Site 28/30 on the ACCORD Tour- The Gault Street Steps

This location was over near the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, on A1A, where several of the locals apparently worked.  These steps are all that remains of the house, which was firebombed by suspected members of the KKK in the winter of 1964.  

Gault Street

Inscription. Gault Street was one of the historically black residential streets in North City. Many residents worked at the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind, the Fountain of Youth, laundries and ice plants that were once located in the area. Three Victorian houses on the west side of the street were built in the 1880's. Most of the houses on the east side of the street were built in the 1920's by Henry Proctor, descendant of one of the famous free black families of colonial Florida whose story is told in the 1992 book Free Men in an Age of Servitude by Lee Warner. Many Gault Street residents were active in the civil rights movement of the 1960's. When the Roberson family, of what was then 167 Gault Street, sent their sons to integrate previously all-white Fullerwood School, their home was firebombed. Only these brick steps remain as a landmark of the heroism of this family in the cause of equality. This Historical Marker Presented this 2nd Day of July, 2007 by Northrop Grumman Erected 2007 by The 40th Anniversary to Commemorate the Civil Rights Demonstrations, Inc. Marker series. This marker is included in the Florida, St. Augustine Freedom Trail marker series. Location. 29° 54.515′  N, 81° 19.039′ W. Marker is in St. Augustine, Florida, in Saint Johns County. Marker is on Gault Street. --Lillian Roberson was about to doze off when she heard a car pull up outside her home. Her husband, Bungum, and four young sons were asleep.  When she got up to check, the back of her home was ablaze--a firebomb had been thrown inside, likely by the Ku Klux Klan. The family escaped, but their home was destroyed. The Feb. 7, 1964, attack was aimed at intimidating the Robersons--the black family had begun sending their children to a previously all-white elementary school. All that remains today of their Victorian home is three brick steps. Hours later the Klan apparently struck again--someone shot up the home of black activist and dentist R.B. Hayling. But the attacks had an effect perpetrators couldn't have anticipated--it turned the sites into monuments. Both are among 10 now designated as part of the Freedom Trail, a series of historical landmarks in St. Augustine significant to the civil rights movement. Included are the home where the Rev. Martin Luther King and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy stayed while in St. Augustine while leading demonstrations that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the former downtown Woolworth's store where sit-ins were staged; and state headquarters of King's Southern Christian Leadership Council. A cold, stiff February northwesterly wind was blowing the rain. The Roberson boys, 3, 5, 7 and 10, were asleep when the dark car pulled up, its lights off. Lillian Roberson got up to investigate and saw flames. "If it wasn't for God, we wouldn't be alive. I was terrified," she recalled recently. The family stayed until the end of the school year, then moved north. Hours after the Roberson home was torched, Hayling was home with his pregnant wife and young daughters when gunfire rang out. He was an adviser to the NAACP Youth Council and head of the St. Augustine chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Council. The bullets, which perforated many of the home's walls, came close to killing his wife and did kill the family pet, a boxer. Hayling loaded up his family and took them to Tallahassee. Hayling was a visible and hated troublemaker to the Klan and local group of lawless marauders, led by Holsted "Hoss" Manucy.  At a Klan meeting in September 1963, the Rev. Connie Lynch, a traveling racist evangelist, urged violence against Hayling, according to the book "Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan." Author David Chalmers refers to a report by a white minister named Irvin Cheny, who quoted Lynch's remarks about Hayling. "He's got no right to live at all, let alone walk up and down your streets and breathe the white man's free air. He ought to wake up tomorrow morning with a bullet between his eyes. If you were half the men you claim to be, you'd kill him before sunup." Five months later, shots were fired into his home.