It was a whole lot better than it is now because it’s gone now.
—Hattiesburg native Richard Boyd, 1991
On the first weekend of every October, the old black downtown of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, hosts an event called the Historic Mobile Street Renaissance Festival. By that time of year, the summer heat has faded away from southern Mississippi and left the region with clear, sunny skies and temperatures in the mid-seventies. Mobile Street, a once thriving black commercial center now pockmarked with empty lots, returns to life. Festival organizers estimate that ten thousand people come to the event, an impressive number for a city of fifty thousand.
Saturday is the busiest day. Beginning early in the morning, the day features a full slate of events, including a gospel competition, a motorcycle show, a hip-hop contest, and the ever-popular Sho’ Nuff Good Barbecue Cook-off. All day long, representatives from local organizations and churches sell artwork, clothing, raffle tickets, and plates of food, filling the warm autumn air with the smells of pulled pork, macaroni and cheese, greens, ribs, and fried catfish. In the afternoon, blues artists infuse the festival with the sound of electric guitars and deep, guttural lyrics. Kids scamper about the crowd, chasing one another between games of double-dutch and turns on inflatable playgrounds. Teenagers stroll down the paved road, holding hands with sweethearts and making plans for Saturday night. Adults gather in small groups along the cracked sidewalks, laughing, sipping sweet tea, and waving at friends and neighbors. The festival draws people of all ages and races to eat, dance, and help celebrate the history of Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street District. The weather is beautiful. The food is delicious. The music is fun. And the people are happy.1
A little park sits about a block south of the center of the festival. The park contains three benches, a handful of small trees, and a plaque commemorating the site as the former location of the Woods Guesthouse. Destroyed by fire in 1998, the guesthouse stood at 507 Mobile Street for over seventy years. The building served a variety of purposes during its time, but today it is remembered most often as the local headquarters of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, an epic, statewide civil rights campaign that captured America’s attention and helped black Mississippians gain the right to vote. A second sign in front of the park indicates the site’s number on the Hattiesburg Freedom Summer Trail, a guided audio tour of fifteen sites that were important to the civil rights movement in Hattiesburg.2
Hattiesburg, also known as the Hub City, abounds in civil rights history. Of over forty Mississippi towns involved in Freedom Summer, Hattiesburg hosted the greatest number of movement volunteers, and its Freedom Schools boasted the largest enrollment. Black Hattiesburgers participated at rates unheard of in other places. By one estimate, over three thousand local African Americans—about a third of the city’s black population at the time—were active in the Freedom Summer. Those were powerful days in Hattiesburg. Local churches swelled with mass meetings. People who had never cast a ballot in their lives went to the courthouse to demand voter registration forms. Children as young as eight years old wrote letters to the president of the United States demanding their freedom. Grade-school dropouts helped plan an overthrow of the state Democratic Party. Regular folks turned into leaders. Some became heroes. They were, as one outsider later remembered them, “people of spirit.”3
Freedom Summer itself was merely one act in a broader local movement. Hattiesburg was active throughout the 1960s. The city’s civil rights era was filled with hundreds of marches, protests, sit-ins, and boycotts and tragically marred by arrests, beatings, and murder. Hattiesburg was the home of well-known freedom fighters such as Vernon Dahmer, Clyde Kennard, Dorie and Joyce Ladner, and the indomitable Victoria Jackson Gray, who in 1964 became the first woman in Mississippi history to run for United States Senate. During the 1960s, scores of nationally known activists passed through the city—Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, Dick Gregory, Bob Moses, and Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke at Mt. Zion Baptist Church (a stop on the Hattiesburg Freedom Summer Trail) just days before he was assassinated in Memphis. The movement is etched in local lore. Locals know this history well, and they’re proud of it. But it is not the history of the movement that draws people to Mobile Street every October.4
Scattered among the crowd at the Historic Mobile Street Renaissance Festival are dozens of elderly African Americans who grew up in the neighborhood. They started this event, and the day truly belongs to them. They seem to appreciate the celebration more than most. These men and women came of age during a time when black residents could not live, shop, or eat in other parts of town. Back then, the old black neighborhood was filled with homes, offices, drugstores, groceries, ice cream parlors, barbershops, dance halls, and restaurants. Back then, Mobile Street was not as empty as it is today.
Standing among the vacant lots and crumbling buildings, the elders share memories from that bygone era. They reconstruct Mobile Street as it once was, pointing out where the old stores stood and exchanging stories of the people who lived and worked in the neighborhood. They recall buying sodas at Dr. Hammond Smith’s drugstore, working at Mrs. McLaurin’s newsstand, or running errands for Mrs. Woods. The Smith Drug Store is closed, but the building remains for now. The same cannot be said of Mrs. McLaurin’s newsstand; like the Woods Guesthouse and so many others, it too is gone. All that remains of these vanished structures are slabs of concrete or piles of brick.
Having worked so courageously during the civil rights movement to break down racial barriers, many of those elderly storytellers are local legends. Yet most of them agree that something was actually lost in those epic victories. Jim Crow had to go; there was no question about that. It was a horribly unjust society, and no one yearns for the ways black people were treated back then. But many of the elders also radiate a palpable nostalgia as they describe the old community. Through tear-streaked smiles, they recall the old community, carefully explaining that the neighborhood did not always look so decayed or feel so barren. The Mobile Street that these older folk knew once bustled with vibrant individuals and institutions. Their recollections reveal to younger folk that earlier generations of black people had built something special there, even within the constraints of Jim Crow. Once upon a time, Mobile Street had a soul.5
Established in 1880, Hattiesburg was a quintessential town of the “New South” that emerged after Reconstruction. Railroads—the definitive industrial mechanisms of post–Civil War Southern modernization—changed the nature of Southern life, opening Dixie’s interior for rapid development and creating new jobs that brought people to places like Hattiesburg. Teeming with railroad tracks, sawmills, manufacturing shops, and rising downtowns, this New South offered unprecedented industrial opportunities for a historically agrarian population. Most Southerners remained in the countryside, but hundreds of thousands of others abandoned their ancestors’ agricultural dreams in search of fresh opportunities.
White Southerners, their society defeated and upended, arrived in the developing towns hoping for renewed stability, better economic prospects, and an expansion of a racial order that protected and enhanced white supremacy. The white architects of this society developed Jim Crow in the subsequent transition from antebellum to modern. Racial segregation laws were pioneered on the railroads, and lynchings increased as the cities grew. To restore control, the white leaders of this New South institutionalized laws designed to consolidate opportunity and power, barring African Americans from full citizenship with new legislation that eliminated constitutional rights, limited access to public spaces, and restricted employment and educational opportunities. These laws were backed by fierce violence and humiliating customs of racial deference. Segregation, lynching, and exclusion cast long shadows over black freedom as African Americans were ferociously blocked from the finest promises of the New South.6
But thousands of former black slaves and their children also came to the cities, desperate to flee the farms where their ancestors had toiled. They too took the new jobs and converged in the growing urban spaces. Racial segregation limited their prospects in every walk of life but also helped form remarkable communities like the one that developed in Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street neighborhood. The nature of Jim Crow knit African Americans into tight, self-reliant groups that struggled together in their churches, businesses, and schools to insulate themselves from the horrors of racial oppression and to provide better futures for their children. The roots of dramatic change were established during this process. The foundations of the churches that later became famous during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s were laid in the 1880s and 1890s, the very era during which Jim Crow was constructed.
Through a racial history of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White explores the forces that shaped race in the American South during the era of Jim Crow. Like the Historic Mobile Street Renaissance Festival, this book is far more concerned with Jim Crow itself than with the more widely celebrated history of the civil rights movement, which, in fact, often eclipses a far more profound history of race in the American South. Jim Crow is frequently portrayed as an unbending system of racial apartheid that remained stagnant between Reconstruction and the civil rights movement. Or it is reduced to the well-known segregation statutes that affected public accommodations and education. But Jim Crow was far more complex. Such portrayals and simplifications frequently overlook key aspects of this particular form of racial apartheid and fail to uncover dramatic transformations in the racial realities of individuals, families, and cities that occurred within Jim Crow. To provide a more complete vision about black and white lives during the era of Jim Crow, this book explores a much deeper Southern racial history by looking beyond the most obvious forms of public segregation and traditional conceptualizations of a “movement,” however long or short it may have been.
In search of this more complete vision, Hattiesburg traverses traditional chronological and racial boundaries to explore the diverse set of factors that transformed race during the era of Jim Crow. Of the many components of this approach, the most important to mention here is that this book, by necessity, is a biracial history. It investigates the perspectives of both white and black Hattiesburg residents, treating representative individuals, both black and white, as conscious historical actors responding to the opportunities, challenges, and constraints of life in the modern American South.
The white sections of this narrative are presented through the personal histories of several of Hattiesburg’s leading white civic boosters and their families. These include a handful of leading businessmen, the town’s founder, and a two-term mayor, all of whom came to Hattiesburg from elsewhere and for decades heavily influenced political and economic strategies and racial policies. While thousands of white citizens played important roles in Hattiesburg during Jim Crow, not all their stories can be included here. This book makes choices that may lead to obvious omissions, especially for local readers. Moreover, as a consequence of both available evidence and historical realities, the perspectives of white women and poor white citizens are not equal to those of affluent white men. After all, it was prosperous white men who most profoundly shaped Hattiesburg’s trajectory. Their actions touched the lives of tens of thousands of people and outlined the framework of life in the Hub City for nearly a century. In some cases, members of their families remain prominent local citizens to this day.7
Documenting white lives and black lives in Southern cities are two entirely different tasks. This is a result of Jim Crow itself. The practice of segregation and the geographies of black settlement have resulted in vastly fewer archival sources of African Americans’ innermost thoughts and political and economic strategies. As in hundreds of other Southern cities, Hattiesburg has no longstanding wealthy black families who would have donated materials to historical archives. That fact, in Hattiesburg and elsewhere, is a result of the economic, political, and spatial limitations imposed upon African Americans during Jim Crow. Because of the absence of such documents as financial ledgers, meeting minutes, and newspaper records, the black sections of this narrative differ from the white sections in their ability to chronicle economic and political activity. Still, despite a dearth of traditional historical sources, the variety of methodologies used here makes possible a vivid recreation of black lives and perspectives.
The black chapters focus primarily on a local family named Smith. For decades, members of the Smith family played important roles in the Mobile Street District. The family first arrived in 1900, and for more than eighty years, they remained heavily involved in local black business, religious, educational, and civic organizations. Led by a formerly enslaved patriarch who raised four sons who became doctors, the Smith family was in many ways exceptional. Yet it was this very exceptionalism and the historical documentation that they left behind that makes the Smith family such an ideal lens through which to document black life in the Mobile Street District during the era of Jim Crow.
This alternating biracial narrative allows Hattiesburg to develop two themes crucial to understanding the changing nature of race in the American South during the era of Jim Crow. The first is to highlight black perspectives and actions. Black Southerners were never merely victims, even during the most violently repressive era of racial oppression. Rather than focusing solely on the atrocities committed against African Americans, of which there were so many, this book probes deeper into the framework of modern Southern life to explore how local African Americans responded to their present realities based on their experiences of the past and their expectations for the future. As grim as those realities may seem in hindsight, everyday African Americans in Hattiesburg constantly found and created new opportunities for themselves and their families, opportunities that produced both immediate and intergenerational results. Even at the nadir of black Southern life, thousands of African Americans experienced the greatest prospects anyone in their family had ever known.8
The second theme explores how local white leaders effected racial change in unintended and surprising ways. This does not mean that the city’s white powerbrokers were not segregationists or white supremacists. They absolutely were, and they worked in tandem with state and regional authorities to craft a system of racial oppression that was both vicious and tragic. But they too struggled while trying to navigate the challenges and opportunities of life in the modern American South. By examining their perspectives and actions over the course of time, this book shows how local white leaders often inadvertently created changes within the local racial order. By incorporating the multifaceted perspectives of white Southerners, Hattiesburg demonstrates how renegotiations in modern Southern life created patterns of unanticipated racial consequences throughout what historian C. Vann Woodward famously called “the strange career of Jim Crow.”9 As they were in real life, the fortunes of the oppressors and the oppressed in this book are at once separate and intractably bound.
The following chapters alternate between white and black perspectives to tell the story of the rise and fall of Jim Crow in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. These synchronized narratives enable Hattiesburg to reveal three primary factors that created rhythmic fluctuations in the local racial order during the era of Jim Crow while also ultimately helping to frame its demise.
First, although often brutal, the process of post–Civil War Southern modernization created unprecedented mobility for African Americans. Most black Southerners stayed on farms in the early years of the New South, but millions of others arrived in the growing cities to take the jobs offered by industrialization. Some took jobs in railroads, sawmills, factories, and light manufacturing. Others held more traditional service jobs, working in domestic positions such as maids and laundresses that were clustered by urbanization. Although black Southerners typically received only the worst jobs in the New South, they took them willingly because of the social and geographical mobility offered by wage labor and urban work. Modernization brought black migrants to the growing cities of the New South and facilitated their movement within, throughout, and eventually beyond those urban spaces. That mobility offered increased levels of autonomy for millions of black Southerners while subsequently weakening white supremacy and control, especially over the African Americans who left the South altogether. The white Hattiesburg sawmill owner who in 1917 “ran down to the station and begged the men not to leave [for Chicago]” had clearly lost an element of power.10
Second, the economy of the New South—deeply rooted as it was in its reliance on external capital and federal spending—created patterns of unintended racial consequences throughout Jim Crow. Hattiesburg’s economic history embodies this longstanding dependence. Yankees, not Southerners, built the railroads and sawmills that ignited the Hub City’s first boom. Reliant on external capital for Hattiesburg’s initial growth, local white leaders throughout the twentieth century continuously asked—at times, even begged—Northern investors and the federal government for assistance. This reliance forced local white leaders to reconsider or alter components of the local racial order. It is certainly true that white Southerners were often quite successful in maintaining power and control over African Americans during the era of Jim Crow—hence the most visible targets of the civil rights movement: public segregation, voting laws, schools, and jobs. But this book looks beyond those obvious examples of racial discrimination to examine how white leaders’ interminable pursuit of external support often resulted in subtler alterations to Jim Crow.
There were several dimensions to this. Most simply, new factories and federal government spending led to more jobs—and thus increased resources and mobility—for black residents. More complex were the political coalitions that had longstanding effects on local race relations. In an ironic twist, local white segregationists eventually found their political allies influenced by the very same black migrants who had used the mobility offered by Southern industrialization to move north, where they could vote. That expanding black political influence would haunt white Southerners in the years after World War II, when they suddenly found their racial order challenged by the “big government” and Northern influence upon which they so heavily relied. In Hattiesburg, the very same white leaders who lobbied the federal government for increased resources during the 1930s and 1940s spent much of their later years mired in a losing struggle to curb federal influence on local race relations. Jim Crow ultimately came undone when African Americans gained the ability to circumnavigate local racial power structures to access protection and equality from a federal government whose authority rapidly expanded between the 1930s and the 1960s.
The third major factor bearing upon the shift in the local racial order was racial discrimination itself. By pushing all African Americans into the margins of Southern life, the white architects of the New South helped foster the development of black communities that grew increasingly resourceful and influential. Restricted and excluded from virtually every aspect of Southern life, African Americans necessarily consolidated resources to develop their own societies and institutions that enriched black life behind the veil of Jim Crow. In many ways, these activities resembled a form of internal governance among a disfranchised people. And when we step back to see this era in a broader perspective, it becomes very clear that the organic origins of the civil rights movement in Hattiesburg and elsewhere lie in turn-of-the-century African American institution building and longstanding community-organizing traditions. Well before civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, or Fred Shuttlesworth were even born, Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church functioned as crucial organizing spaces in Southern black communities. The memory of the sense of unity and cohesion that developed in those Jim Crow–era communities still sparks nostalgia among the elderly black men and women who tell their stories every October at the Historic Mobile Street Renaissance Festival. Tragically, the value and richness of those now hollowed-out communities are so often only appreciated in their absence.
Opening amid the rise of the New South from the destitution of the Civil War and Reconstruction, this book takes readers through approximately eight decades of black and white life in Hattiesburg to illuminate how these concurrent processes affected race during the era of Jim Crow. Ultimately, this narrative weaves Hattiesburg into the fabric of modern American life, using the city itself as a character in a story that looks beyond traditional narratives of segregation and civil rights to deliver a more complex and more nuanced historical examination of race in the American South.