Harrison County's twenty-six-mile beach was restored with federal money, maintained with county equipment and paid for in part by a gasoline tax, and Black residents were still kept off it. On May 14, 1959, Dr. Gilbert Mason, a physician who had moved to Biloxi in 1955, walked into the Gulf with neighbors and his young son. Police ordered them out. When Mason and others petitioned the county supervisors, the board's attorney worked with the state Sovereignty Commission to frighten the signers. One lost his job and another was suspended, and they withdrew their names.
On April 17, 1960, Mason went to the beach alone and was arrested. A week later, on April 24, more than a hundred Black residents walked from Biloxi's Back-of-Town to the beach. A white mob attacked them with sticks and chains while police watched, at least thirteen people were injured, and Mason was arrested and fined; no one in the mob was charged. The New York Times called it the worst race riot in Mississippi history. Reports on the 2018 Freedom Trail marker say two Black men were killed in the riots that followed, a figure the encyclopedia accounts do not give. The Justice Department sued in May 1960, and the beaches opened to all in 1968.
State markers dedicated in 2009 and 2018, the second on the Mississippi Freedom Trail, recall the wade-ins, and the 2009 one stands in the beach lot beside the lighthouse. Mason told the story in his memoir, Beaches, Blood, and Ballots.
The closest stops worth working into your route