9781578062782

Chapter One

Beginnings

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. --Proverbs 22:6

"DR. MASON, WHEN DID YOU BECOME A CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST?" This is the question a white nurse posed last spring when, after practicing medicine in Biloxi, Mississippi, for forty-three years, I found myself a hospital patient. Many people in Mississippi know that Gilbert R. Mason, the black doctor from Biloxi, was for thirty-three years a vice president of the Mississippi Conference of the NAACP and a close associate of Medgar Evers and Aaron Henry. Medgar Evers's last Sunday night on this earth was spent at my house, and I served as a pallbearer at his funeral. In Biloxi they know that I was one of the founders, and for thirty-three years the president, of the Biloxi branch of the NAACP. Local folks know that I organized Mississippi's first nonviolent civil disobedience campaign, the wade-ins on Biloxi beach beginning in 1959, to gain equal access to God's Gulf Coast beaches for all of his children. We endured and persevered to victory through a tidal wave of threats, violence, and reprisals from mad-dog segregationists. Local people will recall the success of our targeted economic boycotts against the encouragers and perpetrators of assaults on and intimidation of black citizens engaged in peaceful protest on the beach. Many in Biloxi remember that in 1960, well before the freedom summers and the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, we undertook successful voter registration drives in Biloxi that gave black folks the power to replace their worst enemies in the local political establishment. Many also recall that in August of 1964, Biloxi's schools became the first in Mississippi to admit black children to formerly all-white classrooms. School desegregation came first to Biloxi because I joined early with Medgar Evers and Mrs. Winston Hudson in the first lawsuit challenging Mississippi's system of enforced racial segregation and inequality in public schools. For over forty years, local people have seen this black doctor from Biloxi uphold the cause of human rights before local, state, and national boards and commissions. These are some of the facts of my life. My nurse knew most of the bare facts. She wanted to understand more.

"So, Dr. Mason, when did you become a civil rights activist?" Many people ask me such questions because they really want to know why I and other local leaders across the South became involved in the civil rights struggle, why and how we took the risks we took, and why and how we achieved success against a white power structure steeped in a vile and sinister racist ideology. Born in the 1920s and 1930s we were the "freedom boomers," not baby boomers, arriving on the scene with a yearning for freedom and equality burning in our breasts. From where did our commitment come? Thankfully, the new generation has no memory of the most vicious and humiliating aspects of legally enforced segregation and its corollary of legalized second-class citizenship against which my generation struggled. Still, the ugly and hurtful residues of racism remain. This book represents my personal effort to reach out to a new generation of black and white youth to help build understanding and to affirm that, having weathered many dangers, storms, and fears, I still have hope for Mississippi and hope for America.

"So, Dr. Mason, when did you become a civil rights activist?" It seems such a simple question, but the answer is complicated. I didn't just become a civil rights activist one day. We are individuals, you know, and there is so much that goes into making the individual: the way you live; your parents and family; the nurturing and examples you receive from neighborhood, community, church, teachers, preachers, Scout leaders; the faith and the ideals you develop; the people you adopt as heroes. All of these play a part in making us who we are.

I am a native Mississippian, born at home at 113 Riggins Alley between Monument Street and Farish Street in Jackson, Mississippi, on October 7, 1928. I was delivered by a black midwife and born into a thoroughly segregated and racist society. From early childhood I realized that discrimination and segregation were not right. As a schoolboy I could not reconcile the practices of Mississippi with the promises of the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. By the time I was in high school, I had begun to believe that we should defy segregationist laws and customs wherever possible.

The world I saw as a child left no doubt in my mind that segregation and humiliation went hand in hand. In 1932, when I was four years old, my daddy and a local grocer with some other friends decided that they would go to Chicago to see Joe Louis fight the Uruguayan boxer Uz Gudan. Though my grandparents had moved to Chicago, I had never been to see them. My daddy got his friends to agree that I could go along. I got into the backseat of that new Chevrolet sedan and went to sleep. When I woke up, I could sense something wrong. As we got closer to Illinois near the Ohio River, the men began to whisper. Cairo, Illinois, had a reputation for beating up on black folks and for race riots and lynchings. I remember they told me to get down on the floor. I got down on the floor. We went on to Chicago safely, but getting down on that car floor had made an impression.

Back home in Jackson, at some point in early childhood I discovered that legal segregation, or the Jim Crow system, meant that I could not use the public parks or swimming pools. Battlefield Park was the public park nearest to me, but we as black folks couldn't play there. Because black kids in Jackson had no public pools available to us, I learned to swim in an old swim hole called the "bowlegged weed" where a storm-ravaged tree bent out over a dangerously steep bank descending to a stream running south from the Goudy brickyard pond. I remember being distinctly disturbed as a Boy Scout because my friend Joseph Debro and I had to wait six months to get the merit badge in lifesaving and camping because the black Boy Scout camp, Camp Lubaloo near Clinton, did not have any certified lifesavers to train us. Our scoutmasters had to appeal to the area Scout executive to allow certified lifesavers from the white Scout camp, Camp Kickapoo, two miles down the road, to certify us. Successful completion of those badges after a long and frustrating wait meant that Joseph Debro and I became Eagle Scouts; it was the first time blacks had done so in Jackson and the second time in Mississippi.

Everywhere we went, Jim Crow laws told us what we could and could not do. Of course, all of the restaurants in Jackson were "white only." I don't recall being able to even walk up to a window to get served. Many department stores would not let us try on clothes before buying--not even ladies' hats. Some stores on Capitol Street wouldn't serve black people at all. As late as 1958, when I was already a practicing physician, I went down on Capitol Street to buy a tie to wear for my daddy's funeral, and the store wouldn't even sell me a tie. Hotels and motels routinely refused us accommodations if we traveled. Gas stations had "colored" rest rooms and "colored" water fountains, and there were "colored" waiting rooms in bus and train stations and in white doctors' offices. Streetcar and bus drivers sent us to the back and placed moveable signs on the seats marked "colored" on one side and "white" on the other. The signs were moved backward and forward depending on how many white folks were aboard. If seats were in short supply, whites sat while blacks stood up for the ride. At Baptist Hospital sick black patients got treatment only in the basement until R. H. Green, a white businessman with a lot of black employees, donated the money to build the R. H. Green Annex so there would be a decent place where colored people could be sick and die. I remember my folks took me there once when I fell out of a tree and they thought I had broken a collarbone.

I finished high school in Jackson's segregated and unequal public school system. Oh, I had many wonderful and dedicated teachers at Sally Reynolds Elementary School, Jim Hill Junior High School, and Lanier High School. Still, we knew that our teachers were not paid fairly and that our equipment was second-rate compared to what the white schools had. In high school particularly, I became aware that we were getting the hand-me-down chemistry instruments--used flasks, retorts, and Bunsen burners--and we even got used desks. We did not go to the white public library. We used the little library at our school or went to the one at Jackson State College. In football we received the thrown-off togs, jerseys, helmets, and shoes from Central High School, which was a so-called white high school in Jackson. The shoes, I remember, were badly used. Many times they had missing cleats or no cleats at all, so we would repair them, then dye and polish them up.

The all-black Lanier football team practiced on a cinder-ridden field in back of the school. The cinders had been covered with a layer of dirt, but every now and then a cinder would come through and cut you when you hit the ground. I carry scars now from that practice field. We did not have a school stadium, so we played all of our games at Jackson State's stadium or at what was called the Mississippi Colored State Fairgrounds. That's right, there was a "colored" fair and a white fair. The Mississippi Colored State Fairgrounds was out on Highway 49 near what is now Medgar Evers Boulevard. We played before a black audience mainly, but our games were well supported and open to all people. Since there were no bleachers, people usually just stood on the sidelines, so there wasn't a question of white versus black seating. We did not have a gym at Lanier either. We played our basketball games at Holy Ghost High School gym on Ash Street, or we played at Jackson State's gym. Holy Ghost was the all-black Catholic school about a block and a half from our campus. I don't recall ever going to see Central High or any other white school play in Jackson.

We had problems sometimes because our Lanier school colors were maroon and white like Mississippi State's, and like them, we called our team the Bulldogs. If you lettered at Lanier, you became a member of the "L" Club and wore a maroon-and-white jacket with a bulldog and a big "L" stitched on it. My older brother was a four-year letterman, but I was usually a second string end and only lettered one year. Downtown on Capitol Street, there were occasions when white guys calling themselves Mississippi State alumni would try to pull the maroon-and-white Lanier jacket off one of our boys, even though there was plainly an "L" and not an "M" on it.

In this environment, when did I become a civil rights activist? I know that as a boy I got into a lot of fights in my own neighborhood. As a little fellow I had wrestled with my big brother, who was six years older. Bullies in our section of town knew that I'd fight them in a minute. They didn't pick on me. Many times though, I fought to defend a little timid friend of mine, Charlie Magee, on Cox Street (I lived on Booker), or because people were picking on my cousin, Christia B. Ratliff, who lived behind me. Bullies have a tendency to pick on people of gentle character or who look weak. After I was grown and in medical practice, a childhood friend dropped by the office one day and told me that a Jackson minister's wife, the widow of Reverend Steen, who had lived across the street from me back then, was asked what I was like as a boy. This preacher's wife said, "He won't lie, he won't cheat, he won't steal, and he don't take no shit." That was my reputation as a boy. The bullies didn't pick on me, because I didn't "take no shit."

Segregation was a legalized bully system. Even before I went to high school I saw how, in the minds of some white people, legalized Jim Crow qualified black people for capricious humiliation and degradation. When did I become an activist? Was it that day when I was twelve years old and bent over to pump air into my bicycle tires at a Gulf station on Terry Road, and a big white guy slipped up from behind and kicked me over? When I turned to ask, "Why?" his smug answer, "'Cause I wanted to," made a lasting impression. His interpretation of Jim Crow gave him a special privilege to bully. I soon started doing small things to defy the system.

Under Jim Crow the law dictated some aspects of race relations--seating on buses, separate schools, and the like. Still, you just never quite knew when some white person's unique idea of racial etiquette/degradation would jump up to entangle, humiliate or threaten you. As a thirteen-year-old, I got a job delivering groceries on my bicycle for Ritter's Grocery in a white neighborhood on Terry Road near its intersection with Silas Brown Street. One evening near dark I made a delivery to a white lady. As I stood on her porch trying to make change in the dark, she got mad because I was too slow to suit her. "Give me that money," she snapped, "I'll count it myself." I said, "Lady, I can count," and handed her the correct coins. Offended, she snarled, "That's what's wrong with you smart-aleck young niggers," and she called the store to complain. The next day at the store, my white boss's wife issued a reprimand punctuated with a veiled threat. "Gilbert, be careful," she warned. Then, pointing down the road toward the Pearl River, she added these ominous words: "They took one colored boy down there, and they never heard from him again." What hard words for any mother's young son to hear come from the mouth of an adult. Even at age thirteen, I knew that the Pearl River had become the premature grave of many blacks. I knew the boss's wife intended to intimidate me with that threat. White folks, she made clear, would not put up with uppitiness from me. With my boyish reply to a white customer's impatience, I had inadvertently broken the rules of racial subordination to the extent that my life was threatened.

Some days later the peculiarities of segregationist racial etiquette ran me afoul of the white store manager himself. My daddy, a strong-willed man that white folks didn't mess with, had taught me to be polite and respectful to all people but subservient to none. He insisted that I address grown-ups, black or white, as "Mr.," "Mrs.," or "Miss So-and-So." When called or questioned, I was to reply, "Yes, Mrs. Smith" or "No, Mr. Smith." This ran square into the peculiar ideas of my white boss at Ritter's Grocery. It took awhile, but one day he noticed that the words "sir" and "ma'am" were never in my vocabulary when answering his customers. Once he caught on, he confronted me and insisted that I address his wife as "ma'am." I defied him. I called her "Mrs." He turned and hit me upside the head so hard that it burst my eardrum. Hurting, enraged, I instinctively reached for the pocketknife I sometimes carried for protection against mugging. In pain, I fumbled with the pocket but couldn't get the knife out before the white man walked off. But for the grace of God, what might have become of me if in that moment my hand had found that knife? I left that store and never went back. My dad wanted to sue, but the only witness was afraid to testify.

I tried working for a while as a carhop at a burger joint near the intersection that used to be called Five Points (where Medgar Evers Boulevard joins Woodrow Wilson Avenue). The attitude of the customers got to me. I did not like people calling me "nigger" or "boy." They would yell, "Hurry up, boy," or "Boy, turn your hat around so you'll look like you're coming all the time." I soon quit the carhop business. I wouldn't "take no shit," but was I a civil rights activist yet?

In high school I took a notion to go to the white state fair in Jackson. As I have said, in those days Mississippi state fairs were segregated. The two fairgrounds were miles apart. The black state fair had animal displays and traditional rides, cotton candy, and hamburgers with onions. But I decided to see the white state fair. I got in okay, and I was walking down the fairway when some big white guy came up--he was bigger than I was, and he just willy-nilly hit me in the jaw and muttered, "You're not supposed to be here. You got your own fair." That was my first and last time going to the so-called white fair.

However, I had other scrapes with Jim Crow insanity. In high school I rode the city bus to school. The bus route was called Whitfield-Mill-Lynch and ran from an industrial area on Mill Street, where it picked up some white riders, to Ash Street, turning onto Lynch into a black neighborhood where the all-black Jim Hill School used to be located and where the black Masonic Temple is now. On that route in the 1940s, many times I and others my age defied the driver and the laws of Mississippi to sit in front of the "colored" sign. The driver would get angry and yell, "You're violating the law. You can't sit in front of that sign." I remember distinctly one day when there was a white man sitting in front of the sign; some of my schoolmates and I got up and went forward to his section. He said, "You can't ignore me, I'm a white man." We said, "So what." He got up. The driver stopped. The white man got off.

We got away with it, but this kind of bucking of the system on buses could be quite dangerous. Twenty years later the burned-out buses and mass arrests of freedom riders showed the risk. However, long before that era, young Medgar Evers defied the color line, riding a bus from Meridian to Jackson in front of the sign. The driver stopped the bus and beat Medgar with his fists. When Medgar still wouldn't move, the driver called the police and had him arrested. One of my fraternity brothers tells about riding a bus to Camp Shelby at Hattiesburg, Mississippi, for induction into the army. Once the bus passed through the gate to the base, one of the black men stood up and said, "Well, we're on a federal reservation now. I'm not gonna sit in the back of the bus anymore," and he moved to the front. The driver stopped and called a white MP; they beat this young fellow unconscious. Or, as my friend put it, "They beat him so bad that he lost his manners."

In Jim Crow days in Mississippi, you just never knew what might come down on you. You could be brutalized unexpectedly. If you struck back, it was almost guaranteed that you would be arrested, manhandled, and further brutalized by the authorities themselves without any real opportunity to prove your case. A good deal of exhaustion comes from anticipation or expectation of unpredictable brutality. You didn't have to imagine racial brutality in Mississippi. Insults, humiliations, beatings, rapes, and lynchings were very real. They are well documented. And as older children we knew about them. Having been personally subjected to a part of that as a child, I can assure you those things existed.

Jim Crow segregation was a heavy burden for the soul, even if it did not always bend your body down. The title of a Bettye Parker Smith short story included in Fathers' Songs: Testimonies by African-American Sons and Daughters is "God Didn't Live in Mississippi Then," but, in spite of it all, I think he did live here even back then. God was here then, or we wouldn't be here now. God showed up in loving families and in concerned neighbors and community leaders. He gave us true churches, strong heroes, and a faith so powerful that our dreams never died. You couldn't explain why I and others became civil rights activists without understanding the importance of these gifts in shaping us.

I am happy and thank God for having grown up in a Christian family. My mother, Alean Jackson Mason, was a gentle and wise person. As a girl she had attended a little one-room public school in Hinds County called Orange Hill School. As far back as I can remember, she worked at home as housewife and full-time mother. My mother sang spirituals and religious songs from her heart, and she could sing them one right after the other. Her gentleness and sensitivity were in the songs she sang. The first I ever heard of the Titanic and all those sad deaths was when she sang the song "The Day the Titanic Went Down." Then she sang about the great flood of 1927 and the great storm in 1928 in Tupelo, and all the people who had nowhere to go. From Mother, I heard about a lynching that she had seen or was told of as a child. She said that to keep the poor victim from crying out, the lynchers had stuffed his mouth with mud. What a thing for a mother to have to share with a son.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Beaches, Blood, and Ballots by Gilbert R. Mason, M.D., with James Patterson Smith. Copyright © 2000 by Gilbert Mason and James Patterson Smith. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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

1578062780

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