CHAPTER SIX
Those Who Stayed
I’m glad I stayed now, I think. I think I made the right decision.
—Dr. Hammond Smith, 1982
In the fall of 1924, Hammond Smith, Turner and Mamie’s second son, returned home for good. Hammond had first left Hattiesburg in 1915 to attend Alcorn Agricultural & Mechanical College, an all-black institution that also offered a residential high school for black youths who came from places like Hattiesburg that had no secondary school for African Americans. Located near the Mississippi River in the town of Lorman, Alcorn sits about 130 miles northwest of Hattiesburg. To get there, Hammond took a train from Hattiesburg to Jackson, where he spent the night before catching another train to the small town of Harriston. From Harriston, he then took a “wagon train” about fifteen miles through the forest to the isolated campus. Distance and cost limited trips home. During Hammond’s first two years at Alcorn, the young man was unable to visit his family over Christmas. But he and his older brother, Charles, also a student at Alcorn, did return to Hattiesburg every summer to live with their parents and to earn tuition money by working as general laborers.1
Hammond stayed at Alcorn for college. He participated on the debate team and demonstrated a natural talent for both science and English. One professor suggested he become a journalist, but Hammond decided on another path. During his years at Alcorn, Hammond took occasional trips to nearby Natchez, where he shopped at a black-owned drugstore. Hammond was impressed by the druggist and intrigued by the role a black pharmacist could play in an African American community. The position commanded not only a great deal of respect but also the opportunity to become an entrepreneur. “I wanted to get in something where I could go into business for myself,” Hammond later explained.2
Hammond’s ambition was a byproduct of his upbringing. His father had constantly stressed the importance of financial independence to his children. “Don’t hire yourself out,” Turner frequently told them. “You’re not going to get anywhere like that.” This philosophy was deeply rooted in Turner’s own life experiences. The son of sharecroppers, he understood how unfair labor arrangements with white bosses could hold black families in perpetual debt. Having escaped the sharecropper’s life by becoming a teacher, he later found his financial future shackled again, this time by the racially imbalanced budget cuts of post-Reconstruction white Redeemers. Understandably, these experiences led Turner to believe that true liberation required financial independence from white people. As Hammond remembered of his youth, “I had it instilled in me to go in business.” As a pharmacist, he could open his own drugstore, thus becoming a respected entrepreneur like the black druggist he admired in Natchez.3
Hammond was further motivated to open his own store by an incident involving his younger brother Martin Luther. While shopping at a white-owned Hattiesburg drugstore, Martin Luther once had a nasty exchange with a white pharmacist for allegedly not saying “please” when placing an order. The white man behind the counter chastised the young black customer in a threatening manner. “He thought he was going to have to fight his way out of there,” Hammond recalled of the episode. “If they treated him like that, I know they treated others like that.” Hammond’s motivation was as profound as it was straightforward—black customers at his drugstore would be treated with dignity.4
After receiving his bachelor of science degree from Alcorn in 1921, Hammond enrolled in pharmacy school at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1876, Meharry was the second black medical school established in the United States (the first being Howard in Washington, DC). Working nights to pay tuition, Hammond excelled at organic chemistry and physics while also serving as chairman of the auditing committee in the Pharmaceutical Department. He graduated on May 22, 1924, almost a year to the day after his older brother Charles received his medical degree from the same institution. Hammond worked in Meridian for about six months before returning to Hattiesburg later that fall. He was twenty-nine years old.5
Shortly after Hammond returned, his father gave him and his brother a little two-story building located in the heart of Mobile Street. Hammond did not know when or how his father had acquired the property, but the purpose aligned with Turner’s principles of self-sufficiency and financial independence. The idea was for Hammond to operate a drugstore on the first floor and Charles to see patients on the second. The building was invaluable to each brother’s career. Strict racial regulations disqualified them from working in any white-owned drugstore or medical office, and without their own building, there was no guarantee that either could have practiced medicine in their hometown. Without an office of their own, the brothers might have been forced to find another place to work.6
In 1925, Hammond bought his first stock of pharmaceuticals on credit and opened Smith’s Pharmacy at 606 Mobile Street. Charles started his new practice upstairs. With their education completed and careers established, the Smith brothers entered new phases of their lives. In 1926, Charles married a Mississippi woman named Myrtle and soon started his own family. Two years later, Hammond wed Lucille Trotter, the daughter of a Methodist minister from Meridian. Each son purchased a home on Dewey Street, the same road where their parents lived. Charles and Myrtle lived next door to Turner and Mamie; Hammond and Lucille lived just down the road.7
Like many African Americans of his generation, Hammond Smith considered leaving the Jim Crow South. His personal and professional connections would have eased the transition to a new city. In Chicago, Hattiesburg-related black social networks lasted well into the 1960s, even as the “little colony of Mississippians” eventually dispersed throughout the city. (The Chicago-based Hattiesburg Social and Civic Club continued meeting until at least 1966.) Hammond’s medical school connections would have offered an extensive professional network—Meharry graduates lived and worked all over the United States—and virtually every American city needed black doctors. Two of Hammond’s younger brothers who also became doctors did eventually leave Mississippi for Ohio and California. Hammond himself came close to doing just that; he considered Ohio seriously enough to travel to Columbus to take the state pharmacy licensure exam. But Hammond did not like the cold, and he believed that opportunities existed for him in Hattiesburg. Ultimately, he decided to stay.8
While Hammond and Charles were away at school, Hattiesburg’s black community underwent several significant changes. Most noteworthy was its growth. After a brief decline during the departures of the late 1910s, Hattiesburg’s black population rapidly expanded once again in the 1920s. Between 1920 and 1930, the city’s black population grew by about 40 percent, from 4,937 to 6,811.9
Like their predecessors, the new black migrants were pulled to the Hub City by the promise of wage-labor jobs. Sawmill layoffs were on the horizon, but the increased wages that were paid to black sawmill workers in the wake of the departures continued to draw black workers to Hattiesburg. Other wage-labor positions could be found in municipal service jobs, in small local manufacturing companies, and among the city’s countless positions typically reserved for black men—general laborer, painter, porter, or deliveryman. Black women’s work was less diverse; as in previous eras, nearly all employed black women worked in some type of domestic service.10
As the sawmills began to decline, several hundred black workers moved into positions relatively new to Forrest County. The Hercules Powder Company, which opened in 1923, employed up to two hundred African Americans throughout most of the 1920s. Other black workers found jobs in sawmills that were converting to naval stores products. And as Hattiesburg slipped into a recession, a growing number of African Americans began working in agriculture. Large sections of the cutover forest were converted to farmland, leading to an unprecedented number of black agricultural workers in Forrest County by 1930. As before, black jobs tended to be more difficult and lower paying than those held by whites. But not all black workers were completely impoverished. There also existed a growing black middle class of entrepreneurs and professionals. And even some of the black sawmill and railroad employees owned their own homes. By the close of the 1920s, more than 35 percent of black Hattiesburgers were homeowners, a rate unmatched anywhere else in the state.11
The influx of black migrants in the early 1920s contributed to the growth of three additional black neighborhoods. The first, a settlement of about two hundred residences, developed near the banks of the Leaf River next to J. J. Newman Lumber. Many referred to the neighborhood as “Newman’s Quarters” because of the large proportion of residents who worked at the sawmill. Another black neighborhood of about the same size grew about a mile and a half south of downtown. A third and smaller black community named Palmer’s Crossing developed just outside the Hattiesburg city limits. Each of these newer black neighborhoods would continue to expand throughout the 1920s and 1930s, adding their own schools, small business communities, and churches.12
Most black life, however, remained concentrated in the Mobile Street District. By the time the Smith brothers returned to Hattiesburg, the black downtown was home to more than 720 black residences and over fifty black businesses, highlighted by a variety of grocery stores, butchers, tailors, barbers, cobblers, boarding houses, and cleaners. By 1925, the black downtown also included a black dentist, a black jeweler, a black life insurance company, and a black funeral home. When Hammond and Charles returned, the neighborhood already had two black-owned drugstores and doctor’s offices, meaning that the Smith brothers were the third African Americans in each of their professions to open shop in the Mobile Street District. With a ratio of one black doctor for every 2,270 citizens in 1930, Hattiesburg’s black community exceeded the national average of 3,125 and was significantly better than Mississippi’s total ratio of 14,221 African Americans for every black doctor.13
Along with a growing number of black churches, professional organizations, social clubs, and Masonic lodges, the Mobile Street District had by then also added a vital new community institution—the Eureka High School. Built by a citywide bond passed in 1920, Eureka High School was constructed over the site of the old dilapidated wooden building where the Smith family children first attended school. The new two-story brick structure featured electric lights, a heating system, washrooms, an auditorium, and a domestic science annex. The new school sat on the corner of Sixth and New Orleans Streets, just a block away from the heart of the Mobile Street business district.14
Eureka provided a new generation of local black students with the best educational opportunities anyone in their family had ever experienced. For a black school in 1920s Mississippi, Eureka offered an impressive curriculum that included English, African American and American history, Latin, geography, algebra, biology, chemistry, and home economics. The vast majority of students did not finish high school (Eureka’s early graduating classes were as small as fourteen), but while enrolled, black youths enjoyed the support of a cadre of dedicated teachers who worked hard to provide one of the best secondary educations available to black Mississippians. Several of Eureka’s early graduates matriculated at colleges such as Alcorn or Tougaloo. Nathaniel Burger, class of 1928, earned a master’s degree at Cornell University and returned in 1940 to serve as principal of his alma mater.15
Eureka’s academic curriculum represented merely a sliver of the institution’s broad contributions to the local black community. The school’s new auditorium immediately became an important site for communal gatherings. Throughout the 1920s, thousands of black residents of all ages poured into Eureka for a wide range of community events, such as organizational meetings, choir concerts, and church services. Some of the South’s leading black preachers and educators visited Eureka to deliver sermons and lectures on such topics as “Evolution or Devilution” and “The Comparison of the American Negro’s Progress with the Other Colored Races of the World.” Eureka also hosted an annual summer institute for black Mississippi teachers and several annual meetings of statewide black fraternal and professional organizations. Local African Americans also used the building to house a community library and to host movie nights. Musical concerts were the most popular events at Eureka. In addition to the school’s own glee club, Eureka frequently welcomed traveling black choirs from across the South. On three separate occasions during the 1920s, the auditorium hosted the world-famous Williams Jubilee Singers of Holly Springs, Mississippi. Several concerts even attracted local white residents, who sat in a segregated section of the auditorium. Mrs. West Tatum, the wife of W. S. F. Tatum’s oldest son, encouraged white citizens to attend concerts at Eureka. “The conduct of the students is remarkably good,” she told an interviewer in 1925, “and would be a lesson to many of the white students.”16
Many programs at Eureka were chronicled in the pages of the Hattiesburg American, which by the 1920s had begun integrating updates from the Mobile Street District into local news coverage. But even this unprecedented attention offered mixed results. News from the black community was almost always relegated to back pages and did not typically include any discussion of the social lives or achievements of African Americans. Rather, stories about the black community focused almost exclusively on efforts to improve African American morality or health, which suggests that much of the news from the Mobile Street District was actually written for the benefit of white readers who were concerned about the behavior of the black men and women who shared their city. Nonetheless, positive stories from the black community represented a major change from previous eras when African Americans only appeared in the local press as victims or criminals. Beginning in 1926, one local black merchant was even allowed to start placing ads in the Hattiesburg American.17
Despite some positive alterations in the social fabric, racial disparities proliferated, even in the brightest spots of black life. Though Eureka High School was one of the best black schools in Mississippi, its facilities and resources were still vastly inferior to those of the local white high school. In fact, part of the money allocated to building the black school was used to purchase secondhand textbooks from the white school, which then used those proceeds to buy new books for white students. Hattiesburg’s black teachers earned a fraction of the salaries paid to their white counterparts. During the 1922–1923 school year, the principal and teachers at the white high school earned annual salaries of $2,700 and $1,246, respectively; the black principal and faculty at Eureka were paid $1,000, and $453.18
And of course, there was the violence. Lynchings occurred with far less regularity than they had twenty years before, but they were still fairly common in the early 1920s, not ending until the lynching of Emmanuel McCallum in 1928. In 1921, a group of white men abducted a black prisoner named Arthur Jennings from the Hattiesburg jail, hanged him from a tree branch, and then shot his body full of bullets. Two years later, a young man named John Gray was taken from police custody by a group of white men and shot to death in retribution for defending a black woman who was being sexually assaulted by a white man. His body was found abandoned in a ditch, and no one was ever officially questioned or arrested.19
Although certainly the most extreme, lynching was just one of the many common acts of racial violence that tainted black life in the Jim Crow South. African Americans were routinely verbally abused, threatened, and assaulted. Any conflict with a white person carried dangerous implications. For school children, walking home through the wrong neighborhood could mean a busted jaw, a blackened eye, or a concussion from an unseen brick. Black women and girls also faced the common threat of sexual assault. At the time, white men in Mississippi were not prosecuted for raping black women, and every black girl had to learn strategies to avoid potentially dangerous situations. One of the great challenges in this endeavor was that the only jobs available to most of them—domestic work—often left them the most vulnerable. Many parents allowed their daughters to work only for white families whom they already knew and trusted or encouraged them to work in an alternative setting to avoid having to enter white people’s homes. Still, the nature of Jim Crow ensured that black residents faced great risks almost every day. Black women and their families had little course of action to seek justice for a rape. And black men could be killed for trying to stop sexual assaults—as John Gray’s family knew all too well.20
In addition to continuities within Jim Crow, the 1920s also saw a disturbing new development—the expansion of the Hattiesburg Ku Klux Klan. This was part of a national trend. Sparked by a rise of post–World War I xenophobia toward Catholic and Jewish immigrants and Northern anti-black sentiment following the Great Migration, the Ku Klux Klan experienced a major revival in the 1920s. Many Klan members were also motivated by what they perceived to be a decline in American morals during the Roaring Twenties and joined the organization to help promote and police civic and religious morality. Unlike the Reconstruction-era Klan, this new version existed in virtually every corner of the United States and even some parts of Canada. With a membership estimated to be as high as five million, the Klan of this era was more organized, better funded, and much larger than previous incarnations.21
In Southern cities like Hattiesburg, Klan members were also heavily influenced by the immensely popular film Birth of a Nation. The highest-grossing motion picture to that point in American history, Birth of a Nation depicted the original Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan as the heroic saviors of Southern white society from the terrors of Reconstruction, a message that closely aligned with core concepts of the Lost Cause that white Southerners had been promoting for decades. When Birth of a Nation opened in Hattiesburg in 1916, a Hattiesburg News editorial read, “Every student at the Normal College; every girl at the Woman’s College; every pupil of the high grade schools of the city; every young man and young woman in Forrest County ought to see that show.… They can learn more in those three hours from looking at that panorama of the Civil War than they get from any book.” The paper concluded, “It is the greatest play ever put upon the screen.”22
Inspired by Klan nostalgia and the call of civic duty, hundreds of white Hattiesburgers joined the White Knights. By December of 1923, the white supremacist organization claimed over five hundred members. The Hattiesburg Klan left behind very few organizational records, but the nature of other Southern branches suggests that the local Klan would have drawn its membership from church congregations and white Masonic lodges. It could also be expected that dues-paying members would have included predominately middle-class white men—including businessmen, politicians, and clergy—as well as ladies auxiliary branches. In Hattiesburg, the Klan also had a junior division that offered free membership to teenage boys.23
As in the rest of the country, Hattiesburg’s Ku Klux Klan expanded its targets beyond African Americans to include immigrants, communists, feminists, homosexuals, and virtually anyone who did not adhere to their deeply conservative values. The Hattiesburg Klan targeted anyone it deemed a criminal or moral deviant, including bootleggers, cheating spouses, and even people who left their animals out in the sun too long. Any white person who stepped out of line could face the Klan’s wrath. One young white man who grew up in Hattiesburg during this time remembered once “smooching” with a girl in a park when “all of a sudden two of the Ku Klux Klan stuck their heads in my automobile and wanted to know what I was doing.” The most extreme example of Klan violence toward whites occurred in the summer of 1921, when a group of seventy-five masked Hattiesburg men abducted and lynched a white man who had been convicted of murder.24
Throughout the 1920s, the Hattiesburg Klan openly published editorials and advertisements in the Hattiesburg American and held public initiation ceremonies at downtown parks. At one such event, they charged one dollar admission and raffled off a new Studebaker. Other typical Klan activities included speaking in churches, marching downtown in full regalia, posting warning signs against bad behavior, protesting racy films, chartering special trains to attend regional Klan rallies, and leading various public events, such as the 1923 flag dedication ceremony at the all-white Main Street High School. The organization enjoyed such widespread public acceptance that in 1924, the sheriff of Forrest County deputized local Klansmen to investigate bootlegging in the Mobile Street District. This brand of Klansmen did not need sheets; they had badges. One can only imagine the terror among African Americans created by such widespread acceptance and public visibility of the white supremacist terrorist organization.25
Soon after the Smith brothers returned to Hattiesburg, they joined an organization named the Hattiesburg Negro Business League, the local branch of the National Negro Business League. Established by Booker T. Washington in 1900, the National Negro Business League was founded to advance black commercial development by cultivating a vast network of America’s leading black businessmen. Under Washington’s guidance, the organization spread into nearly every black enclave in the United States. By the time Washington died in November of 1915, the National Negro Business League included more than six hundred branches and between forty thousand and fifty thousand members.26
The National Negro Business League remained active well after Washington’s death. During the 1920s, its annual meetings continued to draw hundreds of African Americans from across the county, including influential figures such as Washington disciples Emmett Scot and Robert Moton, North Carolina–based insurance magnate Charles Clinton Spaulding, Chicago Defender publisher Robert Abbott, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters president A. Philip Randolph, and the nationally known black educator Mary McLeod Bethune. Attendance and membership began to decline later in the decade, but the league continued for years to provide a major forum for America’s leading black business leaders.27
Perhaps the organization’s most important function, however, was its role in developing subsidiary groups such as the National Negro Insurance Association, the National Negro Bankers Association, the National Negro Finance Corporation, the Associated Negro Press, and hundreds of city and state divisions, including the Hattiesburg Negro Business League, one of twelve branches of the Mississippi Negro Business League. Led by Charles Banks of Mound Bayou, a banker whom Booker T. Washington once called “the most influential negro business man in the United States,” the Mississippi Negro Business League held its own additional meetings in rotating locations across the state.28
When the Smith brothers joined, the Hattiesburg Negro Business League was led by a man named Gaither Hardaway. Born near Enterprise, Mississippi, in 1878, Hardaway arrived in Hattiesburg near the turn of the century to work in one of the local sawmills. He first appears in local records in the 1900 census as a twenty-one-year-old sawmill worker living in a little rented home with six other African Americans. Hardaway’s job at the time would have required long hours and paid him very little, but for a man of his race in that time and place, he would go on from there to great success.29
Within a few years of moving to Hattiesburg, Hardaway married a woman named Minnie and moved in with her and her father. Soon thereafter, he decided to leave his sawmill position to explore other options in the city’s growing black business district. Hardaway worked a few odd jobs before taking a position in a barbershop on Mobile Street. A few years later, he took over the barbershop of Timothy Thigpen (the local black newspaper man and Booker T. Washington supporter) when Thigpen migrated to Chicago. Hardaway operated his shop at 417 Mobile Street over the next few years. He even briefly lived in the shop during the months between Minnie’s death and his marriage to his second wife, Lillie.30
Sometime between 1918 and 1920, Hardaway sold his barbershop to purchase a grocery store on the corner of Seventh and Mobile Streets. Business took off in the early 1920s as the city’s black neighborhood experienced a new phase of rapid growth. Eventually known simply as “the Groceryman,” Hardaway enjoyed a prime location in the heart of Mobile Street and created a broad customer base by offering a free delivery service. His success enabled him to buy a new home and a small office building adjacent to his store. It was he who in 1926 became the first local black merchant to begin regularly placing advertisements in the Hattiesburg American.31
Like many local business owners, black or white, Hardaway parlayed entrepreneurial success into civic leadership. In addition to serving as president of the Hattiesburg Negro Business League, Hardaway was a member of the executive committee of the National Negro Business League, a deacon at the Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, a grand almoner in the Order of the Eastern Star Freemasonry lodge, chairman of the Colored Auxiliary of the local Red Cross, chairman of the Colored Committee of the local Salvation Army, and Hattiesburg’s representative to a statewide black leadership organization known as “The Committee of One Hundred.” Formed in Jackson in 1924, the Committee of One Hundred was composed mostly of black clergy, businessmen, and educators who encouraged racial uplift through morality, religion, civic duty, and the development of black businesses. This organization remained active through the end of World War II and in later years served as a gateway to NAACP membership.32
By the late 1920s, members of the Hattiesburg Negro Business League regularly participated in a variety of statewide organizations that helped develop professional and social networks among black leaders across Mississippi. There were numerous examples. Charles Smith belonged to the Mississippi Medical and Surgical Association of Negro Doctors. Hammond Smith joined a preexisting organization of black pharmacists. E. W. Hall, the city’s most successful black funeral home director, was a member of the Mississippi Funeral Directors and Embalmers Association. Several local teachers were leading figures in the Mississippi Association of Teachers in Colored Schools, which in 1924 began holding annual summer training programs at Eureka High School. Alongside preexisting fraternal orders and mutual-aid societies, these professional organizations increasingly drew together African American leaders from different communities across Mississippi. Like the Committee of One Hundred, many of their members would later form the vanguard of post–World War II NAACP membership. This was not yet the civil rights movement, but these were the people who developed the institutions and networks that later made possible civil rights activism in Mississippi.33
The Hattiesburg Negro Business League essentially operated as the black version of the Chamber of Commerce. Like the all-white Chamber of Commerce, it drew together leaders from different religious denominations into an influential civic organization that guided local black life. With at least fifty members by 1927, the Hattiesburg Negro Business League supported the activities of local churches and schools, conducted annual Christmastime food and clothing drives, led Emancipation Day celebrations each January, organized neighborhood beautification initiatives, and planned countless school fundraisers, health education programs, lectures, and concerts. They even raised money for needy African Americans in other communities. When the Mississippi River flooded in 1927, the Hattiesburg Negro Business League collected cash, food, and clothing to send to displaced African Americans in the Mississippi Delta.34
The Hattiesburg Negro Business League also at times successfully solicited financial and material assistance from whites. President Gaither Hardaway was particularly effective in convincing white wholesale grocery companies to donate food and / or cash to the annual Christmastime charity drives. In 1927, Merchants Grocery, Hattiesburg Grocery, and Mohler Brothers Coffee provided a combined forty sacks of corn meal, one hundred pounds of sugar, a barrel of flour, and twenty-five pounds of coffee that were rationed into hundreds of Christmas baskets and distributed to needy black families. On several other occasions, local white merchants gave cash to support causes led by the league. At other times, Hardaway worked with the all-white Lions Club to secure boxes of toys for poor black kids during Christmas. He also led a survey of local black youths that helped convince white YMCA administrators to sponsor a baseball league for black boys. Eventually, Hardaway and his colleagues even convinced white city officials to pave Mobile Street.35
Perhaps Hardaway’s most intriguing interracial project was conducted through an organization named the Colored Upbuilding League. Headquartered in Hardaway’s office, the Colored Upbuilding League launched a program in 1929 to build a training center for black female domestic workers. After convincing a local white realtor to give them a plot of land, the group raised money from white and black benefactors to construct a “model community house” where young black women learned skills such as cooking, cleaning, and sewing. Black women who were trained in the model home then registered with the organization’s employment bureau, which helped them find jobs. Although by contemporary standards this effort to usher black women into domestic service was highly questionable, the effort must be considered within the context of 1920s Mississippi, when most black women in Hattiesburg were fated to end up as domestic workers anyway, a hard-and-fast reality that was beyond their control. At the very least, this program offered room and board during a period of formal training, as well as the opportunity to directly connect with potential employers.36
John Bradley (J. B.) Woods, the black grocer who sold his store to Gaither Hardaway, also worked with local white businessmen on projects designed to benefit the black community. Like Hardaway, J. B. Woods was initially drawn to Hattiesburg near the turn of the century by the promise of wage-labor jobs. A native of Greenville, Mississippi, he had begun his life in Hattiesburg as an employee of the New Orleans & Northeastern Railroad before leaving that position to open the grocery store on Mobile Street.37
After selling his grocery store to Hardaway, Woods purchased a two-story brick storefront just a few blocks down Mobile Street and opened a new grocery store. He and his wife Ella lived in a small home in the back of the store. Over the following years, Woods, along with Ella and later his second wife, Lenon, earned his living operating a series of businesses out of the storefront, including a grocery, dressmaker shop, barbershop, and boarding house. The building burned down in 1998, and the lot is now occupied by a little park commemorating the old storefront as the local headquarters of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer.38
J. B. Woods died in 1944, two decades before his old building played that crucial role in the civil rights movement. But the legacy of political activism in that building was rooted in his life’s work. As early as 1921, J. B. Woods began hosting political meetings in his store on Mobile Street. It is unknown who else was involved, but for years, Woods and several other local African Americans met in the building to read and discuss race stories and political developments covered in the Chicago Defender. Woods himself was politically active. During the 1920s and 1930s, he served as the chairman of the Forrest County Republican Executive Committee and served as a delegate to the Republican National Conventions of 1924, 1932, and 1936.39
Little is known about Woods’s internal political ambitions. As a black Republican living in Jim Crow Mississippi, he was a disfranchised official of an unelectable party. His influence was so scant that local whites appear to have barely noticed his political activities. Still, Woods participated in politics to the utmost of his ability, hobnobbing with other black leaders at political functions across the country and claiming a political leadership role in the only ways available to him. Though one cannot know precisely what Woods sought to accomplish, the building he owned on Mobile Street was the site of political engagement since at least 1921. When his former wife Lenon decided to open her doors to civil rights organizers in the 1960s, she was building on a long-term legacy of political leadership operating out of that structure. Of course, all of that lay in the years to come.
During the 1920s, J. B. Woods was most influential in Hattiesburg through his role in the Zion Chapel A.M.E. Church and a series of collaborations with black and white business leaders. Whereas Gaither Hardaway worked with the Lions Club, Woods partnered with several white organizations during the Christmas season to help raise money and toys for needy black families. He also promoted events at Eureka High School, served on the Negro Welfare Committee during World War I, led the effort at Zion Chapel A.M.E. to construct a new brick church, and worked with a local white businessman to open a black movie theater. In 1930, he helped convince members of the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce to sell land to a group of black ministers for the construction of a new playground for black children. And in 1932, he worked with a special city relief committee to run an unemployment office for African Americans out of his building on Mobile Street.40
White leaders did not leave behind records explaining their rationale for participating in interracial initiatives that provided benefits to the black community, but it is fairly easy to recognize several potential motivations. Surely, some of them were genuinely interested in helping poor black residents, perhaps out of a sense of paternalism or genuine sympathy. But their involvement in such projects also offered potential benefits to the white community. To start, local white leaders concerned with black outmigration were motivated to maintain their labor force. Small overtures and acts of charity were designed not only to offer relief but also to improve African Americans’ attitudes toward local race relations. Black businessmen such as Gaither Hardaway and J. B. Woods served as intermediaries between leading whites with resources and poor blacks with needs. In addition, programs such as the Colored Upbuilding League’s school for black domestics benefitted whites by training cheap workers for employment in white homes. Lastly, any sort of charity, education, or health program offered the potential to elevate black behavior and morality, thus improving society as a whole in the eyes of a white population that subscribed to stereotypes of black degeneracy and filth.
Regardless of incentive or strategy, none of these efforts directly threatened white supremacy or required white citizens to make any major racial concessions. The programs did, however, hold the potential to offer tangible benefits for local African Americans. Individuals such as Gaither Hardaway and J. B. Woods used these efforts to expand leadership roles and societal influence. And the black community itself was given greater access to resources and an increased stake in society. “The negroes of Hattiesburg form an integral part of this community,” noted one member of the Chamber of Commerce in a 1929 editorial. “Mississippi negroes should be able from time to time to offer worth-while suggestions for the common good. Certainly they should be encouraged to do so.”41
Consider the other view as well. Hattiesburg Negro Business League president Gaither Hardaway may not have left behind memoirs, speeches, or writings that would have better illuminated his own views toward whites, but his perspective can be inferred from his lived experiences. Born in Mississippi the year after Reconstruction ended, Hardaway was in all likelihood the son of former slaves. He came to Hattiesburg during the city’s initial lumber boom and found both opportunity and oppression. As Hardaway rose through the social ranks of the black community, he also lived through the everyday experiences of Jim Crow and bore witness to several extraordinary acts of racial violence that occurred less than a mile from where he lived and worked. Six black men were lynched in Hattiesburg after his arrival, and even if he did not see the murders or the bodies, it is quite likely that he heard the shooting. At the very least, he was aware of the killings.
Gaither Hardaway’s outlook was shaped by years of fear and persecution. But by the early 1930s, Hardaway also enjoyed a level of civic influence unimaginable just a decade before. Like all African Americans, he would have been required to abide by the basic regulations of Jim Crow, including customs of submission and deference in his interactions with whites. It would have been very dangerous for a black man of that era in Hattiesburg to publicly criticize racial segregation or demand increased civil rights. As the son of another member of the Committee of One Hundred later told an interviewer, “Had blacks pushed in the 1920s like they did in the 1960s, they would have been slaughtered.” As with J. B. Woods, no one will ever know Hardaway’s innermost ambitions or his thoughts toward white citizens. To fully consider how a man living under those circumstances might have measured change and progress across the difficult years of a life lived in Jim Crow Mississippi, we need only recognize the realities of his lived experiences.42
In small black Southern communities, Jim Crow ensured that all black people experienced the same forms of social, educational, and economic discrimination. Rich or poor, black people had no choice but to live, shop, dine, and worship among themselves. And because middle-class blacks were excluded from participating in all-white organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce, the only form of leadership they could claim lay in membership in statewide networks and programs they developed to benefit people in their own communities. If viewed at the communal level, this type of activity constituted a parallel form of local government in the black neighborhood.
Certainly, there were undocumented conflicts, jealousies, and social and professional slights, but in the broader sense of society, Jim Crow bonded them together out of necessity. “What was good for one was good for all, and what was bad for them was bad for all,” said the son of a local minister whose family moved to Hattiesburg in 1919. “That was the kind of unity that we had at that particular time.”43
Although men held the official titles in local business and religious organizations, most daily activities in the Mobile Street District were organized and led by black women. Living in a patriarchal society, women did not have the same formal opportunities for community leadership through fraternal organizations or groups such as the Hattiesburg Negro Business League. But involvement in local churches enabled them to carve out unique niches where they could develop leadership roles, exert societal influence, and provide for the welfare of community members.
By 1930, Hattiesburg was home to eighteen black churches—nine Baptist, six Methodist, one Presbyterian, and two branches of the Christ’s Sanctified Holy Church. Regardless of denomination, all Southern black churches included female leadership bodies. Methodist churches had boards of stewardesses, and Baptist churches had deaconesses who advised male leaders and helped lead the congregation. Black churches also had an endless array of female-led organizations that oversaw the congregation’s daily activities and charitable drives. Black women directed choirs, provided food, played the organ, collected clothing for needy families, organized recitals, plays, debates, and lectures, and served as secretaries and treasurers. The most influential women in local black churches tended to be the wives of the city’s leading black businessmen, professionals, and teachers, in part because many of them did not hold formal jobs and therefore had more time to dedicate to organizing activities.44
Several interdenominational women’s groups met separately outside of the churches. In the mid-1920s, an organization named the Colored Neighborhood Society met weekly in the homes of its members to pray, sing, discuss scripture readings, and share cake, cookies, and punch. Almost all reports of their activities included a rendition of the song “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” an old slave spiritual that many members likely learned from their mothers and grandmothers. The meetings closed by taking a collection that was donated to a particular cause or needy local family. Ella Woods, the first wife of J. B., was a prominent member of the group.45
Other black women participated in a variety of organizations that were affiliated with local churches. These included groups like the Women’s Social Club, the Poro Club (whose members sold Poro-brand cosmetology products), the Silver Moon Social Club, the Mah-Jong Social Club, and the Negro Women’s Federation. Like many of the church groups, these organizations conducted initiatives for the benefit for local African Americans. These female-led organizations also held recreational events that were important to the social lives of many black women. Excluded from the debutante balls, garden clubs, and fashion shows of the white community, Hattiesburg’s black women came together in these clubs to craft their own traditions and establish their own standards of respectability and status. They held bridge parties, luncheons, birthday celebrations, dances, cake walks, and health programs, and they hosted tea parties for new graduates of Eureka High School.46
Much of what is known about the activities of black Hattiesburgers in the 1920s and 1930s actually comes from the pages of the Chicago Defender. Because so many aspects of Southern black life were excluded from mainstream newspapers, nearly all of the major Northern black newspapers printed special updates from Southern black communities in their national editions. This type of coverage enhanced the national popularity of Northern black newspapers, especially the Chicago Defender, which by 1929 had an estimated weekly circulation of nearly eighty thousand outside Chicago. Pullman Porters brought copies of the newspaper on trips into Dixie and passed them along to individuals who sold the papers in the barbershops and grocery stores of Southern black neighborhoods.47
The Defender was immensely popular in the Mobile Street District. Black residents who wanted to include updates could send announcements of social events or personal milestones to Amanda McGee, Jessie Brunson, or Curtis Mitchell, local black women who compiled and submitted reports to the paper. Additional news from the Mobile Street District appeared more sporadically in newspapers such as the Baltimore Afro-American, the Philadelphia Tribune, the Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Cleveland Call and Post.48
Major Hattiesburg stories such as the lynching of Emmanuel McCallum received front-page coverage in the Defender. But thousands of smaller stories from Hattiesburg were also mentioned in nearly every national edition of the Chicago paper throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The Defender covered graduations, birthday parties, bridge parties, automobile accidents, dances, organizational meetings, dinner-party menus, retirement parties, engagement parties, people’s vacations, and visits between Hattiesburg and Chicago.49
Upon their return, Hammond and Charles Smith fell into the ranks of black leadership in the Mobile Street neighborhood. They joined the Hattiesburg Negro Business League and immersed themselves in its activities, including the annual Christmas food and toy drives and the Emancipation Day celebrations. In 1929, Charles was elected secretary of the Hattiesburg Negro Business League.50
The Smith brothers played essential roles in the continuously developing Mobile Street District. As an African American doctor, Charles was known by virtually every black person in town. He served thousands of patients and performed a wide range of medical procedures ranging from treating small cuts to delivering babies. Hammond was also widely known. His drugstore in the heart of the Mobile Street commercial district was an important source for medicines and everyday products such as perfumes, tobacco, razor blades, hair pomade, and sanitary napkins. The Smith Drug Store also sold gum and candy and operated a soda fountain that was immensely popular among the students who attended Eureka High School just around the corner.51
Both brothers quickly assumed leadership roles at St. Paul Methodist Church, where their family had belonged since arriving in Hattiesburg in 1900. Shortly after returning to Hattiesburg, Charles was elected to the church’s board of trustees. Hammond joined him in later years. When St. Paul was badly damaged in 1927, the brothers helped arrange a temporary meeting space in the Eureka High School auditorium and one of the black Masonic lodges on Mobile Street until a new church could be completed. In 1930, St. Paul’s congregation moved into a beautiful new brick church that is still in use today. Charles’s and Hammond’s names appear on a stone plaque attached to the northeast corner of the church.52
In later years, St. Paul would develop a reputation as an “elitist church,” according to one member, because it was led primarily by professionals, teachers, and business owners. But this was not yet the case in the late 1920s. The eight men who joined Dr. Charles Smith on the St. Paul board of trustees in 1930 represented a diversity of socioeconomic backgrounds. Among their ranks were a funeral home director, a grocer, a porter, a janitor, a laborer at J. J. Newman, a service station attendant, and a railroad worker.53
Members of the Smith family were frequently mentioned in the Chicago Defender. Charles and Hammond regularly appeared as participants in local community events, and their wives, Myrtle and Lucille, received mention through their roles in the Women’s Home Missionary Society and Phyllis Wheatley Club of St. Paul Methodist Church. The family also appeared in the Defender as attendees of local celebrations, bridge parties, and church services, thus chronicling the basic components of their social lives in the Mobile Street District. The two eldest sons and their wives were the most visible, but nearly all members of the Smith family appeared in Defender updates from Hattiesburg, even Charles’s two young boys, Charles Jr. and Grover.54
The most widely covered Smith family story came in 1932, when Turner and Mamie’s only daughter, Mamie, became engaged to a Clarksdale dentist named Arthur Gipson. After finishing courses at Tougaloo College in Jackson and Knoxville College in Tennessee, the younger Mamie Smith had accepted a teaching job in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where she met Dr. Gipson. The pair were engaged in August of 1932 and traveled to Hattiesburg to celebrate their coming nuptials.55
Mamie’s engagement party was probably the largest celebration her parents ever held at their home on Dewey Street. Turner and Mamie ordered special announcements and sent them to friends and family, who arrived at the Smith home on the evening of Friday, August 19. After the introduction of the engaged couple, guests were treated to games of bridge, a three-person musical recital, and cake and ice cream. The local correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American called the party “one of the loveliest social events of the summer.” Mamie and her husband married less than a month later in the Smith family home and spent their honeymoon traveling through Florida before returning to Clarksdale, where they started a family. Over the years, Mamie and her children—Mamie, Arthur Jr., and Hammond—returned often to Hattiesburg to visit her parents and brothers on Dewey Street.56
In the year that Mamie became engaged, Turner and Mamie celebrated their forty-fourth year of marriage. He was seventy-three; she was sixty-six. By then, their children were all nearly grown and gone. Martin Luther, the third son, had finished medical school and was practicing in nearby Laurel. Wendell, the only son who did not become a doctor, was working as a clerk at Hammond’s drugstore. The youngest boy, William Lloyd Garrison Smith, was enrolled in medical school. City directories indicate that Turner kept working through the 1930s, but his age would surely have slowed him down. Considering his work ethic, he probably never completely retired. Very few black people of his generation did. They worked until they died, which is part of the reason many of them died so young. But Turner and Mamie still had some years left. With the help of their children, they would both far surpass the average life expectancy of black southerners born in any era.
As Turner and Mamie faded into a quiet life on Dewey Street, their two oldest boys, Charles and Hammond, emerged as local black leaders, developing their businesses and taking active roles in the organizations and institutions cultivated by previous generations. Although their race would always limit their position in Hattiesburg society, in the Mobile Street District, they were able to build rich and meaningful lives. In the years to come, those lives would be profoundly eventful.