Beaches, Blood, and Ballots

by Gilbert R. Mason, M. D.

  Sometimes the harassment went beyond threats. Cars would sometimes slow down near our house, get off a gunshot or two, and speed away. On many occasions, I was working late at the office or the hospital when these drive-by shooters appeared. Natalie would call me to report it. Of course, my guardsmen were always outside. They sometimes returned fire. One of them, Joe Kennedy, became so concerned that he brought us a .30–06 rifle to keep in the house. We used to joke about Natalie sitting in the rocking chair all night with the .30–06 across her lap so that we could get some sleep. The truth is that she never learned to use the rifle at all. She was scared of guns. I once took the rifle to a Boy Scout camp, Camp Attawah, and shot it a few times on the rifle range, but we knew that our lives were really in God’s hands at all times. By the grace of God, despite many episodes of gunfire, we knew of only two bullets that actually struck the house. When this happened, we heard gunfire and found the bullet holes in the brick beside the front door frame. I left the bullet holes unfilled as a reminder of the need for vigilance. We suffered a small amount of property damage compared to others in the civil rights movement who lost homes or churches to firebombs, but in 1963 hooligans burned out the interior of my blue Buick, and, again in the 1970s, when I came out of a Biloxi restaurant I discovered that my car had been doused in gasoline and that a number of burned-out matches were lying nearby that had been thrown at the car but not gotten close enough to ignite it. It was the 1970s before police investigations of these incidents satisfied me as to their seriousness and thoroughness.

  The psychological warfare aimed at driving me out of town or shutting me up in 1960 also included the malevolent southern tradition of cross burning. One evening in 1960, after we had moved to Fayard Street, the neighbors called to tell us that there were two crosses burning in our yard. Our house was on a double lot, which gave us a large yard on the north side. There we found the two crosses burning on that north yard near the willow tree. Our guardsmen could not be everywhere or see everything. In the darkness we were vulnerable. Yet, we were more annoyed and inconvenienced by these threats than we were fearful. Gunshots and burned crosses and telephone threats made us more aware, more vigilant, and more security conscious. Beyond being aimed directly at us, much of this meanness, no doubt, also represented attempts to intimidate our friends. The enemies of our freedom thought that they would make an example of that Mason fellow in order to show everybody what happens to black folks who don’t stay in their place. If intimidation was the aim, it did not change us or discourage our friendships. We prayed for God’s protection, put our faith in Jesus Christ, and rested in the assurance that God would not fail us if we continually sought his guidance. Somehow, neither Natalie nor I harbored any great fear. Fear never paralyzed us and never stopped us from doing what we thought was the right thing or the best thing at the time.

  In addition to the cross burnings and verbal threats, harassment also came in the form of weird sounds from the telephone—clicking noises, mysterious interruptions, or sounds like those created when there is an open line or an extension in use. These anomalies made us believe that the authorities had wiretapped us. Too often, the content of private telephone conversations between two people became public knowledge. Information was passed on that could not have been obtained except through wiretap. On the other hand, some of the clicks and noises on the line were probably deliberately created in order to try to intimidate us with the knowledge that our enemies were able to listen in on us at will. There is no direct wiretap information on me in my Sovereignty Commission file. However, these papers do shed some light on segregationist uses of wiretaps. Sovereignty Commission agent Bob Thomas reported in the summer of 1960 that Sheriff Gerald Price in neighboring Hancock County had “tapped the phones of several Negroes suspected of being agitators….”1 This statement does not surprise me in the least. Agent Thomas reported it without any comment or sign of surprise. I suspect that use of wiretaps was routine all over the coast and all over Mississippi. However, I would caution future researchers about trusting reports from surviving wiretap files. Since we knew or believed that we were wiretapped, we came to be very cautious in telephone conversations, and we did a lot of “jivin’ and shuckin’” for the benefit of any unwanted secret listeners. We would say one thing when we meant another, give out purposeful misinformation or disinformation, and use a lot of jive talk or black street lingo as a kind of coded language for hiding things from white wiretap listeners.

  We could not trust our telephones, nor could we trust the U.S. mail. Local post office clerks in Mississippi tampered with my mail and with the mail of other civil rights leaders. The week following the bloody wade-in, I got my first inkling of how insecure and unreliable postal communications could be for someone in my position. Jet magazine, the Amsterdam News, the Chicago Defender and several other mainstream and blackoriented national news organizations had given the Biloxi riots coverage across the country, Jet was the only one of these publications usually available on newsstands in Biloxi. When the issue of Jet that covered the riot arrived in Biloxi we saw white folks going to the newsstands and buying up every issue of Jet that they could lay their hands on. White folks said, “Don’t let those darkies know what’s going on. Don’t let ‘em know what the national press is saying.” Of course, keeping black folks ignorant and in the dark about events that affect their destiny was a control tactic going all the way back to slavery days in the South. When I saw what was going on, I determined to find a way to get some copies of Jet distributed outside the newsstands. Alex Poinsett of Jet was down covering developments in Biloxi. At my asking, Poinsett wired Chicago to get a big package of Jets put into the mail to me. In a day or two, the parcel arrived. The local post office sent me a notice to come in and pick it up. When I got to the post office to claim it, the package had been torn open. Nothing remained of the shipment except its outer shell. I took the matter up with the postmaster. He claimed that it was just a torn package that had lost its contents. Having seen the white folks making quick work of buying up Jet just days before, I could not believe the postmaster. I immediately called Alex Poinsett to get another batch sent, but this time I had the package sent to Mrs. Blanche Elzy. This time the package and contents arrived safely and intact. We distributed those Jets.

  When it came to dealing with the civil rights movement, local postal clerks, in cahoots with the Citizens’ Council or the KKK, were ready to defy federal law and tamper with the mail. Our local NAACP branch meeting announcements were often mishandled in the postal system, or were mysteriously returned to me, as if to let me know that the postal service had my number. Occasionally a branch notice was returned with derogatory comments scrawled across it. One returned notice came with this statement: “I saw your old dilapidated, run-down office. What do you do with your money, give it to the NAACP?” Another memorable returned-mail message smeáred my race with the remark that black people “ain’t worth nothing with them big rumps.” This type of stuff was designed to intimidate us by creating the impression that the Klan and Citizens’ Council were in every powerful organization and that they were watching us legally and illegally.

  With this kind of interference going on with our mail, I was not at all surprised to find one of our branch notices that had been mailed to Marvin Dickey in my Sovereignty Commission file. Sovereignty agent Robert Thomas claimed that Mr. Louis Hollis of the Citizens’ Council had obtained our notice from one of his “new members” to whom it had been delivered “by mistake.” This poor Citizens’ Council member had supposedly “opened the letter” rather than return it to the postal service for a proper delivery.2 From my experience in those days, I think it more likely that a postal worker helped the Citizens’ Council get this notice, knowing that it would be forwarded on to state agents. For this reason I did not trust the U.S. mail, and neither did Medgar Evers or most other civil rights leaders around the state. Our experience was that too many things related to civil rights—far more than the usual—got
“lost,” were “misdelivered,” or were mysteriously slow in arriving. Being unable to trust either the telephones or the mail meant that packages or sensitive messages had to be carried personally. Medgar and his driver, Sam Bailey, spent a lot of needless time on the road because the mails and telephones could not be trusted. Driving that old ‘58 Oldsmobile, one or both of them might start the day driving from Jackson to Vicksburg, come back to Jackson, head to Meridian, and then go back to Jackson or on to the coast doing things that today we would handle by fax, e-mail, UPS, FedEx, or the U.S. mail. It is a shame that the black citizenry back in those days had to forbear with such an ignorant, virulent, racist society. The world’s meanness cost all us a lot of time that could have been used to accomplish so much, if it had been available for other projects to benefit humanity.

  Of all the harassments or punishments that came down on me personally for my civil rights stand in 1960, none hurt more than the punishment fellow Scouters inflicted on me. Scouting was and still is dear to my heart, and a part of my very soul. I had believed in the principles and values taught in Scouting and had taken them to heart as a boy. To me there was a perfect congruency between the ideals of Scouting and my civil rights activities. Some folks on the Mississippi Gulf Coast did not see it that way. When I arrived in Biloxi in 1955, I immediately became active in the Boy Scouts as an assistant scoutmaster. The boys in Biloxi had never seen a first class badge or a black Eagle Scout before I came. One evening I awed them by wearing my old merit badge sash with sixty-one merit badges affixed. Two of the next four black Eagle Scouts in Mississippi came from my troop. In January of 1960, I was promoted from assistant scoutmaster to scoutmaster for Troop 416, which my Masonic Lodge sponsored in Biloxi. As was the custom, white Boy Scout troops were organized into districts separate from the black divisions. My troop was one of the largest, white or black, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. We were very active in the so-called coast division, composed of black troops from Long Beach east to Pascagoula and Moss Point. My boys won just about every banner and every trophy at every camporee or jamboree or summer camp. My troop always heard a lot about freedom. Several members of my troop and several boys from neighboring Troop 419 sponsored by St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Biloxi participated in wade-ins with me.

  In 1960, the Boy Scout National Jamboree was to meet in Colorado Springs in July or August to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Scouting in the United States. In my teenage years, I had longed to go to a national jamboree, but World War II caused the national jamborees to be cancelled. To my great delight the Pine Burr Council chose me and James Harris, the scoutmaster for Troop 419 in Biloxi, as assistant scoutmasters for our division to attend the national jamboree in Colorado Springs with our boys under a scoutmaster from Mobile. We undertook training meetings in February and early March at Camp Attawah, the black Scout camp in south Mississippi. Scouting in Mississippi was segregated like everything else, so black and white Scouts from the same town might never meet each other except at the national jamborees, which were integrated. The white scoutmasters from our area did their local preparation for the jamboree twenty-one miles away from Camp Attawah at Camp Tiak. At these meetings, we met and got to know the thirty-six boys who were to attend the jamboree. We got acquainted with the program, inventoried and signed out equipment, and made the logistical preparations necessary to be successful with thirty-six boys on a trip from Mississippi to Colorado. All that was done in February and March.

  Then arose the matter of the wade-ins on April 17 and April 24 and my commitment to desegregate the beach. I had suddenly became a noted, some would say a notorious, public figure and a spokesman for African American rights. That was too much for some white folks, and they complained loudly to the Pine Burr Council. The council voted to withdraw their invitation for me to attend the jamboree. They sent the chief Scout executive, Mr. Tolbert, a white man, and a black Scout executive, Mr. P. V. McMillen, to break the news to me. Tolbert called and said they had something important to share with me in person. They asked me to suggest a neutral meeting place. I suggested Dr. Dunn’s office in Gulfport. When I got there, Tolbert began telling me how many complaints about my activities they had received from white people on the coast. “Well,” I said, “there ain’t no white boys in my troop.” Nonetheless, Tolbert quickly made it clear that they didn’t want me to go to the jamboree. The Pine Burr Council had already written the letter stating, “Due to the choice that we now make, you will not be able to go to the national jamboree.” So they bumped me, and my lifelong ambition to go to the national jamboree seemed lost. I loved Scouting. Scouting had been so good to me as a boy. That fellow Scouters, keepers of the legacy of such a noble institution, would fail in their idealism hurt me. So Scouting has been both bitter and sweet for me.

  Well, they bumped me, but I did not retreat quietly into the background. I gave the letter to a higher-ranking fellow black Scouter, hoping that the black scoutmasters would raise a hue and cry and come to my rescue. In the weeks after the Biloxi riot, that was just one battle too many for the black scoutmasters to take up. Nobody came to my rescue. That my fellow black Scouters would not carry on a principled fight for me was my second disappointment. I thought that some people were playing it safe, trying not to offend the establishment so that they could maintain whatever status they might have had. In the end, however, the Pine Burr Council could not keep me from going to the jamboree at my own expense, and this I did. And I kept being engaged in Scouting. I am still involved on the executive committee. In 1962, I took twelve Scouts from Biloxi, Moss Point, and Pascagoula to Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. If Scouting was sometimes bitter, it was also sweet. One of my life’s great ironical turns came when I, who had been denied the honor of taking a Scout troop to the national jamboree, was named a 1962 winner of Scouting’s coveted Silver Beaver Award. To this day, the Silver Beaver Award is one of the most valued honors ever bestowed upon me. I have always believed that suffering without justification is redemptive. Perhaps God has sent me honors like this as reminders that human beings and human institutions are redeemable. In two short years, I went from being an unwanted victim of local Boy Scout harassment to being a Scouting honoree. The same Mississippi Pine Burr Council which had deprived me of the honor of attending the 1960 Jamboree nominated me for the Silver Beaver Award two years later.

  I have no way of knowing what degree of coordination existed among the persons who made threatening phone calls, sent harassing mail, or shot up the street I lived on. At the time, the police gave us the distinct impression that they were not displeased that these things were happening to one who stood up for freedom in Biloxi. I do know that much political power and influence is exercised informally outside the formal structures laid out in constitutions and bylaws of institutions and organizations. I do not know whether the many harassments and threats that I received in the 1960s were merely spontaneous individual expressions of racial hatred or if state or local governmental officials coordinated or prompted them in some way. I do know that the state of Mississippi, through the state legislature and governor, contributed to an atmosphere of permissiveness toward racial intimidation and hate crimes in 1956 when it created an official state spy agency, the State Sovereignty Commission, with the sole mission of maintaining segregationist laws and customs. And we do know that the State Sovereignty Commission made substantial donations of tax dollars to the white Citizens’ Council,3 an organization that in turn often supplied information to Sovereignty Commission agents. The very existence of such an agency with overt connections to a bitterly racist group like the Citizens’ Council sent an approving message to all those who practiced racial humiliation, harassment, and intimidation in the name of upholding segregation.

  Psychological lynchings precede real ones. It takes a kind of psychological slander and libel for a racist to convince himself that he is justified in harassing or threatening another person or in taking reprisals on another person who merely asks to be ac
corded an equal opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As a system of lies, racist dehumanizaton begins with the lie that racists tell themselves when they say in their minds that blacks, or some other target group, do not possess the same aspirations, needs, ambitions, hopes, and feelings as white folk, or some other would-be perpetrator group. Lies are at the root of much of this world’s evil, but those lies which deny their victim’s humanity have been most accursed in our times. Such lies have provided the deadly psychological foundations necessary for mass murder and genocide in some places in this unfriendly world. In the American South, lying self-deceit justified every kind of racial evil from the humiliations of Jim Crow to lynchings, beatings, harassments, and the economic sanctions which I have described. In the long run, though, truth is more powerful than untruth. In order to maintain itself, untruth must weave an ever more complex web of lies. In self-deceiving racist minds, not only were blacks less than fully human, but, the truth of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments notwithstanding, in segregationist minds, blacks could not possibly be a part of the “We the people…” envisioned in the Constitution’s preamble, nor in the racist mind could the “truths [that are] selfevident, that all men are created equal,” of which Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, apply to blacks. In the mental illness called racism, lies compound upon lies.