BLACK HISTORY MONTH PART XV – Mound Bayou, Isaiah T. Montgomery and Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard
The Attention of Powerful Men leads to Progress
I wrote about Herbert Lee who was the first SNCC associate murdered in 1961 who advocated for the right to vote for Black people in Mississippi. In order to explain why is task was so fatal I had to write about the Mississippi Constitutional Convention in 1890 which led me to Mound Bayou, Isaiah T. Montgomery and Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard. Mississippi is what America sees in mirror but pretends to be more enlightened.
Mound Bayou
Mound Bayou was established in 1887 as one of the first Black incorporated municipalities in the United States. The town was founded by Isaiah T. Montgomery and his cousin, Benjamin T. Green. By 1898, Mound Bayou had been officially incorporated, allowing nearly 150 men to register as voters. The community had built churches, general stores, a hospital and some of the best schools in the area.
Mound Bayou, through the work of Charles Banks, developed a thriving business infrastructure complete with a governing body, banks, merchants, cotton gins and warehouses, and a public school system. In 1938, Perry M. Smith founded the central Delta’s first hospital when the Mound Bayou Knights of Tabor, a progressive African American fraternal order, built a forty-two-bed facility staffed by physicians from the Meharry Medical School in Nashville, Tennessee. It was a modern facility with two large operating rooms, an X-ray room, a sterilizer, an incubator, a blood bank, and a laboratory.
Self-governing and self-sustaining, Mound Bayou grew into a town of some 800 inhabitants surrounded by a larger Black colony of some 30,000 acres. It had lighted streets, little crime, a bank, churches, schools, and more than forty retail establishments.
In the 1900s, two-thirds of landowners were also Black farmers. The number of Black farmers declined due to high debt and agricultural problems by the 1920s. Another blow happened in the early 1940s when a fire broke out, destroying the business district in the town.
Mound Bayou has a 2024 population of 1,380. Mound Bayou is currently declining at a rate of -2.61% annually. The average household income is $36,809 with a poverty rate of 44.5%. The median age in Mound Bayou is 40.1 years: 30.7 years for males, and 42.6 years for females. The racial composition of Mound Bayou was Black or African American: 99.08%.
Isaiah Thornton Montgomery
Isaiah Montgomery was born enslaved on May 21, 1847, at Hurricane Plantation on Davis Bend, now Davis Island, Mississippi. Isaiah was under human rights violation “owned” by Joseph E. Davis, elder brother of Jefferson Davis - President of the Confederate States of America. Isaiah served as his master’s valet and clerk since age ten. Taught to read and write by his parents, he enjoyed ready access to the Davis library and to the periodicals and newspapers.
Isaiah’s father, Benjamin Thornton Montgomery was allowed to open his own small dry goods store at Hurricane Plantation in 1842. In 1867, Joseph E. Davis sold to Benjamin both Hurricane and Brierfield Plantations for $300,000 ($6,397,398.65 in 2025). The dry goods business must have been very good for a formerly enslaved person to afford two plantations. Additionally, Benjamin must have made a lot of friends with powerful white Mississippians:
“Ben set White people at ease by downplaying Black political aspirations, by affirming that voting was of “doubtful and remote utility” to the freedmen. Discussions of the “suffrage question,” he publicly asserted, are “more likely to produce contention and idleness than harmony.” These were calculated and soothing words, suggesting to White leaders, as one approving White newspaper editor put it, that Ben was a “sensible darky” and a “good citizen” who “attends to his own business [and] does not dabble in politics.”
Benjamin bought a third Davis Bend plantation increasing his holdings to more than 5,500 acres. They established a second dry goods store in Vicksburg. Isaiah married Martha Robb, a former enslaved woman in 1872. Bad crops, and debt ruined the Montgomery’s operations. Their stores were bankrupted and ownership of their land reverted to the Davis family in 1881. Benjamin died in 1877 and both of Isaiah’s parents were buried in the Davis family cemetery. Isaiah and Martha moved their family to Vicksburg.
In 1887, Isaiah (with his cousin Benjamin Green) founded the town of Mound Bayou as the commercial center for a large colony of Black farm owners. Mound Bayou was a model of separate Black economic development, a group economy in which Black dollars circulated in a closed Black economic order. He served for a time as the town’s mayor 1888 – 1902. He was elected as a Republican delegate to the Mississippi Constitutional Convention in 1890.
“We came here to exclude the Negro, nothing short of this will answer.” - Solomon Soladin "S. S." Calhoon, President Mississippi Constitutional Convention
“[Isaiah] Montgomery was assigned to the Committee on Elective Franchise, and he spoke eloquently in favor of, and voted for, a measure to “purify the ballot” by restricting it to literate adult males, those he called the “stable, thoughtful, and prudent element of our citizens.”
Self-preservation. Preservation of the Man, the Family, the Community. Isaiah’s yes vote and the overall ratification of the new Mississippi Constitution (by the body, not by the voters) are destroying Black people in Mississippi to this day. The Black population is 37% of the eligible Mississippi vote as 2024, so this disenfranchisement will not end until Black eligibles exceed 51% or if they find allies in the range of 14%. However, upon private reflection by Isaiah Montgomery:
“He lived another thirty-four years, long enough to admit privately — though never in public — to a sense of betrayal, to a recognition that White supremacists in Mississippi sought “nothing less than a retrogression of the Negro back towards serfdom and slavery.” In a letter to Booker T. Washington, he acknowledged that White talk of “pure government” was a sham, that only armed federal intervention could restore color-blind democracy to Mississippi”
This “color-blind democracy” was accomplished by the Civil Rights Act of 1965. However
“In a 5–4 decision opens a new window, the Supreme Court held that the Section IV (4b) formula used to determine which states and localities were subject to preclearance was outdated and was therefore unconstitutional. The Court concluded that the formula in Section IV (4b) was decades old and targeted practices that had been eradicated as the country had changed and the racial disparity in voter registration and turnout was no longer the case in 2013”
In other words, States can change their voting laws without obtaining federal Department of Justice permission. As of 2023, 29 states (including Mississippi) have passed 94 restrictive voting laws.
Montgomery accepted a federal political patronage job as a collector of government monies. He died in 1924.
Dr. Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard (T.R.M.)
Dr. Howard was born in Murray, Kentucky March 4, 1908. His mother worked as a cook for Dr. Will Mason, a White physician so impressed with the young Howard that he helped pay for much of Howard’s medical education.
Howard entered historically black Oakwood University in Huntsville, Alabama and after graduating in 1924, Howard continued his undergraduate career at Union College of Lincoln, Nebraska. After earning a second undergraduate degree, Howard entered medical school at the College of Medical Evangelists (now Loma Linda University) in Loma Linda, California graduating in 1931. After a residency at Homer G. Phillips Hospital (in St. Louis, Missouri), Howard became the medical director of the Riverside Sanitarium.
In 1935, Howard married prominent socialite Helen Nela Boyd. Although their marriage would last for the rest of Howard’s life, Helen was frustrated by his numerous extramarital affairs. He adopted one child, Barrett, and fathered at least eight children out of wedlock. (!)
In 1942, The Doctor moved to the all-Black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where he became the appointed first chief surgeon at the hospital of Knights and Daughters of Tabor and founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. While there, he founded a large farm, restaurant, hospital, home construction firm, insurance company, small zoo, park, and the first swimming pool for blacks in Mississippi. In 1947, Howard left the Knights and Daughters and opened a second hospital, The United Order of Friendship Clinic.
In 1955, he drew national attention when he became involved in investigating the Emmett Till murder. His compound became a safe place, and he escorted witnesses to the trial, including Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, through a heavily armed caravan. Before the 1955 ended, the death threats and economic pressure became too much for his role in the Till case, and Howard moved with his family to Chicago.
In 1956, Dr. Howard founded the Friendship Medical Center and served as president of the National Medical Association. Dr. Howard, a lifelong Republican, ran for Congress and lost in 1958 against William Dawson, a Democrat. Dr. Howard slowly withdrew from the civil rights activities as his health declined in his later years, and died in Chicago in 1976.
https://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/issue/isaiah-t-montgomery-1847-1924-part-I
https://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/issue/isaiah-t-montgomery-1847-1924-part-ii
https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/mound-bayou/
https://www.urbanlegendnews.org/features/2023/05/31/mound-bayou-a-hidden-history/
https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1867?amount=300000
https://aaregistry.org/story/surgeon-and-activist-theodore-howard-born/
https://mississippitoday.org/2023/03/04/on-this-day-1908-dr-t-r-m-howard/
https://www.postnewsgroup.com/isaiah-montgomery-founder-of-black-town-mound-bayou-after-civil-war/
https://travelnoire.com/what-happened-to-mound-bayou
T.R.M. Howard: Doctor, Entrepreneur, Civil Rights Pioneer - David T. Beito and Linda Royster