— The Mississippi Freedom Trail —
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Mound Bayou businessman and physician Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard (1908-1976) founded and led Mississippi's pre-eminent civil rights organization in the 1950s, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. A charismatic speaker and mentor to Medgar Evers, he led rallies and successful boycotts. He attempted reconciliation with the white community, but a bloody campaign against black civil rights activists, he left the state in 1957.
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T. R. M. Howard, M.D., a Kentucky Native, founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL) in 1951 in Cleveland as a parallel organization to the white Delta Council, which gave economic interests a voice regarding public policy in the state. The RCNL was made up of black leaders from many walks of life: ministers, business people, and members of other activist organizations. It stressed economic issues and offered classes in voter registration. Howard was also a founding member of the Mississippi NAACP.
Howard promoted an agenda of black entrepreneurship, maintaining that political power required financial power. He led voter registration drives, supported boycotts, and lobbied Washington for services and hospitals. The RCNL's annual Mound Bayou rallies drew crowds of up to 10,000, and in 1952 featured an appearance by famous gospel singer Mahalia Jackson.
A physician, banker, insurer, and farmer, Howard launched several businesses in the Mississippi Delta of the 1940s and was chief surgeon at the Knights and Daughters of Tabor hospital in Mound Bayou before setting up his own clinic. He also built a small zoo and a park as well as the first swimming pool for blacks in Mississippi.
When George Lee was murdered in May, 1955, Howard pressed for a federal investigation. Later that year, after the murder of Emmett Till, Till's mother came to Mississippi for the trial and stayed in Howard's home. He provided her with armed escorts to the courthouse in Sumner and out of the state after the verdict. After the trial, Howard's friend Roy Wilkins the executive secretary of the NAACP arranged for Howard to go on a national speaking tour about the Till murder and the sham trial. In his speeches he berated J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, accusing them of neglect in cases involving black victims. In January 1956, the
Chicago Defender ranked Howard first on its annual national honor roll. After he left the state in 1957, Howard opened the largest privately owned black medical facility in Chicago.
He was a mentor to major civil rights figures including Fannie Lou Hamer,
Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, Medgar Evers, and Jesse Jackson. Evers lived in Mound Bayou for a time and worked for Howard's Magnolia Mutual insurance company; while there he received crucial training in activism through his involvement in the RCNL.
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