On February 14, 1964, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Mize’s lower court ruling and ordered that the Biloxi Municipal Separate School District and others be condemned, in solido, to pay court costs. On March 4, the appeals court issued a preliminary injunction, subsequently made permanent, restraining and enjoining the Biloxi Municipal Separate School District from requiring segregation of the races and ordered the district to make arrangements for admission of children to its schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis “with all deliberate speed, as required by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.” The appeals court ordered the district to submit a plan by July 15, 1964, ending the dual race system in at least one grade by September 1964, along with plans to dismantle the dual system in at least one additional grade each school year thereafter. Within a few months, the courts ordered the Biloxi system to develop a plan for extending desegregation to at least three additional grades for the 1965–66 academic year, and the court later ordered that the dual school system in Biloxi be disestablished in its entirety in 1967.
Having won this initial victory in the spring of 1964, we wanted to refine our plans for supporting our children when school opened in the fall. Friends told us that the Biloxi school system had long before developed its desegregation plan. We were told that during the local petitioning process, when my son was in the second grade, school officials had called for his permanent records and transcripts as if they believed desegregation to be imminent. Natalie always believed that the board was determined to purposefully develop a plan that would leave our son’s grade segregated as long as possible. That is the way it worked out. Gilbert, Jr., the lead plaintiff, wound up waiting about three years after the original court victory for the opportunity to desegregate the formerly all-white Michel Junior High School. However, in the spring and summer of 1964, we were not privy to any school board contingency plans that may have been drawn before the courts ruled. For this reason, our preparations of children and parents could not be exact until after July 15, 1964, when the board presented its plan to the judge. Only then did we know which schools and which grades would be desegregated beginning that fall. As it turned out, only the first graders were admitted to school on a nonracial basis in the fall of 1964, but second, third, and twelfth grades were opened the next year.
In our preparations for school desegregation, we coached students and parents on nonviolent responses to harassment. We did not want any incident to ignite a disturbance that might threaten the safety of the children. The newspapers quoted Biloxi school superintendent R. D. Brown as saying that “the NAACP wanted a confrontation.” After years of negotiation with us, I thought that was a rather foolish statement for an educator to make. These were our children, our loved ones. We wanted no confrontation. In fact, a smooth and secure integration was in the best interests of the black community at large and might help others who wanted to choose a different school overcome their reticence and come forward to claim their right. However, we believed that segregationist die-hards in the white community might try to provoke an incident in order to discredit integration. We tried to anticipate such things and prepare ourselves to react in a nonviolent way.
As fate would have it, one week before the opening of the first desegregated school in 1964, a dreaded incident of the type for which we had tried to prepare occurred at Howard Memorial Hospital. I had been up most of the night with a laboring mother who delivered her baby just before 7:00 A.M. After the delivery, I went down to the hospital cafeteria to get a cup of coffee and a biscuit. Just as I sat down at a table, some young white punk came up behind me and poured hot scalding coffee down my neck and back. Stunned, I bolted out of that chair, and loudly demanded, “Man, was that an accident, or did you do that on purpose?” When he coolly replied, “It was no accident,” I let him have it with a left-cross jab. I punched him so hard that it knocked him down and slid him across the floor like he was a mop. My watch went flying off my arm. I picked up a chair and was ready to hit him again if he tried to retaliate. The other people in the cafeteria began saying, “Don’t hit him with that chair.” The white guy made no move to attack me again, so I put the chair down and ran upstairs to the emergency room to get someone to look at my back and document the burns. Dr. Maurice Taquino was in the emergency room, and he quickly determined that I had first-degree burns on my back and neck. They said that my assailant had a broken nose. Someone called the police, and the white guy charged me with assault. When the policeman inquired, no one in the cafeteria at the time would own up to having seen how the incident developed. While the officer investigated, I went on back to my Division Street office and began seeing patients. A short while later, a Biloxi police officer appeared at my office to inform me that I was under arrest, scalded back and all. They took me down and booked me for fighting in a public place.
No one ever likes being arrested, but the bigger threat was that the publicity coming out of the incident would create a negative atmosphere for school desegregation, or that the medical staff at the hospital might rescind my staff privileges or press the state to revoke my medical license. Melvin Zar from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, along with Knox Walker, handled the case for me. At the time, I believed that the hot coffee was thrown on me in a deliberate effort to provoke an incident that would discredit the impending desegregation of the schools in Biloxi. However, since serving blacks in public accommodations such as a hospital cafeteria was a very new feature of Mississippi life in the summer of 1964, the scalding coffee may have been a protest of my very presence in this formerly all-white eating place. My defense was fairly simple. I was acting in self-defense. My attacker had assaulted me with a dangerous weapon—scalding-hot coffee. We had case law to support this defense. When the medical staff called me in for a hearing on charges of fighting in a public place, one physician, now retired, rebuffed my defense, stating, “You can’t say that a hot cup of coffee is a dangerous weapon.” There are now some famous cases involving fast food restaurants that affirm our contention that hot coffee is dangerous, and as such it would be classified as a dangerous weapon if used in an assault of the type that was perpetrated against me. In the end, the majority of the hospital medical staff stood by me. I did not lose staff privileges, and no one attempted to go after my medical license. Likewise, the authorities later dropped the public fighting charges that had been filed against me.
On Monday, August 31, 1964, for the first time in Mississippi history, black children and white children started to school together in desegregated first-grade classrooms in Biloxi. Our own planning as well as the federal and local planning for a smooth and incident-free school opening paid off. We expected that up to twenty-three Negro children would exercise their right to enter the first grade in desegregated classrooms. White House documents show that in the days leading up to desegregation, FBI agents stayed in constant contact with the Biloxi police. The Justice Department sent twenty deputy U.S. marshals to Biloxi to augment local law enforcement and to be available to protect the children in any emergency. The deputy marshals were equipped with two-way radios and tear gas. With the Ole Miss riots just twenty-four months behind us, the U.S. marshals were prepared to delay the black children’s entry into school until it was clear that the situation was completely under control. Backup federal contingency plans called for a select force of eighteen hundred Mississippi National Guardsmen to be deployed to Biloxi under presidential orders within a few hours of any significant disturbance. A similar federal security plan was developed to back up desegregation for the two to five black children expected to enter school in Carthage, Mississippi, later that week. However, as the date for the desegregation of the Biloxi schools drew near, Justice Department officials were confident that our local authorities could and would preserve law and order.9
On August 31, 1964, desegregated classes opened in Biloxi in an atmosphere of calm. Twenty-one black children presented themselves10 on the first day for enrollment in four pre
viously all-white elementary schools. U.S. marshals were stationed in strategic places around the schools, such as Mrs. Madge Curet’s attic, which overlooked the playground at Gorenflo Elementary School. Biloxi police were visibly present at each of the schools. Our transportation committee drove the children right up to the school door, where a marshal met them to usher them inside. Thankfully, no hostile white crowds materialized to create a sense of tension or crisis. Our desegregation went along peacefully. In fact, even though U.S. marshals remained on the scene for nine months, there was not a single school-based incident the entire first year of desegregation. There were some fairly predictable incidents of harrassment of parents away from the school grounds. Mr. Alexander Bellamy, the treasurer of the Biloxi branch, whose first-grade daughter was in the group that broke the color line, was approached by ruffians who threw refuse and urine on him one evening outside his home. About one-third of the parents reported harrassing or threatening phone calls. Two years later, after I was appointed to the Mississippi Advisory Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, I heard of serious incidents in other places in Mississippi, such as parents losing their jobs or welfare benefits or being kicked out of rental housing because they chose desegregated schools for their children. But to my knowledge there were no reprisals of this type perpetrated upon any of the Biloxi plaintiffs.
During the second year of desegregation, when the twelfth grade desegregated, there were some minor incidents at school. Natalie heard about it most because she ran a sort of homework support group at our house several nights a week for the kids involved in desegregation. At the high school there was some name-calling. Occasionally some white kids would purposefully step on the heel of a black kid in crowded hallways. There were even episodes of white kids ganging up around a black kid in the rest room to bully or intimidate him. One high school student, John Robert Esters, who went on to become a medical doctor, was so upset by the harrassment one day that he vomited and lost a dental appliance in the toilet. Some three years after the original court order, urine and feces were thrown on Mrs. Delores Rankin outside Central Junior High as she waited for her son, Don.
On the other side though, there were examples of white children reaching out in kindness to these black students. When Gilbert, Jr., started at the formerly all-white Michel Junior High School, his name sometimes appeared in the paper as the lead plaintiff on the desegregation suit against the school board. One day some of the white kids saw his name in the paper and came up to him, wanting to know what he had done to get into trouble with the school board. It was amazing to us that he ran into a lot of young white kids who wanted to know what they could do to help him. Gilbert, Jr., was very considerate of others and always had a lot of friends, but in high school he had white friends who would offer him rides home after school. Some of these white kids spent time with him in our home and invited him to their homes. Several of those friendships have endured for decades now.
In spite of the vicissitudes of those early years, I think that we as parents concluded that desegregation was worth the sacrifices made. I know that Gilbert, Jr., for example, got access to the best science labs and the best advanced math courses available in the Biloxi schools. He excelled and went on to become a medical doctor himself. Students who wanted to learn office skills got access to training on office machines that was just not available at Nichols. The children themselves, surrounded by a sea of white faces, got the satisfaction of knowing that they were blazing a trail for others and knowing firsthand that they could compete with white students on an equal basis. They got the advantage of coming to know students and teachers of a different ethnic group, and they learned that, while racism had a mean face, not all whites shared the race hatreds that made so many white Mississippians sick. These children and their parents did a lot to move race relations forward in Mississippi. They proved that desegregation could be made to work peacefully. Our children did not have to give up their black identity to do this. Gilbert, Jr., stayed very involved with his church, the NAACP Youth Branch, and with his neighborhood Scout troop. Because our child got the best high school education available, and because he learned to cultivate friendships among every race of people, I considered school desegregation a success.
Under a legal precedent called Singleton, the first desegregation plans in Biloxi were so-called “freedom of choice” plans. No one was forced to do anything. In later years, as integration progressed, the Biloxi branch became very active in seeing that black teachers did not lose their jobs as a result of declining enrollments in black schools. We insisted that teachers be transferred with the students. In 1970, when massive integration and the total dismantling of all vestiges of the dual school system was decreed, these guarantees to black teachers became a part of the court orders governing the process, along with the requirement that no school in the system have a black enrollment that exceeded 40 percent of the student body.
Busy as we were locally with planning for school desegregation, the summer of 1964 saw some signal gains for the larger civil rights movement in Mississippi and in the nation. Under the umbrella of the Council of Federated Organizations, of which Aaron Henry was president, the Freedom Summer voter registration projects got under way across the state, culminating in the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The Freedom Democrats, led by Aaron Henry and Fannie Lou Hamer, launched an unsuccessful nationally televised challenge to the allwhite, hand-picked regular Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. The Freedom Democrat challenge failed to dislodge the regulars, but did effect a change in party rules which made possible a successful Freedom Democrat, or “Loyalist,” challenge to the regulars in Chicago four years later. The summer also saw the passage of the sweeping Civil Rights Act of 1964, which utterly destroyed the legal foundations of state laws dictating segregated public accommodations. With intensive preparation for school desegregation under way in Biloxi, with voter registration drives going, and with the task before us of organizing the Biloxi branch to systematically test restaurants, hotels, and theaters for compliance with the new civil rights law, I was too busy to make it to Atlantic City with the Freedom Democrats. From Biloxi we elected Reverend A. A. Dickey.
Just as soon as President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, the Biloxi branch formed a Food and Restaurant Commitee, an Entertainment Commitee, and a Public Accommodations Committee to test local compliance with the new federal requirement that businesses end segregation in public accommodations and open to all citizens without regard to race. The Biloxi branch’s Food and Restaurant Committee developed a plan called Operation Food. We listed the restaurants and hotels on the coast and systematically sent people to ask for service and report the result. Most of these tests went along without incident, because white businessmen were ready to comply. One of the first establishments we tested was the Longfellow House restaurant in Pascagoula. Someone had led us to suspect that this elite restaurant might not open its services to us. James Crawford, who later got a medical degree, and his wife, June, now a psychologist, reported that when they arrived at the Longfellow House, to their surprise, the waiters and maitre d’ were standing at the door with their arms open, welcoming them and saying that the management wanted the NAACP to know that black diners were welcome. Natalie and I drove over to the Longfellow House without reservations a few days later and found Charles and Myrtle Davis already there. We were all served courteously.
Other establishments at first resisted or showed signs of tension. The Crawfords reported that while they were being served at the Howard Johnson restaurant on the beach, sheriff’s cars kept coming by to check, almost as if there were a fire. When Mrs. Burnell Burney Fletcher, Mr. Joe Edmonds, and Mr. A. E. Mitchell were sent for a second test at Howard Johnson, the tension produced a little humor. When the waitress came to take their order, Mrs. Fletcher decided to have whatever Mr. Edmonds was having. However, when she looked across the table, she saw tha
t a nervous Joe Edmonds was holding the menu upside down and had not made a choice. They’ve gotten many a good laugh out of recalling that episode over the years.
I became the troubleshooter for any establishment that resisted desegregation, or if we could not get anyone to go to a particular place, it fell my lot to go there and see that we got served. At first the Sun ‘n’ Sand in Biloxi refused to serve blacks. I had just gotten a brand-new, canary-yellow, 1964 1/2 Mustang prototype, one of the first off the assembly line. James Crawford and Clemon Jimerson, one of our NAACP Youth Branch officers, along with Charles Davis and Lee Oscar Johnson, piled into that brand-new Mustang with me and headed for the Sun ’n’ Sand. We went in, sat down, and got ready to order. The waitress, as if getting the lay of the land, said, “You’re that doctor from Biloxi, aren’t you?” I replied, “Yes, I am a doctor from Biloxi.” We got served a wonderful meal, but when we returned to the Sun ‘n’ Sand parking lot, we found that someone had taken a knife and scraped a line in the paint all the way around that brand-new Mustang. Like the Sun ‘n’ Sand, the Buena Vista gave some folks trouble the first time it was tested. Then Sam Edwards and I showed up. Sure enough, the Buena Vista staff resisted, but we insisted. We got served at the Buena Vista. Mr. Gus Stevens, a man whom I later got to know as a friend, ran a first-class nightclub on the beach in Biloxi. Gus Stevens brought some big-name acts and nationally known entertainers to his Biloxi club on a regular basis in the 1960s. When Mr. and Mrs. Crawford showed up to test Gus Stevens’s compliance, Gus refused them service. We reported it to the Justice Department, and Gus Stevens was indicted for violating the Civil Rights Act. Subsequently, Gus Stevens began serving on a nonracial basis in compliance with the law.
Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Page 23