Page "African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968)" Paragraph 17

In 1952, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership ( RCNL ), led by T. R. M. Howard, a black surgeon, entrepreneur, and planter, organized a successful boycott of gas stations in Mississippi that refused to provide restrooms for blacks.

Through the RCNL, Howard led campaigns to expose brutality by the Mississippi state highway patrol and to encourage blacks to make deposits in the black-owned Tri-State Bank of Nashville which, in turn, gave loans to civil rights activists who were victims of a " credit squeeze " by the White Citizens ' Councils.