However, I had other scrapes with Jim Crow insanity. In high school I rode the city bus to school. The bus route was called Whitfield-Mill-Lynch and ran from an industrial area on Mill Street, where it picked up some white riders, to Ash Street, turning onto Lynch into a black neighborhood where the all-black Jim Hill School used to be located and where the black Masonic Temple is now. On that route in the 1940s, many times I and others my age defied the driver and the laws of Mississippi to sit in front of the “colored” sign. The driver would get angry and yell, “You’re violating the law. You can’t sit in front of that sign.” I remember distinctly one day when there was a white man sitting in front of the sign; some of my schoolmates and I got up and went forward to his section. He said, “You can’t ignore me, I’m a white man.” We said, “So what.” He got up. The driver stopped. The white man got off.
We got away with it, but this kind of bucking of the system on buses could be quite dangerous. Twenty years later the burned-out buses and mass arrests of freedom riders showed the risk. However, long before that era, young Medgar Evers defied the color line, riding a bus from Meridian to Jackson in front of the sign. The driver stopped the bus and beat Medgar with his fists. When Medgar still wouldn’t move, the driver called the police and had him arrested. One of my fraternity brothers tells about riding a bus to Camp Shelby at Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for induction into the army. Once the bus passed through the gate to the base, one of the black men stood up and said, “Well, we’re on a federal reservation now. I’m not gonna sit in the back of the bus anymore,” and he moved to the front. The driver stopped and called a white MP; they beat this young fellow unconscious. Or, as my friend put it, “They beat him so bad that he lost his manners.”
In Jim Crow days in Mississippi, you just never knew what might come down on you. You could be brutalized unexpectedly. If you struck back, it was almost guaranteed that you would be arrested, manhandled, and further brutalized by the authorities themselves without any real opportunity to prove your case. A good deal of exhaustion comes from anticipation or expectation of unpredictable brutality. You didn’t have to imagine racial brutality in Mississippi. Insults, humiliations, beatings, rapes, and lynchings were very real. They are well documented. And as older children we knew about them. Having been personally subjected to a part of that as a child, I can assure you those things existed.
Jim Crow segregation was a heavy burden for the soul, even if it did not always bend your body down. The title of a Bettye Parker Smith short story included in Fathers’ Songs: Testimonies by African-American Sons and Daughters is “God Didn’t Live in Mississippi Then,” but, in spite of it all, I think he did live here even back then. God was here then, or we wouldn’t be here now. God showed up in loving families and in concerned neighbors and community leaders. He gave us true churches, strong heroes, and a faith so powerful that our dreams never died. You couldn’t explain why I and others became civil rights activists without understanding the importance of these gifts in shaping us.
I am happy and thank God for having grown up in a Christian family. My mother, Alean Jackson Mason, was a gentle and wise person. As a girl she had attended a little one-room public school in Hinds County called Orange Hill School. As far back as I can remember, she worked at home as housewife and full-time mother. My mother sang spirituals and religious songs from her heart, and she could sing them one right after the other. Her gentleness and sensitivity were in the songs she sang. The first I ever heard of the Titanic and all those sad deaths was when she sang the song “The Day the Titanic Went Down.” Then she sang about the great flood of 1927 and the great storm in 1928 in Tupelo, and all the people who had nowhere to go. From Mother, I heard about a lynching that she had seen or was told of as a child. She said that to keep the poor victim from crying out, the lynchers had stuffed his mouth with mud. What a thing for a mother to have to share with a son.
My father, Willie Atwood Mason, lived the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:31). The sayings of Jesus—”Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33) or the greatest commandment, “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength,” and the second like unto it, “Love thy neighbor as thyself’ (Mark 12:30–31)—were my daddy’s credos. He was an upright man who wouldn’t let me as a teenager work in any downtown hotel because “things go on there that a boy’s eyes should not see.” My parents saw to it that I grew up going to Sunday school and church at the St. James Missionary Baptist Church on the corner of Jones and Cleveland in Jackson.
But, now, my daddy was a fighter. He talked freedom as far back as I can remember. In fact, there have been fighters in my family all of my life. My daddy, my brother, and, long before me, my grandfather and great-great-grandfather had the reputation of fighting for freedom and liberty. My father, Willie Atwood Mason, started out as a farmer, as had his father, Walter Harrison Mason. Both eventually became barbers and moved from rural Hinds County to Jackson. My dad and his family moved to Chicago in 1922 as part of the great black migration north looking for jobs. After working at the American Can Company for a while, my daddy decided to return to Jackson in 1926 or ‘27 and resume barbering. He worked for two barbershops before he got his own place, called Mason’s Barbershop, which was and still is located in back of the Alamo Theater in the historic Farish Street district. He eventually moved out on Hamilton Street, where he worked until he died in 1958. When the spies of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission started investigating me in the late fifties and early sixties, they reported that I was “the son of Willie Atwood Mason, the prominent barber on Hamilton Street.”
My father stood for excellence and was beyond reproach. He believed in excellence in all things. Regardless of who you were, black or white, if you were not doing right, if you did not do well or if you did not do the best you could, you would incur the wrath of a gentleman who, in no uncertain words, would let you know that you could do better. He would preach excellence to you. On the other hand, if you did well at something, he would compliment you, white or black. So he gave praise without racial bias, and he gave criticism without bias. He had a clean shop, and his customers came first. Willie Atwood Mason would not stand for mediocrity, and he would not stand for any vulgarity, loudmouthing, or rowdy conduct in his shop. He had a way, a demeanor of command, of uprightness and straightforwardness. I gathered some of that, I think, from him. My daddy was very well respected, so white folks didn’t fool with him.
My grandfather, Walter Harrison Mason, had farmed and barbered before moving to Chicago, but he was also a Baptist preacher. A horse trade reveals my grandfather’s scrappy nature. It seems that, as a youth, my daddy once bought and paid for two horses from two white crooks. Claiming that my dad hadn’t paid, the white men came to my grandfather’s place to try to take the horses away from him. The confrontation got heated, and my grandfather produced a shotgun. “Get on the porch, Atwood,” my grandfather ordered. Then, to the white men he said, “If you come in the yard, I’ll let you have it,” meaning he would shoot to defend his son’s property. The white men left. My daddy kept his horses.
In due course, I learned about my great-great-grandfather, Harrison Mason, born a slave in Virginia in 1792, but transported before the Civil War to Mississippi, where he became the slave of D. M. Birdsong. I never knew Harrison Mason personally, of course, but I knew that it was said that when the Civil War fighting came to Mississippi, Harrison Mason, though up in years, went to the Union lines. He enlisted as a private in Company H, Eleventh Louisiana Colored Infantry, and fought for freedom. After the war, we know he signed a sharecropper’s contract with D. M. Birdsong. In spite of the harsh terms of his sharecropper’s contract, by selling his labor and that of his children off the Birdsong plantation, Harrison Mason saved enough to buy 360 acres of his own near Bolton, Mississippi.
He died at ninety-eight years of age in 1890. Our family patriarch was a distinctive figure around Bolton. Even though two of his sons had reportedly shot a sheriff of Hinds County and escaped to the hills, Harrison Mason himself commanded respect and admiration from a variety of people. Harrison Mason kept to his agreements. He paid his debts conscientiously. My aunt Lois, my dad’s oldest sister, now in her nineties, says that the Indians around Bolton at the turn of the century still remembered the old man as “tall like a pine tree, black like tar, and talk like a radio.” That was Harrison Mason, my great-great-grandfather.
As I grew up in the 1930s, the sufferings of slavery were still living memories much talked about by the old folks in our family. I actually met my great-grandfather on my father’s side, Jeremiah Trotter, who was born a slave in 1850, and I met my great-grandmother, Jenny Brown Trotter, who was born a slave in 1857. On his deathbed in a sparsely furnished room warmed by a potbellied stove, old Jerry Trotter urged us, his great-grandchildren, to gather close so he could see us. I was only eight or nine years old, but my memory of the scene still moves me to tears. I knew more about Jenny Brown Trotter, who lived to be ninety. Jenny’s father and her owner was a white man named Hastings Sandridge. Her mother was a slave woman named Eliza. We called Jenny, our great-grandmother, “Maw.” She was a great church worker and community worker in her prime. She was also very aggressive. It is said that, as a child six years old, Jenny had the audacity to order federal troops off our plantation. I could just see her doing it, too. Maw died in Chicago in 1946. I learned that my great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Calvin Augustus Jackson, Sr., a slave, also had a white father, a man named Addams, who seems to have kept a white family in Natchez and a black family around Yazoo City. We think Addams was a Republican National Committeeman after the Civil War. In freedom, Calvin Augustus Jackson, Sr., had the character to choose to act as father to a little girl not his own, my blond, blue-eyed, light-skinned, great-aunt Delia, who came into this world when a white overseer raped her mother (my great-grandmother) in a cornfield. When freedom came, Calvin Augustus Jackson, Sr., would not take his father’s white family name, Addams. He chose instead to call himself Jackson. In freedom, Harrison Mason also refused to take the Birdsong name of his last master. I am proud to be descended from strong black men and women. As a child, how could I know them or know about them and not breathe in some of their spirit?
I grew up in poverty, but I didn’t know I was poor. We lived in an urban neighborhood, but we did not have electricity until 1938 or ‘39 when I was ten or eleven. We used outhouses almost all of my childhood. We did not have indoor toilets or indoor running water at our house until 1943. We had one spigot on the back porch and one in the front yard but no indoor sink or commode. We were too poor for luxuries like birthday parties or birthday gifts. My wife, Natalie, made me my first birthday cake after I was grown. I was the baby in our family. I had a brother, Willie Louis Mason, six years older than I, and an older sister named Rozelia. Still, my parents managed to afford some kindergarten for me at a sort of daycare/kindergarten called Robinson’s Kindergarten in a private home on Booker Street. My father made it a point every year to buy each of his children his or her own separate set of school textbooks. When we brought home our teachers’ book lists, if we all had a dictionary on our list, then each of us got a new Thorndike dictionary, the red-backed ones. There were no hand-me-down textbooks either. Daddy made sure we each had new books every year until the state started providing them free in the 1940s. There was no doubt that our parents placed a premium on school and expected us to do our best.
We had close ties to a large extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins. This definitely gave us a real sense of security. It also gave us many warm, good times. I had the advantage of knowing both of my grandmothers well. My mother’s mother, Mary Williams Jackson Evans, or Sis, as we called her, lived on a farm in the Orange Hill community near Bolton-Edwards about thirty-two miles from Jackson. She is buried in the little Orange Hill Baptist Church cemetery along with both of my parents. My brother, sister, and I spent some of our Christmas vacations with Sis. I’ll always remember that she had a dogtrot house. That is a house made up of two cabins side by side under a common roof but with an open air hallway, or “dogtrot,” down the middle between the front and back porches. My grandmother had a kitchen and rooms on one side of the dogtrot and bedrooms on the other side. The walls were plastered with newspaper held up with glue made from flour, but the floors were immaculate. They had been scrubbed such that the grains in the wood stood out as if they had been hand polished. Knowing her, they probably had been. Sis had a big fireplace where we would roast potatoes. We wrapped potatoes in mud, then buried them in the hot coals in the fireplace and sat around, and Sis would tell us stories of things near and far. From Sis we heard about the Civil War battle at nearby Champion Hill, when Grant marched on Vicksburg. Or we heard about the Titanic, or the great Mississippi flood of 1927.
I saw my share of cotton growing on Sis’s farm, and I would go in late summer to help pick it for her. Those dry bolls, when you reach to take the cotton out, go up under your fingernails and stick you and give you sore fingers. I stayed one whole summer in the country with Eugene “Uncle Buddy” Wallace and his family. The Wallaces were relatives on my mother’s side. They gave me many good times, taught me to love molasses and gravy, and took me to a Full Gospel Baptist church. (The Full Gospel movement among black Baptists emphasized worship in which tambourines, drums, cymbals, trumpets, and other musical instruments were used, as sanctioned in Old Testament accounts of the dedication of Solomon’s temple in 2 Chronicles 5:13 and in the exhortations to praise found in Psalms 150:3–6.)
When I was sixteen years old, I started spending summers working in Chicago, where I lived with my dad’s mother, Effie Trotter Mason, or “Little Mama,” and with Dad’s sister, Lois. I am so grateful for the gift of my extended family. With so much love and acceptance and support from these and so many others around me, how could I not develop a strong sense of dignity and self-respect? Isn’t that the starting point for respecting others and for respecting all human rights?
There were also important saving graces in the larger black community that surrounded me as I grew up. Housing, of course, was generally segregated all over Jackson. We lived in the black section in southwest Jackson called the Washington Addition, which had its own post office that we called Goudy. We took pride in Goudy as a distinct community where we had the only swimming hole in Jackson. Black kids from all over Jackson came to swim at our hole, and, of course, many friendly fights broke out. The best swimmers in Jackson, though, came from the Washington Addition. Without any formal training, I was able to make the Tennessee State swimming team when I went to college. We were proud of Goudy, and I was proud that folks there called my assistant scoutmaster, Albert Powell, “the unofficial mayor” of Goudy.
Mr. Powell is an example of what was wholesome and good in that community. There were men and women who were dedicated to the development of our youths. There were black ladies in Jackson who stood for something in civic life and civil rights, and there were men who were doing things with boys, and who were preparing boys to do things. Because my own high school teachers and even the professors at Jackson State College would go the extra mile beyond the call of duty, they gave me a full life as a high school student in spite of a Jim Crow budget. We had several English teachers who wanted us to be as adept in literature as we were in grammar. They had us memorize poems like “Invictus” and “Crossing the Bar” or lines from Shakespeare. When I was in seventh grade, I could recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. My son, Gilbert, Jr., learned it at age five. These and other literary and Bible passages committed to memory have served me well over the years. One of my English teachers, Ms. Mabel Wesley, a graduate of Rust College, especially caught my attention during World War II as she taught us Macbeth and its relevance to understanding the struggle for power in the world. She also pointed us
to thoughts from Frederick Douglass, who maintained that power does not respect anything but power—never has, never will. From Frederick Douglass I came to understand that you might not get all that you pay for in this life, but you will pay for all you get. You cannot reap the crops without plowing up the ground. So Frederick Douglass concluded that struggle it must be, whether physical or mental. I was a good student who generally made all A’s, and I certainly understood the implications of Shakespeare and Frederick Douglass.
When several of us decided to form a club called Boys’ Forum at Lanier, we found Coach Ben Allen Blackburn II willing to give up his time to sponsor it and to bring us together with people from various walks of life; we talked and learned etiquette, protocol, and hygiene. Later, when a number of us in Boys’ Forum organized another club called the SPECs, or Social, Political, and Economic Club, Professor T. B. Ellis of the Jackson State athletic department took time to meet with us and mentor us. For the first few meetings of the SPECs, Professor Ellis presided until we elected Walter Washington, later to be president of Alcorn University, as our club president. Now, I had a bad habit of sometimes undiplomatically interrupting people in meetings if I wanted to know something. One night I undiplomatically interrupted Professor Ellis. He shot back, “Mr. Mason, do you rise to a point of personal privilege?” I said, “No, sir.” “Do you rise to make a motion to adjourn, or take a recess, or fix the time at which to adjourn or any other privileged motion?” I said, “No.” He said, “Well, what you are saying is out of order.” “Why is it out of order?” I asked. He said, “Because Robert’s Rules of Order says it’s out of order.” I said, “Who’s Robert?” The next day I bought myself a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order, and I studied it. From that point in high school on, you would not find Robert’s Rules of Order too far from me, nor would you find my Bible too far from me, and that still holds. I was glad when they named a building for Professor Ellis at Jackson State.
Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Page 3