The pressure came down on me in the form of threats that my hospital privileges would be withdrawn. The first hint that this weapon might be used came in the police station after my arrest. Natalie came in with my bail and heard Biloxi police chief Herbert McDonnell ranting and raving to the effect that I was ruining the hospital. Natalie was a quick retort specialist. (I used to call her a retort transcendentalist after Emerson’s work by that name.) Natalie told the chief he had better calm down since he had suffered a recent heart attack, and besides, she said, “If one doctor could do that much damage to a hospital with thirty other doctors, I just wonder, what kind of doctor could that be?” Later that week, at about eight o’clock one night, I was still working at the office when the phone rang and the person on the other end said, “Gilbert” I hung up. Back in those days, if you did not address me by my proper title, Dr. Mason, I hung up. The phone rang again, and this time a member of the hospital staff executive committee identified himself and said, “We [the staff executive committee] want to see you at the conference room of the Biloxi Hospital as soon as possible.” I closed the office and went straight to the hospital.
There I found the conference room packed with people. “We have been reading about your activities and the wade-in,” a prominent physician and staff officer said, “and we don’t appreciate it.” He threatened, “If it continues, we’re going to put you off the staff.” He implied that I could be held guilty of conduct unbecoming a physician, a charge that not only threatened my hospital privileges but could also threaten my Mississippi medical license. However, I discovered once again that I had friends. I will always remember the courage of Dr. Frank Gruich, a Christian gentleman and my ob-gyn preceptor, who, on this difficult night, rose once again to my defense, just as he had at the medical society meeting the year before. Dr. Gruich said, “Dr. Mason is guilty only of exercising his rights as a citizen. He has as much right to go to the beach as anyone else. What he has done [regarding the wade-in] is within the law. Beyond this, he has done no more than anyone else would do to defend himself or to obtain his rights.” Thanks to Frank Gruich, nothing came of the charges. They did not put me off the staff, but the threat remained.
Beyond the hospital Natalie heard talk at church that some of my patients’ white employers were encouraging them to change doctors. Some domestic workers seemed to have expressed concern that they would have to stop seeing me, but if anyone thought that they could use black people to drive me out of private practice because I was standing up for people’s rights under the U.S. Constitution, they were mistaken. Our community would not let it happen. After the bloody wade-in the old scare tactics just didn’t work very well anymore. When they needed a doctor, folks kept coming to me. There were other little signs of the white business community’s displeasure, though. Natalie and I suddenly got some unfriendly pressure from our white landlord about the rent for our drugstore. Then, when the court maneuvers started later in the year, a white contractor with whom we had reached an agreement suddenly refused to install an aluminum carport for me on the house I was buying on Fayard Street.
With the economic screws or the threat of them being put to our people, it was time for back-of-town to respond. We did not return to the beach on Sunday, May 1. Instead we organized a targeted boycott and announced it in a meeting at the United Benevolence Association Hall on Division Street on Sunday. The Sovereignty Commission files show that both police and state agents were there listening. We did not see anything to be gained by a general boycott of white businesses. We believed we could be successful and make an important point about black economic power if we focused our boycott mainly on three establishments. We selected the white-owned general food and variety hardware store at the corner of Nixon and Division streets. This store did a brisk business with black folks. It sold everything from nuts and bolts to ham hocks and collard greens. This business was targeted because pipe and chain from that particular store was used to beat up our people on the beach, and because the owner himself was seen among those rioting against black folks on the beach on April 24. Borden’s Milk Company was also targeted for boycott. Borden’s had fired Mr. A. A. Dickey, who had taken no part in the beach demonstrations. As a matter of principle, we refused to buy any more Borden’s milk products either from home deliverymen or in grocery stores. Our third main boycott target was the large drugstore on Howard Avenue which had fired six black employees, four of whom had never been to the beach.
Before we had been at work on the boycott for even a good week, the Sovereignty Commission agents were writing memos labeling our boycott as “a complete failure.”23 However, Borden’s Milk Company was soon out of business in back-of-town in Biloxi. For many years thereafter, no Borden’s milk was sold in Biloxi. We negotiated with a competing company called Dairy Fresh. Dairy Fresh hired A. A. Dickey and bought out the Borden’s facilities. Dairy Fresh thrived. We put the general store at the corner of Division and Nixon streets totally out of business—lock, stock, and barrel. For many long days a cadre of ladies, often including Mrs. Vashti Tanner, stood across the street from that store keeping vigil and educating any black who looked to be headed there. Of course, if you failed to learn the lesson and headed on toward the store, these ladies educated everybody else about your failings in this matter. The proprietor soon gave it up and closed the store. I should say, those ladies closed him up. He eventually sold the store property to a group of black investors who hoped to open a new black-owned supermarket. I think that we made an important point with these two successes. However, we were never able to exert enough business pressure on the offending downtown drugstore on Howard Avenue to bring its owners to repentance. They never hired back the employees they had let go. They had enough white customers to see them through. Still, I think that by any objective standard our targeted boycott was highly successful. All sorts of inaccurate reports on our intentions made it into the press. One should not measure the boycott by what the press or Sovereignty Commission agents said it was trying to do. They were misinformed and passed on misinformation. Measure the boycott instead by its own aims and results. We never pursued a general boycott. Our targets were narrow and thoughtfully selected because of the special connection of particular businesses to the violence on the beach or to reprisals against innocent people in the aftermath of the bloody wade-in.
In this atmosphere, in the throes of unprecedented violence and intimidation, the black community back-of-town in Biloxi, Mississippi, held up its head and found a new identity, a new pride, and a new spirit. The dry bones of lost hope suddenly reconnected and came to life. In the fires of adversity new leadership came forth—leadership fitted to the times and tasks at hand. Those revived hopes and that new leadership gave birth to the Biloxi branch of the NAACP. By my count there were three NAACP members in the whole town of Biloxi before our heads were smashed on the day of the bloody wade-in. Except for those who belonged to my Masonic Lodge and the Elks Lodge, I could hardly get Biloxi’s black community notables—not even the Scout leaders—to participate in civil rights activities. Because of the fear of our people that the NAACP label would make them special targets for white reprisals, we had created the Harrison County Civic Action Committee to carry on the campaign for the beach. Because of the fears of our people, the NAACP had nothing to do with the first wade-ins. That all changed overnight on April 24, 1960. The folks now saw that they needed a really big bad dog to look out for them. I pointed them to the biggest and the baddest one I knew.
In response to our talk with Roy Wilkins and Clarence Mitchell, Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the Mississippi Conference of the NAACP, drove down and met Dr. Dunn and me at my office on the Monday after the riot. Right away Medgar Evers began soliciting memberships to see if there would be enough interest and commitment to organize a separate new local NAACP branch in Biloxi. Sometime that week we had an organizing meeting at the United Benevolence Association (UBA) hall. It was a memorable gathering. We were talking up a storm. Ta
lk, talk, talk, talk, talk. We were going to do this, and we were going to do that. Soon Reverend John Ferdinand, the associate minister at New Bethel—he got full. He grew very impatient with the lack of direction. He stood up with that gray hair, looking like Frederick Douglass, and said, “Talk don’t buy no land. Let’s do something.” Reverend Ferdinand had been beaten in the street the previous Sunday. He went on, “What are you going to do now? You’ve had your wade-in, and you’ve gotten beat up, and you’ve been arrested. But talk don’t buy no land.”
That gave me an opening. I said, “Our man Medgar Evers is here.” Then and there, with Medgar Evers’s guidance, we got serious about a new strategy. We decided to accept NAACP legal assistance. We decided to gather affidavits from persons beaten on the beach or who had otherwise been deprived of their right to use the beach. As Medgar Evers used to put it, we decided to see who “duly deposes, avers, and says” they are aggrieved. In short, it was time for a showing of faces behind NAACP leadership back-of-town in Biloxi, Mississippi. Now, downtown city officials were saying, “They’re just a bunch of Negroes who went and got arrested. They can’t do nothing.” Back-of-town we were out in the open working with Medgar Evers and looking to the big dogs of the NAACP to help us carry on the struggle. Segregationists might frame a law to keep us from demonstrating, but they couldn’t frame a law to keep us from suing them. Before the week was out in back-of-town, seventy-two courageous persons had signed sworn affidavits. There would have been more affidavits if there had been more time to gather and type them. We also collected photographs of the riot to be placed in evidence with the affidavits. An inquiry was made as to who of the seventy-two people who had signed sworn affidavits would be willing to stand up in court and become a plaintiff in a federal suit. All seventy-two wanted to go to court. All seventy-two were ready for such a showing of faces.
At the end of the week, city and county officials tried to appease us with the appointment of an all-white, nine-man committee to study the beach problem. The clear implication was that their nine men would recommend a separate beach for blacks in each municipality. After all the scars inflicted during the previous week, I had no intentions of accepting a segregated beach. I stated this publicly at the UBA hall on Sunday, May ι. It amused Medgar Evers greatly when I added that I had a nine-man committee of my own to review this problem—the U.S. Supreme Court. Both the press and Sovereignty Commission agents reported this statement.24 Of course, we were already well down the road toward a suit demanding total and unrestricted access for all citizens to any part of the beach. We were about to deliver a punch that no one in the white power structure thought we could deliver from that little black section back-of-town in Biloxi.
And the showing of faces continued. Before the week was out, ninety-two people had become charter members of the new Biloxi branch of the NAACP. Ninety-two folks signed on to bring the big dog to town and feed him. At thirty-one years of age, I was elected the first president of the Biloxi branch, and Mrs. Ruby Tyler was elected secretary. Reverend M. C. Easily became our treasurer, and Mr. Rehofus Esters, Mr. Luzell Bullock, Sr., and Mrs. Ossie Seymour filled out our initial slate of local officers as first, second, and third vice presidents. Over the next week, we attended to the business of organizing the new branch. Heavy police patrols prowled the beach and the neighborhood back-of-town. Things got a lot quieter—so quiet, in fact, that just three days after I had made my statement about having my own “nine-man committee,” Sovereignty Commission informant David McDavid of the Jackson Daily News speculated to Zack Van Landingham that “someone had gotten to Mason … and quieted him down.”25 White folks were still underestimating the strength that we had gained when those dry bones of suppressed black hope and pride had come back to life. Our spirits were high. Our resolve was unchanged. Nobody had gotten to me.
Those who underestimated us got a wake-up call on Sunday, May 8, when, from Atlanta, Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP, announced plans for a national “wade-in” campaign in response to events in Biloxi. Biloxi gave the lexicon of the civil rights movement the term “wade-in.”26 This was good, but we had something better in the works.
Medgar Evers and the NAACP legal defense team had delivered our affidavits, and the Civil Rights Division of President Eisenhower’s Justice Department answered our call for justice. On May 17, from the halls of the U.S. Justice Department, our own Big Bertha roared. The U.S. Justice Department filed suit in federal district court in our behalf against Harrison County, the board of supervisors, Sheriff Curtis Dedeaux, the city of Biloxi, Mayor Laz Quave, and Biloxi police chief Herbert McDonnell for denying Negroes use of the beach. Local officials on the coast were stunned. One newspaper report said that the president of the board of supervisors and Mayor Laz Quave looked as if they were about to have a heart attack when they first got word of the suit. They’d been fooling themselves, thinking they would wear us out or that they would appease us with their nine-man committee. They had boasted, “Ain’t nothing going to come of this.” The Jim Crow establishment told themselves, “Those blacks ain’t got no gumption. The money’s coming from overseas.” No, the money came from Division and Nixon streets. The gumption was also homegrown.
Looking back in 1978, and thinking about the crisis of these great days in Biloxi, I wrote lines that to me still ring true: “Born in the month of April 1960, amidst the turbulent, ominous temperament of a vicious, unfeeling, rabid segregationist South, propelled into a discordant maze of a confused America which could not stop the change to a new equality, the Biloxi branch came forth squalling a clarion call for justice, which was, then and now, at a fervent pitch—so fervent that virtually every significant forward step was a cadence of the Biloxi branch.”
In a press interview in 1960, I credited divine providence for the turn of events that brought federal intervention in our behalf. What I had been through between April 17 and May 17, 1960, seemed nothing short of miraculous. One Sunday, I was arrested in a lone protest on the beach. Not even one person from my own church would go with me. The next Sunday, 125 volunteers had shown up and taken a beating with me on that same beach. But the things that hate had designed to defeat us had made us stronger. Fear left our hearts, when it should have overwhelmed us. Instead, we found the courage to come together to create a proper local instrument for our struggle for freedom and equality. At the beginning of every meeting we had attended that year, whether we were outdoors in a field or inside a lodge hall, we had prayed. When the police wouldn’t let me go onto the beach freely by day, I had gone secretly to the beach at night to pray. In the darkness, on that beach, I had prayed for God to protect us and give us salvation. I had prayed for wisdom, for guidance, and for success in gaining freedom. I had prayed for brotherhood and for us not to lose sight that we are all brothers under the fatherhood of God. I had no doubt that God was the architect of our fledgling success, the reliever of our fears, our protector from danger. “Providence has ways and means of salvation for all people,” I told the press.27 still believe that. However, in May of 1960, the struggle in Biloxi had barely begun.
SIX
Harassment, Lies, and Sovereignty Commission Spies
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? —Psalms 27:1
I met my brother the other day.
I gave him my right hand.
And just as soon as ever my back was turned,
He scandalized my name.
Do you call that a brother? No, no!
You call that a brother? No, no!
Call that a brother? No, no!
Scandalize my name.
—African American spiritual, “Scandalize My Name”
AFTER THE WEEK OF THE BLOODY WADE-IN OF APRIL 1960, my volunteer security group guarded me around the clock for twelve straight months. Natalie and I started sending our child to Mrs. Blanche Elz’s house to sleep at times when the threats increased or were particul
arly intense. Mr. Elzy was one of my guards. Gilbert, Jr., never knew why he got to sleep over at Mrs. Elzy’s so often. He just knew that he liked her, she liked him, he loved the food, and he had great fun playing with her grandchildren. For those who love their family, threatening calls are difficult. Sometimes there were male voices on these anonymous calls. At other times they were females. I could handle it in the daytime, but at night when I was fatigued the calls disturbed me. Natalie, however, became very good at retorting those middle-of-the-night telephone terrorists. They’d call her “bitch,” and she would say, “Well, your mother ought to know.” If they said, “We’re going to run you out of town,” Natalie might say, “Well, if you come by here trying to do it, they might find you in the street.” If they asked her if we were going to the beach again, she told them, “Sure, we plan to be there next Sunday.” If they bragged about the number of guns they were going to use on us, Natalie would tell them, “You better come by and check our house first. You ought to see how many guns we have.” Saying things like that felt good, but it was just propaganda. The fact was that we were committed to nonviolent methods, and we were essentially unarmed in our home. Anytime my name appeared in the paper, we came to expect an increase in harassing and threatening telephone calls or letters delivered in the mail. This was true for thirty years up until the early 1990s.
Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Page 13