Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  At Mission Nombre de Dios, the Vice President slipped away briefly from his entourage during a private tour of the chapel. In one darkened alcove, a nervous priest showed him the small wooden casket of the Spanish explorer and adelantado Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who had named his new settlement St. Augustine—for the great African Bishop of Hippo, brooding genius of early Christianity, architect of its lasting accord with temporal governance in Rome—whose feast date, marking Augustine’s death on August 28 in the year 430, Menéndez was celebrating aboard ship when the Florida coastline at long last appeared.

  The adelantado’s fleet chaplain said outdoor mass a few days later on September 8, 1565, planting a continuous Christian presence at Nombre de Dios, and Menéndez promptly marched up the coast to exterminate an explorer’s colony of French Huguenots, thus renewing the religious wars of the Counter-Reformation on the western side of the Atlantic. From King Philip II of Spain, Menéndez had royal permission to bring five hundred African slaves into the New World, and while no proof survives that Menéndez himself used this license, entries in the mission registry about the Spaniards who stayed on in St. Augustine contain the earliest documentary slave records on the continent—dating more than fifty years before 1619, the commonly accepted beginning of African slavery in the future United States.*

  Nearly two centuries after Menéndez, the Spaniards tweaked their British enemies to the north by chartering Fort Mose, the first armed, independent settlement of free blacks in North America, just outside St. Augustine. (Enraged Protestant colonists in South Carolina prescribed, and more than once carried out, the penalty of castration against slaves who tried to escape to refuge in Spanish St. Augustine, and James Oglethorpe, the original governor of colonial Georgia, personally led prolonged, bloody expeditions against Fort Mose as an archevil haven for insurrectionary runaways and papists.) Soon after the British first gained control of Florida in 1763, causing the entire population of Fort Mose to evacuate with the Spaniards to Cuba, an enterprising Scotsman named Andrew Turnbull tried an experiment in the area by importing the largest mass of white indentured servants ever assembled in North America, “Turnbull’s niggers” as they were called—Greeks, Italians, and some three hundred families from the island of Minorca off the coast of Spain. Before his indigo plantation succumbed to disease and disaster, large numbers of these laborers stole away to asylum in nearby St. Augustine. Their Minorcan descendants were among those on hand to greet Vice President Johnson.

  Fortune hid many exotic layers of American antiquity in Florida, which in modern times came to specialize in the sale of dredged swamplands and sunshine dreams. For generations, established St. Augustine families had held or traded franchises on proven tourist attractions. Purists on the city’s historical commission struggled valiantly to put disclaimers on the more egregious frauds, such as the Oldest House and the working site of Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth, but facts fell lame before imagination. The Alligator Farm relied upon the sheer atmosphere of the Ancient City, and some historical amusements—most notably Ripley’s Believe It Or Not—shook loose to offer daredevil exhibits of tabloid wonder, such as the Calf With Two Heads. In the 1930s, some polls showed Robert Ripley to be the most admired man in America, just ahead of FBI Director Hoover and far above FDR.

  Since then, St. Augustine guarded a share of Florida’s migrations by promoting buncombe exaggerations on the free enterprise side of tourism, balanced by a rigid uniformity against public controversy. Typically, Archbishop Joseph Hurley preached with genuine horror against the reforms submitted to the new Vatican Council in Rome, especially the proposal that the clergy turn their faces instead of their backs to the congregation during mass. To Hurley, this gesture invited needless popular doubt about the clergy’s claim to sovereign, lineal authority direct from Jesus. He and city leaders treated racial matters as unmentionables, whether historical or current, except for the colonnaded downtown square known as the Old Slave Market. As breezily described by buggy drivers, the site fascinated tourists as the relic of a storied past.

  The priest who guided Vice President Johnson through the old mission was a historian, in charge of Catholic preparations for the four hundredth birthday of the nation’s oldest city, upcoming in 1965. President Kennedy had appointed a federal commission to plan for the Quadricentennial—Johnson was there to swear in its members—and the priest seized his private opportunity to communicate some quieter aspects of a heritage he thought worth reflection: the true dates, the neglected Spanish history in America, the religious toll of seesaw colonial wars, the sacredness of local ground not only to the Vatican but also to the Orthodox Church, which had built a shrine to the first Greek settlement in the Western Hemisphere. To the priest’s discomfort, however, Johnson remained silent for a long time before speaking his first words of the tour. “Fifty-five,” he said. Somewhat unnerved, the priest noticed that the Vice President was staring at a sign beneath the wooden coffin. He explained that indeed Menéndez the Conqueror had died at that age in 1574, and that some 350 years later Spain had donated the coffin back to the mission he had founded in St. Augustine.

  “Fifty-five,” Johnson repeated. From his own line of work, the priest recognized a mortality reverie without knowing that Johnson was approaching his own fifty-fifth birthday that August, still haunted by a three-pack-a-day smoking habit and a massive heart attack eight years earlier. Once outside, Johnson snapped back to full energy before an honor guard of Catholic schoolchildren. Instead of waving to them, he insisted on shaking each one’s hand, picked up several for hugs and chitchats and ear-pulls, to squeals of delight, and then, just as suddenly tired again, he announced that he was heading to the hotel for a massage and a nap.

  IN THE NEGRO neighborhood called Lincolnville, George Reedy spent a day of intense mediation at the home of Mrs. Fannie Fulwood, president of the local NAACP. Threats and chaos were normal to him, but to Fulwood—the humbly upright daughter of a railroad worker, who in her forties kept up an arduous schedule as housemaid for the commanding general at the National Guard armory—excitement had grown almost unbearable since the marathon creation of her letter asking Johnson not to give his approval for $350,000 in federal assistance to celebrate the four hundredth birthday of a city that still excluded Negro citizens by legal segregation. There had been three formal readings of her draft at a board meeting, plus a consultation with a Negro college president to make sure the language was presentable, and when Johnson replied only days ago that “no event in which I will participate in St. Augustine will be segregated,” a jolt of hope dissolved into panicky questions. Did Johnson mean that the Fairchild defense plant would have to integrate its workforce before he would visit, or merely that Negroes might accompany him to the plant? Was a visit to a segregated company by private invitation not itself a segregated event? Did the pledge mean that at least one Negro would be added to President Kennedy’s all-white Quadricentennial Commission? Was the commission an “event”? What about the “white only” signs downtown—did they make it a segregated event for the Vice President to stroll near the Slave Market?

  The implications of Johnson’s pledge burned so hotly through the wires that the chief aide to Florida Senator George Smathers soon turned up on Fannie Fulwood’s doorstep. Later came George Reedy, a silver-haired ex-socialist from Chicago, long in the service of the ex-segregationist Vice President from Texas. Both talked long hours to please the NAACP delegation, but it seemed that every time either one called contacts in Washington or white St. Augustine, who in turn were checking with other contacts, new semantic obstacles arose. Word once came back that any Negroes who did attend the big banquet for the Vice President must do so as “guests” rather than as paying ticket holders, which raised new questions about whether a social exception broke segregation. Whose guests would they be? What if the Negroes preferred to pay on an equal footing? Negotiations dragged on so long that Fulwood had to duck out to catch up on her cleaning.

  These
talks themselves marked a drastic leap for the local NAACP, which had stood aloof from the two previous blips of racial protest in town. In 1960, a mob had punished and dispersed a spontaneous student sit-in at Woolworth’s that was inspired by the publicity out of Greensboro, North Carolina. Some months later, to dispel the mood of abject failure he found back home on returning from school, a gifted local student named Henry Thomas decided to apply some of the more precise nonviolent techniques he had observed as a freshman at Howard University in Washington. With recruited friends, he synchronized watches for a convergent movement on McCrory’s, but Thomas alone showed up at the lunch counter. Worse for him, the manager was amiably puzzled about what this familiar local Negro thought he was doing, then amused when Thomas advised him to call the police. Everyone laughed when Thomas stretched forth his hands to be handcuffed, and the officer, whom he knew, merely waved him along to straighten things out. Finally in jail, Thomas endured a look of mortal disappointment from his mother as she apologized to the desk sergeant, a neighbor, for the inexplicable lapse of decency that had come over the first Thomas ever to reach college. After an extended jailhouse sanity interview by the white family doctor of his childhood, Thomas was released to enduring ridicule from both races.

  Since then Dr. Joseph Shelley, the makeshift sanity examiner, had been elected mayor of St. Augustine, and Henry Thomas had become a battered, unsung hero of the 1961 Freedom Rides—other than John Lewis, the only one of the original fourteen Riders to survive both the Alabama ambushes and the medieval privations of Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary. Left behind in the sticky local fears of Negro St. Augustine, the adults agitated and goaded themselves over their paralysis until one night the pastor of First Baptist Church froze up inside while presiding over an NAACP chapter meeting—remaining dysfunctional, as though struck dumb—and when none of the usual professionals came forward, Roscoe Halyard “volunteered” Fannie Fulwood into the chair. Her credentials were lifelong service and a strong belief in memorials for redress, but Dr. Robert Hayling, as youth adviser of her NAACP chapter, pushed aggressively from behind in keeping with a lesson from Henry Thomas: that it was difficult for confrontation to be taken seriously amid old hometown ties, and that the spark of extraordinary personal challenge was more likely to ignite among strangers. As the new Negro dentist in St. Augustine, Hayling did not see a life’s story behind most faces in town. He thought a few picket lines were just the thing to shake these people out of their first-name illusions.

  The threat of pickets stirred up the negotiations at Fannie Fulwood’s house, opening to Johnson’s aide Reedy some of the internal politics on both sides. From New York, Roy Wilkins called to remind his St. Augustine branch that no picketing proposals had been cleared through NAACP channels, which were nearly as centralized and formal as the FBI’s, and that pickets could cause an “international incident” owing to the presence of the Spanish ambassador. Loyalists spoke up for Wilkins and the tested chain of command, but Hayling’s supporters grumbled about how the NAACP “national boys” were always telling them what to do, posing as the pilots of a finely tuned national policy machine even though the only telephone in their statewide Florida NAACP office had been disconnected many months ago for failure to pay a $159 phone bill. Pickets were simple. All they needed were a handful of brave people, some cardboard, and unobjectionable American messages. What could be wrong with that?

  For Reedy, the scandalous threat of Negro pickets actually gained leverage on the white side of town to secure Johnson’s most visible pledge of an integrated banquet. When the whites also agreed to hold a special City Commission meeting the very next day on the more lasting segregation issues beyond the banquet, such as the “colored” signs and the all-white city library, Reedy leaned on the NAACP members to give up the pickets for the deal. Almost immediately, he had to shift direction again to offset a wave of trepidation that ran through some of Fulwood’s colleagues. Exactly who would be willing to go now that the banquet was more than a bargaining issue? A lack of suitable clothing and other deferential excuses welled up, along with the fear of lost jobs. Some told Reedy of receiving phone threats already. They knew there could be no more sensitive breach of segregation than a banquet at the Ponce de León Hotel, the double-towered Moorish castle built almost on the scale of the Alhambra by Henry Flagler—partner of the original John D. Rockefeller and pioneer tycoon of Florida fantasy. The first Negroes to present themselves there as guests instead of doormen would make themselves as conspicuous as the Ponce itself.

  MARTIN LUTHER KING himself would come to St. Augustine for bloody demonstrations in the coming year, but those cataclysms could scarcely match the quiet ripples of intimidation before this banquet. Katherine Twine, an NAACP stalwart who would lead four teams to jail in 1964, took off her best evening dress, unable to go. Her husband, Henry, a postman whom everyone called simply Twine, agreed to escort Fannie Fulwood from the rendezvous point. They mustered only ten volunteers for a motorcade of apprehension to the hotel, where Reedy, true to his promise, met them outside. The Vice President’s assistant guided them through the palm gardens and Spanish archways, past the fountains and the staring, bewildered crowds of whites who had come to glimpse the celebrities, and inside safely to dinner beneath the Tojetti ceilings and other fine appointments of Bernard Maybeck’s interior design.

  Excusing himself from one of the two Negro tables in the vast banquet room, Scott Peek, the Smathers aide, went upstairs in the hotel to find out why the Vice President was late. Johnson, out of sorts since his nap, said he had decided to have his dinner there in the room and come down later for his speech, but Peek protested desperately because of the politics of the situation downstairs. Putting aside the four hundredth birthday of the nation’s oldest city, the little town of St. Augustine was important to Florida’s two senators—who in turn were important to Johnson and President Kennedy—because local banker Herbert Wolfe was a principal fund-raiser for the whole state, treasurer to Smathers in his campaigns. Wolfe, whom President Kennedy had appointed chairman of the Quadricentennial Commission, was the key to all the concessions wrested from local whites for the occasion; he had leaned on the management of the Ponce for the two Negro tables. Now, Wolfe and both Florida senators were waiting downstairs among the dignitaries.

  Everyone had stretched themselves to the breaking point for Johnson and his national policies, said Peek, his temper rising under stress to the point of lecturing the former master of the U.S. Senate. If the guest of honor skipped the dinner, he told Johnson, no one would believe or care that he was tired. He must make an appearance, if only to relieve tension and spare the Negroes the embarrassment of feeling boycotted by the Vice President of the United States. “I’m eatin’ with ’em!” shouted Peek. “At least you can come.” Thus prodded, Johnson roused himself to make an entrance at the banquet, and on his way to the dais he stopped by the Negro tables to shake hands. (“Don’t forget us, Mr. Vice President,” said Robert Hayling.) Back upstairs after the formalities, Johnson complained over drinks about the hardships of the evening. Smathers ought to fire Peek “for the way he talked to me,” he grumbled, but soon he invited Peek to fly back to Washington on his Air Force Jetsta.

  The next day’s newspapers reviewed the ceremonies in lavish detail, welcoming the plans of both the Spanish and U.S. governments to subsidize the preparations for the four hundredth birthday—“St. Augustine Pledged Restoration Assistance.” There was no mention of integration at the banquet, the prior negotiations, nor racial content of any kind. Florida politicians dodged the subject of race even in their private communications; in a follow-up memo to George Reedy, one of the negotiators passed off the conflict by misleading euphemism as “the local problem which existed in St. Augustine.” Local white interest evaporated as soon as Johnson took flight. When the nine-person NAACP delegation filed into the City Commission chamber for their appointment the next morning—Fannie Fulwood was absent, being unable to rearrange her work sched
ule on short notice—they encountered a tape recorder on an empty table. A city employee instructed them to leave recorded complaints for the commissioners, who found themselves unable to attend.

  Nonplussed, the Negroes took turns leaning toward the machine. Rev. J. H. McKissick mentioned the “colored” signs still up at the courthouse and the City Yacht Pier, saying it “would make the city a little more democratic not to have such signs.” He also petitioned for at least one Negro poll worker during city elections. Clyde Jenkins, a barber, protested the confinement of Negroes to menial jobs in city employment. Robert Hayling asked for ordinary courtesy at the offices of the water department, the coroner, and other public agencies, objecting that Negro citizens were commonly ignored or humiliated. J. E. Proctor, a carpenter, seconded this point by recalling that when his sister died the other day and his family sought a death certificate, “we had to stand on the outside to give the information they wanted, and I did not think that was fair. It was cold and raining. We are human like everybody else, and try to do right.”