CHAPTER TEN
A Rising
The background and history of my town is very important to me, because I feel it played the major part in my decision of what I wanted to do in life. It is just an average town, but there is one exception, it is owned and operated almost wholly by Negroes.
—Nineteen-year-old future civil rights icon Victoria Jackson (Gray), 1945
Hammond Smith described World War II as “my big years.” “Anybody could make it back then,” he remembered, “if you could get the stuff to sell.” The Smith Drug Store was so busy during the war that Hammond started keeping later hours and hiring extra help. “At one time,” he recalled, “I was working somewhere around fifteen people.” Business was good to the family. In the spring of 1942, he and Lucille added a major addition to their house.1
By the time of Shelby’s mobilization in 1940, the Smith Drug Store had been a staple in the Mobile Street District for over a decade and a half. Eureka High School students congregated at the store during lunch breaks, after school, and on the weekends. One Eureka student later compared the environment at the drugstore to the teenage hangout in the popular television show Happy Days. “One thing that I remember so vividly,” recalled another Eureka student who grew up in the 1940s, “was the Smith Drug Store and the smell of the drugstore and the ice cream.” The drugstore played a vital role for thousands in the community, offering a vital place to buy toiletries, tobacco, and candy and to gather and socialize. Virtually everyone in the community knew of the Smith Drug Store and understood its central role in the Mobile Street District. When black soldiers started arriving in Hattiesburg in the early 1940s, they too were quickly acclimated to its role.2
During World War II, black soldiers comprised a small minority of troops stationed at Camp Shelby. Throughout the war, Army officials were challenged by segregation ordinances in Southern towns that housed major military bases. A lot of black men—approximately 10 percent of the Army—served in the war, but they had to be trained and housed separately from white soldiers, thus inherently limiting the number of black troops that could be trained at any Southern base. Even with the country engaged in a state of total war, Southern segregationists prioritized local racial protocols over military concerns. Some Southern cities and states forcibly resisted the presence of any black troops at all. Officials in Georgia, for example, rejected black enlistees at “exceedingly high” rates, according to the Army, for vaguely diagnosed disorders such as “psychoneurosis” or “inadequate personality.” Other white segregationists resisted the presence of black troops from the North who they feared might not be familiar with Southern Jim Crow laws and customs. And in some places, white officials expressed concerns over certain types of black servicemen, especially officers, combat troops, and military police. At Camp Shelby, black military policemen were not allowed to carry firearms.3
The precise number of black troops stationed at Shelby each year of the war is difficult to measure, but several reports from the summer of 1941 indicate the presence of just over two thousand black troops, approximately 4 percent of the roughly fifty thousand men stationed at Camp Shelby at the time. Although the percentage of black men in the Army expanded during the war, the number of black men stationed at Shelby remained relatively small. If the 4 percent ratio is applied to Shelby’s total troop numbers throughout the war, then the number of black troops stationed at Shelby during World War II would have averaged about two thousand, with a total of approximately thirty thousand. Very few stayed longer than a few months, but their presence was incredibly important to the Mobile Street District.4
In a city of about seventy-five hundred mostly poor African Americans, the arrival of thousands of well-paid black troops presented enormous economic opportunities for local black business owners. As in the white community, the black restaurants and shops of Mobile Street experienced a sudden surge during the war. In fact, because black soldiers were required to abide by local segregation laws, African American servicemen often had no choice but to eat, shop, worship, and sleep in black-owned establishments. The Chamber of Commerce’s Serviceman’s Guide to Hattiesburg included separate sections for black churches and “Negro Recreation Centers.”5
Black merchants barely had to advertise. Any African American soldier who visited Hattiesburg was immediately directed toward Mobile Street. Black servicemen on leave flooded the neighborhood. “I can just recall as a little girl going down Mobile Street,” remembered Iola Williams. “I thought there must have been a million soldiers on Mobile Street because everywhere you looked, you saw a soldier.” “I never saw so many,” remembered local resident Albert Hopkins of the uniformed troops. “Every time you looked, you just saw a sea wave of brown.”6
Dozens of new businesses opened. In 1939, the Hattiesburg city directory listed thirty black-owned restaurants and grocery stores; by 1946, there were seventy-nine. Moreover, considering the nature of the black neighborhood’s informal economy, thousands of other unrecorded transactions must have occurred involving people selling plates of food, taking in laundry, and converting small homes into restaurants and juke joints. “Hattiesburg was really exciting during World War II,” reminisced Iola Williams. “Mobile Street had anything your heart desired.” “Mobile Street was busting with people, with black businesses,” said local man Charles Brown of Hattiesburg in the 1940s. “It was a mecca.”7
Vernon Dahmer, a future civil rights leader, opened his first grocery store just outside of town during the war. “We were enjoying a wartime economy,” remembered his son Vernon Dahmer Jr. “People had money. Camp Shelby … was booming.” During the war, Dahmer also operated an icehouse and a gristmill and later added a filling station and small sawmill. Like many black businessmen before him, Dahmer’s rising prosperity translated into an expanding leadership role in the black community. Although he is best remembered today for his activism during the 1960s, it was actually in 1944 and 1945 that Vernon Dahmer’s name first began appearing on the rosters of local black organizations alongside individuals such as Hammond Smith and Gaither Hardaway.8
Milton Barnes, another businessman, experienced a similar trajectory. The son of a widowed domestic worker, Barnes first arrived in Hattiesburg as a child in the 1920s. Like many poor black kids, he dropped out of school as a young teenager to help provide for his family. He worked a variety of jobs, including time in a local laundry company and a stint at the Hercules Powder Company, where he briefly belonged to the Hercules Social Club. As legend has it, Barnes became a sole proprietor sometime in 1938 or 1939 when he won the title to a small laundry firm in a game of craps.9
The war facilitated the growth of Barnes Cleaners from a small firm into one of the city’s largest laundry companies, largely because of a deal Barnes struck with some of the Army units stationed at Camp Shelby. This success later enabled Milton Barnes to open a second business named the Embassy Club, a bar and music hall that operated just outside city limits in the black neighborhood of Palmer’s Crossing. The Embassy Club, later renamed the Hi-Hat Club after a fire in 1958, served as a major stop on the Chitlin’ Circuit, a series of Southern black music halls that operated during the final decades of Jim Crow. The list of artists who played at Milton Barnes’s clubs includes legends such as James Brown, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Al Green, Ray Charles, and Ike and Tina Turner. Much of that lay ahead. The essential thing to understand here is that Barnes’s first business emerged during World War II. And like Dahmer, it was during this era that he first began appearing on the rosters of black community organizations alongside figures such as Hammond and Charles Smith.10
Jesse Brown, a Hattiesburg native born in 1926, became a national black celebrity in the late 1940s. During the war, he was one of the young people employed by Hammond Smith. He also worked at Camp Shelby for a summer and later found employment as a server at the all-white Holmes Club. After graduating as salutatorian of Eureka High School’s class of 1944, Brown used the money he saved working during World War II to help pay his first year’s tuition at Ohio State University. He left Ohio State after only two years to join the Navy, and in 1948 became the first black naval aviator in the history of the United States. To this day, he remains a beacon of pride for hundreds of thousands of African Americans, especially black servicemen.11
Shelby’s mobilization created a host of financial opportunities for African Americans. Jimmy Fairley, the son of a turpentine worker and sharecropper, first came to Hattiesburg from Collins, Mississippi, to work as a cement finisher at Shelby. Twenty years later, he became president of the local NAACP. Lee Owens Jr. came to Shelby from a cotton farm near Natchez to unload cement cars. “When I left home,” Owens remembered, “I was making fifty cents a day; $2.50 a week.” At Shelby, he started off making 75¢ per hour and eventually worked his way up to a dollar. “I thought I was rich at the time,” Owens recalled. Isaac Gray, an eighteen-year-old Hattiesburg native, was earning 30¢ an hour as a laborer when he took a job in the laundry at Shelby. “They were paying more than there was anywhere around here,” he said of his decision to take the job. Clearese Cook’s father also did “cement work” at Shelby. Years later, she remembered that her father’s new job enabled her family to purchase “a whole set of school books.” “When the Camp Shelby opened up,” she explained, “it made a difference in our family, and not only our family, other black families.”12
Shelby’s rise also created new financial opportunities for black female domestic workers. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of troops and laborers completely transformed the local market for domestic labor. Local whites, who for decades had benefitted from cheap black labor, suddenly found themselves forced to compete for the services of black domestic workers. The outside troops who came from places such as California and Ohio were willing and able to outspend local whites for black women’s services. Black women’s labor roles remained static during the war, but their compensation generally improved.13
Laundry work in particular paid more than before. During World War II, the number of black-owned cleaners tripled, and the wages earned by employees of those cleaners increased by up to 50 percent. Individuals and small groups of washerwomen also enjoyed increased compensation. Longtime local laundress Osceola McCarty claimed that white troops paid anywhere from “five to ten or fifteen or twenty dollars” for a “bundle of clothes.” “I got so much work,” McCarty recalled, that “I just give some of it to my friends, get them—beg them—to take work for me so I could have a little rest.”14
Many black women took jobs working directly on the base. Osceola McCarty preferred to work at home, but she remembered “so many people” who went “to the camp where they can make some money.” Hattiesburg native Richard Boyd recalled the flood of black domestics to Shelby. “Women who had been doing domestic work would go to Camp Shelby and work for, you know, scales wage,” Boyd recalled. “They were getting paid just like the men. Anybody that could go out there and make that kind of money naturally wasn’t going to do domestic work where they made maybe ten or fifteen dollars a week.”15
Future civil rights leader Victoria Jackson Gray was among the black women who took a job at Shelby during the war. Later a nationally known voting rights activist, Gray was just a teenager when she took a job at Shelby. In addition to better pay, she was also drawn to Shelby by improved working conditions. According to Gray, black women working at the base experienced better treatment than those who worked in town. “Out there, people were treated humane,” she recalled. Several women who worked at Shelby organized a new social group called the Camp Shelby Civil Service Laundry Club.16
White employers responded to these developments in a number of different ways. Frank Tatum actually wrote to Congressman John Rankin to suggest that the Army compel German prisoners of war (of whom there were about three thousand at Shelby) to work in the camp’s laundry facilities so that black women would be forced to return to jobs in town. Of course, this outlandish suggestion far exceeded the Army’s authority and never came to fruition. Most private white employers and large firms simply responded by raising wages to compete for black labor. Black workers in a variety of professions experienced wage increases during the war. Richard Boyd, who took a job with Hercules Powder in 1941, explained that “economically, the camp had a great effect upon Hattiesburg because working conditions got better here in town because of the conditions out there. The employment situation got three hundred percent better.” Not all local African Americans experienced sudden, great financial gains, but Shelby’s mobilization created better opportunities for many.17
Like whites, local black homeowners also rented rooms to traveling workers and soldiers. Most black families did not own homes large enough to rent out extra rooms, but many of those who did converted their homes into makeshift boardinghouses. Precise rental figures for black neighborhoods are unavailable, but records from the black USO indicate at least ten thousand housing referrals over six years through that organization alone. In all likelihood, there were at most a few hundred rentals available at any given time, and most of these were probably very cramped. Arvarh Strickland remembered his grandmother renting three spare rooms that “were fitted out with several beds that would sleep from two to five men in each room. My grandmother presided over this enlarged household as if the men were her sons.” Presumably, she also earned a significant amount of extra income by boarding up to fifteen men at a time.18
Along with new financial opportunities, the arrival of thousands of black troops and laborers also created a number of challenges. First, Eureka High School became extremely overcrowded. Within two years of Shelby’s mobilization, Eureka’s enrollment soared from about eight hundred to approximately thirteen hundred. All city schools were congested, but as the Hattiesburg American observed, “overcrowding was worse [at Eureka] than in any other school.” At one point during the war, the seventh-grade classroom alone had 117 students.19
The increased enrollment was due to several factors. Soldiers and workers alike brought along many of their children and wanted to enroll them in school. Changing economic conditions also played a role. With better jobs and wages, many local black families could afford to send their children to school later into their teenage years before they had to join the workforce. Of course, another major reason for overcrowding was a shortage of black classrooms, teachers, and resources. Eureka was initially designed to serve a much smaller population, and black schools were given far fewer resources than white schools. On average, the state of Mississippi in 1942 spent $47.95 and $6.16, respectively, on white and black students, a gap that was actually wider percentage-wise than it had been a dozen years before. As before, black teachers were paid far less than their white counterparts, yet they were often charged with instructing more pupils. The city did erect and maintain a small school for the children of Japanese American soldiers, but black educational facilities were not expanded until after the war.20
In 1940, a Eureka alumnus named N. R. Burger (class of 1928) returned to Hattiesburg to lead his alma mater. Under Burger’s energetic leadership, Eureka teachers and students worked with the local community to endure the challenges of overcrowding. One of their solutions was to conduct classes in two shifts, one in the morning (7:30–12:30) and one in the afternoon (1:00–4:00). School administrators recruited additional teachers from the local black community, sought volunteer help, and raised money for extra desks and to convert parts of the auditorium into makeshift classrooms. Despite the challenges, Eureka successfully continued its mission of community-based education throughout World War II. “It was a village,” remembered one of the students who attended Eureka during the war. “And that whole village there raised that child.”21
Other major challenges stemmed from the arrival of thousands of black troops into a rigidly segregated society. Racially related incidents began occurring almost immediately after Shelby’s mobilization. In December of 1940, two white police officers shot two black soldiers during a late-night melee outside a Mobile Street beer hall. Thankfully, both servicemen survived.22
Most racial conflicts were less violent, but they were commonplace nonetheless. Throughout the first winter of troop arrivals, the Hattiesburg Police Department was inundated with complaints about black soldiers on city busses. The rules on the busses were clear: black people were required to allow white passengers to board first, and all passengers were expected to sit or stand in the corresponding “white” or “colored” section of the bus. Some drivers also required black passengers to pay at the front and then enter the bus at the rear door. All of these rules were challenged by the influx of passengers during Shelby’s mobilization. Even though the city expanded bus services, thousands of new people began riding the busses. As both “white” and “colored” sections filled beyond capacity, passengers of all races began spilling across the designated racial boundaries. To manage this issue, Hattiesburg city police ordered the local bus company to erect partitions that more clearly “designated separate compartments for negro and white passengers” and threatened to fine any drivers who failed “to keep the white and colored passengers in the sections designated for them.” The chief of police also insisted that segregation laws applied to taxis. “We will not tolerate carrying of mixed loads—colored and white—passengers, in any of the taxi cabs,” he insisted. Such policies only further aggravated an already overburdened transportation system, but they helped maintain rigid racial segregation policies, so local white leaders fought to enforce them despite the difficulties.23
Black troops also experienced regular problems with Hattiesburg police and white residents. Numerous black soldiers reported beatings at the hands of local police and threats to arrest any black soldier who strayed into a white neighborhood. The Hattiesburg chief of police noted that “we expect negro soldiers to stay in the negro section.” In June of 1941, five black soldiers were arrested for a vaguely defined offense related to “disrespect for a white woman.” Other black soldiers reported various forms of harassment. “Twice, whites have driven up beside me and told me to get of[f] the highway,” said Technical Sergeant William Brown. In another incident, a black soldier at Camp Shelby pulled a switchblade to help convince a white supervisor to stop calling him “nigger.” And at one point, local police tried to restrict the sales of the Chicago Defender and other African American newspapers from Northern cities because of the messages of racial equality advocated in the black press.24
Despite these examples of racial conflict, Hattiesburg during World War II was relatively peaceful. Bear in mind that none of these disturbances were novel conflicts for a Jim Crow society. And far worse examples of racial violence occurred in other parts of the state and nation. In October of 1942, black teenagers Charlie Lang and Ernest Green were hanged from a bridge in Shubuta, Mississippi, about sixty miles away. Five days later, a black man named Howard Wash was lynched in neighboring Jones County. The following year, racially related violence occurred at military bases in Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Kentucky, Kansas, Pennsylvania, and California, as well as at Camp Van Dorn in Centreville, Mississippi. That same summer, thousands of Americans were involved in race riots in Detroit, Los Angeles, Harlem, and Beaumont, Texas, that resulted in the deaths of at least fifty people. By comparison, the racial incidents that occurred in wartime Hattiesburg were mild.25
The local black community deserves much of the credit for this peace. In fact, the nature of the black community in the Mobile Street District was one of the primary reasons that Shelby received as many black troops as it did. When placing black troops, Army officials always had to consider how black soldiers would interact with local populations. Vibrant black neighborhoods like Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street District offered the ability to absorb black soldiers into well-established African American communities, thus helping avoid racial conflicts that might stem from the presence of black troops in white neighborhoods.26
Hattiesburg’s black community mobilized rapidly to welcome black troops into their neighborhoods. “The black soldiers were welcomed into the homes and hearts of the people of this community,” remembered Arvarh Strickland. The city’s black churches, businesses, civic organizations, and social clubs participated in virtually every aspect of supporting black troops. There are countless examples. Local women organized a program called “Home Hospitality” that invited soldiers into private homes and churches for Sunday suppers once per month. Community groups organized meal preparation events to provide home-cooked meals for soldiers, especially those soon headed overseas. Business leaders created a separate employment office and separate bus station on Mobile Street for African Americans. When local men were drafted, the Eureka High School Marching Band escorted the new inductees to the bus station “to the blare of martial music,” reported the Hattiesburg American. Community leaders also hosted numerous health programs and social activities both on and off the base. For black soldiers, Hattiesburg was not an ideal place to train, but the support of the black community greatly increased their quality of life. As the Baltimore Afro-American reported of Shelby in February of 1942, “Soldiers on this post are beginning to feel at home.”27
Local African Americans were also very involved in supporting the war effort. Members of the black community appointed “Negro Air Raid Wardens” and devised civil defense strategies for each section of the city’s black neighborhoods. N. R. Burger served as the black community’s “chief of defense” and helped organize “defense training classes” at Eureka High School. Thousands of local African Americans also participated in largescale war bond and Red Cross drives organized by the city’s leading “Colored business and professional men,” wrote the Hattiesburg American.28
The war bond drives were particularly impressive. In October of 1943, fifty-two community leaders divided Hattiesburg’s black neighborhoods into twelve sections, each represented by a “captain” and “staff” who worked to raise donations for the Mississippi War Fund and United Welfare Organization. By running sales booths, canvassing potential donors, and collecting money at local churches, these volunteers managed to sell a reported $18,000 in war bonds in just three months. The following January, community members celebrated their contributions with a “rousing rally” that included a rendition of “Let My People Go” and other traditional African American spirituals performed by the Eureka Glee Club. Eureka principal N. R. Burger planned to print the names of all donors on a large blackboard, but he ran out of space.29
Successful war bond drives continued throughout the war, drawing extensive coverage in the Hattiesburg American and praise from local white leaders. Banker and Chamber of Commerce official G. M. McWilliams wrote that “our negro citizens in Forrest county are perfecting a strong and efficient organization looking toward the enlistment and participation of every colored resident of Forrest county in the purchase of war bonds.” Although local whites repeatedly applauded the black community for its support of the war, none of them appear to have publicly observed the irony of a disfranchised population helping fund a war for democracy.30
The Hattiesburg Negro Business League seems to have been curiously absent from the wartime community initiatives, but the cast of actors included nearly all the old leaders from the black business organization. Longtime Hattiesburg Negro Business League members such as Gaither Hardaway, J. B. Woods, Hammond and Charles Smith, and Paul Weston (the restaurateur and director of the Union Choir Service) each played major roles in wartime community initiatives. Other participants included dozens of local clergy, various women’s groups, and an emerging younger generation of leaders, including the businessmen Vernon Dahmer and Milton Barnes and the principal N. R. Burger. As in previous eras, community organizing was led by an upper tier of black businessmen and was heavily supported by churches, women’s clubs, students, and the general black population. These well-established community-organizing traditions expanded during the war, leading to the development of an entirely new set of organizations related to the local black war effort. The largest of these new groups included the Colored Health Committee, the Colored War Loan Committee, the Human Relations Committee, the Negro Civic Welfare Association, and the Negro USO Committee.31
World War II–era Human Relations Committee. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi)
Led by Paul Weston, the Negro Civic Welfare Association was founded in August of 1941 “to clean up Mobile street for the benefit of the residents and negro soldiers at Camp Shelby.” This organization resembled several preexisting community groups that had operated in the 1930s, but there was one major difference in their approach. In addition to funding their own neighborhood beautification projects, the Negro Civic Welfare Association also requested that white Hattiesburg city officials make civic improvements in the Mobile Street District in the name of the war effort.32
Two months after its formation, the Negro Civic Welfare Association presented a “six-point program” to white city officials, asking the city to provide street cleaning, more police protection, an enforced curfew, the appointment of a black truant officer, the installation of street lights, and new stop signs. Earlier generations of black leaders had previously asked for and received some resources to improve Mobile Street, but this request represented a compelling new tactic for appealing for additional resources based on the broader war effort. It is not clear exactly how many of these requests were fulfilled, but the neighborhood did indeed get new stop signs by the end of 1941. The Negro Civic Welfare Association was active through 1946, organizing health programs, planning neighborhood beautification projects, sponsoring visiting speakers and choirs, conducting youth programs, and coordinating neighborhood parades and ceremonies. The organization first met at the Smith Drug Store before moving its meetings to the new black USO in the spring of 1942.33
On March 22, 1942, black Hattiesburgers celebrated the grand opening of the finest black USO center in the United States of America. Very few of the roughly three hundred black USO centers that operated during World War II were housed in new buildings. Most were established in existing spaces that were converted during the war or in hastily built temporary cement-block buildings. The black USO in Hattiesburg was much more impressive. A T-shaped white clapboard building, the Hattiesburg black USO was constructed on East Sixth Street, kitty-corner from Eureka High School, about a block from Mobile Street. The building contained men’s and women’s locker rooms, a library, a writing room, a lounge, several meeting rooms and offices, a snack bar, and an auditorium with a stage large enough to accommodate band concerts and weddings. News of the opening of the Hattiesburg black USO was covered by the Associated Negro Press and announced in nearly every major black newspaper in the country. The Atlanta Daily World called the building “One of the most modern U.S.O. Centers in the United States.”34
Construction of Hattiesburg’s black USO was funded by a grant provided by the Federal Works Agency (FWA), an umbrella organization of federal public works projects formed in 1939 that oversaw domestic defense building programs during the war. The USO is a nonprofit organization separate from the federal government, but during World War II, many of the organization’s structures were built and maintained with federal money. During the war, Hattiesburg was home to five USO centers, four for white troops and one for African Americans. Three of the white USO centers operated in existing structures. The fourth was built with another grant from the FWA for approximately $150,000. The black USO in the Mobile Street District cost about $41,000.35
Most USO expenses were provided by the national organization, but daily operating costs were also subsidized by local communities. When the Sixth Street USO opened, black Hattiesburgers were asked to raise $1,000 to help fund programming. Led by a committee of black entrepreneurs, including Paul Weston, Gaither Hardaway, and Hammond Smith, the original African American USO Committee canvassed local black neighborhoods to collect donations from businesses, churches, social clubs, and individuals. They received an impressive amount of support. On two occasions, the Hattiesburg American published lists of contributors to the black USO. The lists included not only local business owners, teachers, and clergy, but also hundreds of working-class people and even children who donated amounts ranging from a nickel to several dollars to help support USO activities. The committee exceeded its fundraising goal in about a month and celebrated the accomplishment with a concert at Zion Chapel A.M.E. Church.36
The Sixth Street USO fell under the authority of Hattiesburg’s broader U.S.O. Management Committee, which, of course, was led by longtime members of the Chamber of Commerce. W. S. F. Tatum’s son Frank was the chairman. Frank Tatum occasionally spoke at the black USO and regularly received financial reports and program schedules detailing activities in the building. He also worked to ensure that the city’s USO centers operated in strict accordance with Mississippi’s racial ordinances. When the question arose about which USO Japanese American troops should patronize, Tatum consulted with two local attorneys to provide support for barring them from the white USO centers because “the Mongolian race is classified as colored.”37
Although the black USO was overseen by an all-white management committee, virtually every single activity that occurred in the club was organized by African Americans. As in churches, men held the highest formal positions on the USO advisory board, but women organized and executed most USO activities. These female organizers were led by an impressive staff. The initial “director of Negro work” was a woman named Aquilla Matthews, a professor of music at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who quit her teaching job in the spring of 1942 to work at Hattiesburg’s black USO. The bookkeeper was Goldie Walker, a graduate of Jackson College and the Tuskegee Institute who worked for the local branch of the Universal Life Insurance Company. And the leaders of the USO-based Volunteer Service Organization and Girls Service Organization were longtime Eureka teachers Iva Sandifer and Miss Cora Jones, the notoriously tough disciplinarian known for placing misbehaving students in her “electric chair.” The seven-member USO Women’s Advisory Board consisted of three additional teachers and the wives of several black businessmen, including Dr. Charles Smith’s wife, Myrtle.38
The black women who ran the Sixth Street USO unleashed the full force of a fifty-year-old community organizing tradition. During roughly sixteen hundred days of operation, the black USO was supported by 40,261 volunteer hours—an average of twenty-five volunteer hours per day over the course of four and half years. Local black church and clubwomen worked constantly in the USO. They maintained and cleaned the building, planted flowers and shrubs around the perimeter, collected silverware and plates for meals, crafted decorations and fliers, cooked meals, organized the library, managed invitations and visits, oversaw finances, and provided logistical support for nearly every activity. “The [USO] club,” bragged a souvenir pamphlet, “boasts of having the finest type of womanhood doing volunteer work.”39
The USO offered a wide variety of daily activities: game nights consisting of whist, croquet, checkers, ping-pong, bridge, bingo, and dominoes; classes on typewriting, shorthand, “Negro history,” ballroom dancing, and photography; Bible discussion groups and Vesper services; volleyball and softball matches; fashion shows and Easter egg hunts; wiener roasts and chicken dinners; movies and concerts; and socials and dances. People even held weddings there. The women who ran the center also distributed religious literature, provided sewing and counseling services for troops, operated the library, and helped workers and soldiers secure transportation and room and board. By the time the black USO services ended in the summer of 1946, administrators counted a total of 386,676 participants in USO activities and services (including repeat attendees). Hattiesburg’s black USO was busy all day, every day, even on Sunday.40
Celebrities passed through Hattiesburg’s black USO. In July of 1942, an estimated twenty-five hundred people packed the USO auditorium to hear legendary black activist and educator Mary McLeod Bethune deliver a speech in which she advocated “equal opportunity for participation in all phases relating to human welfare and to the war program.” A correspondent for the Chicago Defender reported that Bethune’s speech “greatly inspired the huge audience.” About two weeks later, world-famous Olympic champion Jesse Owens visited the new black USO as part of his duties as an assistant community recreation organizer for the Federal Security Agency. He stayed in the Mobile Street District for several days at the home of local teacher Edward Tademy.41
In December of 1943, boxers Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, the heavyweight and welterweight champions of the world, appeared at Shelby to participate in exhibition bouts and deliver talks on physical fitness. Louis Armstrong also passed through town on several occasions to perform for both black and white audiences. Bluesman B. B. King was not yet well known, but he too performed at Camp Shelby while stationed there as a member of the Army during the winter of 1943–44. During that same winter, the Harlem Globetrotters held a public scrimmage against black troops at Camp Shelby.42
The black USO was built primarily for troops but was widely used by local residents. Military purposes notwithstanding, the USO offered a new building where the people of the Mobile Street District could access services and host events. Local black residents also had access to the writing room, library, auditorium, snack bar, and meeting rooms. In fact, some of the classes held at the USO, especially typewriting and shorthand, were reserved for civilians only. The women who ran the building kept track of civilian participation. To offer one example, in January and February of 1943, civilians accounted for 14,620 of the 70,100 visitors (roughly 20 percent) to the black USO.43
The black USO formally ended services in 1946, but the local black community continued using the structure as a library, meeting space, dance hall, and auditorium. For a number of years, it hosted Eureka High School’s junior and senior proms. Usage ebbed and flowed over the years, but the black USO in the Mobile Street District has generally played an important role in that neighborhood since its opening. Having survived numerous floods and a devastating tornado in 2013, the Sixth Street USO to this day remains widely used. Most recently, the building has been renovated into an impressive African American Military History Museum that regularly hosts book club meetings, educational programs, exercise classes, speeches, and commemorations in honor of local black history and military veterans of all races. Initially constructed in 1942, it is the only surviving USO in the United States built solely for black troops.44
Turner Smith died in his home on Sunday, May 7, 1944, the year he would have turned eighty-five. Born into slavery, Turner had obtained an education as a free man and married a woman with shared values with whom he raised six successful children. He was an ardent Methodist, Republican, and educator, and for over forty years, he was an active and respected member of Hattiesburg’s black community. Turner’s funeral was held at St. Paul Methodist Church on May 10, 1944, and he was laid to rest at River View Cemetery, one of Hattiesburg’s two black graveyards. A gracious article in the Hattiesburg American memorialized Turner as “one of the pioneer negro citizens of this section” who “won the respect of both races for his work in religious and community enterprises.”45
At one point during the war years, Hammond Smith was working in his drugstore when a young woman entered to tell him a surprising story about his father. “I want to tell you about your daddy, Mr. Smith,” the woman told Hammond. “I see him getting on the bus, and he don’t wait for the white folks to get on.”46
Turner by that time was in his eighties. When he needed to go somewhere, one of his sons usually drove him, but he sometimes took the city bus. Hammond recalled instances when his father had refused to pay his fare in protest for having to enter the back of the bus, but this was the first time he had heard of his father violating racial protocols by boarding the bus before white people. “I didn’t know what they might do to him,” remembered Hammond upon hearing the story. “I knew that if any of them hit him, it was going to be a big fight, and they was going to kill him.”47
No one will ever know precisely when or why Turner started refusing to let whites board the bus in front of him. Perhaps this was a conscious act of racial defiance, a bold final stance by a proud old black man whose entire life had been confined by strict racial boundaries. Perhaps he was simply too tired to wait. As with many components of his life, one can only speculate what that defiance meant to him in that place and time.
Having always told his children “Don’t be a reprobate,” Turner would have been proud of his sons’ community leadership during and after the war years. Both Hammond and Charles made great contributions to local black life. Hammond catered to thousands of troops and their families, wiring money, pouring fountain sodas, selling toiletries, cashing checks, and continuing to play a major role in the local black business community. In 1942, he began serving as an advisor to several new community health clinics for local black residents and troops. He also served as chairman of the Business and Professional Committee of the Colored Red Cross, belonged to the original black USO, and for a time hosted meetings of the Colored War Loan Committee at his shop. Of course, he and his wife Lucille continued their roles as leaders among the congregation at St. Paul Methodist Church.48
Dr. Charles Smith was also heavily involved. He helped organize Red Cross and war bond drives, served as an advisor for new branches of the Forrest County Health Center, and played a prominent role in the Human Relations Committee, an organization founded during the war to help manage relations between black soldiers and local residents. It is worth remembering too that Dr. Smith was one of only three black doctors in a city with an African American population of roughly seventy-five hundred. This position alone required heavy involvement in the black community, as he provided medical services for thousands of local African Americans.49
On September 9, 1946, Hammond and Charles Smith were among the founding members of the Forrest County NAACP. Early organizational records are sparse, but several local historians have noted that the original members included the entrepreneur Vernon Dahmer, grocery store owners Benjamin Bourn and Robert and Constance Baker, and Reverend James H. Ratliff, the pastor of True Light Baptist Church since 1927, who served as the first NAACP president. Membership of the Forrest County NAACP has fluctuated wildly over the years, especially during its first decade, but the organization has remained continuously active ever since its founding.50
This local NAACP growth was part of a much larger trend. Between 1940 and 1946, national NAACP membership grew from approximately 50,000 to 450,000 members. These numbers declined at times, especially in the 1950s, but the NAACP in the years immediately after World War II became larger and more influential than at any point in its prior history. Led by legendary black activists such as Ella Baker, Walter White, Roy Wilkins, and Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP of the postwar era waged a far-reaching and intensive legislative fight for increased civil rights and school desegregation, all of which culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.51
The wartime surge in NAACP membership was one of several oncoming challenges to Southern Jim Crow. During the war, the black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier advocated a national campaign called “Double V,” which represented the need to fight for democracy on both its fronts—not only abroad, but also at home. Millions of African Americans envisioned a similar victory related to their wartime service and the Allies’ philosophy of a war purportedly fought to rid the world of fascism in the name of democracy. The contradictions between this wartime message of self-determination and Southern Jim Crow were widely observed across the globe, most famously by the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal.52
Although white segregationists successfully maintained most components of Jim Crow during the war, there were some encouraging signs of potential change for African Americans and their allies. In 1941, the FEPC (Fair Employment Practices Committee) represented a symbolic—if only superficially enforced—gesture of federal authority over regional racial discrimination. In 1944, the Supreme Court decided in Smith v. Allwright that all-white primaries—a tactic of disfranchising African Americans by requiring primary participants to be members of political parties that banned African Americans—were unconstitutional. Jim Crow remained, but these challenges to white supremacy were threating enough to generate concern among white Southern segregationists, especially over the notion of a permanent FEPC. The worst of the vitriol was spewed by Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, in his plea during the 1946 primaries for “every red-blooded Anglo-Saxon in Mississippi to resort to any means to keep Negroes from the polls.” Some black Mississippians did vote in the 1946 primary, but the threat of violence limited African American political participation to only a few sites. Hattiesburg was not one of them.53
Shortly after the war, Hammond and Charles Smith and several other local black leaders formed a group to encourage black voter registration. Hammond had actually been trying to register to vote for years. Beginning in 1934, he attempted to register to vote every year when he paid his annual property taxes at the courthouse, but was repeatedly turned away based on the grounds that his interpretations of the Mississippi Constitution were inadequate. It is unknown how many other African Americans tried to register to vote during the 1930s and early 1940s, but the years after the war saw the emergence of a new group that began pushing more aggressively for voting rights.54
Voter registration appealed to local African Americans for a variety of reasons. First, at its most basic level, these tax-paying citizens simply wanted to exercise their constitutional right by participating in the democracy. Second, if African Americans could vote, then they could play a larger role in shaping decisions that affected their communities. Local black leaders had for decades essentially operated a parallel form of governance in the black community. Access to the ballot would allow them to exert much broader societal influence. They probably did not imagine a program of rapid neighborhood equalization, but participation in the political process would offer the opportunity to advocate for improved infrastructure in their neighborhoods and increased funding for their schools. Moreover, voting would allow them to vote for county sheriffs, circuit clerks, and tax assessors who could offer more equitable treatment toward African Americans.
The black men and women who tried to register in late 1940s were continually rebuffed by longtime Forrest County circuit clerk Luther Cox. In office since 1935, Cox showed no intention of allowing significant numbers of African Americans to vote. He asked potential black registrants unanswerable questions such as “What do you mean by due process of law?” and “What does the Mississippi Constitution say about titles to land, land sales?” Remember that the Mississippi Constitution of 1890 included an “understanding clause” that empowered local registrars to decide who was qualified to register to vote. In Hattiesburg and elsewhere, the questions and answers mattered very little; it was the race of the applicants that dictated their eligibility. Cox was less educated than either Charles or Hammond Smith, but his power as the local registrar enabled him to make on-site decisions about individuals’ qualifications to vote. Cox made little attempt to hide the absurdity of this process. At times, he ridiculed black applicants with such ridiculous questions as “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?”55
In response, Hammond, Charles, and thirteen other local black men did something that no black Mississippian had ever done. In the spring of 1950, they hired a sixty-five-year-old white attorney named T. Price Dale to sue Cox for racially based voter discrimination in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Their case, Peay et al. v. Cox, was filed in federal court on April 11, 1950.56
The fifteen African American appellants in Peay et al. v. Cox represented a cross-section of traditional local black male community leadership: Hammond Smith was a self-employed druggist and his brother Charles was a doctor; Reverend Isaac Peay was the pastor at Mt. Zion Baptist Church; Reverend Charlemagne Payne was the pastor at St. Paul Methodist Church; Reverend John H. Mayes was the pastor at Sweet Pilgrim Baptist Church; Dr. Theodore Fykes was a black dentist; Clifford Kelly, Joe Knox Jr., and Ratio C. Jones were teachers; Alfonso Clark owned a funeral home; Benjamin Bourn and R. H. Howze owned grocery stores; and Milton Barnes was a laundry and nightclub owner. The only outliers were the two oldest men in the group, Berry L. Neal and Joe Knox Sr., both of whom were retired laborers who had lived in Hattiesburg for decades. Ranging in age from thirty-four to sixty-nine, the plaintiffs in Peay et al. v. Cox represented the full scope of the history of black economic opportunity in Hattiesburg.57
A team of twenty-two local white attorneys came to the defense of Luther Cox. The judiciary was filled with sympathetic white segregationists. Federal judge Sidney C. Mize, a native white Mississippian appointed to southern Mississippi’s Fifth Circuit Court in 1937, dismissed the case based on the grounds that the plaintiffs should first appeal to the State Election Commission. In response, the appellants’ attorney filed suit in the United States Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit, which reversed Mize’s decision to dismiss the suit so that it could “remain pending in the district court for a reasonable time to permit the exhaustion of State administrative remedies.”58
Peay et al. v. Cox never proceeded much further, but the case did attract the attention of the national black press and support from the NAACP. While the case remained pending in 1952, NAACP special counsel Thurgood Marshall examined affidavits filed by black Forrest County residents and called for the Department of Justice to conduct “an immediate investigation of these complaints.” Marshall and the NAACP, however, did not prioritize Peay et al. v. Cox, in part because the organization’s attorneys were preoccupied by other cases, including Brown v. Board of Education, and also because the Hattiesburg registrar assured the Department of Justice that he would stop discriminating against African Americans. Cox specifically agreed to stop asking the question about bubbles in a bar of soap. He did indeed allow a few African Americans to register—including Hammond Smith in 1954—but continued to deny most black applicants. There is no evidence that Cox ever rejected a white applicant. In fact, the United States Department of Justice later found that dozens of illiterate whites, even some who could not even write their own name, were allowed to register.59
The plaintiffs in Peay et al. v. Cox did not file another appeal, because in addition to attorney fees, further action would have required them to pay $100 to appeal to the county circuit court and then an additional $500 to appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court. Obviously, they had no reason to believe that any court in the state would require a circuit court clerk to start registering black voters.60
In 1953, Thurgood Marshall submitted another round of affidavits from Forrest County to the Department of Justice, prompting the federal government to resume its investigation of Luther Cox. But Cox’s strategic decision to allow a handful of African Americans to register effectively convinced the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that he was no longer systematically discriminating against all black voters, and so in 1955, the FBI dropped its investigation. That year, only sixteen African Americans were registered to vote in a county with 7,406 African Americans over the voting age of twenty-one.61
Although Peay et al. v. Cox did not win black Hattiesburgers the right to vote, it nevertheless represented a watershed moment in the tactics of local black leadership. For decades, Hattiesburg’s black leaders had worked within the constraints of Jim Crow to mobilize neighborhood resources and appeal to local white authorities in efforts to improve conditions in the black community. Peay et al. v. Cox offered a fundamentally different approach. With the lawsuit, black leaders in the Mobile Street District were attempting to circumvent local and state authority in a direct appeal to the federal government for civil rights.
Hammond and Charles Smith and their fellow plaintiffs left behind no explanation of their decision in 1950 to challenge Mississippi’s sixty-year-long processes to disfranchise black voters, but clearly something had changed. Much has been written about how American involvement in World War II helped expose contradictions between the Allied fight for democracy and the realities of Southern Jim Crow. This is true. But disfranchised African Americans did not necessarily need a war for democracy to reveal to them that their rights were being violated. Millions of Southern black men and women knew this all along. Turner Smith certainly did. So did J. B. Woods, the local black grocer who regularly attended Republican National Conventions in the 1920s and 1930s. Those men knew of the Fifteenth Amendment and the rights supposedly guaranteed to them by the Constitution. Had they not died within three weeks of one another in the spring of 1944, it is highly likely that Turner Smith and Woods would have been co-appellants in Peay et al. v. Cox.
The greatest advantage held by the new generation was not necessarily one of enhanced perspective but rather one of increased economic independence. Although World War II–era black community organizing resembled the methodologies of previous generations, it was also uniquely bolstered by federally funded projects—especially the black USO and the Robertson Place apartments—and new economic opportunities created by Camp Shelby’s mobilization. Consider these developments within the broader scope of Hattiesburg’s racial history. Local white city leaders had always controlled black access to external resources. But during the 1940s, massive federal spending—all of which was also supported and enjoyed by local whites—created greater financial independence and new paths to federal resources that helped facilitate more aggressive appeals to the federal government for civil rights. As one of Hammond Smith’s employees later told an interviewer, the plaintiffs in Peay et al. v. Cox were all “more or less independent professional men.” Peay et al. v. Cox was a loss, but they were far from the end of their fight.62
In October of 1954, Hammond completed a major renovation of the Smith Drug Store. That autumn, he held a large ceremony to celebrate the reopening and to commemorate the store’s twenty-ninth year in business. The event received coverage in the Hattiesburg American, which cited Hammond’s estimate that he had filled nearly 500,000 prescriptions since first opening in 1925. Hammond placed an advertisement below the feature article, inviting all to the store’s reopening and offering door prizes, souvenirs, and free toys and balloons for the children. The advertisement also included a portrait of Hammond. A black leader in the city for nearly three decades, Hammond had never before had his picture in the local paper.63
Sometime in the following year, Hammond and Charles Smith began meeting with a man named Medgar Wiley Evers in a back room of the Smith Drug Store. In 1954, Medgar Evers was appointed the NAACP’s first full-time Mississippi field secretary. Part of his job included increasing membership and coordinating activities and communication among NAACP branches across the state. It was in this capacity that he began meeting with the Smith brothers in 1955.64
Community members in the remodeled Smith Drug Store, 1955. N. R. Burger is second from right. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi)
Medgar Evers began working closely with members of the Forrest County NAACP. Local black leaders helped introduce Evers to other members of the Mobile Street District. Over the following years, Evers regularly appeared in Hattiesburg. Besides meeting with local NAACP leaders, he also spoke at St. Paul Methodist Church, helped organize a youth chapter of the local NAACP, and constantly encouraged local black men and women to try to register to vote. In 1957, he collected affidavits from local black residents whose voter registration applications had been denied and arranged for the pastor of True Light Baptist Church to speak in Washington, DC, before the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights. The men and women of the Forrest County NAACP who helped facilitate these efforts were small in number. But they used their status as community leaders to operate within well-established community organizing traditions to create a space that allowed for a much more extensive resistance against Jim Crow when the movement finally came.65