‘A first step.’ East Biloxi murals to honor Inez Lounge owner, civil rights history
At the corner of Main and Division Streets in East Biloxi, a split-level building was slowly shedding two coats of paint — a newer cream color and an older tan — to reveal gray cinder block underneath.
Starting in the 1970s, the building housed Inez Lounge & Cafe, owned and operated by a community mainstay named Inez Thomas. A sign on the wall reads “Now Serving,” with breakfast starting at 5 a.m. But the restaurant has been closed since 2017. The building has sat empty since.
But this weekend, a team of volunteers applied a new coat of paint. That will form the base for two murals created by an artist born and raised in East Biloxi, one celebrating Thomas and the other honoring Dr. Gilbert Mason Sr. and the wade-in protests that helped desegregate Mississippi beaches.
The murals, the organizers hope, will serve as an announcement to the world: East Biloxi is coming back.
Jonathan Green, executive director of the nonprofit Steps Coalition, said the mural project is a piece of a broader effort to bring new activity to the neighborhood, where four of every five homes were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and where the population has never rebounded.
Steps and other community groups have plans to rehabilitate commercial buildings and try to bring in new small businesses. One project, funded by the Anthropocene Alliance, will create a natural storm water drainage system that can hopefully address some of the neighborhood’s ongoing problems with flooding.
A longer-term goal is to revive the historic storefronts at 260 Main Street, where Mason ran a pharmacy for a few years before Bloody Sunday.
“Obviously the mural is probably not going to change the quality of anyone’s life in East Biloxi,” Green said. “But it’s a signal that we take the community seriously, and that this is a first step.”
Blocks of businesses
When Thomas opened her first restaurant in Biloxi in 1974, Main Street bustled.
A “Biloxi Blues” placard down the block from Inez Lounge explains that when most nightlife venues were whites-only, “this stretch of Main Street catered to the African American trade, and especially during the boom years during and after World War II, dozens of clubs and cafes here rocked to the sounds of blues, jazz, and rhythm & blues.”
L.C. McCray Jr. remembers those days. Now 77, he moved to Biloxi in 1969, two days after Hurricane Camille.
Taking a break from cutting grass on a Main Street lot adjacent to Inez Lounge on Thursday, he pointed toward Division Street. When he arrived here, there was a neutral ground in the middle of the road, with palm trees providing greenery.
“It looked like New Orleans,” he said.
At the start of a night out, he’d park his car on Division Street. Then he’d hop from restaurant to bar to lounge along Main Street down to the railroad tracks.
“By the time I got to the end, I’d had enough,” he laughed.
Main Street’s decline
He spent many weekend nights at Inez Lounge, visiting so often that he joked they couldn’t open without him. He loved Thomas’s cooking: hamburgers, fried chicken, pork chops, red beans and rice and turkey necks.
But over the years, McCray saw businesses close one by one. As in Black commercial districts around the country, neighborhood businesses were affected by the double-edged sword of integration, which expanded Black Americans’ options for commerce and entertainment but which did not bring equal access to credit, government support and other financial benefits for Black business owners.
East Biloxi was buffeted by natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and man-made catastrophes like the BP oil spill.
Another challenge made fewer headlines: A seemingly never-ending Biloxi infrastructure repair project in which roads were torn up and remained unpaved for years.
Jennifer Johnson, Thomas’s daughter, said the project made it hard to attract customers. No one wanted to drive down those dusty roads if they didn’t have to.
Johnson, who lives in New Jersey but makes frequent visits home to Biloxi, said that was a key factor in the decision to close the restaurant in 2017.
“There was no business anymore,” Johnson said. “She tried for awhile. She did. But unfortunately, you can only go negative for so long.”
The value of a mural
Since early 2019, the Biloxi Main Street Association has facilitated 23 public art projects, mostly murals, in the downtown Biloxi area.
Corey Christy, who oversees the public art initiatives for Biloxi Main Street, said the public art has helped spark growth.
“They were the first thing — in some places that have been kind of revitalized, reborn, [the art] was there and then economy followed,” he said.
After public art — including the Greetings from Biloxi mural — were created at the corner of Howard and G. E. Ohr Street, the lot owner invested $40,000 to rehab his property, Christy said. Now it hosts events like First Fridays, which regularly draws about 500 people.
The Main Street area runs along Howard Avenue from Porter Avenue east to Bellman Street, and north toward the tracks. It doesn’t extend far enough north to include Inez Cafe & Lounge, or other blocks that hosted many Black Biloxians’ businesses.
So Christy’s organization isn’t involved with the mural, but he’s looking forward to seeing the public art tell a piece of East Biloxi history.
John Kemp, a community advocate and East Biloxi native, decided the neighborhood should have a mural a few years back.
He sees Inez Lounge as the perfect spot, because both the restaurant and Thomas herself are East Biloxi icons. Hers was the last burger joint in the neighborhood to close.
“And luckily I got one of the last burgers ever sold in there,” he said.
Thomas still lives nearby but is dealing with dementia. Johnson, her daughter, said the family is excited to see the mural become a staple of the community, just like Thomas and her restaurant.
Kemp said that, with the end of the infrastructure project that people said made the neighborhood look like the Sahara, it’s time to showcase what East Biloxi has to offer.
“People are seeing the potential of the community,” he said. “We want to just basically open a can of paint and let people see that something is going on.”
Green, of Steps Coalition, thinks the mural could kick start the process of rehabilitating the building and then leasing it, creating income for the owners.
“I think that the mural becomes kind of the first step or a stepping stone to seeing that happen,” he said.
Steps Coalition and the Biloxi NAACP are each contributing $2,500 to the mural.
An artist’s vision
Artist Demetrius Gayden, who grew up on Keller Avenue, created designs for two murals.
He’s still tweaking the details, but the main ideas are there. One features a large image of Inez Thomas, beaming in a white apron. The other contains a portrait of Dr. Gilbert Mason, Sr. over a backdrop of newspaper headlines about the wade-in demonstrations.
Gayden, who is 43, grew up hearing about the wade-ins from older relatives. When he went to play on the beach, his dad would remind him that Black Biloxians had fought for his right to do that. As he started researching to design the mural, he was struck by the newspaper headlines that recorded the events before he was born.
Gayden recently finished another public art project, creating murals for a pedestrian walkway at Bayou Auguste. He estimates he spent well over 100 hours painting over more than a month.
The work took longer than he anticipated in part because people he knows kept passing by and wanting to catch up, which led to 20-minute conversations.
“I’m not the type of dude to shy off, be like, ‘Man, I’m working!” he said.
When he begins working on the murals at Inez Lounge, Gayden will wake up at 5 a.m. every day, “like working in the shipyard,” to paint in the cooler early morning before starting his primary job as a tattoo artist.
While he was painting the Bayou Auguste mural, kids from the neighborhood would come over to find out what he was doing, and then they got to add their own paintings to the wall.
He hopes the same thing will happen while he’s painting at Inez Lounge.
“It’s needed,” he said. “I’m telling you, I know, ‘cause I was born and raised there. It’s needed.”
This story was originally published July 27, 2021 at 5:50 AM.
