Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  Mabel’s story and interview with King ran under the headline “What Manner of Man Is Leading America’s Negro Revolution?” “To his lowliest followers,” Mabel wrote, “he is virtually a saint.” The saint’s battle for St. Augustine, though, was only just beginning. Shortly after King left the city, vandals again attacked the Crescent Beach cottage, this time breaking windows, smashing furniture, and pulling cabinets from the walls before setting the house on fire.

  On June 11, Martin Luther King returned to the Ancient City. When he and a small group of activists appeared on the steps of the Monson Motor Lodge to challenge policy in what King had described as “the most segregated city in America,” motel manager James Brock informed them, “We’re segregated at this time.” When they refused to leave, Sheriff L. O. Davis had them arrested and locked up in the St. Johns County jail. Interviewed in his cell, King renewed his vow to desegregate St. Augustine, “even if it takes all summer.”

  Tirelessly, King continued to call the nation’s attention to the Jim Crow laws and their fervent enforcement by city officials. Southern senators, meanwhile, had spent the past two months filibustering the civil rights bill, which was being protested with increasing frequency and virulence in St. Augustine’s Old Slave Market, a site chosen as a KKK meeting place for its symbolic significance. Racial diatribes assailed the summer air on a nightly basis, and violence constantly erupted, as when the Klan assaulted white civil rights activists and journalists who’d converged on the city. The Daytona Beach Morning Journal covered, and condemned, the attacks, and Mabel pleaded for peace and cooperation between factions in the escalating racial fray. She pleaded in vain.

  King rallied his supporters: “We’re preparing for a long, hot summer, and we see our push here in St. Augustine as a purifying prelude.” The Klan dug in. Connie Lynch ranted at meetings in the Old Slave Market; posters displayed King’s portrait with the caption “Martin Luther Coon.” Jackie Robinson, who had broken baseball’s color barrier in 1947, traveled to St. Augustine to encourage the protesters in their struggle.

  Two days later, King organized a “swim-in” at the Monson Motor Lodge. As black demonstrators in bathing suits jumped into the motel pool, dozens of newsmen and photographers were present to witness James Brock pouring jugs of muriatic acid into the water. The next day, Hoss Manucy and the Klan arrived with several alligators, which they promised to dump in the pool should any blacks decide to test the city’s segregation laws again. Later in June, at the segregated St. Augustine Beach, black protesters began staging “wade-ins,” singing hymns and walking arm in arm as they made their way into the ocean—or attempted to, as they were invariably assaulted by whites at the water’s edge. Ultimately, troopers had to be dispatched to form protective wedges between the protesters and their adversaries. Indeed, the situation in the city had become so combustible that Governor C. Farris Bryant, who had been in office since 1961, invoked emergency powers to create a special police force to supplement the troopers.

  On one occasion, Lynch was joined on his platform at the Market by J. B. Stoner, a Klansman who would eventually be convicted of conspiring in the 1958 bombing of the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Stoner’s incendiary diatribe—“Niggers want to integrate because they want our white women,” and when black demonstrators appeared on the north side of Cathedral Plaza, “There they come! The niggers are coming now!”—sparked a riot, as roaming packs of whites set upon the black demonstrators and left nineteen of them inert on the pavement.

  For their part, blacks stood undaunted and undeterred. At mass meetings in black churches, impassioned speakers asked, “Are you willing to get beat up and go to jail for freedom?” Their audiences responded with their actions, marching, shouting, wading in, and clashing with their oppressors in near-nightly violence. Footage of blacks being beaten on the beach and assaulted on the streets of St. Augustine was broadcast nightly on the news across the nation. Three weeks into June, the racial turmoil in St. Augustine was sharing headlines with the disappearance of three civil rights workers who had been arrested by local police in Neshoba County, Mississippi. The FBI as well as hundreds of U.S. Navy sailors descended on the area; swamps were dredged and woodlands combed in the search for Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney. Not until August would their bodies be found.

  In an effort to calm the “racial war of nerves” in St. Johns County, Governor Bryant—again claiming broad emergency powers granted to him by state law—banned nighttime demonstrations. Tobias Simon, representing the SCLC, challenged the ban in federal court, and Judge Bryan Simpson ordered the governor to appear in his Jacksonville courtroom to show cause for the suspension of rights. Flouting a charge of contempt, the governor refused to appear himself and instead sent Attorney General James W. Kynes, who was also named in the contempt proceedings.

  Mabel had been following the case closely. She had written critically of Kynes five years before, when, as an assistant state attorney to Gordon Oldham, he had interviewed Sam Wiley Odom at Raiford. She remained convinced that powers in Lake County and beyond had been responsible for Odom’s reversal, and she was certain that Kynes had been instrumental in effecting it. Mabel’s congenial relationship with the state attorney, a fellow Volusia County resident, ensured that she’d have a seat in the federal courtroom for Kynes’s appearance.

  Among the first witnesses to be called was Officer Jerry Harris, who arrived with Kynes and who testified that his shirt had been torn by a knife in a scuffle with a demonstrator. As state attorney Warren pointed out, a crisis was brewing. If Harris’s assertion was true, the credibility of King’s claim that the demonstrations were peaceful, and therefore protected under the First Amendment, would be in jeopardy. Still, Warren noted, in all his experience with the St. Augustine protests, “discipline among the demonstrators was excellent,” and he had never witnessed a single incident of one of them “fighting back or engaging in disruptive conduct or abusive language of any kind,” even when assaulted verbally and physically by the Klan “and other hoodlums.”

  Judge Simpson ordered the officer to produce the torn shirt as evidence, but Harris demurred. He claimed that he had sent it to his wife in Tampa “to be mended,” whereupon Simpson ordered federal marshals to “proceed immediately to Tampa and retrieve the torn shirt, without alerting the wife or allowing the officer to place a phone call.” Warren, too, suspected foul play, and requested the court’s permission to speak with the officer in the judge’s chambers. Under Warren’s questioning, and with Kynes also present, the officer admitted that he had lied—there was no torn shirt. Displeased that a witness in his courtroom had testified untruthfully in a crucial federal case, Judge Simpson proposed the officer be held in contempt of court, but SCLC attorney Tobias Simon “made an impassioned plea on King’s behalf that the young man not be punished.” Aware of the “intense pressure the witness was under,” King “would be satisfied,” Simon averred, “if he recanted his testimony in open court.”

  Accustomed though Mabel had grown to corruption in Lake County, she was incensed by the blatant willingness of a witness in federal court to derail a vital battle in the civil rights movement by committing perjury. But she restrained her indignation in reporting the story for the News-Journal, in light of Martin Luther King Jr.’s position. Still, she took heed of every instance that Judge Simpson clashed with Kynes or admonished him for attempting to introduce new testimony with his questioning. What might be routine in Lake County was not necessarily standard procedure in federal court.

  “The Ku Klux Klan is not going to take over St. Augustine,” King had said, “even if we must offer our bodies as sacrifices.” That sacrifice was at least temporarily averted on July 2, when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, the Senate having finally voted in favor of the bill. King called for a truce and shut down demonstrations for two weeks. He was ready to “declare victory” and leave the city.

/>   On July 16, in an interview with Mabel, King said, “I pray that I shall never have to demonstrate in St. Augustine again. I would like to get out from under the tension.” Expressing dismay that the city, unlike Birmingham, had not yet desegregated, he remarked that Governor Bryant had not made good on his promise to form a biracial committee and that, as a result, “the Ku Klux Klan—or call it what you will” had indeed “taken over the city.” Still, he did not favor bringing federal troops to St. Augustine, because their presence would summon up thoughts of Reconstruction—“We don’t want to inflict this on our Southern Brothers.” After reaffirming his desire to work out the conflict in accord with the law, King ended the interview by turning to Mabel with a request: “If you know of any other channels we can explore to bring this thing to an end, please let me know. If anyone can reach the power structure here and persuade it to call off the Klan, we will welcome it.”

  Mabel spoke highly of King to state attorney Warren, whom she praised in an editorial for his efforts “to settle the racial crisis” in St. Augustine and whom she encouraged to bring the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to bear on the city’s tense racial situation. Mabel never relented in her own efforts to stand up to and editorially challenge white supremacists like Hoss Manucy, even as he continued to baldly assert that his “boys” intended “to fight niggers.”

  In August, King held a press conference in St. Augustine to claim a victory for his movement. He held in his hand an order from Judge Simpson declaring that fifteen local restaurants must begin serving Negroes immediately and prohibiting Hoss Manucy’s Ancient City Hunting Club from interfering with their peaceful compliance with the law.

  Generally, Manucy did not suffer from bad press. As he remarked, reporters for the local newspapers often themselves “donated” to his hunting club. He did note one exception: the “Daytona paper,” which “was the only ones that give us a rough time.”

  * * *

  —

  MABEL HAD CLEARLY REGAINED her professional footing in Daytona, and she had regained peace and pleasure in her personal life as well. In November 1960, Patricia Reese, while still a student at Florida State, had married Sanborn Chesley, the son of Army Corps engineer and Mount Dora councilman Harrison Chesley. A year and a half later, Mabel married Harrison. They bought a modest ranch house on a thin peninsula between the Halifax River and the Atlantic Ocean, just south of Daytona Shores.

  In August 1963, in the little house in Yalaha County, Charles passed away at the age of seventy-five; Pearl broke the news to Jesse in a letter. Bereft of her husband’s companionship, and absent her fellow conspirator, strategist, and confidante now that Mabel had been driven from Lake County, Pearl found herself rudderless. She seemed to be tallying only losses, and added another when she returned to Yalaha from a visit with Jesse at Chattahoochee and discovered that her tiny shack had mysteriously burned to the ground. The fire had claimed her photos of Jesse and all the letters he’d sent her from Chattahoochee—the letters she’d read over and over, letting them dissolve the miles that lay between her and her son, as if the two of them were once again lying side by side beneath an Okahumpka pine, the way they had done before Jesse’s illness, gazing at the clouds and laughing together at the shapes they took in the sky.

  Heavy-hearted, Pearl called her old friend. When they hung up, Pearl did not hesitate to act on Mabel’s advice: She packed her bag and moved to Daytona Beach. With Mabel’s help, she found a job as a maid at the Princess Issena, an upscale historic hotel, and a small, affordable apartment near a city bus stop. The two women still found time to fish together along the Halifax River, Mabel chain-smoking her low-tar cigarettes as the pair waded in calf-deep water and planned Pearl’s next trip to Chattahoochee. In the absence of any news from attorney Thomas Champion, the possibility of Jesse’s transfer had dimmed.

  Attorney Richard Graham

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Troubled by It

  THE SKIES OVER THE ATLANTIC were quiet that autumn evening in 1969 as the middle-aged woman from Okahumpka made her way along the shoreline of Daytona Beach. Three months earlier, on July 20, the United States had met President Kennedy’s challenge when Apollo 11 landed on the moon; America could declare a victory in the Space Race. The woman on the beach could boast no triumphs. Her husband had died “a bitter man,” as her friend Mabel had observed, “his hopes of seeing his son freed dashed on the rock of judicial injustice.” Pearl, too, had married again, to a Lake County man, Thomas Eisentrager, but he’d died of cancer in 1968. And Jesse, now thirty-two, was still locked up in the criminal ward of the state hospital.

  Pearl walked frequently along the shoreline, in part to save herself the cost of bus fare but also to lend herself hope for her son and his future. She still wrote to Jesse twice a week, and he faithfully answered her. She carried his latest letters with her, and on her solitary walks she read and reread them. “My dearest Momie,” they usually began, and they would continue with accounts of his day-to-day doings and simple requests, for new batteries for his radio or for coffee “and something to eat.” “My sweet Momie,” read one letter, “I sure do want two say that I thank you for being so good as two send me the dollar bil as it will sure come in handy.”

  But today Pearl was walking with purpose, to the Daytona office of Volusia County Legal Services (VCLS), where twenty-eight-year-old lawyer Richard Graham had a desk.

  “Mabel Chesley recommended I come see you,” she said.

  Graham, like most residents of Volusia County, knew Mabel Chesley by her editorials in the News-Journal, but he’d never actually met her. And initially he found Pearl’s account of Jesse’s case hard to believe—“another mother who thinks her kid’s innocent,” he’d thought. Still, Pearl’s sincerity affected him, and he was new enough on the job to be more intrigued by the case than skeptical of it.

  “Does he have a lawyer?” Graham asked.

  “Tom Champion,” Pearl told him. “In Mount Dora.”

  Wary about encroaching on another lawyer’s territory, Graham advised, “I need to talk to him first. If he’s representing your son, I shouldn’t be interfering.”

  Pearl explained that Champion could no longer work on the case. “The sheriff and the state attorney are just ruining him. He’s going to have to leave the county if he doesn’t get off this case because they’ve taken all the business he’s got away from him.”

  The explanation puzzled Graham, who was as yet unfamiliar with the way justice operated in Lake County. But Champion confirmed what Pearl had said—his involvement in the Jesse Daniels case had “given him a hard time in Lake County.” Willis McCall and Gordon Oldham, both of whom were still in office, had been exerting their power against him. Champion briefed Graham on the case and indicated that he’d be happy to have a lawyer from Legal Services step in.

  “Do you think he’s innocent?” Graham asked.

  “I know he’s innocent,” Champion said. “The boy was railroaded.”

  Champion suggested that Graham speak with Mabel Chesley, as she knew more about the Daniels case than anyone. “She will not let this case go,” he said. “She wants justice for this kid.”

  Richard Graham had grown up in nearby DeLand, where his father was a partner in Landis Graham French, the oldest law firm in Volusia County—circumstances that made Graham, as he said, “probably programmed a little bit” toward a career in law. When he joined the firm after he’d finished military service, however, he quickly realized that real estate law wasn’t what he wanted to practice. “I wanted to see some action.”

  The Office of Economic Opportunity, which had instituted a federally funded program to provide legal assistance for Americans in low-income neighborhoods as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, had opened a small Legal Services office in Daytona Beach. In 1969, Graham heeded the call for young attorneys. Still, there were tensions. “The OEO wanted us to do impact cases, but the local ba
r wanted us to do divorces,” Graham recalled. “They didn’t want us to be fooling around with constitutional cases.” After only a few months, the director of the office left, and Graham moved up. But he’d had very little practical lawyering experience behind him when Pearl walked through the door.

  After he spoke with Tom Champion, Graham spoke with Mabel Chesley, who gave him a detailed and impassioned account of Jesse’s case and the McCall-Oldham power axis that had thwarted her and Pearl so many times. In researching the relevant case law, Graham and his young associates came across a 1966 case, Baxstrom v. Herold, that seemed pretty much on point: The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that a prisoner who had been certified insane by a prison physician and detained for a period of time beyond his original sentence had been denied equal protection under the law. He discovered, too, that he could file a petition for writ of habeas corpus in a court at any level in the state, which would allow him to bypass the hopeless Lake County court and to file directly with the Florida Supreme Court.

  Mabel found Graham to be not only bright but also committed, inexperienced though he and his staff were, and for the first time in a long time she was moved to write an update on the Daniels case in the Daytona Beach Morning Journal, noting that the sheer amount of “judicial water” that had passed over the dam had opened up some new options. In addition, the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the creation of poverty programs—including Legal Services itself—had altered the tenor of the times enough that the courts might be more receptive to Graham’s petition.

  The petition argued that there had been insufficient basis for the indictment, and that Jesse’s due process and equal protection rights had been violated. The Florida Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and it ordered J. B. O’Connor, M.D., as superintendent of Florida State Hospital, to show “the lawful cause and authority for the detention and imprisonment of the petitioner.”