Samuel Bowers - Early Life

Early Life

Bowers was born on August 25, 1924, in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Sam Bowers Sr., a salesman, and Evangeline Peyton, daughter of a well-to-do planter. On both sides of his family he was deeply rooted in the southern Mississippi—New Orleans area. His mother's father had a plantation, while his father's father, Eaton J. Bowers, was a four term Congressman from Mississippi's Gulf Coast. Representative Bowers was an explicitly virulent opponent of equality for Negroes (African-Americans). In a speech to the U. S. House of Representatives in 1904, during his freshman term, he said: "Let me say to the gentleman from Massachusetts that it is evident that we have at least two theories as to how the negro should be dealt with. One may be termed his idea of the development by higher education, social equality, and the like, while the other might be dominated the Southern idea of the absolute segregation of the two races, the fitting the negro for that sphere and station which, based upon an experience born of more than a century's knowledge of him as a slave and nearly forty years' experience with him as a freedman, we believe he can acceptably and worthily fill, with absolute denial of social intercourse and with every restriction on his participation in political affairs and government that is permissible under the Federal Constitution. . . . The restriction of suffrage was the wisest statesmanship ever exhibited in that proud Commonwealth . . . . We have disfranchised not only the ignorant and vicious black, but the ignorant and vicious white as well . . . ."

Sam Bowers Jr. attended high school in Jackson, Mississippi. During World War II, he served in the Navy. Eventually, he settled in Laurel, Mississippi and started his own small business, Sambo Amusement Company, variously reported to be a pinball machine business and a vending machine business.