My first glimpse of the potentialities for a new direction for local activism came in a November 1964 White House conference which I, as a vice president of the Mississippi Conference of the NAACP and president of the Biloxi branch, attended along with Aaron Henry, Charles Evers, Felix Dunn, and a number of other community leaders from across the South. In 1964, under President Johnson’s leadership, Congress had passed the Economic Opportunities Act, which created the Office of Economic Opportunity. Many of the antipoverty programs which OEO envisioned, under the leadership of Sargent Shriver, were designed to use local initiative in the guise of community-based groups to set local antipoverty agendas and strategies. One of the key OEO initiatives was the Head Start program, which was set up to lift economically disadvantaged preschool children into health and educational readiness. The White House conference was designed to acquaint the participants with the possibilities of the Head Start program and stimulate grant applications.
I cannot say for sure exactly why I was chosen to attend the White House meeting. The Biloxi schools had begun desegregation that fall, and my reputation as an activist was by now well established in NAACP circles in Mississippi and the South. In any case, I was ready for what I heard in Washington. I discovered that Sam Yette, a former classmate of mine at Tennessee State, was working as an assistant to Sargent Shriver. I got the presentation that the other conferees received, but Sam Yette made sure that additional firsthand information got to me. The group stayed overnight in Washington and had a chance to discuss the merits of the proposal over dinner. The next day, at the conclusion of the conference, we all met with President Johnson on the South Lawn of the White House to hear personally of the president’s commitment to Head Start.
However, even as we Mississippians began forming a new vision of a local antipoverty agenda, we were also doing some high-level politicking for a federal appeals court appointment for Biloxi attorney Howard McDonnell. As a state senator, Howard McDonnell had distinguished himself by introducing legislation outlawing use of the Black Annie, or bullwhip, at the State Penitentiary at Parchman. McDonnell had proven himself to be a man of character, moderation, and fairness during the many crises in Biloxi in the early 1960s. We hoped to inspire President Johnson to appoint McDonnell to a vacancy on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. As I moved through the receiving line to shake President Johnson’s hand, I mentioned my hope that he would give serious consideration to Howard McDonnell. The president, however, had made up his mind and did not mince his words. “It’s going to be J. P. Coleman,” Johnson said. Coleman had been the governor of Mississippi when the Sovereignty Commission was created and when the first Biloxi wade-in took place in 1959. Rather than follow extremist segregationists like Ross Barnett into the desert of unpledged electors or Goldwaterism, Coleman had remained loyal to the national Democratic ticket in 1960 and 1964. Still, I was not enthusiastic about this prospective appointment. Little could I have suspected that it would be J. P. Coleman who, as a federal appeals judge four years later, would write the opinion which declared the Harrison County beaches public and opened them to all citizens without consideration of race.
Of course, Head Start was the main concern at our meeting with President Johnson. Upon my return to Biloxi, I met with several persons in the black community, including Mr. John Pettus, Mr. Robert Fortner, Mrs. P. I. Green (a local kindergarten teacher), and the trustees at First Missionary Baptist Church of Biloxi. We met at Nichols High School and decided to send forward a Head Start application in the name of First Missionary Baptist Church for a program to serve seventy-five children. This was the first Head Start grant proposal forwarded from the coast. The Back Bay Mission and the Biloxi Municipal Public School System also soon made application. The Biloxi school system’s application was funded at a very high level. The school system was able to get its program implemented in the summer of 1965, making it the first operational Head Start program on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Elsewhere in our county, the Child Development Group of Mississippi, operating out of Jackson, organized some Head Start centers in Gulfport working through Mr. Robert Hoskins. Over in Pass Christian, the parochial school under the direction of Father Philip McCloone received a Head Start grant. The Systematic Training and Rehabilitation Act (STAR) was another part of the OEO community-based program package; we got it going at the old Our Mother of Sorrows school, which had just closed, on Division Street. The STAR program was focused on reaching out-of-school adults with GED and other adult education and literacy courses. My wife, Natalie, wound up as a social worker for the STAR program, and Mrs. Rosa Martin was the program writer. It is my understanding that, because of the vigor of various groups in putting forward proposals, Mississippi was funded for more Head Start slots than any other southern state. There were five different Head Start grant projects operating in Harrison County plus the STAR program.
By November of 1966, many of us on the coast who were involved in these initiatives saw a great disadvantage in several groups writing local grant programs that were, in effect, in competition with each other. The more we talked, the more logical it seemed that we would form an umbrella organization to go after a larger piece of the pie in order to serve more children. In fact, the initial federal legislation authorizing these programs envisioned local community action agencies to harness and coordinate neighborhood-based activity. The Harrison County Board of Supervisors attempted to create a community action agency topdown—that is, as a semiofficial arm of county government—with state representative Jim Simpson as its chairman pro tempore and Dr. J. O. Tate, Dr. Milas Love, and others as board members. This county-backed agency went nowhere. Energy, initiative, and commitment to the new OEO programs were coming from grassroots people across the county and not from the politicians. As community activists saw the need for coordination, we turned to Thomas Rafferty, director of the STAR program. One of the duties outlined in Rafferty’s job description was to act as a community organizer. Therefore, with Raffert’s help, we sent out notices for a meeting to be held at the Harrison County courthouse in Gulfport. Beginning with this November 1966 meeting, we completely transformed the community action agency. We rewrote its constitution and bylaws to create genuine grassroots representation through a region-wide forty-five-person board. NAACP members were at the forefront of this reorganization; thus they obtained a guaranteed NAACP slot on the new board. Every effort was made to create equitable representation for each of the municipalities and areas to be served. Moreover, all of the existing grantees in the county were guaranteed representation on the new board. As president of the Biloxi branch, I was elected to the guaranteed NAACP slot on the board. As the reconstituted board for the new Harrison County Community Action Agency took shape, I was elected its chairman, and Father Philip McCloone from Pass Christian was elected vice chair; among the new board members were Mayor Francis Hursey of Pass Christian, funeral director Lang from Gulfport, and Reverend Kaufman and Reverend Regier from the Mennonite mission in Gulfport. The Harrison County Community Action Agency was later renamed the Gulf Coast Community Action Agency.
I am very proud of the accomplishments of the Harrison County Community Action Agency in its early years. We had an enthusiastic and hardworking board. Some of our meetings would convene at 7:00 P.M. and not wind up until 2:00 A.M. For the most part they were good, productive meetings. Our first director was Mr. Ray Fernandez. We quickly applied for a state charter of incorporation. Our largest program continued to be Head Start. One of the ways the Harrison County Community Action Agency fought poverty was to provide solid employment to adults caught up in poverty. We absorbed the employees of the preexisting Head Start programs and retained neighborhood-based oversight boards for each Head Start center. The neighborhood boards were answerable to the overall community action agency board.
The poverty-stricken children we served got stimulation and training which their parents could not otherwise afford or provide. In addition to taking field trips, the kids learned the al
phabet, numbers, colors, shapes, and directions—all essential to their later success in school. Beyond the classroom, we provided nutritious meals and free medical treatment to the children. At first, only Dr. Felix Dunn and I would treat Head Start children, and only Dr. J. O. Tate and Dr. George Powers would attend to their dental needs. I helped Dr. Dunn with physicals for the initial class of children, but stepped aside from any direct personal involvement in the medical program for about two years in order to avoid any semblance of conflict of interest with my role as chairman of the board. However, the workload, especially the required paperwork, became too great for Dr. Dunn, so after a couple of years I applied for and received a waiver that allowed me to resume assisting him with giving the Head Start children their physicals. One of my most poignant memories of this time is of a little black child who came in with his mother for his pre-Head Start physical. The little fellow looked at me and then turned to his mom and asked, “Mama, Mama, is he a doctor?” “Yes,” the mother replied, “he’s the one that brought you and your brothers and sisters into this world.” Without skipping a beat the little boy said, “Well, he ain’t white.” Sadly, in less than four years of life this black child had concluded that you had to be white to be a doctor. I immediately saw the need these children had for positive black role models to help expand their vision of possibilities for themselves.
The agency branched out in several new directions. We administered a program called Operation Bootstrap to assist teenagers and young adults in finding employment or appropriate job-related training. We also launched ourselves into a project to develop low-income housing units. In the housing arena, the Community Action Agency acted as a broker, negotiating with OEO and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to bring their resources to the table with the Council of Negro Women and local contractor Frank Collins. The result was the TurnKey housing project in North Gulfport. With advice from Mrs. Unita Blackwell, the mayor of Mayersville, along with Dr. Dorothy Height and Mrs. Dorothy Duke, we were able to get seventy-seven new TurnKey homes constructed with sweat-equity from the new homeowners as part of the package.
Of course, as with any new institution, we had our moments of administrative difficulties as an inexperienced board trying to find its way. Our first executive director resigned in a controversy over making major supply purchases without consulting the board or gaining its consent. A gentleman named Kochek then served briefly as our director. When Mr. Kochek left, Reverend John Aregood of the Back Bay Mission shared executive duties with Father Philip McCloone for a time. Before I stepped down from the Harrison County Community Action Agency board in 1969, we employed Mr. Doyle Moffett as agency director. The agency was stable and in good hands. It found effective ways to supply the needs of “the least of these.” I took great pride in the fact that the Biloxi branch of the NAACP was the prime mover in bringing the Harrison County Community Action Agency into being.
The year I left the Harrison County Community Action Agency Board, 1969, was the year that Mother Nature sent an unparalleled calamity to Mississippi Gulf Coast residents, regardless of their race, creed, or color. On the night of August 17, 1969, Hurricane Camille struck the coast with 230-mile-per-hour winds which drove the waters of the Mississippi Sound across low-lying zones in a 30-foot storm surge. The worst-hit area was to our east in Pass Christian, but there was plenty of wind and water damage to go around. Practically the entire black community back-of-town in Biloxi was inundated with four to six feet of floodwater from the storm surge. Some 6,000 homes were destroyed along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where 132 people were killed before the storm went inland and wreaked havoc with flooding as far away as Virginia, where an additional 200 persons lost their lives. Chaos and crisis stalked our lives for months after the storm, as all kinds of people, white and black, rich and poor, who had lost everything struggled to put their lives back together again.
The Masons at 873 Fayard Street in Biloxi struggled with all the rest. Before the storm, in good Boy Scout fashion, we had prepared a family plan to ascend to our partially floored attic in case rising waters entered the house. Gilbert, Jr., had the job of making sure the Coleman lantern was in working order and that it got to the attic. Natalie was in charge of our battery-powered radio. We watched storm news on the local television station until our electrical power went out as lines snapped in the storm’s fury. As we sat in the darkness with the wind howling outside, we heard the sound of water lapping at our kitchen door. When we went to the back to check it out, we found that two inches of murky saltwater had already seeped through the door to cover the kitchen floor. We decided it was time to go to the attic, but access was through a ladder and crawl space on the back porch. When we opened the door to go out onto the porch, water poured into the house at a rapid pace. I sent Natalie and Gilbert, Jr., on up the ladder and turned back into the house to try to save a few things by lifting them off the floor. I went to the bedroom to try to save Natalie’s clothes, but water was already in the chest of drawers, dresser, and closet. I could do little good. Ironically, in a surge of energy, I did manage to lift a heavy console-type television off the floor and onto a couch. By this time the carpeting was floating up, and I had to literally fight my way through the living room, back to the kitchen and on out to the porch to climb to safety in the attic with my family. Our house was eleven feet above sea level. When daylight came, the extent of our personal disaster became apparent. Our home had been invaded by four and a half feet of sea water. As the water receded, it left a briny mud coating on floors and walls and all that it had touched. Everything we owned was destroyed. Our two automobiles had been completely submerged in water and ruined. My office was ruined and all of my medical equipment was destroyed by four and a half feet of water. I was unable to see patients at the office for two weeks. We had money in the bank, but no change of clothes, no food, no water, no electric power, and no transportation to take us to where these items could be obtained. However, we were not alone. Thousands of people, white and black, rich and poor, were in the same predicament. Common loss evoked a spirit of camaraderie that mitigated some of the suffering of those awful days immediately following the storm.
Once the enormity of the devastation had sunk in, I called an immediate meeting of the executive committee of the Biloxi branch of the NAACP. We had a dynamic branch executive committee, including Mrs. Natalie Mason (a trained social worker), Mr. Robert Fortner (a civil servant), Mrs. Myrtle Davis, Mrs. Marjorie Reese, Mr. Jack Martin, Mr. Å. E. Jackson, Mr. Charles Davis, and Mr. W. O. Hill. We quickly identified food, drinkable water, and housing as the most urgent needs of the community, and we began actively seeking and disseminating information on when and where these necessities might be available. Natalie and Mrs. Elzy began organizing the social service by surveying the community for its most urgent needs. In these days of disaster, the Biloxi branch reached out to the needy not only in the black community but in the low-income white neighborhood on “the Point” to the east of us on the Biloxi peninsula. During the first couple of days, the disaster looked like it had drawn everybody together, black and white, to create a true spirit of community. Matt Lyons, director of the Biloxi Housing Authority, called a meeting, which I attended. We respected each other, but we had often been adversaries on issues related to the desegregation and proper upkeep of public housing units in Biloxi. The spirit of that meeting following the hurricane was so good that I complimented Matt Lyons on the direction in which he appeared to be going. The personnel of Keesler Air Force Base were gallant in distributing water. They had water flown in, delivered it to the hospital, and made it available to the general public in large cans that looked like gasoline cans. Although they could not go onto private property, heavy equipment operators from the Naval Construction Battalion Base in Gulfport began clearing the worst of the storm debris that blocked the streets. All of this made me hopeful. The Red Cross opened up for emergency food and clothing distribution at the Howard Avenue Community Center. The
mood was so positive to start with that I even telegrammed Roy Wilkins at the national NAACP offices to say that it looked as if everybody was working together.
However, once the most pressing survival needs of the community were addressed, that initial surge of almost euphoric emergency cooperation receded, and a bureaucratic nightmare ensued. The federal Office of Emergency Preparedness set up an office in Biloxi but staffed it with people who proved to be totally unprepared for a disaster of the magnitude of Camille, and who did not know what to do for folks looking for money or materials to begin making home repairs. There was virtually no provision for emergency food stamps or medical services for the displaced. Had not the weather been unusually dry in the days after the storm, our water-related losses would have been much greater. Some private relief groups such as the Salvation Army performed beautifully. Others like the Red Cross brought in staffers with dehumanizing, denigrating attitudes toward those in need. No doubt the primitive state of governmental disaster relief programs placed too much responsibility on private charities and overburdened their staffs. However, Red Cross workers in Biloxi developed a reputation for needlessly humiliating those seeking relief, especially black folks, whom they often seemed to make beg, cajole, or grovel for assistance. In the bureaucratic maze, victims of the disaster were treated not as people with feelings and a deep need to preserve their dignity but as if they were almost invisible. Over time, an emerging pattern of ill treatment of blacks and poor white people at the hands of the Red Cross required the Biloxi branch to become a virtual mediator and advocate in seeing that individual needs were fairly met. We became again the community advocates for the powerless, the voiceless, the poor, the unemployed, and the dispossessed who were in every sense “the least of these.”
Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Page 25