Mac Secrest, Editor Who Crusaded Against Segregation, Dead at 86

By: A.M. "Mac" Secrest, editor of a small weekly newspaper who crusaded against Southern resistance to desegregation in the 1950s, has died. He was 86.

David Secrest says his father died Saturday in Chapel Hill after complications from throat cancer surgery.

"Mac" Secrest also served as a federal mediator in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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

Secrest pressed his views despite threats of violence, attacks on his home and menacing signs placed in his yard.