Since no agents spent the effort to really know anyone whose skin was black, the picture of the black community that emerges from the Sovereignty Commission files reduces complex and vibrant African American communities to simple dichotomies of characters: the controllers and the controlled. Agents obsessed and speculated about who could control whom, and in this speculation now enshrined in their files, they besmirch the good names of those whose lives were filled with hopes and dreams and determination and faith that far transcended the paltry impressions of black people left in these prejudiced agents’ writings. Many of the people so foolishly thought to be potentially useful as controllers of others were in fact just the opposite. Reverend Famous Mcllheney and Mrs. Fannie Nichols had no interest in controlling forward-thinking, aggressive, liberty-loving black folks. Anyone attending a PTA meeting at Nichols High School when Mrs. Nichols was principal would have thought they had mistakenly dropped in on an NAACP meeting, so vigorous was her advocacy and concern for freedom. The Sovereignty Commission agent who speculated about her potential as a controller admits that he never met this fine lady.
Like Mrs. Nichols, Reverend Famous Mcllheney was an intractable and eloquent advocate of freedom. At a time when some black ministers were afraid to host civil rights meetings in their churches for fear of reprisals, Reverend Famous Mcllheney freely invited us to his two churches, Little Rock and Morning Star Baptist churches in Gulfport. Reverend Mcllheney openly aided and abetted the Harrison County Civic Action Committee. Mcllhene’s eloquence and consistency in talking liberty was like pouring gasoline on the fires of freedom that were burning in our hearts. I guess no white men ever heard Reverend Famous Mcllheney pour out his heart before God for liberty. The agents freely speculated about this revered man of God, but they never bothered to make personal contact with him. What sloppy work! Reverend Famous Mcllheney was an emollient greasing the freedom movement and making things roll faster and better. He never acted as a break or a damper on anything. How ridiculous that without knowing him, without even being in a meeting with him, white agents could speculate about whether they could use such a man as Reverend Famous Mcllheney to control others. Had they inquired beyond the white folks’ rumor mill, they would have been quickly disabused of this idea. It is not only the prejudice but the utter ignorance of the Sovereignty Commission agents that makes these files so misleading and so frustrating for me to read.
In setting the record straight about Reverend Famous Mcllheney, I do not mean to leave the impression that Reverend Mcllheney was the only black minister taking a stand for civil rights. Certainly from the very start of our movement Reverend Å. H. Potter opened New Bethel Baptist Church in Biloxi to us, and that church became a bastion of civil rights under his leadership. Reverend W. T. Guice at Mount Bethel Baptist Church in Gulfport, Reverend Fox at First Missionary Baptist in Handsboro, Reverend Orange Harris at St. John AME in Biloxi, and Reverend Davis at St. Paul’s United Methodist in Biloxi all stood out as men of God and men for God, and all became champions of liberty. Let me also never forget that there were white ministers in this Mississippi who, under the inspiration of God Almighty, tried to put into practice the teachings of Jesus Christ that all of us are brothers. Reverend Orlo Kaufman and his associate, Reverend Harold Regier, at the Camp Landon Mennonite Mission in Gulfport took their stand openly with us, and triggered a Sovereignty Commission investigation of their activities.20 Moreover, I can never forget Reverend John Aregood and Reverend Roger Gallagher of the Back Bay Mission, who opened their building to welcome the ministers’ session of the first state NAACP meeting on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, only to find the meeting besieged by an angry white mob throwing stones and smashing the windows of that sanctuary of good works. The sound of breaking glass provided the devil’s accompaniment to our singing of “Lift Every Voice” that night, and still these white men of God stood with us. Scandalized and oppressed by those who knew them not, these men, too, paid a price for walking in the footsteps of Jesus in those hard days of the early 1960s on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
SEVEN
Ballots, Beaches, and Bullets
And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon Englands mountain green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
—William Blake, from Milton, a Poem in 2 Books
NOTHING WORTHWHILE COMES WITHOUT A STRUGGLE. Some struggles are physical. Some struggles are moral. Some struggles are legal and political. Every struggle is a spiritual struggle, a test of faith and will. Recently, a white friend twenty years younger than I heard me speak of the sad events of the bloody wade-in and of the simultaneous struggle we undertook for voter registration and school desegregation in Biloxi. Somewhat taken aback to learn how broad an assault we had launched against segregation in 1960, this white gentleman probed to understand why it was that we had been prepared to risk so much, to suffer so much and endure so long. It took eight years for the courts to settle the issue of our right to free access to the beach. After responding to several of my friend’s questions about the source of our motivation and strength without seeming to convey to him a satisfying understanding, I quoted from William Blake’s poem Milton, ending with these lines:
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
Then, I smiled and said, “We were building the new Jerusalem right here in Biloxi.” That there was a larger meaning, a larger inspiration for our work seemed to satisfy this inquirer. We did believe in a transcendent and redemptive purpose in our work. We believed that our unjustified suffering could awaken slumbering moral sensitivities in the majority white community that surrounded us. With Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we held the strong belief that we could wear out hatred with love. That may be why I was moved to tears when, in the fall of 1960, I heard for the first time the song “We Shall Overcome,” which was being sung by children from a Laurel, Mississippi, youth choir at a state NAACP youth meeting. That song still moves me. The tears, I think, represented then and still represent the depths of my hopes and prayers for the redemption of all of us, white and black together.
Along about the same time late in 1960, Dr. Clay Easterly, my white surgeon friend, reminded me that such a hope might not be in vain. In the darkest hours of that time, when most white folks in Biloxi were still blazing mad about the civil rights activities erupting in their backyards, Dr. Clay Easterly reached out to relate to me as a man and a fellow physician. Dr. Easterly was a big man. He had been a professor at the LSU Medical School, and he was truly a skilled surgeon. He was also an army reserve colonel and did a lot of weight training. Dr. Easterly had an impressive upper body build and tremendous strength, so much so that people said that he looked like “Mr. Clean,” the muscleman mascot of a 1960s floor-cleaning product. One evening in 1960, after Dr. Easterly and I finished a late surgery together, this white man turned to me as a fellow physician and said innocently, “Let’s go have a drink together.” Now this was long before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 opened public accommodations to people of my complexion, so I was a little surprised at the suggestion. I responded with a question: “Where?” Easterly said, “Let’s go to Baricev’s on the beach.” I knew the racial tension in Biloxi was running high after the riots, so I answered, “You don’t wan
t to go in there with me, they’d have me lynched.” The look on Dr. Easterly’s face turned dead serious, and he curled his lip and replied, “I wish to hell the bastards would bother us.” Given his robust build, I had no doubt that, if attacked, Dr. Easterly could have taken good care of himself. Given his principles, I rather suspected that he might just as soon try to clear a barroom as to be forced to disassociate with a friend.
Clearing a barroom might have been satisfying for a moment, but it would have been a strategic error. It would have gotten no one registered to vote. It would have changed nothing in the political power base in Biloxi. We needed people challenging things at the ballot boxes and in the courtrooms much more than we needed folks challenging drunks in barrooms. So, for strategic reasons, I declined Clay Easterly’s interesting invitation. However, I have never forgotten the spirit of this white Biloxian’s gesture to a black man who had become a pariah to the white establishment. Was not this a sign that Jerusalem could be built here on Mississippi’s green and pleasant shore?
During the summer of 1960, Medgar Evers and I also grew close to each other, both as a direct result of the legal action over the beach, and because we in Biloxi began exploring the possibility of filing a lawsuit to desegregate the public schools. My son, Gilbert, Jr., turned six years old in 1960. Therefore, for the first time, I had the proper legal standing necessary to file suit on his behalf to desegregate the Biloxi Municipal School District. If Gay Easterly showed me something about redemption, Medgar Evers showed me something about commitment.
Two of the most treasured papers in my possession are letters that Medgar wrote to me and Robert Carter, the NAACP legal counsel, in October of 1960, regarding my request for the NAACP to file suit to desegregate the Biloxi schools. This was the first such request to come out of Mississippi. Medgar wanted to join the prospective suit on behalf of his own children in Jackson. Because he was an NAACP employee, his desire to become a plaintiff put Medgar in a somewhat awkward position. He wrote these words to Robert Carter at NAACP headquarters in New York: “I have two school age children who are presently going to private school (segregated). Now it is rather difficult for me to reconcile to the general public the fact that I believe in what I preach, while at the same time [I] practice something to the contrary I would like to be one of three or four Plaintiffs to initiate legal action to destroy the segregated system here in Jackson” Medgar followed this letter to NAACP headquarters with a personal letter to me. “I am anxious to get something going here in Jackson,” he wrote, “to the point that I am willing to risk even life itself” (emphasis added). He went on to say, “We have procrastinated long enough in the state and the [ill] treatment from the whites has not lessened, [but] rather increased. My feeling is, if we are to receive a beating, lets [sic] receive it because we have done something, not because we have done nothing.” Medgar Evers wound up giving his life practicing what he preached. His words and deeds laid out an example of leadership and devotion which has served as a continuing source of inspiration in my life.
Biloxi was a busy place for me in the summer of 1960. While we began our initial stages of planning for the battle for school desegregation, the question of access to the beach had begun its long journey through a maze of court maneuvers—county, state, and federal. Simultaneously, we got very serious about voter registration. We were determined to have a say over the character of Biloxi’s municipal leadership. Mayor Laz Quave’s threats and thugs had no place in the Biloxi that we envisioned for our children. We had to register people to vote, and we had to find a political alternative to the rabid segregationists who had hitherto come to the top in Biloxi politics.
The commission form of city government, under which Biloxi operated, made it difficult for minority voices to be heard. The mayor and two commissioners ran for office at large. In office, the mayor-commissioners triumvirate acted as both executive and legislative branches of city government. The mayor and two commissioners oversaw different departments and came together to make ordinances. There was no city council. Since the mayor and two commissioners were elected at large, there was no hope of someone with a black face winning office, and the minority vote carried less weight in elections and at city hall than it should have. Still, the only way to change or moderate the political climate of the city was to elect a new mayor and new commissioners. With at-large elections and no black majority districts, the political challenge was twofold. First, we had to find and ally with moderate white politicians who might have difficulty being elected without our support. And second, we needed to register more black voters. The more black folks voting, the smaller the number of white votes needed to elect a moderate white candidate.
Voter registration as a conscious civil rights strategy came to Biloxi and the Mississippi Gulf Coast several years before the famous long hot summer of 1964, when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) ran freedom schools and voter registration drives in over forty Mississippi communities. We were ahead of the curve in Biloxi and on the rest of the coast. On the Mississippi Gulf Coast we had conducted the first civil disobedience campaign in the state. With the May 17, 1960, Justice Department beach access suit, we launched the first federal court challenge to any of Mississippi’s Jim Crow laws. For our audacity in standing up for our rights, we had gotten our heads beaten in before it happened to anyone else in the state. Therefore, we got serious about trying to chain up the segregationist mad dog through the ballot box several years earlier than black folks in some other places in Mississippi.
The Jim Crow system of de jure segregation in Mississippi relied on the disenfranchisement of black voters. Mississippi’s 1890 constitution engineered black disenfranchisement after the Civil War through the use of devices such as lengthy residence requirements, literacy tests, and the poll tax. All of these devices were outlawed in the mid-1960s, but we had to contend with them in our early efforts at voter registration on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Overcoming the poll tax obstacle involved persuading our people to pay a tax that had been made optional in an effort to discourage voting, or it meant raising the money to pay the tax for those without resources. It also meant educating people as to the necessity of keeping poll tax receipts handy for three years for presentation at the polls at election time.
The literacy test was a more formidable obstacle. An applicant for registration as a voter was required to appear in person before the county circuit clerk and give an interpretation of a section of the Mississippi constitution. This could be very intimidating in the atmosphere which segregationists cultivated. The law instructed the clerk to evaluate each person’s answers and approve only those applicants who could, in the clerk’s estimation, correctly interpret the selected passages. The horror stories about the literacy tests and local clerks’ arbitrary and capricious evaluations are legion. Most often, clerks assisted whites in making acceptable interpretations or even waived the literacy requirement altogether. On the other hand, even college-educated blacks were often failed for the smallest error on an application form or the least deviation from a clerk’s peculiar notion of a correct interpretation of the selected passage. The clerk’s decision could be appealed» but the appeal was to the all-white county election commission. If blacks successfully navigated these barriers, in some areas of the state they could expect economic reprisals, loss of their jobs, and physical threats if they exercised the resulting voting privilege. The masses of black people in Mississippi were disenfranchised as a result. One authority estimates that only 5 percent of Mississippi’s African American citizens were registered to vote in the early 1960s.1
As we prepared folks for the wade-in campaign in 1959 and 1960, the Harrison County Civic Action Committee and especially the Biloxi Civic League, of which I was president, strongly emphasized the need to increase local black voter registration. Personally, I had been a registered voter from the time I turned twenty-one years old. I had registered to vote, and my father
had paid my poll tax for me in Hinds County while I was in medical school. When I arrived in Biloxi to set up my medical practice, I immediately registered to vote and paid the poll tax. I was aware of the Southern Voter Institute operating out of Atlanta, which was headed first by Vernon Jordan and later by Wiley Branton. The NAACP was also placing emphasis on voter registration as a vehicle for long-term solutions to many of the problems of the South and the nation. By the time of the bloody wade-in at Biloxi, the NAACP’s W. C. Patton was working out of Memphis as a voter registration field representative. Tools were at hand to help us take these steps.
In November of 1960, there was a generational changing of the guard in the Mississippi Conference of the NAACP. Following the bloody wadein, my old scoutmaster and an early NAACP activist from Jackson, James A. White, wrote to me urging me to make myself available to become more involved in the civil rights movement beyond Biloxi. I was committed, and there was no turning back for me, so I allowed myself to be put forward as a candidate for state NAACP office in 1960. That fall, Dr. Aaron Henry was elected state president. I was elected his first vice president, Dr. Felix Dunn was elected second vice president, and Mr. Ñ. C. Bryant of McComb became the third vice president. Following the leadership of the national NAACP, we young turks on the state level placed a new and heavy emphasis on voter registration as a prime weapon in the battle for human rights in Mississippi. Thus, immediate voter registration projects got under way in the towns where these new state NAACP officers resided. We were determined to change the power base of local government in the state, and we were determined to set an example for other groups across the state.
On the coast in Gulfport and Biloxi, we followed through with a massive voter registration effort. In the Biloxi branch of the NAACP, Mrs. Ruby Tyler was the chairperson of our voter registration campaign in 1960. We invited W. C. Patton to come to Biloxi to help us get better organized for this effort. Because of the unusually congenial disposition of the Harrison County circuit clerk, Mr. E. G. Lindsey, voter registration proved to be far less intimidating on the Mississippi Gulf Coast than it was elsewhere in the state. Mr. Lindsey threw no capricious obstacles into our path. The main problem we encountered was in transporting people the distance from Biloxi to the county courthouse in Gulfport for their state and county registration and then back to Biloxi City Hall for a municipal registration. The law at the time required these two appearances in person for completion of registration. For success in overcoming transportation problems, great laud and honor is due especially to Mr. John Henry Beck. John Henry Beck was an unlettered man, but a natural-born leader. At one time Mr. Beck had been the Worshipful Master of my Masonic Lodge, Acme Lodge Number 307, Prince Hall Affiliation, Scottish Rite. We later renamed the lodge and a small park on Division Street in John Henry Beck’s honor. He was on our local troop committee for the Boy Scouts. John Henry Beck burned gasoline in his car at his own expense and wore the tread off his tires hauling people over to Gulfport to register and then back to Biloxi City Hall to complete the process. He hauled people to register anytime, not just in the heat of a political campaign.
Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Page 17