ABSTRACT
Mason was born in 1911 to a sharecropping family. The Masons worked halves for the same white family that had once owned Mason’s grandfather, and from whom Mason’s great-grandfather had taken the Mason name. When the sharecropping arrangement ended in the 1920s, Mason, still a boy, had moved to Chapel Hill. In 1934 he began what became a 60-year relationship with an all-white fraternity at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His job was originally called “houseboy.”
