Mississippi Freelance

Last updated

Mississippi Freelance was a liberal monthly newspaper, with the stated mission of "reporting the otherwise unreported." The paper was edited by Lew Powell and Ed Williams, who were working at the time as reporters for the Greenville, Mississippi Delta Democrat Times (under editor Hodding Carter III) and articles were written by volunteer reporters. [1]

Contents

History

Editors Powell and Williams explicitly chose not to make Mississippi Freelance an underground publication. In 1969, Powell told a reporter for The Delta Review:

Undergrounds are largely ineffective in changing the political situation because they're so far removed from it. We want Mississippi Freelance to analyze the system, not ignore it... I hope to have a sizable Establishment readership that's concerned with how their tax money is being spent and so forth. You can seek exposes without having to be liberal, conservative, or without touting any other cause. And there's idiocy in government that needs exposing no matter what your political stripe. [2]

The name of the newspaper was chosen to parody an old newspaper, the Mississippi Free Lance, which had been published by former Mississippi governor and U.S. Senator Theodore G. Bilbo, an ardent white supremacist. [3] The Freelance criticized racism and ineptitude in Mississippi politicians, universities, and particularly the state's Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. [3]

At the time of the paper's founding, Powell and Williams shared a rental house on Washington Avenue in Greenville, which also served as the business and editorial offices for Mississippi Freelance. [2]

Williams told the Delta Review:

As a journalist, I see stories all the time that are just crying to be written. I want a chance to write them, to spend time on them, if necessary. [2]

Powell correctly predicted the longevity of Mississippi Freelance in that interview:

I have some money saved, and I'm single. This is the only time I'll be able to try something like this. We won't expect this thing to go over financially. We'll probably print 12 issues and shut down. [2]

Mississippi Freelance was published from April 1969 to March 1970, with a twelve-issue run and about 700 subscribers in Mississippi and elsewhere. [4] Its first issue in April 1969 included an interview with New York congressman Allard Lowenstein; a humor piece by Williams pointing out that "many of the men on top of Mississippi's power heap" were former cheerleaders; and an exclusive interview by Powell with an officer in the Memphis Invaders, an African American militant group. Four thousand copies of this first issue were mailed to legislators, lawyers, and people on mailing lists prepared by friends. [2]

After the second issue, which included a "provocative piece on Mississippi hippies," Powell left the Delta Democrat Times to focus full-time on Mississippi Freelance. [2]

Mississippi Freelance ceased publication in March 1970. [1]

Curtis Wilkie was the paper's Washington bureau chief.

On October 11, 2016, Mississippi Freelance editors Lew Powell and Ed Williams spoke about the publication at the University of Mississippi in the Meek School of Journalism and New Media. [5]

Related Research Articles

The Daily Bugle is a fictional New York City tabloid newspaper appearing as a plot element in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The Daily Bugle is a regular fixture in the Marvel Universe, most prominently in Spider-Man comic titles and their derivative media. The newspaper first appeared in the Human Torch story in Marvel Mystery Comics No. 18, returned in Fantastic Four No. 2, and its offices first shown in The Amazing Spider-Man No. 1. The Daily Bugle was first featured on film in the 2002 film Spider-Man. The fictional newspaper is meant to be a pastiche of both the New York Daily News and the New York Post, two popular real-life New York City tabloids.

<i>Houston Chronicle</i> Newspaper in Houston, Texas, USA

The Houston Chronicle is the largest daily newspaper in Houston, Texas, United States. As of April 2016, it is the third-largest newspaper by Sunday circulation in the United States, behind only The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. With its 1995 buy-out of long-time rival the Houston Post, the Chronicle became Houston's newspaper of record.

Underground press

The terms underground press or clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant group. In specific recent Asian, American and Western European context, the term "underground press" has most frequently been employed to refer to the independently published and distributed underground papers associated with the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s in India and Bangladesh in Asia, in the United States and Canada in North America, and the United Kingdom and other western nations. It can also refer to the newspapers produced independently in repressive regimes. In German occupied Europe, for example, a thriving underground press operated, usually in association with the Resistance. Other notable examples include the samizdat and bibuła, which operated in the Soviet Union and Poland respectively, during the Cold War.

<i>East Village Other</i>

The East Village Other was an American underground newspaper in New York City, issued biweekly during the 1960s. It was described by The New York Times as "a New York newspaper so countercultural that it made The Village Voice look like a church circular."

Hodding Carter American writer

William Hodding Carter, II, was a Southern U.S. progressive journalist and author.

<i>The Clarion-Ledger</i> Newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi, US

The Clarion Ledger is an American daily newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi, predominantly featuring sports news. It is the second-oldest company in the state of Mississippi, and is one of the few newspapers in the nation that continues to circulate statewide. It is an operating division of Gannett River States Publishing Corporation, owned by Gannett.

The Mississippi Business Journal is a statewide weekly business newspaper, located in Jackson, Mississippi.

Hodding Carter III

William Hodding Carter III is an American journalist and politician. He was Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs in the Jimmy Carter administration.

Clinton Bernard LeSueur is an American politician and journalist. A native of Holly Springs, Mississippi, he resides in Washington, D.C.

Mary Dawson Cain was an American newspaper editor, political activist, and gubernatorial candidate in Mississippi. A Democrat, she advocated for conservative causes and is particularly remembered for her campaigns against the Social Security tax. She ran for Governor of Mississippi in 1951 and 1955, the first woman to do so.

"Go, Mississippi" is the regional anthem of Mississippi, adopted as the official state song on May 17, 1962.

The Delta Democrat Times is a daily newspaper that has been published in Greenville, Mississippi, United States since 1938, when Hodding Carter merged his Delta Star, which he started with his wife Betty Werlein in 1936, with the Democrat Times, which had been in publication since 1868, calling it the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times. The paper was home to Carter's editorial columns, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1946. His son Hodding Carter, III, took control of the paper upon his death. The first black editor of the paper, Donald V. Adderton, took over in 2000 and served until 2004.

Curtis Wilkie

Curtis Wilkie is an American journalist, college professor and historian of the American South. He is the author of numerous books including When Evil Lived in Laurel: The White Knights and the Murder of Vernon Dahmer and Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South. Historian Douglas Brinkley has written that, "Over the past four decades no reporter has critiqued the American South with such evocative sensitivity and bedrock honesty as Curtis Wilkie."

Joseph S. Clarks and Robert F. Kennedys tour of the Mississippi Delta United States Senators investigative tour of the Mississippi Delta

United States Senator Joseph S. Clark and Senator Robert F. Kennedy toured the Mississippi Delta on April 10, 1967. At the behest of civil rights lawyer Marian Wright, Clark and Kennedy, together with two other Senators, traveled to Mississippi to investigate reports of extreme poverty and starvation. Following a field hearing, they drove from Greenville to Clarksdale, stopping and touring impoverished communities as they went. Deeply disturbed by what they saw, the senators returned to Washington D.C. and began pushing for a series of reforms to alleviate the situation. Extensive media coverage of the event exposed the American public to real instances of malnutrition and starvation. The country was shocked and hunger became an important topic nationwide as people began looking for solutions. Efforts by the government and political action groups ultimately resulted in the problem being largely reduced by the 1970s.

1967 Mississippi gubernatorial election

The 1967 Mississippi gubernatorial election took place on November 7, 1967, in order to elect the Governor of Mississippi. Incumbent Democrat Paul B. Johnson Jr. was term-limited, and could not run for reelection to a second term.

Lew Powell is an American journalist, author, and newspaper editor. He began his career by founding and editing the independent liberal monthly newspaper Mississippi Freelance. He reported and edited for TheCharlotte Observer for thirty-four years and has written several books about North Carolina.

Mississippi Highway 438 is a state highway in western Mississippi. The route starts at MS 1 in Wayside and travels eastward. The road travels through farmland and intersects U.S. Route 61 and its old alignment near Arcola. MS 438 continues eastward and ends at Sunflower River Road and Kinlock Road on the Washington–Sunflower county line near Kinlock. The route was constructed around 1950, connecting from MS 1 to US 61. The route was extended to the Washington–Sunflower county line by 1958, and to US 49W in Inverness by 1960. The section east of the county line was removed from the route by 1974.

The Democrat-Reporter is a local weekly newspaper in Linden, Alabama, United States. It was established in 1911 from the merger of the Linden Reporter and the Marengo Democrat. The newspaper was published by the Sutton family for over a century, with Goodloe Sutton running it from 1985 to 2019. The newspaper won national acclaim in the 1990s for its investigation of a corrupt county sheriff, but was met with criticism in early 2019 over an editorial from Sutton calling for the return of the Ku Klux Klan.

Howard Goodloe Sutton is an American newspaper editor, publisher, and owner. From 1964 to 2019, he published The Democrat-Reporter, a small weekly newspaper in Linden, Alabama. Sutton was widely celebrated in 1998 for publishing over four years a series of articles that exposed corruption in the Marengo County Sheriff's Office; he received awards and commendations and was suggested as a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2019, Sutton once again became the focus of national attention when he wrote and published an editorial suggesting the Ku Klux Klan be revived to "clean out" Washington, D.C. He already had a local reputation for other, similarly inflammatory racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, and homophobic editorials.

Betty Werlein Carter was an American publisher, editor and writer.

References

  1. 1 2 "Mississippi Freelance Records, 1968-1972". finding-aids.lib.unc.edu. Retrieved 2017-09-19.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Greenwood, Sterling (August 1969). "The Mississippi Freelance -- Mission: Expose". Delta Review: 40–89.
  3. 1 2 Wilkie, Curtis (2001). Dixie . New York, NY: Scribner. p.  187.
  4. ↑ "Abstract". Mississippi Freelance Records, 1968-1972. The Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill. Retrieved 23 April 2013.
  5. ↑ "Remembering the 'Mississippi Freelance'". YouTube. Retrieved 20 October 2016.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.