Medgar Evers and I were working intensely on our Biloxi school desegregation suit in the spring of 1963. Medgar was in town frequently and therefore assisted us in planning the new wade-in. Through Jess Brown, the Jackson-based black attorney who was handling NAACP work, we sent forward a request for ten thousand dollars in bail money from the national NAACP to cover bail for up to a hundred demonstrators. We expected to have to put up a hundred dollars per person to spring our people from jail. Not knowing the disposition of this request, we searched locally for backup bail arrangements that would be available under our control if the national money failed to come through. Dr. J. O. Tate, a black Gulfport dentist and lover of freedom, came to our aid with a pledge to put up his real estate holdings as security for bail bonds. Bishop Robert Nance of the Church of God also agreed to put up his property to help with bail. We did title searches to make sure that some unknown encumbrances wouldn’t slow down the bailouts. Like the 1959 and 1960 wade-ins, the 1963 Biloxi wade-in was a grassroots initiative. We knew that we had to be prepared to take full responsibility for our actions.
Medgar Evers spent the night at my house on Fayard Street on Sunday, June 9, 1963. Medgar got up and shaved on Monday morning. News from Jackson called him back to the state capital where a wave of sit-ins and boycotts had started producing arrests. The Jackson police chased demonstrators with dogs and used cattle prods to herd people into paddy wagons and garbage trucks for trips to the jail or the fairgrounds lockups. Lena Home and Roy Wilkins were coming to Jackson to bolster morale. As state NAACP field director, Medgar Evers had one very predictable aspect: when people in trouble called him, Medgar went straight to them. When he left my house Monday morning, Medgar told me that he planned to be back with us to handle logistics for the wade-in scheduled for the next weekend. He left in such a hurry that he forgot his razor.
Many of us over the years had expressed concern for Medgar Evers’s physical security. His name was always popping up on Klan hit lists. Medgar lived with threats on his life coming in almost every day in the early 1960s. When a wave of threats on my life had arisen in 1959 and 1960, I had accepted friends’ offers to organize a group of guards to watch my office and my home and to accompany me on house calls and hospital rounds when needed. Friends had offered Medgar Evers similar organized protective arrangements, but our field director declined. I had heard Medgar Evers talk of his personal faith that the strong arm of God and the breast shield of God had been put around him. He declined offers of protection because he felt the bare and naked revelation that “God is going to protect me.” I had been under threat, and I shared Medgar’s faith in God’s protective mercies. Unlike Medgar, however, I had accepted the protective offers of friends as one of the means by which a benevolent God might throw his arms around me.
Threats against all of us were constant at this time. As a matter of fact, early in the evening of Tuesday, June 11, 1963, Natalie was at the front gate of our house on Fayard Street talking to a neighbor when the telephone rang. She went inside to answer it, and when she returned to the yard she found a suspicious bulging bag hanging on our front fence. Natalie called me, and I called the police and hurried home. The police arrived promptly to investigate. We would not touch the bag. When the investigating officer cut open the bag, a dead cat fell out. Paperwork took me back to the office and kept me late that night. My friend Mr. W. O. Hill, who lived on Main Street in Biloxi, was attending an Elks convention in Jackson. At around midnight, the phone rang at my office, and W. O. Hill blurted these words into my ear: “They just killed Medgar Evers!” The cowardly Klansman Byron De La Beckwith, hidden 150 feet from the front door of Medgar’s Jackson, Mississippi, home, fired the rifle shot that snuffed out the life of this young father, husband, and beloved civil rights leader. He was cut down on his doorstep holding NAACP T-shirts in his hands. Medgar Evers was martyred in a holy cause.
Over the next several days there was a whirlwind of activity and confusion. It was rumored that Medgar’s murder was part of a Klan plot to take out all of the state-level NAACP officers at once. The dead cat hanging on my fence certainly made me think twice about the possibility. Medgar Evers’s funeral was set for Sunday, June 16, 1963, the date we had agreed upon for our new wade-in. Of course, our wade-in was postponed. National civil rights leaders from every organization were expected to attend the funeral. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., sent word that he would be present. The M. W. Stringer Grand Masonic Temple in Jackson was the only building in the black community large enough to hold a sizeable crowd. I served as an active pallbearer for our slain friend, along with Dr. Felix Dunn, Mr. R. L T. Smith, Jr., Mr. Henry Briggs, Mr. Paul Cooke, Mr. Houston Wells, Mr. Cornelius Turner, and Mr. Nolan Tate. Thousands of black citizens from all corners of Mississippi converged on Jackson to honor the life and work of Medgar W. Evers. Inside during the services, Roy Wilkins, Reverend R. L. T. Smith, Sr., and Reverend G. C. Hunte spoke. The hymns “Be Not Dismayed,” “We Shall Overcome,” and “God Be with You” were sung. After the funeral the thousands who could not get into the Masonic Temple walked with us behind the hearse through the streets of Jackson. Dr. Martin Luther King walked just a few steps behind me and the other pallbearers. I had met Dr. King a few months before on an airline flight to Atlanta. He had encouraged our work in Biloxi, and, as an Alpha man himself, Dr. King graciously autographed my Alpha card. Now, in Jackson, we mourned together for a fallen comrade.
In Jackson before the funeral, several civil rights activists, including Robert Carter, the NAACP legal counsel, had gathered at attorney Jack Young’s home. Someone in the group asked me, “How will this death affect your wade-in?” “Should this death stop us?” I asked. Medgar was such a dynamic person, and he was planning to be there with us. I said, “I believe Medgar would want us to go on.” Bob Carter said “No, don’t put it off. This should not make you change your plan. If you have the feeling that you should carry out your plan, go on.” I mentioned our request to Roy Wilkins for ten thousand dollars for bail money. Jess Brown, the Jackson attorney who handled NAACP work, told me that I should make alternate arrangements in case NAACP money did not get there in time.
Full of sorrow and dismay, we in Biloxi had to decide whether to go ahead with the planned wade-in. We had several meetings during the week following the funeral and decided to undertake the wade-in as a memorial tribute to Medgar Evers. We decided to carry little black flags as a sign of mourning. Several ladies, including Mrs. Clara Ramsey, went to work making the flags. We knew the danger. We had seen the venom of the white rabble in Biloxi in 1960. This time we were assured of police protection, but we could not know whether it would really materialize or be adequate. We prayed for God’s protection, and then we went on with what we as men and women had determined to be necessary to gain our rightful use of a public beach.
On Sunday afternoon, June 23, 1963, approximately seventy-five demonstrators, including two white ministers, Reverend John Aregood and Reverend Roger Gallagher from the Back Bay Mission, and a white college-student intern at the mission, assembled outside my office on Division Street. We then drove to the waterfront together, parked our cars, and walked onto the beach at the foot of Gill Avenue between the Biloxi lighthouse and the old Biloxi cemetery. This was the exact site where the worst of the white mob attacks had taken place three years before. Here, we placed a double row of black flags in the sand to honor the martyred Medgar Evers, who had assisted in our planning of the wade-in. The Biloxi police assembled nearby in a force augmented with sheriff’s deputies, police from other coastal towns, and Mississippi Highway Patrol units. At the request of the Justice Department, FBI agents were also on the scene as observers. Some federal agents posted themselves in the lighthouse to take pictures. Mayor Guice himself, along with Commissioner Creel and Commissioner Dukate, was standing by personally to direct police activities. The newspaper estimated that two thousand white spectators gathered, but, in contrast to the bloody wade-in of 1960, the police provided us the pr
otection we needed. This time the authorities actively worked to prevent mob violence from developing.
As I got out of the car and prepared to go onto the beach, a white physician colleague on the Biloxi Hospital staff came storming out of his beachfront house seventy-five yards away, ran over to me, and announced in an agitated voice, “You see that house down there? If you go in front of my house, we’re going to have you arrested.” Of course, we needed an arrest to get a new suit moving in state court, so that we could bypass Judge Mize on our way to the U.S. Supreme Court. I shrugged and said, “Well, whatever. What else is new?” This was my first indication that the beach property owners might take our bait and make the arrests we needed. They were about to swallow, hook, line, and sinker.
Once on the beach, I headed for the water. We swam, played ball, and milled around for forty minutes or so before real-estate agent William Allen appeared with a bullhorn and started barking orders at us. “I represent the ownership of this house you see here on the corner of Gill and Highway 90,” he squawked, “and you are now on private property. If you do not move we’re going to have the police arrest you.” His announcement was exactly what we needed. Therefore, we did not move. A few moments later, a Biloxi police officer, Detective Leslie Montgomery, took the bullhorn and announced, “You are under arrest for trespassing.” Mr. Allen signed the complaint as a representative of Mrs. James M. Parker, who was away in Europe. Yes, it was going to be hook, line, and sinker. Old Br’er Rabbit was going to be thrown back into that briar patch. Unfortunately, as the papers were being prepared, the white mob grew rowdy. They turned one parked car over on its side. Through an open window, someone set fire to the interior of my 1959 Buick, destroying one of the seats and damaging the other. The water used to extinguish the blaze ruined what was left. One of our young demonstrators, James Black, who has since become a well-known minister in Biloxi, had driven my car to the beach that day, parked it, and left a window down for ventilation. This good deed gave the vandals their opening. Following our arrests, my fire-damaged car was towed to A & A Wrecker Service, where someone took a drill to the lock on the trunk and reamed it out. Luckily, there was nothing of value inside, because I had removed my medical bag from the trunk before going to the beach that day. The tires were slashed on a third car in our caravan. No blows were exchanged, although I saw the police quickly corral one white who broke through the police cordon and headed toward the demonstrators. We suffered property damage but no violence at the hands of racist ruffians on this day.
On the beach, police officers formed lines on either side of our little group and marched us up through the gathered white crowd to a waiting moving van parked beside the road. The name of the moving company had been covered with a fresh coat of dark blue paint. We were ordered into the back of that van with no ventilation on a hot and humid south Mississippi summer day. I objected. Once on the van, I tried to hold the doors open. I knew that some of the elderly ladies in our group, particularly Mrs. Altease Fairley Magee and Mrs. Aslena Massey, were in frail health and needed air. Nevertheless, the police forced the doors closed, locked us up in the crowded sweltering darkness, and hauled us down to Biloxi City Hall. When the van came to a stop it was in the midst of a mob of white hooligans, who immediately took hold of the vehicle and began rocking it and picking up on the front end as if to try to throw us out the back. Some of us fell to the floor, but when the doors opened, no one was thrown out.
The conditions inside the van surprised and angered me. I had not thought that Mayor Guice would allow something like this to befall citizens peacefully demonstrating for their rights. So, when the doors opened, I jumped down and headed straight for the mayor to object to the severe treatment we had received in the van. “I would have never thought you would have allowed such a travesty,” I protested. Christopher Rosado said he had never before seen “a black man shake his finger in a white man’s face,” the way I did Mayor Guice that day. I told the mayor that I was surprised that a man of his character would even allow these people to be arrested. As was his manner, Mayor Guice responded calmly, “Well, Doctor, I told you ahead of time that if you went to the beach, you would be arrested. I asked you to postpone it for a week for the blessing of the shrimp fleet, and you agreed.” Unlike the 1960 arrests, there was no cursing, no threatening, and no vulgarity. It was all just matter of fact. They locked everybody up. We had not yet received the NAACP bail money that we understood to be on the way. This meant that Natalie and Chris Rosado had to bail me out, so that I could go to work on bail money for the others. Without bail money in hand, they were all loaded back into the van for another hot, suffocating thirty-minute ride to the county jail in Gulfport.
I spent the rest of that Sunday afternoon working to get bail money together. It became apparent that it would be impossible to use Dr. Tate’s and Bishop Nance’s property bonds to bail people out of jail until Monday morning. Hoping that I might get money wired from the NAACP, I decided to telephone Roy Wilkins personally. The conversation did not go well. I was very disappointed that the NAACP money had not already gotten to us. I was distressed that our people would have to spend the night crowded in a hot, unair-conditioned jail. I told Roy that Jess Brown was to have arranged ten thousand dollars in bail money for us from the national office. Roy Wilkins firmly informed me that, whereas the NAACP was a formal organization, Mr. Jess Brown was sometimes an informal person. Roy Wilkins said he had the ten thousand dollars and would send it. On Tuesday morning the ten thousand dollars did arrive from the national office. However, by that time we had already bailed everyone out on the property bonds of Dr. Tate and Bishop Nance. We put the money from the national office in the bank.
I wish that I could say there were no further repercussions from the 1963 wade-in at Biloxi, and that we just went on to court and made our appeals. There is more to the story. I will credit the police with taking the steps necessary to prevent the kind of white gang activity that terrorized the community after the 1960 wade-in. This time, the police actively dispersed the crowds of whites that started gathering at various locations. The police also cordoned off the black neighborhoods and prevented white persons from driving through the area. Our investment in voter registration and political action had yielded a dividend. We got the kind of police protection that citizens have a right to expect from their police forces and public officials. Things had changed greatly in three years.
The NAACP now stepped in to provide the arrested Biloxi waders with legal assistance from R. Jess Brown. As expected, the seventy-one persons arrested on June 23, 1963, were found guilty of trespassing in city court. Judge John Sekul, who presided, had served as city prosecutor in the 1960 beach case. Mr. Lyle Page was now the city prosecutor. Once again, the city courtroom was packed. Every seat in the Negro section was filled, and more than a hundred additional black citizen observers were left standing. Attorney R. Jess Brown asked the judge to allow standing blacks to sit in vacant seats in the white section. “In the interests of peace,” Judge Sekul declined.29 Forty-three adults were tried and found guilty of trespassing. Because I was a repeat offender, Judge Sekul handed me a one-hundred-dollar fine plus a thirty-day jail sentence, the maximum punishments available to a city court judge. Seven others also received the maximum, including the white ministers, Reverend John Aregood and Reverend Roger Gallagher. The judge reasoned that, despite this being their first offense, Aregood and Gallagher were white folks who should have known better than to go onto the beach with blacks. The cases of the twenty-eight teenagers arrested with the group were remanded to youth court.
Jess Brown filed our appeal from city to county court, where Judge Luther W. Maples presided. Our Harrison County court trial opened on November 20, 1963. District Attorney Boyce Holleman and county prosecutor Gaston Hewes joined Biloxi city attorney Lyle Page at the prosecutor’s table. Black folks once again packed the house for the trial. A pool of twenty prospective jurors was examined, including eighteen whites and two Negroes. Th
e prosecutors used two of their six allowable challenges to excuse the two Negroes. An all-white twelve-man jury was impaneled to hear the case. Testimony began on Thursday, November 21, with prosecutors attempting to show that we had willfully and knowingly trespassed on Mrs. Parker’s property.30
In 1963, the Harrison County Courthouse was located just across the street from the Greyhound bus station in Gulfport. When the trial adjourned for lunch, twelve or fifteen of the black defendants went across the street and staged a sit-in in the white section of the bus station’s restaurant. The Gulfport police were called to the scene, but they made no arrests. The blacks were served, but, after completing service, the owner closed both the white and colored sections of the eating facility for the duration of the trial.31
On the last day of the county court trial, Friday, November 22, when we recessed for lunch, the news broke that President John F. Kennedy had been killed by an assassin in Dallas, Texas. We were all deeply shaken by the news. When court reconvened and the bailiff directed us to be seated, someone in our number refused to sit and announced that “none of us are going to sit until we all stand for a moment of silent prayer for our slain president.” A hush fell over the room, and all stood and bowed their heads, prosecutors and defendants, white and black. This shared memorial moment did not change the predictable jury verdict. Jess Brown summed up; the jury got the case and returned a guilty verdict that very evening. The twenty-nine remaining defendants each posted the two-hundred-dollar appeal bonds needed to carry the case on to circuit court. (Several of those arrested on the beach on June 23 did not make the appearance in county court. Therefore, our appeal involved only the twenty-nine remaining defendants.) Of course, we lost in circuit court a year later,32 appealed to the Mississippi Supreme Court, and then went on to the U.S. Supreme Court, where, after several years, we eventually prevailed.
Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Page 20