Senator Burgin from Columbus, who presided over the state convention, was presumed to be doing the bidding of Governor John Bell Williams. Williams, a former congressman, had come home to run for governor in 1967, after the Congressional Democratic Caucus stripped him of his seniority and committee chairmanships for publicly supporting Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. I think my motion to include the Loyalists in the delegation would have passed if it had been put to a vote. There had been a lot of preconvention talk about such a compromise in the south end of the state, and there had been talk along these lines at the convention itself. The Williams forces, however, were in no mood for compromise. Even though there appeared to be some considerable convention sentiment in favor of my motion, Senator Burgin would not allow it to come to a vote on the floor. After hearing my motion, Senator Burgin responded, “I am going to rule that motion out of order.” This ruling was met with a chorus of cries of “Why? Why? Why? Why?” I went forward to question the ruling, but to no avail. A slate of delegates acceptable to the governor was quickly put before the convention and elected to the slots that remained to be filled. Near the front of the auditorium, I met columnist Bill Minor, who said in his always frank and candid way, “Doctor, did you really think that they were going to seat any of the Loyalists or Freedom Democrats?” I said, “I had hoped so.” He retorted, “You’re really naive.” Of course, the test of whether or not I was naive would have been a state convention debate and floor vote on my motion. The powers that be were not willing to risk it. My hope was that the majority of the state convention delegates would be sensible. Senator Burgin and the governor merely proved that they were not ready for compromise, nor were they ready to risk entrusting the matter to a vote of the convention. In 1968, the day of genuine biracial coalition politics had not yet arrived for us in the Mississippi Democratic Party.
Understandably, the Loyalists, led by Aaron Henry, proceeded to challenge the credentials of the Regular delegation. Aaron sent me word that if I wished to have a Loyalist spot reserved for myself, I would be elected a Loyalist delegate. Even though I knew that the Regular delegation, of which I was a duly elected member, would in all likelihood not be seated, I decided that I could not accept the Loyalists’ offer. I told Aaron that the Loyalists certainly would go to Chicago with my full sympathy, but, having worked within the rules and gotten elected in south Mississippi, I did not want to appear to be running with the foxes and hunting with the hounds.
I believed that the Regular delegate selection process had worked fairly in Harrison County. I agreed to testify to my own personal and local experience before the Credentials Committee in Chicago in advance of the national convention. My dad’s old example of criticizing those things and persons that needed improvement and complimenting those who had done a good job came to my mind. I did not believe that my county deserved to be tarred with the same brush as the rest of Mississippi. I had not gone soft in any way. We had made some notable strides in Harrison County, and my sense of honor bound me to point that out. Charles Evers and Dr. Matt Page, who had been elected in the regular process in other areas of the state, declined the invitation to testify. I do not judge them in any way. They saw what they saw in their areas, and I saw what I saw on the coast. We each had a truth to uphold.
I made a special trip to Chicago for the Credentials Committee hearing along with Mayor Bobby Galloway of Lumberton, a small town in the Fifth Congressional District located about fifty miles north of the Mississippi Gulf Coast. A young white man from rural Mississippi, Bobby Galloway had never spent much time with a black man. In Chicago Bobby and I were roommates for one night. We talked into the wee hours. I took him to school in black history—every facet of it, social, political, and economic. We became genuine friends. The next day, we both gave testimony about the substantial extent of black participation in the delegate selection process in the Fifth Congressional District in southeast Mississippi. We made no apologies for the rest of the state. Still, I will always remember Congresswoman Barbara Jordan’s vigorous cross-examination. I love Barbara Jordan, but she gave me a tough time. As a point in fact, I had previously advocated for absolute fairness in the entire delegate selection process. I was merely there attesting to its fairness in my own neighborhood. Of course, Barbara Jordan had no personal knowledge of me, the Biloxi struggle, or the details of the civil rights movement in Mississippi, nor did she know about the delegation compromise motion that I had attempted to broker at the state convention in Jackson. I took my lumps and admired her style.
Given what I understood to be the national party’s commitment to create a level playing field in delegate selection, I was certain that the regular delegation would not be seated. As I had expected, the Credentials Committee ruled that, statewide, the Regulars had failed to carry out in good faith the national party’s delegate selection mandate. Therefore, the Loyalists succeeded in unseating the Regulars when the delegates went into session a few days later. Within just three years of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the world of national Democratic Party politics turned upside down.
I certainly understood and accepted Aaron Henry’s statement that “none of us is free until all of us are free.” Before leaving for Chicago, Aaron and the Loyalists again offered me a spot in their delegation, but, having testified for the Regulars, I felt that I should decline this honor. However, I did accept with enthusiasm the Loyalists’ invitation to come to Chicago as their guest to stay in the Midland Hotel with the delegation. Natalie and I decided to take Gilbert, Jr., and make the trip on the train with the Loyalist delegates. In Chicago, the delegation presented us with guest passes that allowed us to observe all sessions of the convention. Gilbert, Jr., was a sophomore at Biloxi High School, so this was a great learning experience for him. Outgoing as he is, he got himself acquainted with some members of the national press and landed a job pulling television cable around the floor for CBS News. For Democrats, this turned out to be a terribly divisive convention. Antiwar demonstrations outside the convention hall erupted into violence. Mayor Daley’s insensitive comments and the rough tactics of the Chicago police made a bad situation much worse. The convention nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey for president, but went on to suffer a humiliating defeat in the fall at the hands of Richard Nixon and the Republicans. The independent candidacy of George Wallace in 1968 fractured the solid South and guaranteed the delivery of the White House to the Republicans.
The aim of a political party is, above all else, to win elections. At home in Mississippi we faced the task of trying to build or rebuild the Mississippi Democratic Party into a true biracial progressive coalition. Just as an all-white faction could not succeed within the national Democratic Party, an all-black state party would have no hope of winning statewide office or exercising any real influence with statewide elected officials. The task of salvaging a biracial party coalition was not easy. A lawsuit was filed contesting which faction, Loyalist or Regular, had the legal right to use the party name. This produced the specter of a trial in Biloxi featuring the ACLU defending the president of the state NAACP, who also happened to be chairman of the Loyalist Democrats. The courts refused to deal with the case, leaving it to the state’s Democrats to grope their way toward some type of resolution on their own.
The election of Bill Waller as governor in the fall of 1971 was helpful. Waller, a former district attorney from Hinds County, had earned broad respect for carrying forward two unsuccessful prosecutions of Klansman Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers. As governor, Bill Waller broke new ground in appointing a significant number of blacks to state boards and commissions. He appointed my wife, Natalie, with her master’s degree in social work, to the board of the Youth Department, which oversees youth correctional facilities and other programs for troubled children. Under Governor Waller’s moderate leadership, we began slowly and haltingly to put things together.
The state party conformed to the national party’s mandates in the d
elegate selection process in 1972, and at the state convention meeting in Jackson, we debated things out. I was once again elected a state and national convention delegate from south Mississippi. I, along with Boyce Holleman (our Gulf Coast district attorney), state senator Stone Barefield from Hattiesburg, and Ben Stone, the Fifth Congressional District’s Democratic candidate for Congress, participated in the attempt to hammer out a solution that would let the state party go forward united in 1972. I was elected parliamentarian of the state Democratic Executive Committee in 1972 and was reelected to that position in every election cycle for the next twenty years. We went to the Miami national convention in 1972 in a Mississippi delegation that included a number of Loyalists such as Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, Mr. Charles Young, Mrs. Winston Hudson, Ms. Pat Derian, newspaperman Hodding Carter III, and a number of Regulars from both 1964 and 1968. Many of the white Regulars supported the failed presidential primary bid of George Wallace, who was wounded in an assassination attempt in the Democratic primaries of 1972. I, of course, was a McGovern man. At Miami, George McGovern was nominated for president, and the national party went down in a humiliating presidential defeat for a second consecutive time.
Following the 1972 national presidential defeat, Aaron Henry continued as the Loyalist chairman. The Regulars continued with a slate of party officers of their own, and the two factions continued with their tiffs at the interim convention at Kansas City in 1974. As titular head of the Regulars, Governor Waller showed a grace and courtesy which eased tensions at critical moments in Kansas City. The candidacy of Jimmy Carter for president in 1976 occasioned a final healing of the Loyalist versus Regular split. With much friendly advice from the national party, Loyalists and Regulars agreed to create two state party cochairpersons, one black and one white. This decision turned out to be the key compromise that brought the Regulars and Loyalists into the same fold. I was elected a national convention delegate for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and again in 1980, and I was elected an alternate for Jesse Jackson in 1988.
The Mississippi Democratic Party has had to really struggle to build and keep its biracial coalition together since 1976. In 1980, under the guidance of Governor William Winter, we abandoned the black and white cochair arrangement in favor of a single state party chairperson, Danny Cupit. It was a very difficult decision, and I am not sure that we have yet sorted through all of its distressing side effects. In 1988, after a painful intraparty struggle, a black and white majority coalition on the one-hundred-person Mississippi Democratic Executive Committee overrode Governor Ray Mabus’s handpicked choice for party chairperson and elected Ed Cole, an aide to Senator Stennis, as the nation’s first black state party chairperson.
Despite some very difficult times, the Mississippi Democratic Party managed to hold most of Mississippi’s statewide elective offices through the era of Reagan-Bush realignments in southern congressional politics. Every succeeding Democratic governor since Bill Waller has appointed substantial and increasing numbers of blacks to state boards and commissions. Since 1968, four different Democratic governors have honored me with appointment or reappointment to state board service. When the state legislature created an agency called the Division of Comprehensive Health, a forerunner to the Medicaid Commission, Governor John Bell Williams appointed me as one of the two physicians to sit on its governing board. I remember wondering when the appointment to the Division of Comprehensive Health came down if the governor was trying to assuage himself or to appease me for the debacle his forces had created in turning down my delegation compromise motion at the 1968 state Democratic convention. I like to think that the governor knew he was getting a good man for a medical board. I accepted the appointment and became one of the first black appointees to any state board or commission since Reconstruction.
When Governor Cliff Finch took office in 1976, he nominated me along with three white physicians to fill vacancies on the Mississippi State Board of Health and Medical Licensure, which regulated the state’s health department and licensed and disciplined physicians. The story that then unfolded revealed to me a side of Cliff Finch that few people knew about. The man had a heart of gold. He was like a mockingbird. He did no harm to anyone, but he was determined to see that justice was done. The state constitution requires that all gubernatorial appointees be confirmed by the Mississippi Senate. The black Mississippi Medical and Surgical Association, of which I was an officer (I served two terms as president, 1977 and 1978), endorsed my candidacy. The senate, however, balked and refused to confirm any of Governor Finch’s state health board appointments. The senate reasoned that the state constitution required that nominees to the state board of health must be approved by the medical association. Well, I was approved by the Mississippi Medical and Surgical Association founded in 1900, but I was not the choice of the predominantly white Mississippi State Medical Association founded in 1840. So, the senate refused to confirm me or any of the governor’s four other appointees.
Unfortunately, the nine-member Mississippi State Board of Health and Medical Licensure could not conduct its business without the proposed new members. Governor Finch, a white Democrat, stuck with me, his black nominee. The governor refused to submit new nominees to the senate. Instead he issued temporary commissions appointing us to serve on an interim basis until such time as the senate acted to confirm his nominees. For almost four years, I served on the state board of health on this basis. Governor Cliff Finch even joined Dr. AI Britton and me in a lawsuit, arguing that it was wrong for one medical society to have the exclusive right to endorse state health appointments. Seeing it as a constitutional issue, the governor did not believe that his hands should be tied in making appointments because of politics in rival professional associations. The case wound its way from circuit court all the way to the Mississippi Supreme Court.
However, before the supreme court ruled, the legislature had brought Mississippi into conformity with the practices of other states by dividing the Mississippi State Board of Health and Medical Licensure into two separate boards. One board was created to handle medical licensure and the policing of the medical profession, and the other was given the task of overseeing the work of the state department of public health. In 1980, Governor William Winter appointed me, along with Dr. Matt Page, a black physician from Greenville, to the new nine-member Mississippi State Board of Medical Licensure. This time the senate confirmed the nomination. This black doctor from Biloxi, who in 1955 was given only “courtesy” staff privileges without voting rights at the Biloxi Hospital, was now helping determine who was to be admitted and expelled from medical practice in the state.
The increasingly favorable minority appointment record of statewide officeholders bears witness to growing black political strength in an evolving biracial coalition. Black political strength and the emergence of healthy white-black progressive coalitions is also increasingly visible on the local level. I have seen the hard labor of the civil rights generation bearing its political fruit in all corners of the state. In the River Region» the Delta, and Jackson, where blacks are in the majority, the number of black officeholders rapidly expanded in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. Charles Evers, whom I was proud to recommend to the national NAACP board to walk in his brother’s steps as our state NAACP field secretary, was elected mayor of Fayette, Mississippi. Robert Walker, a former employee of the African Bureau of the U.S. State Department who became the first black faculty member at the University of Mississippi and served later as an outstanding state NAACP field secretary, was elected mayor of his hometown of Vicksburg. Another former NAACP field secretary, Cleve McDowell, the first black to attend the Ole Miss law school, was elected mayor of Drew, Mississippi.
Even more impressively, exclusion has given way to inclusion in Harrison County on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where black voters make up barely 20 percent of the electorate. Here, where I still practice medicine, in 1998, black-white coalition politics delivered county-wide election victories to county judge Robin Alfred Midcalf and circ
uit judge John Whitfield, both of whom happened to be black. This Gulf Coast, where the civil rights movement had its bloody beginnings in Mississippi in 1959 and 1960, became, in the 1990s, the first place to demonstrate that black candidates can win elections in an overwhelmingly white majority district in Mississippi. The world of Mississippi politics, especially Mississippi Gulf Coast politics, has indeed turned upside down in the past thirty years.
Although I stepped down from state party office in 1992, I still believe in the absolute necessity of biracial coalition politics for Mississippi’s overall future health, wealth, and wellbeing. Democratic coalition politics produced Governor William Winter’s landmark Education Reform Act of 1982. In the 1990s, while Mississippi elected its first Republican governor since Reconstruction, Democratic coalition politics continued to dominate the state legislature, which enacted, over the Republican governor’s veto, the Mississippi Adequate Education Program to equalize funding between rich and poor school districts. Neither white moderates nor black activists could have passed this monumental legislation by themselves. Together, they have been able to begin the difficult process of building the state anew.
Beaches, Blood, and Ballots Page 28