Gulfside Assembly: A Black Methodist Shoreline in the Jim Crow South

On a stretch of the Mississippi Gulf Coast near Waveland, a three-hundred-acre property once gave Black Methodists something that almost nowhere else in the segregated South offered: the right to walk to the beach.

Bishop Robert E. Jones was the first African American to be elected a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church when that happened in nineteen twenty. Based in New Orleans, he had attended a white Methodist camp meeting in Ohio called Lakeside Assembly, where the sight of families swimming freely in the lake gave him an idea. He spent years identifying a site on the Gulf Coast, raising four thousand one hundred and twenty-five dollars from small donations given by hundreds of Black churchgoers across the region, and on April sixteenth, nineteen twenty-three, he purchased the property. On January twenty-fourth, nineteen twenty-four, Gulfside Assembly was incorporated.

It was the only beach resort on the Gulf of Mexico open to Black Americans at the time. Families came from across the South to stay in the hotel, hold conferences, attend youth camps, and simply stand at the waterline without being told to leave. During the civil rights era, Gulfside became a meeting ground for activists and church leaders who could not safely gather elsewhere along the coast.

For eighty years the grounds served that purpose. Then on August twenty-ninth, two thousand and five, Hurricane Katrina came ashore near Waveland with a storm surge that erased every structure on the property, including the Bishop Norris Hall conference center that had been dedicated just three weeks earlier.

Recovery has been slow and partial, but Gulfside Assembly has not surrendered the land. An open-air chapel was dedicated in twenty sixteen, and the organization continues to hold gatherings on the same ground where Bishop Jones had the audacity to imagine a Black church camp on a white Southern beach.