City Beautiful
An Award-Winning Newspaper Column by Jonathan Odell
In 2008-2009 Jonathan Odell penned a series of columns for his hometown newspaper in Laurel, Mississippi, based on the interviews he did while collecting background information for his novels. Dozens of people, Black and White, shared their family lore concerning the county’s scandalous Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow past.
In 2010 the Mississippi Press Association (MPA) awarded the column First Place for a Series of Stories. MPA judges singled out the series for special mention by offering an additional commendation: “Phenomenal! What a great idea, and what great reading! Riveting from the start. By embracing all the controversy and giving space to all those voices, you’ve created a truly engrossing series for your readers. First by a huge margin!”
Below is a compilation of those columns:
Laurel, Mississippi: City in a Bubble
Jonathan Odell
FAULT LINES
Twenty-six years after the Civil War ended, the Yankees took over Laurel, Mississippi. There were no shots exchanged, only money. Not that Jones County had never seen Yankees before, but until that point in time, we had avoided being occupied by them. After all, Jones County got its name from John Paul Jones whose famous line was “I have not yet begun to fight!” That pretty much summed up Jones County. They’d fight anybody, anytime, anywhere, for the right to be left alone to their own ways.
The county got the nickname of “The Free State of Jones” for more than one reason. Before the Civil War, it was hard to get anybody to stay, much less hold any kind of public office. When you were in Jones County, things always looked better some place else. Nothing but endless pine forests and poor farming land. So, for a large part of the County’s history, those who remained were free from any form of government and learned to work things out for themselves, every man the master of his own world, regardless how meager. This even extended to family rearing. If the few men who owned slaves wanted to procreate with one and raise up two families side-by-side, it was nobody’s business but theirs.[i]
When the Civil War commenced, this attitude of fierce independence, combined with the relative scarcity of slavery dampened enthusiasm for seceding from the Union, and Jones County became a refuge for Confederate deserters, Union sympathizers, and those who believed that just because Mississippi seceded from the Union, they didn’t have to. That’s when “The Free State of Jones” got its second meaning. Jones County fancied itself an independent republic. The message was loud and clear, “just let us be!” The heroes of Jones County were not grey-clad soldiers, but backwoods men and women employing any means, fair or foul, to stay alive, feed their families, guard their farms, and steer clear of what they called, “a poor man’s fight and a rich man’s war.”
Respect for authority gained little headway after the Civil War, either. Families made do on small plots of land cut from the seemingly endless forests of pine. Family clans were the only widely accepted form of government. For many years following the War, nobody was much interested in this forlorn swampy stretch of wilderness, and we were left happily to our own devices.
Then the North ran out of trees.
Mississippi’s dense forests of yellow pine attracted wealthy Northerners. They sent their land buyers down to the Piney Woods to gobble up vast acreages, clear-cutting everything within reach of a railroad track and hauling it away to more civilized locations, leaving behind a plague of abandoned shantytowns. Every time they laid a mile of tract, a shantytown spouted up. It was said you could throw a stone from sawmill to sawmill all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Like an enormous hoard of locusts, the teams would deplete the land, then move on to the next stop, leaving behind abandoned mills, rotting shanties, and ravaged wasteland. It wasn’t pretty, but it was standard business practice. 2
In 1891 Laurel was in line to become the next abandoned shantytown. That’s when Our Marvelous Yankees rode in from Iowa to the rescue. The Gardiner brothers traveled south by train and within the first few moments of setting foot in Mississippi were slick talked by a Jones County sawmill owner into buying him out of his failing operation, lock, stock, and barrel. For a generous $64,000 they got the ramshackle operation that had already cleared every tree that could be ox-carted to the depot and 16,000 acres of timberland that nobody could get at. The bare, stump-strewn community was such a blemish on God’s earth that the former owner had even refused to name it after himself, not wanting to sully his reputation by having his memory forever associated with that hovel of a settlement. Instead, he called it Laurel, after a flowering bush that grew locally. Unfortunately, the plant was toxic to livestock and had to be eradicated.
We were quick to discover these weren’t your regular run of Northerner. You could say we found them peculiar. This was the age of robber barons—Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Carnegies—the “Captains of Industry” who were known for amassing great fortunes while keeping their employees impoverished. These were men who operated as absentee landlords, extracting all the wealth from an area, and then spending their plunder in more affluent surroundings.
There is an old Laurel saying that underscores this uniquely Gardiner eccentricity. “While others came to rape, pillage and leave, Our Yankees raped, pillage and stayed.”
The two Gardiners brothers, along with their kin the Eastman’s, promptly announced they were going to pack up their socialite wives and their privileged children, vacate them from their fine Iowa mansions and elite schools and transplant them to the bleakest, most isolated settlement in Mississippi, which by the way, had to be the most Yankee-averse State in the Nation.
The Gardiners and the Eastman’s believed they could raise up a civilized paradise by starting from scratch right there in the Piney Woods. But the question remained, if you were going to civilize anybody in the whole wide world, why would you start out with folks as obstinate and primitive as the backwoods people of Jones County, where the only thing in abundance was acres of yellow pine, too far removed from the railroads to be much good to anybody except outlaws in hiding and razor back hogs?
I can imagine the day Catherine Marshall Gardiner, the Grande dame of our Yankee clan, disembarked at the stump-stubbled depot, and looked around at what her husband had got her into. There she was in her satins and silks, a woman of wealth, breeding, and class, on a first-name basis with the nation’s moneyed elite, standing on a rough-plank loading platform, surveying her new home. Goats and pigs roamed among shacks that had never seen a pane of glass or a real cook stove.
She wrote to a friend soon after, “Although things are a bit crude, the people are real neighborly.” Spoken like the most devoted of foreign missionaries. While the men created wealth, she threw all her energy into as civilizing this rough-edged populace with a religious zeal that fueled her ambitions until her the day she died.
Her early reports back home encouraged the other branches of the family. They all followed, the Gardiners and the Eastman’s, Our Marvelous Yankees, as rootless and oblivious as clouds, scouting out prime locations for their heavenly palaces in the Piney Woods.
The men worked with a vengeance, tearing down the old sawmill and investing a fortune to bring in an engineering genius from Milwaukee to design a state-of-the-art milling operation. They hired local workers and paid better than market wages.
To everyone’s surprise, this included Black laborers.
Perhaps they hadn’t read the papers.
The year before the founders arrived, Mississippi ratified the notorious Constitution of 1890 that put the Negro back in his place, by eliminating his right to vote, sanctioning segregation, and ensuring he would never be a political or economic threat to a White Mississippi man again.
But in the Eastman-Gardiner never-never-land, Black laborers worked side-by-side with Whites, both in the camps and in the mill. They even promoted some Black workers to foremen. Our Yankees were indeed treading dangerous waters.3
There were those who thought that the Panic of 1893 was the lumber barons just desserts for flouting social conventions. Construction across the nation halted and demand for lumber dried up. Laurel’s marvel of a mill, the one that cost Our Yankees the last of their capital, sat idle. They could not afford to pay their laborers, White or Black.
This is when folks were sure the Iowans would show their true colors. Any other lumber baron would tell their workers to get lost, every man for himself, and when business picked up, start over with a fresh crew. After all, it wasn’t like Our Yankees owed these backwoods laborers their loyalty.
Besides the newspapers, Our Yankees hadn’t read the management books of the day either. Hard-nosed businessmen of the day, like Andrew Carnegie, all agreed you couldn’t be sentimental and make it through these rough times. In those days laborers were locked out, starved, beaten, and shot just to show who the boss was.
The Eastman-Gardiners saw things differently. They told their workers if they agreed to accept a drastic cut in pay, that when times improved the company would give them a raise and reimburse them for any back pay lost during the crisis. Management and labor made a mutually beneficial deal that most 21st Century companies couldn’t pull off. After seven months of living hand-to-mouth, better times returned, and the owners not only kept their promise but also donated the entire first year’s profits, $600, toward the building of a school for the workers’ children. Eastman Gardiner Lumber did better than survive.
In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt outraged White Mississippians when he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for lunch. James K. Vardaman rode that outrage all the way to the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion. He promised if elected he would close all schools for Blacks. “An educated nigger,” he espoused, “is the waste of a good field hand.” He was overwhelmingly elected.3
Our Yankees must have missed his inauguration speech. They went about constructing schools for their White and Black workers alike, dangerously pushing the limits of Jim Crow. These Yankees were building their empire in a bubble, shielding it from the prevalent racist and monopolistic practices of the day. They figured their money and shrewd business-savvy would keep safe from the menace building around them.
They were right. Under Vardaman’s administration, Laurel got the credit for a lumber boom that dramatically boosted the State’s chronically ill economy. By the end of Vardaman’s term of office in 1908, Mississippi ranked 3rd in the country for lumber production. Laurel alone would soon turn out 1,000,000 board feet of lumber—a day.
Word was getting out about this miracle in the Piney Woods. The locals called it “The Magic City”. Northerners doubted the rumor of “enlightened labor practices” in of all places, Mississippi. And in a lumber camp to boot, sites notorious for drunken brawls, knifings and every other kind of unsavory practice that lonely, demoralized men could devise.4
No, the Northerners figured, it had to be a hoax.
In 1912, the Atlantic Monthly decided exposed the lies and dispatched a reporter to Laurel. And to make the story even more dramatic, they sent a woman. She admitted to coming with very low expectations, probably just hoping to get out alive. She wasn’t much comforted when, on the way down, a fellow passenger assured her that all the talk about hookworm in the South was just a conspiracy to keep Northern capital away. Nor was she thrilled when she arrived in Laurel and saw the “fields of blackened and ragged stumps,” or when a yellow cow ambled down the sidewalk toward her searching for something to chew on.
Of course she was rightly impressed with the modernity of the equipment, able to cut deeper into the forest than ever before. But what really caught her eye was on the monstrous steam-powered loaders, whose primary purpose was to lift immense logs and set them onto the waiting train cars.
Yet that’s not what sent her estimation of Laurel soaring. She noticed that not only were the giant machines conveying logs; they were also being used to lift and remove prefabricated housing units. Our Yankees had devised a way for the usual crew of four hundred workers to take their homes with them every time they changed camp. And since they could have homes, they could have families. Our Yankees had done the impossible. They had transformed vicious, depressing, uncivilized logging-camps into pleasant moveable villages, complete with wives and children and schools and churches. No more endless track littered with dead shantytowns.
And education? At that time Mississippi was spending an average of $6.17 per White pupil. Laurel spent $20. Laurel schools, in 1912, were already acknowledged as best in the State.
To top it all, the woman reporter discovered that founders’ benevolence extended to Negroes. They too were provided with schools and churches, houses, and health care, just as were the Whites. This was unheard of anywhere else in the nation, much less the South. While Mississippi spent next to nothing on the few existing Negro schools, and seemed set on burning those down, Laurel was not only constructing them but also liberally funding them. That reporter could see right off Our Yankees had a knack for pushing the prevailing system of segregation as far as they could get away with legally.5
Word spread. Men looking for fair pay, descent employment and a little respect found their way to Laurel. The school system attracted families from all over and new businesses sprang up, included three more sawmills. First-generation free Blacks, whose only option had been to place themselves back into bondage under the sharecropping system, came for the chance of being treated like human beings and they gave rise to the first Negro middle class in Mississippi, some say in the South. Front Street grew into an unbroken string of Black-owned businesses and professionals. They exhibited a sense of upward mobility found nowhere else in the South. According to a Northern paper, “By the 1920s Laurel’s black population evoked a confidence and culture that paralleled the socioeconomic ascension and development of many northeastern black communities.”7
SPLENDOR IN THE SWAMP
Catherine Gardiner had been busy as well. She hit upon an idea that would put as deep an imprint upon Laurel as her husband’s business practices. A well-traveled woman, she was aware of the revolutionary thinking taking hold in cities like Chicago, Detroit and Washington D.C. called the “City Beautiful Movement.” This progressive urban philosophy espoused that the character of the citizenry could be enhanced, and civic virtue inspired through beautification and monumental grandeur. This spoke to Catherine’s prophetic spirit. Until now only major cities had embraced the concept. Laurel was a speck on the map with just 8400 people. But that didn’t dampen Mrs. Gardiner’s grandiose visions. She got busy and began advocating.
Tiny Laurel with its pig trails and rutted tracks, sitting on the edge of the Tallahala Swamp, almost overnight became a city of broad boulevards, lined with oak saplings. They were planted as if to show Mrs. Gardiner’s faith in the majesty of her vision.
And just as they had worked within the segregation laws of the day, City Beautiful conformed to certain class distinctions that were respectfully observed in the layout of the city grid. Each level of society was assigned its own street. Just as New York’s Fifth Avenue was a symbol of wealth, Laurel was to have its own majestic Fifth Avenue where the lumber barons erected stately mansions. Fourth Avenue was reserved for managers, Third for foremen. Second and First were for workers and their families. Merchants got 6th and 7th. Class and industry were in perfect balance.
Between 1903 and 192o magnificent buildings appeared like Imperial Faberge eggs, each one outdoing the previous in elegance and uniqueness. There were the splendid Georgian, Jeffersonian Revival, and Classical Revival mansions built by the barons. The merchants erected Queen Annes, Colonial Revivals, and Mediterranean style homes. The Episcopal Church on 5th Avenue was Romanesque Revival, while a Presbyterian Church was designed in Neo-Gothic style and erected across the street. There was a Beaux Arts Courthouse and a Prairie-Craftsman Style City Hall inspired by Louis Sullivan. All of this was within a four-block area!
The lumber company’s headquarters was now an opulent Italianate mansion copied from a Roman villa built in the 1540s. Three hundred and fifty buildings, private, commercial, and public, went up in bold classical revival styles. The town never had a population much over 20,000 people yet boasted the finest collection of late 19th and early 20th century revival architecture in the South.
The Gardiners engaged the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted to landscape a city parkway system for tiny Laurel. Olmstead, known as the "father of American Architecture,” designed the country’s first public spaces including New York City's Central Park and the grounds surrounding the U. S. Capitol. The National Recreation Association declared Laurel as having the best park system of any small town in America.
And naturally in those days when you thought of golf courses, you immediately Scotland came to mind. So, Seymour Dunn the famous Scottish golfer and noted designer was dispatched to lay out the local golf course. Professional golfers of the day swore it was the best 18-hole course in the nation.6
The local school system became so renown, the prestigious University of Chicago declared that it would accept any Laurel High School graduate without an entrance exam.
The family even transformed their person grief into the city’s glory. The tragic death of the sole male heir to the baron’s empire in 1921, at 23, provided Catherine and her relations with the opportunity to shape the character of Laurel schoolchildren generations to come. As a memorial to the young man, the family built a Georgian Rival mansion to house a public art gallery, the first in the State. The founding families contributed from their own extensive collections, donating important 19th and 20th-century paintings by such noteworthy American artists as Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt, George Inness, John Frederick Kensett and Ralph Albert Blakelock. Works by John H. Twachtman and John Singer Sargent were acquired soon thereafter.
When the average person thought of Mississippi, a world-class art museum was not the first thing that naturally came to mind. Take a barefoot boy growing up on a hard-scrabble Jones County farm, set him down on the marble floors of the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, and just see what happens. I have. One hour in that magnificent temple, located in the poorest State in the nation, lifts a child forever above his Piney Woods horizon, irrevocably altering how he perceives the world and his place in it.8
I can only imagine what Catherine Gardiner and her kin told these internationally renowned designers, architects, engineers and artists to get them to come to Laurel, Mississippi at the turn of the century. What were they thinking as their trains pushed deeper and deeper into backwoods America, past dirt-road depots, shantytowns and falling down tenement shacks, hollow-eyed children doomed to ignorance, hookworm and pellagra, void of any sign of culture and grace, only to be met at the Laurel station by starry-eyed Yankees with open checkbooks and grandiose visions of Athens in a bubble?
Of course there were plenty of times Our Yankees put aside their noble illusions and bowed to popular sentiment. Like in 1911 when the town to erect a Confederate memorial to dispel once and for all, any lingering doubts about Jones County’s loyalty to the late glorious cause. George S. Gardiner was asked to fund the grand marble and granite monument. He contributed $1,200 and the following quip: “You see there a handsome monument erected with Yankee money to the Confederate dead of the Free State of Jones which seceded from the Confederacy after the Confederacy seceded from the Union.”
No doubt he was beginning to understand the fault lines on which he had built his city.
More surprising though, was how little Our Yankees were challenged for their racial tolerant practices. Across the rest of Mississippi, things had only gotten worse for Blacks since the Vardaman administration. Jim Crow was the rule, and most Blacks were shackled to a tenet farm system called sharecropping which seemed to be designed to put them deeper into debt each year.
In 1916 Theodore G. Bilbo was elected governor and proposed a solution to the “race problem.” “I’m the best friend the nigger’s got in the state of Mississippi,” Bilbo declared. “I’m trying to do something for ‘em. I want to send ‘em back to Africa where they belong.”
That period was tragic for Blacks all over the country. It seemed that in every city that African Americans could compete in the workforce and create a viable middle-class, Whites instigated a riot to level the community. From 1917 to 1923, twenty-six race riots erupted. Over a thousand Black citizens were slaughtered by White mobs, their homes and businesses burned.
Then why not Laurel, with its conspicuous Black middle class located in the most racially explosive state in the nation?
An Eastern reporter in 1912 explained the good relations between Blacks and Whites this way. “In general, race troubles seem to arise where the poor Whites are ignorant and inefficient, and so have some reason to fear competition.” But the writer went on to say Laurel Whites were “absolutely opposite…responding to any opportunity for education and self-help.” Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner’s plans to build character into the nature of the work as well into the fabric of city life seemed to be paying off handsomely.9
It allowed Catherine Gardiner to push the envelope even further. When she read an article in the New York Sun about the state of Negro education, she openly questioned Laurel’s commitment to Black education. After learning that black school children received one quarter of the funding appropriated to White education, she spearheaded the building of new schools for blacks, contributing $10,000 and challenging both the city and the Black community to match it. They did, creating a unified effort, ingeniously bridging cultural, class and racial divisions.
In 1928, Oak Park opened its doors, becoming the center of a conspiracy that operated under the radar of Jim Crow. In order not to upset the White supremacists, the school was officially termed a vocational school, which implied teaching only basic life skills and useful trades. Yet Catherine Gardiner and the Black community heroically set about creating an institution that attracted and paid for the best Black teaching talent from around the country. Oak Park launched surgeons, lawyers, political scientists, college professors, star athletes, Army generals, concert pianists, and operatic superstars.10
CRACKING OF THE BUBBLE
Laurel reached its zenith in the 1920s. The founders had ceaselessly advocated civic responsibility, cultural development, and industrial growth, infusing the community with art, traveling theaters, Chautauqua lectures, books, and jobs. Laurel claimed more millionaires per capita than any city in the nation. A host of Black chauffeurs drove their mistresses to the Piggly Wiggly to shop on Fridays. Upstairs maids, downstairs maids, cooks, and butlers often lived in their own quarters on the alleys behind the mansions, flaunting small town segregation codes. Things were good, and they looked like they could stay this way forever.
If only the trees hadn’t given out.
By this time there were four milling operations in Laurel, and the lands were depleted. And of course, there was the Great Depression. Even the city in the bubble wasn’t immune from that.
For half a century, the barons had ingeniously used every tool at their disposal to keep their City Beautiful from succumbing to its violent past. Yet the fissures of class and race had always run beneath the town’s foundations. As the Eastman-Gardiner dynasty became less of a force economically, their social and cultural clout to hold together those disparate elements waned as well. The fault lines on which they built their dreams were shifting.
But even as their influence waned, they were able to bequeath new life for their child. With the forests played out, one thing they had was plenty of sawdust. The families sent off to for Thomas Alva Edison’s chief engineer, (again, why not the best?) and charged the young man with coming up with a use for the mountains of waste. By a combination of science and accident he hit upon a revolutionary invention—artificial wood. His name was William Horatio Mason, and he named the product after himself: Masonite. The company grew into an industrial behemoth that would carry the city forward, long after the barons were gone.
By the 1940s, Our Marvelous Yankees, who had come in like clouds, were in retreat. The children no longer graduated from local schools. Their women traveled in the glamorous circles of big city life. They kept 12 room apartments on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and townhouses in Georgetown. The men took jobs on Wall Street. They golfed with Presidents and became involved in international intrigues. A grandson of Catherine’s began what was to become the CIA. They say he was the one who dubbed it “The Mighty Wurlitzer.” They were citizens of the world now.11
Even the Grande dame Catherine Gardiner, now widowed, seemed to lose her relevance in the face of the encroaching world. She spent much of her time traveling from continent to continent, collecting baskets and exotic artifacts. It was not uncommon to find this type of bizarre item in the local paper.
Mrs. George Gardiner, recently returned from another tour of the world, has made a gift of 24 new baskets, two grass skirts from New Zealand, a poi that a New Zealand girl would wear on her head and few other strange in interesting bits she has picked up, here and there, in her sojourn in the Malay Archipelago. Laurel Leader Call, September 5, 1935.
The temples still stood. Mrs. Gardiner’s seedlings grew into majestic oaks. Each year fourth graders trooped through the art museum to see the second smallest basket in the world and the medieval suit of armor and the Samurai swords. They were told the story about the poor rich boy who died young in 1921 and had his honeymoon mansion rebuilt into this glorious institution. The founding families had taken on the aura of an ancient race of giants.
Their names were still on the streets and etched into the stone lentils of the buildings, but they themselves dime in the memory of its citizens. William Horatio Mason moved into his mansion, not on 5th Avenue with the benevolent barons, but on 6th with the merchants. He was a scientist and entrepreneur, not a molder of character and community. Besides, Laurel was now too industrially diverse and too much a part of the global market to be shaped by one family’s dream, no matter how noble. The “real world” had finally arrived.
As one pragmatic White Laurelite of the time put it, “We’re suffering a terrific hangover from benevolent paternalism. There’s a death struggle to keep up public institutions which were endowed privately now that the endowments are no longer adequate. We’re used to having poppa foot the bill.”12
What the founding families saw as necessities for shaping the kind of character and civic virtue that could hold a community together across culture, class and race was now as viewed as an unwelcome tax burden.
It is said that every success sows the seeds of its own destruction. It’s possible that the community built upon those old fault lines was always destined to shake apart, as the tectonic plates of history shifted. Laurelites were soon to discover that they couldn’t keep their past waiting in the wings forever.
Notes:
[i] Victoria Bynum, “White Negroes in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law,” Journal of Southern History LXIV (May 1998).
2 Noel Polk, A Human Perspective: Mississippi’s Piney Woods, (The University Press of Mississippi 1986), 21-24. Polk, a Mississippi State professor is also the author of Outside the Southern Myth (University Press of Mississippi, 1997) which contrasts the Piney Woods folks of Mississippi with their better known, cotton-rich “…julep-sipping, plantation owning…” cousins in the Delta.
3 Sally Vardaman Johnson, interview with author. Johnson is the great-granddaughter of Mississippi’s notorious governor, James K. Vardaman, known as the “Great White Chief.” Besides advocating the burning of African American schoolhouses, he publicly promoted lynching as a way to enforce White supremacy.
4 Southern Lumberman 28(1 July 1895).
5 Ethel Puffer Howes, “The Aesthetic Value of Efficiency,” The Atlantic Monthly CX (July 1912), 81-91.
6 Lavish Laurel, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, 23 August, 1996.
7Albany Evening Journal, 24 June, 1922.
8 A local tradition that dates well before integration calls for schools to provide fourth-grade students from all the schools in the area, Black and White, a guided tour of the museum. Many older Laurelites, including myself, recall this day being a seminal experience in their emergent worldviews.
9 Ethel Puffer Howes, 88.
10 Cleveland Payne, interview with the author. Payne is a 1957 graduate of Oak Park, a retired college professor and local historian for Laurel’s African American community. He is the author several books including, The Oak Park Story: A Cultural History (National Oak Park High School Alumni Association, 1988)
11 Alexander Chisholm Lindsey, interview with author. Lindsey’s great-uncle was Frank Gardiner Wisner, raised in Laurel, and chosen by Dean Acheson in 1947 to create CIA covert operations. His life of international intrigue and his tragic death are the subjects of several books on the CIA. Lindsey’s grandmother, Elizabeth Wisner Chisholm and granddaughter to the original lumber baron, once overheard her housekeeper, a teen-aged Leontyne Price, singing while she worked. Mrs. Chisholm sent the girl to Julliard and served as her accompanist, filling local venues with black admirers as well as with Laurel’s White elite, effectively integrating Mississippi audiences years before the Civil Rights movement.
12 Laurel Leader Call, 30 April, 1941.
An Award-Winning Newspaper Column by Jonathan Odell
In 2008-2009 Jonathan Odell penned a series of columns for his hometown newspaper in Laurel, Mississippi, based on the interviews he did while collecting background information for his novels. Dozens of people, Black and White, shared their family lore concerning the county’s scandalous Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow past.
In 2010 the Mississippi Press Association (MPA) awarded the column First Place for a Series of Stories. MPA judges singled out the series for special mention by offering an additional commendation: “Phenomenal! What a great idea, and what great reading! Riveting from the start. By embracing all the controversy and giving space to all those voices, you’ve created a truly engrossing series for your readers. First by a huge margin!”
Below is a compilation of those columns:
Laurel, Mississippi: City in a Bubble
Jonathan Odell
FAULT LINES
Twenty-six years after the Civil War ended, the Yankees took over Laurel, Mississippi. There were no shots exchanged, only money. Not that Jones County had never seen Yankees before, but until that point in time, we had avoided being occupied by them. After all, Jones County got its name from John Paul Jones whose famous line was “I have not yet begun to fight!” That pretty much summed up Jones County. They’d fight anybody, anytime, anywhere, for the right to be left alone to their own ways.
The county got the nickname of “The Free State of Jones” for more than one reason. Before the Civil War, it was hard to get anybody to stay, much less hold any kind of public office. When you were in Jones County, things always looked better some place else. Nothing but endless pine forests and poor farming land. So, for a large part of the County’s history, those who remained were free from any form of government and learned to work things out for themselves, every man the master of his own world, regardless how meager. This even extended to family rearing. If the few men who owned slaves wanted to procreate with one and raise up two families side-by-side, it was nobody’s business but theirs.[i]
When the Civil War commenced, this attitude of fierce independence, combined with the relative scarcity of slavery dampened enthusiasm for seceding from the Union, and Jones County became a refuge for Confederate deserters, Union sympathizers, and those who believed that just because Mississippi seceded from the Union, they didn’t have to. That’s when “The Free State of Jones” got its second meaning. Jones County fancied itself an independent republic. The message was loud and clear, “just let us be!” The heroes of Jones County were not grey-clad soldiers, but backwoods men and women employing any means, fair or foul, to stay alive, feed their families, guard their farms, and steer clear of what they called, “a poor man’s fight and a rich man’s war.”
Respect for authority gained little headway after the Civil War, either. Families made do on small plots of land cut from the seemingly endless forests of pine. Family clans were the only widely accepted form of government. For many years following the War, nobody was much interested in this forlorn swampy stretch of wilderness, and we were left happily to our own devices.
Then the North ran out of trees.
Mississippi’s dense forests of yellow pine attracted wealthy Northerners. They sent their land buyers down to the Piney Woods to gobble up vast acreages, clear-cutting everything within reach of a railroad track and hauling it away to more civilized locations, leaving behind a plague of abandoned shantytowns. Every time they laid a mile of tract, a shantytown spouted up. It was said you could throw a stone from sawmill to sawmill all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Like an enormous hoard of locusts, the teams would deplete the land, then move on to the next stop, leaving behind abandoned mills, rotting shanties, and ravaged wasteland. It wasn’t pretty, but it was standard business practice. 2
In 1891 Laurel was in line to become the next abandoned shantytown. That’s when Our Marvelous Yankees rode in from Iowa to the rescue. The Gardiner brothers traveled south by train and within the first few moments of setting foot in Mississippi were slick talked by a Jones County sawmill owner into buying him out of his failing operation, lock, stock, and barrel. For a generous $64,000 they got the ramshackle operation that had already cleared every tree that could be ox-carted to the depot and 16,000 acres of timberland that nobody could get at. The bare, stump-strewn community was such a blemish on God’s earth that the former owner had even refused to name it after himself, not wanting to sully his reputation by having his memory forever associated with that hovel of a settlement. Instead, he called it Laurel, after a flowering bush that grew locally. Unfortunately, the plant was toxic to livestock and had to be eradicated.
We were quick to discover these weren’t your regular run of Northerner. You could say we found them peculiar. This was the age of robber barons—Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Carnegies—the “Captains of Industry” who were known for amassing great fortunes while keeping their employees impoverished. These were men who operated as absentee landlords, extracting all the wealth from an area, and then spending their plunder in more affluent surroundings.
There is an old Laurel saying that underscores this uniquely Gardiner eccentricity. “While others came to rape, pillage and leave, Our Yankees raped, pillage and stayed.”
The two Gardiners brothers, along with their kin the Eastman’s, promptly announced they were going to pack up their socialite wives and their privileged children, vacate them from their fine Iowa mansions and elite schools and transplant them to the bleakest, most isolated settlement in Mississippi, which by the way, had to be the most Yankee-averse State in the Nation.
The Gardiners and the Eastman’s believed they could raise up a civilized paradise by starting from scratch right there in the Piney Woods. But the question remained, if you were going to civilize anybody in the whole wide world, why would you start out with folks as obstinate and primitive as the backwoods people of Jones County, where the only thing in abundance was acres of yellow pine, too far removed from the railroads to be much good to anybody except outlaws in hiding and razor back hogs?
I can imagine the day Catherine Marshall Gardiner, the Grande dame of our Yankee clan, disembarked at the stump-stubbled depot, and looked around at what her husband had got her into. There she was in her satins and silks, a woman of wealth, breeding, and class, on a first-name basis with the nation’s moneyed elite, standing on a rough-plank loading platform, surveying her new home. Goats and pigs roamed among shacks that had never seen a pane of glass or a real cook stove.
She wrote to a friend soon after, “Although things are a bit crude, the people are real neighborly.” Spoken like the most devoted of foreign missionaries. While the men created wealth, she threw all her energy into as civilizing this rough-edged populace with a religious zeal that fueled her ambitions until her the day she died.
Her early reports back home encouraged the other branches of the family. They all followed, the Gardiners and the Eastman’s, Our Marvelous Yankees, as rootless and oblivious as clouds, scouting out prime locations for their heavenly palaces in the Piney Woods.
The men worked with a vengeance, tearing down the old sawmill and investing a fortune to bring in an engineering genius from Milwaukee to design a state-of-the-art milling operation. They hired local workers and paid better than market wages.
To everyone’s surprise, this included Black laborers.
Perhaps they hadn’t read the papers.
The year before the founders arrived, Mississippi ratified the notorious Constitution of 1890 that put the Negro back in his place, by eliminating his right to vote, sanctioning segregation, and ensuring he would never be a political or economic threat to a White Mississippi man again.
But in the Eastman-Gardiner never-never-land, Black laborers worked side-by-side with Whites, both in the camps and in the mill. They even promoted some Black workers to foremen. Our Yankees were indeed treading dangerous waters.3
There were those who thought that the Panic of 1893 was the lumber barons just desserts for flouting social conventions. Construction across the nation halted and demand for lumber dried up. Laurel’s marvel of a mill, the one that cost Our Yankees the last of their capital, sat idle. They could not afford to pay their laborers, White or Black.
This is when folks were sure the Iowans would show their true colors. Any other lumber baron would tell their workers to get lost, every man for himself, and when business picked up, start over with a fresh crew. After all, it wasn’t like Our Yankees owed these backwoods laborers their loyalty.
Besides the newspapers, Our Yankees hadn’t read the management books of the day either. Hard-nosed businessmen of the day, like Andrew Carnegie, all agreed you couldn’t be sentimental and make it through these rough times. In those days laborers were locked out, starved, beaten, and shot just to show who the boss was.
The Eastman-Gardiners saw things differently. They told their workers if they agreed to accept a drastic cut in pay, that when times improved the company would give them a raise and reimburse them for any back pay lost during the crisis. Management and labor made a mutually beneficial deal that most 21st Century companies couldn’t pull off. After seven months of living hand-to-mouth, better times returned, and the owners not only kept their promise but also donated the entire first year’s profits, $600, toward the building of a school for the workers’ children. Eastman Gardiner Lumber did better than survive.
In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt outraged White Mississippians when he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for lunch. James K. Vardaman rode that outrage all the way to the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion. He promised if elected he would close all schools for Blacks. “An educated nigger,” he espoused, “is the waste of a good field hand.” He was overwhelmingly elected.3
Our Yankees must have missed his inauguration speech. They went about constructing schools for their White and Black workers alike, dangerously pushing the limits of Jim Crow. These Yankees were building their empire in a bubble, shielding it from the prevalent racist and monopolistic practices of the day. They figured their money and shrewd business-savvy would keep safe from the menace building around them.
They were right. Under Vardaman’s administration, Laurel got the credit for a lumber boom that dramatically boosted the State’s chronically ill economy. By the end of Vardaman’s term of office in 1908, Mississippi ranked 3rd in the country for lumber production. Laurel alone would soon turn out 1,000,000 board feet of lumber—a day.
Word was getting out about this miracle in the Piney Woods. The locals called it “The Magic City”. Northerners doubted the rumor of “enlightened labor practices” in of all places, Mississippi. And in a lumber camp to boot, sites notorious for drunken brawls, knifings and every other kind of unsavory practice that lonely, demoralized men could devise.4
No, the Northerners figured, it had to be a hoax.
In 1912, the Atlantic Monthly decided exposed the lies and dispatched a reporter to Laurel. And to make the story even more dramatic, they sent a woman. She admitted to coming with very low expectations, probably just hoping to get out alive. She wasn’t much comforted when, on the way down, a fellow passenger assured her that all the talk about hookworm in the South was just a conspiracy to keep Northern capital away. Nor was she thrilled when she arrived in Laurel and saw the “fields of blackened and ragged stumps,” or when a yellow cow ambled down the sidewalk toward her searching for something to chew on.
Of course she was rightly impressed with the modernity of the equipment, able to cut deeper into the forest than ever before. But what really caught her eye was on the monstrous steam-powered loaders, whose primary purpose was to lift immense logs and set them onto the waiting train cars.
Yet that’s not what sent her estimation of Laurel soaring. She noticed that not only were the giant machines conveying logs; they were also being used to lift and remove prefabricated housing units. Our Yankees had devised a way for the usual crew of four hundred workers to take their homes with them every time they changed camp. And since they could have homes, they could have families. Our Yankees had done the impossible. They had transformed vicious, depressing, uncivilized logging-camps into pleasant moveable villages, complete with wives and children and schools and churches. No more endless track littered with dead shantytowns.
And education? At that time Mississippi was spending an average of $6.17 per White pupil. Laurel spent $20. Laurel schools, in 1912, were already acknowledged as best in the State.
To top it all, the woman reporter discovered that founders’ benevolence extended to Negroes. They too were provided with schools and churches, houses, and health care, just as were the Whites. This was unheard of anywhere else in the nation, much less the South. While Mississippi spent next to nothing on the few existing Negro schools, and seemed set on burning those down, Laurel was not only constructing them but also liberally funding them. That reporter could see right off Our Yankees had a knack for pushing the prevailing system of segregation as far as they could get away with legally.5
Word spread. Men looking for fair pay, descent employment and a little respect found their way to Laurel. The school system attracted families from all over and new businesses sprang up, included three more sawmills. First-generation free Blacks, whose only option had been to place themselves back into bondage under the sharecropping system, came for the chance of being treated like human beings and they gave rise to the first Negro middle class in Mississippi, some say in the South. Front Street grew into an unbroken string of Black-owned businesses and professionals. They exhibited a sense of upward mobility found nowhere else in the South. According to a Northern paper, “By the 1920s Laurel’s black population evoked a confidence and culture that paralleled the socioeconomic ascension and development of many northeastern black communities.”7
SPLENDOR IN THE SWAMP
Catherine Gardiner had been busy as well. She hit upon an idea that would put as deep an imprint upon Laurel as her husband’s business practices. A well-traveled woman, she was aware of the revolutionary thinking taking hold in cities like Chicago, Detroit and Washington D.C. called the “City Beautiful Movement.” This progressive urban philosophy espoused that the character of the citizenry could be enhanced, and civic virtue inspired through beautification and monumental grandeur. This spoke to Catherine’s prophetic spirit. Until now only major cities had embraced the concept. Laurel was a speck on the map with just 8400 people. But that didn’t dampen Mrs. Gardiner’s grandiose visions. She got busy and began advocating.
Tiny Laurel with its pig trails and rutted tracks, sitting on the edge of the Tallahala Swamp, almost overnight became a city of broad boulevards, lined with oak saplings. They were planted as if to show Mrs. Gardiner’s faith in the majesty of her vision.
And just as they had worked within the segregation laws of the day, City Beautiful conformed to certain class distinctions that were respectfully observed in the layout of the city grid. Each level of society was assigned its own street. Just as New York’s Fifth Avenue was a symbol of wealth, Laurel was to have its own majestic Fifth Avenue where the lumber barons erected stately mansions. Fourth Avenue was reserved for managers, Third for foremen. Second and First were for workers and their families. Merchants got 6th and 7th. Class and industry were in perfect balance.
Between 1903 and 192o magnificent buildings appeared like Imperial Faberge eggs, each one outdoing the previous in elegance and uniqueness. There were the splendid Georgian, Jeffersonian Revival, and Classical Revival mansions built by the barons. The merchants erected Queen Annes, Colonial Revivals, and Mediterranean style homes. The Episcopal Church on 5th Avenue was Romanesque Revival, while a Presbyterian Church was designed in Neo-Gothic style and erected across the street. There was a Beaux Arts Courthouse and a Prairie-Craftsman Style City Hall inspired by Louis Sullivan. All of this was within a four-block area!
The lumber company’s headquarters was now an opulent Italianate mansion copied from a Roman villa built in the 1540s. Three hundred and fifty buildings, private, commercial, and public, went up in bold classical revival styles. The town never had a population much over 20,000 people yet boasted the finest collection of late 19th and early 20th century revival architecture in the South.
The Gardiners engaged the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted to landscape a city parkway system for tiny Laurel. Olmstead, known as the "father of American Architecture,” designed the country’s first public spaces including New York City's Central Park and the grounds surrounding the U. S. Capitol. The National Recreation Association declared Laurel as having the best park system of any small town in America.
And naturally in those days when you thought of golf courses, you immediately Scotland came to mind. So, Seymour Dunn the famous Scottish golfer and noted designer was dispatched to lay out the local golf course. Professional golfers of the day swore it was the best 18-hole course in the nation.6
The local school system became so renown, the prestigious University of Chicago declared that it would accept any Laurel High School graduate without an entrance exam.
The family even transformed their person grief into the city’s glory. The tragic death of the sole male heir to the baron’s empire in 1921, at 23, provided Catherine and her relations with the opportunity to shape the character of Laurel schoolchildren generations to come. As a memorial to the young man, the family built a Georgian Rival mansion to house a public art gallery, the first in the State. The founding families contributed from their own extensive collections, donating important 19th and 20th-century paintings by such noteworthy American artists as Winslow Homer, Albert Bierstadt, George Inness, John Frederick Kensett and Ralph Albert Blakelock. Works by John H. Twachtman and John Singer Sargent were acquired soon thereafter.
When the average person thought of Mississippi, a world-class art museum was not the first thing that naturally came to mind. Take a barefoot boy growing up on a hard-scrabble Jones County farm, set him down on the marble floors of the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, and just see what happens. I have. One hour in that magnificent temple, located in the poorest State in the nation, lifts a child forever above his Piney Woods horizon, irrevocably altering how he perceives the world and his place in it.8
I can only imagine what Catherine Gardiner and her kin told these internationally renowned designers, architects, engineers and artists to get them to come to Laurel, Mississippi at the turn of the century. What were they thinking as their trains pushed deeper and deeper into backwoods America, past dirt-road depots, shantytowns and falling down tenement shacks, hollow-eyed children doomed to ignorance, hookworm and pellagra, void of any sign of culture and grace, only to be met at the Laurel station by starry-eyed Yankees with open checkbooks and grandiose visions of Athens in a bubble?
Of course there were plenty of times Our Yankees put aside their noble illusions and bowed to popular sentiment. Like in 1911 when the town to erect a Confederate memorial to dispel once and for all, any lingering doubts about Jones County’s loyalty to the late glorious cause. George S. Gardiner was asked to fund the grand marble and granite monument. He contributed $1,200 and the following quip: “You see there a handsome monument erected with Yankee money to the Confederate dead of the Free State of Jones which seceded from the Confederacy after the Confederacy seceded from the Union.”
No doubt he was beginning to understand the fault lines on which he had built his city.
More surprising though, was how little Our Yankees were challenged for their racial tolerant practices. Across the rest of Mississippi, things had only gotten worse for Blacks since the Vardaman administration. Jim Crow was the rule, and most Blacks were shackled to a tenet farm system called sharecropping which seemed to be designed to put them deeper into debt each year.
In 1916 Theodore G. Bilbo was elected governor and proposed a solution to the “race problem.” “I’m the best friend the nigger’s got in the state of Mississippi,” Bilbo declared. “I’m trying to do something for ‘em. I want to send ‘em back to Africa where they belong.”
That period was tragic for Blacks all over the country. It seemed that in every city that African Americans could compete in the workforce and create a viable middle-class, Whites instigated a riot to level the community. From 1917 to 1923, twenty-six race riots erupted. Over a thousand Black citizens were slaughtered by White mobs, their homes and businesses burned.
Then why not Laurel, with its conspicuous Black middle class located in the most racially explosive state in the nation?
An Eastern reporter in 1912 explained the good relations between Blacks and Whites this way. “In general, race troubles seem to arise where the poor Whites are ignorant and inefficient, and so have some reason to fear competition.” But the writer went on to say Laurel Whites were “absolutely opposite…responding to any opportunity for education and self-help.” Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner’s plans to build character into the nature of the work as well into the fabric of city life seemed to be paying off handsomely.9
It allowed Catherine Gardiner to push the envelope even further. When she read an article in the New York Sun about the state of Negro education, she openly questioned Laurel’s commitment to Black education. After learning that black school children received one quarter of the funding appropriated to White education, she spearheaded the building of new schools for blacks, contributing $10,000 and challenging both the city and the Black community to match it. They did, creating a unified effort, ingeniously bridging cultural, class and racial divisions.
In 1928, Oak Park opened its doors, becoming the center of a conspiracy that operated under the radar of Jim Crow. In order not to upset the White supremacists, the school was officially termed a vocational school, which implied teaching only basic life skills and useful trades. Yet Catherine Gardiner and the Black community heroically set about creating an institution that attracted and paid for the best Black teaching talent from around the country. Oak Park launched surgeons, lawyers, political scientists, college professors, star athletes, Army generals, concert pianists, and operatic superstars.10
CRACKING OF THE BUBBLE
Laurel reached its zenith in the 1920s. The founders had ceaselessly advocated civic responsibility, cultural development, and industrial growth, infusing the community with art, traveling theaters, Chautauqua lectures, books, and jobs. Laurel claimed more millionaires per capita than any city in the nation. A host of Black chauffeurs drove their mistresses to the Piggly Wiggly to shop on Fridays. Upstairs maids, downstairs maids, cooks, and butlers often lived in their own quarters on the alleys behind the mansions, flaunting small town segregation codes. Things were good, and they looked like they could stay this way forever.
If only the trees hadn’t given out.
By this time there were four milling operations in Laurel, and the lands were depleted. And of course, there was the Great Depression. Even the city in the bubble wasn’t immune from that.
For half a century, the barons had ingeniously used every tool at their disposal to keep their City Beautiful from succumbing to its violent past. Yet the fissures of class and race had always run beneath the town’s foundations. As the Eastman-Gardiner dynasty became less of a force economically, their social and cultural clout to hold together those disparate elements waned as well. The fault lines on which they built their dreams were shifting.
But even as their influence waned, they were able to bequeath new life for their child. With the forests played out, one thing they had was plenty of sawdust. The families sent off to for Thomas Alva Edison’s chief engineer, (again, why not the best?) and charged the young man with coming up with a use for the mountains of waste. By a combination of science and accident he hit upon a revolutionary invention—artificial wood. His name was William Horatio Mason, and he named the product after himself: Masonite. The company grew into an industrial behemoth that would carry the city forward, long after the barons were gone.
By the 1940s, Our Marvelous Yankees, who had come in like clouds, were in retreat. The children no longer graduated from local schools. Their women traveled in the glamorous circles of big city life. They kept 12 room apartments on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and townhouses in Georgetown. The men took jobs on Wall Street. They golfed with Presidents and became involved in international intrigues. A grandson of Catherine’s began what was to become the CIA. They say he was the one who dubbed it “The Mighty Wurlitzer.” They were citizens of the world now.11
Even the Grande dame Catherine Gardiner, now widowed, seemed to lose her relevance in the face of the encroaching world. She spent much of her time traveling from continent to continent, collecting baskets and exotic artifacts. It was not uncommon to find this type of bizarre item in the local paper.
Mrs. George Gardiner, recently returned from another tour of the world, has made a gift of 24 new baskets, two grass skirts from New Zealand, a poi that a New Zealand girl would wear on her head and few other strange in interesting bits she has picked up, here and there, in her sojourn in the Malay Archipelago. Laurel Leader Call, September 5, 1935.
The temples still stood. Mrs. Gardiner’s seedlings grew into majestic oaks. Each year fourth graders trooped through the art museum to see the second smallest basket in the world and the medieval suit of armor and the Samurai swords. They were told the story about the poor rich boy who died young in 1921 and had his honeymoon mansion rebuilt into this glorious institution. The founding families had taken on the aura of an ancient race of giants.
Their names were still on the streets and etched into the stone lentils of the buildings, but they themselves dime in the memory of its citizens. William Horatio Mason moved into his mansion, not on 5th Avenue with the benevolent barons, but on 6th with the merchants. He was a scientist and entrepreneur, not a molder of character and community. Besides, Laurel was now too industrially diverse and too much a part of the global market to be shaped by one family’s dream, no matter how noble. The “real world” had finally arrived.
As one pragmatic White Laurelite of the time put it, “We’re suffering a terrific hangover from benevolent paternalism. There’s a death struggle to keep up public institutions which were endowed privately now that the endowments are no longer adequate. We’re used to having poppa foot the bill.”12
What the founding families saw as necessities for shaping the kind of character and civic virtue that could hold a community together across culture, class and race was now as viewed as an unwelcome tax burden.
It is said that every success sows the seeds of its own destruction. It’s possible that the community built upon those old fault lines was always destined to shake apart, as the tectonic plates of history shifted. Laurelites were soon to discover that they couldn’t keep their past waiting in the wings forever.
Notes:
[i] Victoria Bynum, “White Negroes in Segregated Mississippi: Miscegenation, Racial Identity, and the Law,” Journal of Southern History LXIV (May 1998).
2 Noel Polk, A Human Perspective: Mississippi’s Piney Woods, (The University Press of Mississippi 1986), 21-24. Polk, a Mississippi State professor is also the author of Outside the Southern Myth (University Press of Mississippi, 1997) which contrasts the Piney Woods folks of Mississippi with their better known, cotton-rich “…julep-sipping, plantation owning…” cousins in the Delta.
3 Sally Vardaman Johnson, interview with author. Johnson is the great-granddaughter of Mississippi’s notorious governor, James K. Vardaman, known as the “Great White Chief.” Besides advocating the burning of African American schoolhouses, he publicly promoted lynching as a way to enforce White supremacy.
4 Southern Lumberman 28(1 July 1895).
5 Ethel Puffer Howes, “The Aesthetic Value of Efficiency,” The Atlantic Monthly CX (July 1912), 81-91.
6 Lavish Laurel, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, 23 August, 1996.
7Albany Evening Journal, 24 June, 1922.
8 A local tradition that dates well before integration calls for schools to provide fourth-grade students from all the schools in the area, Black and White, a guided tour of the museum. Many older Laurelites, including myself, recall this day being a seminal experience in their emergent worldviews.
9 Ethel Puffer Howes, 88.
10 Cleveland Payne, interview with the author. Payne is a 1957 graduate of Oak Park, a retired college professor and local historian for Laurel’s African American community. He is the author several books including, The Oak Park Story: A Cultural History (National Oak Park High School Alumni Association, 1988)
11 Alexander Chisholm Lindsey, interview with author. Lindsey’s great-uncle was Frank Gardiner Wisner, raised in Laurel, and chosen by Dean Acheson in 1947 to create CIA covert operations. His life of international intrigue and his tragic death are the subjects of several books on the CIA. Lindsey’s grandmother, Elizabeth Wisner Chisholm and granddaughter to the original lumber baron, once overheard her housekeeper, a teen-aged Leontyne Price, singing while she worked. Mrs. Chisholm sent the girl to Julliard and served as her accompanist, filling local venues with black admirers as well as with Laurel’s White elite, effectively integrating Mississippi audiences years before the Civil Rights movement.
12 Laurel Leader Call, 30 April, 1941.