Though the black-controlled city of Mound Bayou had at all times punched nicely above its weight within the battle for freedom, it was within the Fifties that it had its biggest affect. It served as a safe working base for Dr. T.R.M. Howard’s Regional Council of Negro Management (RNCL). Based in 1951, RNCL was for a time essentially the most highly effective civil rights group within the South, whose officers included future civil rights icon, Medgar Evers, who had come to Mound Bayou to promote insurance coverage for Howard. His expertise as Howard’s protégé enabled him to go on later to develop into the primary area secretary of the Mississippi NAACP. The RCNL efficiently boycotted service stations that denied restrooms to African People, utilizing the slogan on ten thousand bumper stickers, “Don’t Purchase Gasoline The place You Can’t Use the Restroom.” All through the South, these bumper stickers communicated a subversive message which was immediately traceable to 1 little city.

The RCNL additionally organized rallies in Mound Bayou, which drew as many as ten thousand, together with such budding activists as Fannie Lou Hamer. Two outstanding headliners had been NAACP legal professional Thurgood Marshall and the famed gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Regardless of many inflammatory speeches, together with Howard’s crowd-pleasing story that the race-baiting late Senator Theodore G. Bilbo had despatched a message from hell, there was no obvious violence. One cause was that any white individual within the all-black city would have instantly stood out. One other deterrent to any attacker was that members of the group, together with key officers of the RNCL akin to Howard, had been closely armed, thus precluding a profitable escape.

However Mound Bayou’s pro-freedom political surroundings was the important precondition for the RCNL’s success. Mayor Benjamin A. Inexperienced declared in 1954:

Our city, I say, is essentially the most free metropolis within the South. I say this as a result of I’ve seen a lot injustice accomplished my very own individuals I couldn’t go it on. Might you? As a rule, down South there are particular locations the place we will dwell—eat, drink. There are again doorways that everyone knows. So Mound Bayou is free. We preserve it that means. Anyone is available in will get equal therapy earlier than the regulation.

Mound Bayou’s popularity as a beacon of freedom had penalties for African People that transcended its boundaries. To those that regarded the group as an remoted and smug black island, for instance, Inexperienced answered:

We don’t ask for patronage as a result of we’re coloured. Our enterprise enterprises don’t compete on a coloured foundation. We will’t afford to construct a Chinese language wall round Mound Bayou. We consider that each one avenues must be open to all individuals and we welcome vacationers who will assuredly get their cash’s value out of our city…and there’s no place the place Negroes can’t go.

These “vacationers,” had been instrumental in disseminating pro-freedom concepts past Mound Bayou. They included tens of 1000’s of African People who got here there annually from different communities to attend RCNL rallies in addition to to patronize the city’s hospital and leisure amenities. These guests typically bought their first publicity to a Southern city the place members of their race voted, held workplace, enforced the legal guidelines, spoke freely, and walked by way of the entrance door. Their day-to-day experiences in Mound Bayou had been an inspiration for altering their very own communities.

After the Supreme Courtroom’s ruling in 1954 towards college segregation in Brown v. Board of Schooling, the RCNL made its strongest problem but to Jim Crow by circulating petitions amongst black dad and mom to desegregate Mississippi’s public faculties. The marketing campaign encountered brutal retaliation from the white segregationist Residents Councils who put stress on white native bankers and different retailers (lots of whom had been members) to impose a “credit score freeze” on civil rights activists. When the RCNL and NAACP joined forces to recruit African People to petition for varsity integration, white newspapers retaliated by printing the names of the signers. The ensuing intimidation was so formidable that the RCNL deserted the technique, stating that persevering with participation was akin, as Howard put it, to capturing bear with a cap pistol.

The RNCL might have retreated on one entrance, however attacked on one other. It boldly introduced a counteroffensive towards the Residents Councils, together with a plan to encourage black companies, voluntary associations, unions, and church buildings to switch the financial institution accounts into the black-owned Tri-State Financial institution in Nashville. The objective of this “anti-freeze fund” was to allow the financial institution to advance loans at market charges to civil rights activists who had been in any other case unable to get them. The NAACP not solely embraced the proposal however made it a significant precedence. Within the subsequent months, Tri-State depositors got here to incorporate the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance coverage Firm (one of many largest and oldest black firms), the Brotherhood of Sleeping Automotive Porters, the Mississippi Prince Corridor Masons, the Knights and Daughters of Tabor, the nationwide African Methodist Episcopal Church, and varied locals of the United Vehicle Staff. Black newspapers saved a working tally and NAACP officers akin to Medgar Evers assisted in dealing with functions.

These efforts contributed to a noticeable thaw within the credit score freeze. In February 1955, for instance, a excessive NAACP official in Washington concluded that “complaints of financial pressures have out of the blue ceased to exist.” Sylvester Bowens, a farmer from Glendora, Mississippi, exuded to the organizers of the fund: “Solely Heaven is aware of the aid your newspaper and others, the NAACP, and Dr. T. R. M. Howard of the Regional Council of Negro Management dropped at my completely satisfied soul.”

Whereas the “anti-freeze fund” had helped Mound Bayou-based RCNL to outlive the racist onslaught of the White Residents Councils, the segregationist offensive by no means appeared to let up. In August 1955, critically vital occasions had been unfolding within the small Delta city of Cash, Mississippi that not solely put Mound Bayou again within the nationwide highlight but in addition altered the course of American historical past.