In
1964 St. Augustine, Purcell Conway, a black 15-year-old, held hands with a
white nun during a civil-rights demonstration that drew the angry attention of
a white mob from the Ancient City and beyond.
The mob surged forward. Conway was
attacked, and so was the nun. They tore off her headdress. They dragged her to
the ground by her hair. They kicked her. Fifty years later, the memory is
still clear: How can people be so cruel, so petty? he asks. How silly, he says,
that there is so much hate over the color of one’s skin.
Conway traveled Wednesday to
Tallahassee, where he reunited with other activists from what he calls the
“teenage rebellion” — the civil rights demonstrations that rocked St. Augustine
from 1963 until the summer of 1964, when the Civil Rights Act became law.
They went to the Capitol building to
see Robert B. Hayling inducted into the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame. His
portrait will go up there along with those of the other inductees, the late
James Weldon Johnson and A. Philip Randolph, both of whom grew up in
Jacksonville. Hayling, 84, still sharp and witty,
was a dentist who inspired and led the youthful demonstrators in St. Augustine. Now in their late 60s and early 70s,
most of them grew up together in the largely black neighborhoods of
Lincolnville and West Augustine.
Asked to describe the St. Augustine
of his youth, Shed Dawson, who was arrested nine times, gave a long pause
before speaking. “Scary. Very challenging. Dangerous.
Sad.” You had to be careful, said James
Jackson, who was captured and beaten by members of the Ku Klux Klan. “You didn’t want to go and get
caught out alone at night, especially outside of your comfort zone, outside of
Lincolnville.” Jackson knew many of the Klansmen by
sight. He’d see them going about their business during the day, on the streets
downtown.
And as the Civil Rights Act moved
through Congress, the Klan rallied, openly, on St. Augustine’s quaint downtown
streets, in robes that exposed their faces for all to see. Houses were firebombed. Grenades
were thrown at juke joints. Shots were fired.
One white man, with a loaded shotgun
on his lap, was shot and killed as the car he was in cruised through a black
neighborhood one night. In his death convulsion, he fired shots of his own
through the floor of the car.
Young blacks from St. Augustine
picketed outside stores, sat at lunch counters where they could not be served.
And they marched through the city’s streets, past churches that would not admit
them.
One sign asked: “Are you proud of
your 400 yrs history of slavery & segregation.”
Demonstrators were threatened and
beaten. They were arrested and jailed for attempting to integrate the beaches,
lunch counters, hotels. Many of the black demonstrators were
trained in nonviolent ways of protesting and pledged to never strike back. Others made it clear that they were
armed and would defend themselves, their families and their community if called
to do so. Conway says two things united the
young black demonstrators: They were fed up with the status quo, where they
were permanent second-class citizens. And they were inspired by the civil-rights
struggles elsewhere.
Why not St. Augustine too?
“It gets to a point in your life
that you’ve been stepped on, mistreated, seen your family members mistreated,”
he said. “Forget about the fear — you will die to see this changed.”
‘A MEAN LADY’
At 12, Conway had a white friend, a
fellow paperboy, and when they each ordered milk shakes at the lunch counter at
the McCrory’s store, he couldn’t understand why the woman there let his friend
eat inside, but insisted he go outside. His friend joined him on the
sidewalk. “She’s a mean lady,” he said.
At 14, Conway was mowing the lawn of
a white woman who offered him a sandwich and a drink. She left it for him on
her garage floor, next to the dog’s bowl. As a child, he’d been naive. But now
his eyes were open — and he chafed as he saw how his parents had to call white
people “Mr.” or “Miss,” while they were simply called by their first names,
George and Julia. So he was ready, at 14, to join the
Movement. That’s what he and his friends called it. Conway recalled that black teenagers
would go the swimming pool at Florida Memorial College, a black Baptist school
that moved to Miami a few years later.
College students would tell the
teenagers about the Movement. They’d talk about what was happening around the
South, about why action was needed in St. Augustine.
By 1964, the Movement drew Martin
Luther King Jr. and other prominent black leaders to the city.
It drew the support of many white
college students from elsewhere, who were beaten and threatened alongside the
young black demonstrators. It drew the support of rabbis and
priests and nuns and 72-year-old Mary Elizabeth Peabody, mother of the governor
of Massachusetts, who was jailed after supporting the demonstrators.
And it drew national and
international coverage to a tourist city preparing for its 400th anniversary.
Tourists stayed away. In 1965, a
state legislative report on the unpleasantness in St. Augustine would note that
the city lost $5 million in tourism, which meant the state lost taxes too.
“Which means that all citizens of
Florida indirectly paid for Martin Luther King’s visitation to America’s oldest
city,” the report said, before fretting about the “devastating barrage of
unfavorable publicity” from “purported” news accounts. “Despite massive propaganda to the
contrary,” the state report said, “Negroes and whites have lived together
amicably in St. Augustine for centuries.”
‘I WAS AFRAID’
Maude Burroughs Jackson knew
unfairness as she grew up in the small black community of Hill Top in
Middleburg. Still, she was relatively sheltered, there in the country. She came to St. Augustine in 1960 to
go to Florida Memorial College. The city, she said, felt hostile.
Discrimination was open. “It seemed like a mean place,” she
said. “Things have really changed over the years. But I was afraid many times.”
She got involved in the Movement
after going to Hayling’s dental office with a toothache. She went to wade-ins at segregated
beaches, and between classes she sat at lunch counters or picketed. She was
jailed three times. One night, in Hayling’s office, she
made dinner for King — steak and toast and salad. “He’d come in late that
night, and with the situation being the way it was, you couldn’t just go
outside and eat.’’
‘LUCKY AS HELL’
James Jackson said he tries to find
the humor in every situation. So he laughs, still, about the night the Ku Klux
Klan caught him, Hayling and two other black men, James Hauser and Clyde
Jenkins.
He said he stayed calm through talk
about getting killed, about getting set on fire. But when the Klan got to
talking about castration? “I said, ‘I got to get out of here.’ ” Jackson and his companions had gone
to eavesdrop on a Klan rally that drew hundreds to St. Augustine and figured
they could spy safely from a back road. That was almost a fatal error. They
were beaten, severely.
Jackson shows off a scar on his
forehead, courtesy of a lug wrench. And the Klansmen paid particular attention,
he said, to the hands of Hayling, a dentist: How could he practice his
profession with broken hands? “We were lucky as hell to get out of
their with out lives,” Jackson said.
The story he heard later was that a
preacher in the crowd snuck away to alert police. Sometime later, an officer
walked up to the rally. “He said, ‘All right, that’s enough,’ ” Jackson
recounted. He took them to the hospital, and
then to the sheriff’s office. There, bloodied and bruised, they were charged
with assault.
After the Civil Rights Act was
signed, Jackson remembers coming out of a hardware store and running into
Halstead “Hoss” Manucy, one of the prominent white segregationists in town.
Manucy had hurled many insults at Jackson but apparently didn’t recognize him
when they bumped into each other. “Now I’m not a tall man, but he was
shorter than me, and he looked up at me and said, ‘Excuse me sir.’ ” Jackson laughed. “Excuse me sir! The
biggest smile came over my face.”
‘SHELL SHOCK’
Shed Dawson graduated from R.J.
Murray High School just a few weeks before the Civil Rights Act was passed. But
he was already a civil-rights veteran; he was arrested nine times and spent at
least 90 days in jail.
So within a day or two of the act’s
passage, he and three other black teens went to a barbecue place on U.S. 1 to
“test” the bill. They squeezed their car into a tight
space at the front door. As they approached the door, a group of 25 to 30 men
and women came from behind the building, almost as if they were waiting for
them.
They had bricks and beer bottles and
baseball bats — “their own little personal weapons,” Dawson said.
The four friends split up and ran.
Dawson made it to some nearby woods. “Because I was 18 and they were
half-drunk, they couldn’t catch me.” Frustrated, the mob returned to
their truck. Perhaps 15 minutes later, Dawson came out of the woods and saw the
truck approaching, with people crowded into the back of it — still looking for
him.
He ran back in the woods, hiding
there for more than two hours. Finally, he crept out and saw a highway patrol
car parked in front of another restaurant. Now, he thought, he would be safe. Dawson went into the restaurant,
where the manager stopped him brusquely: “What do you want?”
Dawson’s shirt and tie were filthy,
his best pants were muddy and his good shoes were caked with mud. He said he
needed to talk to the trooper, who sat, just a few feet away, ignoring him. “He’s eating lunch,” the manager
said.
Dawson insisted. Eventually the
trooper got up, locked Dawson in his car, and resumed his meal.
As he ate, a crowd of whites
assembled around the car, rocking it back and forth, pounding on the
windshield, calling Dawson names. The trooper, frustrated, came out,
started the engine, and got on the radio. “I found the — — y’all are looking
for,” he said.
At the station, they took Dawson’s
mug shot, took his fingerprints, but eventually didn’t charge him. The trooper
then took him to the headquarters of the Movement, where Dawson’s disappearance
was big news.
“He [the trooper] was a hero,”
Dawson said. “Everybody was cheering — yeah yeah yeah — and shaking his hands.
He was soaking it up.”
King spoke that night at a church,
and invited Dawson to sit with him at the pulpit. So he did, still in his
filthy clothes. Dawson ended up traveling the world
as a civil servant for the Navy, working on aircraft carriers — a life that
would have seemed impossible to him as a teenager. Before things changed, he might have
been a cook or a yard man. If lucky, he could perhaps have been a brick mason
or a plumber’s helper. The struggle was worth it, he said, although when he
returns to his hometown, the past sometimes feels far too close.
“I’ve been all around the world and
I’m OK,” he said. “But when I got back to St. Augustine, to a restaurant, I
feel fear, like flashbacks, like the soldiers had. Shell shock.
“I guess it will never go away.”
No comments:
Post a Comment