On May 14, 1959 — a year before the Greensboro sit-ins — Dr. Gilbert Mason walked into the Gulf of Mexico off Biloxi and was ordered out. The 26-mile beach had been built with federal taxpayer money in 1953; adjacent homeowners claimed the sand as private property. Mason came back. On April 24, 1960, a white mob attacked 125 demonstrators with chains, pipes, and guns. Police arrested the protesters, not the attackers. The wade-ins continued through 1963 while national cameras pointed elsewhere. The Justice Department sued the city in May 1960; the case moved through courts for eight years. In 1968, the Fifth Circuit ruled the beach public, and every inch of it opened. Mason ran his medical practice on Division Street through all of it. That building still stands. So does the beach.
