Beaches, Blood, and Ballots

by Gilbert R. Mason, M. D.

  Meanwhile, my medical practice grew, and I made a living and a life for myself and for Natalie and Gilbert, Jr. Some were surprised that I did as well as I did, given the fact that I treated more than my fair share of indigent patients. Now, I did not get all of the black patients. There were two white doctors in Biloxi who had as many black patients as I did. When I had first arrived, Dr. W. P. Kyle, a seventy-seven-year-old retired black physician living in Biloxi, told me that the white doctors would have a tendency to direct the poorest black folks to the black doctor and retain for themselves those black patients most able to pay. Therefore, I knew that I would have to work hard to earn a paying practice that could sustain me financially as I undertook the disproportionate load of charity cases that would come my way. Locally, some doctors were charging four dollars for a house call and three for an office visit. I set my normal fees a little higher at seven dollars for a house call and five dollars for an office visit. Few of my patients had employers who provided health insurance. If they had any insurance, it was likely to be what they called “street insurance” with premiums of a few cents collected weekly at your door. Companies like United, Independence, Security, and Universal operated that way. When a policy holder was sick, I filled out a form and wrote a note to the insurance company stating the amount of time the patient would need off from work to recover. The company then paid the patient fifteen or twenty dollars a week for as long as they were laid up. The patient was then supposed to pay me. Some paid, and some didn’t.

  Members of black lodges and black benevolent associations sometimes got similar benefits through their lodge or association. On the coast in Biloxi we had the United Benevolent Association, the Order of the Odd Fellows, the Courts of Calanthe, the Household of Ruth, the Elks and Masons, and Masonic auxiliaries such as the Daughters of Isis. Catholics had the Order of the Blessed Martyr Peter Claver and the St. Vincent de Paul Society. I well remember old Mrs. Amelia Bertrand, who lived on Bohn Street and headed up the local St. Vincent de Paul Society. One day Mrs. Bertrand came in and asked me if I would become St. Vincent de Paul’s designated physician for three dollars an office visit and four dollars a house call. It was much like negotiating with a modern HMO. I accepted her offer. Notwithstanding these creative grassroots approaches to health care finance, most of my patients needed credit and paid their doctor bill in installments. Despite their poverty, despite their lack of insurance or low insurance benefits, my patients were good to me. Many people have been surprised to learn that my collection rate was actually greater than that of the average family practitioner, white or black, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. My patients gave me a decent living in return for my services. For this I am grateful. By the grace of God, we served, we survived, and we prospered.

  The ideal of service that had inspired us at Howard pointed beyond the examining room and the hospital ward to the needs of the community. The concept of the physician as a part of the community, a teacher as well as a healer, was always before me. The preamble to the constitution of the National Medical Association exhorts doctors to serve as a “nexus” to the general population. Natalie, as a social worker with a master’s degree, saw and actively supported the larger role implied in these concepts. Therefore, from the beginning of our service in Biloxi, we made every effort to become a part of the community. We became active members of the First Missionary Baptist Church in Biloxi. Through friendships with John Pettus, P. I. Green, and Joseph Austin, I immediately became active on the Boy Scout Council, first as an assistant scoutmaster and then as scoutmaster for Troop 416. Though we had no daughters, Natalie became active in Girl Scouts. We joined the P.T.A long before Gilbert, Jr., even started to school, and I became the team physician for the Nichols High School Tigers. I joined the Masonic Lodge and the Elks Lodge; Natalie joined their ladies’ auxiliaries. Sidney Clark, a childhood friend and fellow Boy Scout from Jackson, had become an instructor at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi. Sidney was trying to form an alumni chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I became his seventh man and a charter member of the coast’s Zeta Mu Lambda chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha. I had the honor of being asked to join Sigma Pi Phi, the world’s oldest black professional fraternity. Natalie helped found the Mississippi Gulf Coast’s alumni chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Through Mr. Alphonse Jenkins, the Sportsman’s Club, a black men’s fishing club in Biloxi, reached out to include me in their deep-sea fishing and social outings. We were also quick to join the Gulfport branch of the NAACP, then led by Dr. Felix Dunn. I later became associated with the NAACP’s Medical Committee for Civil Rights, and in 1960, I became founding president of the Biloxi branch of the NAACP.

  I found gracious friendships and much-needed camaraderie in all of these groups. These lodges, fraternities, and associations were service oriented. The Alpha Phi Alpha motto, which derived from the gospel of Mark—”First of all, servants of all, we shall transcend all”—summed up the spirit of many black fraternities, lodges, and benevolent organizations in those days. My Masonic lodge, for example, sponsored and financially underwrote my Scout troop. During the civil rights struggle our adversaries failed to calculate the true strength that came to the movement through black lodges, civic groups, fraternities, sororities, and professional associations. White racist calculations relied on numbers and locations of NAACP chapters or numbers of people believed to be on official NAACP membership rolls. This was a faulty measure of black sentiment. Black people have always been very creative in dealing with white pressure. In the 1940s and 1950s, Mississippi public school teachers were required to list all organizations of which they were members. An NAACP membership could get them fired. Many of our brothers and sisters faced similar intimidation and threats from white employers if they joined the NAACP. The NAACP or its members were the white racists’ target. The white establishment tried to make people fearful of joining, and then followed a silly logic to conclude that black folks did not want the equal rights for which the NAACP stood. If we did not have a chapter in every city and county they thought we were not there or had no local support for the cause of civil rights. However, black people in Mississippi were like water. When we were blocked in one direction, we just moved in another, always with our eyes on the prize. We had stealth fighters that the segregationists and kluxers never saw. The truth is that almost every black organization of which I was a part was also giving financial support to the NAACP. The United Benevolent Association in Biloxi hosted many NAACP meetings. Many who felt that they could not personally join the NAACP supported NAACP group memberships for their lodges, fraternities, sororities, civic clubs, and professional associations. There were seldom any employer threats attached to membership in a black civic club, fraternity, sorority, lodge, or professional association that bought an organizational membership in the NAACP. Antagonistic white employers never caught on to the connection, so they never understood our strength. Each organization was itself a kind of “nexus” in the community giving communications networks and strength to the civil rights struggle.

  I did my best to support the many groups I joined. Scouting, P.T.A., and NAACP work wound up getting more of my time than the others. However, each group nurtured me with some of the true friendships and psychological support which I needed in order to survive in the troubled times of the 1960s. Because of black friends, the isolation and loneliness that Jim Crowism might have imposed on a black physician never really enveloped me. Occasional balls and parties lightened our lives. Some of our social events were strictly custom de rigueur, black tie and tuxedo affairs. On the other hand, many organizations met in people’s homes because restaurants and hotels denied us accommodations. Jim Crow drove us out of sight of the white community, but meeting in people’s homes cemented our friendships. This practice, along with the brotherhood and sisterhood we shared in being black and together in hostile times, built a special closeness. In the NAACP and in the Gulf Coast Medical, Dental, and Pharmaceutical Association, Dr. Felix Dunn and
Dr. J. O. Tate became trusted friends. Clare and Tommy Rhodeman, G. Jack and Rosa Martin, James and June Crawford, Alexander Bellamy, Herbert Caliste, Rehofus Esters, Wayne F. Calbert, and many others from all walks of life befriended us and stood with us through thick and thin.

  Little by little we became a nexus in back-of-town in Biloxi. As we gained people’s trust, they sought our advice on all kinds of personal and community problems. On the evening when I was inducted into the Masonic Lodge, my older brother, Willie Louis, came over from New Orleans for the event. There in that lodge hall people from every walk of life surrounded me, a young twenty-seven-year-old physician still wet behind the ears, asking me questions not only on health and medical conditions, but on all manner of issues and concerns. It was apparent that the folks had not only inducted me into the lodge as a first-degree Mason but had also taken me to their bosoms. My brother pulled me aside and said, “Man, this is the place you ought to be.” My brother’s words struck a chord within me. In that instant, from the mysterious depths of a grateful heart, I, too, knew that I had found my destiny, my place of service. The boundaries of that service soon expanded.

  FOUR

  The Beach

  Jabez called upon the God of Israel, saying, “Oh that thou wouldest bless me and enlarge my border, and that thy hand might be with me, and that thou wouldest keep me from harm so that it might not hurt me!” —1 Chronicles 4:10

  FRIENDS AND FAMILY MEMBERS IN CHICAGO AND WASHington had told me that I would not tolerate the limits that Jim Crowism would impose on my life if I returned to Mississippi. In 1955 the world was changing, and I knew it. The courts were ruling in case after case that segregation violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As an idealistic young physician, I had no intention of living my life or seeing my son live his life within the narrow confines laid out by racist segregation laws. Thus, in May of 1959, four years after I started my medical practice, I led nine black people to take their first steps onto the “white-only” public beach in Biloxi, Mississippi. The Biloxi police promptly ordered us off and threatened us with arrest. This 1959 wade-in and the series of sustained protests which followed marked the beginning of Mississippi’s first nonviolent civil disobedience campaign. As the instigator of the first wade-in, I became the prime mover and chief organizer of an eight-year struggle to open Harrison County’s twenty-six-mile-long public beach to the full enjoyment of all citizens. Almost overnight, I became a recognized local civil rights leader. As a result, I and my family, along with friends who supported this cause, became for years the targets of vile threats, intimidation efforts, and firebombings. My name appeared on KKK hit lists alongside those of Medgar Evers and Aaron Henry, and I was the target of at least one bungled assassination attempt.

  From the time that I arrived in Biloxi in July of 1955, the thought that the twenty-six-mile-long Mississippi Gulf Coast beach was closed to me and my family because of skin color did not sit well with me at all. According to Harrison County and the city of Biloxi, my little son could not legally swim in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico that lapped the shore just a few blocks from our home. Local practice reserved God’s sunrises and sunsets over the glistening waters and white sands of Biloxi beach for the exclusive enjoyment of white folks. For a man who loved swimming and who had gloried in the free use of the parks in Chicago and Washington, D.C., the idea that a marvelous oak-lined public beach was forbidden territory was just too much to abide.

  The 1959 wade-in was no fluke or accident. It was premeditated. I had been thinking and talking about such a move from the first time I saw that long, wonderful beach. The intense beauty of the Mississippi Gulf Coast had been one of its attractions for me. When I joined the Gulfport branch of the NAACP in 1955, one of the first suggestions I made was that we set the goal of opening up use of the beach to all citizens. I was already committed to the cause of civil rights when I first returned to Mississippi. I had shocked Dr. W. P. Kyle, Biloxi’s elderly retired black doctor, in 1955 when I had told him that I intended to see Biloxi’s schools desegregated within seven years. Dr. Kyle said, “You might as well leave now.” Dr. Kyle had little faith in Mississippi or the U.S. Constitution. He and I both knew that white Mississippi contained a mean element which had no qualms about bringing suffering or even death to those who would defy the system. I knew that up in Indianola racists had burned the home of Dr. Clinton Battle, an acquaintance of mine and a Meharry medical graduate. The white community put the economic screws on Clinton Battle and forced him to leave the state in 1958 or 1959. Dr. Battle went into practice in Chicago with Dr. T. R. M. Howard, another black Mississippi physician who had been driven out of the state.

  Beyond livelihood, those who even appeared to challenge the racial status quo in Mississippi risked their very lives. Shortly after I set up practice in Biloxi, poor Emmett Till, a teenager, was murdered upstate in Mississippi for so-called “flirting” with a white woman. In 1956, Reverend George Lee, my last pastor at St. James Baptist Church in Jackson, got his head blown off for trying to register to vote in Bolivar County where he also pastored a church. Then, Mack Charles Parker was lynched in Poplarville in 1958. The dangers involved in confronting the devil in his own den were clear. The extremists among our white brothers had proven that they had no respect for the U.S. Constitution, federal law, or the laws of God. Mississippi’s white establishment, hearts hardened by years of racist practices, repeatedly ignored racist violence and gross injustice perpetrated upon black citizens.

  As a member of the Gulfport branch of the NAACP, I continually asked why the branch didn’t do something about access to the beach for black citizens. I never got an answer. In view of the violence that was in the air, I guess I understood why. Racism and racist laws represented a powerful evil. On the other hand, if we failed to take a stand, we acquiesced in a kind of spiritual slavery that denied us our full manhood and womanhood. The words of that old Negro spiritual rang in my young ears: “I’d rather be dead and in my grave than live and be a slave.” I wanted to live. I wanted to live a long life, but I wanted the chance for a full and wholesome life for my family and for us as a people. I did a lot of praying, a lot of thinking, and a lot of talking before I took that first step into the water on Biloxi beach in 1959. The time was right. The federal courts were moving in the direction of assuring racial equality. So, we stepped forward in the faith that a merciful God would protect us as we, his black children, claimed our rights under the U.S. Constitution to enjoy his beautiful world along with all of his other children.

  The twenty-six-mile-long beach in Harrison County is a man-made or cultivated beach one hundred to one hundred fifty yards wide running along the south side of U.S. Highway 90 from Biloxi to Pass Christian. A chain of mansions and large homes, many of them antebellum, overlook the beach and the Gulf of Mexico on the north side of U.S. 90. Interspersed along this oak-shaded scenic route are occasional hotels, motels, harbors, and shopping centers. Public officials and private citizens routinely denied black people the right to use any portion of this extensive beach except for a few dozen yards opposite the Veterans Administration Hospital in Gulfport or in a designated area called the Rice Fields opposite the Episcopal church in Pass Christian. Of course, black maids or babysitters sometimes brought white children in their care to the beach without objection. However, if Negroes ventured onto the beach to enjoy it for themselves, they generally got cursed, harassed, spat upon, kicked, hit, or run off by white ruffians or property owners from across the highway. Law enforcement officers routinely stood back and watched this harassment and did nothing. More often than not, lawmen themselves acted to remove blacks from the beach. In 1959 when a white nun teaching at a black Catholic school took her students to the beach in Gulfport for a class project, the Gulfport police summarily removed the teacher and her students from the beach. At Biloxi no part of the beach was accessible to Negroes. Along this twenty-six-mile beach, there was inconsistent policy. Bl
acks never knew when or where they might encounter embarrassment, intimidation, or removal from the beach. Even in the small areas at the Gulfport V.A. or the Pass Christian Rice Fields where it was customary for blacks to have access, white property owners’ complaints prompted local authorities to remove blacks from the beach arbitrarily. At the same time white people, whether property owners or not, were allowed free and unmolested access to any portion of the beach they might want to use along its entire twenty-six-mile extent.

  Since public money was invested in the creation and maintenance of the beach, I believed that the local officials would be forced ultimately to grant free use of the beach to both black and white citizens. I talked over the issue with friends. I talked about the beach with the boys in my Scout troop. I vowed repeatedly to go to the beach one day to claim my rights as a citizen. Several adults said, “Doc, when you go to the beach, let us go with you.” Some of the boys in the Scout troop expressed the same sentiment. After four years of talk, I decided that Thursday, May 14, 1959, was the day for us to enjoy our rights on the beach in Biloxi where blacks had hitherto had no access whatsoever. That morning, I announced my plan to my neighbors Mr. James Hoze and Mr. Murray Saucier. Murray and James wanted to go, but Murray asked me to wait for a while so that he could run an errand. By that afternoon we were ready.