the state: African Americans were fired for being members of the NAACP, others were evicted from rental housing, and some businesses were boycotted in an effort to suppress activism. In 1959, the Citizens' Council in Holmes County started the Holmes County Herald to compete with Smith's newspaper, The Lexington Advertiser. In 1960, Smith received the Elijah P. Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism from the International Conference of Weekly Newspaper Editors and Southern Illinois University. On Halloween 1960, an eight-foot tall cross was burned on the lawn of her home. While this was a sign of the Ku Klux Klan, she attributed the incident to teenagers having learned hate from their parents. Beginning in 1961, Smith faced an outright economic boycott on advertising, as the White Citizens Council increased its opposition after learning that she was printing jobs for African-American activists. Smith attracted support among other newspaper publishers, such as Hodding Carter, Jr. of Greenville, Mississippi. In 1961, he organized a committee to raise money to help her. In December 1961, Smith began to print the Mississippi Free Press, founded by activists in an effort to get their news out to the African-American community in the state. Most white-owned newspapers carried only negative coverage of their efforts, if any. Smith later undertook other printing jobs for African-American customers: the monthly Baptist Observer and books for the black Baptist Convention. These jobs helped support her newspaper. She also hired blacks to work in the printing plant and became more familiar with them personally and their political struggle. Smith continued to report fuller accounts of local news, for instance providing the details of the police shooting in June 1963 of Alfred Brown, an African-American Navy veteran of World War II and father of five who was fatally shot soon after being released from a mental hospital. She described the racism of the police in this incident, including their refusal to let Brown's family go to his aid. In the civil rights years and later, African Americans in Holmes County said they gained optimism from seeing her as an example of a "white person [who] showed the capacity to change and the willingness to join them." Initially Holmes County was relatively quiet in terms of civil rights activity, but this changed in 1963 and 1964. In 1964 Smith welcomed the 33 SNCC volunteers who came to the county to educate African Americans and