Nor was that all. In February, 1964, whites blasted Hayling’s home with shotguns, almost killing his pregnant wife and two children, and burned the homes of two Negro families whose children had been admitted into an all-white school. Meanwhile the Klan threatened violent retaliation against white businesses that voluntarily desegregated. And Washington not only ignored Hay ling’s calls for aid, but pledged $350,000 to help white leaders celebrate St. Augustine’s four hundredth birthday, come 1965.
The situation was so grim, Hayling told King, that the St. Augustine movement was finished unless he and SCLC moved in and took over. Only King could gain national attention for St. Augustine’s battered Negroes. Only he could get them to march and demonstrate again. Would he come and lead them?
King was profoundly upset by Hayling’s tale of woe. He could not understand why Johnson and the Justice Department had failed to send federal marshals to St. Augustine. Equally distressing was the fact that Washington intended to use taxpayers’ money—including that of Negro taxpayers—to subsidize segregated birthday festivities in that unhappy town. On March 6, during an SCLC rally in Orlando, King met again with Hayling and assured him of SCLC’s support. Though a small SCLC task force was away in Selma, Alabama, working on voter registration, King and his staff had decided to convert St. Augustine into a major “nonviolent battlefield.” They intended to expose Klan savagery to the eyes of the nation and the world; then maybe Washington would provide police protection for Negroes and civil-rights workers in Dixie. By dramatizing the segregated conditions of America’s “Ancient City,” they aimed to win federal guarantees that Negroes, too, could participate in St. Augustine’s quadricentennial celebrations and eat and sleep in public accommodations of their choice. “The Negro takes pride in this nation and his contributions to its greatness,” King wrote Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, “but these continued denials to our citizenship place a heavy burden on our confidence in the American dream.” Once the Senate realized that voluntary desegregation was impossible in southern communities like St. Augustine, maybe it would break the filibuster and enact the civil-rights bill at last.
King sent Vivian, Williams, and Lee ahead to prepare St. Augustine for nonviolent combat, with plans to join them once they had the Negro community mobilized. Through March and April, King spoke around the country, with FBI field agents single-mindedly bugging his hotel rooms. Meanwhile he somehow finished his Birmingham book, Why We Can’t Wait, and mailed the last revisions off to New York. Because of the pace of events (the assassination of Kennedy, the rise of Johnson, the onset of a presidential election year), King had dropped the idea of a “quickie” about Birmingham and instead had produced a serious work that included a blueprint for racial justice. He hoped it “would answer many questions for many people for some time to come.” Hermine Popper, who had helped with Stride Toward Freedom, had finally taken over the editorial labors and had done such a “constructive and important” job in polishing the text while preserving King’s style that he accorded her a special acknowledgment in the book. Harper & Row, which had published Strength to Love the year before, would bring out a hardcover edition of Why We Can’t Wait in June, with New American Library to follow with a paperback edition in August.
Meanwhile King kept in constant contact with his lieutenants in St. Augustine. Ready to start pressing, Hosea Williams secured King’s permission to conduct night marches to the old Slave Market in St. Augustine’s public square. The Slave Market was to be the symbol and rallying point for all demonstrations. King realized that night marches were dangerous, that something drastic could happen. But “he saw this as the creative tension that would make the whole nation see what was happening in St. Augustine,” Vivian said.
On the night of May 28, while King was in Los Angeles, a riot broke out in St. Augustine. When Andrew Young led a Negro column around the Slave Market, lights from television and newspaper cameras suddenly flashed in the darkness, whereupon Klansmen poured out of the market and fell on the demonstrators with bicycle chains and iron pipes, the police looking on indifferently. A white thug knocked Young unconscious and others kicked and beat him while he lay in the street. Finally the cops stopped the violence, and the marchers streamed bleeding and crying back to St. Paul’s church in the Negro district, located southeast of the plaza. That same night, white marauders shot up an empty beach cottage SCLC had rented as King’s headquarters.
The next day, King wired the White House that “all semblance of law and order has broken down in St. Augustine, Florida,” and that the President must provide federal protection for Negroes there. But the administration felt that state and local authorities could handle the city, though it assured King that the FBI would “stay on top of the situation.”
That must have struck King as a cruel joke. On Sunday, May 31, he arrived in St. Augustine to take command, only to learn that Sheriff Davis had secured a local court injunction that banned night marches. That very evening, in fact, he and his deputies broke up a demonstration with force. In a press conference later, his bulletin board crowded with letters from all over America praising his handling of Negro “troublemakers,” Davis announced that the FBI was in town to protect Martin Luther King so that he would not become a martyr. He added with smug satisfaction, “The FBI insists Dr. King is a communist.”
On Monday, King and a retinue of lawyers and aides took their complaints to the U.S. District Court in Jacksonville, asking Judge Bryan Simpson, a native southerner, to overrule the local court injunction and permit the night marches to continue without police interference. At hearings called by the judge, Young and other witnesses described the mob attack at the old Slave Market. Sheriff Davis took the stand, too, and admitted that he had “special” deputies beyond his regular and auxiliary forces. Simpson demanded a list of names. When he came to Hoss Manucy, the judge exclaimed, “Why that man’s a convicted felon in this court!” Vivian rejoiced that Davis was “on the hot seat” now. Sensing victory, King’s attorneys put Dr. Hayling on the stand, and the judge listened, visibly moved, as Hayling recounted how the Klan had beaten and almost cremated him and three comrades.
The judge wanted to study the case, and King and Hayling agreed to suspend demonstrations until he reached a decision. Back in St. Augustine, King evangelized a mass meeting in a hot Negro church, beads of sweat glistening on his brow. The cries and amens punctuating King’s oratory recalled the fervor that had rocked Shiloh Church at the height of the Albany Movement. “I want to commend you for the beauty and dignity and the courage with which you carried out demonstrations last week,” King said. “I know what you faced. And I understand that as you marched silently and with a deep commitment to nonviolence, you confronted the brutality of the Klan. But amid all of this you stood up.”
He went on: “You know they threaten us occasionally with more than beatings here and there. They threaten us with actual physical death. They think that this will stop the movement. I got word way out in California that a plan was under way to take my life in St. Augustine, Florida.” He continued amid volleys of applause, “We have long since learned to sing anew with our foreparents of old that
Before I’ll be a slave [yes, all right, well?]
I’ll be buried in my grave [amen, amen]
And go home to my Father [amen]
And be saved…
At King’s behest, Harold DeWolf and four Boston University colleagues came down to St. Augustine to help open negotiations with the local white leadership. SCLC guards escorted them through elaborate safety procedures to a Negro home where King had his command post. To DeWolf’s surprise, little Marty ran out—“Uncle Harold!” he cried, and gave DeWolf a hug.
“Marty, what on earth are you doing here?” DeWolf asked.
“Oh, I’m with Daddy.”
Shaking the hand of his old teacher, King explained that it was impossible to shield the children from danger, that he had so little time to spend with his family and thought his boys especially n
eeded more fatherly companionship. So he had brought Marty with him.
King gave DeWolf a list of demands—public accommodations in this city must be desegregated, Negroes hired as policemen and firemen, a biracial committee established to work out harmonious race relations—and DeWolf conveyed them to local white leaders. “They could have been on opposite sides of the world,” he lamented, “so far as communication was concerned.” As expected, the whites categorically rejected King’s demands.
There was excellent news from Jacksonville, though. On June 9 Judge Simpson enjoined Sheriff Davis and the city of St. Augustine from interfering with night marches and prohibited the sheriff from subjecting his prisoners to any further “cruel and unusual punishment.” In his court order, the judge cited instances in which Davis and his henchmen had crammed ten demonstrators into a small concrete sweatbox and herded twenty-one women into a circular padded cell ten feet in diameter and left them there for an hour and eighteen minutes; one of the women was a polio victim on crutches “and unable to stand without them.”
King was overjoyed that a southern judge had found in favor of the movement. At a mass meeting that day, he exhorted his cohorts to “march tonight as you’ve never marched before.” And he decided that it was time for him and Abernathy to generate “creative tension” by going to jail. They marched to Monson Motor Lodge, which overlooked Matanzas Bay, and demanded service in the restaurant, refusing to leave until the police came and arrested them.
That night, while King was in jail, a screaming white mob overran a police cordon and assaulted four hundred Negroes as they trekked through the plaza. At last state police dispersed the rowdies with tear gas, one of them sobbing, “Niggers have more freedom than we do!” From jail King telegraphed President Johnson that St. Augustine had just experienced the “most complete breakdown of law and order since Oxford, Mississippi” and that he must send federal marshals before somebody got killed.
The next day, in Washington, administration forces won a vote of cloture in the Senate, thanks to the conversion of minority leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who proclaimed in King’s favorite words that the civil-rights bill was “an idea whose time has come.” While King was locked up in Florida, the hated southern filibuster went down to defeat, all but assuring the passage of Kennedy’s year-old civil-rights measure.
The following day, June 11, King bailed out of jail looking haggard and frightened. Hay ling claimed that he had been in solitary confinement and didn’t like to discuss what had happened. Perhaps that experience and the good news from Washington explained his abrupt departure from jail. In any event, he flew off to collect an honorary degree at Yale University, and his detractors howled in disgust, deriding his brief imprisonment as just another “publicity stunt.”
While he was gone, his aides kept up the demonstrations, including “swim-ins” at all-white beaches. On Friday, J. B. Stoner, a rotund Atlanta attorney and vice-presidential candidate of the National States’ Rights party, came to town and harangued a white crowd at the Slave Market. “Tonight,” Stoner cried, “we’re going to find out whether white people have any rights. The coons have been parading around St. Augustine for a long time!” Now whites were going to march, and neither “Martin Luther Coon,” a “longtime associate of Communists,” nor the “Jew-stacked Communist-loving Supreme Court” could stop them. Escorted by the police, he and 170 other whites headed through a mostly darkened Negro section, dogs barking and snarling as they tramped down the dusty street sporting Confederate flags and signs that read “KILL THE CIVIL RIGHTS BILL.”
Throughout the next week, tension mounted in St. Augustine, as Stoner ranted at milling crowds in the plaza and King’s battalions continued their swim-ins and nightly marches to the Slave Market. Back from New Haven, King was almost mobbed one night when he rode by a Stoner rally with Lee and Abernathy. As they waited at a traffic light, someone screamed, ’There’s Martin Luther Coon!” Whites surged around the car, started rocking it, and might have turned it over had not Lee stomped on the accelerator and run the red light in a successful getaway.
On the beaches, meanwhile, roving gangs whipped Negro bathers with chains and almost drowned C. T. Vivian. When black and white demonstrators jumped into the swimming pool at Monson Motor Court, the manager flung muriatic acid into the water to flush them out. King himself led a small column to the motor court, only to encounter a swarm of hecklers. Hosea Williams, who couldn’t swim, was certain they were going to throw him into the water, and he wanted to “get the hell out of here.” But King restrained him. “I’m not going to run, Hosea.” With the ruffians encircling them and shouting, “Hey, coons,” King led his party quietly back to their cars. “I was scared they were going to jump us,” recalled a young white staffer. “But King was so calm. His eyes—I don’t know how to describe eyes like that. You could just look at them and think, well, if he can do it, somehow nothing will happen to me.”
Though nothing happened that day, Stoner and Hoss Manucy were determined to foment a Negro massacre in the streets of St. Augustine. When news came that the Senate had passed the civil-rights bill, they raged that it would “bring on a race war” and whipped a thousand whites into a frenzy of anti-Negro hatred. On the night of June 25, eight hundred club-wielding Klansmen moiled out of the Slave Market and slashed into a silent Negro column marching through the square. A white journalist reported that “the mob emitted an eerie cry as it crossed and recrossed the plaza,” clubbing Negroes to the pavement, ripping the clothes off a thirteen-year-old girl, and then mauling a Newsweek reporter when he intervened and helped her escape.
King and Abernathy were standing on the corner at Dr. Hayling’s office when two young marchers ran by in near hysteria, crying that it was “a mob scene up there, people lying in the street all over the place.” The two leaders raced to the Negro church where the beaten demonstrators and other blacks were gathering. “People felt so badly and so hurt over what had happened,” recalled SCLC staffer Dana Swann. “Everybody was angry. Some were ready to go to war.” But King and Abernathy calmed and soothed them: “You know the risk.…If you go back there, if you retaliate, somebody will get killed…. There have to be some sacrifices made.” Then Hosea Williams led them in singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Said Dr. Hayling: “To see the wounds and the split skulls and the broken noses and broken arms…It required tremendous control to see these and not get motivated at some point to want to set up some type of reprisal or to fight back.”
For King and his followers, St. Augustine had become a nightmare. The Johnson administration still refused to send federal marshals there, and Florida governor Farris Bryant, instead of curtailing the Klan, ignored Judge Simpson’s injunction and banned any more night marches in the city. With the state government blatantly supporting St. Augustine’s segregationists and his people terrorized by unchecked white gangs, King’s campaign was stalemated.
Fearing another Albany, he conferred with his Research Committee about how to bail himself out of St. Augustine with dignity. The civil-rights bill only needed Johnson’s signature to become law, and SCLC had other projects and strategies for the 1964 election that demanded King’s attention. To make matters worse, he had lost the services of one of his most valuable subordinates. Wyatt Walker had resigned as SCLC’s “chief of staff” to take a position with Education Heritage, which was planning a multivolume series on Negro history and culture. In private, Walker confessed that he had “had it emotionally” and that he could not survive on the $10,000 annual salary SCLC paid him. “I’m reluctant to let him go,” King said, “but the development of the Negro Heritage Library is so critical to the long-range goals of the Negro community that he goes with my blessings.” Eventually King named Andrew Young to replace Walker as SCLC’s executive director.
As it turned out, events in St. Augustine allowed King a graceful exit. Prodded by Judge Simpson, Governor Bryant established an emergency biracial committee to open negotiations be
tween white and Negro leaders in St. Augustine and try to reach a settlement. King pronounced this “a significant first step” toward “reconciliation and the creation of the beloved community.” To “demonstrate our good faith” and give negotiations a chance, he called off the campaign and on June 30 left for Atlanta with his executive staff.
Had the campaign accomplished anything? Hayling thought it had dramatized to the nation the fact that the oldest European community in America was a bastion of segregation. Undoubtedly the “raw and rampant” violence exposed there had helped administration forces get the civil-rights bill through the Senate. And King’s presence had created the pressure that got city officials to talking with Hayling and his people, although it remained to be seen whether St. Augustine would comply with a federal law desegregating public accommodations.
“St. Augustine,” said an SCLC official, “was the toughest nut I have seen in all my days of working in cities in direct-action campaigns.” And King, too, branded it the “most lawless” community he and SCLC had ever worked in. They were lucky no Negroes had been slain. Still, veterans of the campaign had nothing but praise for King, who had gone there to help his people regardless of the consequences. “Once he recognized the need and symbolism in that need,” said a Negro associate, “he was willing to go all the way and give all.”
ON JULY 2 KING AND OTHER NEGRO LEADERS were on hand when the President signed the civil-rights bill into law in the East Ballroom of the White House. The cabinet and J. Edgar Hoover were also present. Addressing national radio and television, Johnson asserted that “those who are equal before God shall now be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.” The “WHITES ONLY” signs that had hurt and angered King since boyhood would now come down everywhere in Dixie, thanks to the moral and political force exerted by him and his marching legions. “Let us close the springs of racial poison,” Johnson said in his conclusion. “Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our Nation whole….”
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