associated with the “decline-of-newspapers narrative.”14 The modest uptick in the number of statehouse reporters is somewhat misleading, particularly when considering the state-by-state breakdown of the numbers. In Mississippi, for example, the number of capitol reporters has been on the decline for at least twenty years, with the latest numbers showing a loss of four full-time or part-time reporters (from seventeen to thirteen; of the thirteen, nine are part-time).15 These numbers do not necessarily reflect a newspaper’s lack of commitment to covering the state capitol but can be a reflection of a number of factors: revenue and circulation, of course, but also state populations and the number of times a state government is in session per year (as both are indicative of the likelihood that editors will assign reporters to the beat, according to Pew).16 This information begs a few important questions: Who, then, is currently covering the Mississippi statehouse? Also, are any of the state’s women journalists, especially those not on the capitol beat at least part time, leading or working on investigations of significant political consequence, as Nancy Weaver, who did not walk the state capitol beat, did? To put it another way, are there women who are following Ronni Patriquin’s unsolicited advice and “find[ing] a niche,” like politics, that will allow proof of their worth and talents?

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Associated Press reporters Emily Wagster Pettus has thirty years of reporting experience, twenty-two of them covering the Mississippi state capitol. She has exposed corruption and abuse at all level of government, while keeping an eye on those stories that have racial and class-based implications for readers (See, for example, a recent story regarding the discovery of an unserved warrant in the murder of Emmett Till17). Her work brings to mind a recent quote she retweeted from her Twitter account, which originated with Washington, DC–based journalist Celeste Headlee: “There is no ‘media’ deciding what people should or should not know. There are thousands of reporters looking for stories, most of them mission driven, believing they can lift the voices of the unheard, challenge the powerful, make the world a better place.”18 As indicated in the aforementioned Pew Center report, nonprofit newspapers are helping fill in the essential gaps in statehouse reporting—while also producing relevant content related to state political issues.19 That certainly seems to be the case in Mississippi. One such publication, the Mississippi Free Press (MFP), published and edited by women (publisher and director of revenue Kimberly Griffin and editor and executive director Donna Ladd, respectively), is putting out the kind of journalism that earned “Rea’s outside agitators” their nickname—and made many a state lawmaker curse and spit their names when they saw The Clarion-Ledger headlines. For the sake of evidence, see the April 2022 ethics complaint the MFP filed, along with a supplemental one filed by the Mississippi Center for Justice, against the Mississippi House GOP Caucus for barring MFP reporter Nick Judin from a March 2022 GOP House Caucus meeting at the state capitol, in accordance with the Mississippi Open Meetings Act. Norma Fields would be proud.20 Only two years old, Griffin and Ladd’s paper has the same name, and fighting spirit, as the publication founded in 1961 by civil rights icon Medgar Evers. (In fact, Griffin and Ladd use the name to pay their respects to Evers and with permission of the Evers family; Reena Evers-Everette, Medgar’s daughter, is a member of the MFP’s advisory board.21) The MFP provides important statehouse coverage of relevant issues and events—for example, in the days following the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, Ladd commented on Mississippi House of Representatives Speaker Philip Gunn’s public remarks that a twelve-year-old girl who is raped by her father or uncle “cannot terminate a resulting pregnancy,” in Ladd’s words.22 However, the paper’s coverage goes far beyond state capitol observations and reactions. The MFP has entire sections dedicated to “Medicaid,” “Prisons,” “Policing,” “Race & Racism,” and “Immigration,” part of Griffin and Ladd’s mission to build a “proud ‘challenge brand’ to the way journalism had always been done in Mississippi.”23 “That is, we are unapologetically focused on people over power, not the reverse,” Ladd said in a March

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2022 editorial.24 That MFP has so quickly been able to establish its reputation and brand (“solutions journalism”) on a regional and national level speaks to how eager readers are to have access to journalism that goes beyond the five Ws (and an H). Ladd’s efforts, in fact, recall similar efforts of Hazel Brannon Smith, one of the journalists that Ladd most admires.25 There are a number of other women outside of the MFP who are doing their part as well. Reporter Anna Wolfe of the online publication, Mississippi Today, doesn’t have a desk at the capitol and the state’s elected officials should be thankful for that fact. Some of her most recent work includes covering corruption involving the leadership of the Department of Human Services, the state agency responsible for family services, including SNAP and TNAF payments, child support services, and guardianship. An ongoing series includes the story of nonprofit administrator Nancy New and her son, Zach, who embezzled millions of in federal grant funds, money earmarked for “tangible [welfare] resources to the poor” but funneled through the New’s nonprofit foundations, the Mississippi Community Education Center and the Family Resource Center of Mississippi.26 New and her son used the money to help fund state projects when no other sources could be found—including a new volleyball facility at The University of Southern Mississippi—and on private business projects, including partnerships with a Christian ministry and investments in the pharmaceutical firm, Prevacus (founded to help find a cure and treat CTE-related concussions), owned by former NFL quarterback Brett Favre, and everything else from religious concerts, expensive cars and vacations, and lobbyists.27 They also used some of the funds to bribe then state welfare director John Davis, who required no oversight in the accounting of the money once the funds passed through his office to New.28 In the months following the original investigations, after Nancy and Zach New pled guilty to several federal charges, including bribery, fraud, and racketeering, Wolfe continued her investigation into the matter—including a civil lawsuit filed by the state of Mississippi against Favre and others in an attempt to recoup the aforementioned funds that had yet to be repaid to the state.29 It is the type of developing story that someone like Ronni Patriquin would have eaten up, and Wolfe’s work brings to mind Patriquin’s dogged efforts at exposing corruption at the state level. And then there’s the future of women in Mississippi journalism, as embodied by the work of a Mississippi native and current south Alabama resident, Lynn Henderson Oldshue. Oldshue, from Yazoo City, recently won the Alabama Press Association’s first place award in feature writing for a series on domestic violence, “From Hell to Hope,” for Lagniappe magazine. Another series on sex trafficking, “Sexual Slavery in South Alabama,” won a second place Green Eyeshade Award. She is the author of Our Southern Souls, a collection

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of stories, in print and blog form, that chronicles stories of people from all over the region, her home state included. Oldshue’s journalism has the kind of sociopolitical bent that the women featured in this book would have been eager to read, and Oldshue, who currently reports for Alabama Public Radio, plans to eventually return to her home state full time to add to the legacy of outstanding activist and enterprise journalism produced by the likes of Norma Fields, Johanna Neuman, Jo Ann Klein, and Ellen Ann Fentress.30 When she returns, she also hopes to add to her own family’s story, one tainted with the evils of racism, but rescued, at least partly so, by Oldshue’s uncle, who risked his own livelihood and reputation to give Mississippi the kind of journalism we needed and deserved at the time: Rea Hederman. The goal of this book was to tell the stories of several women who witnessed the evolution of Mississippi politics during the last years of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth—and, in their role as journalists, recorded their observations and opinions for the public record. That they were all white, affluent, and privileged should not be surprising—that Black and Brown women journalists were excluded from white-owned newsrooms says as much about the history of Mississippi journalism and its culture as anything revealed in this book. Indeed, their absence was a product of the systemic racism and sexism described in these very pages—discriminated against not once, but twice, with their lives hanging in the balance if they dared to report what they witnessed and experienced. No one knew more about the dangers of being a Black woman journalist, and a Black woman reared in the Deep South, than Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Indeed, her work as both a journalist and activist can be traced to her Southern and racial identities and the tragic experiences of her childhood and young adulthood. Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, Wells-Barnett, by age sixteen, lost both her parents and a younger brother to yellow fever; as the oldest sibling, the welfare of her remaining siblings became her primary responsibility—a decision she made after her extended family wanted to split the siblings up to various relatives’ homes. “I am the oldest of seven living children,” she recalled telling someone at the time of the deaths. “There’s nobody but me to look after them now.”31 By the time she began her career as a journalist, Well-Barnett had seen more death than most people in a lifetime—including her beloved paternal grandmother, Peggy, to a stroke, and a sister, Eugenia, circumstances unknown.32 However, the brutal murders of grocer Thomas Moss, a friend from Memphis, where Wells-Barnett had lived and worked as a teacher after the death of her parents, and two of his employees, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart, tore into her soul and galvanized Wells-Barnett to define lynching in the most honest of terms: “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who

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were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘the nigger down.’”33 In the Memphis Free Speech and Highlight, a newspaper she co-owned (and renamed Free Speech), she pleaded with Black citizens to leave Memphis, and if they stayed, to stop spending money in the city. Memphis was, she wrote, “a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but take us out and murder us in cold blood when accused by white persons.”34 She paid a high price for those early editorials. She was out of town when a mob destroyed the Free Speech offices and equipment; a white newspaper placed a bounty on the head of any person who attempted to publish the Free Speech again, and Wells-Barnett told relatives that she could not return to Memphis because the white mob had threatened to end her life the minute she stepped foot back in the city limits. “They made me an exile and threatened my life for hinting at the truth,” she wrote. “I felt like I owed it to myself and my race to tell the whole truth.”35 Thus began the activism and revolutionary journalism, “antilynching journalism,” if you will, of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. As noted by Wells-Barnett scholar Rychetta N. Watkins, she “advocated political agency through her writing and investigations”36; in fact, her journalism went beyond the antilynching campaigns for which she became so widely known, as she forged a political identity based on economic power and “self-protection and self-determination,” activism forged years earlier in part by her lawsuit against the Chesapeake, Ohio, Southwestern Railroad, the first such legal action brought by a Black woman, sparked during a trip from Memphis to Holly Springs when Wells-Barnett refused to move from the first-class ladies’ car to the smoking car when so ordered by the conductor. She sued for both discrimination and assault—the conductor and two other men “laid violent hands on her,” she later said, when they tried to physically remove WellsBarnett from her first-class seat, one for which she lawfully paid.37 Wells-Barnett initially won her suit in local court, but the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned that verdict on appeal. She remained affected for some time by the outcome of the case—“[I]f it were possible, [I] would gather my race in my arms and fly far away with them,” she wrote in her diary at the time—but also by what she considered a lack of support from the Memphis middle-class Black community.38 However, the case granted her national celebrity, which she used to provide a careful and detailed critique of lynching that not only connected it to the false cries of rape of white women but to “a practice that went largely uncontested even among Northern whites,” biographer Mia Bay notes, “into an ugly symbol of the racial injustices of Jim Crow.”39 Wells-Barnett’s mission took her nationwide and abroad, but she always kept a close eye on her native Mississippi and came back home when she

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could. “Being a native of the state, which has been the strongest political organization in the South, I was handed from town to town from Memphis to Natchez, Mississippi, and treated like a queen,” she said.40 Her visits to Vicksburg, Greenville, Water Valley, and Mount Bayou have been welldocumented, as has been her rebuke of state leaders—including Black elected officials—for their failure to protect the state’s Black citizens.41 For example, she openly and sharply criticized Mount Bayou founder Isaiah Montgomery, a delegate to the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention, for his undeniable support of the “Understanding Clause,” a provision that would allow state lawmakers to circumvent the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and prohibit Black citizens from voting. “It would have been better,” she said, “to have gone down to defeat voting against this outrageous measure,” she wrote in the Free Speech.42 Wells-Barnett would also carefully document lynching cases in the state and across the South, and, when necessary, conduct her own investigations when Black men were falsely accused of raping white women and lynched as a result (as she once did when she traveled to Tunica County, Mississippi, to research the case of one Black man lynched by a white mob following accusations that he had raped the sheriff’s sevenyear-old daughter).43 In the spirt of Wells-Barnett, there are no journalists better suited than Black and Brown women to cover similar sociopolitical issues of the Deep South—those related to race and social justice, for example, and it is an obligation that a few current Mississippi publishers and editors are trying to meet by hiring the following journalists: Azia Wiggins (MFP), Aliyah Veal (MFP), Torsheta Jackson (MFP), and Mina Corpuz (Mississippi Today, formally of the Clarion-Ledger). These women represent a small but vocal group of reporters who are working on stories that focus on the needs of the state’s Black and Brown communities. In a place like Mississippi, that is important, given the fact that these communities represent a majority of the state’s population. “The people must know before they can act,” Well-Barnett declared in 1892’s Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, “and there is no educator to compare with the press.”44 NOTES 1. McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance, 4. 2. Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 25. 3. “[T]he best solution for harmony between the races” quote from Howell, Hazel Brannon Smith, 4.   4. Klein phone interview.   5. Ibid.

340

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  6. Stevens December 2 email.   7. Fentress 2019 interview.   8. Patriquin phone interview.  9. Elisa Shearer, Katerina Eva Matsa, Amy Mitchell, Mark Jurkowitz, Kirsten Worden, and Naomi Forman-Katz, “Total Number of U.S. Statehouse Reporters Rises, but Fewer Are on the Beat Full Time,” Pew Research Center, April 5, 2022, 1. https:​//​www​.pewresearch​.org​/journalism​/2022​/04​/05​/total​-number​-of​-u​-s​ -statehouse​-reporters​-rises​-but​-fewer​-are​-on​-the​-beat​-full​-time​/. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Katerina Eva Matsa and Jan Lauren Boyles, “America’s Shifting Statehouse Press,” Pew Research Center, July 10, 2014, https:​//​www​.pewresearch​.org​/journalism​ /2014​/07​/10​/americas​-shifting​-statehouse​-press​/. 13. Edward Smith, “A Declining Statehouse Press Corps Leaves Readers Less Informed About Lawmakers’ Efforts,” Vlex, accessed July 6, 2022. https:​ //​ law​ -journals​-books​.vlex​.com​/vid​/disappearing​-declining​-statehouse​-readers​-60401856. 14. Quote from Rick Edmonds, “After Shrinking for Years, Statehouse Coverage Has Started Modestly Growing,” Poynter, April 5, 2022. https:​//​www​.poynter​.org​ /reporting​-editing​/2022​/after​-shrinking​-for​-years​-statehouse​-coverage​-has​-started​ -modestly​-growing​/. 15. The number of Mississippi statehouse reporters taken from Shearer et al., “Total Number of U.S. Statehouse Reporters Rises,” 4 (https:​//​www​.pewresearch​ .org​/journalism​/2022​/04​/05​/statehouse​-press​-corps​-grows​-in​-most​-states​-with​-some​ -notable​-exceptions​/); the 20-year decline deduced from the fact that, according to Shearer et al, the number of Mississippi statehouse reporters have declined, and that fact added to statements made from the Matsa and Boyles’s Pew Center report that indicated that statehouse reporting declined between 1998–2014. 16. Shearer et al., “Total Number of U.S. Statehouse Reporters Rises,” 1. 17. See Jay Reeves and Emily Wagster Pettus, “1955 Warrant in Emmett Till Case Found, Family Seeks Arrest,” AP News, June 29, 2022. https:​//​apnews​.com​/article​/ arrests​-mississippi​-kidnapping​-emmett​-till​-49708de557faf747ec3e9fa8c021e9cd. 18. Celeste Headlee, Twitter post, July 6, 2022, 7:39 a.m., https:​//​twitter​.com​/ CelesteHeadlee​/status​/1544659728688627715. 19. Shearer et al., “Total Number of U.S. Statehouse Reporters Rises,” 1. 20. Donna Ladd, “We Just Amped Up Our Fight to Attend Party Caucuses at the Capitol. Here’s Why,” Mississippi Free Press, April 13, 2022. https:​ //​ www​.mississippifreepress​.org​/22868​/we​-just​-amped​-up​-our​-fight​-to​-attend​-party​ -caucuses​-at​-the​-capitol​-heres​-why. 21. For evidence of the ties between Medgar Evers’s newspaper and the MFP, see Kimberly Griffin, “Extra! Extra! MFP’s Nonprofit Acquires Jackson Free Press Journalism Assets, Archive, Offices,” Mississippi Free Press, May 23, 2022. https:​ //​www​.mississippifreepress​.org​/23930​/extra​-extra​-mfps​-nonprofit​-acquires​-jackson​ -free​-press​-journalism​-assets​-archives​-office. For Everette’s bio, see https:​//​www​ .mississippifreepress​.org​/board​_members​/reena​-evers​-everette. For the sake of full

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disclosure, the author also is a member of the MFP advisory board. Author’s bio here: https:​//​www​.mississippifreepress​.org​/board​_members​/pete​-smith. 22. See Donna Ladd, “How Speaker Philip Gunn’s Remarks on 12-Year-Olds, Incest and Pregnancy Went Viral,” Mississippi Free Press, July 6, 2022. https:​//​www​ .mississippifreepress​.org​/25361​/how​-speaker​-philip​-gunns​-remarks​-on​-12​-year​-olds​ -and​-pregnancy​-went​-viral. 23. As indicated by the section headers on the MFP main page. See https:​//​www​ .mississippifreepress​.org​/. 24. Donna Ladd, “Pinching Myself Over MFP Team Growth, Strength, Culture in Just Two Years,” Mississippi Free Press, March 14, 2022. https:​ //​ www​ .mississippifreepress​.org​/21939​/pinching​-myself​-over​-mfp​-team​-growth​-strength​ -culture​-in​-just​-two​-years. 25. As evident by Donna Ladd, Twitter post, May 15, 2017, 11:08 p.m., https:​//​ twitter​.com​/DonnerKay​/status​/864331695415316480. 26. Anna Wolfe, “‘Whipping Child’: Nancy New Asked Highest Officials for Help Before Arrests in Welfare Scandal,” Mississippi Today, June 22, 2022. https:​//​ mississippitoday​.org​/2022​/06​/22​/new​-asked​-officials​-for​-help​-before​-arrests​-welfare​ -scandal​/. 27. Ibid. See also Wolfe, “Phil Bryant Had His Sights on a Payout as Welfare Funds Flowed to Brett Favre,” Mississippi Today, April 4, 2022. https:​//​mississippitoday​.org​ /2022​/04​/04​/phil​-bryant​-brett​-favre​-welfare​-scandal​-payout​/. 28. See Wolfe, “Disgraced Welfare Director Faces New Bribery Charges,” Mississippi Today, April 18, 2022. https:​//​mississippitoday​.org​/2022​/04​/18​/john​-davis​-faces​ -new​-bribery​-charges​/. 29. Wolfe, “State Files Lawsuit to Recoup $24 million in Welfare Funds from Brett Favre WWE Wrestlers and 34 Other People or Companies,” Mississippi Today, May 9, 2022. https:​//​mississippitoday​.org​/2022​/05​/09​/mississippi​-welfare​-scandal​-civil​ -lawsuit​/. 30. Biographical information about Oldshue taken from here: https:​//​mobilerotary​ .org​ / past​ - speakers​ / feb​ - 17​ - 2022​ - lynn​ - henderson​ - oldshue​ - acclaimed​ - radio​ -commentator​-magazine​-publisher​-lagniappe​/. Information about Our Southern Souls taken from its website: https:​//​oursouthernsouls​.com​/. 31. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda B. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 10–11. 32. Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (New York: Amistad, 2008), 12. 33. See “Life Story: Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931),” Women & The American Story, New-York Historical Society and Museum, accessed April 7, 2023. https:​ //​wams​.nyhistory​.org​/modernizing​-america​/fighting​-for​-social​-reform​/ida​-b​-wells​/; quote from Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 101. 34. Eve L. Ewing, forward to Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda B. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), x. 35. Wells, Crusade for Justice, 54. 36. Rychetta N. Watkins, “The Southern Roots of Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s Revolutionary Activism,” Southern Quarterly 45, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 117.

342

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37. Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely, 48–49. 38. Ibid., 48–49, 56. 39. Ibid., 6. 40. Wells, Crusade for Justice, 38. 41. LaTonya Thames Taylor, “Ida B. Wells-Barnett,” Mississippi Encyclopedia, April 15, 2018, https:​//​mississippiencyclopedia​.org​/entries​/ida​-b​-wells​-barnett​/. 42. Jinx Coleman Broussard, Giving a Voice to the Voiceless: Four Pioneering Black Women Journalists (New York: Routledge, 2004), 41. 43. Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely, 102. 44. Wells-Barnett, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases—Oct. 5, 1892,” Iowa State University Archives of Women’s Political Communication, accessed April 7, 2023,  https:​//​awpc​.cattcenter​.iastate​.edu​/2020​/09​/21​/southern​-horrors​-lynch​-law​ -in​-all​-its​-phases​-oct​-5​-1892​/.

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Index

Note: images are indicated by italicized page references abolition, woman suffrage and, 35 accountability reporting, 17 activist journalism, 17, 329; of Fields, 114, 126–27; Smith, H. B., 42–43, 54–55, 89 Addams, Jane, 38 African Americans. See Blacks Agent Orange, 304, 308 Ainsworth, Peggy (wife of Carter, III), 157 Air and Water Pollution Control committee, 247 Alabama Press Association award, 336 Albritton, A. B., 186–87, 190, 202 Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College, 239 Alexander II, 178 Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 65, 281 Ali, Muhammad, 244 Allain, William “Bill,” 114, 118–20, 294, 331, 332, 332 Anderson, Bob, 202 Anderson, Lois, 56, 56 Anklam, Fred, Weaver and, 280–86, 288–90

Anthony, Susan B., 38 antilynching: bill, 69, 156; journalism, 338 antisuffrage campaign: in Jackson newspapers, 38; of Power, K., 26, 28, 34–41; Woman’s Congress and, 39–40 AP. See Associated Press “Arrest of Bombing Victim is a Disservice” (Smith, H. B.), 88 Associated Press (AP), 149, 185; EEOC filings and, 145; first women hired by, 13 Atwater, Lee, 293 Austin, state capitol beat in, 184–85 awards, 157, 336; Hederman, R., staff journalism, 265–67, 291; Robert F. Kennedy, 265–67, 286, 287, 291, 291; Smith, H. B., 88 Babe Ruth, 182 Bankers Trust Savings & Loan Association, 202, 203 bank fraud, Finch and Means, 249 Barat, Madeline Sophie, 220 Barber, Rims (civil rights leader), 141, 147 Barefield, Stone, 201 385

386

Index

Barnett, Ross (governor), 115, 116, 140, 152, 161; Finch and, 246–47; Meredith entry opposed by, 194–95, 228–29, 246–47; at Neshoba County Fair, 238–39, 240; segregated academy fundraiser of, 282; on segregation and Jim Crow, 238 Bartlett, Bruce, 292 Bath Jewish History Archive, 178 Beasley, Maurine (historian), 13 Beckwith, Byron De La, 115 Bergstrom Officers Wives Club (BOW), 104 Bernstein, Carl, 182, 218 Biden, Joe, 261n208 The Big Story, 217 Bilbo, Theodore (senator), 156 Black Codes, 32, 200 Black laborers: forced, 200–202; myth of contented, 58; Ogden, F. S., and, 51, 58, 61 Blacks: antisuffragists perception of, 34; Black Belt elite, 51, 66; ClarionLeger equal coverage of, 243–44; first mayor, 241; mysterious deaths series, 265–67; Power, K., view of former slaves and, 26, 31–32, 34, 42; Waller strategy for votes of, 246 Black women journalists, Wells-Barnett example, 337–39 Bledsoe, Albert, 35 “Blue Ribbon Committee,” 284, 285 Bolton, Charles, 281, 282 botanists, 19th-century women, 39 Boteler, E. L., 113–14 Bourbon Democrats, 241–42 BOW. See Bergstrom Officers Wives Club Bowen, David, 250 “Boys of Spring,” 284 Bradley, Patricia, 312 Bradshaw, R. C., 247 Bramlett, Leon, 119 Brighton Beach, 219

Brown vs. Board of Education, 5, 61, 70, 75, 229; Education Reform Act and, 118; Emmerich, J. O., on, 150; Plessy confirmed by, 280–81; private academies in response to, 304–5; racist editor on, 140; violence following, 277 Bryson, Boyce, 107–8 Buchanan, Margaret, 13 Bulkeley, Christy, 183, 312–13 A Bunch of Letters from the Great Northwest, 25 Burgard, Stephen, 175 Burgin, Bill (senator), 267, 278–80, 314 Byrd, Richard (sheriff), 84–86 Cain, Mary Dawson, “Hacksaw Mary,” 15–16, 22n101, 56; background, 66; campaign against federal government, 53–54, 65–67, 69, 71; civil rights opposition of, 42, 69–70; “conservative everywoman image,” 66; in DACWS, 65; Democratic Party left by, 53–54; on 8-armed octopus of federal government, 71, 95n108; gubernatorial campaigns of, 66–67, 68, 68, 74; on integration, 54; IRD incident and nickname story, 54, 71; newspaper published and edited by, 42; Ogden and, 53, 54, 72, 329–30; organization memberships, 53, 71–72; prohibition criticized by, 67, 69; racial equality opposed by, 69–70; racial segregation supported by, 67, 72–73; racism of, 54, 70–71, 73, 75–76; Smith, H. B., contrasted with Ogden and, 42–43, 76; Southern hegemony supported by, 53; Spanish descent of, 67; Till case and, 70–71; white supremacy perpetuated by, 42, 73, 329–30 California state government, Neuman reporting on, 225 Campbell, Nancy (Albritton), 3, 199; Albritton and, 186–87, 190, 202;

Index

atypical reaction to senator advances, 198; on Austin state capitol beat, 184–85; birth and background, 176–77; career of Povich, E., and, 183; college journalism work and internships, 184–85; Daily Herald post of, 176, 181, 183, 184; education, 181; Fields scolding of, 191; high school newspaper run by, 177–78; Hurricane Camille experience of, 184; marriage, 202; marriage obstacle to being hired, 186–87; Parchman Farm coverage by, 176, 199–202, 234; Patio Bar experiences of, 197–98; Reese, Jr., and, 186–88; on sexism, 191–92, 198; on state capitol beat of, 181, 190–92; Stevens and, 5, 164; Sun Herald position, 189–92; at Sun-n-Sand, 196–97; unequal pay and, 183; on uninvited advances, 192; UPI careers of Povich, E., and, 11, 175–77 Capitol Reporter, 1, 142, 308, 310; Fentress work with, 304, 307–9; Minor and, 305–6 Capitol Street Gang, 115 Carmichael, Gil, 118, 247 Carter, Hodding, II, 151 Carter, Hodding, III, 139–40, 204; on Hederman family journalism, 225, 230; MAP founded by, 158–59; Stevens work for, 142, 160 Carter, Hodding, Jr., “Big Hodding,” 83–84, 154–55, 161; retirement, 157; violence against, 156–57 Carter, Jimmy (president), 177, 206, 293 Cason, Clarence (professor), 79 Castleberry, Curtis, 107 Castleberry, Mary, 155 Castleberry, Vivian, 12, 104 Catfish Journal, 320 CDGM. See Child Development Group of Mississippi Cearnal, Lee, 290

387

Chasing Newsroom Diversity (Mellinger), 306 Cheney, James, 188, 238, 293 Chicago Sun-Times, 185 Chicago Tribune, 207 Chicago World’s Fair, 25, 38, 41 childcare (daycare), 269, 270 Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), 158–59 Christianity, 38–39; racism conflict with, 2, 16, 63, 82; socially aware, 110 civil rights (civil rights movement), 15–17; Cain opposition to, 42; Eastland, W., efforts against, 242–43; economic boycotts and, 157; editors enmity toward leaders of, 140–41, 147; Ellis view of, 162; Goldwater opposition to legislation, 64; Hederman family and, 229; Jackson Free Press on, 232; Ogden’s stance against, 51; Smith, H. B., shift in view of, 54–55, 76; Stevens and, 3, 139, 163; violence and, 54–55, 69–70 Civil Rights Act, 64, 144, 150, 154, 163 Civil War, 27, 35, 200, 228 The Clarion-Ledger, 13, 27–28, 54, 207, 335; award-winning series by staff, 265–67, 286, 291, 291; editor hired by Gannett, 288; Education Reform Act role of, 289; family ownership, 3, 5, 226–27; first hires by Hederman, R., 6; Gannet purchase of, 287; Hederman, Rea changes made to, 6, 148, 232, 275– 76; Hederman family battles over, 8; Henry-Power merger and, 226; Jim Crow fight of, 14; Kennedys attacked in, 266; Neuman work for, 7, 218, 225; “new,” 275; newsroom corner for old racists, 275–76; Ogden and, 42, 52; “outside agitators” and, 230, 231–36, 244, 252; Patriquin reporting for, 218, 225, 232–36;

388

Index

Power family interests in, 15; public education reporting in, 280–86; Pulitzer Prize, 267, 290; reporter on Smith challenge, 76; sale of, 268; segregation prior to Hederman, R., 243–44; selling of, 8; Southern womanhood and, 15; states rights and, 15–16; as the “Thunderer,” 227; Ward as writer for, 140; Weaver hired by, 274; weekly letter from Powell, M., in, 25; women journalists tenure and legacy, 9. See also specific journalists Clark, Charles (governor), 51 The Clarksdale Press-Register, 3, 152 “closed society,” 33, 42, 55; Neuman and, 207; Povich, E., and, 188 Cogan, Nathan, 178 Cold War, 65–66 “The Coleman Report,” 277 college newspapers, 183, 222, 268 Commercial Appeal, 193, 202 Commission for the Federation of Women’s clubs, 72 Commission on the Status of Women, 155, 247 communism, 87, 271 Confederacy, 14–15, 27, 31 Confederate Veterans, 14–15 Cooney, Matt, 182 Cooper, Owen, 119 Cornell Daily Sun, 182–83 Cornell University, 180–81 cotton, 59, 201 Cowan, Ruth, 13 Criminal Justice Planning Agency, 247 crusade journalism, 14–15 Cupit, Danny, 290 DACWS. See Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service Daily Herald, 313; Campbell tenure at, 176, 181, 183, 184; Fentress with, 304, 309–11; “Hurricane Edition,”

310–11; journalist staff of, 309–10; Klein with, 273 The Daily Texan, 184 Daniel, Clifton, 115, 115 Dantin, Maurice, 249 Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), 52, 62 Daughters of the Confederacy, 242 Davis, Jefferson (Confederate president), 27 Davis, John, 336 Davis, S. F. (judge), 83–84 DCC. See Delta Cotton Council Deep South, 339 Deep South Dispatch (Herbers), 152 Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service (DACWS), 65 Delta Cooperative Farm, 86 Delta Cotton Council (DCC), 53 Delta cotton farmers, 15–16 Delta Democrat Times, 42, 52, 142, 156–59, 204; Stevens freelancing for, 155, 160 Democratic Party: Bourbon Democrats faction of, 241–42; Cain election loss in, 75; Cain falling out with, 53–54; changes and, 291–92; civil rights adoption by, 51; desegregation position of, 158; Finch support from, 116; Freedom, 205; ideological changes of Republican and, 292, 293–94; “Jeffersonian Democrat,” 66; Klein and, 290; Loyalists and Regulars divide, 114–15; MYD and, 158; Ogden criticism of, 59–60, 64, 65; Ogden shift from, 57; racial equality evolution of, 243 Democrat Times, 86; Ogden column in, 58 The Denver Post, 267, 294 Department of Human Services, 336 Department of Natural Resources, 234 desegregation, 163, 288; Ogden death and, 65; Ogden opposition to, 59–60;

Index

schools investigation after orders of, 285–86; White flight and, 277, 281 Dewey, Thomas E., 291 Dickerson, James, 276 Dickinson, Tim, 261n208 digital technology, Fentress on, 333 “Dis An’ Dat” (Ogden column), 51, 57 divorce, 319–20; no-fault, 127, 319 Dixiecrats, 115, 290–91 Douglas, Ellen. See Haxton, Josephine Dowdy, Wayne (US representative), 294 Durant News, 78, 82–83 Eastland, Jim, 248, 261n208, 291–92 Eastland, Woods, 242–43 Ebony, 150 Edison, Thomas, 38 editors, first women, 12–13 education, 63, 73, 336; Fentress reports on, 311, 313; “freedom-of-choice” plans in, 281; Power, K., on funding for, 31; reform, 110. See also public education system; specific journalists Education Reform Act, 118, 289, 290 EEOC. See Equal Opportunity Employment Commission Eisenhower, Dwight D., 60 Eisenhower, Mamie (first lady), 13 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Price for Courage in Journalism, 88 Ellis, Joseph, 152, 161–62 Emmerich, John, 142, 152–53 Emmerich, J. Oliver (elder), 150–52 Enterprise-Journal, 4; boycott of, 151; Emmerich, John, inheriting, 152; Emmerich, J. Oliver, and, 150–52; Stevens freelancing for additional papers and, 155 enterprise journalism, 17, 175, 183; of Stevens, 163–64 Environment Protection Agency (EPA), 308 Equal Credit Opportunity Act, 319 Equal Opportunity Employment Act, 144

389

Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC), Stevens and, 4, 148, 331; conciliation, 146, 147; creation of, 144; inauspicious start of, 143–44; lawsuit approvals, 147; mission change, 146; Newsweek sued by, 144–45; 1972 number of filings, 146; Stevens settlement and, 147 equal pay, 183 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 10, 74; ambivalence toward, 126; Fentress and, 318; Fields support of, 104, 121–22, 125–29; Gandy on, 125–26; Mississippi delegates opposition to, 270–71; National Women’s Conference on, 270–72; Stevens coverage of, 153–54; Stevens on Jackson Daily News and, 149–50 Ervin, Sam, 218 Esquire, 194 Evers, Charles (mayor), 192–93, 269; brother’s death impact on, 241; Neuman covering campaign of, 239, 241, 244–46 Evers, Medgar, 87, 115, 335; assassinator of, 246; death of, 239; Ward and, 140–41 “executive sessions,” 111–13 Eyes on Mississippi, 320 “Eyes on the Mississippi” column, 1 Fagan, Steve, 274 Faulkner, William, 231, 287, 329 Favre, Brett, 336 FBI, 249; Operation Pretense, 121 federal government: Cain campaign against, 53–54, 65–67, 69, 71; 8-armed octopus of, 71, 95n108; Ogden criticism of, 59 Federal highway Commission, 114 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan), 122, 180 feminism: “displaced homemaker” and, 121–22; Fields changed views of,

390

Index

122–23, 127–28; paleoconservatism vs. liberal, 271; second-wave, 10, 121, 196, 272, 316 Fentress, Ellen Ann (Quinn), 191, 273, 308; Agent Orange investigated by, 308; at Capitol Reporter, 304, 306–9; career overview, 304; college writing of, 303, 305; Daily Herald position of, 304, 309–11; on digital technology and opportunity, 333; documentary on Minor by, 320; education, 304–5; on education beat, 311, 313; father’s message to, 303; on Fields, 121, 128–29; on Fields and gender roles, 121; first meeting Fields, 1; first stories at Capitol, 307–8; freelance journalism of, 304, 306, 320–21; on Gandy, 316–17; Journalism route of Fields and, 3; “little lady” and, 5; Minor as mentor of, 307, 309, 317; on Mississippi, 296; motherhood-work struggles of, 318–19; MP&Ls issues covered by, 308–9; segregated academy attended by, 304; shared paths of Fields and, 2–3, 11, 106; Sun Herald work of, 304, 311–12; working friendship between Fields and, 317–21 Fields, Norma, 12, 18, 115; activist journalism of, 114; advice to Fentress, 319, 321; background and overview, 103–6; “birddogs” following in footsteps of, 331; bond between Fentress and, 2–3, 11, 106; Bryson suicide coverage by, 107–8; career beginning, 2, 3, 104–7; divorce of, 319–20; education and Navy position, 106; on equal rights, 196; Fentress on, 121, 128–29; Fentress working friendship with, 1, 317–21; on Finch campaign, 247; first assignment, 3, 103; first front-page story by, 107–8; gender roles and, 121; gossip column of, 104; Great Depression

and, 105–6; husband of, 105, 106–7; Ku Klux Klan covered by, 108–9; legacy of Stevens and, 9; Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal and, 103, 107, 130n32; as part-time stringer, 107–10; political column of, 103–4; Povich, E., and, 206; press conference attendance by, 331; Rutherford hiring, 107; second wave feminism and, 10, 121; Smith, H. B., influence on, 56, 89–90, 129, 330–31; Southern womanhood and, 103–4, 128–29, 129n3; style of, 191; in Washington D. C., 106–7 Fields, Norma, as capitol correspondent, 108; activist journalism of, 126–27; “displaced homemaker” championed by, 121–22; earliest stories as, 110; embezzlement investigation of, 113– 14, 134n100; ERA and, 104, 121–22, 125–29; feminism view change in, 122–23, 127–28; Gandy critiqued by, 124–26; governor tenures covered by, 114–21; highway commission corruption and, 113–14, 134n100; leaders admired by, 117; Mississippi state highway bill covered by, 110–11, 132n71; “no-fault” divorce bill report by, 127; part-time work as, 110–14; politicians view of, 110–11, 121; on secret legislative meetings, 111–13; sexism and, 108, 123–24; Stevens working with, 142, 149, 153; on truth and founding fathers, 128 Fifteenth Amendment, 339 Finch, Cliff (governor), 2, 7, 114, 245; campaign strategy of, 246–47; corrupt administration of, 116–17, 134n110, 221, 247–50; Eastland, J., and, 248; reporter relations tension, 247–49, 252; S&L banks crisis and, 203, 248 First Amendment, 84, 112, 127 First Baptist Church, in Jackson, 226 Food Stamp Act of 1964, 244

Index

forced Black labor, 200–202 Ford, Gerald, 270 Fordice, Kirk, 114 The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 184 four F’s, of women’s pages, 12, 21n79 Fourteenth Amendment, 339 Fourth Estate, 252 freedmen (former slaves): population percentage, 42; Power, K., view of, 26, 31–32, 34, 42 Freedom Democratic Party, 205 Freedom of Information bill, 111, 133n89 Freedom Riders, 150–51 Freedom Summer, 151, 161, 162 Friedan, Betty, 122, 180, 320 Gaines, Cassie, 206 Gaines, Steve, 206 Gandy, Evelyn (lieutenant governor), 117–18, 124–26, 125, 135n120, 315; cultural bias and, 316; death of, 316; education reform support from, 289; Finch and, 248–49; gubernatorial defeat of, 313–17; Minor on, 315, 316; sexism in era of, 316; sixteenthsection fight to keep bill on, 278–80; state media on second campaign, 314; stereotypical news frames of, 313–16 Gannett, 8, 287 Gates, Jack (editor), 223 gender roles, 38–39, 121. See also Southern womanhood George Street Grocery, 193, 195–96, 205; regulars, 194 GI Bill, Montgomery, 60 Gibson, John S., Jr., 224 Gilger, Kristin Grady, 312 Gingold, Judy (lawsuit ringleader), 145 Goldwater, Barry, 57, 64, 157–58, 293; Deep South needed by, 292; Southern strategy of Nixon and, 243 The Good Girls Revolt (Povich), 144 Goodman, Andrew, 188–89, 238, 293

391

good ‘ol boy network, 313 GOP, 61, 160 Gordon, Robert, 276, 286 Gray, Lloyd, 309 Great Depression, 79; Fields and, 105–6; Nashville economy decline during, 105 Green, Marjorie Taylor (representative), 330 Green v. County School Board, 281 Greenville Separate School District, 276–77 Greenwood Commonwealth (Commonwealth), 142, 150; Stevens hired by Emmerich, John, 152 Griffiths, Martha, 154 Grisham, John, 121 Guihard, Paul L., 64 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 159, 177, 204–5, 206; voting rights fight of, 246 Hamilton, Minerva (mother of Fields), 106 The Hardest Deal of All (Bolton), 282 Hardin, David, 290 Hasley, Ethel, 13 Haxton, Josephine (pen name Ellen Douglas), 156 Hayes, Joel Addison, 33 Hayes, Margaret Howell Davis, “Maggie,” 33–34 Hederman, Bertie, 227 Hederman, Bob, 5–6, 140, 227; son disapproved by, 288 Hederman, Rea (Clarion-Ledger editor), 5; affair, loss of paper, 8, 286–87; bond between reporters and, 251–52; Clarion-Ledger changes made by, 6, 148, 232, 275–76; “clean house” efforts of, 231; commitment to rebranding family journalism, 225; courageous staff of, 250–52; family conflict, 8, 286–87; family reputation haunting, 230; on Gandy, 279; grand prize won by, 265; Jim Crow

392

Index

coverage of, 250–52; Kennedys and, 266, 294n10; move to New York, 287–88; Neuman interview with, 7; Neuman sent to nation capitol by, 250; newsroom absence of, 286–87; New York Review of Books bought by, 287; Oldshue and, 337; “outside agitators” hired by, 230, 231–36, 244, 252; Patriquin interviewed with, 231–32; resources provided by, 266; Stennis conversation with, 250; Stevens and, 148–49; Weaver on, 274 Hederman, T. M., 226–27 Hederman, Tom, 140 Hederman, Tom, Jr., 227 Hederman family: award refusal pressure from, 266, 286, 287; battles, 8, 232, 286–87; on board of directors, 266, 286; board seats held by, 286; Carter, H., III, on, 225, 230; decades spanned by control, 5; EEOC lawsuit and, 147–48; Kennedys hated by, 266, 294n10; newspapers controlled by, 5, 305; racism of, 226–30; Stevens firing and, 4, 139–40; white supremacy network of, 228–30 Henry, Aaron (civil rights leader), 141, 147, 158, 159, 160; Stevens and, 162–63 Henry, Robert H. “Cousin Hi,” 28, 140, 226 Herbers, John, 152 Hillel International, 179 Hoffman, Don, 265 Holmes County White Citizens’ Council, 86–87 Holtzman, Jerome, 185 homosexuality scandal, Allain accusation and, 118–20 Hood, Orley, 315 House of Hospitality, 27 Howell, Jeffrey B., 330 Hurricane Camille, 176, 184

Hurricane Frederic, 310–11 The Innocence Project, 200, 201 integration. See racial integration intermarriage, 54 Internal Revenue Department (IRD), 54, 66, 71 International Women’s Year, 160 IRD. See Internal Revenue Department Jackson Daily News, 8; Cain featured in, 66; on Gandy, 314–15; Gordon as managing editor of, 276; Hederman family ownership of, 5; Jim Crow fight of, 14; Klein position with, 273; old-guard reporters, 276; Power, K., work for, 25–26; racism of, 140; sale of Clarion-Ledger and, 268; Stevens fired from, 4, 129, 139, 149–50; Stevens settlement with, 147; Stevens tenure at, 10–11; Sullens purchase of, 140 Jackson Free Press, 232 Jackson League of Women, 278 Jackson State University, 268–69 Japanese Americans, internment camps of, 60 Jefferson, Thomas, 66 Jim Crow journalism, 16, 17, 42, 329; of Hederman, R., 250–2; of Ogden, 52–53, 58, 62, 65 Jim Crow system, 2, 5, 14; Barnett praise of, 238; Cain support of, 54; Democratic Party supporting, 115; legislation, 242; Ogden support of, 54, 62; Patriquin and, 217–18; PressRegister editor and, 161–62; “states’ rights” as, 290 Johnson, Andrew (president), 32 Johnson, Lyndon B. (president), 64, 244 Johnson, Paul B., Jr. (governor), 115, 116, 140, 228 Johnson, Sarah, 160 Joiner, Bob, 114

Index

journalism: antilynching, 338; college, 183; crusade, 14–15; enterprise, 17, 163–64, 175, 183; golden years of Mississippi, 11–12, 334; Lost Cause, 14, 18, 26, 32–33, 329; political process role of, 195; sports, 185; transitionary figure in women’s, 330; watchdog role in press and, 114. See also Jim Crow journalism journalists: as Fourth Estate, 252; increased number of part-time, 333– 34; Minor as embodiment of ideal, 9–10; state lawmakers socializing with, 194–99 Judin, Nick, 335 Jurney, Dorothy, 12, 108–9 Kate Power’s Review, 26, 35–41 Kennedy, Ethel, 266 Kennedy, John F. (president), 64, 182 Kennedy, Robert F., journalism award in name of, 265–67, 286, 287, 291, 291 Kent State shootings, 268–69 Keyes vs. School district No. 1 of Denver, CO (1971), 65 Kilpatrick, Dean, 206 Kincaide, W. S. “Kat,” 161–62 King, B. B., 244 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 140–41, 182 Kirksey, Henry, 241 Klein, JoAnn, 3, 252, 332, 332; biggest story for Clarion-Ledger, 278–80; Clarion-Ledger state capitol position, 273; on Fields in press conferences, 331; first job, 273; Greenville integration covered by, 276–77; Hederman, R., hiring of, 7–8; higher education of, 273; job hunt and interviews, 269, 272–73; land reform debate covered by, 7–8, 267, 278–80; last stories for Clarion-Ledger, 290; move to Mississippi Gulf Coast, 273; Neshoba County Fair covered by, 290, 293–94; political career decision in 1980, 290; as press secretary, 294;

393

on Reagan speech in Neshoba, 293– 94; writing background and career choice, 268–69 Klibanoff, Hank, 176, 190, 276 “Knock, Knock.” See “Through Hazel’s Eyes” Kuhn, Bowie, 185, 223 Ku Klux Klan, 78, 108–9, 152, 156, 265; Jews murdered by White Knights of, 188–89; Mississippi delegates link with, 271 labor. See Black laborers Ladd, Donna, 237, 335–36 Ladies Home Journal, 36 land reform, sixteenth-section, 7–8, 267, 278–80 lawmakers (politicians), sexism in reporter socializing, 196, 198–99 Lewine, Edward, 219 The Lexington Adviser, 78, 82–83 lie detector tests, 119 Life, 285 Lloyd, Edgar, 249 Lomax, Alan, 311 Long, Betty Jane, 126, 127 Lost Cause journalism, 14, 18, 329; definition of, 26; Kate Power’s Review as, 26; Ogden and, 58, 65; Power, J. L., allegiance to, 33; white supremacy and, 32–33 Louisville Courier-Journal, 12–13 Loyalist Democrats, 114–15, 159, 162 Ludtke, Melissa, 185 lynching, 337–39; antilynching bill, 69, 156 Lynyrd Skynrd, 205–6 Mabus, Ray (governor), 120–21, 284 magazine revolution, 36 Magnolia Curtain, 141 MAP. See Mississippi Action for Progress maternalism, 31, 191 Maxwell, William, 231, 292

394

Index

McAtee, Leon, 83–84 McCarthy, Joseph, 87 McCarthyism, 157 McComb (MS) Enterprise-Journal, 142 McDavid, Francis, 115, 115 McGovern, George, 182 McLean, George, 110, 132n71 McRae, Elizabeth Gillespie, 329 Mead, Margaret, 318 Means, Jimmy, 249, 252 Mears, Walter, 303 Mellinger, Gwyneth, 306 Memphis Free Speech, 338 Meredith, James, college entry of, 52–53, 64, 88, 161–62; Barnett opposition to, 194–95, 228–29, 246–47; Enterprise editor and, 151; Kennedys support of, 266 MFDP. See Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party MFP. See Mississippi Free Press Minor, W. F. (Bill), 1, 80, 116, 141–42, 279, 318; on changes of Hederman, R., 6; early career and family background, 305–6; Fentress documentary on, 320; Fentress mentored by, 307, 309, 317; on Fields, 2; on Gandy, 315, 316; on Hederman family, 5, 140; as ideal journalist, 9–10; “muckraker” reputation of, 305; newspaper purchase by, 305; Stevens working with, 149, 153 Minter, David, 85, 86 “Minutemen militia,” 32 Mississippi: as closed society, 33, 42, 55, 188, 207; divorce laws, 319; ERA failure of, 126; first Black mayor of, 241; Magnolia Curtain of, 141; readmission of, 32; Weaver and Klein reasons for liking, 267. See also state capitol beat, Mississippi; specific topics Mississippi Action for Progress (MAP), 158–59

Mississippi Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen. See “Black Codes” The Mississippian Collegian, 305 Mississippians for Quality Education, 284 Mississippi Community Education Center, 336 Mississippi Constitution, 1890, 8 Mississippi Constitutional convention, 32 Mississippi delegation, at National Women’s Conference, 270–71 Mississippi Delta, farmhands, 274–75 Mississippi Employment Commission, 249 Mississippi Federation of Women’s Clubs, 53 Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), 158, 159 Mississippi Free Press (MFP), 87, 335–36 Mississippi Game and Fish Commission, 234 Mississippi Gulf Coast, 273, 304, 309; Hurricane Frederic, 310–11 Mississippi Highway Commission (Mississippi Department of Transportation), 2, 113–14, 134n100, 233 Mississippi Highway Patrol, 201, 205, 268 Mississippi House of Representatives, 126, 194, 198–99, 245 Mississippi Humanities Council, 123 “Mississippi Matters,” 29–30 Mississippi Medicaid Commission, 311–12 Mississippi Opening Meetings Law, 113 Mississippi Open Meetings Act, 335 Mississippi Parks Commission, 233–34 Mississippi Penitentiary Board, 202 Mississippi Press Association (MPA), 25, 38, 41, 79; Carter, Jr., meeting Smith, H. B., in, 83 Mississippi Press Women, 56

Index

Mississippi School for the Deaf, 232–33 Mississippi State College for Women (MSCW), 3 Mississippi state politics: sample of women journalists covering, 11–12; second-wave feminism and, 196. See also state capitol beat, Mississippi Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, 42, 52, 53, 87, 243; as “ghost branch” of government, 229–30; shutting down of, 232 Mississippi Surplus Property Procurement Committee, 247 Mississippi Today, 336 Mississippi University for Women (MUW), 124 Mississippi Valley State University, 52 Mississippi Vocational College. See Mississippi Valley State University Mississippi Young Democrats (MYD), 158 Mitchell, Jerry (reporter), 76 Molpus, Dick, 284 mongrelization, 60 Monroe Morning World, 222–23 Monroe News Star, 222 Montgomery, Mary Delia, 51 Montville, Leigh, 185 Moore, Eddie Myrtle, 272 Morgan, George (prison administrator), 234, 235 Mosby, Ray, 162 MPA. See Mississippi Press Association MSCW. See Mississippi State College for Women Murtagh, Walter (sheriff), 82–83, 86 MYD. See Mississippi Young Democrats NAACP. See National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Nashville Tennessean, 105 National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards, 202

395

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 115, 140–41, 161–63, 239; “angry racism” and, 156; Evers, C., as field secretary for, 241; MFDP and, 158; violence after integration petition of, 277 National Commission on the Observance of international Women’s Year, 270 National Federation of Press Women, 154, 308 National Organization for Women (NOW), 149 National Women’s Conference, 270–72 Navy, Fields as stenographer in, 106–7 neopopulism, 246 Neshoba County: Reagan Southern Strategy and, 290–93; shootings, 188–89, 238 Neshoba County Fair, 237–39, 240; Klein coverage of 1980, 290, 293–94 Neuman, Johanna Cathy: background of, 7, 218, 219–20; Bowen demand for firing of, 250, 252n8; California state government and, 225; city council members and, 224; ClarionLedger and, 7, 218, 236; closed society and, 207; culture shock, 236–37; early newsroom experiences of, 223–25; education importance to mother of, 220; Evers, C., campaign followed by, 239, 241, 244–46; Fields and, 207; Finch administration covered by, 221, 247–50; first newspapers, 218; “game little critter” reference to, 250, 251, 251; Hederman, R., and, 230; humiliating interview incident, 224; immigrant grandparents of, 218; Jackson and, 207; Jewish family history, 219–20; Mississippi attraction of, 231; nation capitol assignment, 250; on Neshoba County Fair, 237–39; on state capitol

396

Index

beat, 231, 236–39; as “Yankee” troublemaker, 236 New Deal, 53–54, 66–67, 69; Smith, H. B., criticism of, 81 New Left, 270–71 Newman, C. B. “Buddie,” 194–95 Newsweek, EEOC lawsuit against, 144–45 “New Woman,” 36 New York Review of Books, 287 The New York Times, 145, 219, 266, 320 Nieman Report (Bulkeley), 312–13 90 Degrees in the Shade, 79 Nisei, 156 Nixon, Richard, 160, 182; resignation, 183; rhetorical strategy and racial coding of, 292–93; Southern strategy of Goldwater and, 243 noblesse oblige, 228 no-fault divorce, 127, 319 Norman, Cora, 122–23 Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, 103, 107, 130n32 “North Mississippi Justice” (Tulsky, Hoffman), 265, 266–67 The Northside Reporter, 76 Northwest Ordinance of 1785, 278 Norton, Eleanor Holmes, 145 NOW. See National Organization for Women Ogden, Florence Sillers, “Miss Florence,” 15, 22n101; Black slaves owned by family, 61; Cain and, 53, 54, 72, 329–30; civil rights opposition of, 51; “closed society” and, 42, 55; columns and views of, 51, 52–53, 58–65; Congress connections of, 60; death of, 65; family wealth and influence, 52; federal government criticized by, 59; internment camps support by, 60; Jim Crow journalism of, 52–53, 58, 62, 65; newspapers, 58; on “racial self-respect,” 63; racism

of, 52–53, 61–63; shift in political party loyalties, 59–60; Smith, H. B., contrasted with Cain and, 42–43, 76; tribute editorial on, 57; Truman report criticized by, 59–60; WCG founded by, 52–53, 62–64; white supremacy perpetuated by, 57, 329 Oldshue, Lynn Henderson, 336–37 Old South, women journalists and, 55, 56 Operation Dixie, 64 Our Southern Souls (Oldshue), 336–37 Overby, Charles, 8–9, 288, 290 paleoconservatism, 270, 271 Parchman Farm: Black codes context of, 200; Campbell coverage of, 176, 199–202, 234; forced labor of, 202; inmate interviews, 235; number of guards issue, 234; Patriquin coverage of, 6, 202, 207, 234–35, 252; plantation, 199–200, 201; superintendent, 234 paternalism, 187, 242 Patio Bar, at Sun-n-Sand, 197–99 patriarchy, 3, 12, 107, 128, 187, 191 Patriquin, Ronni Wilds (Clark), 3; Clarion-Ledger reporting, 232–36; corruption focus of, 233–34, 336; as daughter of Deep South, 207; early career and job hunts, 218, 222–23; on equal coverage for Blacks, 244; family and background, 6, 217–18, 219–20; finding niche, 333; Hederman, R., and, 6, 230, 232; higher education of, 222; “little lady” and, 223; Mississippi viewed by, 231; mother of, 220–21; Parchman Farm coverage by, 6, 202, 207, 234–35, 252; race relations and, 221; reputation of, 218–19; as scene maker, 221; state parks coverage, 233–34; St. Louis Post-Dispatch and, 225; TV broadcast journalism post of, 225

Index

pay gap, 183, 306–7, 313 Pearabo, Marie (mother of Patriquin), 220–21 PEER. See Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review Pensacola High School newspaper, 268 Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER), 233 Pew Research Center, 333, 335 Pickett, Sallie, 13 Pig Laws, 200 Pike County White Citizens’ Council, 72 Piney Woods region, 227–28 Pittman, Ed, 318 plantation system, 58–59, 228, 252 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 80, 280 Pope, Edith, 14–15 Povich, Don (father of Povich, E.), 179, 180, 188–89 Povich, Elaine, 3, 189; anti-Semitism fears of parents, 188–89; career of Campbell and, 183; career path, 179–81; Cornell Daily Sun job, 182– 83; culture shock in Jackson, 193; D. C., UPI transfer, 207; education, 4, 180–81; enterprise journalism of, 206–7; family and background, 178–79, 188–89; on Fields, 123; on George Street, 195–96; Hamer funeral covered by, 204–5, 206; on House member late night call, 198–99; journalism career choice, 175, 181–82; locker rooms and, 185; Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash covered by, 205–6; on Mississippi culture, 4–5, 204; political issues covered by, 206–7; Reese, Jr., UPI, Campbell and, 186–88; on sexism, 196; sinkor-swim mentality of, 203–4; sports journalism challenge of, 185; state capitol beat and, 192–93; Stevens and, 164; trip to Jackson from Bath, Maine, 192; at UPI, 11, 202–7

397

Povich, Janice (mother of Povich, E.), 188–89 Povich, Shirley, 145, 179, 181–82 Power, J. L., 13, 226; Daily ClarionLedger partnership of, 27–28; death of, 29; election campaign, 28–29; family status and power, 30; home of, 27, 30; Lost Cause allegiance of, 33; as MPA member, 25; printing trade of, 27–28; Reconstruction dismantling efforts, 32–33; weekly column of, 29–30; white supremacy and Lost Cause, 32–33 Power, Kate Markham, 13–14, 15, 58; “beloved land” illusion of, 34; birth and siblings of, 28; Chicago World’s Fair trip of, 25, 38; education cause of, 31; father’s election campaign run by, 28–29; former slaves viewed by, 26; Lost Cause journalism of, 18, 26, 329; “Mississippi Matters” taken over by, 29–30; newspaper work with father, 25–26; “New Woman” and, 36; privileged status of, 26, 40; racism and, 34; “up and doing” ideology of, 30–35; weekly periodical, 35–36; woman suffrage opposed by, 26, 28, 34–41; Women’s Congress and, 39–40 Prather, Lenore, 125, 125 pregnancy, 222, 269 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, 269 press: political process role of, 195; women political candidates framed by, 124 Press-Register: Ellis as editor of, 161–62; staff under Ellis, 162; Stevens return to, 160, 162; Stevens work for, 3, 4 prison reform, Campbell reporting on, 201–2 prohibition, 67, 69, 82, 226 Project Head Start, 158, 159 Providence Cooperative Farm (PCF), 85–86

398

Index

public education system: ClarionLedger articles on, 288; 1970s number of segregated academies, 282; public school attendance percentage, 281; Weaver-Anklam team report on, 280–86, 288–90; Winter reform efforts, 270–86, 288–90; Winter special session on, 288, 289–90 Pulitzer Prize, 8, 88, 156; ClarionLedger 1983, 267, 290; Klibanoff and Roberts, 190 Quinn, David Peel (father of Fentress), 303 Quinn, James, 276 racial equality: Cain opposed to, 69–70; Stevens and, 163; as un-American, 243 racial integration, 89; Cain on problem with, 54; of colleges, 52; Freedom Riders and, 150–51; Greenville Separate School District, 276–77; Hederman family opposition to, 228–29; opposition, 228–29. See also Meredith, James racial segregation, 57; Barnett praise of Jim Crow and, 238; Cain support of, 67, 72–73; The Clarion-Ledger, 243– 44; “fairplay segregationist” editor on, 151–52; Hederman family and, 227; in private academies, 281, 282, 304; “racial self-respect” rhetoric on, 63; separate but equal doctrine, 280; Smith, H. B., and, 82, 85. See also desegregation racism, 275–76; of Cain, 54, 70–71, 73, 75–76; Christianity and, 2, 16, 63, 82; of editor Gates, 223; editor’s shift from, 151; false rape accusations and, 338; Hederman family history of, 226–30; Jackson Daily News, 140; NAACP accused of angry, 156; of Ogden, 52–53, 61–63;

Power, K., and, 34; racial coding, 292–93; scholarship on women journalist, 16–17, 22n101; state’s rights and, 66; women journalists protecting Southern, 18, 22n101 Randle, Henry, 55, 86 Rankin, John E., 60 Reagan, Ronald, Southern strategy of, 290, 293–94 Reconstruction era, in Mississippi, 241; dismantling efforts of Power, J. L., 32–33; Power, K., “beloved land” and, 34 redistricting battle, 163 Reed, Jack (prison administrator), 6, 234–35 Reed, Jack K. (Parchman superintendent), 201–2 Reese, Andrew Jackson, Jr., (Andy): Campbell, Povich, E., working for, 186–88, 202; hesitation to hire women journalists, 202, 269; Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash and, 205–6; mindset on reporters working for, 188; Povich, E., given bank story by, 203–4 Reese, Andy, “Handy Andy,” 5, 175–76 reporters, number of, 334 Republican Party: ideological changes of Democratic and, 292, 293–94; Ogden alliance with, 57, 60, 62 Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism, 265, 266, 286, 287, 291, 291 Roberts, Gene, 190 Rolling Stone, 206 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 59, 69 Roosevelt, Franklin D. (president) (FDR), 81, 290, 292; Cain opposition to New Deal of, 53–54, 69, 74; Ogden support of, 59; Works Progress Administration, 305 Rowan, Carl T., 150, 151 Russian Jewish families, 219 Rutherford, Harry (editor), 2, 107, 110

Index

Rutherford, Joe, 120 The Sacramento Bee, 267, 294 Saggus, James, 311 Salter, John, 229 Saturday Evening Post, 36 Schlafly, Phyllis, 126, 270, 271 scholarship: on news framing, 315–16; previous, 12–14, 21n79; on racism of women journalists, 16–17, 22n101; on Smith, H. B., 330–31 Schwerner, Michael, 188–89, 238, 293 second-wave feminism, 10, 121, 196, 272; sexism and, 316 Second World War, 59, 105, 219 segregation. See racial segregation Seimer, Bill, 224 Senate Appropriations Committee, 279 Senate Constitutional Committee, 126, 196 Senate Corrections Committee, 234 Senate Judiciary Committee, land reform bill in, 242 Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil Rights, 242 separate but equal doctrine, 61 Sessions, Cliff, 64 sexism, 221; Campbell on, 198–99; of editors, 223; in Fields critique of Gandy, 124; Fields experiences of, 108, 123–24; Gandy campaign and, 314; at George Street, 196; Klein job search and, 269; Povich-Campbell era and, 199; sexual advances and, 185; during social interactions with lawmakers, 196, 198–99; state capitol beat, 5, 177 sexual assault, current views of, 199 sexual discrimination, 13, 139; EEOC and, 144; Klein job hunt and, 272– 73; women candidates and, 155 sexual harassment, 270 sharecroppers, 86 Sigma Delta Chi award, 157 Sillers, Walter, Jr., 52, 194

399

“sixteenth section land reform” debate, 7–8, 267, 278–80 Slater, Sid, 11 slavery, 61. See also freedmen S&L banks, Povich, E., reporting on, 203–4 Smith, Hazel Brannon (nee Freeman Brannon), 1, 56, 77; activist journalism of, 42–43, 54–55, 89; advertising boycott against, 76, 86; Awards of, 88; bankruptcy, 89; birth and background, 76; Christianity-racism conflict of, 16, 82; citizens’ council conflict with, 86–87; civil rights and shifting views of, 81; civil rights shift, 54–55; column, 78; conservatism of, 81–82; contempt of court charge of, 83–84; criticism of racial violence, 77, 78; Durant population and, 78; “editor as citizen” philosophy of, 80; ERA comment of, 154; family expectations, 76; famous quip of, 80; Fields and, 56, 89–90, 126, 129, 330–31; firing of, 86–87; illness and death of, 76; internal struggle of, 85; law and order campaign of, 82–84; local focus of, 78–79; local paper revenge toward, 86–87; marriage, 78–79; McAtee ruling fought by, 83–84; misinterpretation of, 89; newspapers published by, 78; Ogden and Cain contrasted with, 42–43, 76; political beliefs of, 81–82; Pulitzer Prize won by, 88; race views of, 78, 82; racial segregation and, 82, 85, 89; as reluctant activist, 89; scholarship and, 330–31; sheriff Byrd libel suit against, 84–86; sheriff Murtagh and, 82–83; university journalism shaping career of, 79–80; violence against, 76, 88 Smith, Walter Dyer, “Smitty,” 1, 78 SNCC. See Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

400

Index

Snider, Billy, 78 social maternalism, 31 Social Security, 71 Social Security tax, 53 Society of the Sacred Heart, 220 society pages, 222 Southern Black Baptist church, 204–5 Southern hegemony, 30; Cain belief in maintaining, 53; forced labor and, 200; love of Old South and, 56; Ogden racist rhetoric in support of, 52–53; women’s suffrage threat to, 26, 29, 36 Southern Strategy: Nixon and Goldwater, 243; racial coding in, 292–93; of Reagan, 290, 293–94 Southern womanhood, 2–3, 9; Fields and, 103–4, 128–29, 129n3; Kate Power’s Review, 36, 37; Power, K., social ideology and, 30–31; “southern lady” image and, 122–23; white supremacy and, 14; woman suffrage threat to, 29; women journalists and, 9, 15, 122–23 Special Committee on Public School Finance and Administration, 284 Spell, William, 119–20 Spell, William S., Jr., 141 Sports Illustrated, 185, 222–23 sports journalism, 185 SRA. See State Research Associates state capitol beat, Campbell on Austin, 184–85 state capitol beat, Mississippi: Capitol Reporter, 306–9; current coverage issue, 334–36; decrease in number of reporters on, 333–34; discrimination faced by women on, 13; FentressFields friendship on, 317–21; Fields as correspondent for, 2, 10; Finch-reporter tensions, 247–49; first woman journalist on, 10; George Street Grocery and, 193–96; Klein assigned to, 273; Neuman on Mississippi, 231, 236–39; Patio Bar

socializing, 197–99; restrooms in capitol building, 5; sexism, 191–92; stories covered by Campbell, 190–92; “Yankee” journalist stigma on, 192–93 State Ledger, 226 state parks, 233–34 State Research Associates (SRA), 282 states’ rights, 15–16, 161; Cain column in support of, 53, 66; racism and, 66; Reagan campaign and, 290 States’ Rights Party, 60 state supreme court, 83; women on, 123 State Tax Commission, 247 Stennis, John C., 250, 251, 251; Democratic Party changes and, 291–92 Stevens, Nancy Lee Yates, 10–11; background and family tragedy, 142–43; birth date, 142; black mayor election coverage by, 141; Carter, H., III respected by, 160; comment on ERA and Jackson Daily News, 149–50; education and career, 3–4, 143; EEOC filing, 139, 141, 145–46, 331; EEOC legislation and, 143–49; enterprise journalism of, 163–64; on ERA, 153–54; Fentress and, 313; Fields and, 142, 149, 153; firing of, 4, 129, 139–40, 149; Freedom Summer secretly covered by, 162; freelance work of, 141–42, 150, 153, 155, 160; Henry NAACP leadership covered by, 162–63; issues covered at Jackson Daily News, 141; legacy of Fields and, 9; as Loyalist Democrat, 160; marriage and move to Jackson, 143; Press-Register rejoined by, 160, 162; progressive stance of Carter, H., III respected by, 160; redistricting battle covered by, 163; settlement with EEOC, 147; state capitol coverage, 160; “tough as a journalist” advice of, 163–64; on women in politics, 154–55, 160

Index

Stevenson, Adlai, 60 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 225 Straight Ahead (Waller), 246 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 158–59 The Student Printz, 268, 269 Sullens, Fred, 140 Sullivan, Charles (governor), 246 Summit (MS) Sun, 42; Cain and, 53; Fentress work with, 304 Sun Herald: Campbell return to Mississippi to work for, 189–92; Fentress with, 304, 311–12 Sun-n-Sand Motor Hotel, 196–99, 317 Supreme Court: desegregation ruling, 65 surnames, women Journalist, 3 Sutton, Carol, 12–13 Swan, Jimmy, 246 taxation, 247; Cain opposition to, 54 Ted Kennedy (senator), 266 Tennessee Supreme Court, 338 Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, 114 There’s No Crying in Newsrooms (Gilger), 312 Thirteenth Amendment, 200 Thompson, Bennie (mayor), 141 “Through Hazel’s Eyes,” 78 Thurmond, Strum (governor), 290–91 Till, Emmett, 86, 335; Cain on case of, 70–71 The Times-Picayune, 2, 190 travel, gender roles and, 38–39 Treyens, Cliff, 289, 290 Truman, Harry S. (President), 59–60, 81, 290; Democratic Party changes and, 292 Trump, Donald, 330 trusty system, 201 Tugaloo College, 31 Tulsky, Fredric, 265 Tupelo: Fields interactions with leaders of, 108; tornado, 220 Tupelo Daily Journal, 2. See also Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

401

UDC. See United Daughters of the Confederacy Understanding Clause, 339 UNESCO. See United Nations Educational Scientific, and Cultural Organization United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), 52, 58 United Nations, 63 United Nations Educational Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 63, 73 University of Southern Mississippi, 190 UPI, Jackson, 3, 149, 276 UPI, Jackson, Campbell and Povich, E., at, 11, 175–77, 234; Campbell’s biggest story with, 199–202; Povich, E., joining, 202–3; Povich, E., time with, 11, 175–76, 202–7; Reese, Jr., and, 186–88 UPI, Povich transfer to Washington D. C., 207 USM, 269, 273 Vance, J. D. (senator), 330 Van Zandt, Ronnie, 206 Vietnam, 112, 113, 268, 313 violence, 158–59, 227; campus shootings and, 268–69; against Carter, Hodding, Jr., 156–57; civil rights and, 54–55, 69–70; following Brown vs. Board of Education, 277; Ku Klux Klan, 108–9, 152; murders of Jews by KKK, 188–89; Neshoba County murders, 157; series on unsolved Black deaths and, 265–67; Smith, H. B., criticism of racial, 77, 78; against Smith, H. B., 76, 88 Voss, Kimberly Wilmot (historian), 12–13 “Votes for Women” campaign, 34–35 voting, 246, 252. See also woman suffrage Voting Rights Act of 1965, 245

402

Index

Waggoner, Sam, 114, 134n100 Waites, Bernard, 289 Wall, Diane, 123 Wallace, George, 292–93 Waller, William “Bill” (governor), 114–16, 117, 162; campaign strategy for black votes, 246; memoirs, 246; Parchman Farm prison and, 201–2 Walt, Edgar Thatcher, 152 Ward, Jimmy (editor), 139, 276; civil rights leaders hated by, 140–41, 147; Sullens and, 140 The Warrior, 178 The Washington Post, 145, 182, 320 Washington School, White flight to, 277 Watergate, 112, 113, 164, 313; journalist hopefuls and, 175; Neuman and, 218; Povich, E., and, 182 Watts, Trent, 237, 238 WCG. See Women for Constitutional Government Weaver, Nancy (Teichert), 3, 252, 291; Anklam and, 280–86, 288; awards byline of, 265, 267; Clarion-Ledger assignments, 267; Clarion-Ledger sale and, 8; education reform and, 8–9; education series of Anklam and, 280–86, 288–90; grand prize receipt of Hederman, R., staff and, 265; on Hederman, R., 274; internships, 274; interviews by Anklam and, 285; mantra of, 283, 283, 285; Mississippi appreciated by Klein and, 267; Mississippi Delta farmers examination by, 274–75; National Women’s Conference and, 270–72; Robert F. Kennedy journalism award and, 265–67, 286, 287, 291, 291; route to Mississippi, 274; series on unsolved deaths of Blacks, 265–67; sexual harassment experience of, 270 Weekly Southern Planter, 27 Weidie, Wayne, 275 Weill, Susan (scholar), 17 Welfare Rights Organization, 163

Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 337–39 Welty, Eudora, 231 Westinghouse Broadcasting, 182 White Citizens’ Councils, 72, 76, 86–87, 115, 232; mouthpiece for, 275; school desegregation opposition of, 282 White flight, 277, 281 White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, 188–89 white nationalism, current, 330 white privilege: Neshoba County Fair and, 237–38; nineteenth-century women journalists and, 41–42; Power, K., and, 30 white supremacy, myth of, 35; Bourbons approach to, 242; Cain and, 42, 73, 329–30; Hederman family hegemonic network of, 228–30; Hederman family mouthpiece for, 5; Ogden as perpetuating, 57, 329; Power, J. L., role in maintaining, 32–33; statewide network of support for, 141; women journalists in support of, 13–14 Whitt, Jan (biographer), 16–17 Wicker, Tom, 231 Wilds, Richard “Uncle Dick” (great grandfather of Patriquin), 217 Wilkie, Curtis, 7, 231, 286 Williams, John Bell, 246 Winter, Elise (wife of Winter, W.), 284 Winter, William (governor), 110, 117– 19, 123, 247, 283; disparities noticed by, 280; education reform efforts, 270–86, 288–90; Fentress and, 313; gubernatorial bid, 282; news media sought by, 285; special session called by, 288, 289–90; women nominees and, 123 Wolfe, Anna, 336 “Woman’s Congress of Representative Women,” 39–40 “A Woman’s Place in Politics” (Fentress), 316–17

Index

woman suffrage: Southern hegemony threatened by, 26, 29, 36. See also antisuffrage campaign women: clubs, 72; commission on status of, 155, 247; International Women’s Year, 160; in workforce, 306–7, 313. See also sexual discrimination; specific organizations; specific topics women botanists, 19th-century, 39 women candidates, 154–55. See also Gandy, Evelyn Women for Constitutional Government (WCG), 52–53, 62–64; Cain alignment with, 72, 73–74 Women in the Press (Bradley), 312 women journalists: AP first, 13; balancing act of, 306; collegeeducated, 185; contemporary Mississippi, 339; dangers for Black, 337–39; discrimination faced by political correspondents, 13; EEOC filings of, 144, 145; failure expectations about, 109; Fentress advice to new, 333; first managing editors, 12–13; “firsts” of, 331–32; future Mississippi, 336–37; Hederman, R., first hires of, 6; heroic figure for, 43; hesitation to hire, 186–88, 202, 269; inappropriate topics for, 103–4; locker rooms barred to, 185, 222–23; male editors role in careers of, 307; marriage, motherhood identifier of, 187; 1970s-1980s Mississippi, 3; nineteenth-century, privilege and, 41–42; Old South and, 55, 56; postwar rhetoric and,

403

104–5; pregnancy rule for, 222, 269; previous scholarship on, 12–13, 21n79; scholarship on nineteenthcentury, 14; small-town newspapers option for early, 304, 306; Southern womanhood image and, 9, 15, 122–23; state capitol beat first, 10; in support of racism, 18, 22n101; in support of white supremacy, 13–14; surnames of, 3; topics covered by, 312–13; as underpaid, 306–7; uninvited sexual advances toward, 185. See also specific journalists; specific topics women’s pages, four F’s of, 12, 21n79, 104 women’s rights (women’s movement), 5, 144, 270, 330–31; southern whites contempt for, 35 Women’s Strike for Equality March, 122 Woodward, Bob, 182, 218 workforce, women in, 306–7; percentage and pay, 313 Works Progress Administration, 305 world government, Ogden fear of, 57, 63 World’s Columbian Exposition, 25 Wright, Fielding (governor), 60 Wynn, Ellis E., 83 “Yankee” journalists, stigma of, 192–93 “Yankee” troublemaker, Neuman as, 236 Young, Andrew (UN ambassador), 204, 290 Young, Jim, 193 Zeller, Bob, 248

About the Author

Pete Smith is an associate professor of communication and media studies in the Department of Communication at Mississippi State University. A native Mississippian, Pete is a proud graduate of the state’s public educational system. He holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from Mississippi State, a master’s in communication from Auburn University, and a PhD in mass communication from The University of Southern Mississippi. Pete’s research interests include the study of twentieth-century broadcasting and print history, politics, and gender-related issues in the media. He is the author of Something on My Own: Gertrude Berg and American Broadcasting, 1929– 1956 (Syracuse University Press, 2007) and has published several academic articles on the aforementioned topics. He is currently working on a biography of blacklisted actor and labor leader Philip Loeb for the University Press of Mississippi.

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