Booker: Civil rights progress made segregationists nervous

The Jewel of the Delta

We were headed for Bolivar County, where Mound Bayou lies just off U.S. Highway 61, halfway between Memphis and Vicksburg. The town was established in 1887 by former slaves as a place where blacks might work for themselves instead of for whites, providing for each other everything they needed, and feeling safe, even while surrounded by the white feudal system. The local joke—although it was more true than funny—was that Mound Bayou was “a place where a black man could run FOR sheriff instead of FROM the sheriff.” From day one, Mound Bayou officialdom was black, from the mayor down to the cops. And although a dot on the map, with no more than 2,000 souls, the town had caught the attention of prominent Americans, including Booker T. Washington.

A renowned advocate of trade schools for blacks, and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, Washington had impressed President Theodore Roosevelt, who invited him to the White House within weeks of taking office after President McKinley’s assassination. They got along so well, Roosevelt invited him back for dinner. The next day the South erupted in fury when the Associated Press (AP) reported it on the wire. Die-hard segregationists took the presence of a Negro as a guest at the White House as an insult to the South, and particularly threatening to the self-respect of any Southern woman. It always seemed to come back to the Southern woman. A Southern white man was not going to stand for any black man being in close proximity to a white woman unless the black was a servant. If proximity couldn’t be avoided, it could never be on an equal basis.

According to historians, Roosevelt was disgusted by the outrageous attacks in the Southern press.1 So, a few years later, he gave them some payback. On a bear hunting trip at the mouth of the Mississippi River after the 1904 elections, he had the train stop in Mound Bayou where he very pointedly crowned the black township, “the Jewel of the Delta.”

Our contact person, and Mound Bayou’s most prominent citizen, was Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a tall, broad-shouldered, bear of a man who was a gentleman planter, businessman, and home builder as well as a physician. (The “T. R.,” coincidentally, was for Theodore Roosevelt and the “M” for Mason, which he added to his name out of appreciation for the white doctor, Will Mason, who had helped him acquire his medical education.) Born in Kentucky and educated in Nebraska and California, Doc Howard had begun his medical practice in Mississippi in the mid-’40s. By 1955, his civic activities (or more specifically, his civil rights activities) were having as much impact in the Delta as his medical practice, in which he performed as many as twelve operations a day and supervised a hospital where nearly 50,000 men, women, and children, most of them poor sharecroppers, could get treatment each year. After dark, however, his was a different world, in which he was warned repeatedly of a likely ambush if he ventured into the backwoods for nighttime speaking engagements. In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, Mississippi was becoming even more inhospitable to anyone thought to be awakening “the sleeping Negro.” And that was exactly what Dr. Howard was trying to do.

Among his non-medical activities, he was president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (the “Leadership Council”), an organization pledged “to guide our people in their civic responsibilities regarding education, registration and voting, law enforcement, tax-paying, the preservation of property, the value of saving and in all things which will make the black community stable.”

Dr. Howard’s strategy for rousing and organizing the “grassroots” was to draw on the skills of blacks who had “made it” into leadership roles either in the business world, a profession, or the church. Working with the NAACP, the Leadership Council promoted civil rights, self-help, and business ownership. It made the white power structure nervous.

============

"Shocking the Conscience" can be purchased here.