Others in the community took time with me when they didn’t have to. College Hill Baptist Church sponsored Boy Scout Troop 58, my troop. Mr. James White, my scoutmaster, got me a job throwing the Jackson Daily News, which gave me a chance to know virtually all of south Jackson in the Washington Addition, including some subscribers in bars and honky-tonks. Mr. White was in the forefront of teaching us to be selfsustaining and aware of economics. He played the violin and taught me to love classical music. Many men and women volunteered as merit badge counselors. Mr. T. C. Elmo, a letter carrier, worked with us on aviation badges, and Mr. John Bates, my high school coach and shop teacher, helped with the wood carving badge. Mr. M. M. Hubert, the cooperative extension agent, helped us with the agriculture badge. Professor Price took me to his lab at Jackson State many evenings to go through various experiments for the chemistry badge. Mrs. Shirley, a biologist, and her husband, Professor Hardy, would take time for Saturday field trips. I thought I knew something when I could call every plant on the Jackson State campus by its Latin name. One summer I got a job landscaping and pouring sidewalks on that campus. The nurse at Jackson State worked with us Scouts on the personal fitness merit badge. It was she who first diagnosed my nearsightedness, which in turn led to my first pair of glasses at age thirteen. Professor J. Y. Woodard worked with us before school, after school, or any time you could get to him. Before I finished high school they even had me mentoring younger boys as a merit badge counselor for some badges and working as a summer camp senior counselor.
Scouting was so good to me, but so was my church. Our church, the St. James Missionary Baptist Church, had Sunday school each Sunday morning and BTU (Baptist Training Union) each Sunday evening. I seldom missed any service. The first pastor I really knew was a lady, Reverend Crawford, who wore a long black dress, and she could really preach. Deacons like Brother Earl Martin, Sr., taught us in Sunday school and BTU. After going over a lesson in small groups, we reassembled, and I was often called on to summarize the lesson for the younger kids. This helped me gain a lot of confidence in public speaking.
The two great events of my childhood happened almost simultaneously when I was twelve years old. I joined the Boy Scouts, and I “got religion” and joined the church. We had a revival meeting in our church, and I made a profession of faith. I made a vow to change—not that I was all that sinful, but I felt that I could change to adopt the ways of the Lord and embrace his teachings. Reverend T. C. Simmons baptized me outdoors in the Goudy brickyard pond. As the congregation sang “On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand…,” the candidates for baptism assembled in white robes made from sheets and waded out into the water. I was a good swimmer and had no fear, even though Reverend Simmons believed in immersing you three times in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Joining the church and joining the Scouts were two great events that just dovetailed for me. I took the Boy Scout oath seriously: “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to … help other people at all times.” And from church I knew that if I was going to be godlike, it also meant helping other people at all times.
Beyond building my self-confidence, the teachers, preachers, and Scout leaders I encountered gave me strong positive role models with powerful ideals to guide my life; they gave me heroes. When we sat around the fire at Scout camps and sang, “Softly falls the night of day, / While our camp fire fades away; / Silently each scout should ask / Have I done my daily task? / Have I kept my honor bright? / Can I guiltless rest tonight? / Have I done and have I dared / Everything to be prepared?,” I believed in those words, and I felt them. I still do as an adult. When we sang, “My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,” I believed it, and I believed in freedom even when it was being denied to me as a young black boy. Yes, I believed. And I believed in the ideals of Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale and the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. I believed the words of the Bible that God is just and loves all of his children equally. And when my scoutmaster, James A. White, and my Scout troop committeeman, Reverend R. L. T. Smith, Sr., talked freedom and civil rights to the boys, I listened. I also learned from their deeds. I knew that Reverend Smith stood for lofty principles and was a founder of the Mississippi Conference of the NAACP and of the Jackson branch. I knew that he and lames A. White ran an unofficial voter registration office, printing pamphlets and flyers and talking freedom in Mr. White’s garage in the 1940s. I knew they had kept on even when their jobs as letter carriers were threatened. I knew that my coach, John Bates, and his wife, Gladys Noel Bates, had lost their jobs when they filed suit to equalize teacher pay for blacks and whites in Mississippi. I knew that Mrs. Rose McCoy, a teacher whose dentist husband help found the Mississippi NAACP, cared enough to bring the great black opera star Marian Anderson to sing at Lanier High School, because black kids couldn’t go to events at the city auditorium. Along the way, some caring soul also brought the great singer and actor Paul Robeson to sing on the steps of Sally Reynolds Elementary School in Jackson in 1943, while we assembled on the lawn, our spirits soaring with the crescendos of freedom’s melodies. Because someone cared enough to bring him to the ears of a poor boy in Jackson, Mississippi, Paul Robeson inspired me in his songs and in his life. In Paul Robeson I found my greatest black hero.
Paul Robeson was a genius. The son of a black preacher from Philadelphia, Robeson finished first academically in his class at Rutgers, lettered four years in college sports, and in both his junior and senior years was named a college All-American in football. Robeson went on to Columbia Law School and finished tops in his class there, but decided on a career as a singer and actor. What a vibrant, warm bass voice. He sang spirituals, he sang opera, he sang in several languages, and he sang freedom. No one can sing about Joe Hill “going on to make men free” like Paul Robeson. To this day, when I hear Paul Robeson sing the lines of the old spiritual—“One of these mornings bright and fair, / I’ll spread my wings and cleave the air, / And I know my robe will fit me well, / Because I tried it on at the gates of hell”—I hear an authentic voice of the African American experience. His statements against injustice and his singing for liberty and for justice to labor got him in trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, but he stayed true to his conscience. Paul Robeson became my great living black hero.
How could you be around, be with, sit at the feet of people who love liberty and not absorb some of it yourself? So many people in my childhood were inspirations to me. They reminded me, as one of the poets said, that I, too, could leave behind me “footprints in the sands of time.” They helped me believe that I, too, should try to make a difference. They helped me to find myself and to find my calling.
I had wanted to be a doctor from at least the time I was in elementary school or as far back as I can remember. I think the impetus toward medicine really grew out of my own inner makeup, although I had the good fortune to have seen and known some black physicians and dentists as a child. I visited in the home of my friend Î. F. Smith, a fellow Boy Scout, whose father was a dentist. I knew about men like Dr. Miller, who ran the Afro-American Hospital at Yazoo City, and Dr. Ñ. B. Christian and the young Dr. A. M. Hall in Jackson. On Farish Street a black physician had founded the Sally Harris Clinic, which most black families in central Jackson used for outpatient treatment rather than going to Baptist. Dr. Miller came from Yazoo City to take my tonsils out at the Sally Harris Clinic. I admired physicians and dentists, but I liked medicine because medicine was disciplined and orderly. As a child, I liked animals, and I liked the body. The mystery of life and of living functions always fascinated me. I wanted to become a doctor because doctors were scientists, and scientists explored things, and I wanted to explore things. At church I learned that Jesus wanted us to serve others, and when I became a Boy Scout and we pledged “to … help other people at all times,” that just sealed it. I truly wanted to help other people at all times. The first high school term paper I wrote was “What Is This Thing
Called First Aid?” I wanted to become a doctor for the science involved and for the Good Samaritan acts that I could do to help other people, to relieve suffering, to save lives, and to prevent disability. I knew that to serve humanity in this way meant going to college, something no one in my immediate family had ever done.
I had heard that Howard University was the best black university in the country, and that it had a good premed curriculum and a medical school. Being a straight-Α student, I was qualified, but I knew that Howard was too expensive for our budget. Tennessee State was my second choice, because I had heard that they, too, had a good premed program. However, out-of-state tuition made Tennessee State too expensive. My daddy urged me to go to Tougaloo, where he could pay the cost. I didn’t want to go to Tougaloo; not that I had anything against Tougaloo, but I wanted medicine. Seeing my resolve, Daddy found a way. “Well,” he said, “you can go to Chicago and work and live with my mother, and she won’t charge you any board. If you stay with her summers, you can save enough to go wherever you want to.”
So it was that I prepared to go to Chicago to work that summer after high school graduation, and to go on to Tennessee State in Nashville that fall. I was going into the wider world to prepare for the service to humanity that all of my ideals, my curiosities, and my faith in God called me to do. However, these same ideals and the powerful examples in the lives of the people I knew in southwest Jackson also pointed me toward leadership and toward a life committed to community activism. As I stood on the platform ready to board the train to Chicago, my daddy reached for the arm of his sixteen-year-old son, grasped it strongly, and said with emphasis, “Gilbert, be strong, steadfast, unmoved, and trust in God.” My dad’s hands grasped me again nine years later in a train station in Washington, D.C., to remind me emphatically of these same words. More inspiration was to come from the world outside Mississippi.
TWO
Preparation for Service
[T]herefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding. Exalt her, and she shall promote thee: She shall bring thee to honour, when thou dost embrace her. —Proverbs 4:7–8
I WAS ONE SORE DUDE THE NIGHT I GOT ON THE TRAIN to make the trip from Jackson to Chicago to stay with Little Mama, my dad’s mother, and work in the summer of 1945. I was sixteen years old and had just graduated from high school. That day I had gone out to Sis’s farm to say good-bye. I had made the mistake of riding old Dan one last time. Old Dan was the horse my daddy owned and kept at my grandmother’s place. Old Dan was in one of those moods where every time I got a little distance from the house, he would take off at a gallop back to the house as fast as he could go, despite my fervent efforts to reign him in. When I thought I had him stopped, he would take off again. So, before I could finally dismount, old Dan had made me physically sore. In a sense, riding old Dan was like riding the unpredictable vicissitudes of segregation in Mississippi. Old Dan’s effect had been physical. Racism’s effect was more subtle. My physical soreness I felt when I got on the train in Jackson. I did not understand the restrictive soreness imposed by segregation until I got off that train and breathed the freer air of Chicago.
My older sister, Rozelia, who had been to Chicago many times, accompanied me on the trip. When we rolled into the Twelfth Street station, Rozelia announced that we were going to catch the El, Chicago’s elevated public transit system, out to my grandmother’s apartment. When I got on the El, the only two vacant seats together were beside white folks. Now, here I am from the heart of Mississippi in 1945, and “you don’t be sitting by no white folks in Mississippi.” I was not familiar with integration at all. Anxiety hit me. I said, “Sudda, Sudda, where do I sit?” (We called my sister Sudda.) She said, “Sit anywhere, fool,” and she sat right down beside those white folks. Thoroughly intimidated and not quite knowing what to expect, I sat down beside her, and we rode uneventfully to our destination. That was an experience. My anxiety and fear had come from a soreness created by riding Jim Crow all those years in Mississippi.
My grandmother, Effie Trotter Mason, or Little Mama, as we called her, welcomed me into her home, a basement apartment at 2722 Indiana Avenue on the South Side. The apartment was noisy with streetcars going by at eye level outside and with all sorts of things going on in apartments above us, but Little Mama allowed me to work and save whatever I could for college. During my first two summers in Chicago I stayed with her. My grandmother stood less than five feet tall, but she had a powerful religious faith. Her husband and my grandfather, Walter Harrison Mason, had been a Baptist minister, and one of my uncles, Reverend Abraham Mason, was pastor of a Full Gospel Baptist Church in a converted storefront on South State Street near Comiskey Park. Little Mama and I had many long talks about religion. She was a great singer of spirituals and hymns, and she actually wrote and published several gospel songs. Her song “O Who’s Goin’ to Lead Me?” affirmed the faith that “Jesus goin’ to lead me, / O Jesus goin’ to lead me through this unfriendly world.” Little Mama’s “Hide Me, Jesus, in the Solid Rock!” was her sung prayer that “When trouble comes, as sure it will, / … Let thy light be guiding still, / Hide me, Jesus, in the solid rock.” Thomas A. Dorsey, the famous composer of the hymn “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” did the musical arrangements for Little Mama’s songs and published them. Little Mama and I went to Sunday services at Pilgrim Baptist Church on Indiana Avenue and Thirty-third Street, where she was a member of the one-hundredvoice Pilgrim Gospel Chorus.
The day after I arrived in Chicago, I went out looking for a job. I remembered that in 1922 my daddy had gone to work for the American Can Company in Chicago. As fate would have it, the first plant that I went into was a can company, the Crown Can Company. I told the manager that I was only sixteen but that I wanted to go to college in the fall and needed a job. He said, “Have you ever worked a slitter machine?” I said, “No.” I didn’t want to ask what a slitter was, but he showed me the machines and how they worked in the can-making process to cut large sheets of tin-coated steel into pieces the width of a can. I got the job as a slitter operator and learned to feed the machine, pushing the sheets through the cutters at just the right time every few seconds. We worked from can to can’t—that is, from the time you can see until the time you can’t. I caught the streetcar to work and back each day.
At the Crown Can Company in Chicago, I also developed my first real friendships with fellow workers outside my own race. Each day three of us sat down to lunch together, a young Mexican-American fellow, an Italian-American girl, and me. From my Mexican friend I learned about bean sandwiches with chile peppers. From my Italian friend, who smoked on every break, I learned that some people smoke just because they like it. In Chicago, I got to know these two friends from other races without trepidation. This is something that would not have happened in Mississippi at that time.
I gained a sense of public freedom in Chicago that I had not known in Mississippi. I got to know about my uncle Thurston, an army officer, who was one of the first blacks to break the color barrier at Inglewood High School in an exclusive all-white Chicago neighborhood. Chicago was not a perfect city. Its neighborhoods were rigidly segregated, but not its public accommodations. I took great pleasure in being able to walk down State Street in Chicago and just literally go into every store. Unlike in Jackson, Mississippi, in Chicago every store had its door open to black people and all people. Madison Avenue and State Street in the Loop had everything you might want—Brooks Brothers, jewelry stores, the Merchandise Mart. If you love having fun in a big shopping center, as I do, go to the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. Now, I was not about to buy a Brooks Brothers suit or any expensive jewelry, but I could and did go in and look whenever I wanted. I especially delighted in Chicago’s public parks, where I could walk freely and enjoy the beauty of God’s creation unrestrained by manmade segregationist prohibitions. There is something basic in human nature that makes you yearn for that kind of freedom. Beyond this, I saw my first black policemen in Chicago in 1945. That was someh
ow reassuring. And even Chicago’s white policemen seemed friendlier, or at least they were more polite and courteous to black citizens than what I had seen in Jackson. I came to believe that if I should get into a dispute with a white person in Chicago, I would have an equal opportunity to prove my case with the police or in court. That belief was liberating. In the segregation era in Mississippi, so much of the black man’s fear, or at least caution, in the presence of white people came from the fact that Mississippi law enforcement and Mississippi courts gave whites a free hand to intimidate, threaten, beat up, and brutalize blacks. Simple conditioning in such a hostile environment was enough to create anxiety and fear. In Chicago, I lost that fear. I felt free to just wander around the city, something that I wouldn’t do now. But back then, it was a great place for the sore spirit of a black teenager to stretch and heal.
Here, as in Jackson, I also gained security from being surrounded by a large extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins. They gave me an education outside the classroom. My aunt Lois, who had no children of her own, became my guardian angel in Chicago. She worked at Lakeside Press for many years. I actually stayed with Aunt Lois my last three summers in Chicago. My aunt Ruby was an artist and sculptress. For several years, Aunt Ruby had pursued a modeling career in New York, but she had returned to Chicago. Ruby took me to my first formal piano concert in a big hall on State or Wentworth. I dressed in black tie and black suit. She had a big collection of records and taught me to love Billie Holiday and Rachmaninoff. I collect Billie Holiday and Rachmaninoff albums to this day. Ruby was well read and also introduced me to the Rosicrucian idea of reincarnation. My aunt Geneva took me to my first pro football game, the Chicago Bears versus the College Allstars. One of her friends took me to my first White Sox baseball game, where the pregame festivities featured my hero, Paul Robeson, singing several numbers.
Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Page 4