TV REVIEWS : Honoring Editor’s Passion for Justice

With few exceptions, such as “Driving Miss Daisy” and the TV series “I’ll Fly Away,” on-screen female role models of modern-day struggles for racial justice don’t readily come to mind.

Jane Seymour has narrowed the void with a spirited portrait of a woman in the Deep South who did make a difference, although it cost her dearly.

“A Passion for Justice: The Hazel Brannon Smith Story” dramatizes the lonely, frightening vigil for racial equality waged by a flamboyant, white female editor of a small newspaper in rural Mississippi in the 1950s.

Hazel Smith, who in 1964 became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing “in the face of great pressure and opposition,” is a natural TV movie subject. And how refreshing to find a heroine who’s neither a TV anchor megastar or an abused wife and vengeful mother.

In fact, one of the throwaway pleasures in this movie is that the heroine’s marriage to a Yankee (affably played by D.W. Moffett) is a rich, loving union rarely portrayed in movies anymore.

Seymour--co-executive producer with her husband, James Keach, who also directed--revives a little-remembered Southern heroine whose human scale and beaming demeanor are welcome respite from righteous, intense movie stereotypes normally associated with courageous activists like herself.

A backwoods idealist who epitomized a fast-dwindling breed of print journalism role models, Hazel Brannon Smith is an unlikely pioneer. Under an array of big floppy hats and sophisticated fashions, Seymour’s Smith is a daring, unconventional doyenne of cultural life, a kind of Zelda Fitzgerald or Auntie Mame in radical clothing.

The sense of place in Rama Laurie Stagner’s teleplay is evocatively captured by cinematographer Ross Maehl. Sandwiched between squeaky clean bucolic charm and lifelong friends who dump her (such as Richard Kiley’s civic leader), Smith trashes local bigots in her newspaper column and literally loses all her friends in the storybook hamlet of Lexington, Miss., circa 1954.

In a milder variant of “Mississippi Burning,” her visits to the local beauty parlor turn spiteful, a black colleague in her print shop is murdered, her office is firebombed and she nearly loses her life.

* “A Passion for Justice: The Hazel Brannon Smith Story” airs Sunday on Channel 7 at 9 p.m.