Blacks

Black Past - 65 years ago, on May 14, 1959, the modern era’s first major civil rights campaign in Mississippi began when Black physician Gilbert Mason attempted to swim with a group of friends at a whites-only section of Biloxi Beach on the Gulf of Mexico. Mason and his friends left the beach when threatened with arrest for violating the state’s segregation laws. But they soon established the Biloxi chapter of the NAACP, with Mason as chapter president. It took more than nine years, many demonstrations, more than 100 arrests and a federal court order, but in 1968 the city’s beaches were finally desegregated.