Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Read online

  Beaches, Blood, and Ballots

  Beaches, Blood, and Ballots

  A Black Doctor’s Civil Rights Struggle

  Gilbert R. Mason, M.D.,

  with James Patterson Smith

  Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies

  www.upress.state.ms.us

  Copyright © 2000 by Gilbert Mason and James Patterson Smith

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mason, Gilbert R.

  Beaches, blood, and ballots: a black doctor's civil rights struggle/Gilbert R. Mason, with James Patterson Smith.

  p. cm. (Margaret Walker Alexander series in African American studies)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 1-57806-278-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-1-934110-28-7

  1. Mason, Gilbert R. 2. Afro-Americans—Civil rights—Mississippi—

  Biloxi—History—20th century. 3. Afro-American physicians— Mississippi—Biloxi—Biography. 4. Afro-American civil rights workers—

  Mississippi—Biloxi—Biography. 5. Biloxi (Miss.)—Biography.

  6. Biloxi (Miss.)—Race relations. 7. Civil rights movements—

  Mississippi—Biloxi—History—20th century. 8. Mason family.

  I. Smith, James Patterson. II. Tide.

  F349.B5 M37 2000

  976.2′00496073′0092—dc21

  [B] 00-024664

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  For Natalie

  Social Worker

  Plugs at day, plugs at night,

  Helps the wrong, helps the right,

  Sometimes works without desire

  Works so well must retire.

  See my baby working hard,

  Got to make it says the Bard,

  Getting up early hitting the clock,

  Go six miles like going a block.

  Going to places smelling like rum,

  Visit the elite or visit the slum,

  There she goes never a shirker,

  That’s my baby, Social Worker.

  Gilbert R. Mason

  May 30, 1950

  Cogito, ergo sum.

  René Descartes

  Gil’s Prayer

  Thou hast sown in the fertile

  Bayous of the Father of Waters,

  Thou hast tendered the bloom

  In the garden of martyrs.

  Thou hast shepherded the foundling

  When none other bothered,

  Now Lord, spare the promise

  From premature barter.

  Thou hast embellished the spur

  And given it splendor,

  Thou hast given it strength,

  But made it tender.

  Thou hast placed in its hands

  An unfulfilled agenda,

  Now Lord, give it stay

  To praise the sender.

  Gilbert R. Mason

  April 14, 1954

  Contents

  Foreword

  Acknowledgments

  ONE: Beginnings

  TWO: Preparation for Service

  THREE: Going Home to Serve

  FOUR: The Beach

  FIVE: The Bloody Wade-In

  SIX: Harassment, Lies, and Sovereignty Commission Spies

  SEVEN: Ballots, Beaches, and Bullets

  EIGHT: Desegregation Now!

  NINE: Community Action and Hurricane Camille

  TEN: Inclusion, Influence, and Public Responsibilities

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Index

  Foreword

  On Thursday, May 14,1959, eight months before four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College launched the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins, nine black citizens of Biloxi, Mississippi, ventured onto a forbidden spot on a twenty-six-mile-long segregated beach in open and conscious defiance of Mississippi’s Jim Crow practices. Police removed these swimmers from the Mississippi Gulf Coast beach and warned them against returning. At a time when, out of approximately ten thousand black residents of Biloxi, three were members of the NAACP, there followed months of mass meetings, public petitioning, and communitywide planning to challenge the banning of blacks from the beach through civil disobedience and federal court cases. Additional wade-ins at Biloxi the following April triggered the bloodiest race riot in Mississippi history and produced the first significant U.S. Justice Department intervention in Mississippi to challenge the state’s segregation laws in federal court.

  On April 30, 1960, New York-based reporter James L. Hicks of the Amsterdam News, in a front page feature series of articles on the Biloxi wade-ins, wrote a piece entitled “This Man Mason.” Hicks, who had covered civil rights activities throughout the South, led his story with this statement: “Little Rock has its Daisy Bates; ... Martin Luther King rose up out of the racial turmoil of Montgomery, Alabama, and now Biloxi, Miss., has its Dr. Gilbert Mason.” With this salute, Hicks recognized the Biloxi wade-ins as marking the beginning of the civil rights movement in Mississippi. In retrospect, it is now clear that these wade-ins heralded the opening salvo in a sustained series of Mississippi Gulf Coast wade-ins and lawsuits that for the first time successfully challenged the state’s segregation laws.

  Almost simultaneously, the local organizers of the Biloxi wade-ins began working on one of the earliest Mississippi school desegregation suits, a suit which, in 1964, for the first time anywhere in Mississippi, opened the doors of public schools to black children and white children on a nonracial basis. The local moving force behind all of these Mississippi civil rights milestones was Dr. Gilbert Mason of Biloxi. Dr. Mason, a black medical doctor and native Mississippian, was the founder and president of the Biloxi branch of the NAACP and for thirty-three years was a vice president of the Mississippi Conference of the NAACP while Aaron Henry was its president.

  This book is Dr. Mason’s, presenting his story from his point of view. In the larger sweep of civil rights historiography, Dr. Mason’s firsthand account illuminates a neglected but profoundly important level of the civil rights movement and civil rights leadership. Without the inspiration, determination, courage, and harrowing sacrifices of countless individuals working at the local level to dismantle Jim Crow limb by limb and branch by branch in small cities and towns across the South, the success of the civil rights movement would have been truncated and of limited significance. Beginning with the 1954 Brown case, the U.S. Supreme Court destroyed the legal doctrine underpinning racially segregated schools and brought into question the legality of a wide array of other segregationist laws and practices long thought to be deeply ingrained in a distinctive southern way of life. The national heroes and spokesmen of the civil rights era are well known. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, and James Farmer, and the national organizations which they represented, have long been associated in the public mind with the moral, legislative, and legal crusade to banish racial discrimination and segregation from American life.

  Change in the law at the national level created opportunity for a revolution in political and social practices in the South. However, the realization of this opportunity required committed individuals in hundreds of cities and towns across the South who were willing to face up to the fearsome task of challenging entrenched segregationist power structures at the local level to claim the rights and benefits guaranteed under the constitution and laws of the United States. Challenging long-lived social customs or power arrangements is never easy. That Jim Crow’s peculiar and demeaning system of back-of-the-bus mandates and practices including racially separate and unequa
l schools, waiting rooms, parks, drinking fountains, rest rooms, and public accommodations was swept away in less than a generation is largely due to the idealism, intelligence, and long-suffering perseverance of countless local leaders who rose to the occasion, took new ground, and made change a reality in cities and towns across the South.

  As a primary source document, Dr. Mason’s memoir contributes to an evolving historical understanding of several important questions. First, why did individuals at the local level decide to risk jobs or careers, personal safety, and even their lives for the movement? What types of men and women became local civil rights leaders? What models or ideals guided them? How were their ideals shaped? What did they expect to gain through the risks and sacrifices they undertook? Second, this memoir offers insight into the origins of local strategy and tactics. How did local leaders build the clusters of local followers and supporters necessary to sustain their efforts over a period of years? How did the organization of the local civil rights struggle evolve? To what extent were local civil rights activities spontaneous and indigenous to the communities in which they arose, and to what extent were they prompted by leaders and issues beyond the local community? Who determined the points of attack? Was local or national leadership in control? Finally, from the point of view of a front-line veteran in the civil rights struggle, were the achievements of the movement worth the price paid? How did those who risked themselves in the campaign for desegregation view the emerging voices of black separatism? In addressing these and other questions, Dr. Mason’s story offers a local activist’s eyewitness assessment of the incredible local changes through which Mississippi, the South, and the nation passed in the 1960s and 1970s.

  Dr. Mason’s account has further value as an important document illustrating African American life in Mississippi and the Deep South during the period from the 1930s through the 1990s. In tracing Dr. Mason’s childhood in Jackson, Mississippi, it sheds light on the life of first-generation urban, black, working-class families who remained connected to their roots on farms near the emerging cities of the South. The impact of the great migration on African American families is also seen here from the point of view of family members who remained in the South, but maintained close personal relationships with relatives in Chicago and other northern cities. Dr. Mason speaks of the higher education experiences of black physicians and of their adjustments to the restrictive circumstances under which they practiced medicine in the waning days of the Jim Crow era in the South.

  This book had its origins in a long series of tape-recorded interviews which Dr. Mason undertook in the spring and summer of 1998 for the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Southern Mississippi. Before becoming committed professionally to the lengthy interview project, I had known Dr. Mason politically, as we had both served on the state executive committee of the Mississippi Democratic Party and the Harrison County Democratic Executive Committee at various times between 1984 and 1998. As a historian, I knew that Dr. Mason had made important stands in Biloxi and that he had endured the firebombing of his office and the burning of an automobile in the struggle for the desegregation of the beach. However, I knew little of the detail of these stories. In recent years in Democratic Party life, we have most often seen Dr. Mason as our local and state party parliamentarian, in which role he was insistent, correct, strong, and unwilling to accept slipshod methods. Party executive committee members saw his strength and respected his obvious expertise in parliamentary procedure. Where we did not follow his advice, we often came to regret it. Like many of the younger members of our committee, I saw the bold strength and determined perseverance of Dr. Gilbert Mason in political settings and knew little else about him as a man. Not until the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta did I catch a glimpse of the inner man, the idealist combating in the arena of politics for convictions deeply held. One evening after a long convention session, Dr. Mason and I, along with Mayor Gerald Blessey of Biloxi, wound up in a hotel barroom sitting together at a table discussing—of all things—the Sermon on the Mount. In this setting, I discovered that the black doctor from Biloxi was also an armchair philosopher who was much concerned with Christian ethics and who was at home in theological discussions.

  Over the next few years, as a professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi, I occasionally sent students working on papers related to the civil rights movement to see if Dr. Mason might give them a few moments out of his busy day for a first-person interview. He routinely declined these and most other requests for interviews. I was therefore somewhat surprised when Judge Robin Alfred Midcalf telephoned me to ask if I would be willing to assist Dr. Mason with a book about his life. I suggested to Judge Midcalf that a good starting place for such a project would be a series of oral history interviews that could be transcribed for posterity. If the working relationship proved satisfactory to Dr. Mason and to me, we could then decide whether to take the project forward to produce a book for publication. From March through July of 1998, we undertook weekly interview sessions, which were usually conducted in Dr. Mason’s home. From sixty hours of taped interviews, five hundred typed, single-spaced pages of transcripts were produced. Over the months I gained genuine admiration and deep respect for Dr. Mason as a man of great courage, genuine faith, noble dreams, and tremendous endurance. In an atmosphere of mutual respect, we developed a good working relationship and agreed that we would continue working together to transform the interview material, enriched by Dr. Mason’s personal papers and contemporary newspaper stories, into his first-person account of the civil rights era.

  In preparation for each interview session, I constructed an agenda of questions to guide our discussion. Sometimes the information related in one session would suggest areas for fuller discussion in the next. In several instances, I decided to ask for a second account of an important episode in order to clarify events. Often, the second account produced new and richer details on tape. As we worked to organize and construct the book, fresh memories continued to be evoked and noted as enrichments to the raw interview accounts. Dr. Mason’s review of his papers, old newspapers, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission files, and drafts of proposed chapters often produced even greater detail, new recollections, and fresh insights from him that were then incorporated into the revisions of chapters. My work as a historian has been to pull Dr. Mason’s recollections together into a narrative form that presents his point of view, his interpretations, and his understanding of the situations through which he has lived. This process has resulted in a document that brings us face to face with what it meant to be black in Mississippi in the days of Jim Crow, what it cost local leaders to challenge that system, and how the success of that challenge nurtured a genuine hope for the future of America in the heart of this embattled veteran of the civil rights struggle in the South.

  James Patterson Smith

  Acknowledgments

  First of all, I wish to acknowledge and thank God Almighty for my life and for the strength that made this book and all things possible. Second, I want to thank the Mississippi legislature for funding the oral history projects proposed in the budget of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History under the leadership of Mr. Elbert Hilliard, executive director, the trustees, and the Honorable William F. Winter, president of the board. With their support and leadership the capable professional staff at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History has been able to continue and expand Mississippi’s fine Oral History and Cultural Heritage Project working through the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the University of Southern Mississippi.

  This book grew out of an oral history project involving more than sixty hours of interviews with me conducted by Dr. James Patterson Smith of the University of Southern Mississippi’s Department of History. Sincere thanks therefore go to the University of Southern Mississippi, Dr. Horace Fleming, president, and to Dr. Charles Bolton, director of the university’s Center for Oral History a
nd Cultural Heritage, whose staff members, Ms. Marie Sykes and Ms. Shana Walton, graciously typed and proofread almost five hundred single-spaced pages of interview transcriptions in an efficient and timely manner. Further, I want to thank the university for permitting Dr. Smith to use his sabbatical leave to assemble, extract, and refine the contents of the basic interview materials in an academic and coherent literary and historical manner. I am grateful for the many hours that he has spent researching, organizing, and editing the story of my life. I wish to acknowledge Dr. James “Pat” Smith and to thank him for being coauthor of my life story.

  I also thank Natalie Mason, my wife of almost half a century, who not only made my life far richer than it ever would have been without her, but who also patiently sat in on and participated in most of the original interview tapings. I thank Dr. Smith’s wife, Mrs. Jeanette Smith, who courteously tolerated my many telephone calls to her residence and proofread the book manuscript for us.

  I certainly thank my family for the generous information they provided about family matters and genealogy, much more of which is recorded and available for posterity in the transcribed interview at the McCain Archive at the University of Southern Mississippi than could be included in this book.

  I want to acknowledge my older brother, Willie Louis Mason, a retired longshoreman, who has been my tutor and mentor from childhood, and his wife, Elnora, who advised and encouraged me when I was in junior high and high school during World War II while my brother was away serving the nation in the U.S. Army on the battlefields of Europe. Later, as I worked my way through college, they opened their home and allowed me to stay with them while I worked on the Mississippi River for half the summer of 1948.

  I am eternally grateful to the whole NAACP family for their long history of dependable support for human rights endeavors. I want to especially thank the Biloxi branch of the NAACP for its many courageous and visionary stands over the years, and I thank my successor as its president, Mr. James Crowell, for his grace, his constancy as a friend, and his dauntless personality. I want to thank Samuel Yette, author of The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival, for his brotherly advice over the years.