Beaches, Blood, and Ballots: A Black Doctor's Civil Rights Struggle

264 Pages·2000·14.598 MB·English

by  Gilbert R. Mason, James Patterson Smith

Beaches,
Blood,
and
Ballots
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Beaches,
Blood,
and
Ballots
A Black Doctor's Civil Rights Struggle
Gilbert R. Mason, M.D.,
with James Patterson Smith
University Press of Mississippi I Jackson
Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies
www.upress.state.ms.us
Copyright © 2000 by Gilbert Mason and James Patterson Smith
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mason, Gilbert R.
Beaches, blood, and ballots: a black doctor's civil rights struggle /
Gilbert R. Mason, with James Patterson Smith.
p. cm. (Margaret Walker Alexander series in African American
studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57806-278-0 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-934110-28-7
i. Mason, Gilbert R. 2. Afro-Americans—Civil rights—Mississippi—
Biloxi—History—2oth century. 3. Afro-American physicians—
Mississippi—Biloxi—Biography. 4. Afro-American civil rights workers—
Mississippi—Biloxi—Biography. 5. Biloxi (Miss.)—Biography.
6. Biloxi (Miss.)—Race relations. 7. Civil rights movements—
Mississippi—Biloxi—History—2Oth century. 8. Mason family.
I. Smith, James Patterson. II. Title.
F349-B5 M37 2000
976.2'oo496o73'oo92—dc2i
[B] 00-024664
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
For Natalie
Social Worker
Plugs at day, plugs at night,
Helps the wrong, helps the right,
Sometimes works without desire
Works so well must retire.
See my baby working hard,
Got to make it says the Bard,
Getting up early hitting the clock,
Go six miles like going a block.
Going to places smelling like rum,
Visit the elite or visit the slum,
There she goes never a shirker,
That's my baby, Social Worker.
Gilbert R. Mason
May 30,1930
Co$tfo, ergo 6um.
Rene Descartes
Gil's Prayer
Thou hast sown in the fertile
Bayous of the Father of Waters,
Thou hast tendered the bloom
In the garden of martyrs.
Thou hast shepherded the foundling
When none other bothered,
Now Lord, spare the promise
From premature barter.
Thou hast embellished the spur
And given it splendor,
Thou hast given it strength,
But made it tender.
Thou hast placed in its hands
An unfulfilled agenda,
Now Lord, give it stay
To praise the sender.
Gilbert R. Mason
April 14,1954
Contents
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xv
ONE: Beginnings i
TWO: Preparation for Service 19
THREE: Going Home to Serve 35
FOUR: The Beach 49
FIVE: The Bloody Wade-In 65
six: Harassment, Lies, and Sovereignty Commission Spies 88
SEVEN: Ballots, Beaches, and Bullets 112
EIGHT: Desegregation Now! 141
NINE: Community Action and Hurricane Camille 168
TEN: Inclusion, Influence, and Public Responsibilities 184
Epilogue 203
Notes 209
Index 215
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Foreword
On Thursday, May 14,1959, eight months before four students from North
Carolina Agricultural and Technical College launched the Greensboro
lunch counter sit-ins, nine black citizens of Biloxi, Mississippi, ventured
onto a forbidden spot on a twenty-six-mile-long segregated beach in open
and conscious defiance of Mississippi's Jim Crow practices. Police re-
moved these swimmers from the Mississippi Gulf Coast beach and warned
them against returning. At a time when, out of approximately ten thou-
sand black residents of Biloxi, three were members of the NAACP, there
followed months of mass meetings, public petitioning, and community-
wide planning to challenge the banning of blacks from the beach through
civil disobedience and federal court cases. Additional wade-ins at Biloxi
the following April triggered the bloodiest race riot in Mississippi history
and produced the first significant U.S. Justice Department intervention in
Mississippi to challenge the state's segregation laws in federal court.
On April 30, 1960, New York-based reporter James L. Hicks of the
Amsterdam News, in a front page feature series of articles on the Biloxi
wade-ins, wrote a piece entitled "This Man Mason." Hicks, who had cov-
ered civil rights activities throughout the South, led his story with this
statement: "Little Rock has its Daisy Bates;. .. Martin Luther King rose
up out of the racial turmoil of Montgomery, Alabama, and now Biloxi,
Miss., has its Dr. Gilbert Mason." With this salute, Hicks recognized the
Biloxi wade-ins as marking the beginning of the civil rights movement in
Mississippi. In retrospect, it is now dear that these wade-ins heralded the
opening salvo in a sustained series of Mississippi Gulf Coast wade-ins and
lawsuits that for the first time successfully challenged the state's segrega-
tion laws.
Almost simultaneously, the local organizers of the Biloxi wade-ins
began working on one of the earliest Mississippi school desegregation
suits, a suit which, in 1964, for the first time anywhere in Mississippi,
opened the doors of public schools to black children and white children
ix