Ninth grader Maurice Singleton watched his older sister Sharon Singleton shuffle through their parents’ records before plucking her find from the shelf. She walked to the record player, carefully sliding the round black disk out of its cover before placing it on the device.

She gently set the needle on the single 45 record, a crackle breaking the air before the smooth sounds of Tyrone Davis’ “Can I Change My Mind?” filled the room. Roscoe Robinson was performing that night at Maurice’s first big dance social at the 100 Men D.B.A. Hall in Bay St. Louis, Miss., and Sharon was determined to make sure her brother wasn’t some fly on the wall. It was time he learned how to swing out.

“She was very outgoing. She was smart and a leader in her class,” Singleton said of his sister. “She just wanted to make sure that I was prepared for the social. I think she had an ulterior motive, too. She knew if my dad let me go, he would let her go.”

Sharon and Maurice situated themselves in the middle of the living room. Standing in front of his sister with a hand on her shoulder, he waited for her instructions.

“All it is is one step to one side, two steps to the other side,” Sharon demonstrated, starting with her right foot and then shifting to her left. Maurice followed his sister’s lead, repeating the steps over and over again until he got a feel for it.

“And then you add your own little nuances to make it interesting for you,” she added.

From there, Sharon taught him how to swing her out, spin her around and get right back on beat with the music. The pair stayed up all night until she felt comfortable that her brother had gotten it right.

Hancock County native Maurice Singleton participated in Rachel Dangermond’s “Conversations with Lions” series, wherein Black elders discuss their upbringing in Bay St. Louis, Miss. Photo courtesy Conversations with Lions

Dressed in some black slacks and a gold long-sleeved shirt, Maurice checked his appearance in the mirror. There wasn’t a wrinkle in sight thanks to how well he ironed his clothes. Double-checking that his ticket was in his pocket, Maurice left his house for the 15-minute stroll to the hall.

Walking inside the venue, the ninth grader didn’t see any classmates or friends, but plenty of other young adults his age were in attendance that fall evening in 1967. He happened to see his sister with her friends across the room, and he joined them to wait for Roscoe Robinson to take the stage.

“He might have been like a one- or two-hit wonder. If he came to Bay St. Louis, he was on the chitlin circuit because usually they book somebody in the area and they would play a club in the area the next night as well. So they’ll do like a four or five gig run in the area,” Singleton told the Mississippi Free Press.

When the lights dimmed and the band began playing, Maurice and the other attendees knew the show was about to start. But after all these years, the only thing that sticks about that night in Maurice’s memory is the singer’s hair.

“I remember him wearing processed hair because I think a lot of entertainers back then had processed hair, but I don’t remember too much about his performance,” the 72-year-old admitted.

Nevertheless, Singleton remembered how much fun he had that day as he danced and swung out with his sister and some of her friends, showing off the moves Sharon spent all night teaching him.

“It was almost like a coming of age, so to speak,” Maurice reflected.

‘In the Mainstream’

In 2018, Rachel Dangermond was planning her next community workshop when the ding from her iPhone signalled she had received a new text message. Grabbing her device, she opened the message to see a link with the headline, “Live in a Blues Hall.” Brows furrowed in confusion, she opened the link to read further.

Reaching the end of the article, she scoffed before closing it altogether, peeved as to why her friend would send that. Sure, she was looking to move out of her house in the Bay and find something that could double as lodging and a space to host her workshops. She also had a son to raise, and a blues hall didn’t seem suitable for that.

Two months went by, and life continued on. Dangermond continued her community work in Bay St. Louis, but she was having difficulty bringing her ideas into fruition. That’s when she remembered the link about the 100 Men Hall, and she had a lightbulb moment. A little research revealed that the space was up for sale.

Rachel Dangermond, originally from New Orleans, bought the 100 Men Hall in 2018 after Jesse Loya and his wife Kerrie sold the venue to her after not having much success operating it as a music venue. Photo by Malcolm Morrow

The prior owners, Jesse and Kerrie Loya, bought the property after Hurricane Katrina swept the coast, and they spent many years repairing it. Having seen little success in turning the property into a dance hall, the married couple had been trying to sell the hall for five years when Dangermond approached.

“I walked in here, and I’m telling you the minute I walked in the door, I knew with divine clarity I was gonna do this,” Dangermond told the Mississippi Free Press during an interview on Jan. 31, 2025.

At the time, though, she wasn’t quite sure what “this” was, as the writer didn’t have concrete plans for what she wanted to do with space. A few run-ins with some locals, however, spurred some ideas.

While she was at a local grocery store, a guy stepped up to her and asked, “You the woman that bought that hall? When I was a little boy, I came in, snuck behind my brother’s knees and saw Sam Cooke right here.”

Another time, as Dangermond was taking her trash outside, a woman on a bike stopped her to talk about the hall. “When I was a little girl, they wouldn’t let me in, so I sat on the steps,” the resident said. “Etta James was singing. The door was closed, but I could hear her like she was standing next to me because she had this booming voice.”

A mural on the outside wall of the 100 Men Hall depicts Bay St. Louis’ first NAACP president Albert Fairconnetue, local musician Bo Darensbourg and singer Etta James, as well as three Bay St. Louis children (not pictured) and blues musician Lucious Spiller (not pictured). Photo by Malcolm Morrow

Eventually, Dangermond resurrected the original nonprofit organization that founded the space and etched a plan to reintroduce the 100 Men D.B.A. Hall to the community as a music venue and to collaborate with artists to document and tell the historic building’s story.

“This was built for a community that did not have a place in the mainstream, so we’re going to open it up to all the cultures who do not have a place in the mainstream,” Dangermond said. “Whether that’s the Latin culture, whether that’s the Jewish culture, whether that’s the gay culture. That’s part of the mission.”

”We want to commission artists of color to help us tell our story—whether that’s visually, whether that’s performance art, whether that’s spoken word, whether that’s writing about it, whether that’s photographing it,” she added.

‘An Ideal Little Town’

Bay St. Louis is one of 11 cities that make up the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The quaint coastal city with beautiful beaches and waterfronts and a wealth of rich history and cultural significance was the site of a 1789 Spanish land grant to Thomas Shields. In 1818, the town became incorporated under the name Shieldsborough and soon became a resort for wealthy planters and for tourists who came after the completion of the New Orleans, Mobile and Chattanooga Railroad in 1869. By 1875, the town became known as the city of Bay St. Louis, now named after King Louis IX of France.

The racial composition of Bay St. Louis has always been majority-white, though Black people settled in the city as early as the 1880s. The area around Sycamore Street east of the railroad tracks became a Black community around then. Many Black-owned businesses and ethnic mom-and-pop shops lined Washington and Sycamore streets in the middle of the 20th century before desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, a Sun Herald article reported in 2022, including dry cleaners, clothing stores, grocery stores, a pharmacy, a bakery, a game room, a midwife, a barbershop and a dentist. These businesses catered to Black residents who were not welcome to shop or dine in white establishments in the downtown area due to Jim Crow laws at the time.

Maurice Singleton grew up in Bay St. Louis four blocks from the beach. As a child, he played in ditches and found crawfish that he would bring home to boil for a snack. He spent time fishing with his friends, and they used the woods behind his house as their personal playground.

“We’d run the woods and run into snakes. We climbed trees. We fell out of trees. We rode our bicycles all over Bay St. Louis and a place called Sunnybank, which was on the bay of Bay St. Louis,” Singleton told the Mississippi Free Press in May 2024.

“The Manless Wedding” was one of many events hosted at the 100 Men D.B.A. Hall. The skit featuring an all-women ensemble is about a mistress interrupting a wedding ceremony to inform the groom he is the father of her child. Photo by Malcolm Morrow

Maurice and his 10 siblings lived in the last house on a dirt road, and the closest house to theirs was a quarter mile away. His uncle Antoine “Leo” Rosemond, a junk man who lived up the street from the family, was a resourceful man who assembled his own lawn mower at 7 years old. The 72-year-old recalled going with his uncle to mow laws from seven in the morning to seven in the evening.

“I learned a lot about survival, imagination and resourcefulness because he was an incredible, resourceful person,” Singleton said. “I think I grew up in an ideal community, an ideal little town.”

Despite segregation, Black residents in Bay St. Louis carved out a space for themselves. For education, Black students attended Valena C. Jones School or St. Rose De Lima, where white German nuns educated them and where students attended mass daily.

After the Civil War, many African Americans across the South formed benevolent and fraternal organizations in efforts to increase their social, economic and political power. In Bay St. Louis, 12 African American men founded the One Hundred Members’ Debating Benevolent Association in 1894 with the mission of assisting Black families and burying the dead in a respectable manner.

“There were things called societies. The Sheltering Rock Society. The 100 Men’s Hall. The Prince Albert Men’s Association. Children of Charity was another one. One Hundred Men housed many of these groups because we could not use the white ones,” Bay St. Louis native Calvin Smith told the Mississippi Free Press. “If we die, none of the white organizations would want to bury us.”

On June 17, 2011, the 100 Men D.B.A. Hall earned recognition on the Mississippi Blues Trail for its significance in being a center of social life for Black Bay St. Louis residents and as a venue for Black artists performing on the chitlin circuit. Photo by Malcolm Morrow

In 1922, the association built the 100 Members D.B.A. Hall, which was a center of social life and entertainment for African Americans in the Bay. Over the decades, the association would sponsor events and rent the hall to promoters who brought in musical acts such as B. B. King, James Brown, Ray Charles, Etta James, Irma Thomas, Big Joe Turner and others.

“Our parents, Calvin and I’s parents, all our friends and their parents, they all belonged to this benefit association,” Maryland Smith, Calvin’s sister, told the Mississippi Free Press. “… Activities were being held at the 100 Men’s Hall, and there was one in particular, they called it ‘The Manless Wedding.’”

For this event, Black women in the community would dress up in black suits while sporting drawn-on mustaches or beards on their faces to resemble men, even though the entire ensemble consisted of women. One lady served as the preacher who performed the ceremony while another woman dressed like the groom and the other as the bride. The premise of the skit revolved around a couple about to get married before a woman interrupts the ceremony to accuse the groom of fathering her child.

“It was written by one of mama’s cousins, and her name was Lula. She wrote the whole script, and they took that on the road and traveled between Mississippi and Louisiana performing this little skit. It was funny,” Maryland Smith said.

‘More Intentional’

By the 1950s, insurance companies and other resources took on the duties that many organizations had been providing. Over time, fewer and fewer people were around to continue sponsoring events that kept the hall open, Calvin Smith said. As a result, the One Hundred Members’ Debating Benevolent Association disbanded by 1982. The hall then entered the hands of the Disabled American Veterans, and a Georgian couple bought it in 2000 with the idea to turn it into an art gallery.

Hurricane Katrina caused severe damage to the property, but just as FEMA was about to raze it, Jesse and Kerrie Loya purchased the building in 2006. The State of Mississippi gave the couple $110,000 to restore the hall, and the couple opened it as a music venue in 2011. That same year, the property received a Mississippi Blues Trail marker, but the hall closed again in 2014. Four years later, Rachel Dangermond purchased the property.

The 100 Men D.B.A. Hall is a cornerstone landmark in Bay St. Louis for its Black community, with many of whom able to reminisce about their childhoods and what was happening at the hall during various points in their lives. Since her purchase, Dangermond has turned the hall into an open historical spot that captures the life of African American families, Calvin Smith said.

“She moved into the building; she took it over; she reinvented it,” he said. “She’s also got a building behind the 100 Men’s Hall where she calls it the 100 Women’s group. She has done a tremendous job keeping our history alive.”

Many notable artists performed at the 100 Men D.B.A. Hall on the chitlin circuit including Tina Turner, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, B.B. King and Bay St. Louis native James Booker. Photo by Malcolm Morrow

Dangermond said she aims to make the 100 Men Hall accessible to people of all backgrounds: Black, white, gay, straight, old, young. Bay St. Louis is a retirement community with most of her audience being white people in their 60s and 70s.

“There’s not a lot of young people,” she said. “We do events where sometimes we get a blend, but those are very intentional and very driven to make that happen. But to get the young people in, that is a rare occasion.”

The New Orleans native has geared community projects and workshops to engage the Black community that the space was originally intended to reach. African dancing and drumming classes, soulful Christmas, art camps, portrait projects with photographer Gus Bennett and the 100 Women’s D.B.A. are just some of the events and programs devised and tailored for the Bay’s Black residents.

“Our mission is to uplift women of color in business, and we also give out five scholarships a year to young women of color graduating from high school,” Dangermond expounded.

From left: Myron Labat, Charles E. Joseph, Calvin Smith and Maurice Singleton participated in the third installment of the “Conversations with Lions” series, in which they discussed their experience growing up Black and Catholic in Hancock County, Miss. Photo by Malcolm Morrow

She also launched “Conversations with Lions,” a recorded dinner conversation between Black elders discussing their upbringing and experiences in Bay St. Louis. The video series takes place inside the 100 Men Hall and currently has three episodes.

“When we were doing the portrait project … this guy came to talk to me who was writing a story about the hall,” she recalled. “He was a white guy, an older gentleman ,and he said with all sincerity that Black people here didn’t experience racism. I said, ‘No, that’s not true,’ and that made me think that we need to be more intentional.”

Charles E. Joseph, Myron Labat, Calvin Smith and Maurice Singleton participated in the third installment about growing up Black and Catholic in Bay St. Louis. In the video, the men share stories about their upbringing in the city and their connections with one another, as well as how school and the church played in shaping them to be the well rounded men they are today.

“It just makes me reminisce about all of the good things that I learned from where I grew up,” Smith said. “It helps me refresh. I don’t think about it every day, but if I can talk about it, I could talk about it for hours, the kinds of things that we did as a youth coming up in that community.”

Rachel Dangermond wants to do more “Conversations with Lions” videos, but she has paused the series to work on a vintage camper project that she is turning into a podcast studio. The camper is mobile, so she’ll have the ability to travel to record with people who can’t come to Bay St. Louis.

“It was important to the four of us telling the story because we’ve gone away, we’ve all come back, and we all have been pretty close to the 100 Men’s Hall,” Singleton said. “We experienced it. We lived it, and so it was important for us to tell it.”

Read original article by clicking here.

‘Keeping Our History Alive’ at the 100 Men D.B.A. Hall, a Cornerstone of Bay St. Louis’ Black Community

‘In the Mainstream’

‘An Ideal Little Town’

‘More Intentional’

Local Dining Stream

Things To Do

Related articles

Catfish Tacos

Dwelling in God’s presence

Let’s Eat, Mississippi: The Dinner Bell in McComb