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African jungle.”18
For Jones, it offered the perfect setting for the “Gulfside Idea” to take root. By the spring of 1923, he had raised $4,125 through personal donations from ministers and penny drives conducted in Methodist churches across the Southwestern District, enough for the down payment.19 Shortterm association notes issued to the Merchants Bank and '1 rust Company in Bay St. Louis bearing between 7 and 8 percent interest would allow Jones to finance the purchase.20 Jones knew, however, that no amount of money could overcome the hard reality of the color line. So he used his skin color to circumvent the line. During his inspections of the property and negotiations with the sellers, Jones stealthily obscurcd his racial identity. A white Methodist minister accompanied him 011 his inspections of the grounds, leading the sellers to assume the two represented “white” Methodism. More important, Jones formed close partnerships with white bankers and civic leaders in Bay St. Louis and New Orleans, especially George R. Rea, president of the Merchants Bank and 'I rust Company. In April 1923 Jones acquired title to the land. Shortly thereafter, he transferred ownership to the Gulfside Association (of which he was president) “before,” as one account later described, “the wave of protest could get well under way.” Rea, who later served as a member of Gulfside Association’s board of trustees, played a central role in squelching local white opposition and drumming up acceptance of Gulfside among the local business community.
In addition to the three hundred acres he purchased outright, Jones acquired from the Deblieux family the remaining twenty years of a ninety-nine-year lease on an adjoining 318-acre tract (much of which was unin-habitable swamps) owned by the state of Mississippi and known as “sixteenth section” land. Under the Public Land Survey System implemented by the state upon its admission to the Union in 1817, a portion ot land in each county—the sixteenth section—was retained by the state and leased in the form of a trust, with the money collected in rent dedicated to public education. (See Map 5.)
“To have [purchased this land] with but a few minor hitches was a task worthy of highest praise,” an account of the transaction later noted. Others greeted the acquisition with a mixture of amazement and skepticism born of remembrances of other big, grand projects that generated much attention and praise but eventually succumbed either to white racism, under-
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Map 5. Land acquired by Gulfside Association, 1923
capitalization, internal division, or some combination of the three. Lvcn promotional material gave voice to these collective memories of loss and pervasive sense that an acquisition of such scale and ambition was simply too good to be true. Shortly after Gulfside’s founding, one black commentator wrote: “A little band of colored folks down here, in some wav, has gotten hold of some^of the most valuable property along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I don't mean just a little piece of it either, live or six hunc. acres with about a mile and a half frontage is what I am talking about. And they have it alright, for I have seen it for myself and saw the papers, too. But, I just can’t help from thinking this way about the whole big project: How long will they hold it?”21
While Jones and his fellow ministers began the arduous task of clearing the land and building a sanctuary from white racism and commercial amusements, Gulf Coast boosters were busy lobbying for the types of
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