CHAPTER EIGHT
Community Children
My life has been made much, much fuller by attending Eureka between 1935 and 1938. I never would have gone to college. I never would have been a professional man if I hadn’t attended Eureka.
—Dr. Isaac Thomas, Eureka High School Class of 1938
On Tuesday, May 1, 1934, the Hattiesburg Negro Business League threw a celebration of its own. At about noon, black shop owners closed their businesses and teachers released children from school so that all could participate in the opening parade of the 1934 “Negro Fair.” Two black marching bands, one from Hattiesburg and another from nearby Laurel, led a procession of black residents through the city streets. People with cars adorned their vehicles in ribbons and signs and drove slowly behind the bands. Hundreds more marched on foot, following the convoy from downtown Hattiesburg to the campus of Eureka High School, where the crowd gathered underneath a big-top tent for a series of prayers and speeches marking the opening of the fair.1
This Negro Fair was organized to raise money for a new park for local black youths. Black business owners sought to transform a lightly used section of the Mobile Street District into a recreational area containing tennis and basketball courts, a baseball diamond, a multipurpose athletic field, a cinder track, and playground equipment. This idea had been in development for several years. In 1930, the grocer J. B. Woods and several black ministers approached the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce with a proposal to buy and develop land for a new park. Four years later, a grant from a New Deal program called the Civil Works Administration (CWA) was expected to help pay for landscaping and playground equipment, but that financial support fell through when the CWA was dissolved in March of 1934. Soon thereafter, the Hattiesburg Negro Business League resolved to raise the money on their own.2
Open every afternoon and evening between May 1 and May 4, the 1934 Negro Fair featured a variety of fundraising events. Local artisans and cooks erected small booths where they sold handicrafts and plates of food. Several local choirs, including the Eureka High School Glee Club, performed ticketed concerts in the Eureka High School auditorium. On the final day of the festival, several members of the black community staged a minstrel show.3
Wednesday was “White Citizens Day” at the Negro Fair. An estimated fifty white residents attended a special chicken dinner prepared by local black women and enjoyed an evening concert at the Eureka High School auditorium. A local white judge delivered a speech “thanking the leaders among the colored population for their example in avoiding conflict with the law,” reported a journalist in the Hattiesburg American. The American supported the fair throughout the week, calling it a “worthy enterprise” and labeling the event a “success.” The local black correspondent for the Chicago Defender went so far as to call the fair “one of the outstanding events in the history of this city.”4
The 1934 Negro Fair raised approximately $110—not enough to complete the park, but a good start nonetheless. Over the following months, the Hattiesburg Negro Business League partnered with other black organizations to secure additional funding through individual donations, church collections, community rallies, and contributions from various social clubs and mutual-aid societies.5
After two years of fundraising, the effort at last proved successful. The new community park officially opened on June 2, 1936, with tennis matches, ball games, and a ceremonial parade of local black youths who would grow up playing on those grounds. The original facilities have since been replaced, but the park remains in use today at the corner of New Orleans and Ninth Streets in Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street District. It was initially placed there by black men and women who led an extended, multipronged community-organizing effort during the middle of the Great Depression. That community loved its children.6
Hammond and Charles Smith played key roles in the playground effort. No direct details of their contributions are documented, but both brothers were heavily involved in the Hattiesburg Negro Business League. Hammond was secretary of the organization in 1934, and Charles was elected chairman the following year. Both were involved in a statewide professional organization called the Mississippi Medical Surgical Association of Negro Doctors, and they were influential at St. Paul Methodist Church, the “congregation on the hill” where their family had belonged since arriving in Hattiesburg in 1900.7
In 1934, Turner Smith turned seventy-five and Mamie sixty-eight. Turner was still listed in city directories as a carpenter, but he and Mamie appear in few other records from that era. Although each had at least a decade more life to live, their most active days were behind them. But they were enveloped by family. Three of their children had moved away, but the fourth son, Wendell, still lived at home. Charles and his wife, Myrtle, lived next door with their four children—Charles Jr., Grover, and the twin girls Myrtle and Sarah. Hammond and his wife, Lucille, who never had children, lived just four doors down. Now led by a younger generation, the Smith family stood out in the Mobile Street District for their professional success and leadership. They were pillars of the community.8
The economic recession of the 1920s and 1930s did not affect Hammond Smith as badly as it had most Hattiesburg residents. Everyone struggled in some way, but Hammond’s drugstore provided him and his family with a stable foundation during these hungry times. Owning a drugstore was one of the most financially lucrative opportunities available to black Mississippians during the early decades of the twentieth century. According to a 1935 study, Mississippi’s black drugstore owners generated, on average, nearly three times the income of grocers and far more revenue than restaurateurs. In addition to filling prescriptions, Hammond Smith also cashed checks, sold tickets to local events, and retailed the essential products of daily life—razor blades, perfumes, shoe polish, hair pomade, pipes, chewing gum, candy, sodas, and ice cream. “I got along better than the physicians in those days … because I had so many things to sell,” Hammond recalled. “I’m not saying that it didn’t hurt, but I got along pretty good.”9
Hammond and Lucille lived fairly comfortable lives throughout the 1930s. Like all local African Americans, they remained subject to the racial ordinances and customs of Jim Crow, but their lives also appear to have been much more pleasurable than were the lives of most working-class whites. They owned their own home and never struggled to feed or clothe themselves. Hammond was even able to afford to hire help in his store. “I always had two or three people working,” he remembered of the depression years. The couple led active social lives, spending much of their time in church, with family, or at various parties, celebrations, meetings, picnics, and bridge tournaments. They also regularly took vacations to the Gulf Coast or traveled to other parts of the state to see relatives. In late October of 1933, the couple went to Chicago for the 1933 World’s Fair. The timing of their trip would have placed them at the “Century of Progress Exhibition” near the arrival of the famous Graf Zeppelin, the largest airship in the world until construction of its successor, the Hindenburg.10
Of course, Hammond and Lucille Smith were exceptions for the era. Most of Hattiesburg’s working-class black men and women struggled mightily. Their challenges were rooted in the broader trends of job loss that affected the entire city. Local black workers were not as negatively affected by the practice of “last hired, first fired” that characterized depression-era black economic inequality in other parts of America. Despite some examples of whites taking black jobs, racially segregated fields of employment generally survived the financial crisis. Domestic work remained an almost exclusively black occupation, and large percentages of black men were always employed by local firms and the city’s municipal departments. What did change in the 1930s was that even the most menial black jobs became increasingly difficult to acquire. Few white men were ever going to clean a Hattiesburg city sewer, but as the sawmills cut out, unemployed African Americans flooded the city’s labor pool, making even the least desirable wage-labor jobs harder to find. During the 1930s, the city’s black male unemployment rate ranged between 20 and 30 percent.11
As with working-class whites, low pay and unstable labor arrangements led to the expansion of a distinct class of roving laborers who spent their days moving between entry-level, low-paid jobs such as construction worker, general laborer, deliveryman, or servant. Several black men also began working on nearby farms for daily wages. Very few black Hattiesburgers ever worked permanently in agriculture, but farm jobs on the outskirts of town offered seasonal employment for some.12
It is impossible to cite any precise income figures for the local black male precariat, but their earnings in the mid-1930s likely ranged somewhere between Mississippi’s average per capita annual income of $177 in 1935 and about $400, roughly the amount a general laborer could earn working sixty-hour workweeks at Tatum Lumber over the course of a year. Income could vary widely depending on a variety of factors. One truth remained constant: nearly all of Hattiesburg’s working-class black men performed physically demanding and dangerous jobs for extremely low wages. Of course, this was not exactly a new development.13
Black women in 1930s-era Hattiesburg actually experienced relatively low rates of unemployment; because their jobs paid so little, they were essentially recession proof. Even amid the worst financial catastrophe in modern American history, thousands of white Hattiesburg families could still afford to hire black women as maids, cooks, nannies, and laundresses. A handful of black women started their own businesses or became teachers, but most were prevented from pursuing any other avenue of employment. Even well-educated black women were not eligible to work as secretaries or typists in white-owned offices. And fewer than twenty local black women ever secured one of the federally funded jobs provided by the New Deal. Also remember that black women were not allowed to work at the Reliance Manufacturing factory that opened in 1933. These restrictions left thousands of working-class black women with no other choice than to work in domestic service for very little pay. With an unemployment rate of only about 10 percent toward the end of the 1930s, black women were at once the most highly employed and the most severely disadvantaged segment of Hattiesburg’s population.14
Part of the reason for such statistically low rates of unemployment among black women was that roughly 40 percent simply did not participate in the city’s labor force. Married women—more than 70 percent of local black women over the age of fifteen—had advantages. Some, including Lucille and Myrtle Smith, did not have to work, because their husbands earned enough income to provide for the family. Others chose not to work because the wages were so low. Many wives and mothers concluded that it was far more logical to spend their time maintaining a family garden or sewing clothes for their children than cleaning a white person’s house for just a few dollars per week. Most unmarried black women did work, but few lived alone. The Mobile Street District included dozens of boardinghouses and female-led intergenerational units where single women lived together.15
Joblessness and poverty affected people of all races, but black Hattiesburgers were further disadvantaged by unequal access to New Deal benefits. Despite provisions restricting racial discrimination, white Hattiesburgers enjoyed vastly more access to programs like the CCC and WPA. In a city where black people comprised roughly one-third of the population, the white-to-black ratio in public emergency-work jobs was roughly five-to-one for men and nine-to-one for women. And because African Americans had been systematically disfranchised and blocked from participation in city government, nearly all local WPA grants were used to fund projects that only benefitted whites.16
Consider, for example, the vastly different nature of Hattiesburg’s two youth recreation projects. As the Hattiesburg Negro Business League scrambled to raise a few hundred dollars for a new park, the city’s white civic leaders secured federal grants totaling over $50,000 to construct a new gymnasium for the white school. White people from neighboring towns were allowed to use the WPA gym, but no black team was ever allowed to take the court. Despite some modest examples of interracial cooperation in the 1920s and 1930s, local white leaders demonstrated very little willingness to include African Americans in any meaningful federal relief program. There were too many parks, schools, roads, and gardens to fully measure these disparities, but thousands of local whites clearly enjoyed disparate access to federal support.
Poor black people in Hattiesburg lived extraordinarily difficult lives. Black children who grew up in Hattiesburg during the depression later remembered the adversities of the era. Clearese Cook, whose father took to the rails in search of out-of-town jobs, remembered days when her family could not afford flour or shortening and times when she “had to wear the same dress five days a week.” Douglas Conner, whose father worked at J. J. Newman Lumber until the mill closed, remembered “times when we had only bread and water to eat.” Constance Baker, the daughter of a black carpenter, remembered her father struggling to find work and occasionally having to accept used goods in exchange for his services. One white woman paid him for a job with “an old piano and an old quilt.” When asked about the depression, the black washerwoman Osceola McCarty told an interviewer, “You just couldn’t get no food hardly.” One particularly heart-wrenching story from the era occurred during the summer of 1932, when two hungry black children aged ten and six appeared at Hattiesburg City Hall and began singing, hoping “that they would collect a few cents with which to buy food,” reported the Hattiesburg American.17
The poverty of the era ravaged the psyche of many. Some turned to larceny; just about every major store in the Mobile Street District appears to have been robbed at one point (though whether the thieves were black or white is often unknown). Others turned to alcohol. Bootlegging was common in the region, and consumers had access to all sorts of moonshine or hooch, which helped them detach from the stressful realities of their environment. Douglas Conner remembered the way his father used to drink. “He would be sober enough to go to work and do his job,” Conner explained, “but during off-duty hours, except when he was sleeping, he was constantly drinking. I don’t believe I ever saw him completely sober a day in his life.” Similar testimonies about alcoholism are scarce, but we can be certain that Conner’s father was not alone. Hattiesburg’s working-class white community experienced its own share of crime, alcoholism, and vagrancy, but black life, with its immense racial disadvantages and disproportionate punishments for violations of social norms, was almost always more stressful. The fact that most local African Americans lived in a floodplain only added to their vulnerability and their challenges.18
As difficult as their lives were, it is also important to remember that working-class black Hattiesburgers were a resilient and well-callused population. Most had struggled with poverty all their lives. Some, including Turner Smith, had once been enslaved. Many black families responded to the continuing challenges of the 1930s as they always had—by embracing traditions of self-help and community organizing that had characterized black life in the Mobile Street District for decades. Working-class black families maintained side gardens and kept chickens or even cows to provide food for their families. “I don’t know of a single person out in that neighborhood that didn’t have a garden and hogs and chickens and all those kinds of things,” remembered Ralph Woullard Jr. of growing up black in the area just south of Hattiesburg. Some people made their own clothing or shoes. Even the poorest black families strove to instill a sense of pride and self-sufficiency in their children. Speaking of the pride of his mother, Douglas Conner related that she never let any of her kids accept food from another family, “even if we were hungry.” Clearese Cook took an after-school job as a domestic worker during junior high school so that she could buy fabric to make her own dresses. “That was one thing that was taught in my family growing up,” Cook later told an interviewer. “A sense of pride.” For black families like the Cooks, the notion of “a sense of pride” represented intergenerational principles of self-sufficiency to survive poverty on their own terms.19
Table 8.1 Black Hattiesburg Organizations during the 1930s (Church affiliations denoted in parentheses) |
|||||
Benevolent |
Fraternal |
Professional |
Religious |
Social |
Youth |
Civic Improvement Association Colored Citizens Welfare League Home Guards (St. Paul) Missionary Society (Mt. Carmel) Missionary Society (Zion Chapel AME) Mother’s Club Mothers’ Jewels Band (Zion Chapel AME) Queen Esther Circle (St. Paul) Welfare Club (True Light) Willing Workers Club (Mt. Carmel) Women’s Federation Club Women’s Foreign Missionary Society (St. Paul) |
Afro-American Sons and Daughters Elks Royal Zophangs |
Forrest County branch of the National Association of Negro War Veterans Hattiesburg Negro Business League Poro Agents |
Boys Unit (St. Paul) Ladies Aid Society (St. Paul) Pastor’s Wives Club Pulpit Aid (Zion Chapel AME) Union Choir Service |
Afro-American Society Art and Industrial Club Chain of Friendship Club (Presbyterian Church) Friendship Club Galaxy Federated Club Happy Hearts Social Club Hattiesburg Social Service Club [Chicago] Hercules Social Club Jolly Five Social Club Just Us Club Mah-Jong Social Club Peanut Social Club Phyllis Wheatley Social Club Rescue Club (Mt. Carmel) Silver Moon Social Club Social King’s Club White Rose Social Club Women’s Social Club |
Colored Youth Forum (Mt. Carmel) Girls Reserves Luxis Club Negro Boys and Girls Improvement Association PTA |
The city’s black poor were not entirely on their own. Throughout the 1930s, they received a variety of aid from dozens of community institutions and organizations. In spite of widespread economic challenges—or perhaps because of them—black communal activity expanded at unprecedented rates during the Great Depression. In addition to churches, Hattiesburg in 1936 was home to more than forty black community organizations, including fraternal orders, social clubs, interdenominational religious groups, professional societies, and neighborhood improvement associations. Working together through interconnected, multilayered networks, these groups led a variety of initiatives designed to improve the lives of local black citizens. The 1934 Negro Fair was just one example among thousands of black community initiatives in the 1930s.20
The best-documented community programs were led by the Hattiesburg Negro Business League. Even during the recession, Mobile Street sustained a vibrant downtown business community filled with shops, including a confectionary and ice cream parlor, a dental office, a movie theater, an auto mechanic shop, an insurance company, a jewelry repair shop, a beer garden, a black-owned filling station, and numerous funeral parlors, doctors’ offices, barbershops, groceries, tailor shops, and restaurants. Local black business owners worked through the Hattiesburg Negro Business League to orchestrate charitable projects that benefitted other members of their race.21
The regular activities of the Hattiesburg Negro Business League included fundraising drives to aid needy children, annual Christmastime toy drives, a “Poor Folks Christmas Fund,” and a variety of charity football games, luncheons, and rallies. Additionally, black businessmen often organized parallel relief organizations when African Americans were excluded from citywide relief programs. For example, the grocer Gaither Hardaway led a Colored Division of the Salvation Army and a Colored Auxiliary of the local Red Cross. The year after Mayor Tatum evicted the Red Cross from City Hall for serving African Americans, Hardaway led a month-long effort of the Colored Auxiliary that raised $165. After a similar initiative in 1933, local Red Cross chairman J. C. Fields praised Hardaway’s leadership, telling the Hattiesburg American, “We appreciate the splendid membership and interest the Hattiesburg and Forrest county colored people have always given in the past.” Fellow grocer J. B. Woods similarly created a black version of a citywide relief program, during much of the 1930s operating an unemployment office for black workers out of a building he owned on Mobile Street.22
Additional forms of aid were disbursed through churches. By the mid-1930s, Hattiesburg was home to twenty-five black churches. Due to a diverse array of denominations in black communities, the Hub City actually had more black churches than white ones. The city’s African American denominations included thirteen Baptist, seven Methodist—three AME, three MEC, and one CME—one Presbyterian, one Christ’s Sanctified Holy Church, and three Pentecostal Churches of God.23
Hattiesburg’s three oldest black churches—St. Paul Methodist, Mt. Carmel Baptist, and Zion Chapel A.M.E.—formed the bedrock of communal life of the Mobile Street District. Initially established during the 1880s in rickety wooden buildings, each church had since relocated into large brick structures located within a half mile of one another near the center of the black downtown. In addition to being the oldest churches in the black community, St. Paul, Mt. Carmel, and Zion Chapel were also the largest. Precise congregation numbers are not available for each year, but a report from 1937 indicates that St. Paul and Zion Chapel each had about five hundred members. It is safe to assume that Mt. Carmel, which added new wings in the 1920s to accommodate a growing population, had at least as many congregants. By the mid-1930s, True Light Baptist Church had also grown quite large, with a membership of about 350. Approximately one-fourth of all local African Americans belonged to one of the city’s four largest congregations. Nearly all of Hattiesburg’s most influential black leaders belonged to one of the original three.24
Whereas smaller churches often only met biweekly and were guided by itinerant preachers, Hattiesburg’s largest black churches met at least twice per week and were led by full-time pastors who lived in homes provided by the congregation. Pastors at the big churches changed every few years, but they always held active roles in the community, working closely with local organizations and participating in community events such as fairs, sporting contests, and neighborhood fundraisers. Moreover, they were among the regular customers of the city’s barbershops, groceries, and restaurants. To residents of the Mobile Street District, pastors were at once religious leaders, neighbors, and friends.25
The city’s largest black churches were also guided by deacons and boards of trustees who controlled financial and personnel decisions. Pastors served as temporary figureheads, but deacons and trustees held the most influence. Local black businessmen featured prominently in the leadership of the city’s largest African American churches. Hammond and Charles Smith served on the board of trustees at St. Paul, Gaither Hardaway was a longtime deacon at Mt. Carmel Baptist, and for over thirty years, J. B. Woods was among the leading members at Zion Chapel. Entrepreneurs and professionals guided church governance, but most congregants were among the city’s working-class black population. Although a handful of blue-collar workers did serve as deacons or trustees, most working-class black men and women contributed to church life by participating in Sunday schools and choirs, volunteering for church-related events and organizations, and making small donations to collection plates as their finances allowed. People in every church gave to help those who struggled. “If we knew that somebody was having a hardship, we shared with them,” remembered the son of a local pastor. “What I mean by ‘we,’ I’m talking about the community.”26
As they had in earlier decades, black women continued to play crucial leadership roles in every single church. There were several layers to their involvement. Informally, black women oversaw logistical support for nearly all church events—suppers, revivals, weddings, funerals, choirs, parties, holiday celebrations, and special commemorations, such as Women’s Day or Grandparent’s Day. It was women who arranged flowers, placed Bibles in the pews, set out candles, washed pastors’ robes, and cleaned church floors. The largest churches included formal organizations that performed these services—such as the Pulpit Aid of Zion Chapel or the Ladies Aid of St. Paul.27
Black church women also occupied formal leadership roles by serving on stewardess or deaconess boards or belonging to women’s missionary societies. Most black women’s missionary societies were local branches of state and national missionary societies that in some cases predated the Civil War. Many American missionary societies worked for international causes, but in most Southern black communities, these groups focused primarily on aiding the local poor. The largest black missionary societies in Hattiesburg included St. Paul’s Foreign Missionary Society, Home Guards, and Queen Esther Circle; Mt. Carmel’s Missionary Society and Willing Workers Club; and Zion Chapel’s Missionary Society and Mothers’ Jewels Band. Operating within prescribed gender roles of the era, they led Bible study classes, provided instruction on women’s hygiene and childcare, and helped plan activities in local schools. Because these organizations usually charged monthly dues, their membership was typically limited to the wives and relatives of the city’s leading black business and professional men. Lucille and Myrtle Smith, Hammond and Charles Smith’s wives, both belonged to the St. Paul Women’s Foreign Missionary Society.28
In addition to forming their own organizations, local black churches worked together constantly. In the fall of 1931, six of Hattiesburg’s largest black churches—St. Paul Methodist, Mt. Carmel Baptist, Zion Chapel A.M.E., True Light Baptist, Mt. Bethel Baptist, and Mt. Zion Baptist—formed an interdenominational organization named the Union Choir Service. Led by local businessman Paul Weston, the Union Choir Service raised money for charity by holding monthly singing competitions at one of the member churches. Held after regular Sunday services, the events began with a scripture reading and congregational singing before moving on to the competition. During the competition, each of the six church choirs would perform two or three traditional spirituals. A collection basket was circulated through the crowd during each performance, allowing audience members to vote for the best choir based on the amount of money they donated. Whichever church collected the most money during their performance was declared the winner. The winning church choir went home with the bragging rights, and all the money went toward the same causes. A report from November of 1934 indicates a total collection of $20.80, a modest amount but quite enough to help feed and clothe some needy families.29
On Thanksgiving Day of 1934, the Union Choir Service worked in conjunction with the Hattiesburg Negro Business League to publish the inaugural issue of The Union Messenger, the city’s first black newspaper in over twenty years. The Union Messenger, its editors explained, sought “to bring to the public a clean and clear cut paper … [that] will meet the long needs of the city for a colored newspaper.” Thanking the support of local ministers and business leaders, the newspaper encouraged “the full cooperation of the 7000 Negroes of this city.” That inaugural issue was filled with dozens of community updates and advertisements. “Go Forward,” encouraged an advertisement sponsored by several local black businesses, including the office of Dr. Charles Smith and the Smith Drug Store.30
Religious and business organizations predominated over local life, but more than a dozen other women’s clubs formed in black Hattiesburg by the 1930s offered the greatest level of interconnectivity between community organizations. Although often affiliated with churches, women in these groups worked with a wide variety of peers, ranging from close friends and neighbors to women from other parts of town or even other cities. Many women belonged to several clubs at once. Lucille and Myrtle Smith both belonged to the Phyllis Wheatley and Women’s Federated Clubs, meaning that each belonged to at least four community organizations.31
Rooted in the late nineteenth century, the African American clubwomen’s movement spread through every sizeable black community in the United States during the early 1900s. By 1916, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) counted over fifteen hundred affiliated branches. But even this official count captures only part of black women’s involvement in clubs. Countless numbers of black women joined informal non-NACW affiliates. After all, it does not take much effort to organize a group of friends or neighbors and attach a name to it. Some clubs operated with well-defined sociopolitical objectives. Others just gathered on weekends to socialize. The NACW affiliates are best known, but black women’s clubs were diverse. Hattiesburg was home to all kinds.32
America’s most visible black clubwomen’s organizations participated in community-based initiatives such as running orphanages, supporting schools, teaching domestic service courses, and advocating racial uplift across socioeconomic classes. The NACW, which later changed its name to the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, adopted the motto “Lifting as We Climb,” a slogan that reflected their shared vision of racial uplift as a broad mission of black advancement. Generally speaking, the organization was guided by the philosophy that improvements to the education and behavior of lower-class African Americans offered universal benefits to the race as a whole. Like their counterparts in places such as New York City and Washington, DC, Hattiesburg’s most visible black clubwomen worked toward racial uplift by designing community projects focused on improving public health, education, childrearing, and domestic skills.33
Religious groups and women’s clubs were not exclusively limited to African Americans. Similar organizations played analogous roles in Hattiesburg’s white community. White men controlled local politics and business activities, but white women actively influenced society through involvement in a variety of church missionary groups and women’s clubs that aided pastors, raised money for charity, ran public health projects, and supported local schools. The biggest difference between black and white women’s clubs, however, was that white women’s clubs enjoyed support from local companies and access to publicly funded institutions. Many of the activities conducted by white women, such as college scholarship drives and library book donations, were impractical for African Americans, who could neither attend the State Teachers College nor borrow books from the local library. White women belonged to a community with far greater access to federal benefits, municipal support, and wealth, and the activities of their clubs reflected their social privilege.34
But black women’s clubs did also organize a variety of purely social activities. In addition to running daycares and teaching home economics courses, the lives of black clubwomen in the 1930s were filled with parties, cake walks, hikes, picnics, ice cream socials, beauty pageants, and dances. Hammond, Lucille, Charles, and Myrtle Smith were all featured prominently in social news from the Mobile Street District. They hosted dinners, attended parties, and participated in bridge tournaments.35
The social lives of Mobile Street residents were documented by local women, who sent neighborhood updates to national black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the Pittsburgh Courier for inclusion in the “Mississippi” sections of their national weekly editions. The Baltimore Afro-American and the Pittsburgh Courier were each sold in the Mobile Street District during parts of the 1930s, but the Chicago Defender always remained the most popular Northern black newspaper in the neighborhood. Between 1930 and 1939, the Defender published at least four hundred updates from Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street District. It is impossible to gauge exactly how many local African Americans read the Defender each week, but the newspaper was clearly important for many people in the neighborhood. In 1936, a reporter for the Defender interviewed Hattiesburg grocer J. B. Woods at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, writing, “He says people in his town are strong for The Chicago Defender and feel lost without it.”36
Black women’s clubs stereotypically included middle- and upper-class women, but Hattiesburg was also home to a small number of clubs led by working-class women. For example, Reponzia Washington, the wife of a sawmill worker and carpenter, was a leader in the Social Kings Club. Verda Mott, whose husband was a truck driver, was president of the Mah-Jong Social Club. Numerous groups of working-class black men and women participated in a variety of groups that outlined the parameters of their social lives.37
In 1936, a group of black male employees at the Hercules Powder Company formed their own organization called the Hercules Social Club. These men lived difficult lives and occupied rigidly segregated and dangerous jobs that placed them in close proximity to toxic and explosive chemicals. Black employees at Hercules were not even allowed to enter the plant through the same entrance as white workers, let alone use the company’s new clubhouse. But even these low-paid and excluded men developed a group identity based on their common employer.38
Members of the Hercules Social Club left behind no explanation of their particular goals or vision, but its leadership suggests that these working-class men ascribed great importance to their roles within the group. The club’s business manager, twenty-eight-year-old Roosevelt Fox, was a former railroad laborer; its chairman, twenty-five-year-old Albert Washington, had an eighth-grade education; its treasurer, fifty-four-year-old Steve Gould, was an Alabama native supporting a family of seven; its secretary, Robert Richardson, lived with his wife and infant daughter in a tiny rented shack; its vice-president, thirty-four-year-old Hattiesburg resident Houston Haney, had a seventh-grade education and lived with his wife, mother, niece, and two daughters in a little rented shotgun home; and its president, Muffy McCoy, lived with his wife in the left side of a split shotgun house that was only large enough for a single window. One can only speculate what this club meant to these men. They were all poor, black, and disfranchised, living in Great Depression–era Mississippi. But as leaders in the Hercules Social Club, they carried impressive titles in front of their names. And they gathered with their families on every fourth Friday night at eight o’clock to play cards, sing, and talk, enjoying precious respite from lives that were otherwise filled with little respect and very difficult days. Race and socioeconomic status framed the parameters of their working-class lives, but did not extinguish their sense of communal belonging or in any way eclipse their humanity.39
On weekend nights, the dance halls and makeshift juke joints of the Mobile Street District filled with more raucous activities. By the mid-1930s, Hattiesburg’s black downtown was home to drinking establishments such as the Red Circle Beer Garden and the Love Garden of Joy, as well as dozens of informal bars operated out of stores and private homes. Although Mississippi extended prohibition even after the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933, a 1934 state law did authorize the sale of light wine and beer—but not hard liquor—in some venues. Regardless, state liquor laws mattered little in the unregulated juke joints that operated near Mobile Street. On weekend nights, hundreds of working-class black men and women gathered in those spaces to gamble, drink, and dance late into the night. “They used to say that they lived for Saturday night,” remembered one local of the neighborhood’s reputation. “That’s when they whooped it up and had a real good time.”40
The black revelers who frequented these juke joints and dance halls bore witness to some remarkable American musical history. Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street District, located in close proximity to New Orleans, had for decades been a hotbed of black musical talent. Jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton appeared in Hattiesburg nearly twenty years before most people in New York City or Chicago had ever heard of him. As early as 1907, the neighborhood had its own group—the Hattiesburg Big Four String Band—that played to both black and white audiences across the region. This rich tradition continued throughout Jim Crow. The list of musicians known to have performed in the Mobile Street District in the 1930s includes Robert Johnson, Little Brother Montgomery, Cooney Vaughn, Hattiesburg natives Gus Perryman and Mississippi Matilda, and the Edgewater Crows, who performed a popular song called the “Mobile Street Stomp” in homage to the local black business community. In 1936, a white music producer from Jackson came to Hattiesburg to record a group known as the Mississippi Jook Band. According to Rolling Stone magazine, their tracks “Barbeque Bust” and “Dangerous Woman” represented the first recorded evidence of “fully formed rock & roll guitar riffs and a stomping rock & roll beat.”41
The most popular events in the Mobile Street District were the Friday night football games played by the Eureka High School Tigers. In 1936, the Tigers moved to a new home field located at the recently completed recreational park in the Mobile Street District. That fall, the Tigers enjoyed their best season to that point in school history. Appropriately dressed in orange and black, the Tigers won all ten of their games by a combined score of 146–6 on their way to winning the Big Eight Conference championship (Mississippi’s toughest conference for black schools).42
The Eureka Tigers captured the city’s adoration. “Everybody loved Eureka football games,” remembered class of 1938 graduate Isaac Thomas. “Hattiesburg used to be booming with celebrations after the football games,” recalled another black resident. Even white people started coming. Eureka games were regularly advertised in the Hattiesburg American and included a “special section” reserved for white spectators. Ruby Cook, a white girl who grew up in Hattiesburg during the 1920s and 1930s, frequently attended Eureka games with her future husband and their friends. In fact, the couple’s first date was at a Eureka Tigers game. Mrs. Cook remembered the stadium “wrapped up with people, black and white.” “It was bigger than Hattiesburg High,” she recalled. “They had a little old drum major.… That kid could stand and put his feet on the ground and his head on the ground backwards and twirl his baton.”43
Eureka High School football team, 1941. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi)
Eureka was the Big Eight Conference champion again in 1937 and produced strong teams in each of the following years. The best team in school history was probably the 1940 squad, which went unbeaten and was named Mississippi state champion. That December, the Tigers were given the honor of hosting the Pine Bowl Classic, an annual exhibition game played between championship teams from different Southern states. On Christmas Day of 1940, Eureka hosted Haywood High School from Brownsville, Tennessee. The Tigers jumped out to an early lead before eventually losing their momentum and falling by a score of 13–6.44
Football occupied a half dozen or so evenings in the fall, but Eureka High School played a major role in local black life throughout the year. During the 1930s, Eureka hosted an endless variety of adult education classes, summer teacher workshops, organization meetings, lectures, and concerts. At one point in the early 1930s, Eureka hosted an estimated eighteen hundred attendees during the annual statewide meeting of the Afro-American Sons and Daughters, Mississippi’s largest black fraternal organization. People from the community were in the building all the time. Eureka was a site of constant activity and a beacon of communal pride.45
As should be expected, Eureka High School received far fewer financial resources than the all-white Hattiesburg High School. During the Great Depression, the state of Mississippi spent about half the national average on per pupil school expenditures. Black students were particularly disadvantaged. During the 1929–30 academic year, Mississippi spent an average of $31.33 on white students and only $5.94 on black ones. Per capita expenditures offer a useful contrast, but because these calculations typically do not account for additional expenses such as transportation, electricity, water, and administrative costs, they do not fully measure the totality of racially based educational inequalities. Critical, too, is the fact that black schools did not have comparable access to benefits provided by the New Deal. Between 1935 and 1937, New Deal programs allocated approximately $8 million to white school buildings in Mississippi and $400,000 to black school buildings, a particularly stark comparison considering that African Americans still comprised roughly half of the state’s population.46
The disparities in Forrest County were not quite as unequal as the state averages. Figures from each year are not readily available, but in 1940, the county spent an average of $37.84 on white students and $18.20 on black students. Despite this inequity, $18.20 actually represented about three times the state average for per-pupil spending on African American students. As late as 1939, 30 percent of Mississippi counties still did not even have a high school for black students. Hattiesburg actually had one of the best black educational systems in the state. Students in grades one through six were split between three schools: the Third Ward School, the Sixteenth Section School, and Eureka. All local black students who continued beyond sixth grade went to Eureka.47
Eureka opened the 1937 academic year with an enrollment of 822 students guided by a faculty of fifteen. Principal J. W. Addison had taught math at Eureka since the school opened in 1921 and had recently been promoted. Henry Whisenton, a graduate of Tougaloo College, was the assistant principal and football coach. Alfred Todd, a graduate of the Tuskegee Institute, taught history and served as assistant football coach. All the other teachers were women: Ruby Henry, Vera Spencer, Laura McLaurin, Marie Washington, Rubye Watson, Rosa Hines, Estelle Jenkins, Rhoda Mae Hopkins, Rhoda Tademy, Grace Love, Sarah Clark, and Pennie Lee Cole, who later married Mr. Todd. Most of the female teachers were single and over the age of thirty, with at least two years of college experience. At least three of the twelve were Hattiesburg natives. Pennie Lee Cole, Marie Washington, and Rosa Hines were second-generation Hattiesburgers whose fathers had worked for one of the railroads or at J. J. Newman Lumber.48
Eureka’s curriculum included basic subjects—English, social and vocational civics, health, general mathematics and algebra, science, American government, economics, and history. Some teachers also offered a variety of electives based on their expertise. Marie Washington, for example, taught Latin. Former student Douglas Conner also remembered black history classes featuring lessons on Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey. Female students learned domestic science in a small annex in back of the school. Many of the girls learned to make the very dresses they wore to school at the school itself.49
Most black Hattiesburg youths did not finish high school, but they did generally remain enrolled in school longer than the average black Mississippian. Hattiesburg was among the state’s leaders in rates of school attendance and literacy among African Americans. Many of those who did graduate—usually less than forty per year—went to college. “There have gone out of the [Eureka] high school of Hattiesburg quite a number of young men and women who have gone to colleges,” observed a local white WPA researcher in 1936. The Eureka alumni who attended college seem to have felt well prepared by their experience at the school. Douglas Conner, salutatorian of the 1939 class, remembered having been “fortunate to have had dedicated teachers who demanded performance.” Conner, who later became a doctor, was particularly encouraged by Mr. Whisenton, who, he remembered, “inspired in me a love of science which was so essential for my later medical training.” Isaac Thomas, a 1938 graduate who also became a doctor, credited his greatest professional accomplishments to the teachers at Eureka and the education he received there. “If it hadn’t been for the encouragement of the instructors there at Eureka like Mrs. Clark, Mrs. Love, Professor Todd, Professor Whisenton, Mrs. Washington, Mrs. Tademy,” Thomas told an interviewer in 1994, “I don’t know what I would have done.”50
Eureka teachers were compassionate and devoted. They were also strict and demanding. They dressed formally for classes and required colleagues and pupils alike to refer to them as “Professor,” “Miss,” or “Missus.” They were also harsh disciplinarians. Back then, there was little debate about corporal punishment in Southern public schools. Eureka teachers used switches, straps, and paddles to strike students who violated the rules. “The strap was the road then,” remembered one former student. “You just had to obey.” Another Eureka graduate remembered an incident when Principal Addison overheard a student disrespect a teacher. Without asking any questions, Principal Addison stormed into the classroom and whipped the student. “He came in taking off his belt,” the observer recalled. Cora Jones, a longtime seventh grade teacher, developed a particularly frightening reputation as a harsh disciplinarian. Douglas Conner recalled that she “taught with the aid of a thick strap.” Isaac Thomas remembered that Miss Jones had a special chair that she called “the electric chair.” When students misbehaved, Thomas explained, Miss Jones would “make them sit in the chair and whup them with the left hand.”51
Extracurricular activities at Eureka closely reflected communal values of racial uplift and self-help. In 1931, black students at Eureka formed an organization named the Negro Boys and Girls Improvement Association. Advised by their teachers and the pastors of Mt. Carmel Baptist and St. Paul Methodist churches, the Negro Boys and Girls Improvement Association included approximately eighty students dedicated to improving the “physical, mental and moral” health of black youths in the community. They invited guest speakers, organized efforts to improve school grounds, and held fundraising concerts. They somehow convinced the internationally renowned Celestin’s Original Tuxedo Jazz Orchestra to play at one such event. In 1935, another group of Eureka students successfully organized a fundraising effort to build a new hedge around the building.52
For years, Eureka also had an active Luxis Club, which was essentially the black version of the YMCA-supported Hi-Y clubs for white youths. Led by high school students aged fifteen and older, members of the local Luxis Club contributed to local black life by sponsoring speaking engagements at the school, leading exercise programs, and participating in statewide meetings. In 1936, Eureka hosted several hundred student leaders during the Thirteenth Annual Assembly of the Mississippi High School Luxis Clubs. Among the attendees at that 1936 conference was a high school student named Gladys Noel, who later, as Gladys Noel Bates, became famous for her civil rights activism, especially in 1948 when she and NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall sued the state of Mississippi over racially unequal teacher salaries.53
Located just a block from Mobile Street, Eureka was a direct extension of the community. From elementary to high school, Eureka students were immersed in the community-organizing traditions of the Mobile Street District. The young people experienced all the normal school-age rites of passage—building new friendships, taking exams, attending dances, falling in love. But even beyond the school lessons and social activities, Eureka students also learned important lessons about how to behave in their community and navigate life in the Jim Crow South. These messages reinforced lessons that black youths learned at home and church and helped provide crucial pathways toward community membership.54
For students, the community must have also at times seemed like an extension of Eureka. As former student Ralph Woullard Jr. recalled, “All of the teachers lived in the community.” Principal Addison lived directly across the street. Students interacted with Principal Addison not only in Eureka’s hallways but in virtually every corner of their neighborhood. In 1938, one unfortunate student skipped school to go to the movies only to find Mr. Addison perched next to him in the theater. Students saw their teachers all the time—at churches, concerts, lectures, sporting events, grocery stores, barbershops, and even in their own living rooms. Deeply respected and influential in the community, black teachers were ubiquitous role models and sources of guidance.55
The Eureka Parent Teacher Association (PTA) also played an essential role in supporting students. One of the most interesting aspects of the Eureka PTA is that it included some adults who were neither parents nor teachers. The roster of PTA captains from the 1937 Christmastime fundraising drive included a diverse set of individuals: Jennie Brown, the wife of a local auto mechanic, was in her early fifties and had a fifteen-year-old son; Frank Calloway was a local janitor in his late twenties who was married and had a five-year-old child; beautician Brookie Young was in her mid-twenties and married to a much older night watchman who had four daughters of his own; railroad employee Isiah Reed and his wife, Maggie, were the parents of a ten-year-old daughter; Janie Stringer was a single woman in her mid-thirties who had no children and worked at one of the local black-owned funeral homes; Myrtle Smith was a captain in the 1937 drive. Along with Principal Addison and teachers Susie Neal and Cora Jones, this group in 1937 raised a reported $371.91 in support of the school, thus helping alleviate some of the racially imbalanced school funding discrepancies. Other PTA activities included collecting baskets of food and clothing, hosting benefit concerts in the school auditorium, and organizing a school brass band.56
Local adults also helped plan numerous school lunches, theatrical performances, proms, and birthday and graduation parties. “The baccalaureate was held at the school and it was always packed,” recalled one student. The school was widely supported. Virtually all black community organizations were somehow affiliated with Eureka, either by holding events at the school or organizing programs to benefit the school. Examples of these activities include a 1938 movie night sponsored by local churches, the formation of a Colored Youth Forum by members of the Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, a beauty pageant for black girls run by the Mt. Carmel Missionary Society, an effort by local businessmen to purchase curtains for the auditorium, and the inclusion of several girls in crafting and artwork contests at the annual meeting of the state Women’s Federated Club.57
Eureka was more than just a school. It was a communal rallying point, and the children who attended that school were reared not only by their relatives but also by their teachers, neighbors, and other members of the community. “It’s not like today where you only look after your children,” remembered class of 1937 graduate Veola Chase. “It was more like a family setting.… All of the children were community children.”58
It might be difficult to imagine how black children who grew up in Hattiesburg during the Great Depression could have felt optmistic about their futures. Most people in their community were desperately poor, and members of their race were treated as second-class citizens and excluded from many of the opportunities available to whites. All the black children of that era suffered through the difficulties of daily life during Jim Crow. “Day after day I lived with segregation,” remembered Douglas Conner years later. “It was a part of my community; it was a part of my life. Being black meant a life of subordination, a life of limited goals and expectations.”59
But just as memorable to Conner and to many of his peers was the support and guidance they received from the adult leaders of their community. Much of that support is obvious—the 1934 Negro Fair, PTA drives, school programs, and fundraisers. Less obvious—yet just as important—were the ways in which local black leaders acted as sources of guidance and role models for impressionable young black students like Douglas Conner.
When Conner’s parents divorced because of his father’s drinking, Conner moved in with relatives who lived down the street from members of the Smith family. Conner at a young age was impressed by Dr. Charles Smith. Walking by Dr. Charles Smith’s house almost every day, Conner came to see the black physician as a model of how to obtain success and happiness within the constraints of Jim Crow. “I saw a black man who seemed to have material success, and I dreamed it might be possible for me too,” remembered Conner of Dr. Smith. “As I passed his house on my way to and from school, I would see his fine home, his finely manicured lawn, and I would say to myself: ‘My goodness, that’s the way to live.’ ” Writing in 1985—nearly fifty years after graduating from Eureka High School—Conner reflected, “I often recall how Dr. Charles Smith had been my role model simply by being there as I walked to school in Hattiesburg.… Deep down, I think I am following in Dr. Smith’s footsteps.”60
Hammond Smith, whose store was located around the corner from Eureka, offered similar inspiration for some of the community’s children. In an interview conducted fifty-six years after Isaac Thomas graduated from Eureka High School, Thomas remembered one particular day when he walked into the Smith Drug Store “to buy me a cone of cream. I walked in and I saw the license on the wall, saw the diplomas and things. Alcorn College and Meharry Medical College. And I just made up my mind then I wanted to be a pharmacist.”61
Arvarh Strickland, a black Hattiesburg native who grew up during the 1930s and 1940s, remembered the value of local black leaders and community institutions such as Eureka High School and St. Paul Methodist Church during his youth. At Eureka, Strickland explained, “We developed pride, we acquired ambition, and above all, we learned to dream and to appreciate the dreams others had for us.” At St. Paul Methodist, Strickland remembered finding “sympathetic audiences to listen” and a forum where “I was given my first opportunities to lead.” “At St. Paul,” he recalled, “I was somebody, as were we all.”62
Strickland, who went on to become an esteemed professor of history at the University of Missouri, later in life referred to the older generation of “role models and mentors” in the Mobile Street District as “the bridges that carried us over.” In Hattiesburg, the men and women who operated as these bridges were people like Charles and Hammond Smith and the other black men and women of their community who worked together through their churches and various organizations to help provide a sense of belonging, propriety, and hopefulness among an incredibly disadvantaged population. And these men and women became all the more empowered in the 1940s, when the Depression’s grip finally weakened and Hattiesburg’s economy suddenly surged.63