It is doubtful that any other American small town has contributed so much to the advancement of human freedom during the twentieth century as Mound Bayou. Without it, such civil rights icons as Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer, and possibly Rosa Parks might have remained invisible to history. Evers and Hamer both lived and worked in Mound Bayou during the early 1950s, and as we shall see, Parks’s story intersects with it as well. During the Jim Crow era, Mound Bayou was an inspiration for African-Americans throughout the United States. Founded in 1887 by the cousins Isaiah T. Montgomery and Benjamin T. Green, two former slaves of the Davis family—which included Confederate president Jefferson Davis—it was one of the few Southern places where African-Americans freely exercised the rights of free speech and to vote and hold office. Elsewhere in the South, they often were unable to vote, unable to publish, and subject to curfews and other restrictions on free movement. Relying primarily on consensus and moral suasion, crime was so low that the town closed its jail in the early 1920s as a “useless and unnecessary institution.”
One precondition of Mound Bayou’s success as an outpost for free expression was a political environment that encouraged business ownership and law and order. In this respect, the founders of the community shared the same view as their ally Booker T. Washington, who argued that economic power provided the most secure foundation for the protection of individual rights. But, as Mound Bayou’s founders also understood, political guarantees of equal citizenship were essential in making this possible. In 1927, the town’s Chamber of Commerce underlined this point in a recruiting advertisement for more African-American settlers. “Town of law and order; no jail,” it declared. “Come to Mound Bayou and run for judge or chief of police and not from them.”
Before Tulsa’s Black Wall Street even existed, Mound Bayou, with its multitude of Black businesses, served the same role in Mississippi. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the town had thirteen stores, several small shops, a sawmill, three cotton gins, the leading Black-owned bank in Mississippi, and ten churches. Mound Bayou also had a privately maintained high school of two hundred pupils, a rarity for African-Americans anywhere in the country, and certainly in Mississippi. The lone example of a white-controlled institution was the local Carnegie Library, which had only come about because of a personal request from Washington to Andrew Carnegie.
Mound Bayou often left a strong impression on both white and Black visitors. A Black journalist on his first stroll considered himself “as free as a Junebug, because I am in a town owned and operated by my people, and I am free to walk the streets and if I feel like going out on the streets and shouting there is no one of another race to tell me to stop.” Another Black visitor marveled that “You receive your mail from a Negro postmistress or her Negro clerk; you purchase your railroad ticket from a Negro man or his Negro assistant, you get your telephone connection by means of an exchange by which ‘Central’ is a Negro girl; all express business is transacted by the Negro manager of the American Express company; you refresh yourself with a ‘coke’ manufactured by a Negro man.” Visitors disembarking from six daily passenger trains had such entertainment choices as “the brassy clamor of the gramophone” as well as such places of amusement as “the Lyceum, the Casino, the Bon-ton café (with jazzy music), the Luck Coles restaurant” and, though perhaps less comfortably, “many advertisements of minstrel shows.”
As African-Americans increasingly took to heart the Mound Bayou model of American freedom, prominent whites were starting to notice, too. In 1907, at the request of Booker T. Washington, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered his train to make a special stop. Recalling his brief visit to Mound Bayou one year later, he hailed the community as “a thriving and prosperous town and every man in that town... is a colored man... it is an object lesson full of hope for the colored people and therefore full of hope for the white people, too.” In 1912, Booker T. Washington also came to the community. To a crowd of several thousand, he described Mound Bayou as a “place where a Negro may get inspiration by seeing what other members of his race have accomplished… where he has an opportunity to learn some of the fundamental duties and responsibilities of social and civic life.”
As they had before, outside visitors commented on the contrast between assertive Mound Bayouans, who jealously guarded their rights, and African-Americans in the rest of Mississippi, who were disfranchised and weighed down by Jim Crow. In 1943, journalist Enoch F. Waters observed: “Psychologically, Mound Bayou negroes are different. They are independent, an integrated part of the economy. They meet their neighbor on the basis of equality and their opportunities are no less, no greater than his. They go where they want without reservation, express themselves freely, live democratically and modestly. They’re a free people in a land of opportunity. And the Delta knows them as a different people. This recognition is reflected in their attitude toward Mound Bayou. People here are ‘Mr.,’ ‘Miss.,’ or ‘Mrs.’ to whites to whom other Negroes are Mary, Sam, and Sue. ‘Girls’ and ‘boys’ here are children. Adults are women and men to all that cross its boundaries.”
In 1980, longtime Mound Bayou citizen Zee A. Barron recalled that when she was a child six decades earlier, Isaiah T. Montgomery had explained to her his original vision. “When I founded Mound Bayou it was the worst howling wilderness,” he told her. She added: “And he told us why he came to Mound Bayou and how he established this community in order that Negroes may have the freedom of expression and freedom to live and earn a livelihood.”
But Mound Bayou was also a cultural symbol of freedom. Before and during the Harlem Renaissance, it provided an inspiration to both black playwrights and songsters. In 1915, the town was the setting for a lushly staged all-Black musical comedy, Darkydom. When it premiered at New York City’s Lafayette Theater on October 28, it featured a powerhouse of the top Black entertainers of the day. A reviewer did not greatly exaggerate by commenting that “No such aggregation of leaders in the firmament of Negro theatricals has ever before been gathered on a single stage.” Another predicted that it “will be hailed with delight throughout the entire country by the entire race who is interested in the renaissance of the Negro stage.” Duke Ellington so admired the chief composer Will Marion Cook that he called him “dad” and “the master of all masters of our people.” Composer Eubie Blake had an equivalent high regard for the show’s bandleader, James Reese Europe, ranking him many decades later as the “Martin Luther King of music.”
Darkydom starred the rising comedy team of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles. Nearly a decade earlier, shortly after attending Fisk, a prominent HBCU in Nashville, they had used a similar setting for their play, The Mayor of Dixie, centering on two rival mayoral candidates in all-Black Jimtown, where African Americans, as in Mound Bayou, voted without hindrance and held office.
The similarities between the two towns were not just coincidental. The example of Mound Bayou had long been available to Miller and Lyles. For example, The Nashville Globe, which was edited by Miller’s father, had given prominent coverage to the town in its formative years. There were more personal connections as well. While at Fisk University, then an emerging educational pipeline for the town’s elite, Miller lived in the same residence hall as two of the sons of Mound Bayou’s co-founder, Benjamin T. Green. One of them was future mayor Benjamin A. Green.
While the book of Darkydom apparently no longer exists, reviews give a rough summary of what it was about. The two main actors, Miller and Lyles, play two scheming tramps who are evading pursuit from a valet of a railroad executive who is trying to give them a reward for inadvertently saving the railroad president. The tramps, however, evade the valet, fearing that he is out to arrest them for bumming a ride. After getting a tip that the tramps are in Mound Bayou, the valet secures help from the town’s barber, played by Clifford Green, who, according to a critic, made a “dignified” Mose Montgomery—“a paraphrase of the founder of Mound Bayou.” The story culminates when Mose exposes two other tramps trying to wrongly collect the reward and forces them to flee town.
The show featured some nineteen musical numbers, several of which are now considered lost. Cook was the main composer, but a variety of others contributed lyrics, including James Weldon Johnson, the lyricist for “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” widely regarded as the Black national anthem, and Lester A. Walton, the manager of the Lafayette Theater and an accomplished journalist. While mostly lighthearted, the songs included the somber “Ghost Ship,” which focused on the Middle Passage. Two of the songs later found a popular audience: “My Lady Lips am Like De Honey,” with lyrics by Johnson, and “Mammy,” with lyrics by Walton (not the later Al Jolson song of the same name).
Despite the conventional plotline, the selection of Mound Bayou as the setting promoted a subtle, but ultimately subversive, message. Darkydom began its run only about eight months after the premiere of the notoriously racist Hollywood blockbuster The Birth of a Nation. At the time, white supremacy was rampant, and Woodrow Wilson was instituting Jim Crow as official policy in the federal government. Darkydom, by contrast, uncontroversially depicted African-Americans in the South working in occupations where they might often be unfamiliar to theatergoers, including political officials, the town marshal, an insurance agent, and prosperous storekeepers and bankers. These aspects of the play stood in contrast to The Birth of a Nation, which showed African American voters and politicians as menacing, childlike, and easily manipulated.
A reviewer for The Freeman, a black newspaper, hailed Darkydom as presenting “untold opportunities to a playwright in depicting Negro life in both its gay and its somber aspects.” According to an account in the Washington Bee, “many side selections were introduced, consisting of choruses, quartettes, and other musical promenades to make a street scene at Mound Bayou, Miss. Mound Bayou Bank is shown, barber shop, millinery store, hotel, etc. Villagers are passing and passing; some are going to the bank, hotel, and barbershop.”
Darkydom garnered stellar reviews, including one in Variety, which recommended it as “good for touring purposes for a long time to come, while these two crackerjack funny men, Miller and Lyles, remain the standard bearers.” The main quibble of Black critics was with the choice of the term “Darkydom.” Reviewer R.W. Thompson suggested that “If the management consults the wishes of the masses of the colored patrons, they will select a title that will convey the idea that it is genuine Negro entertainment without using a term that is banned by polite society.” Giving the play that name, he argued, detracted from “such a fruitful theme as the thrifty atmosphere of Mound Bayou affords.” Similarly, The Freeman reported that Black audiences had voted Darkydom “‘all right’—except the title.”
After its success in New York, the play toured in several northeastern cities including Newark, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. But it was running up against a rising racist tide. While it was playing in Philadelphia in November, for example, the modern Ku Klux Klan, itself inspired by The Birth of a Nation earlier in the year, was officially launched in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
By the end of 1915, the cast of Darkydom were moving on to projects. During the next decade, many became closely identified with the key accomplishments of the Harlem Renaissance. Though Darkydom was later largely forgotten, it had reached a large interracial audience, often in packed houses. By choosing Mound Bayou for the setting and characters, the authors, despite an overriding focus on pure entertainment, had challenged an older mindset, which had confined African-Americans to the roles of one-dimensional and socially marginal comic characters.
If Mound Bayou proved culturally significant as the setting for Darkydom in 1915, it continued in this role, though less explicitly, six years later. In 1921, Miller and Lyles, as actors and writers of the dialogue, teamed up with composers Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, to stage Shuffle Along. At the time, Harlem was very much on the rise as an African-American cultural, intellectual, musical, and economic center. By 1918, and lasting through the 1920s, these trends, represented by such figures as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington, became so significant that they came to be called the Negro Renaissance, or, as we’d say today, the Harlem Renaissance.
In many ways, Shuffle Along represented the culmination of the vision represented by Darkydom. Set in the fictional all-Black Southern town of Jimtown, the residents are an occupational cross section, including a mayor, police chief, store owners, and ordinary workers. All citizens have the franchise, freely express their opinions, and elections are hard-fought. Drawing a direct analogy between Jimtown and Mound Bayou, Eric Glover declares that “In Shuffle Along, blacks have Jimtown all to their own... The citizens of Jimtown give the finger to white supremacy by settling in Dixie, the states of the southeastern United States that had constituted the Confederacy.”
This is not altogether accurate. Rather than giving a collective middle finger to the white outside world, the residents just ignore it and go about their business. Miller and Lyles play the roles of Sam Peck and Steve Jenkins, partners in a grocery store. The two have a falling out when both run for mayor of Jimtown, one the leader of a Republican machine and the other an independent. In contrast to the Harvard Law–educated Benjamin Green, the polished and thoughtful mayor of Mound Bayou at the time, Sam and Steve are quasi-illiterate buffoons. After Sam calls him an electoral long shot, Steve responds, “I might be de dark horse, but you ain’t gwine be no Black Mayor.” This stereotypical dialogue was intentional by the writers. “That’s the way they [African Americans] were expected to talk,” Eubie Blake recalls. “That was very funny to white people. That’s what they wanted to hear.”
Each ignorant that their opponent is doing, Sam and Steve hire the same private detective to investigate whether the other is pilfering from the cash register to finance his campaign. Each hedges his bets by agreeing that the winner will pick the other as police chief. Sam and Steve take for granted a third candidate, Harry Walton, running on a platform to clean up Jimtown. After the election, Harry exposes the dishonesty of his opponents, wins a second election, and runs the roguish pair out of town.
Shuffle Along was a smash hit but, unlike Darkydom, it sustained this success for many years to come. By January 1922, it passed the milestone of three hundred performances, and more than one thousand attended each night, far more than any other Black show on Broadway. “The 1920s were the years of the Manhattan Black Renaissance,” Langston Hughes recalled. “It began with Shuffle Along... a honey of a show... People came back to see it innumerable times. It was always packed.”
The most memorable song from Shuffle Along was “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” composed by Blake and Sissle to salute the dark horse candidate for mayor. In addition to top-line stars from the period, the cast included the newcomers Paul Robeson and Josephine Baker in the chorus. Baker, then only sixteen, made a special impression. One reviewer hailed her as “one of the unique sights of the year, a chorus girl who literally ‘walks off with the show’ in several instances, not by mere beauty—as has been done—but by her comedy dancing.” Another wrote that it was “impossible to take your eyes off the little cross-eyed girl.”
The most important accomplishment of Shuffle Along, like Darkydom before it, was to whittle away at white prejudice against Black achievements and emphasize the common humanity of African-Americans. Many whites attended out of curiosity and skepticism about a “colored show” but came back for repeat engagements. Along the way, they had been exposed to the depiction of a southern town where African-Americans expressed themselves with humor and grit, as voters and concerned citizens.
While the precise impact on white attitudes is debatable, Shuffle Along was clearly a breakthrough for African-Americans. A popular song in the Ziegfeld Follies of1922, “It’s Getting Dark on Old Broadway,” gives some indication:
Real darktown entertainers hold the stage.
You must black up to be the latest rage.
Yes, the great white way is white no more,
It’s just like a street on a Swanee shore;
It’s getting very dark on old Broadway.
In the decades that followed, Mound Bayou continued to be an important cultural and political symbol of self-government, security, and freedom for African-Americans. According to a refrain in the popular blues song “Mound Bayou” from 1942: “All my friends are lucky to be way back there / If they knew what I’ve been through, they’d stay back there!”
For many African-Americans of the 1950s, Mound Bayou took on renewed importance. Under the leadership of the wealthy physician, mutual aid organizer, and fraternal society leader Dr. T.R.M. Howard, it was the headquarters of a popular movement which promoted both civil rights and self-help and entrepreneurship: the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. In addition to staging mass rallies against Jim Crow and disfranchisement, the Council, under Howard’s leadership, not only provided protection to witnesses and Black reporters during the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, but it coordinated an informal investigation of the lynching. Two months after the trial, on November 27, 1955, Howard came to Montgomery, Alabama to speak about the Till case, and about his activities in Mound Bayou, to an overflow audience at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Martin Luther King Jr. hosted the event, and Rosa Parks was in the audience. Only a few days after Howard’s speech, she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. Parks later said that she was thinking of Emmett Till when she made that decision.
