On the beach just south of the old Biloxi cemetery sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 P.M., nine of us made our move to start the first wade-in and the first public civil rights demonstration in modern Mississippi history. Murray Saucier, Adell Lott, Otha Lee Floyd, James Hoze, Jimmie Hoze, Gloria Hoze, and Jackie Hoze all took that first step with Gilbert, Jr., and me. The youngsters and I went into the water to play. Unfortunately, a lady traveling in the wrong lane of U.S. 90 caused an accident near our place on the beach. The accident brought the police to the scene. One of the officers spotted us and yelled, “You know that you can’t swim here. Come on down here. We’re going to put you under arrest.” I came out of the water and asked, “Why can’t I swim here?” The officer said, “Well, the beach is private property.” County trash cans were on the beach, and we had often seen county equipment at work there. I knew that something built or maintained with public money could not be private property, so I questioned him. “Why is it private property? It cannot be private,” I said. At this the officer ordered me to get into my car and follow him down to Biloxi police headquarters “to find out about it”
At police headquarters Chief Herbert McDonnell was nowhere to be found, so they took me to his assistant chief. To my question “Why is the beach private property?” the assistant chief had no answer. He said, “If you want to know about that you’re going to have to come back tomorrow.” They did not book me or bind me over for trial at this time. I suppose that I could have just walked away from the confrontation, but I didn’t. The next morning, Murray Saucier and I came back to city hall with the same question on our minds. How can this beach be private property? Why are black folks prevented from swimming there? This time the officers ushered us into the august presence of Biloxi’s mayor, Laz Quave. Mayor Laz Quave soon impressed me as insensitive and unfeeling. He acted ignorant. Whether he truly was so or not, I cannot say. Over the next several years, I concluded that this mayor huffed and puffed to make a show for the white population while hoping that his posturing would bluff or intimidate the blacks. When the civil rights struggle heated up, Laz Quave was given to making irresponsible and inflammatory remarks like “The communists are behind this.” Well, we’ve long since proven that it wasn’t the communists giving him headaches over Jim Crow. No, it was just one big-foot boy from Jackson, Mississippi.
Needless to say, my first encounter with Mayor Quave did not go well. Straight out I asked him why black folks couldn’t use the beach. “It’s on the book,” he said. I demanded, “What about the beach is on the book? I want to see the book. Show me the book.” Obviously frustrated, the mayor made an accusation. “You’re just trying to get that NAACP down here,” he growled. He then gave me the old spiel about how some of his best friends were black folks. Notwithstanding the human degradation and deprivation all around him, Mayor Quave’s demeanor and attitude would have you believe that the races had lived in some kind of Jim Crow utopia before I came to Biloxi starting trouble. Now, I was a member of the NAACP, but I had gone to the beach on my own. We had no Biloxi branch of the NAACP at this time, and the Gulfport branch had not shown any interest in the beach problem. Still, I showed my colors. “Yes,” I answered “I belong to the NAACP, and I also belong to the First Missionary Baptist Church in Biloxi. I am a native Mississippian,” I asserted. “I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and my family has roots that go back nearly two hundred years in Mississippi. So, I want to see the book with this statute in it.” “Well,” he replied, “the book is not here.” I asked, “When will it be here so that I can examine it?” He would not say. It became plain that there was no room for negotiation. I wanted to see the book, and he would not or could not produce it. At this point, Mayor Quave cursed and threatened me. He said, “If you go back down there on the beach, we’re going to leave you down there!” By this time, my wife had arrived with my friend Christopher Rosado, a fellow Scouter. Standing outside the mayor’s door, Natalie overheard this threat and later swore to it in an affidavit. I took the mayor’s threat seriously, but it did not stop me.1
I left Biloxi City Hall and immediately called Dr. Felix Dunn, the president of the Gulfport branch of the NAACP, to ask for help. There seemed to be few options available to us. I had acted on my own without the Gulfport branch voting to get involved. For some unknown reason, the Gulfport branch remained silent about the beach. However, I did ask Felix if he could at least recommend a local attorney who might research the beach issue and all the legal ramifications for us. There were no black attorneys on the Mississippi Gulf Coast at that time, but Dr. Dunn suggested that a white attorney in Gulfport, Mr. Knox Walker, might be helpful. That very same day, May 15, 1959, Dr. Dunn introduced us. Knox Walker was indeed willing to do the research, so I engaged him as my counsel Over the next few months, Mr. Walker proved himself to be a principled man who was genuinely concerned about all people. It took a lot of guts for a white southern lawyer to take a case like this. At the same time, I was planning to send Knox Walker’s work to Dr. James Nabrit at Howard University for an opinion. Dr. Nabrit was a friend of mine and dean of the Howard University School of Law. Nabrit had been one of the attorneys on the Brown v. the Board of Education case in 1954. Before I went to Howard University, I had met Dr. Nabrit through a high school friend of mine from Yazoo City. I contacted Nabrit and kept him informed about all developments related to the beach.
Knox Walker delivered some good research. From the minute books of the Harrison County Board of Supervisors going back to 1924, Walker showed that investments of public money in stabilizing the coastline had been going on for decades. In 1924, the county had authorized a 2 percent local gasoline tax, a so-called seawall tax, for the construction of a concrete barrier on the south side of the road that became U.S. Highway 90. The seawall was designed to protect the roadway from erosion. There had apparently been some natural beach and marshlands south of the highway, but wave action made this a shifting shoreline that threatened the highway. The county had built the seawall with no objection from property owners on the north side of the highway. Years later in 1947, a massive hurricane struck the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The resulting shoreline erosion showed that violent wave action could undermine the seawall itself and again threaten the highway. Following the 1947 hurricane, the Harrison County Board of Supervisors asked for and received federal assistance to construct a twenty-six-mile-long sand beach fifty to a hundred yards wide to further protect the seawall and the highway. In exchange for at least $1,300,000 in federal funds, the Harrison County Board of Supervisors signed a contract that guaranteed that the reclaimed beach would be open to the public in perpetuity. (The total taxpayer investment in the construction of the beach was over $3,000,000, including state, local, and federal money.) Walker’s research showed that the board of supervisors had not conducted a formal eminent domain process to gain easements south of the seawall. However, publicly funded work on the beach had proceeded without protest from any of the twelve hundred property owners on the north side of U.S. 90, except for one. In Gulfport a man named Henritzy had built a cabin on his property south of the seawall to protest the beach project. The Mississippi courts had ruled that Henritzy had no right to block beach construction. His cabin was torn down and the project was completed. It could be argued that the investment of public money in beach construction and the contractual agreement openly entered into between the United States government and Harrison County gave all citizens, including blacks, the right to use the beach forever. Nonetheless, in the absence of eminent domain proceedings, Walker was uncertain what a court case might produce. In any event, he found no statutory prohibition of blacks using the beach. In theory, when the police had removed us, they were enforcing the rights of the white property owners north of the highway. These property owners were presumed to own the beach south of the highway opposite their homes. It was as if the Henritzy ruling had never occurred. It was clear that the legal questions at issue would revolve around the county’s guarantee of public acce
ss in perpetuity and the extent to which our paying taxes to build and maintain the beach gave us user rights superseding any private property rights.
These facts gave me a personal sense of certainty that we would eventually gain equity and equal opportunity on the beach. However, facts alone did not change any county or municipal officials’ behavior. We were going to have to challenge their practice of systematically excluding blacks from the beach either in a political body, in the courts, or on the streets. Whatever we did, it seemed likely that there would be a long, tough, and potentially expensive struggle. We had to come up with a strategy. The Gulfport branch of the NAACP still chose not to do anything with our information. No existing black organization stepped forward to act. Moreover, it seemed that many of our supporters in the black community felt uncomfortable acting in the name of the NAACP. The NAACP label invited increased white harassment. Therefore, in June of 1959, Dr. Dunn and I decided to organize interested persons into a new county-wide umbrella group, the Harrison County Civic Action Committee. In the city of Biloxi we resurrected a black organization called the Biloxi Civic League. These were true grassroots organizations. Dr. Felix Dunn was elected chairman of the Harrison County Civic Action Committee, Calvin Corley secretary, P. I. Green treasurer, and I was elected the whip. In Biloxi I became president of the reorganized Biloxi Civic League.
We began speaking wherever we could to raise public awareness of our legal rights and to make known our intent to desegregate the entire twenty-six-mile beach. From the beginning we talked about the likelihood that we would have to undertake a wade-in. We spoke to ministerial groups, to clubs, and to churches in Biloxi and Gulfport. I must have spoken personally to at least a dozen groups that summer. It appeared that everyone to whom I spoke endorsed the goal of gaining for black folks full access to the entire beachfront. With the black community behind us we began a voter registration drive, prepared to petition the Harrison County Board of Supervisors, and began planning for a massive countywide wade-in to be launched if our petition failed. According to my daily diary for 1959, on September 3, I met with Mr. Eulice White, Mr. Joseph Austin, and Dr. Felix Dunn at the 19th Street Community Center in Gulfport to draft the petition. On September 7, we held a mass meeting in an open field in the Soria City neighborhood of Gulfport. At the Soria City meeting, the Harrison County Civic Action Committee voted to adopt this petition and present it to the Harrison County Board of Supervisors with the request that this board enforce our rights to use the beach. I drafted the language of the petition. The petition included a short statement of facts along with a simple request for remedy. The beach was maintained for public use with public funds under the control of the Harrison County Board of Supervisors. The police in some municipalities along the coast denied certain citizens use of the beach. We therefore petitioned the supervisors to end existing municipal police impediments and guarantee all citizens the unrestrained use of the entire beach. The whole group voted to adopt the petition, but it was left to four individuals to sign it in the name of the group. Mr. Joseph Austin, the longtime director of the Negro Division of the City of Gulfport’s Recreation Department, Mr. Eulice White, a general repairman privately employed by a white Gulfport family, Dr. Felix Dunn, and I were the ones who signed.
We brought the petition before the five-member Harrison County Board of Supervisors on October 5,1959. Our original plan was that all four of the signers would appear before the board to support our cause. However, the week of that board meeting, Dr. Dunn went to a World Series game. That left Eulice White, Joseph Austin, and me to appear before the supervisors. Eulice and Joseph decided that it was best for me to do the talking. The three of us went to the supervisors’ meeting, and I presented the petition and our supporting research. Things turned hostile. Mr. Dewey Lawrence, Sr., was president of the board. “If you go back down there [to the beach] again,” Mr. Lawrence warned, “there’s going to be bloodshed.” I retorted, “Blood flows in white folks’ veins as well as in black folks’ veins, but we did not come here to talk about blood. We came to talk about the beach.” Mr. Lawrence then asked me, “How much of the beach do you want use of?” My response was quick. I said, “All twenty-six miles, every damn inch of it.” This was what I had said to every black group to whom I had spoken all summer. “Wouldn’t access to a portion satisfy you?” he asked. Again I said, “No, we want all twenty-six miles.” Now, I did not know it at the time, but the Sovereignty Commission papers show that soon thereafter, a handful of black and white folks began talking behind the scenes about a compromise deal for some kind of a separate, protected, all-black beach. I never knew about that until I read the Sovereignty Commission files almost forty years later. The blacks allegedly involved in these talks knew that such a compromise would have been totally unacceptable to me. Since my tax dollars had built and maintained the whole beach, why should I have to drive miles to some special zone, when white taxpayers could go anywhere they wanted? I was uncompromising. I guess that’s why I was kept in the dark.
The Harrison County Board of Supervisors took no action on our petition. They took it under advisement. However, the next day the coast newspaper, the Daily Herald, ran a front page banner headline story, “Negroes Seek Use of Harrison Beach,” which characterized our little petition as “the first significant test of Mississippi segregation laws. …”2 Within forty-eight hours, the board attorney, Senator Stanford Morse, was in Jackson pressing the State Sovereignty Commission to investigate Dr. Dunn and me with the intent of discrediting us. The Sovereignty Commission agents who reported this also stated that local officials believed that they could “handle” Joseph Austin and Eulice White.3 There were immediate negative repercussions for them. Within twenty-four hours, the city of Gulfport fired Joseph Austin. On the night of October 5–6, the Ku Klux Klan burned a six-foot cross in Mr. Austin’s yard in the Handsboro community, and he received threatening phone calls. Though he never said a word to us about it, Joseph Austin came under great pressure to withdraw his name from the petition and to get me to withdraw my name also. However, to my knowledge Joseph Austin never withdrew his name, and he never once even suggested that I withdraw mine. Eulice White and his wife were both fired by their white employers. My diary entry for October 7 notes that Eulice White withdrew his name from the petition. Joseph Austin and Eulice White were both good men. They paid a high price for daring to exercise their First Amendment rights. For many months, the Harrison County Civic Action Committee took donations and placed them in an account in the Hancock Bank for White and Austin, because no local employer would hire them after they took this stand.
As for me and Dr. Dunn, a hail of threats soon erupted on us. Anonymous telephone calls at our homes and at our offices day and night carried hateful messages such as “Nigger, you’d better leave town, because we’re going to kill you.” Dr. Clay Easterly, one of my white physician friends, responded to the newspaper story about the petition in a friendly way by calling me aside. He said, “I want to congratulate you on your efforts, but I ask you to do one thing. Be careful. Be careful.” He wanted me to be aware of forces outside the hospital that would harm me physically, psychologically, and economically if they could. Dr. Easterly meant this as fatherly advice, and I took it that way.
My diary indicates that on October 28 agent Zack Van Landingham of the anti-civil rights State Sovereignty Commission paid me a visit at my office. The State Sovereignty Commission files state that Van Landingham had first tried to talk to Dr. Dunn at his office in Gulfport. However, when Van Landingham arrived, Dr. Dunn had gone on seeing a patient and let Van Landingham cool his heels for fifteen minutes. Offended, this impatient state agent abruptly left Dunn’s office and came to my office in Biloxi. I went ahead and saw him. Agent Van Landingham characterized me as “curt and cool” in my deportment toward him. He reported correctly that I was firm in my determination “never to agree to anything except complete integration of the entire beach.” After three weeks of threats my position r
emained unchanged. Before he left town, Van Landingham took this information straight to State Senator Stanford Morse, attorney for the board of supervisors, to Gulfport mayor Billy Meadows, and to the president of the board of supervisors, Dewey Lawrence. According to Van Landingham’s memos, these officials believed that they could wait us out, and that eventually a majority of black citizens would accept a separate beach and thus leave Dunn and me isolated. A copy of Van Landingham’s memorandum was sent to his director and on to Governor J. P. Coleman.4
Along about the same time in the fall of 1959, Attorney Knox Walker shared some frightful information with Felix Dunn and me that showed just how high the human cost of our pressing forward might be. One of Knox’s clients had connections to the Klan and had obtained a secret KKK assassination list with twelve names on it. Knox showed it to us. Dr. Felix Dunn and I were on the hit list, along with Aaron Henry, Medgar Evers, Ñ. C. Bryant of McComb, R. L. T. Smith, Jr., and R. L. T. Smith, Sr., in Jackson. I think five other black men around the state were also targeted. Through Medgar Evers, we, of course, warned these men.
The growing number and seriousness of threats to my life caused me to accept organized personal protection from a group of friends who called themselves the Black Angry Men, or BAM for short. My BAM-recruited security detail included Sam Edwards, A. A. Dickey, Marvin Dickey, Clifton Nunley, Joe Kennedy, Arthur Bousqueto, John Elzy, Harold Boglin, A. J. Haynes, Alfred Thomas, Earl Napoleon Moore, Richard Magrone, and Charles Davis, plus the prettiest BAM, Myrtle Davis. They made themselves available to stand guard over me day or night in shifts as needed for about four years. For a solid year of that time in 1960 and 1961, they covered me around the clock. My security accompanied me on hospital rounds. They posted themselves outside each hospital room while I checked my patients. BAMs went with me on house calls. During office hours, they kept a vigil from a gas station across the street. At night the Black Angry Men watched my place from the rooftop of Arthur Bousqueto’s house across a vacant lot from my house on Fayard Street. When speeding cars fired gunshots toward my house, the BAMs returned fire, and they checked into anything that looked suspicious.
Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Page 9