Edgar Simpson of the University of Southern Mississippi is the winner of the 2022 Diversity in Media History Research Award.

The award – presented by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) – recognizes the outstanding paper in journalism or mass communication history that addresses issues of inclusion and the study of historically marginalized groups or topics. The award winner is selected from
research submitted for the annual conference competition.

Simpson won for the paper, “Spinning Hate: Mississippi’s post-Brown PR Offensive and the Secret Campaign Against “Agitators, 1956-1960.”

While all of the papers that were considered offer worthwhile insights into issues of
gender, identity, and race representation in media, this particular paper does excellent work examining an important moment in media history that continues to have implications for current moment; as the author(s) state: “These incidents, the study argues, are not just quaint echoes of a dead past, but rather a rare window into what manipulating the public sphere looks like.”

Through an examination of public relations practices in the state of Mississippi following Brown vs. Board of Education, this scholarship advances existing scholarship on the Civil Rights Movement, the press, and public relations, “by examining the extraordinary efforts of the Sovereignty Commission to maintain whiteness as policy by manipulating the public sphere through both accepted public relations practices and the more nefarious art of coercion.”

The study relies on the commission’s archives, opened to the public in 1998 after a 21-year Freedom of Information Act suit, along with other relevant historical resources, to examine the work of this commission and, more importantly, how this commission’s agenda sought nothing less than to manipulate the public sphere (alá Habermas) to gain support for its agenda of ongoing segregationist practices and policies.

This paper raises important and timely questions about the importance of information
sourcing and verification and the need for journalists to ask tough questions of public officials and organizations and the information they readily provide.

Simpson will receive a plaque and cash prize for their award-winning research.
He will also be recognized during the History Division’s business meeting on July 28th virtually.