This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

______A SANCTUARY BY THE____________________S E A
Item read, “was a good mark of the work that Gulfside has been doing with the aid of its white friends.” "The applause of nearly five thousand persons,” a report to the Gulfside board of trustees proudly noted, “stamped indelibly the approval of friends.” “These gatherings,” another article read, “seem to . . . be doing excellent work in promoting acquaintance and sympathy between the intelligent and liberal white and negro people along the Coast.” Along with Song Fest, Gulfside hosted an annual Goodwill Dinner for white residents of Waveland. For the 1933 occasion, students from the boys’ school decorated the main dining room in llie Jackson House and helped prepare the meals for scvenly-five guesls. A program of music and speeches followed dinner. This and similar events for white audiences were featured prominently in all of Gulfside’s applications for grants and other funding sources.45
By the late 1920s Jones’s national fund-raising efforts began to yield results. In 1928 Gulfside secured a $25,000 grant from the John D. Rockefeller fund disbursed over a five-year period; the following year, the Julius Rosenwald fund donated $6,000 disbursed in $2,000 annual payments over a three-year period.47 During the years 1928 to 1930, donors from across the country contributed roughly $2,000 annually in additional funds. The late 1920s witnessed Gulfside’s most rapid physical development, with the completion of the academic building and women’s dormitory, as well as an additional ten new camp houses. In 1930 the county appraised Gulfside’s total acreage at '$102,'780, and its buildings and improvements at $90,736, among total net assets of $192,240.
Gulfside’s administrators hoped that the infusions of funds from philanthropies would provide a temporary stimulus to development as opposed to a long-term dependency. “Gulfside as a recreational center and assembly ground for Negroes of America can only be made secure as the idea takes root in the racial consciousness of the Negro. . . . The temporary help now being offered by philanthropists must and will be withdrawn in time.”48 And until it did stand on its own, Gulfside’s programs and overall vision of racial uplift would remain subject to white approval.49 Indeed, with white dollars came white scrutiny, and for Gulfside’s administrations, a constant fear of embarrassment. This, in turn, made the project of domesticating and beautifying the land all the more urgent. For white trustees and influential donors, the state of the property was to reflect the hopes and dreams of “the race.” “The buildings and the landscape should be beautiful,” Committee on Interracial Cooperation president and Gulf-
A S A N C T U
SEA
side trustee Will Alexander told a roomful of white donors at a 19 ing in New York City. “They should symbolize a service to Negr very large scale.” In annual reports to donors, Gulfside listed ai chief needs funding that would allow it to drain the hundreds of wetlands that covered the middle portion of the Gulfside tract. Hi diverse range of coastal species, the wetlands stood as a silent ren an older coast, one in which human habitation was sparse and p animal life abundant. Through its social programs, Gulfside vv remove what racial uplift reformers at the time characterized as vc African Americans’ slave past. The condition of its property was reflection of those aspirations. Domesticating the land an^1 ' n unruly shoreline became synonymous with uplifting the ract an to the point, demonstrating to their white neighbors that they were dedicated to ensuring that the coast be well groomed and aestl pleasing. Gulfside should stand for “order, cleanliness, industi tesy, and usefulness. There are no sink holes around the place, 1 yards.’ Everything is beautiful, wholesome and sanitary.” Failure these standards merited a swift rebuke from white donors. Fc one visit, Edwin R. Embree, Gulfside trustee and director of the wald Fund, upbraided Jones for the sorry “condition of the furn in the Jackson House, reminding him, ‘The condition of furnit cleanliness of the rooms is part of the education which any such should give.”50
While outside donations were trickling in during the late 192c of Jones’s investments were falling apart. The plan to sell lot.'' r t proved a disaster. As soon as buyers acquired warranty de^.„, < arose over the administration of the property. Gulfside admin struggled to enforce land-use regulations. Some lot owners at to run boardinghouses or rent out their cabins, and insisted on thci use the property as they pleased. In the late 1920s the board of trustc to stop selling lots, while allowing those who purchased lots to ret; ownership claims. Gulfside’s troubles, though, were far from ove sure the timely payment of property taxes, Gulfside decided to property taxes and later send bills to the owners. Seeking to av ments, lot owners argued that they considered property taxes t< eluded in the initial purchase price. Many of them refused to a edge the bills issued by Gulfside. Gulfside’s administrators sooi themselves paying taxes on the entire property. As Jones put it, “in