When Sunday, April 24, finally came, I again attended church and made an appeal for volunteers. That afternoon about 125 people showed up at the assembly point in front of my office on Division Street. We had ample volunteers for three groups. We got them organized and decided to go ahead and send them to their appointed zones on the beach at 1:00 P.M. It soon became obvious that the authorities and a group of white ruffians knew every move that we had planned to make. As we were getting ready to roll we noticed white guys, civilians, with handheld two-way radios on Nixon Street in front of my building and up on Division Street. We heard the sounds of the radios as the white men talked back and forth to each other. As we pulled out for the beach I heard one of these white men speak into his walkie-talkie and say, “They’re leaving now.”
In my car I cruised down the beach surveying the protest zones. On my first pass down the beach from Gill Avenue going back east to the hospital, everything looked quiet. I noticed dozens of sheriffs deputies already on the beach at two of our three target zones. I mistakenly supposed that they would protect us. Oddly, there were very few Biloxi policemen around. On this first sweep, I saw no evidence of white gangs or any other potential trouble. I turned around and headed back west on Irish Hill and then south to the beach.
By the time I got back to the lighthouse the shit had hit the fan. Hordes of snarling white folks poured onto the beach at the foot of Gill with bricks, baseball bats, pipes, sticks, and chains and attacked our unarmed black protesters. The law enforcement officers were just standing around. I immediately realized that our group was in imminent danger. I did not know it, but back down the beach in front of the hospital a similar violent confrontation was transpiring. Our folks were like lambs being led to the slaughter. I thought, “Lord, what have I gotten these people into.” Some of the forty or fifty blacks at the foot of Gill were already in the water with at least four or five hundred whites surrounding them and beating whomever they could lay hands on. It was too late to call it off. When they started whipping on Le’ Roy Carney, one of my Boy Scouts, he took off running down the highway and ran through the cemetery and along the railroad to escape his white pursuers. There was no protection for any of us from law enforcement. The dozens of sheriffs deputies on the scene appeared to step back so as not to interfere with the melee on the beach. The sheriff himself was there and did nothing to stop the white mob. Up until this time, I would not have anticipated even the Biloxi police behaving this way, let alone the sheriff. I was later told that FBI agents had observed these beatings from the lighthouse, and they apparently did not do anything to stop them either.
Seeing these developments from the highway, I immediately wheeled my car back around through the cutoff in the Highway 90 median west of Gill and headed back east to the scene of the riot. In the neutral ground, five white men with cue sticks were beating two black youths, Joe Lomberger and Gilmore Fielder. A deputy sheriff stood nearby letting the beating proceed and doing nothing to protect the boys. I halted my car in the middle of the eastbound lane and jumped out to stop these guys from beating on Joe and Gilmore. One of the whites hit me with his cue stick. I grabbed the stick, took it from him, and started working on him with his own stick. When he reached down to try to tackle me, I jammed the sharp end of the cue stick down on his back. Another white thug hit me and grabbed me. I bit him—something I surely wouldn’t do today, given what we have learned about blood-borne diseases. At about this time, the deputy sheriff, Merritt Brunies, finally intervened. He grasped my collar and took the two black boys into custody but allowed our white assailants to run away. “You’re under arrest,” the deputy said to me. “You’ll have to come on downtown.” I looked over at the beach where several persons were down injured, pleading for help in the midst of the white mob. I said, “I’ve got more to do than be under arrest.” With the cue stick still in my hand, I hurried across the highway to the beach to help the injured. I left my blue ‘59 Buick sitting in the middle of the highway. The deputy made no move to stop me. The sheriff himself was there with his hands on his hips doing nothing but posturing as if to say, “Boy, you’re in a heap of trouble now.” We were indeed in a heap of trouble.
When I stepped across the seawall, cue stick still in hand, the hoodlum mob just melted away. As I walked, they parted like it was the Red Sea. Mr. James McGowan, Sr., was down bleeding with his teeth knocked out, sand and blood mixed all over his face. Miss Burnell Burney summoned me there. Mr. Dorothy Galloway had been beaten across his knees with a cue stick and lay on the ground crippled. Across the highway, a Negro airman lay knocked out cold on the ground from a beating that was so brutal that a white lady had rushed from her house with a gun to scare his attackers away. A State Sovereignty Commission agent reported that an ambulance was called for, but none arrived during the twenty minutes that the agent was there.3 As far as I could see, none of the sheriff’s men made any effort to assist those being beaten or those injured. One officer even stated that we (the blacks) were getting what we deserved. On the beach a white airman from Keesler tried to help Mr. Galloway to his feet. Other blacks heroically helped the wounded off the beach. We carried Galloway and McGowan off the beach to my car. Deputy Brunies met us at the car. I told him that I couldn’t go to jail right then, because I had to go sew people up. I promised to turn myself in when I finished. Surprisingly, the deputy accepted my promise and let me go on to work. Marvin Dickey drove us in my car on to the hospital, so that I could see whether I would be needed there. The same type of mob violence was producing casualties on the beach in front of the hospital. The lawmen there also just stood by and watched. As black people ran from the beach, white gangs pursued them. Thus, the violence spread across the Biloxi peninsula and continued into the night. Our April 24 demonstration had become “the bloody wade-in.” The Jackson Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News quickly labeled it the worst and bloodiest race riot in Mississippi history.4
At the hospital several people had come into the emergency room. I got their names and their employers’ names from the hospital admission forms. Curiously, the white nurse, Mrs. Spiers, had written the word “integrational” as the cause of injury on each admission. Sovereignty Commission files show that their agent dutifully took down the names for his purposes, whatever they might be, and the press reported them, too. Kenneth Thames, age eighteen, Marzine Thames, age twenty-one, Luzell Bullock, age thirty-eight, Sanford Williams, age unknown, and my undertaker friend and longtime patient, Wilmer B. McDaniel, age thirty-five, all had been admitted to the Biloxi Hospital. When I got there, Dr. Eugene Trudeau was sewing up McDaniel, who had received ugly gashes on his chin and head, as well as an eye injury, in the fighting in front of the hospital. Baseball bats and chains had delivered these injuries to McDaniel. I stuck my head into the room to see about my friend. I asked Dr. Trudeau how things were going. Dr. Trudeau said only, “Yeah.” McDaniel said, “It’s okay, Doc, I don’t care who sews me up. Just go ahead and let him [Dr. Trudeau] do it.” I left the hospital for my office where others who had been injured were heading. However, the next day, Dr. Trudeau filed a complaint with the hospital staff that I had interfered with the doctor-patient relationship when I had checked on McDaniel. At my office, Ellis Brown and two or three others were awaiting treatment when I got there. I bandaged or stitched folks up and gave tetanus shots as needed. Eight others were said to have been admitted to the hospital at Keesler Air Force Base.5 In my opinion, the newspaper estimates of injuries in the riot were way too low. They reported only emergency room treatments at Biloxi Hospital or Keesler Air Force Base hospital. The newspapers did not count those injured who were treated at my office or at the veterans’ hospital or who took care of their wounds at home.
Large crowds gathered in the streets around my office and down at my apartment on Nixon Street that afternoon. Several hundred people milled around telling Natalie that they were there to protect me from arrest. A white merchant who owned a general store that sold groceries and hardware
in our neighborhood started walking up the crowded street shooting a pistol into the air, I guess trying to scare people off. Natalie remembers Biloxi police cruisers roaming around with loudspeakers broadcasting threatening messages. “If there is any trouble,” they blared out to the crowds, “Dr. Mason will be held personally responsible!”
At some point during that tumultuous afternoon, Dr. Dunn showed up at my office. He had not been present in the beach demonstration that day. Dr. Dunn and I knew that Roy Wilkins and Clarence Mitchell, our top national NAACP officials, were in Meridian, Mississippi, that day for an NAACP regional conclave of some sort. From my office, we telephoned their meeting place in Meridian. We talked personally to Roy Wilkins and Clarence Mitchell. We reported our beatings and the apparent complicity of the authorities. This was our first effort to get the national NAACP involved in the Biloxi beach desegregation struggle. Wilkins and Mitchell suggested that Medgar Evers investigate the situation.
Later on in the afternoon, when people stopped coming to me for treatment, I went over and turned myself in at the city courthouse and jail, where deputy Brunies happened to be hanging around. When I presented myself, the deputy looked surprised and said, “Well, he promised he would come back, and he did.” The authorities charged me with fighting in a public place and obstructing traffic. They also charged Joe Lomberger and Gilmore Fielder. Our attackers were never arrested. I made bail immediately. My second beach-related trial within a week was set for Monday afternoon.
Dr. Dunn and I attended a meeting at New Bethel Baptist Church late that afternoon. New Bethel was the largest African American church in Biloxi at that time. The house was packed. Folks were feeling angry and betrayed, and they spoke out freely. Many expressed the belief that the police and the hoodlum mobs that attacked us were in cahoots with each other. Forty years later, after reading the Sovereignty Commission files and listening to their tapes, I can say with certainty that powerful people had indeed prompted the white hooligan mob to go after us on the beach. In good faith, Dr. Dunn had informed the sheriff of our peaceful intention. Citizens have the right to expect protection in the exercise of their basic rights. The sheriff chose to break faith with the citizenry, as did officials of the city of Biloxi.
The moral fault, the blame before God for the evil done in the 1960 Biloxi riot lies with the authorities who decided to use public safety information for diabolic ends. The Sovereignty Commission files make clear that days before the Sunday wade-in, an array of state, city, and county authorities and police agencies knew about our plan, and they knew about the white mobs that would be waiting for us. In collusion, and with malice aforethought, a broad spectrum of morally corrupt state and local officials and police agents all abused and misused the information entrusted to them. And what evil did they do? Rather than using their knowledge to protect us, as was their sworn duty, the authorities themselves recklessly passed along their information about our plans to the meanest and most virulently prejudiced and irresponsible elements in the white community. The mob of white thugs who met us on the beach west of the lighthouse had first assembled around the law enforcement vehicles that were parked nearby. When some of these law enforcement officers pulled away, it seemed to be a signal for the white thugs to move onto the beach. When the white gang made their move, the Biloxi police had purposefully made themselves scarce, and the scores of sheriff’s deputies and Mississippi highway patrolmen on the scene did nothing. The riot proceeded with the police viewing it from the sidelines. The ruffians appeared to have coordinated everything they did on the beach with the sheriffs men and with Biloxi city officials.
I would not have believed such a thing possible before I saw it on April 24, 1960. At the time, I was one of those who strongly suspected collusion between the authorities and the white gangs. Now, almost forty years later, I have found independent, hard proof that a racist violent intent existed in the Biloxi Police Department long before April 24, 1960. The Sovereignty Commission files reveal that as early as October 15,1959, Assistant Chief Walter Williams told a Sovereignty Commission agent that the only way to end the beach controversy was to “go out and beat the hell out of any Negro found on the beach.”6 The Sovereignty Commission agent did nothing but record Williams’s heinous pronouncement without even a hint of any concern for the legal or moral implications of such a statement coming from the mouth of a high police official.
Further, there is now hard evidence of police complicity in the white gang’s assault on the beach. This is seen in Sovereignty Commission investigator Bob Thomas’s memorandum on the riot. After local officials tipped him off to our wade-in plan, Thomas made a flying trip to the coast on April 22, the Friday before the riot. On that Friday afternoon, Biloxi’s police chief, Herbert McDonnell, and Assistant Chief Walter Williams told agent Thomas that they expected a march on the beach on Sunday. McDonnell said that rather than beef up his force to protect the public, he intended to “operate on a skeleton crew,” and that neither the chief nor the assistant chief would be on duty. The chief said that “a lot of people had notified him that they would be around the beach in case Mason showed up.” In short, state agents knew that Biloxi authorities had decided to let vigilante violence reign down on us, and the state agents did nothing to stop it. In the same interview, Chief McDonnell lamented the fact that the white Citizens’ Council was weak around Biloxi. He thought the white Citizens’ Council was “badly needed” to “coordinate the activities of citizens against” civil rights demonstrations.7 This same state agent was present on the beach during the riot and reported that Sheriff Dedeaux told his deputies not to make any arrests on the beach.8 In short, there was official foreknowledge and complicity in the violence. Whether they consciously solicited and coordinated white hooliganism on the beach or merely turned their heads once it erupted, Biloxi city officials, State Sovereignty Commission agents, the sheriff of Harrison County, and the Mississippi Highway Patrol all shared guilt in promoting a bloody confrontation where none was intended, needed, or wanted. In this sordid affair, it was these white public officials alone who had the power to decide how to use the notification they had received for good or ill. The white authorities chose to render harm instead of help. They decided to direct or to permit the direction of a mob assault on peaceful demonstrators. In so doing, they bear full and complete responsibility for the blood that flowed over the next two days in Biloxi.
The Dunns and the Masons had a long-standing custom of taking our Sunday evening meal together. Because our Nixon Street apartment was so small, when we hosted the Dunns in Biloxi, we usually went to the Blue Note, which at the time was a first-rate black cafe. When the Dunns had us to Gulfport, we often ate at Dr. Dunn’s spacious house. After our meeting at New Bethel Baptist Church in the late afternoon following the bloody wade-in, Dr. Dunn invited us to his home in Gulfport for dinner. As we started to leave the Nixon Street apartment, two Biloxi policemen came to the door. The officer doing the talking said that they had a message for me from the mayor. He said, “The mayor sent us to tell you that if anybody’s killed tonight, we’re going to hold you responsible.” Threats of this type were getting to be a habit with Biloxi officials. I was concerned, but I went on to Gulfport to Dr. Dunn’s home. As it turned out, Dr. Dunn’s dinner invitation probably saved my life and the lives of my family that night.
The violence that the authorities had allowed to be unleashed on the beach in the afternoon continued and intensified in Biloxi’s streets throughout the night. After dark, vicious white mobs roamed Howard Avenue between Lemeuse and Main streets and milled around at the police station and the bus station assaulting black passers-by. Two airmen were beaten up downtown in the vicinity of the old courthouse. White hoodlums stopped Reverend John Ferdinand, the black associate pastor of New Bethel Baptist Church, and slapped him around. This gray-headed reverend told them, “I’m old enough. You can beat me up if you want to, but it’s not going to stop us.” Louis Johnson, a black air force master sergeant, was
coming home from an Elks meeting in Moss Point. Sergeant Johnson always carried a .45 caliber pistol in his car. Johnson made the mistake of turning up Howard Avenue coming north off Highway 90. Near the old courthouse a bunch of white ruffians jumped in front of his car and started banging on it. One brandished a pistol and rapped on the sergeant’s car window with it, saying, “Roll the window down.” Johnson pulled his .45 out and rapped right back on the window with it. The white guy dropped his pistol and took off running. A white eyewitness reported seeing another black man stopped, dragged from his car, and thrown through the plate-glass window of a furniture store. During the night, armed white hooligans invaded the African American section of Biloxi that we called “back-of-town.” Some white gangs traveled on foot and beat any black they came upon, or they stopped cars carrying blacks and attempted to beat the riders. Other trouble came in white-driven automobiles and pickups that attempted to run down blacks in the streets. Gunshots rang out from cars loaded with white men and teenagers. They raked black businesses, dubs, and cafes with shotgun blasts. The Twilight, the Kitty-Cat, and the Little Apple cafes were shot up. Mrs. Myrtle Davis witnessed the shots fired into the Kitty-Cat, where two people received buckshot wounds. When Mrs. Davis reported it to the police chief, he promptly arrested her for making the report. The chief asked Mrs. Davis if she knew “that Dr. Mason.” She said, “No, but I’m going to make his acquaintance as soon as I can.” Myrtle had seen enough. She later became a local NAACP officer.
Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Page 11