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Mississippi Dockside Gambling: Casino Development Along the Bible Belt's Gulf Coast
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10201 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1993 |
3,143 Words |
| Author
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Peggy Robbins
Peggy Robbins, a Tennessee native, is a free-lance writer
living in Gulfport, Mississippi. Over the past three decades,
she has written extensively about American heritage and
military history. |
On November 12, 1992, 34-year-old Douglas Ingram, a draft-beer salesman for a Mississippi distributing company, was unloading the last of twelve kegs of beer he was delivering to the President Casino, a converted riverboat moored in the Broadwater Beach Hotel's marina in Biloxi, when a rainstorm he thought was subsiding resumed. Ingram, who had one hand on a metal dolly and the other on the metal keg, was struck by lightning. "I felt that bolt of lightning go right through me . . . . It felt like a mule kicked me in the chest," he later recalled. He was left very weak and dizzy but was not seriously injured.
The incident, which was widely reported locally, raised eyebrows. Could lightning striking a young man delivering beer to a place of gambling be an occasion of divine intervention? Or, could the young man's miraculous survival be the divine intervention?
On the larger issues, questions are raised. Is the Mississippi Gulf Coast emerging from an era of hard times and uncertainty into one of prosperity and confidence? Or, as some natives would have it, is it "sinking in sin" by becoming dependent on the fickle practice of gambling?
For several years the residents of the Mississippi coast hotly disagreed about the merits of legal gambling. Some insisted that it was a salvation for the declining tourist industry; others pictured it as an invitation to crime and corruption. Not until 1992 did the lure of easy money prevail over--not silence but prevail over--the objections to gambling in the Mississippi section of the Bible Belt.
Legalization of dockside gambling
The Mississippi Constitution of 1890 made gambling in the state illegal. As the years passed, even cruise ships from the Caribbean sailing to and from the coast had to shut down their gambling operations except when they were far offshore. But by 1990, industries that had long been the backbone of the coast's economy--tourism and seafood--were in enough of a slump that arguments in favor of dockside gambling had become more appealing. Docksiding was made legal by state law, but the issue was subject to approval by the voters of each county. Antidockside forces, including the large membership of an organization named Families for Quality Life as well as sizable religious groups, fought hard against it, and in a December 1990 referendum docksiding was defeated in all three coastal counties--Hancock, just east of Louisiana; Harrison, the location of Biloxi and Gulfport, the two
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