St. Augustine Movement

The St. Augustine movement was a part of the wider Civil Rights Movement, taking place in St. Augustine, Florida from 1963 to 1964. It was a major event in the city's long history and had a role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Background

Despite the unanimous 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that the "separate but equal" legal status of racially segregated public schools rendered them inherently unequal, St. Augustine still had only six black children admitted into white schools by 1964. The homes of two of the families of these children were burned by local segregationists, while other families were forced to move out of the county because the parents were fired from their jobs.

400th anniversary

St. Augustine was scheduled to celebrate its 400th anniversary in 1965. Memorial ceremonies for the anniversary were expected to get the attention of international media, and city officials excluded African Americans from planning of the festivities. The preparations focused mainly on the "Spanish past that endorsed pluralism and Pan-American brotherhood" while ignoring the history of slavery in the US and the Jim Crow laws still in force in the Southern states at the time.

General characteristics

St. Augustine was a city with a population of about 15,000 and was largely dependent on tourism. Black people accounted for 23% of the population but racial segregation and Jim Crow prevented them from playing any sort of role in the local political and economic affairs.

History

Robert Hayling

Dr. Robert Hayling is generally considered the "father" of the St. Augustine movement. A Tallahassee native, Hayling served as an Air Force officer, and then became the first black dentist in Florida to be elected to the American Dental Association. He set up business in St. Augustine in 1960 and joined the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that year. Under his leadership the local chapter was growing and began to put pressure on the local government to desegregate the city. An opportunity to protest came in 1963 as St. Augustine was preparing for its 400th year anniversary. The local NAACP wrote a letter to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson asking that he cancel his visit to St. Augustine in March 1963 where he was planning on dedicating a Spanish landmark.

While the campaign was successful at convincing Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to speak before an interracial audience in St. Augustine, it had no effect on the overall Jim Crow laws. The NAACP campaign lacked a direct action component and Hayling believed that this was a major failing. Hayling founded an NAACP Youth Council that engaged in nonviolent direct action, including wade-ins at the local segregated swimming pools.

Sit-in protest

A sit-in protest on July 18, 1963, at the local Woolworth's lunch counter ended in the arrest and imprisonment of 16 young black protesters and seven juveniles. These protesters were offered plea deals offering release in return for a pledge to abstain from any further protesting. Four of the arrested juveniles, two girls and two boys, refused the plea bargain. These four children were JoeAnn Anderson, Audrey Nell Edwards, Willie Carl Singleton, and Samuel White, and they came to be known as "the St. Augustine Four". They were sent to "reform" school and retained for six months. Their case was publicized as an egregious injustice by Jackie Robinson, the NAACP, the ''Pittsburgh Courier'', and others. Finally, a special action of the governor and cabinet of Florida freed them in January 1964.

Armed attacks and self-defense

In addition to nonviolent direct action, the St. Augustine movement practiced armed self-defense. In spring of 1963, the NAACP aggressively lobbied for the city's federal funding to be suspended until it came into compliance with existing federal civil rights legislation and the ''Brown v. Board of Education'' decision. This led to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) stepping up its death threats against activists. In June, Dr. Hayling publicly stated, "I and the others have armed. We will shoot first and answer questions later. We are not going to die like Medgar Evers." The comment made national headlines. When Klan nightriders terrorized black neighborhoods in St. Augustine, Hayling's NAACP members often drove them off with gunfire.

In September 1963, the Klan staged a rally of several hundred Klansmen on the outskirts of town. They seized Robert Hayling and three other NAACP activists (Clyde Jenkins, James Jackson, and James Hauser), and beat them with fists, chains, and clubs.St. Augustine Movement
– M.L. King Research & Education Institute, Stanford University The four men were rescued by Florida Highway Patrol officers. St. Johns County Sheriff L. O. Davis arrested four white men for the beating and also arrested the four unarmed blacks for "assaulting" the large crowd of armed Klansmen. Charges against the Klansmen were dismissed, but Hayling was convicted of "criminal assault" against the KKK mob.

After the incident at the September Klan rally, tensions escalated further. In October, a carload of KKK night riders raced through the black neighborhood of Lincolnville shooting into homes. When blacks returned fire, one Klansman was killed. NAACP activist Rev. Goldie Eubanks and three others were indicted for murder (they were later acquitted). Disturbed by Hayling's militancy, the national NAACP removed him as head of the Youth Council. Hayling, Eubanks, Henry Twine, Kathrine Twine, and other activists left the NAACP and contacted the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by Martin Luther King Jr., for assistance.

Spring Break protests

In the spring of 1964, Hayling put out a call to northern college students to come to St. Augustine for spring break, not to go to the beach, but to take part in civil rights activities. Accompanying them were four prominent Boston women: the wife of the vice president of the John Hancock Insurance Company, and three wives of Episcopal bishops (including Hester Campbell, daughter of William Ernest Hocking and granddaughter of John Boyle O'Reilly). It was front-page news on April 1, 1964, when one of them, Mrs. Mary Parkman Peabody, the 72-year-old mother of the governor of Massachusetts, was arrested in an integrated group at the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge, north of town.

That event brought the movement in St. Augustine to international attention. Over the next few months, the city got more publicity than it had ever previously received in its four centuries of existence. The massive nonviolent direct action campaign was led by Hayling and by SCLC staff, including: Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Hosea Williams