Many times in later years people have asked me why it took so long after the Brown decision in 1954 for us to get into court to challenge Mississippi’s segregated school system. They point out that we did not actually file suit in federal court until 1963, almost nine years after the Brown decision. In response, I point out that I had talked about school desegregation from the time I arrived in Biloxi in 1955, but I had no actual standing for filing suit until my own child entered school. In the spring of 1960, while Gilbert, Jr., was in the first grade, we actually petitioned the Biloxi school board for desegregation for the first time. Nothing came of this petition. After the bloody wade-in, and after the Biloxi branch came into existence, I undertook serious discussions with Medgar Evers about school desegregation. On October 11, 1960, Medgar Evers wrote to Robert Carter, the NAACP legal counsel in New York, requesting on our behalf national NAACP assistance for “a group of citizens in Biloxi, Mississippi, who would like to file suit to desegregate the schools for the second semester term, 1960–61.”2 This is likely to have been the first request for assistance in desegregating a Mississippi public school district that the national NAACP office received. The timetable which Medgar suggested for attaining our goal was reasonable, but it turned out to be unrealistic. We soon discovered that the courts would expect us to exhaust all administrative remedies within the school system before petitioning a judge for a hearing on our complaint. The Biloxi branch petitioned the Biloxi school board again in 1961, before the Ole Miss desegregation crisis and while the arch-segregationist Ross Barnett was still governor of Mississippi and still shoveling money to the State Sovereignty Commission to fight desegregation. It was the spring of 1963 before we had exhausted local school board administrative remedies without producing any results. Only then could we go to court. Even though we had the Brown precedent in hand, and the law was on our side, it took almost three years from the time of our first inquiry to Robert Carter for us to get into the courts. It then took nine additional months of litigation to obtain the appeals court ruling that finally opened the Biloxi schools under a freedom-of-choice desegregation plan.
Because white elected officials at the time were quick to blame “outside agitators” for any signs of local black discontent with Jim Crowism, the question often arises as to where the initiative came from for school desegregation. Was it outsiders, or was it truly local folks with gumption who started the ball rolling for school desegregation? The answer should be clear at this point. We in Biloxi initiated every phase of our struggle. We looked to the national and state NAACP organizations for advice and legal assistance, but we set our own priorities and chose our own targets and tactics. In the matter of school desegregation, I believe that our example and determination in Biloxi played a role in inspiring Medgar Evers’s decision to file on behalf of his children in Jackson. The courts eventually consolidated what came to be known as the Mason case in Biloxi with the Evers case in Jackson and the case of Mrs. Winston Hudson and her sister Dovie for Dovie’s daughter in Carthage, Mississippi. Thus, the plaintiffs in all three of Mississippi’s first school desegregation cases gained federal court relief simultaneously in 1964.
In Biloxi, the Masons intended to file suit whether anyone else did so or not. However, as we discussed the school situation with our friends, we discovered many kindred spirits who felt as strongly as we that it was an affront to the dignity of mankind to deny a person equal protection under the law. In this case our children were being denied an equal opportunity for a full educational curriculum. The beach case had taught us about the harassments and risks that anyone challenging Jim Crow would have to be ready to face. I had that inspiring October 18, 1960, letter from Medgar Evers announcing his own desire to join a desegregation suit on behalf of his children, and telling me of the depths of his commitment to the point that he was “willing to risk even life itself.”3 School desegregation was risky business. It required a showing of faces and a signing of names to petitions. Any black person who went public as a plaintiff in a lawsuit could expect white employers to immediately label him or her a troublemaker, and bring economic pressure to bear or do worse. Mrs. Winston Hudson told us about the harassment which she endured connected to school desegregation up in Leake County. The atmosphere in Carthage grew so threatening that she sat up all night with a shotgun literally across her lap so that others could sleep.
As we began to move toward a court confrontation over the schools in Biloxi, I contacted some of the parents of school-age children that I knew through my medical practice to determine their interest in joining a suit. Others came forward on their own when they heard that there was a move afoot to desegregate the Biloxi schools. Many families expressed an early interest in the suit, and many people showed up at our home for meetings. Everyone had to be serious about the risks involved and the punishments that could come down on us, and they had to consider the possibility of losing their jobs. When it came time to actually sign petitions, the group had narrowed down considerably. In the end, thirteen families felt able to join our school desegregation suit on behalf of their twenty-five children. All of us were insulated from the kind of economic pressure that white employers so often brought to bear on blacks who bucked the system. Beyond the Mason family, the final group included two full-time ministers, Reverend Thomas Davis and Reverend Oscar (Orange) Harris, Mrs. Johnnie Brown, a waitress whose husband owned a dry cleaning business, and another nine who were were totally beyond the reach of any local economic blackmail because they were federal employees working as instructors or blue collar laborers at Keesler Air Force Base. These were Mr. Lewis Black, Mr. Harold Boglin, Mr. Samuel Edwards, Mr. John Elzy, Mr. Rehofus Esters, Mr. Jack Martin, Mr. Clifton Nunley, Mr. Christopher Rosado, and Mr. James E. McKinly.4 Four of the thirteen school desegregation plaintiffs, John Elzy, Sam Edwards, Harold Boglin, and Clifton Nunley, were also active members of my volunteer bodyguard group.
Over a period of many months, the parents and sometimes the children met often at my office or in our home. All of these plaintiffs held a deep loathing for segregation. They were united in their determination to secure for their children the best education possible through the Biloxi school system. These were hardworking people who had dignity. The plaintiff families shared a strong Christian faith and viewed segregation as morally wrong. In our meetings we discussed the problems that we could expect, and we developed plans for transporting the children to the desegregated school and for making sure that every child had proper school supplies and clothing. We discussed ways that we could support the children in this new and possibly intimidating educational environment. We wanted to insure their academic success, but we also wanted the children to be prepared for any taunting, exclusion from extracurricular activities, or other hostility they might encounter. We cautioned children not to respond to acts of hostility in kind, but rather to report negative incidents and names of perpetrators to their parents. Parents were in turn to report incidents to the Biloxi branch. We concluded that it would be even more important than ever for the black parents to be actively involved in PTA in the desegregated schools.
Of course, there could be no desegregation case until we established through petitioning and negotiation that the Biloxi school board would not act to bring the schools into compliance with the Brown decision and the Fourteenth Amendment. So, we got on the board’s agenda and sat down face-to-face and eyeball-to-eyeball to try to negotiate desegregation. When we met, we simply proposed that the board come up with a good faith plan to totally dismantle all vestiges of the dual school system based on race. Superintendent Robert D. Brown was hostile to the desegregation proposal from the beginning. Superintendent Brown talked like Ross Barnett. Brown would not admit that Negroes were discriminated against and remained basically negative in his dealings with us throughout. At first, the five-person board dug in its heels, too. Dr. D. L. Hollis had a “segregation forever” outlook. The board’s disposition, no doubt, reflected that of the majority of white citize
ns in Biloxi, who had put Laz Quave into office as mayor in 1957. There was a tendency for the board to try to avoid the real issues of federal law and the Constitution with the argument that the black folks they knew weren’t interested in integration, and that our group somehow did not represent overall black feelings about the matter. Odd that they would think that a segregationist all-white board in Mississippi would be more able to read the minds of black folks and represent their true feelings better than the community’s own black physician and its own black NAACP executive committee. With staggered terms, the board’s makeup changed, and we dealt with several board members whose names did not appear on the list of defendants when we finally filed suit.
However, over time, we discovered some spirits of moderation among the school board members. Mrs. Dudley Andrews, for example, was friendly and had an open mind. Dr. Peter Pavlov, a white dentist who treated both black and white patients in an office with a nonsegregated waiting room, was sort of a moderate. Dr. J. A. Graves, the board’s president when we filed suit, was also a moderate. Mr. Ñ. T. Switzer, Sr., was harder to read. Perhaps he was ambitious for elective office and held his cards close to the vest. Our meetings were generally moderate to friendly in tone. I think that Biloxi officials were concerned for the tourist trade. The 1960 riot over beach desegregation had hurt business. The local powers that be wanted no more bad publicity. Officials at Keesler Air Force Base weighed in on the side of moderation and an easing of racial tensions in the town. Especially after the 1961 election of Mayor Guice, it was evident that city leaders wanted things handled peacefully. Nonetheless, however friendly their outward deportment in our meetings, the board refused to act. The state of Mississippi, in the person of Governor Ross Barnett, made public statements prohibiting any desegregation during this time. The board’s delays and failure to act meant that we actually wound up petitioning them several times. By the fall of 1962, we thought that it was evident that the board would not act on its own accord, and we were ready to file the lawsuit.
Meanwhile, in September of 1962, Governor Barnett’s demagogic resistance to federal court orders mandating the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi set off the shameful riots at Oxford that left two persons dead and dozens wounded. Some thirty thousand federal troops had to be deployed on the university campus to bring things under control. The NAACP financed Meredith’s legal fight to desegregate the university. Because our home had by this time become a familiar stopover place for civil righters, James Meredith spent some time with us before his admission to Ole Miss. As Medgar Evers had done, James Meredith slept in my den. Meredith met with attorney Constance Baker Motley at our house.5 It was apparent to me that James Meredith had guts. A veteran, he was very intelligent, and he had a rare sense of feeling not only for his own people but for all of the citizens of Mississippi. Meredith had a very strong ego. He knew that as the first black to attend Ole Miss he would be making history. A strong ego was probably necessary for anyone to succeed in making the kind of stand that Meredith made; unfortunately, however, a later consequence was that he became alienated from the NAACP.
The Ole Miss riot demonstrated just how explosive the school desegregation issue could become in Mississippi in 1962, if a deceitful demagogue decided to use it to build a racist following. On October 2,1962, two days after the Ole Miss riot ended, attorney J. Francis Pohlhaus, the NAACP’s Washington bureau counsel, wrote me to suggest that if we wanted to go ahead with a suit for desegregation of elementary schools in Mississippi, we “should seek the maximum Federal protection.” Pohlhaus believed that the best way to ensure maximum protection would be for the federal government itself to become the moving party in the lawsuit. I was aware that the Justice Department had filed suit in Virginia seeking desegregation of schools in Prince George County, which received large sums in federal impact aid. The presence of Keesler Air Force Base and a veterans hospital in Biloxi meant that the Biloxi schools also received substantial federal impact aid. This suggested the possibility that we could get the Department of Justice to file suit in Mississippi. Pohlhaus argued that even if the Justice Department would not file suit, a case involving children of military personnel would be less likely to subject the parents and children to physical violence.
We took these suggestions to heart. The Justice Department agreed to undertake school desegregation suits in Biloxi and Gulfport on the same premise upon which they had undertaken the Virginia suit Therefore on January 18, 1963, when the first Mississippi school desegregation suit was filed, the Justice Department filed as the plaintiff seeking to prevent both the Biloxi and Gulfport school systems from segregating any dependents of military personnel or federal employees. Judge Sidney Mize once again put up predictable barriers. In April he ordered the division of the suit, mandating separate hearings for the Gulfport and Biloxi issues. On May 16, 1963, Judge Mize dismissed the Gulfport case, holding that the federal government had “no standing as plaintiff in this court and does not have the requisite interest in the subject matter to maintain the action. …” The trial judge held that “only natural persons are entitled to the privileges and immunities of the Fourteenth Amendment…,” and that the federal government was not a person and “could not sue for the deprivation of civil rights of others/’ On June 18, 1963, Judge Mize dismissed the Justice Department’s Biloxi school case on the same grounds.6
Since we had known from at least May 16 that Judge Mize would dismiss the government’s case, we prepared a separate school suit with NAACP support and filed it on June 5, 1963, on behalf of the thirteen parents and twenty-five children in Biloxi. We thought that in contrast to the Justice Department, we most definitely had, in Judge Mize’s words, the standing of “natural persons.” We, of course, had decided to assume whatever risks might come with our action. These continued to be potentially very serious. Within the next three weeks after our school suit was filed, Medgar Evers was assassinated, and we staged the June 23, 1963, wade-in. Moreover, it had been less than a year since the rioting at Ole Miss. My hospital privileges had been threatened after the 1960 wade-in, and the officers of the local medical society had threatened to go after my medical license when I had protested my exclusion from a meeting with a gubernatorial candidate. On a personal level, I was aware that challenging Jim Crow in Mississippi could be like challenging a rattlesnake. While I was not afraid, I believed in being prepared. If the authorities went after my medical license in retaliation for my civil rights activities, I owed it to my family to be prepared to make a living elsewhere. We knew that if there was a cloud hanging over me from having a license revoked in Mississippi, it would be difficult to get a license in another state. We decided that I should take out and maintain an Ohio medical license in 1963, as a kind of insurance against the Jim Crow rattlesnake striking at our vulnerable spot. I had no intentions of leaving my home unless forced out, but with an Ohio medical license as a backup, I was now prepared to continue making a living whatever retaliations might come to us in the wake of the school suit or any other activities we might choose to undertake.
Over the months after the school desegregation suit was filed, I came to know and respect the NAACP education and legal defense attorneys who were associated with our case. Marian Wright Edelman handled matters for a time. Constance Slaughter-Harvey was active in our case, as was Constance Baker Motley, who is now a federal judge. Attorneys Jess Brown, Derrick Bell, Cassandra Flipper, Jack Young, and Carsie Hall worked with us for a time. Then there was the young black attorney Fred Banks, who also came aboard to handle part of the case. Fred Banks was a distinguished graduate of my alma mater, Lanier High School, and of Howard University School of Law. After assisting us and after laboring in the vineyards of civil rights for many years, Fred Banks went on to become a member of the Mississippi Supreme Court. I am proud to have been associated with each of these attorneys early in their careers.
Once in court, in June of 1963, we asked Judge Sidney Mize for a speedy trial on th
e merits of the case. We petitioned the judge to issue an injunction to permit our children to attend school on a nonracial basis beginning in September of 1963. We argued that the Biloxi school board should be required, within sixty days, to submit a plan to accomplish the complete conversion of the dual-race school system into a unitary, nonracial system over a three-year period. We held that such a plan should reassign children, teachers, administrators, and school staff on a nonracial basis, and that the plan should eliminate racial distinctions in budgets, facilities, school curricula, and extracurricular activities.7 Notwithstanding the recent integration of Ole Miss and the nine years of case history and precedents under the Brown decision which insured that segregated schools would not stand, and notwithstanding the state’s poverty, Mississippi’s attorney general, Joe Patterson, put the world on notice that the state would fight us. On behalf of the state and the Biloxi schools, on June 10, Patterson filed a motion to dismiss the suit. The attorney general and the school board had the audacity to argue that, after almost three years of petitioning and negotiating with the board, the Negro plaintiffs had not exhausted “any of the administrative remedies available.” The state also argued that the federal court had no jurisdiction in the matter, and that we as parents had no standing for undertaking a legal action on behalf of our own children.8
Given his previous behavior in desegregation cases, no one should have been surprised that on July 5, 1963, Judge Mize upheld the state’s petition and ordered the case dismissed. This did not stop us. Ten days later, we put up a $250 cash bond and filed notice of appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. On July 26, the court of appeals denied our request for an immediate injunction against the Biloxi schools pending their ruling, but within seven months the appeals court announced a decision. In the interim between the time of our appeal and the time of the final ruling, two other Mississippi cases were combined with ours. The Carthage or Leake County desegregation case of Mrs. Winston Hudson and her sister Dovie on behalf of Dovie’s daughter, Diane, and the Jackson case in behalf of Medgar Evers’s children, Darrel, Rena, and James, had also been dismissed by federal district judges in Mississippi. Of course I retained a special affection and deep respect for Mrs. Myrlie Evers and her children. I also developed a great admiration and fondness for Mrs. Hudson, who took to calling me her wade-in doctor. With our cases combined, one unified Mississippi case was presented to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
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