Mound Bayou businessman and physician Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard (1908-1976) founded and led Mississippi's pre-eminent civil rights organization in the 1950s, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, which he established in Cleveland in 1951 as a parallel organization to the white Delta Council. Made up of black leaders from many walks of life, including ministers, business people, and members of other activist organizations, the group stressed economic issues, offered classes in voter registration, supported boycotts, led voter registration drives, and lobbied Washington for services and hospitals. Howard, a founding member of the Mississippi NAACP, promoted black entrepreneurship on the belief that political power required financial power, and the RCNL's annual Mound Bayou rallies drew crowds of up to 10,000, including an appearance by Mahalia Jackson in 1952. A charismatic speaker, Howard was also a physician, banker, insurer, and farmer who launched several businesses in the Mississippi Delta in the 1940s, served as chief surgeon at the Knights and Daughters of Tabor hospital in Mound Bayou, opened his own clinic, and built a small zoo, a park, and the first swimming pool for blacks in Mississippi. He attempted reconciliation with the white community, but amid a bloody campaign against black civil rights activists he left the state in 1957. After George Lee was murdered in May 1955, Howard pressed for a federal investigation, and after the murder of Emmett Till later that year, Till's mother stayed in Howard's home while he provided her with armed escorts to the courthouse in Sumner and out of the state after the verdict. Following the trial, Roy Wilkins arranged for Howard to go on a national speaking tour about the Till murder and the sham trial, during which Howard accused J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI of neglect in cases involving black victims. In January 1956, the Chicago Defender ranked him first on its annual national honor roll. After leaving Mississippi, he opened the largest privately owned black medical facility in Chicago and mentored major civil rights figures including Fannie Lou Hamer, Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, Medgar Evers, and Jesse Jackson; Evers lived in Mound Bayou for a time, worked for Howard's Magnolia Mutual insurance company, and received crucial training in activism through the Regional Council of Negro Leadership.