Dr. Dunn argued that the board of supervisors should stop municipal police forces along the coast from interfering with blacks using the beach. He tried to approach things in a practical way. Felix stated that there was no mechanism for talking to local authorities or for getting the municipal and county officials into the same room to come up with a common policy. He solicited Sovereignty Commission help in getting local authorities to discuss a common county-wide policy to resolve the crisis. But these agents persisted in twisting his words and demanding that Dr. Dunn propose a definite plan then and there. Felix said repeatedly that he was there to get talks going, and that he had no authority to present a plan. He asserted that any plan would have to win approval with the Harrison County Civic Action Committee. One agent asked Felix what he would do if the local officials denied blacks any use of the beach at all. Felix would not say what he would do, but he and his attorney carefully pointed out that the NAACP had not been involved as of yet, and that continued trouble on the beach could affect the tourist trade. He was quite open about being president of the Gulfport branch, and he laid it out before these good ole boys that he could keep the NAACP from intervening legally if the local folks would deal with him.
When the Sovereignty agents claimed that Mason might oppose a negotiated solution, Dunn jived them some about how he could influence the black community and “control” me, if necessary. Now I must say that, in reality, Felix Dunn never ever gave the slightest hint to me that he was even thinking about trying to control me. We shared the same civil rights goals. However, on this control jive, Felix faked the agents out of position and got the ole boys with their noses wide open. They bought Felix’s line on this control thing. You find them repeating this control disinformation to themselves in the files whenever they get disturbed about my activities. They did this even though they never had another conversation with Felix, and Felix certainly never tried to control me.
After they kept pushing on Felix for some sort of a plan, and after he repeatedly told them that he had no authority to make a deal, Felix wound up speculating. Hypothetically, would a stated policy that ended police harassment and ended all specific prohibitions of black use of the beach be compatible with informally agreeing that certain places on the beach in each municipality would be viewed as primarily available to blacks? In the talk around this point Felix specifically ruled out any formal prohibition of blacks using any beach area they might choose, but he did not rule out the possibility that blacks might voluntarily limit themselves to certain areas. Now we in Biloxi would have absolutely rejected any such informal agreement to direct our beach use to a particular area, even if it meant that we would not be prohibited from going elsewhere, and Dr. Dunn knew this. However, in these speculations, Dr. Dunn never said anyone would agree. He was trying to get discussions going between local officials and black leadership on the coast. He was not trying to come up with an acceptable hypothetical end product. He said this repeatedly.11
This was a long meeting. The tapes run for more than two hours. I have here laid out so much of the taped record in order to show the distortion in agents’ summaries and uses of these records. Toward the end of the meeting, someone, not Dr. Dunn, brought up the reprisals taken on black bars doing business with Dr. Dunn’s jukebox company the night of the Biloxi riots. Dunn acknowledged the raids and stated his belief that they had been undertaken in order to try to break him. He stated that he had worked to try to resolve racial conflict in the community and did not deserve such treatment. This discussion, which took up perhaps the last twelve or fifteen minutes of the 130-minute meeting, became the main event according to the agent’s written summary of the meeting. In agent Zack Van Landingham’s racist interpretation, a medical doctor took a day off work in a crisis week that had seen riots, shootings, and death in his community to come to Jackson for the “primary purpose” of protecting his vending machine company. The long, drawn-out discussion of “Negro use of the beach” which took nearly two hours appeared to the cynical white agent to be “of secondary importance.” The agent’s negative assumptions kicked in as he wrote, “Without coming outright and saying so, both he (Dr. Dunn) and his attorney (Knox Walker) desired the Sovereignty Commission to take some action in having the local authorities ease up the pressure on Dr. Dunn with reference to his juke boxes and cigarette vending machines’ being placed in certain places run by Negroes.” Just to set the facts straight, the day before Dr. Dunn’s trip to Jackson, the sheriff of Harrison County served arrest warrants on the constables involved in the raids on black bars. The constables had already been arrested on charges of extortion connected with those raids before Dr. Dunn went to Jackson. Dunn had no need nor likely expectation of state help in this matter. Yet, in the biased written summaries of this meeting, selfish, petty business worries were interpreted as the main concerns of a dedicated physician,12 whom I knew to be a genuine humanitarian and a long-time benefactor to his community. Tapes of the meeting belie the agent’s biased view, and I reject the one-sided racist interpretation of my friend’s motives.
Moreover, Dr. Dunn’s carefully worded statements that specifically rejected any de jure segregation of the beach and repeatedly upheld the principle of unrestricted black access to the beach were twisted in the agent’s notes to say falsely that Dr. Dunn believed that certain sections of the beach “should” be set aside for black use in each of the municipalities. This misleading summary totally disregarded Dr. Dunn’s repeated advocacy of negotiations, his statements that he had no authority to propose a plan, and his repeated resistance to stating ideas about a plan. Agent Zack Van Landingham heard what he wanted to hear. When I first read Van Landingham’s memo, I could not reconcile what was written there with what I knew about Felix Dunn’s commitment to our cause. I suspected that the agent had greatly distorted things. In comparing the secret tape of this meeting to the written summary, I found out how correct my suspicions were. There is a clear editorial gap between what actually was stated and what agent Van Landingham wrote.13 Researchers beware!
The tapes indicate that, when this meeting between Dr. Dunn and the Sovereignty agents ended, reporters were gathered outside the office. The parties to the meeting agreed that since they were trying to get negotiations started, they should make no statements to the press about the substance of their talks. There were news stories the next day reporting that the meeting took place at the State Sovereignty Commission offices, but none of the substance of the talk was revealed—that is, nothing was revealed until it served the mean purposes of the Sovereignty Commission to discredit Dr. Dunn.
On May 17 the U.S. Justice Department intervened in the beach case. On May 19, the Jackson Daily News, some of whose reporters fed information to the Sovereignty Commission,14 ran a front-page story beneath a huge lying headline: “NAACP Requested Segregated Beach, Asked Sovereignty Commission for Facilities Three Weeks Ago.” The story presented a gross distortion of the April 28 conversation between Dr. Dunn and the Sovereignty Commission agents. The newspaper used this lying headline as a lead-in to report the Justice Department’s beach desegregation suit.15 I believe that the Sovereignty Commission released an inaccurate account of a supposedly privileged conversation at a time calculated to demoralize efforts under way to build NAACP membership. The timing of this lie was, I believe, also aimed at discouraging petitioners in the beach desegregation suit. The lie in the Daily News headline made it appear that the local NAACP leadership was unprincipled, and might be such low scoundrels as to lead poor black folks out onto a limb in this beach lawsuit and then saw it off behind them. None of it was true. The release of this false account of the April 28 meeting was designed to embarrass the NAACP and undercut its leadership. This news article offers just one small sample of the dirty tricks this agency pulled all over the state in its attempts to discredit black leadership.
I never had a direct conversation with a Sovereignty Commission agent that was twisted or misrepresented in the manner of Dr. Dunn’s A
pril 28 conversation, but the Sovereignty Commission spread a false rumor about me in the press in an effort to discredit me as a physician. It seems that on April 29, 1960, the Sovereignty Commission’s paramount paid black informant, Percy Greene of the Jackson Advocate, planted the idea with agent Zack Van Landingham that I could be discredited as a physician. Now, the press was already quoting me as saying we were going to file a lawsuit over the beach. Greene told Van Landingham the false story that at the convention of the black Mississippi Medical and Surgical Association in Jackson during the week following the bloody wade-in, the president of the National Medical Association, I believe it was Dr. W. Montague Cobb, had “bawled Dr. Gilbert Mason out for the manner he had assumed in the Biloxi race riot.”16 This alleged incident never happened. It was either a deliberate bald-faced lie or a Percy Greene hallucination. No one who knew of Dr. Cobb’s civil rights activities, or who knew of the spirit of Howard University or of my personal relationship with Cobb as one of his students at Howard University’s medical school, could have placed any credence in such a report. Dr. Cobb later served as national president of the NAACP. Notwithstanding the utter falsity of Percy Greene’s report, Van Landingham was confident that this fictitious episode would quiet me down. What happened next demonstrates the close cooperation of the Jackson newspapers with Sovereignty Commission efforts to libel and discredit black leaders. Percy Greene gave Van Landingham the idea on April 29. On April 30, the Jackson Advocate editorialized against me, saying, “It appears to us that the great discoveries yet to be made regarding the cure of cancer, heart disease … and the broad field of medical research, would leave little time to the really dedicated doctor for leadership in political action.” Greene’s editorial went on to accuse me of a lack of “diplomacy and statesmanship and goodwill,” which Percy Greene said served only to confirm the statement of Edmund Burke, concerning the French Revolution, that the “sides of sick beds and the arms of dentists’ chairs are not the places to train statesmen and the leaders of the people.”17 On May 4, the Jackson Daily News ran an editorial accusing me of neglecting my patients in order to gain the notoriety associated with leading civil rights activities. The white editorialist somehow thought I enjoyed having my life constantly threatened and my office firebombed. Still, this Sovereignty Commission-inspired Daily News editorial charged that the Harrison County Public Health Department was covered up in patients because my services were no longer readily available. “While he pursues a business of integration and socializing on the beaches,” the paper alleged, “the State of Mississippi continues to carry out its efficient, beneficial and much-needed health work through its clinics supported by the taxpayers of this state.”18 Thus the Sovereignty Commission turned a fictitious incident into a press attack on my leadership and my professional dedication. I hasten to add that the premise of the editorial was false. I kept just as busy with my medical practice as always, and the public health nurses in Harrison County had nothing added to their chores due to my civil rights activities. It should also be pointed out that the national NAACP office had just launched an investigation of racial discrimination in state health department services in the South. Moreover, when representatives of the NAACP’s Medical Committee on Civil Rights visited my office, they complimented me on the community ombudsman activity that my medical office had undertaken.
There is other direct evidence of the cozy relationship between certain sections of the press and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. On May 4, 1960, chief Sovereignty Commission investigator Zack Van Landingham reported that “Mr. McDavid of the Jackson Daily News” had telephoned to inform Van Landingham that the newspaper had “a number of listening posts on the Gulf Coast.”19 The information passed on in this phone call was false, but the fact that the reporter felt free to make such a call is indicative of the special relationship between sections of the press and the Sovereignty Commission. In his report on racial tensions surrounding a Fourth of July picnic undertaken by my church, First Missionary Baptist, at the DeSoto National Forest recreation area, Sovereignty Commission agent Bob Thomas noted that reporter Tom Cook of the Daily Herald stated that he (Cook) had tried to “keep this story quieted down as much as possible.” The same Tom Cook years later remembered his meeting with Medgar Evers in Dr. Dunn’s office as being most pleasant. How strange, complex, and hypocritical were the relationships that Jim Crow imposed upon us all. I think when Tom Cook spoke of keeping the DeSoto National Forest picnic story “quieted down,” he was probably referring to the self-censorship policy of his bosses at the Daily Herald, rather than some intiative of his own. This would be consistent with other things that I was personally told about the Daily Herald. At about this time in 1960, I asked reporter Billie Ray Quave of the Daily Herald why the local paper was not more fair in reporting the news of the civil rights struggle. I told him that I did not feel that our side of these controversies was being adequately explained. His reply was revealing. “Doctor,” he said, “I must tell you that I have a boss that I must answer to.” Newspaper self-censorship aided and abetted the aims of the State Sovereignty Commission, whether undertaken with that intent or merely practiced out of fear of the wrath of white advertisers or subscribers. For other newspaper publishers, a misguided allegiance to the racial status quo led them far away from the journalistic ideal of pursuing the truth to become themselves purveyors of destructive rumors and lies in active league with Sovereignty Commission enemies of truth.
I cannot leave the subject of lies and distortions in the Sovereignty Commission files without a forthright effort to set the record straight for innocent people, many now dead, about whom Sovereignty agents’ records leave misleading or distorted impressions. I take this endeavor very seriously, because most of the people the agents wrote about were not known personally to the agents. Regarding my friend Dr. Felix Dunn, whose motives and life are so unfairly characterized in the Sovereignty Commission files, I would say this: Felix Dunn was a genius. He went beyond taking the heat, the threats, and attempted bombings of his clinic that came with being a known state and local NAACP officer; he pioneered many things that have for years benefited black people and poor people in Gulfport. I want to acknowledge that Dr. Dunn’s early success in getting federal funds to build the Bell Apartments inspired me in some of my later housing initiatives as chairman of the Harrison County Community Action Agency. When I finished medical school, I came home to Mississippi hoping to make a difference, knowing that decent housing for the poor was a way of promoting long-term gains in public health. Dr. Dunn was the pioneer who showed us the way. Our TurnKey low income housing project drew its inspiration from the William E. Bell Apartments, which were named for the longtime president of Dr. Dunn’s alma mater, Alcorn State University. Dr. Dunn was also personally responsible for the construction of the Saraland low income retirement complex in North Gulfport. Beyond these contributions to the life of the community at large, it is almost impossible to calculate the amount of his own personal financial resources that Dr. Dunn invested in the cause of civil rights. He paid large sums to get documents copied, bought a life membership in the NAACP, and supported the cause of civil rights through political donations. Dr. Dunn freely gave of his know-how in any worthy project, and he gave substantially to student scholarships at Alcorn State University. All of these things and more define Felix Dunn as a man who put the welfare of his people above his business interests. He was an example of black entrepreneurship and black civic devotion. In their rush to smear and discredit a good man, the Sovereignty agents missed all of this about Dr. Felix Dunn.
The racist mind is so intently busy looking for the negative that it misses the positive in so many people and situations. In their rush to judgment, without knowing anything meaningful about the personal pilgrimages through life that had led me or Felix to take up the fight for freedom, they dismissed us, they dismissed the depths of our longings, they dismissed our capacity to suffer to gain freedom, and they wrongly assumed that
we could be “controlled.” Without ever really knowing me, and without inquiring very deeply about me in the black community, the Sovereignty Commission agents assumed in 1959 that some black community leader would easily pursuade me to remove my name from the first beach desegregation petition presented to the Harrison County Board of Supervisors. How presumptuous! No one ever approached me with such a proposal, and no one in the black community in Gulfport or Biloxi would have had the audacity to approach me with such a proposal. Anyone who knew me, including Felix Dunn, knew that it was downright foolishness, utter stupidity, to try to control me. As a matter of fact, contrary to the assumptions of Sovereignty agents, the vast majority of the comments I heard in the African American community were from people seeking to thank me for my role in drafting the beach petition. Similarly, those who knew Felix from his days as a quarterback at Alcorn University behind Charles Evers, who was his center, knew that Felix was tough, resilient, streetwise, smart, and an unrelenting competitor. The Sovereignty Commission agents never really knew us. Their racism kept them from giving black leaders enough respect to really get to know them. White investigators dismissed us. They expected some negative stereotype of the Negro to kick in, kill the movement, and take their problems away. We reacted to hardship and threats in ways that were absolutely opposite to what the Sovereignty Commission agents expected. Such are the perpetrator’s delusions in the racist dream that created for us the nightmare world of segregation. Contrary to the deformed stereotypes of white racist imaginings, we proved to be real people, fully human, with hearts courageous and hopeful and willing to suffer for justice for ourselves and for our children.
Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Page 16