Beaches, Blood, and Ballots

by Gilbert R. Mason, M. D.

  A black-owned Standard station across the street from my office on Division Street lost three windows to shotgun blasts. Some whites attacked a truck owned by Wilmer McDaniel. They broke out the windshield and attempted to get at the black driver inside the truck, but he managed to drive away. Some blacks who worked late shifts in white sections of town on that Sunday evening found their places of work surrounded by white mobs. Many were so alarmed by the mayhem in the streets that they were afraid to go home after getting off work. This kind of intimidation of black workers continued for days. One evening later in the week, I personally drove through a threatening white crowd to a po’ boy cafe in an east Biloxi white neighborhood to bring home Mrs. Ella Cotton, a fearful black cook who, along with her husband, was blockaded in the cafe. During Sunday night alone, according to the Clarion-Ledger, at least eight blacks and two whites suffered gunshot wounds.9 The press reported that, in all, more than twenty blacks were injured in the riot.10 Many others sustained unreported injuries. Worst of all, later that week, after the newspapers quit counting, two young black men were tragically murdered in a continuing racist crime wave on the coast.

  The vast majority of riot-related violent assaults and the only deaths in this frenzied week came down on blacks. Almost all of the reported victims were black. However, our story would be incomplete if we did not acknowledge that a handful of blacks were guilty of carrying out reprisals on innocent whites. A white physician friend of mine, Dr. John B. O’Keefe, was coming back from Pascagoula and made the mistake of turning down Division Street in the black section of town. Black folks brickbatted the doctor’s car and pelted it with rocks. White taxi drivers running through the area also reported their cars being pelted or stopped and rocked. The newspaper reported that a white teenager, Andrew Parker, was riding in a car near Main Street when some blacks yelled at him to stop. He got out of the car and was shot in the back. Luckily, the wound was only superficial.11

  Sometime after I arrived at Dr. Dunn’s house in Gulfport that night, my brother called from New Orleans. The news from Biloxi about roadblocks, shootings, and uncontrolled mob action had reached New Orleans. At my brother’s urging, I decided to spend the night at Felix Dunn’s house. With this reign of terror going on in the streets of Biloxi, Chief McDonnell slapped on a curfew at 10:00 P.M. that night and ordered all bars closed. Having in effect unleashed this thing, the chief now went on radio to appeal to everyone, white and black, to get off the streets.

  On Monday morning, black folks started going early to hardware stores to buy guns and ammunition. When word got out that blacks were arming themselves, whites also started buying ammunition. The local newspaper reported that, by Monday afternoon, stores in Biloxi were sold out of ammunition. Sheriff Curtis Dedeaux issued a notice, carried on the front page of the afternoon paper, decreeing registration of all firearms with the sheriff’s office.12 Sporadic episodes of white gang activity continued in Biloxi for several days. Before business hours on Monday morning, unknown perpetrators tossed two firebombs at my office at 439½ East Division Street. One of these kerosene-filled pop bottles, stuffed with rags, crashed through a window into the examining room and burned itself out, doing little damage. The other smashed up against the outside wall of the building and burst into flames. Asariah Taylor and another man visiting a neighbor jumped a fence and put the fire out. Someone called me. I immediately drove to the office and called the police. The police officers made only the most superficial and unenthusiastic inquiry. They did not even take fingerprints from the surviving bottle and fragments. They never gave me a report.

  That afternoon, I was scheduled to be back in court before Justice of the Peace Anthony Anglado. I was charged with public fighting and obstructing traffic on Highway 90. Before leaving my office for court, I was made aware that we had become a national news item. A New York area radio station called me and recorded an interview. There were many newspaper interviews. By this time the press was saying that the authorities had identified me as “the instigator” of the wade-in.13 “Instigator” is a label that I have since been proud to wear in the campaign for equal rights, equal justice, and equal opportunity. Later in the week, the Jackson Advocate quoted me in response to a provocative question as saying, “Anyone who says that I touched off the riot is an unmitigated, calculated and pathological liar.”14 I never tried to hide my role as a leader. I took the heat willingly. However, I did not cause this riot. I had led peaceful demonstrators who were unarmed and thoroughly coached in nonviolent tactics. Others chose to attack us. Others had decided to touch off a riot.

  After the radio interview, I drove to court and parked my car nearby. Two police officers met me at the car as if they were going to have to bring me in. They walked with me down the street to the courthouse. I mention this police escort in order to refute the caption beneath an AP wirephoto of me walking down the street beside the officers. I did not request this escort. And I was certainly already on my way to court voluntarily when the officers appeared. Yet the newspaper caption falsely states that the officers “escorted” me to court after I allegedly “expressed fear” for my safety.15 Through the grace of God, I really felt no fear that day. However, even if I had felt fear, the Biloxi police would have been the last people on earth that I would have let know about it I was absolutely not going to do anything that would reward or encourage their ongoing efforts to intimidate blacks. So, the news photo caption completely misrepresented my mood.

  At the courthouse I met my attorney, Knox Walker. A large black turnout for the trial again buoyed our spirits. Judge Anglado issued a warning about disturbances in open court and then for some reason took me, Joe Lomberger, and Gilmore Fielder into his private office for the trial. To charges of disturbing the peace, we all pled not guilty. Deputy Brunies stated that we had all been fighting, and that I had parked my car in the middle of Highway 90, blocking traffic. Lomberger and Fielder argued that they were merely fighting to defend themselves from a group of whites who had attacked them. I argued that I had abandoned my car to try to break up the fight and render first aid to the injured on the beach. Notwithstanding the deputy’s admission that a group of whites had run away when he arrested us, we were all three found guilty and fined twenty-five dollars for disturbing the peace. I got an additional twenty-five-dollar fine for blocking traffic. Truly here was a case in which the victims of crime were blamed and fined. Several other cases stemming from the Sunday afternoon and Sunday night fighting were heard in city and county courts Monday afternoon and evening. It is important to remember that African Americans made up the vast majority of those injured in the riots. However, according to the Clarion-Ledger, while twenty-two Negroes were found guilty of riot-related offenses that Monday, only one white man was similarly convicted.16 There was no such thing as evenhanded law enforcement or evenhanded justice in this affair. Of course, I filed to appeal my conviction.

  The most tragic and horrible events associated with the hateful week of the bloody wade-in were the murders of two young black men, Bud Strong and Malcomb “Papa” Jackson. Today we would call these hate crimes. The loss of each one of these boys was heartbreaking, but the murder of Bud Strong especially touched the black community, because he was mentally retarded and could not have helped himself. Bud Strong’s murder touched the members of my church in a special way, because Bud’s sister, Miss Coreen Strong, was a member of First Missionary Baptist Church in Biloxi. Miss Coreen taught Sunday school at our church and was extremely dedicated and really good at what she did. She was a public school teacher with an excellent reputation in Biloxi’s segregated school system. Her brother, Bud, was retarded but not institutionalized. Bud Strong would come up to you on the street and say innocently, “Give me a nickel, mister. Give me a nickel.” A couple of nights after the riot, someone took poor, helpless Bud Strong and cut his throat, all but decapitating him, then left him dead in the neutral ground on Highway 90 in front of Beauvoir facing the beach. Of all the places in our community
to kill a black man, none could have sent a more sinister or a more powerful symbolic message than Beauvoir, the antebellum mansion that served as the post-Civil War home of Jefferson Davis. Although he could not have understood what was happening around him, Bud Strong was a victim of race hatred. I went to McDaniel’s Funeral Home and examined Bud Strong’s body. The only thing holding his head onto his torso was the skin of the neck and the ligamentum nuchae that runs down the neck. Bud Strong was a lamb led to the slaughter, a victim and a martyr in the struggle for the desegregation of Biloxi beach. No one was arrested for his murder.

  Because of the riot, the Mississippi Highway Patrol and other police agencies beefed up their presence on the coast. In this awful mood of hate and bigotry, with racial passions running wild in the state and with local all-white police forces, unwarranted police assaults killed teenager Malcomb “Papa” Jackson. Jackson, age eighteen/was a former member of my Scout troop. Police in the neighboring coast town of Pascagoula beat “Papa” Jackson to death in custody. I examined photographs of this boy’s beaten and bruised body. There is no doubt in my mind that these boys would be alive today were it not for the racist rancor and hate-filled atmosphere which the authorities unleashed over the wade-in. One of the first projects of the new Biloxi branch of the NAACP was to press for investigations of the murders of these boys. On private retainers, Howard Andre McDonnell, one of the finest criminal attorneys on the coast, investigated the murders of Bud Strong and Malcomb “Papa” Jackson. However, as with many other cases of racial murder in Mississippi, no one has yet found out who killed Bud Strong or who beat “Papa” Jackson to death in the Pascagoula jail.

  Anyone who ever doubts the virulence or viciousness of the passions which the Jim Crow system nurtured in people need only review the events of the last week of April 1960 in Biloxi, Mississippi. Jim Crowism was a wild, mad-dog system in its effects. How else could you explain how the simple desire of 125 people to use a few yards of a twenty-six-milelong beach could trigger such rage, mayhem, and murder? Jim Crowism caused a certain segment of the white population of the South, at times, to behave like surgically decerebrated cats—as if they had somehow lost all touch with the part of the brain which adds the learning-based thought, judgment, and inhibitory messages that normally restrain the raw reflex rage reactions promoted from the hypothalamus. Surgically decerebrated laboratory animals will literally rage themselves to death in reaction to the slightest noise or irregular stimulation. Like the phenomena seen in surgically decerebrated animals, racism is man-made. In an environment filled with mean and dehumanizing practices that equated status with skin color, madness could be set in motion if anything threatened, or could be made out to threaten, the status of the least privileged of the privileged group. When they had ignored or blessed the vicious, wild, mad-dog reactions that had been bred up in the perverted union of hateful racist dogma and sinful segregationist practices, Biloxi’s so-called city fathers had decerebrated the community. As a result, Bud Strong and Malcomb “Papa” Jackson died, and dozens of others were hurt.

  Having sown to the wind, Biloxi’s white establishment tried through disinformation to deflect blame for the resulting whirlwind of violence onto imaginary “outside agitators.” In a UPI interview, Mayor Laz Quave claimed, “We’ve got Negroes here from Alabama, Louisiana, all parts of Mississippi and everywhere else. It has to be an organized move.”17 Here and now, I say without hesitation that the mayor’s statement was an absolute bald-faced, vicious, pathological, and unmitigated lie. None of the blacks arrested were from out of state. In an Associated Press interview, Anthony Ragusin of the Biloxi Chamber of Commerce accused the NAACP of being behind the trouble. This was another deliberate lie. There had been no NAACP involvement in the beach demonstrations up to that point. Even more outrageously, Ragusin falsely appealed to McCarthy-era paranoia when he told the reporter that the demonstrations were “financed with overseas money.” The Associated Press quoted Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, who said in a statement from New York, “When Anthony Ragusin… implies… that the NAACP is acting as an agent of the ‘enemies of the United States’ by inspiring demonstrations ‘financed by money from overseas’ he is telling a deliberate, premeditated and vicious falsehood.”18

  I suppose the establishment resorted to this false line about outsiders because they thought it would be believed in the white community. A lot of white folks at that time, even some well-meaning whites, had a strange psychology about the Mississippi blacks that they knew. They assumed that the native black folks didn’t have sense nor guts enough to do anything to change the status quo. Their racism led them to underestimate us. Some whites probably believed that it must be foreigners or outsiders stirring things up. Even Governor Barnett and Mayor Quave seemed to believe that we had no gumption or staying power and that the movement would burn itself out. Filled with racial hubris, they were stupid enough to live under the illusion that black folks didn’t have the power to think or the guts to act. Well, they met a different breed of Negro when they met me and other young blacks of the same mind-set.

  Whereas an unthinking bunch of lower-class whites did the violent dirty work of the Biloxi riot, a segment of Biloxi’s elite white establishment almost immediately set out to intimidate an aroused black community through economic pressure. The A&P food store fired Mr. Marvin Dickey, who had driven my car from the beach to the hospital during the riot. However, Marvin found another job right away. Mr. Bill Bradford, just about the best brick mason and cement finisher in the country, lost his job for going with me to the beach. Bill was never again able to find work with a white contractor in Mississippi. In retaliation for the wade-in, one of the big drugstores on Howard Avenue fired six employees, including short order cooks Mrs. Lorea Barnes Wright, Mrs. Eleanor Shelby, and Mrs. Ola Mae Odom and handyman Mr. Willie Wiggins, who was a deacon at my church. None of the six discharged drugstore employees had even gone near the beach. The firings of innocents were apparently meant as a message to the whole black community back-of-town. In a similar move, Borden’s Milk Company fired Mr. A. A. Dickey, who was never involved in any wade-in.

  All through the week following the riot, local and state authorities attempted to discourage any thoughts that we might have had about going back to the beach the next Sunday. There were many questions about our intentions. I decided to keep them guessing. I might return to the beach, I said. There was no law forbidding it, and there could be no law forbidding it. In Jackson that week, the Mississippi State Legislature hurriedly passed, and Governor Barnett quickly signed into law, a special bill designed to seriously discourage any further civil rights demonstrations on the beach. In the civil rights community they took to calling this bill the “Mason Bill,” a weapon specially designed to corral me. The “Mason Bill” made breach of peace a felony punishable by up to ten years in the penitentiary, if anyone was hurt or killed in a riot construed to stem from the breach of peace. Moreover, the bill made the specific act of “breach of peace on a coastal beach” a special crime subject to a two-hundred-dollar fine and a four-month jail term, even if no injury or deaths were involved. In explaining the bill, Senator W. B. Alexander of Boyle maintained that “the bill was most urgently needed on the Coast and may be needed this weekend.” It passed quickly. As soon as Governor Barnett had signed the “Mason Bill” into law, the news reports said, copies “were rushed to Gulf Coast officials … in anticipation that another flare-up of racial violence may occur in the next several days.” There could be no doubt that the bill was aimed at one man—me. I had been charged with breaching the peace and disorderly conduct when I went to the beach on April 17 and April 24. Besides the prison time, the law had other potentially serious ramifications. Some in the segregationist establishment tried to lay the blame for the riot on me. With these new laws on the books, a felony conviction associated with any future demonstrations could easily lead to the loss of my Mississippi medical license. Several other pieces of legislation were de
bated that week which, through stiff fines and jail time, aimed to discourage sit-ins and other types of civil disobedience activities that had not yet been seen in Mississippi. The “Mason Bill” led the way.19

  Our adversaries also applied a variety of other pressures to Dr. Dunn and me. Again, during the week following the riot, I received innumerable threats on my life in the mail and by telephone. Knox Walker obtained another Klan hit list with our names on it. We took note and increased our personal vigilance. However, Dr. Dunn and I also got plenty of direct economic bullying aimed at us. In those days, Dr. Dunn was quite a businessman. I admired Felix Dunn’s entrepreneurial spirit. To me, he was a good example of Garveyism and the new spirit of black pride in taking up business activity. Over the years, Dr. Dunn had invested in a number of businesses. For example, he bought the Standard service station at the corner of Nixon and Division streets across from my office. In 1959, Felix Dunn had started Top Flight Amusement Company, a jukebox and vending machine company that placed machines in thirty-two black-owned bars and cafes in Harrison and Hancock counties. However, the bigger you are, the bigger the target you offer your enemies.

  On the night of April 24–25, 1960, while the riot raged in Biloxi, Harrison County constables Hudson Puckett and Clyde Collins carried out a series of provocative raids on black bars in the Gulfport area. These establishments just happened to do business with Dr. Dunn’s new Top Flight Amusement Company. In a sworn affidavit published in the Daily Herald, the constables admitted that when they “heard about the racial battles going on in the City of Biloxi…,” they immediately “took steps against places in the City of Gulfport where crowds of Negroes were known to be gathering and which were selling intoxicating liquors.” Six black-owned Gulfport establishments were raided the night of the riot, and the newspaper reported that over the next forty-eight hours, the two constables hit another fifteen joints.20 The black bar operators were officially charged with possessing and selling intoxicating liquor. In 1960, Mississippi still had its prohibition laws on the books. Selling liquor was technically a misdemeanor offense. In Harrison County, however, local officials, with state connivance, routinely overlooked liquor sales in bars, whether black or white owned, so long as the state’s “official” black market liquor tax was paid on the whiskey sold. Sovereignty Commission files and tapes indicate that the black bar operators believed that the April 24–26 constables’ raids sought to pressure them to change their vending and jukebox contracts in order to break Dr. Dunn’s new company.21 Extortion charges were filed against the two constables but were later dropped due to insufficient evidence.22