To me, the most powerful symbol of a world turning upside down was the appearance of several of President Richard Nixon’s closest advisors visiting in my home in back-of-town Biloxi, Mississippi, to discuss an appointment to serve on the president’s Mississippi Advisory Committee to the Cabinet Committee on Education. In 1970, the Justice Department called a halt to any further delays in school desegregation in the South. Seven southern states with five hundred public school districts faced a crisis of their own making. In Biloxi, we had successfully desegregated the schools beginning in 1964. However, there were plenty of predictions of doom across the South. Some thought that the Citizens’ Councils would create massive white resistance or violence. Others speculated that there would be a nearly total white abandonment of the public schools across the Deep South. In places where there had been little effort toward school desegregation, emotions were running high. To his credit, President Nixon decided to create a special Cabinet Committee on Education, headed by Robert Mardian, to recruit local leaders in the affected states to advise and assist federal and local school officials in making safe and peaceful transitions from segregated to unitary school systems.
The president sent several of his closest assistants to Mississippi to interview me and other potential committee members. I, Gilbert R. Mason, Sr., great-grandson of a slave, welcomed into my den at my home at 873 Fayard Street, back-of-town in Biloxi, Mississippi, presidential assistant Robert Mardian, Postmaster General Red Blount from Alabama, Nixon advisor Fred Larue from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and Attorney General John Mitchell. There in my home we talked about school desegregation and the background to our local school desegregation suit.
The next thing I knew, in June of 1970, I received an invitation to come to the White House to meet with President Nixon. The president had invited sixteen Mississippians to serve on this, the first of the state advisory committees. In the East Wing of the White House, six black Mississippians and ten white Mississippians sat down with federal officials to discuss school desegregation.1 sat at the table with Mr. Warren Hood, a Mississippi furniture manufacturer with fourteen factories who also sat on the Mississippi Oil and Gas Board and on the boards of the Masonite Corporation, Deposit Guaranty National Bank, and Standard Life Insurance of Jackson. Mr. Hood had a reputation as a moderate in Mississippi politics. In the middle of lunch, he leaned over to me and said, “We want you to be chairman of the Mississippi Advisory Committee.” I was flattered, but I declined his suggestion. I told Mr. Hood that we, meaning black leaders in Mississippi, respected him for his civic activities and his reputation for fairness. “We want you to be our chairman,” I said. Mr. Hood agreed to accept the chairmanship of the committee, if I would accept the vice chairmanship. On that basis we went forward with the work. We hired Dr. Kirby Walker, retired superintendent of the Jackson public schools, as our executive director. Dr. Walker had been Jackson’s school superintendent when I finished at Lanier. He had signed my diploma. Now, I was vice chair of a committee that hired him.
This was an interesting committee. Its makeup pointed to the possibilities for cooperation across racial lines that might build a new day in Mississippi. On the president’s Mississippi Advisory Committee, I and other NAACP activists like Jack Young and Doug Conner sat with white moderates like Warren Hood, Gil Carmichael, and Owen Cooper. There were rumors that one of our other white members held less moderate views. I never knew if that was true or not. However, at our press conference in Washington, a reporter asked President Nixon, “How could you get an active member of the white Citizens’ Council to join a committee with the president of the Biloxi branch of the NAACP and the president of the Jackson branch of the NAACP?” President Nixon answered, “Because all of them are good men.”
Over the next several months, a part of the work of the committee involved receiving input and advice on controversial matters such as school busing. Sometimes we heard from ordinary citizens, parents, and school officials. We met again with President Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell and representatives from the other state advisory committees in New Orleans in August of 1970. Our wives were invited to join us there and meet Mrs. Nixon. There was a big regional meeting in Atlanta where Elliot Richardson and George Schultz led us in a discussion of busing. I wrote a paper on busing in which I concluded that the good to be gained from desegregation and the opportunities for children to interact with persons of all races fully justified using this and every available tool. I found the opportunities to exchange ideas and experiences with members of other state advisory committees to be a valuable part of this committee’s work.
Closer to home, from 1970 to 1973 the Mississippi Advisory Committee worked to make Mississippi school districts and citizens’ groups aware of the emergency assistance funds which the federal government made available for distressed school districts to aid them in making successful desegregation transitions. Our role was to act as a liaison between the president’s cabinet and local schools, PTA groups, and others interested in strengthening public education in Mississippi. We surveyed school superintendents to gain insight into their opinions and recommendations. We listened and sent advice back to the cabinet and to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. In turn, we passed on to local school districts the information and insights that we had gleaned. We conducted the initial review of grant applications from local school districts under the federal Emergency School Assistance Program of 1970 and made recommendations as to which proposals merited funding. The first such grant application was approved in July of 1970, and, by the end of the year, 95 of Mississippi’s 150 school districts had received aid under the Emergency School Assistance Program. We met frequently with representatives of the Mississippi School Boards Association and made grants to strengthen the work of PTA groups throughout the state.
The result of these efforts between 1970 and 1973 was a transition to desegregated schools that was smoother and much more peaceful than most people had anticipated. Most important, the level of tax support for the public schools remained constant. I believe that our influence was positive in every way. I regret only the resegregation that has occurred in Jackson and the Delta region of the state as whites have continued to show a decided tendency to flee from black-majority public schools and school districts in favor of private academies. Still, close to 90 percent of Mississippi schoolchildren attend the public schools of Mississippi in 1999, some twenty-nine years after the final desegregation decree came down.
In the late 1970s, as we put the Mississippi Democratic Party back together, on three occasions President Carter invited me and other state party leaders from across the South to the White House. In August of 1977, President Carter invited me to be a member of a group to receive a special White House briefing on the Panama Canal treaties, then under review, which were due to expire in 1999. President Carter invited me to another White House meeting on October 25, 1978. This meeting was focused more on the status of the Democratic Party and the need to reinvigorate the party and defeat a perceived growing trend toward voter apathy. My third White House meeting with President Carter focused almost entirely on the president’s 1980 reelection bid. Senator Edward Kennedy had entered the early primaries, and the president was concerned with marshalling his own forces against Kennedy and uniting the party against the Republicans in November. Each of my trips to the White House has been something of a spiritual journey, and they were probably much more useful to me as an American than to the presidents who called me to their briefings. On any visit to the White House you tend to reflect on the history of the country and the great decisions made in those rooms. You tend to think of the personal history that has brought you there. For me the political world was turning upside down. We as a people were moving from exclusion at the lowest levels to inclusion at the pinnacle of American life. All of us in Mississippi had come a long way in the ten short years between the time of my arrest for trying to desegregate a beach in Biloxi and the moment when I received t
hat first presidential invitation to the White House to discuss and help plan for desegregation across the entire South. Being that God has put me in the company of presidents and governors and cabinet officers, I have prayed that I would never lose sight of a suffering and striving humanity to whose health and healing I dedicated myself long ago.
My visits to the Carter White House had additional symbolic meaning for me. President Carter, more than any other president before Bill Clinton, represented the promise and the potential for progress wrapped up in the black alliance with southern white moderates and liberals in state Democratic Party organizations in the South. For years, I had worked to build such a coalition in Mississippi. From 1964 to 1975 I served on the Mississippi Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. I suppose that my experiences in Biloxi, including our evolving experience with school desegregation, brought me the appointment to this body. In that capacity I saw the ills of Mississippi writ large. I heard reports of continuing intimidation and reprisals against those seeking to desegregate schools and public accommodations in other areas of the state. I had certainly seen enough myself to know that racist segregation would die a hard death in Mississippi. But sometimes in these monthly meetings of the Mississippi Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, I also saw hope for the future. I saw hope in the federal mandate that there be a single high standard of civil rights enforcement throughout the nation. I saw hope in the people of Mississippi, black and white, who were willing to show their faces and serve publicly on such a body. I especially valued my advisory committee association with fellow Alpha Phi Alpha and Lanier High and Howard University medical school alumnus Dr. Albert Britton of Jackson. I came to know and respect Dr. Powers, a white dentist from Long Beach, Dr. A. D. Beittel, president of Tougaloo College, and the courageous Mrs. Hazel Brannon Smith.
Mrs. Smith’s strength and commitment amazed and inspired me. A white female newspaper owner from the small town of Lexington, in Holmes County, Mississippi, Mrs. Smith endured years of economic reprisals because she consistently advocated moderation and campaigned against fear and intimidation. The Citizens’ Council and the Sovereignty Commission had tried to break her, but they failed. Like the storm-tossed flower of Robert Frost’s poem, she “knelt and lay lodge but was not dead.” Hazel Brannon Smith may have knelt in prayer, but racists never brought her to her knees broken. In public she stated that she “would not take crap off anyone,” and I believed her. I got to know her well and thought the world of her. I knew that Mississippi was redeemable, so long as salt-of-the-earth people like Hazel Brannon Smith were willing to struggle for its soul. She gave me hope for the future of progressive biracial politics in Mississippi.
Beyond being concerned with basic political rights and rights to public accommodations, the Mississippi Advisory Committee heard many complaints about access to government services such as health and welfare. We found that the state welfare agency denied citizens access to its policy manual. There was a widespread practice of keeping welfare clients or potential clients ignorant of the relief programs for which they might qualify. I was surprised to find that poor whites, especially, were systematically kept in the dark about welfare programs in some areas of the state. Many local welfare officials in Mississippi turned needy whites away, telling them that such programs were only for blacks. When we investigated, even our civil rights advisory committee had difficulty in getting the state welfare agency to supply us with their handbook. The powers that be in Jackson acted as if we were after some closely guarded national security secret. In the end, it was a volunteer, a Dr. Retta from Maryland, who supplied us with a copy of the Mississippi handbook on welfare. We in turn copied this material and distributed it so that our citizens might know their rights to assistance under these programs.
Some of our work on the civil rights advisory committee brought us into contact with employers. The two largest employers in south Mississippi were Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula and Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi. When the committee received complaints about discrimination in these places, I took them home to the Biloxi and Moss Point branches of the NAACP for action. We on the coast were able to resolve these complaints locally. General Bryan Shotts, the commander at Keesler Air Force Base, proved to be a man of goodwill in working with us to resolve complaints about discrimination in hiring and promotion and in the treatment of servicemen of different races. General Shotts’s moderating influence regarding equity and justice, both on and off base in Biloxi, was much appreciated. In the midst of grave challenges that came before us, my occasional encounters with responsive and sensitive employers gave me glimmers of hope for my Mississippi and glimmers of hope for biracial coalition politics.
Political empowerment and court action emerged as the most solid foundations for my hope. It was plain that white moderates or liberals by themselves could not guarantee a sane future for the state, for they were in a minority within their own dominant ethnic group. Moreover, black Mississippians alone, even if fully empowered, would constitute only a 37 or 38 percent block of votes statewide. Blacks could not control statewide offices on their own. However, it was equally plain to me that a coalition of perhaps one-third of the state’s white voters, the moderates, in combination with a truly empowered black voting block could combine to create a biracial progressive coalition that could control state politics. For coalitions to work, all partners must reap benefits from the partnership. In coalition politics was the hope for reconstruction and political renewal in Mississippi. In south Mississippi from 1964 to 1968, we worked hard to build the black voter base for such a coalition. We registered new voters with impunity. We worked to turn out the vote for every election from dogcatcher to coroner. When the 1968 presidential campaign rolled around, we were ready for those precinct and county caucuses in the Fifth Congressional District where the selection process for Democratic National Convention delegates was to begin. As I later told the Democratic National Convention’s Credentials Committee in Chicago, some came walking, some came running to those precinct caucuses. In Harrison County, we had one of the heaviest precinct caucus turnouts of any presidential convention year in history. The strength of the black precinct turnout gave us black strength in the county convention and strength in the congressional district convention where the first batch of national convention delegates were to be elected. From the Fifth Congressional District in 1968, I was elected a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, along with District Attorney Boyce Holleman. All this took place in what became known as the “Regular” party process. In the Fourth Congressional District, the “Regular” party process elected Charles Evers a delegate. Up in the Delta, Dr. Matthew Page was elected. These outcomes guaranteed that, for the first time in history, there would be blacks in the Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention.
In 1968, black voters made up something approaching 20 percent of the electorate in Harrison County and the Fifth Congressional District in southeast Missisippi. My election from the Fifth Congressional District made for a reasonably fair and equitable representation of black voters in the convention delegation from our particular region. However, elsewhere in the state, black representation was not at all reflective of black voting strength. In the first, second, third, and fourth congressional districts, blacks were in some cases excluded from the precinct caucuses or systematically underrepresented in the county convention processes. This exclusion rekindled the “Freedom Democrat” movement, which took to calling itself “Loyalist” as opposed to the so-called “Regulars” who would control the state convention, in which the remaining convention delegates were to be selected. The Loyalists conducted a separate caucusing process across the state and produced a competing delegation that sought to replace the so-called Regular delegation at the Chicago convention. The Loyalist decision to pull out of the Regular delegate selection process was not communicated to us in the south end of the state. However, by the time we assembled for the state De
mocratic convention in Jackson, it was apparent that there would be a challenge to the state’s Regular delegation, unless action were taken to remedy the inequities that had surfaced in the early part of the delegate selection process.
I hoped that the state party convention could be brought to draw the Loyalists into a coalition by electing the remaining delegates in such a way as to guarantee the Loyalists half of Mississippi’s national convention delegation. At the 1968 state convention, I became the author of a motion to suspend the rules and elect a slate of delegates that would include Matt Page, Aaron Henry, Charles Young, R. L. T. Smith, Sam Bailey, Andrew and Oscar Carr (two white businessmen who were in sympathy with the Freedom Democrats), myself, and enough others to give blacks and Loyalists half of the twenty-two-member delegation. I thought it was a sensible compromise that would save the state the embarrassment of having its delegation challenged and unseated in Chicago. Columnist Robert Novak was sitting next to me when I made the motion. He asked me if I thought this motion had a chance of passing. I said, “I hope so.”
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