On May 19, 1960, a Biloxi beachfront property owner for thirty-seven years, Mrs. Lee Dicks Guice, through her attorney husband, W. L. Guice, filed suit against the Harrison County Board of Supervisors in the county’s chancery court asserting a claim to private ownership of the beach section located directly across Highway 90 in front of her residence. Interestingly, Mrs. Guice’s suit sought to have the courts nullify the assertions made in a personal letter to her from the board of supervisors in which the board claimed for itself ownership of the land south of the seawall. Mrs. Guice also asked that her complaint be ruled a class action suit encompassing the claims of perhaps two thousand property owners along the twenty-six-mile sand beach.12 A group called the Biloxi Beach Property Owners Protective Association quickly formed to support the Guice suit.13
Now, the Guice filing took place one year before the Biloxi mayoral election, but Mrs. Lee Dicks Guice just happened to be the mother of Daniel Guice. Both our federal suit and Mrs. Guice’s local suit were still in litigation when municipal elections were held the next year. If the new mayor, elected in 1961, had taken any step to change the city’s beach use policy, he would have alienated the powerful Biloxi Beach Property Owners Protective Association and clouded seriously the legal claims put forward by his own family members. Thus, while we got a much better tone of voice from city hall after the 1961 municipal elections, we got no new beach use policy. Our fate was to remain strictly in the hands of the courts and the slow-moving wheels of justice.
The federal case got its first hearing before Judge Sidney C. Mize in Biloxi on June 6, 1960, when attorneys for the county and city officials named as defendants moved for additional time to consider their plea. This was to be the first in a long series of delaying motions employed by the state that succeeded in putting off the ultimate day of reckoning for eight years. Judge Mize’s eagerness to accommodate the state’s delaying tactics revealed him to be a judge with no sympathy for our cause. Many of the conservative judges who sat on the federal bench in Mississippi in the early 1960s, in effect, became accomplices in the state’s overt efforts to subvert or block implementation of federal civil rights mandates. Federal trial judges’ rulings in Mississippi in the 1960s were repeatedly overturned on appeal, albeit at great pain to those seeking justice and great expense to the taxpayers who wound up paying court costs. Judge Mize fit right into the segregationist mold. If we were going to get justice, Judge Mize seemed determined to make it very slow in coming.
A sampling of the repeated delays which Judge Mize imposed on the beach court proceedings demonstrates his spirit and also helps convey an understanding of the frustrations that built up in the black community over the next several years and ultimately led to a new major wade-in effort On June 9, 1960, assistant U. S. attorney general Joseph M. F. Ryan filed a motion on our behalf seeking a preliminary injunction to enjoin Harrison County and the city of Biloxi from preventing Negroes from using the beach under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.14 Judge Mize refused to grant this injunctive relief. Judge Mize also ruled against the government’s motion for an early date to take depositions from the defendants in order to possibly open the beach to plaintiffs’ use during that summer. Furthermore, the federal district judge agreed to grant the defendants two months, until August 8, 1960, to prepare to give depositions before government attorneys.15 With these two rulings, Judge Mize foreclosed any hope that the Harrison County beaches might be open “perpetually for public use” by all citizens during the summer of 1960.
Under these circumstances, the NAACP, through the offices of Robert Carter in New York and A. P. Tureaud in New Orleans, brought forward the motion asking to intervene on the government’s side on behalf of thirty-two Biloxi Negro plaintiffs.16 The granting of this motion would have given the plaintiffs a say in any proposed settlement and a determining voice in any decision to appeal a negative ruling from Judge Mize. Ten days later, and without ruling on our NAACP motion to intervene, Judge Mize granted the state an additional thirty days’ time to answer the government’s complaint, and allowed an additional forty-five days for these defendants to file their objections to the NAACP motion to intervene.17 Additional defense delays granted ostensibly so the defendants could prepare their arguments moved the federal trial date back to November 30, 1960, by which time seven months had elapsed since the bloody wade-in.
At the time, we did not feel that our side of the suit was receiving fair treatment in the local press. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the newspaper headlines. We thought that all citizens should be informed about the role that public officials had played, not only in denying us use of the beach but in aiding the white mob in its first assault on us on April 24. The affidavit evidence which the Justice Department introduced in its complaint charged police complicity in the initial violence which spread through our community and resulted in two deaths and dozens of injuries. We reasoned that any question about police misbehavior of this nature should have been of serious concern to all reasonable citizens, black and white. The local newspaper, however, virtually blacked out the Justice Department’s claim. Whereas we thought that these accusations ought to have been in the headline captions or lead paragraphs of stories, the local press buried this accusation. The Daily Herald treated the case as a cool unfolding of technical legal maneuvers in which the main public interest was in whether the beach was private property. From our perspective, uninformative Daily Herald headlines such as “U.S. Cites Cases In Beach Suit,” or “32 Negroes File To Intervene in Beach Use Suit,” or “Start Taking Depositions In Beach Case”18 sanitized the case for the white public and controlled the political discomfort which our accusations may have caused the local white establishment. The Jackson papers took the same approach. In the initial coverage of the maneuvers in federal court, only the Memphis Commercial Appeal slipped in its normally segregationist stance and led its coverage with the headline “Police Accused of Aiding Mob,”19 which we considered to be a central complaint that should have been of concern to the whole community. Of course, the Commercial Appeal was read by few people on the coast. The local press certainly did not contribute to any community moral self-examination in the wake of the bloody wade-in.
In September, while we yet awaited the movement of the federal wheels of justice, local chancery court judge William G. Hewes brought forward in his court the complaint of Mrs. Lee Dicks Guice against the county board of supervisors in which she claimed the beach as private property. Oddly enough, in Judge Hewes’s court, Harrison County officials denied ever making “a public beach, public park, or public playground” on the privately owned property of Mrs. Guice or other beachfront homeowners. Rather, the supervisors held that they had never claimed title to the beach and had never attempted to open the beach to public use. They argued that the only activities which local government was authorized to undertake on the beach were activities directed purely to maintenance of the beach as a protection against erosion of the seawall and the adjacent highway.20 Notwithstanding their 1948 pledge to the federal government to maintain the beach for public use, the county’s strange new logic asserted that no citizen, white or black, had any right to be on the beach if a property owner objected. Given Mrs. Lee Dicks Guice’s claims that she was in legal control of the use of the beach in front of her residence, and given the county’s response, the government filed a motion with Judge Mize requesting that Mrs. Guice be added to the list of defendants. This maneuver caused repeated delays in the federal case, as defense attorneys were granted additional time until the end of November 1960 to prepare their answer to the government’s amended complaint.21
Meanwhile, in chancery court Mrs. Guice’s case came up for a hearing before Judge Hewes. After three days of preliminary hearings Judge Hewes announced his intention to rule on the case during the September 1960 session or soon thereafter.22 The speed with which local officials were able to prepare for and bring forward Mrs. Guice’s case in chancery court is noteworthy,
especially given the fact that haste was so lacking in Judge Mize’s federal proceedings due to the same local officials’ own delaying tactics. The supervisors and city officials openly asserted that a Guice victory in the local courts would strengthen their defense in federal court.23 Thus, our adversaries worked to delay Judge Mize’s federal proceedings and so delay the day of reckoning about black access to the beach.
On December 19, 1960, the local courts in the person of Chancellor William G. Hewes upheld Mrs. Guice’s claim against the Harrison County Board of Supervisors that since there had been no eminent domain proceedings at the time of its construction, the beach in front of her home was indeed Mrs. Guice’s private property. However, Judge Hewes also held that the county had a continuing right to maintain the beach as an erosion control barrier. The local paper reported that even though the judge assigned court costs to the county supervisors, the officials “expressed cautious jubilation.” Nonetheless, the jubilant losers determined to appeal the decision to the Mississippi Supreme Court in an effort to further bolster their defense in the still-pending federal suit.24
Meanwhile, in our federal case, it took Judge Mize an entire six months, from August 9, 1960, to February 20, 1961, to deliver a negative ruling on our NAACP-backed petition to intervene in the Justice Department suit against the supervisors. The lengthy delays in the federal proceedings frustrated us. NAACP general counsel Robert Carter wrote to explain to me that the option of filing a separate federal suit was still available. However, Carter cautioned that, given Judge Mize’s slowness in delivering his negative decision on the NAACP motion to intervene, we were not likely to see much movement on any lawsuit to be heard before this particular judge.25 In February the government filed a motion for a summary judgment in the federal case. With that motion still pending, we focused our energies on the politics of the Biloxi mayor’s race and settled in to await further court developments. On May 22, 1961, over one year after the Justice Department originally filed suit, Judge Mize finally got around to hearing preliminary arguments on the government’s summary judgment motion. After this hearing the judge gave both parties an additional forty-five days to prepare written briefs.26 Even though St. John Barrett, the Justice Department Civil Rights Division lawyer handling our case, was optimistic that there would be a favorable ruling on the government’s motion for summary judgment, it soon became apparent that Judge Mize would make no definitive ruling until the Mississippi Supreme Court had spoken in the Guice case. Despite strong government arguments that the county’s land-reclamation contract with the federal government superseded any claims made by Mrs. Guice, Judge Mize refused to move. Another whole year elapsed before the Mississippi Supreme Court issued its very predictable May 1962 ruling upholding the Guice claim to private ownership of the beach.27 Only then did Judge Mize restart the federal case.
On July 27,1962, over two years after the Justice Department had filed suit, Judge Mize denied the government’s motion for summary judgment against the supervisors and city officials. Anyone who thought we would now quickly go to trial was mistaken. In September, the defendants brought forth the 119th motion in this case asking Judge Mize to add all of the property owners along the entire twenty-six-mile coastline as defendants in the suit. This request, which Judge Mize granted in December of 1962 and reaffirmed in March, built in an enormous additional delay due to the difficult requirement that the government serve papers, in person, on some two thousand new defendants. This maneuver also guaranteed a long and drawn-out trial, if we were ever able to get to trial given this segregationist judge’s propensity to grant the defendants every desired delaying motion.28 Obviously, the attorney general of the state of Mississippi in 1963, who directed the defense of the local officials, believed that his office could wear out the Justice Department’s civil rights lawyers, just as Governor Barnett and Mayor Quave had believed they could use delay to wear me out personally in 1960. Utterly frustrated, we petitioned U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy requesting that he intervene personally with the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to request it to order Judge Mize to hold an early hearing on the merits of the beach case. Robert Kennedy, however, ignored this petition.
By March of 1963, our patience with both Judge Mize and the Justice Department was exhausted. In the three years since federal court proceedings had begun, we had elected a mayor and two city commissioners, but we now found that the ballot box held little power over ongoing litigation. Direct action was in the air again. We in Biloxi had carried out the first acts of collective civil disobedience in Mississippi in 1959 and 1960. Now, we watched in great frustration as others took up this tool, while we sat waiting through the interminable court delays that continued to deny our use of the beach. In 1961, while we yet waited for justice in the courts, we saw a dozen freedom riders jailed for violation of the Jim Crow laws at the Trailways bus station in Jackson. In 1962, while we yet waited for justice in the courts, students from Tougaloo College staged a sit-in at the Jackson Public Library. While justice was being denied us on the coast, my older sister, Rozelia Stamps, and her daughter, Carolyn, along with Medgar Evers and many more, had dogs set upon them and were then arrested and hauled off to the state fairgrounds and imprisoned for picketing downtown Jackson, Mississippi, merchants. While our access to the Mississippi Gulf Coast beaches was yet being denied, my older brother, Willie, a New Orleans longshoreman, was giving his financial support to the effort to desegregate the New Orleans public schools.
The behavior of demagogic segregationist politicians added to our frustration with the slow-moving courts. In September of 1962, Governor Ross Barnett’s irresponsible behavior led to rioting at Ole Miss and made necessary the introduction of thirty thousand federal troops to enforce James Meredith’s right to attend the University of Mississippi. It was reported that two Harrison County constables were seen on the Ole Miss campus during the riot. In the spring of 1963, George Wallace prepared to stand in the doorway of the University of Alabama to block Vivian Malone’s and James Hood’s pathway to learning. At the same time, President Kennedy talked about a new civil rights bill to open public accommodations to all. Still, the Kennedy Justice Department declined to prod Judge Mize into action on our case. However, the chances for passage of any meaningful new federal civil rights legislation seemed dim in view of the maze of legislative obstacles that could be thrown up by long-tenured segregationist southern congressmen and senators. Given these prospects, I concluded that, despite the frustrations associated with litigation, the dismantling of Jim Crow would ultimately have to be consummated judicially.
In this atmosphere, with the feeling growing in the Biloxi branch that “justice too long delayed is justice denied,” I and others began thinking creatively about the means by which we might move the court case past the restraining hand of Judge Mize at the district level. Without consulting expert legal advice, I had observed that some cases moved directly to federal appeals courts from the state courts. It seemed to me that if we were again willing to risk all that might come to us in its wake, another wadein followed by mass arrests on the beach might give us the means to bypass the recalcitrant Judge Mize. If city or county officials arrested and convicted us, we could appeal to the state supreme court and go from there directly to federal appeals court and the U.S. Supreme Court. Federal trial judges in Mississippi need not be a part of the process.
However, another beach demonstration carried obvious risks. The riot that had broken out in the wake of the 1960 bloody wade-in had left two dead, eight wounded in shootings, and dozens of others injured in beatings. Violent resistance to black demands in Mississippi was rising. In Vicksburg in 1963, my friend Wharless Jackson got into his truck, turned the ignition key, and was blown to kingdom come. We knew that this new scheme might cost us some lives and some hardships and losses. Still, the spirit that prevailed among people my age, who were in their twenties and thirties at that time, was one that demanded that we throw off the remaining vestiges of slavery a
nd assert and utilize our full manhood and womanhood. The law itself constricted us as black citizens in ways that other citizens were not constricted. Life mattered to us, but we were willing to take risks to add to life’s wholesomeness for ourselves and our children. Of course, we had prayer on our side. We in the Biloxi branch set our faces toward the beach once again in 1963, and began planning a new wade-in that would bring us a new court strategy and the hope for an earlier resolution of this problem.
In preparation for the 1963 wade-in, we had civilized discussions about security with Mayor Guice, who owed his election to the black voters in back-of-town. The mayor listened and seemed to be sympathetic. We actually negotiated the demonstration date with Mayor Guice in order to maximize the protection available from the police department. The city’s annual Blessing of the Shrimp Fleet had already been calendared for Sunday, June 9, our first proposed wade-in date. We agreed to delay the wadein for one week in order to gain whatever protection we could by avoiding a date when police forces would have to be spread between two different events. Various other officials, including District Attorney Boyce Holleman, tried to talk us out of the demonstration for reasons of public safety, but we were determined to try to get to the Supreme Court by this alternate route. We understood that the mayor would have us arrested if there were a complaint from the property owners on the north side of U.S. Highway 90. We needed those property owners to bite at our bait. We needed to be arrested in order to get a new state court suit going.
Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Page 19