A.M. “Mac” Secrest, small-town Southern editor who campaigned against segregation, dies at 86

Secrest, anti-segregation SC editor, dies at 86

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — A.M. “Mac” Secrest, who as editor of a small-town South Carolina newspaper crusaded against Southern resistance to desegregation in the 1950s, has died. He was 86.

Secrest also served as a federal mediator throughout the Deep South during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Secrest died Saturday at the University of North Carolina Memorial Hospital after complications from surgery for throat cancer, his son, David, said Tuesday.

“He was a true Southern gentleman who stood up for integration. He was very strong on humanitarian issues,” said Richard Cole, the former dean of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill. “He also was a very warmhearted and giving person who was loved and respected by his students.”

Secrest was the owner and publisher of The Cheraw Chronicle, a weekly in northeastern South Carolina. He criticized segregationists who followed a strategy of massive resistance after the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision on school integration in Brown v. Board of Education.

Secrest refused to be silenced, despite threats of violence, attacks on his home and menacing signs placed in his yard.

Author and journalist Hank Klibanoff, who co-wrote “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation,” praised Secrest as “a rarity whose courageous editorial voice in the 1950s and 1960s revealed there were cracks in the bulwark of the segregationist South where rational and progressive thinking could survive.”

Klibanoff said Secrest “editorially challenged segregationist Southern editors who fiercely advocated massive resistance, upheaval and opposition to the law.” By remaining civil and not engaging in personal attacks, Secrest retained the respect of the editors with whom he battled and kept the paper alive for 15 years, Klibanoff said.

When he was inducted into the UNC School of Journalism’s Hall of Fame in 2007, the school lauded Secrest for steadfastly maintaining his opposition to discriminatory practices advanced by Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and other segregationists of the era.

After selling the Chronicle, Secret taught journalism at Chapel Hill for five years. He moved to North Carolina Central University in Durham in 1976 to help establish its Department of Communications and worked there for nine years until he retired.

Andrew McDowd Secrest Jr. was born Sept. 15, 1923 in Monroe, N.C. He graduated from Duke University in 1944 and earned a Ph.D. in history there in 1972.

During World War II, he served as an officer aboard the USS. Hammann, a destroyer escort. He and Ann Louise Eastman of Concord, N.H., married in 1948. After the war, Secrest worked for newspapers in New York state and in North Carolina, including The Laurinburg Exchange and The Charlotte News.