{"response":{"docs":[{"id":"ffc_crlsa_p15415coll1-1040","title":"Fred Shuttlesworth : Transcribed Interview","collection_id":"ffc_crlsa","collection_title":"Civil Rights Library of St. Augustine","dcterms_contributor":["Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, University of Florida"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Florida, 28.75054, -82.5001"],"dcterms_creator":["Shuttlesworth, Fred","Colburn, David"],"dc_date":["1900/2022"],"dcterms_description":["Interview with Fred Shuttlesworth, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) leader actively involved in civil rights demonstrations in St. Augustine. Provides an account of his participation in the St. Augustine civil rights movement. Focuses on the organization and choices of the SCLC. Compares the St. Augustine movement to other movements.","C: How did you become involved in the st. Augustine crisis? s: Well, by becoming one, by being one of the principals in the Civil Rights movement with Dr. King and Abernathy and Lowery, and the others ... C: Yeah. S: And we felt that it was unnecessary in my view movement by the, then ••• known personalities of the movement put in an appearance. C: Were you still in Birmingham at the time? s: Yes. C: I see. s: Well, no, I was in Tallahassee, was in sixty-... c: st. Augustine was ' 64 . s: ' 64 . I was living in Cincinnati. My relatives were there but I was still in Birmingham. Had charge of the Alabama Christian Movement and I was in Birmingham more than here because I had so many legal cases to resolve. E: Right, right. Just out of curiosity, background ... you were affiliated with what church in Birmingham? s: I was pastor of the Bethel Baptist Church in North Birmingham, which was bombed twice. C: Right. And, you were the chief organizer of the Birmingham •.. the demonstrations, is that correct? In' 63? S: One of them. C: One of them. OK. Why, how did SCLC get involved in St. Augustine, do you Know? 1 S: Well, I think it was Dr. Hayling then. Now, he was the head of the local Civil Rights group there, and requested to come down. And, of course, all those requests go to Dr. King and the board, you see. And the decision was reached to go down. I guess they started off sending the staff in and then the principals started going in. c: Who were the SCLC leaders in st. Augustine? The ones who were directly in charge? S: Well, let's see. Hosea Williams was one, because he and I led several nights marches there. C.T. Vivian was one. He and I led the march, one of the marches which went to the river. We went swimming when the desegregation order was being ••. go ahead. C: What was SCLC after in St. Augstine, do you think? s: Well, generally what we would be after in everything, to alert peopLe, to get people to move on toward their rights. I think here the beaches were segregated and the restaurants and so forth were segregated, and of course, there was the Klan riding around at this local sheriff's deputy possee and so forth, so we had to do all of that, so we come up police brutality there and human rights. c: Um hum. Was there an attempt to keep pressure on Congress with the ' 64 Civil Rights Act being considered at that time? S: Yes, yes, definitely. c: Um hum. When did you arrive in st. Augustine? 2 S: I really don't know. I went down, I went down several times. Come in and stay a day or two and participate and drive back. Both to Birmingham and Cincinnati. C: What was the idea behind the night marches? S: Well, we figured that daytime marches had special value, but that to do it at night would create more attention, that is ... C: Um hum. s: ... keep the community at unrest it decided to do something about it, and they had to be more protective and so forth so on. And I might tell you that the police in themselves were nervous and scared even though they had guns and dogs. c: Yeah. How would you compare, just out of curiosity, St. Augustine to Birmingham? s: Well, the worst riot I ever was in my life was in st. Augustine, Florida, around that flea market. That was atrocious, vicious. I think that was that because the police had allowed their climbing together and get there ... whet up their appetite, like the Indian used to do a war party-type situation, you know. C: Right. S: And sit up on defenseless and helpless people that night there. But Birminham, by far, was the more difficult and dangerous situation continuously because of the residual effects of the Klan because of the atent and patent abuse of 3 human rights by the police, by the courts, by everything else. There we did have a federal Judge, who took charge and followed this thing from day to day, and when we were in the court, he would leave. Evidently, Hoss Manuey was the one who arrested me. Manucy was the head of the Klan then. I didn't know until I had been Jailed that night with those Jewish rabbis and I was looking at it on tv. I said, \"That's the guy that arrested me.\" c: (chuckles) So, was st. Augustine more violent, do you think, than Birmingham or ... S: No, I can't say it was more violent ... c: Yeah. s: I just said that particular riot. St. Augustine was not violent expect for that riot that night and then one on the beaches where we went to the beaches and the Klan opened up for us to come in and swim. Of course we had no intention of swimming--getting out there in deep water and getting drowned, and most of our people were children. C: Right. S: So I said to c. T. Vivian, I said .•• they said, \"Come on in, niggers.\" Said, \"all right, we're coming,\" and we would go and head toward the water, you knows. They were taunting us and we were just, you know, chatting back. \"You all got the right to swim, dammit come in.\" I said, \"all right, we'll be there. Just don't worry about it. Get back so we can come in. Open up.\" So they got back further out in the 4 water and opened up a space between them, I guess, for us to come in there and swim, I guess, which would be about twenty, fifteen or twenty yards. They were up to breast or shoulder deep in the water. And so I said to c. T. Vivian, \"we must go into the water, but we ain't going as far as they are, because I can't swim and I sure am not going to take the responsibility for drowning these kids.\" So we quietly passed the word back through the line, as I remember that incident. \"Follow us. Do what we do.\" So the Klan that welcomed us come in, so they got even further back. Just means that less people got hurt or drowned, hurt that day. They got further back, so we went, just as we were going into the day. They got further back, so we went, just as we were going into the water, going straight to it, then as soon as we went, just as we were going into the water, going straight to it, then as soon as we got about ankle­deep, I said, \"Left face,\" and we all started to turn back, coming out of the water. them, hit two or three. And the Klansmen ran, some of Then the policemen moved in to break it up and this was another vicious situation. c: What were the ... S: One policemen was up on top of a car, bashing heads, at those times, with billy sticks. And they were trying to get to him to kill him. They were mad because we had the right to swim. 5 C: Did .•. how were the police in st. Augustine? We they very helpful? S: Well, I think they were helpful when they had to be. C: Yeah S: You know, they didn't particularly cherish patrolling and guarding us. I'm sure that no policeman likes to beat the head of another white person. C: Right. S: But ... C: That was Sheriff Davis S: ..• they were under orders and I think that the mistake in many of these things is allowing these people to get so violent and whip their appetites and emotions up until they have to really spill over into violence. I think that's, that's the key to most of the problems that broke out in the South, Klan and other things. If you move people along at a certain time, you might, you know, avert some of the violence that was done. c: You, they had these two fellows--stoner, and Connie Lynch in st. Augstine. Were they also in Birmingham? They were, Stoner was the Klansman and Lynch was the ... S: Yeah, well, I think he lived in Atlanta. I never met them personally. I presume that they came, you know, the Klansmen had a knack for roaming around, I guess, for wrong, just like we'd kind of roam around and do for rights. I would imagine. 6 C: Yeah. So you never, you never heard them speak or ran into them. S: No, no. I understand there was a Klan rally there. C: Yeah, there was. S: Hailey or somebody went to it and they beat him up. I don't remember who it was. c: Well, he rode by and got, he got waylaid by the Klansmen who saw him riding by. How about the community as a whole? Did you get any cooperation at all from the white leadership in the community? S: Not to my knowledge in the commmunity? c: Yeah. S: I don't remember. And then I wasn't in charge of that day­to- day situations like that. Somebody who was in charge and stayed there awhile like c. T. Vivian or Hosea Williams or Bernard Lee or Abernathy or some of them would have known more about that than I would. C: Yeah. How about success in St. Augustine? Do you ... Was there a general feeling that SCLC had gained a victory for the black community in St. Augstine? s: Well, I'm certain that, yes, of course we had the contributors, by getting the legal victims, by getting the Klan defused, by •.. C: The Civil Rights Act was, of course, passed. S: And I want to go back. There were some white people who came, who cooperated, but I think these, most of them were 7 whites who came from without. And then we had the priest, the rabbis, who went to jail with us who considened it an honor in those days to go jail with the priest. And some others. There was one girl, a white girl I believe who was from the local community. I'm not sure. I can't be sure if they were. I don't want to give the impression there was absolutely no white cooperation, but I think most of it, as, there as in other places, came from the outside. C: Um hum. Talked about the federal govement? Were they very helpful? S: Well, in moving the court situation. See, we had gotten from Birmingham and Montogomery and Sela, we had gotten the ferdal goverment enforcing agent of the goverment involved, so they could move into court quickly and get people that law enforcement officials would do their duty. Now, that was by far the most important situation. C: Yeah. s: In enforcing rights, see. C: Did .•• S: The justice department moved pretty quickly there. C: Was the justice department, say, as cooperative as it had been in Birmingham or were they very cooperative in Birmingham? S: Well, I think they were, they were cooperative to the limit of their thin understand as to what the role of the justice department should be in the goverment, you know. I wonder 8 why none of FBI agents couldn't do anything expect stand up and look and take notes. C: Right. S: Martin Luther King used to kick me when he'd stand there, take notes, great note takers. He'd tell you exactly how many blows you took before you fell. (Chuckles) But then under Robert Kennedy, you see, and Teddy Kennedy the justice department began to move actually and get the agents involved a little bit more. Of course, within limits. C: Yeah. s: Always deferring to local officials to using marshals when they had to. They insure that the agents would not just stand by and see anybody get killed, you know. c: Um hum. How did, how did SCLC decide where, what communities to go into in a particular year? S: Well, that's usually the board and staff decision. c: Um hum. And so they'd have a bunch of letters from various communities ..• S: Or request and phone calls. People would community directly with Dr. King. You didn't just get a letter and go into a community. You had to have some close-up concersation and really get the feel that, that something is needed, and then here is someplace we could go where we could make a is needed, and then here is someplace we could go where we could make a witness which would be both moving, moving and 9 meaningful. And could be seen by the country as getting some things won, you Know. C: Right. So did they try to go with one major community? S: Yes. Well, we didn't be in two, three places at one time. C: Ok. Was that decided from the start really to go with one community, say, as to Montgomery, or was that a later decision? s: Do what? c: Was it decided early on in history of the SCLC to go with one community or did that sort of develope after you tried several communities and found that it didn't work that way? S: Well, the limitations in staff and what we could do, Dr. King's time, mine, Ralph Abernathy and others, were meeded at many speaking engagments, just almost synthesized that we had to limit and concentrate ourselves on one basic job at a time. Now there would be follow-up in one community or there might be people, some as staff and some going in to other communities, speaking and doing things and encouraging people. Or even some of us could be doing that, but the major activity had to be confined because of resources to basically one area at a time. C: Was there a real feeling or fear in SCLC that it was very important to keep the movement non-violent so that violence wouldn't spread among the black America at least. s: Oh, definitely, we felt that by all means. And wish that it could have been kept that way. We wish that the country 10 could have responded to nonviolence before this violent content became evident and too many people hurt and go jail records and disillusioned on this false concept of black power and so forth. C: I was wondering, how old were you in 1963? Four '64 ? S: Well, I had to be, let's see, I was born in ' 22, so you subtract. Probably forty-two then. C: And how did you, how did you become involed in the Civil Rights Movement originally? S: Well, that's a long story but it can be shortened by saving when I went to Bethel Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama in ' 63, I immediately started dealing in my own church and voting registration and community progress, and I was real ••. a driving force then. I got other members of the community to do the same, and then I worked with Civic League across Jefferson Country. Became known that way. C: Um hum. S: And then I was good, a pretty good speaker and I was invited to do the NAACP Emancipation address. The first year, I think two years straight they elected me as membership chairman, which gave me access to people because I was already known. And then I was membership chairmen when NAACP was outlawed in 1956, in May. Now, also, before this or during this time, before I was elected membership chairmen, the first big headline, I guess I got it in Birmingham, was that when I got fifty-five minister to sign 11 for Negro police, fill out their Negroes at that time. In '55, that was a little bit before the MIA stared its boycott. So that's how I got involed and of course, with the funding of my ... with the outlawing of the Alabama .. of the NAACP in Alabama, of course I called a mass meeting June 5, 1966, and organized the local movement and then went on to national meeting and many a group still does meet, and then, and we started attacking segregation. My philosophy was.that the best defense was a great offense and if all segregation. My philosophy was perhaps best being used in situations when the orangizers filed their first lawsuit contending ...••• One of the men said to me, \"now we've got that thing started, let's sit back and see how that comes out.\" I immediately said to him without thinking too well that we had to continue to protest. But I mean, put a lot egg because that egg spoils and you've wasted your chaveer. But I mean, put a lot of eggs in the basket, somebody will hatch out. And so we went in railroad station, pashas and, anything else. The courthouse was when you had to go into massive demonstrations, be down at the courthouse and decide that the citizens are going to be down there and desecrate the courteous. Then, we had the bus situation that started in Montgomery and also into Birmimingham. c: Is that when you first got to know Dr. king or had you known him? 12 S: No, I knew him before in Montgomery that same site. We had talked that year occasionally, but met, naturally, and of course we were there when they organized that night to start getting together to demastriate. So then, after Birmingham became so big, we got started, we had fought and won several legal victories and they would become pyrrhic victories because the law would be frustrated by the courts and the judges so that we began talking with SCLC and others about a confrontation. That's why the massive demonstrations were, we'd build around, even that people had to be moved enmasse for their rights. That to confront the system, we had to massively rise up non-violently. And really create turmoil in the sense to create attention in the community. You can't operate normally with segregation. And that Birmingham was the best place because of good climate and having establish as a citadel and because the next thing is being a type of a strong person, I gusset I ... they called me strong. I don't know what I was, I was a fool maybe. The Klan couldn't run me out. You know, they burned my house, blew the house down around my head. I didn't run out and leave town. And I had established a trust among the people whereas if I ever told them I was going to do any one thing, I would do it, because there was no doubt that if they people respected and would follow, because the few that would follow me in danger, you know, they would stick with me, you know. So that's, that's just a decision to make 13 this massive confrontation in Birmingham because we said we said in Birmingham goes, so goes the nation. C: Right. S: And it did. C: Right. What, where did you, had you come from before you went to Birmingham? S: I was born in Montgomery, Alabama, but I didn't .•. they brought me to Jefferson Country when I was a Kid, baby. So I was raised up around Birmingham. Oxmore, about ten miles from Birmingham, all my life in the rural. c: Had you gone, had to gone to college or religious school? s: When I was in Biramingham? c: Yeah. s: In '43, in 140, in 1940, I finished high school in Louisville. I married in '41 when I was 19. Worked for two or three years at the cement plant there. Then I went to Mobile, Alabama to get started on defense work. Got a job with the goverment. The only schooling I'd had beyond high school then was I started going to night school because I felt the call to the ministry. And the, I worked for the goverment until '47 when I quit to go to school at Selma University to begin my college work, Selma University in Selma, Alabama, the black belt, where we had the '65 voting riots there. I went there in '47. I began pasturing two churches--one on the east side, rural church and one on the west side in '48. And then in I was going to school at 14 C: Selma University. At that time it became practical for people not with a degree to get a c certification, and I felt that if I got that along with my two little churches salaries, I could make a living. So I immediately left Selma University on the spur of the moment and went to Alabama State. Made very high grades there for a year, three quarters. While I was there, I commuted back to Selma, to my local churches, and all of a sudden, the large churches there, the First Baptist Church, which incidentally, a storm tore it up in January of this year, but, the minister suddenly left First Baptist Church in October of '50, and I was well-thought of in the church for coming up there. And the deacons asked me to temporarily serve until they got ready to send out and get somebody. 'Course I preached there from October until May. Preached every morning and then go right immediately to my other country churches. And in May they called me, so I stayed there from May until '50 to '52, and that's how I became, you know, involved there. And then I went back to Selma University and I'm back there now. Got my AB degree at Selma that I have, and then I went, commuted back to Montomery and got my BS degree. In '60 I was on a Master's degree. Right. So thats, that's where I am now. Who are on the board of directors of the SCLC? Besides Dr. Aber ... Reverend Abenathy ... 15 S: I don't know. You'd have to get some of the minutes because there's a lot of people. C: Right. S: David from Louisiva, Anderson from Baton Rouge ... C: How often do they meet, once a year? S: Johnson from Mississippi. The board meets in April, and SCLC meets in August. at a convention. C: I see. Ok, well, listen, I thank you for your time. S: All right. c: And I really appreciate the information. S: Ok, if there's any publication, you know, write the group, give me a copy of it. c: I certainly will. s: What's your name again? c: David Colburn, C-0-L-B-U-R-N. I'm at the University of Florida. s: Where? C: University of Florida. S: And you're doing this for what? c: I'm writing a book for Columbia University Press. S: Oh, Ok. c: On the st. Augustine Civil Rights crisis. S: All right. c: And I'll send you a copy. s: Would you? c: When I finish. Sure will. 16 s : Thank you. c: Thanks for your time. 'Bye. 17","Ku Klux Klan -- Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) -- St. Johns County Sheriff's Office -- St. Augustine Police Department -- Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- Wade-in -- Police Brutality -- Picketing -- Mass Arrest of Rabbis -- Klan Rally -- Civil Rights March -- Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- Night March"],"dc_format":["application/pdf"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/CNE/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":null,"dcterms_subject":["Civil rights--United States--Florida"],"dcterms_title":["Fred Shuttlesworth : Transcribed Interview"],"dcterms_type":["Text"],"dcterms_provenance":["Proctor Library"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://civilrights.flagler.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15415coll1/id/1040"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":["Flagler College is not the copyright owner for this item, nor can the College provide a copy of this item. Please contact the contributing organization to obtain a copy and permission to reproduce this item."],"dcterms_medium":["transcripts"],"dcterms_extent":["17 pages"],"dlg_subject_personal":["Shuttlesworth, Fred L., 1922-2011","King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968","Williams, Hosea, 1926-2000","Vivian, C. T.","Manucy, Holsted, 1919-1995","Stoner, Jesse Benjamin, 1924-2005","Lynch, Connie (Charles Conley), 1912-1972"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"ffc_crlsa_p15415coll1-1045","title":"Henry Twine : Transcribed Interview","collection_id":"ffc_crlsa","collection_title":"Civil Rights Library of St. Augustine","dcterms_contributor":["Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, University of Florida"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Florida, 28.75054, -82.5001"],"dcterms_creator":["Twine, Henry","Colburn, David"],"dc_date":["1900/2022"],"dcterms_description":["Interview with Henry Twine, prominent leader of the St. Augustine civil rights movement and one time president of the local NAACP. Twine discuss the civil rights movement's origins in St. Augustine as well as major events between 1960-1965.","INTERVIEWEE: Henry Twine INTERVIEWER: David Colburn PLACE: St. Augustine, Florida DATE: C: \\VeH l-\"tn0ught::t:::wcn'.tlc;:l-start\"ln-1963 and you can tel1 me how things got started •. a- fir T: Well, actually t+re first begi·rmfng- at 1'111 io::IF-laglerlt Memorial College, there / were some students who went uptown and sat in~d they called some of the trustees from other cities to come in, and they finally got~them out of ;jail 'l :n·J \u003e h'J'.:.JI d 1 and sq~~ \"t17.. And from then on out the members 'began to pi ck up and I ..+-j-+-.......... ~~· into the city. C: Was this early in 1963, do you remember~about what time? T: do not know when the sit-ins first began, when the first sit-ins actually happened. Al A lot of people claimed that Martin Luther King came and started it, but we were actually then the doing it approximately a year before King.arrived on the scene.~ after ;s.a-\"Y:;;f We. on o c ri v0 NAACP ~ some workers inl'~ had/f NAACP chapter here al 1 the time, so they sent some workers iry f fellow by the name of Lutman and a fellow by the name of Brown, I· cannot think of their first names, one named Brown I think he ·0 ) vY was NAACP, and still ~in service now, and Lutman.\"~o young fellows, I think they came in from around Savannah, Savannah State College, I am not sure, but they --~ .. ~ came in and worked during that summer. And-j\\;~ we began to make demands on -+Jre )l. \\AU'v the city and~~~~the first marches that we had. C: What were race relations like before the sit-ins star~ed? T: Well, as usual,\"~'1m., we thought things were good. The whites as usual, thought /d .. s.-u_,, things were good1and this wa'!5~we made any demands. This is where the troubles t (]Jv:\"r; begin in 0inter....race relations. xfxax~M¥xwaxxmia~kxkexw~wi~xka~ext~ The average dif-black was happily, as it seems, h. b • ~\th 1s us1nes~ ~~ t e f.1 rst ti.m e whistlin' and doing his business and going it-' is h.e asks for a piece of the pie, ~~a about CRSTAUG 13 A LR 2 T: ferent story. C: In terms of.,~f.J. segregation, what was it, was there a segregation in the T: ot c: T: C: T: school system? Oh, everything, everything, everything, not only the school system, ' ~~ other place,f radio station, everything. They were just as loose about it as any bus terminal, and everything else. And separate white and black~· drinking fountains, white and colored at that particular time, and so forth and so on. And there were no colored restaurants uptown, you could not eat at any of the lunch counters, or any other place •. How about the library? Did you us~ the library? ,., •, ho.d I really don't know, now we~ never tried to use the library before, we did try at that: particular time and we were turned away. Not only that but even churches, right now very few blacks can be found attending white churches around How about the Catholic ~/(),!:;. ' church, \u003et!t that intergrated? Or did it have ••. ? 1 · ...•. :r·~i!.i~~rii'~~:'.~J;~ attended 0 \u003c;. Most blacks,~far as I kn~w, St. Benedicks up here on, I would say yes/it wa: segregated in a way of speaking 1 because('!l up until that · ~ 11 d'(v _._. time, .tfp., until the 1960s) the blf!ck kidsl(ttended St. Benedicks School up/\\on Central Avenue. The white kids went to what they called CTS and St. Joseph's Academy. The black kids could only go, I think, as far as eighth grade up there. They had no white sisters at all in the school. But they could only go as far as eighth grade, they usually had to transfer to the public school or if they continued their Catholic education, they had to go up to Rock Hill, South Carolina. So those who had money, or somebody who would sponsor them, ~'t:t'!fff.. . would go up to Rock Hi 11, South Carolina, that was~ the nearest black, ~· ....-=\u0026Ji~ Catholic, \"filit.higher public education, ••b':ldm!~tm~~mtt•EW·'~'­They had to Rock Hill, South Carolina, to continue, you know their grade...,.. school . CRST AUG 13 A JR C: ~ ~hen did you get i nvo 1 ved in \u003cfie:-.t~ the Ji vi 1 Ii ghts group? .,.:_,~ T: Oh, I have been involved, actually~ since I ·came out of service in 1946. C: Excus~.sne:r;;:;;but-·had you lived in St. Augustine all of your life? ~ T: Practically all my life. Actually I was born in Tallahassee, Wffe~~gr~-:\u0026 ~~~~~I came her~/when I was six months old, between here and Tallahassee, and I started school in Tallahassee. And when we moved here permanently, I wo1:.ild say !{heh I was flil~about nine or ten ye:;? old. about third or fourth grade. But,~ first that I can rememberfn what you -o. 'L think might want to call~ Civil Rights struggle was right arourid 1946 or 1947• •lJ!i; ~here was a black lad~i:;'me here with some people,~~:;:;:~ they had a beach cottage and they went to the beach, and this lady was in the t:~ o.re of wo1..',f S water with the kids, the blacks~ nursing the kids, and she was in the water with the kidsf I believe it was late in.the 1940s or early 1950s. ~ i .' .~ this lady went in ~ ~'(} And a.cfrF sheriff the water· with thy hids at what they called a white beach/ (\\\\ Ct:.1 ~. by the name of Noll Carter went down, there and yanked this . , ' woman out of the water. Well, maybe this was in the 1950s, I am not sure of the date, but we had just elected a fellow by the name of· L.O,Davis, Jr,._ .,--,. as sheriff at that time. His father ran a store in the b 1 ack community on Washington Street for ye;:irs. and years/, fa~ both of them were pretty 1ibera1 as far as blacks were conc~.rn1ed;~~em credit and_ doing other favors. c).r·t)J And everybody knew him~ he was a little boy and raised up here. And there Noc I /a.11d he.. was a deputy under him, q~·~~~ Noll Carte/ anked this lady out of the wate~ Well, news spread in tnwn, and meeting at' the a manifesto, or what- I ever the case might be,~-sOfITTroTT'ec;::scrt~=~. and they asked me to read it, -....... .. -,~-~ ---- pg 4 T: But this kind of blew over, kind to demonstrate in other parts of Then we had a young fellow who lives right down the street here by the name of r: bet i C/J\"C,... Henry Thomas,!' he was away going to school l~,i@~--~~~:~~r!Fe, up around Atlanta, and Henry came here and sat in by himself. LriO'~nt'h\\!JiY\u003c!J!ll8t..,.. his 'f~ ~-. 7•\" mother lives right down the street now. He sat in by himself, I He cut the 1 i ghts out on the counter and everybody sa i d~J~R gl: t think a~ ~oo 1 worth 1 s liO' -r j :.:i._.·,~ $.~ . ;·._~_.. he/\\was crazy or somethin and they arrested him. They put 'him in jail, and after they put him in jail they -fit,el ~ o nz.., ·{4/IJ o took him out of the jail one night about l~r~ o'clock and brought him co ... lf' l c o1- down to the hospital for a oelile'clc rer the doctors to look at him and have him committed. lJh,.__,.f;:-dc::UJf'\\ , ~ ~ -~he Mas~ and raised so much sand down there;--~Clibw., some how or£1t1other, $' -=t::: ancl IV ~'\"':ch:,®11!:~.J]lffl~f!l~§l\"--11:-h~~~~;f~l:S,_:;~;tm~-~1!1111i¢i'\\ he . g~~-~~~,~-~f ~~~L::~-~-~~~~-~-~~--~~- he re and went back, he is living in Atlanta now. -;;:~ed the freedom tiUW\u0026 ~riots -........._..,_....__ ___ ,,.. -~~ .. .,.~,·-·r,..,,,_+--~--~--\"-~\"\"~·· -~-.. ~-·-~--·- ~~;;=-\u003cl;-:-) I understand that he is,doing very well in Atlanta, he owns a couple of ----:\u0026cu-1$~ .. ~1 . .· . those~ I believe/ Kentucky Fried Chicken, or some chain outfit, or something there. C: d4q{) what do you think got you involved? ~~hat was it in your background/ 8 ~ your parents, the service~ \u003c- ~ ,:. other than the fact t:b:at... ·tho~ obviously you are black, what got you involved in the civil rights movement? Ii T: Wanting a better life I imagine, wanting things that I have seen other people with, C: T: a wanting to live better, and so forth and so on. I stayed in the service/11ittle better than three years and I was mostly with a white outfit the time I was in the service going to schoo 1 up in New Jersey \"il.1-\"f f' \\· ..· ., -S~~· , LP~\"fc6o\u003em munications . ~a= ~ Q Fort Martin? Fort Martin, right, that was iJre I }'las stationed. fronrihere, ..f_._l rst I went to as far as Utah ~ then back over to /\\ Carolina for a while. + tNo.S I Yeah,f\\out 'S}i~re at c4j\\£}-j_ • I lii~ ~-~t\" fJ\\ff fS-l'CtS Fort Martin and then to North pg 5 C: were in the service? T: After you came out of school? No. ~~rt~~'l)I was in the 437, {ju_~e~of\\ t~tlr~hich ~:Ji llJ\"t\u003e~k ~~ • a= I .,,.f-_ I · k d _a,i;Vv-1{(v(r ~Q,/U._ - • --'}'=1--- fo r the A1 r Force. · · .{/1J..P.Afi \u003c::i'/'J_,~fUcrr-'- wfl'at ever they did around here. And V\\ CJf(];Vvi.-vY\"'-OJ~ then, after I came back home,)\\'about~a year I got married~! was working as a janitor 0 s-h31 to the ThompsonRecord Company. I took the ro Ex.cm j I was luc~y enough·:to pass it)· ,.PnO. J:: ~~ C€J.-v\\ \\;)\u003e.-Id~ Posto.J :;:;;;,.QJ1.AJ-'-~·cr.. .. .; SVv-o~,.I .. (1~--t---\" • Q:: \\/JO~ . C: So there was nothing specific that happened it~ just your desire to have what you CV(...) T: .t£ere ts: a lot of things )LGU:d.:JIM that ~\"'' 7:\u003e1\u003e'1,fh\u003e,} specifically that happened, I J'.flJ4B:m. you S'.e''!'A' the way they treated people around here, I mean as far as putting them in jail, for instance, when a white man killed a black woman right on, right in front of Pantry Pride. ·nw\"t... . This was all during this particular time. _,,..was Adeputy sheriff by the name of Bi 11 Wade, and~ he was involved in a little gambling scheme out here. He had a little joint or whatever and bliJlck/f9l~~:i rl . (/Ut.f I , 1-- ;::..?f\\f\u003c~, went out there and gamb,led . ~ J~e pulled a 1:\u003ei stol and killed them, 1 :.;i)'1m~\" ' ' O ~.i. f·.·111v, o1 l' ~- _Jh .''( Wo '\\.. r/1' 11:1.,r, . . 1-J;r rln \\, ( of_; '\" =' I . . 1 f I , , ,.._,, 1 t./.! J ;_... ... ..} L·-·'\\.. ti ,....'1 f1 ·v 'Lr';t.:r '~'f~~,..· ' .... f ~~;;:.t~~,J.ma/.JJir. pfrr .,rfr~i c,,ko.Jr. There was fellow by the name of Sheppard, and they never wanted to arrest the -~~Y and the black fel lows0 weAe_. ~~ 1l,e_r€.~.e J.a:,.1~'\\. · ~tki?.kf (\\il,i~(}\\/'l.fw+:ll,-_k,\u003e. ~{...tcui)d~-ekr;f:rfind out who he was. Butl -th~ ~eatl') ~ ,~·v._,{aet( ::tG-+6\\4}\\ .a~Js(~or~·l}~ ittrllr1;'4~~JDM. w L-. I O..--:...:-Tut.0A-(UY~nd a 11 the blacks u}+~ ~ ~:gistered~U:lf \"t~e~~; get people T to register, we did not have to much t~ouble registering around here. The only diff-erence though is that if you went to register and if you were not sharp and watching, 0-- they would automatically register you\" Republican if you did not tell them that you wanted to participate in the Democratic primary. Now they would do this to you at the registrar!s o~fice. away and then WHHDi Democratic Party. So you would have to watch them. Now, I have seeru people come have to go back t/.end in a registration slip to get in the 1 , .••• \"·.?I Of course the Republican Party could not participate in the l;Q;~~\\8j( ~J:~~Jt:etjp~~~.;~t;J:tl!'!\"\"l~ffF~'f.;:r;ieuu~Democra tic .-----\"'~. ·\". . primary. pg 6 T: The Republicans there were not strong enough to hold a primar~;RF-there was not that much competition. But in the general electio/~ you could vote either way you want\u003cul 1v · VO f-c.,. C: How about in terms of registrationl'~~::tfromeltt!J.d..-.e, did you find you had to re-register? Did they take your name off the registration list? T: C: T: C: T: C: T: Well, I think they did this in general accordance to the list~- eyery pnce in a while . /\\, 9A\\'l'C0 Ot,,k b)o.U~:::, as they do now . 1'.=t!ili!Ut X«lli I do not think they persistantly ·~I?-· d •:ta~ but I do l not know. do I know~ in North Carolina they did(\that specifically toward blacks. Yes, I worried about that. . 12 v0·ihv,..\\\"\" l/ ?n. L6l',.,..,,' \u003c.\u003e' h~ . l-V /Y) Well, I guess back to 1963, ~you said that flt, i?~cfjrv·Ct--r-- ~~the NAACP, what!' was your involvement in the NAACP at that time? 10-r-t\\CU\\ar e.,\\je ~\\l~ Ot{\u003c'rL'-D rdS OC~ Well I was a member at tliatY time and f.i!iW'il · .11 ffly\"1,13ecretary ~I served on the executive board. lXCJA\"t,0 Now what role did Dr. Hilling play here? Was he the head of the youth council? ~~ll.P 1 . :W~ Yes, /,_,_f®IV\\\\ td youfu- C.;;;ncil ._ '-ibaJ (/.AQ.•\\ O.d . ..- have got NAACP chapters in most cities · .· . \"' -with' mostly elderly peopl)C:he older people_,but they never had an active youth council --~~~---~~~~~~~~ He saw the need for this and at that particular time the older persons who had been in the NAACP chapters kind of underground could not let white people know what was going on and this kind of thing. These kids;;...;:.1\"1..._!r- .. were seeing what was going on with the states and so rf.I ,· \\\\ ! flC\\ forth and they were ~o get out on the street. So we took xkR advantage of this and formed a youth council. C: Was there much interaction between the college students and the youth council or was the r· youth council mostly young black kids from St. Augustine? ~;r;..n-= ,,, ... ~ \\'i•v,'.;.;; 1 i 1 T: Well, ~ young black kids.,,.M.. ~ from: in the city. Oh, there were several kids from$ the school participating. ~they were willing and they participated quite ..... ' ~. ~ .. :.' a bit but afxxru1xsR quite naturally the parents drag home the meaning of the good word/ pg 7 T: )nd CJ.l?J'l'\\Y the administration out at the school and they put the\"\"\"1tttJ:-Von and you get into jail C: you see. pf!:?'f{'v . ';/ When did things begin to get out of hand at least..:iC! the hostile reaction from the white connnunity? Did it happen from the first? T: No, .a:;t\u003e: f\u0026ici~quite natuarally we got a little resistance Xlmm to begin with1but -\\\"!,,. \\ \"e'-j vJf\\\"\"5 6-:::1 0Gr jt:\u003e · \"!f.11* thought maybe this thing C blow E::f:f ove1/a I would imagine so xirax this was on \\-\\ (2.£At.L '-/ their minds. Right around 1964 '11ifj1J£'ilit\\heated up because we began to apply a little pressure. At this particular time we began to appeal to the head of theC'.o::P.:~~)iv(h .. v~ to~e.Bishop at that particular timet(!c;:.,,::;.~~animn~~-lllUIMi~~mSi!l!:f;i .. :£~1!;~., ~~~~~~~~- he had headquarters ... and lived in Jacksonville Beach .. We wrote 1 et t er s to him and then'..,~egan ~talking about this celebration we were supposed to have. 400th Anniversary? T: Right, : 1 ·-ya!'I\u0026'\" tat is where we began to apply the pressure. We began to write letters and we began to get the word out to the news media and so forth. We even wrote to +h-C..-\u003c''Q . . \\ · ,_ . ( . ~4• . J:il e ~tlr Jwa::geaw ~L£8Rlio. ~-\u0026Dh;::iitlfifii:Jorganization of American States. \\ 0 C\\ \\ (jl- d\u003e\u003c ... ,.'(,\\f.J\u003e· T: Right, we even wrote them because~~~~~~~~ ,, people were participatin~ c;.n c)./ 'Q in this·prograu;,-~ and word began to leak outvthat is when we began to take to the all~ streetsxxxW2xhegxRXNi:Xh and King~egan with•8#J ~·!J down in'Florida. C: Tell me about that~ow you get King to come here? Al\\ ri'o,h t· • · E. T: \"\"\"\"!SiEiitibl Well, they were having a meeting down in Orlando, Florida. N~f-tbf exactly what the meeting I forget now HHX was but it was a big one. C: 151 c . .J-n C.,kr~/tJ-Q._,,J Cvh 1$ · I think it was a state meeting -lJ-rT-~~'\\.}...\u003e~-=o,_tJ_·_JJJv_'~~_l_•..J./V\"'\"'~--\u003e' . U ; T: Right, right down in Orlando, Florida. So several of us, Hilling, myself, Billy Eubanks, my wife, about two carloads of us went down and we went to talk with him . d-. . CV\\ or(~'.t-1'\u003e i t.:£1..-l:.\\of\\ .Pr90.f\\ ;~.tel ~ k-~ :A· about the situation.\\-\\e ~ ,..~-~~--- v and we were -Mt c a IS unn and IN~ -eXt · ro,;i --- ---- ---------------------- T: pg 8 ~tz\\rvC1 we needed kRxp some help and ~that particular time the NAACP national chapter just ~rt- -or_i etri tcd did not believe in taking to the streets. It has always been a - :-ma Elli!~ ' b aj}:tcf..:::lccr;vq'Vi .. L.J\u003c--Q.,. CDu-A_:x.) . outfit you know. You go to court and you wm (D:/v'-· ~ but youVdo not demonstrate et 'fly o f1e.. \"s -,a:_ or you are going to get/mt and risk st 1 1g ! s- life. Now this was at that particular stage in the game. So at that particular time the NAACP sent some representatives there. We had most of our officials come here from time to time. ...wti=tmd Father who Gibson I think came here from .. · Miami and Reverend Graham(\\ at that particular time~ was a big wig in the state. I remember ~ they would not turn their books over to the r\\l.--_j.0'-2~.X::~~? ~J '\"' D~,.A. CcJ). o L ... state. They wanted to find out whatC 1 1 a _Q!tt:P. ~the NAACP vJo..s/ state legislature 1 and they refused1 a~d~~h of them. AJ that.particular ~~~k.:.,-,.~_-'\\,/$~:e±::s::t:-J.. I time they came in and tried to talk us out of it ...s., ..o,...,,,ij~l:±zi=_;;:;!J...I~' 2;~P-£~ The., OLAt:j:::\u003e i 111~ , __y/ C: _;£;;JiN' JU!ll lihiitllf§Rl_J~1Ptil• i 1 1,~~national president of the NAACP, .. \u003c\u003e T: :Roy Wilkins? C: Roy Wilkins just retired. T: Yes., ,..:. C: I read something that he sort of censored Dr • 1 H~~~~ {\\(/v. tJt1li\\Cl)..., 5 (}(}-\u003c-., 'l • \\J~ He did. Or~ remarks. This came~uttsome moonies report1or somebody hoJ picked up a rema'f k rt\\h at Helltt~W~-ov made. He said something about-./-whites were really -·- T: ' rt., d-'(' V}.;\u003e;\"\\J./~,._,- (f 0. • c:: r-{\\, f· 'j-t).J ,/ . 'f'-'\\~ ~'O'? and we: made them pretty angry and they began to throw fire-bombs and \\_Q_ Jf they began to shoot at peoplets houses and so forth. In fact they threw some right down the street. ~~Ieu i'~my sister Lilian Robinson, had Bunyan Robinson, lO; (fl rJdte., wvd ? ) her kids were the first kids to integrate the school out in--the p1~; School, hous,out there one that lived next to and they burnt up their there was a deaf fellow night.\u003c'- That is my sister's house. Then 15'\u003c --n-1i::- he r~name of Charlie Bronson. His kids were attending school and we were out there attending a PTA meeting and somebody set a fire in the back seat of his car and burnt up his car right there in the front of -f\\'18J the school. So the whites~after they found out that we were intending to keep on . _.,.., T: C: T: pg 9 C {• ' (! ..... ( ('./ I) 1 . II I c-ffi\\, C j} ,,XJ-(.f .. ,e_;\\ . r../ ', .(t~f Iv- /) this thing/ a.y~ ·. v\"\"' ~ i_.hey came to Hell'O' and Hell6rtJ focvi\\ired/ and he made the remark, I' Shoot first and ask questions later if this is the way it is going to be.'\" ~ i--1t.0'S '6 So when he made this remark thevmedia picked up this thing more and they sent it on s:: the wires. It is like this is what they wan~---they want~ something/and up until -_- that time we had not;~e had tried to be quiet and go about our busines~ with this ~ thing. I was working iJY ~~~Aug us tine 1 '1 - , . there o~ ), ~ · t , ~~ree t a no/one 0 1 f the reporter~~~e by a¥,s~31:rd r/:t t~~;nf:,~~-t~~ ~~J h7~~~1~i/ell wa~~!, \\i~~\u003ehj H~llb~nd what i!s going o~j\\~Lb- know. i\\Lo~k at, ;~is.~ .. Anq I looked1tM''SUt d rh0 e-1,,:.:cJt« .,_v bo..tn::.I the man made a remark so we had ~··vrx·c:J1)2) ff f: · '8 and we tried to assume that it was not so important but it had gone.._, like wildfire at that time. Somebody called fJ I V/. (}/\\/vJ-- 0 n' c\".1-1 re-of the national office) CJvx:t:X,_.. Wilkins being the man r-J.. c1J in a court~ri t:at:ed outfit;.that is when~stated that he would have no part of this. Did he ask you to remove H~ll6~ from the Youth Council? Did he go that far? 0 . +·f10;.Jf- I cannot say for sure but it was something in~ order. ~Wnw;m:et'L 6tfu:w:£~ They wanted to lift~- charter and everything else, so then that is when SCr ' ~J we turned to the ·SE , ~went down to Orlando with C.T. Vivian. T t WOI S 0 \u0026X'li'jfL T: Williams• C.T. was the main speaker down there, King wasn't there. I think King was in his room or something. Anyway, I remember meeting with C.T. Vivian/ . Ji? and 1efi'@a. I think C.T. Vivian was the director of branches for the SC(7'or something; and we persuaded. him at that particular time ·to come and take a look here. So they sent some workers in here to begin with and they looked around and and they tho,ught ·.tha t~J~ffiiett~a r1-. they ~H\\~•k . ~ trouble;/}7fiere would not be that much hostility(\\ ~nly they liked what they saw would not have that much problem ~1 was that St. Augustine was promeniently Catholic, this is the birth place you know of Catholism in the United States.e. !!O we sold them on this \\deo ~ ~ .......... pag 10 T: They thought this to be a dominant tourist town and some people accus/.d. us times for ruining the businesses and c;~~~ ~~\" M1..t'.MI .e tourists off and so forth. at But, this was not our intentionf to begin with. Maybe there was some remarks made to organize .a~J'~f:'P'\\i.asc.if.'a'fld'Z'tt~ Klu Klux Klan/1from all over the state. We had somebody from all of the United States here. Here was this fellow a~cus/ed of beating these kid-s with stones. Another fellow out of South Carolin~ ~~~~~~~1~a1e.,,~~ .~e •. died, he had a heart attack • ,,..., ~ ~ -:::~Jtmtfi.E:~yncli:~~- T:~~ey came in as organizers. This fellow out of Louisiana, he had a heart attack and died but he was supposed to come here. He was scheduled to come here, b...:a:;e Uiiii!b~!lllivi•91i~io.. pe was a big man in Louisiana .at that time/ ~a big Catholic man. ~ @'3'.f~llm+ _h.e ~alked about shutting the Catholic schools down and everything • . ·~~.: • :S- w~1fc.d iv ~'\" .J- ·+h(., blod:~~;. oYJ soyrit.t He said ~~;tmd'!!~\"l.i:Jl:~;~1~-€~~\";:~\"\"'~ =~~~~~~~¥i~~~~~tqJ~~~~k~~g:£,B~~· He was supposed.to come here but he had a heart attack and died right before he arrived here. We had some of everybody, a fellow who did some bumming over in Jacksonville, remember the bumming school over there, he was caught right here, he was taking a rose plant or something like that. He worked over here at mobile courtyard. See they would let all elclY\\ev-i+ h 1'dc .. I and all this bad sljm'@t!: and they would come in~. these guys come in here AllJll;I JJr we had the ~ John Bird society, all of the big whigs on the John Bird Society, we had the \\Lu- an o\\ ~Klux Klan )left some of everytloiing that you could name here. C:~ I think the day I came by here I mentioned that I was going to talk T: c: t o 'S2-··k --~R (J~ · n d I d1. d • He will talk to you now~ d.'fitetif~_:;;r, about four or five years !!\"L he wo.uld not ~talk to anybody. turns out that he talked. But he said that 1-t- 1,Nt1.sd1f\\~:1 c0-n- Ju coi1h;t:-,A· I kno., ~ him, And now it L~~~~~~~~~~~ Page 11 C =-~~~lt~_::anot:.{;;e;Vli,i,i'lF,:you.;tt't'f 00t;Pmmen~~ Helling was a very militant -f~(( black, he said that at one meeting they came away shaking~ heads. This 'E T: was he and the city police chief, Stewart, saying that this fellow had all the markings of a black panther. How would you characterize him? tti !! I() 2\\ No#'~ ... pefinitely not1 ~~~~~,..-was raised University, his daddy was a professor there. H~' lling finished school in Tallahassee I think he attended college.·~~ in North Carolina; ;r liffi~i!~~ I do fl,\"-.J r _f'vo\\'Y\\ -n-1~ '-- not know whether he attended ATI or not and then'-'he went t~.?~ That is where he got he got his degree. That is where all the black doctors and ministers had to go at that particular time. We had this meeting up at the Civic Building. We were making certain demands on the city. Quite naturally when you 1-1¥ resisted autom::;=ic­ally at that particular time you were~crazy or you.~re a bad name;. ~· _i;r~ Helling was ,.,.- a spokesma'J ;.Jo he spoke for the ~ommunity.~ tris i~ what happened• _:nytime you resisted automatically you n• (1 f.,,\u003c_. . . were If .-f\"\"t(UJ1 1 m'ld: ~Mt!\u0026lilltille the Black Falcons 1 and we never had · the Black JI _C-:-:,., Falcons here. We probably could have gotten here but fori\"' some reason we w~ tliril-::;} p·e xs\\ s-iTJ(] f I I @know .how the ('(yr.f . .t\u003c\"~·t started. Thetent the National Guard, they sent all the Highway Patrolmen. There were supposed to have been 2000 or 1500 camped out on Butler's Beach~or something/~ somewhere between hete. (/J'IJ Jacksonville were going to invade the city of St. Augustine. You have never it in your life. T;('is was on camera in a way of speaking. And they would catch our people down there every once in a while and if wt,(2.t; f\\6!..E~ they ~Veatch somebody with a knife or a gun or something they would arrest them. But one night they caught some guyf who came up from Ocala, from what the newspaper and from what I understand/they had a bushell basket of annnunition and all kinds of guns. And they put them in jail and they go out they are going to bring them up to have a hearing the guy. They turn him out. And at that time a fellow w.as living by the name of Page 12 Jim Dot. He was pretty wealthy and he owned a couple of famous ship bars. He was a millionare or I imagine he was. He was a big young fellow. That is the way that most of them are that hung out in there where Barnett Bank is now, in that lot. I understand that Dot was the man that was doing a lot of the financing in fact for the community private school that is operating right now in the YMCA building. That is one of the reasons why we are having such a zoo at the Y now. Because the Y was developed by a liberal mayor. Blacks could use the pool, blacks could use the facilities and everything, but they do not even want to do that. They are not very generous with us on the one hand, and on the other hand over there, the Y is even sponsoring a day care center for mothers in the black community. This is well and good for the black mothers to keep their children off the streets while they go out and work and this kind of thing to keep them off of welfare. I am for day care a hundred percent. We need that care, we need somebody to take care of black children, but I also feel black parents, black mothers or somebody in the community in their homes has always taken care of those black kids. Maybe there are not the best facilities in the world, but there are houses. Now all of a sudden the city cracks down, and the Y decides to put in a day care center, saying that it is federally funded. So the city cracks down, and all these people who have been keeping children are closing up. So now the Y punishes us, and they have got the day care center. They have got three to four whites up there, and some whites working, whites directing and all this kind of stuff, and in the black community that is what we were doinq for them. In the mean time the Y is housing this private school. To me, you cannot serve two masters. If you are going to feed me with the right Page 13 hand, feed her with the left hand. We have had a heck of a to do with the Y about this thing. We need a lot more blacks on the bJard of directors. We have got black members at the Y and all this, but there are no blacks in the policy-making outfit at all. If you have no black participation out there, you are going to limit black kids to an alley as a place to go. We do not have anything private, we do not have a private swimming pool. This is the only place we can go where we do have things like that. We deserve to have something besides a softball team, and they have some pretty nice things out there, weights, and softball, and things like that, for everybody, and I think it is really pretty down there. They have tennis courts and basketball courts, and all that kind of thing. C: The William Kinnard(?) jolt that was riding through the black community, did this happen much during this period of time that you know of? T: Sure. I mean this was common practice. C: There were nearly a hundred of them. T: We knew that someone was framing , and they knew it. And then we tried to talk. This was during the time when everybody knew about it. Maybe that week, there was something else that came up. I think his wife was in the school system here. He had two small girls, and they had a big old bJx of dolls at the house, up in Scottsville, I believe. For some reason, I called, or someone called, and told him that they were out riding that night. We had pretty good communications, word of mouth, phone, or someone would get out there in the back yard and holler. I saw the cop pass. Well, they would take this car, we were told, and we believed it, and I still believe it, and they would take this car and they would paint different colors on different days. It was mostly black, Page 14 and they would put a white top on it or a black top, or a black top on a white body, anything on the same car. And this was the car they were operating from, this car and a pickup truck. Now, Roosevelt James, a fellow who lives out on Palmer Street, a fellow who has not been able to get a plumbing licence, they stopped at his house several times to try to find Brady(?). Now Brady never stayed there, they thought he did. They would pass there, just ride up and down the street all night long. So one night they stopped at his house, and they were all out there winding through the rooms. They came by in this pickup truck and when they did, they had a number sixty-eight, he did not want to kill anybody, bird shots in the shotgun, and they unloaded in the squad in his house, and when they did, he just ran out in the street, and man, he did not have his trousers on! And he f---ed with these guys, so what happened, there are these men there, they are out there investigating, so Brady.(?) goes to the school to see if his wife is there, and they see a pistol in her pocket, and they arrest her for carrying a weapon, but they do not catch the guy who is in the truck, they do not do anything with him. We have got the tag numbers, we turn in the tag numbers, we have seen who we identified, we know who is doing it and everything else. We always had to be on the alert to go to sleep at night. So a couple nights before then it had been down the road where Goldie Eubanks lived on the corner. Now, Goldie was very outspoken, and folks could tell he had been there for a number of years from South Carolina, and everybody seemed to like Goldie, until Goldie began to make I I some demands, and then he was a scoundrel. One night my brother-in-law was in the house, and he heard the dog's noise Page 15 out, and he ran out to see what it was about, or ran to the door, and when he did, they took one of these old flambeaux off the street where the city had been doing some work, this was before they had these automatic blinkers, they had little flambeaux, kerosene flambeaux or whatever they worked on, and set it in the back seat of his car sitting in the front yard. So he either had a choice of trying to get his gun and shoot at the guys or putting out his car. So he ran to put out his car and they disappeared by the time the police came about two weeks later, that is when they set the house on fire, but in the meantime, he then was talking on the phone, I do not recall exactly who it was, someone was talking on the phone to his wife, and she got up off the divan, she must have been seven or eight months pregnant, and the divan was across from the door almost to the back of the room. She got up off this divan and answered the phone, and that was the only thing. These guys went out there and stopped this car in front of their house and riddled that house with bullets. It looked like they had machine guns or high-powered rifles. Some of them went clean through the house, literally almost just shot the door clean off the hinges, and she happened to be in the next room, otherwise she would have gotten killed. They killed the boxer dog. He came to the door and was stepping around when he heard the commotion out there. Somebody even saw this and everything, and nobody ••• C: That must have been, I guess, when he made that comment, about arming himself. T: Yes, right. It brings back the time when we had a young fellow get shot right in that center, just some fellow was walking down the street, and he got shot with a .22 rifle right through the heel of his foot. Page 16 C: Why did they go out to the Klan meeting? T: They did not actually, I was supposed to go on with them, they did not actually attend the Klan meeting. Now we had some very good, liberal white people that would inform us, some local people from here and some ministers that had come up from Daytona who we trusted who were at our meetings and would keep us informed and so forth, because we wanted to stay one step ahead of them. So they had been attending those Klan meetings, and they decided that night how we were going to find Jenkins. Well, they were supposed to come by for me, but I do not know what I was on, but anyway they did not come by, I did not go. They were having the Klan when I was out there, and we heard all the time remarks about what all was going on, and Jenkins' stoning the common men out there and whatever else was going on at that particular time. So they went out on the road, out on U.S. 1, and there is a bowling alley right across from the shopping center, that is where they were, on back down there behind the little grade school that is there now. So they just rolled out there out of curiosity to see what was happening, and they went down there and were just standing around, and when they turned around there were so many cars coming from the Klan meeting, they got in this lane of cars that was turning right going back in the woods. Well, these guys were just waving people on, waving them on, you know. So they got in this particular lane, traffic was so heavy from what I was told that I do not think they could get out of it or something, and they attempted to turn around and come back out. Well, after they got down in there, somebody passed the word around, and all these guys had CB's during that time, and we did not have any, and they got down there and they poked him right on down there. This Page 17 is what happened when they discovered they drove him all over the woods while they said the words, \"Niggers, niggers, niggers,\" and this was the cry at that particular time. They pulled him onto the ground, and pulled him onto the stage, and they whipped him. It was awful. You should have seen it, it was really something terrible. I do not know if you have seen any pictures of it or not, but it was something terrible. C: I have not seen any pictures of it, no. T: And then the local doctors did not want to wait on him. They really tried to, I do not know, they told Hilling he needed a dentist. They wanted to break him up, they tried to break his hands, pulling his hands off, his fingers, pulling between his fingers, and then they were going to set him on fire. They really knocked him for one once. C: Some of these white people, did they get the sheriff out there? How did the sheriff know about it? T: The sheriff was there. He was there all the time, he and all his deputies, I mean this was common. The sheriff was, in a lot of cities in the South the sheriff was in the Ku Klux Klan. You do not know who it is under those sheets, ---, you do not know who is in there. Now he is working out there today and tomorrow, but at night he is out there under the sheets. So, he swears that, \"I do not know,\" and so some of these people who were attending this meeting saw what was going on and they slipped away and called. Or they patrolled, I do not know, maybe he was there, I do not know. He was accused of being there, some of the people thought he was there. So they went out there, and they went to get some gasoline, they were going to set him on fire. Page 18 C: Yes, I remember that time. Is it true that they took Dr. Hilling and Houser and the other fellow over to Jacksonville Hospital to protect them, or did they take them over there because they could not get treated at Flagler? T: They could not get any treatment over there. You know, we had a black list, we might want to call it, over there at Flagler. Some of the doctors would see you out there picketing or see some of your family out picketing and tag a label on you. Everybody here knows everybody, and the local police would take pictures. You would be out there picketing, and they would ride by in the car, and everybody would take your picture. So they had you on at the clinic and everything else in town. I mean, you went in a place, and they would look, and they identified you, and you are one of those smart guys or whatever the case might be, and so you just do the best you can to go somewhere else. C: Now, these doctors, many of them were members of the John Brooks(?) Society. T: I would think so, yes. We definitely would think so. They even, I do not know about now, but on this radio news, not WFOY(?), another radio station, every Saturday morning they would have a call-in, some conservative poll, some guy working I guess out in Texas or something, was it not? Right. C: Yes, I cannot remember what the fellow's name is, but ••• T: I can, Hunt. Yes, he was a millionaire or something. He ran the program out of Texas, and his was the only program such as this or whatever the case might be, every Saturday morning on this radio station, to keep people informed of what was going on and so forth, and this fellow was Page 19 highly conservative and so forth, and the government was listening. We had just gotten that to tie, in a way of speaking, city and county against the federal government at that particular time, especially on the conservative programs and so forth. C: Well, I guess that brings us into sixty-four. T: Well, we had meetings with the city. We tried to sit down and iron out our problems. We wanted to talk with them. I knew the guy who was city manager at that time, and we had big meetings set up with the City. C: Was that Barrier? Was Barrier city manager? T: I believe he was, I believe it was Barrier, I think it was. And all the black men used to come, and the city commission and some of the county representatives and so forth, and we would go up there, and there he is sitting up there with a tape recorder. So quite naturally, I mean we do not want to talk to no tape, we want to sit across the table, and they refused to talk with us. So this is the thing that had gone ~~~~~~- with you all now. We had some kids that did some picketing and sitting in. We look back on it now, but at this particular time, they grabbed them, I think, and then put them in jail, and after they put them in jail, they sent them to reformatory school. C: Oh, that was the two young girls and the two young boys. T: Right, right, they were on the corner we are on now, and he has not been exactly himself since then. This was a hell of an ordeal for these kids twelve and thirteen years old, and we had a heck of a time getting them out. It took us six months or eight months to get these kids released from reformatory school. C: That was an incredible development. Page 20 T: I am telling you now, we have been through the mill. My wife was one of the first, she and probably Jenkins I would say, were the first black adults to go to jail here. Mostly the kids were doing the serving. And the kids were easy for it. We kept them ornery. They were well­dressed and everything else, and they were pretty good, and they would go in and sit at the lunch counter, and the whites did not want blacks, and when the blacks were at the lunch counter, and you were open, you would have to serve them, so they would cut out the lights, and all the waiters and waitresses would just walk out, and they would close the door, so they would lock up the place almost, lock the inside. C: Shelley argues that the blacks would lay all over the floor. Is there any truth to that? T: We did have a lie-in. These are the only people who made any time in jail besides these kids, we did have a lie-in, and we did not have any protection to that. This happened at St. George Pharmacy. This only happened one time. A young lady, well, they dropped all these things off the records, I think she spent about thirty days in jail. We had offered her an alternative, she teaches school now down south, and so forth. Now, they will say that the kids who participated, they went on to make them criminals, but this is a lie. Now I can tell you a lot of kids who participated are people who are teaching in the public school system. Some of them are principals and assistant principals and all this kind of thing. They went on to continue their education. C: Shelley would have you believe that this took place all the time. T: I know, I know, I can tell you exactly how many of them there were, four, I think, or five of them. There was only one place this took place, and Page 21 that was St. George Pharmacy. This was the only place this took place. C: How did you get all those people in from the North, those college kids, and Mrs. Peabody? T: Well, these people were interested in, this was the hardest place in the nation at that particular time, because, you know, you had your freedom riots and everything else, and these people followed King, they believed in King. So, actually, we wrote some letters to some fraternities, some white people had come here, some liberal-thinking people, some people who were staying out, but we had contact with the University of Florida, we knew somebody over there. This was Dr. Jones, they eventually fired him over there. And the Homily(?) brothers, I remember them from the University of Florida. C: David Chalmers came over. T: Yes. Homily(?), I think they were from Daytona. And we had a lot of northern students there. I cannot think of some of the names. Some of them lived in housing with us much of the time. Butt Dr. Jones, I remember him specifically. He got arrested over there, and boy, that was really big news when his wife found out about it, that they had locked him up, she called me long distance that night in Gainesville, and my wife went to jail with him, she was having quite a time of it, and eventually they fired Dr. Jones from over at the University of Florida. He fought this thing, he fought this thing for years, and they did spot him everything in the last four or five years, I believe it was. C: Now, when Mrs. Peabody came, and some of those ministers from the North, and those college kids, then the press seemed to come, the New York Times, and the ABC cameras and everything. Page 22 T: Well, the press was following King here when he came here. King was something new. Nolx\u003edy had ever seen this before. This was almost like Martin Gandy(?) you know, the black passion resistance. You offered your body as a living sacrifice, you did not fight back. Now, the northern kids fought them back. Leeland(?) fought them back. This was annihilating women, you fought the white man, but we could not shoot, we could not buy any ammunition, we could not buy twenty-two shells, we could not buy no guns, we could not buy anything around here. We do not have no violence. This was the only way we could do it, and this was King who persuaded us to do it. I bet that Leeland(?) did not like to go along with his ideas, but he had to, because this was King's organization and everything, and he did not want any shots fired. C: After the Easter protests, things seemed to quiet down from then until May, and then they got really hot. What was happening in that stretch of time? Do you remember? That would be from the end of March, actually it would just be the month of April, really. T: Well, during that particular time, King had several commissions, made up of citizens in other places. We had to stop and revamp. We had to get money and everything to get people out of jail. This was, I think, the first time my wife went to jail, I believe, alx\u003eut $250 I think, in fee charges, conspiracy, delinquency and minor trespassing out at the Warners(?) or something. The next time, I think, was $500 or something like this, or $1500. C: Fifteen hundred, that is very high. T: Well, and the next time, it went up to alx\u003eut $7,500 or something like this apiece on fee charges. So then we had to revamp, and we had to reorganize Page 24 We would sit at Leeland's house or somebody's home. We would meet in various homes with the executive board, and all these attorneys would meet. Now, we had pretty good legal advice, from CUsters(?), Guy Simons, Earl Johnson and so forth. And all these lawyers were legal defense, and also Civil Liberties Union. One time we had thirty-seven attorneys in there. C: What were the demands being made? Do you remember the specifics? T: Integrate the lunch counters, this was one of them. Jobs were one. C: I remember that one. T: All right. We wanted to integrate the beaches. We even talked about the churches. C: Plus foods. T: Foods, this was one of the main ones. Cleaning supplies. Fire department. C: One of the big things that Shelley and other whites would claim is that percentage-wise, there was a comparable number of blacks employed by the city to equal the percentage of blacks in St. Augustine. T: Yes, if they pick and choose. Right now, you look at the blacks, and I mean, we have been negotiating with the city right now. In fact, we have some demands up there right now to upgrade blacks, of trying to open up a school or something, so these blacks can move up in their positions. Now we have got one, maybe two black farmers out there at the present time. One fellow by the name of Jones who is in charge of the food, who puts the orders in or something like this, he has got the highest position as a black in the city work force. We do not have any blacks. You go uptown and go up the the city building and find out how many black workers there Page 26 out there twenty-five or thirty years, and he is still patrolling. Fred Waters' salary is below the lowest-ranked white patrolmen who walk. But I imagine his salary is pretty comfortable now, because they have been negotiating contracts, he had to gain approval. It is the union, you know, they have been unionized. We have never had but one black policeman, but they have given those tests, but what happened is this city has its own civil service rules. They are not statewide, and they are not covered. In this city, I mean you make up your own civil service rules. You have got a civil service board that consists of about four or five people, who represent the police department, there is one from the fire department, and I think two or three civilians on it. All these are white people. All right, now they give a civil service exam whenever there is an opening, and if you take the exam, then they have the right to pick the man who they think is best qualified, best suited for the job, as far as I know now, maybe I am wrong, and then this fellow is picked. Now we have had people who have passed the exams, but I admit they did not go to school, and you stay on there until the time falls and there is another opening, after you take the exam again. This is the way they do it, they do not keep stagger slips. C: When King came here and started mobilizing the black community, although as you are pointing out, it was mobilized, when he came here and started holding his meetings, what sort of things did the SCLC expect from the black community? T: Nothing but cooperation, we had told them that we did not have any money. We did not have no anything. C: He just wanted to get as many people on the street ••• Page 27 T: On the street, this was his strategy, to get as many people on the street, fill up the jails if necessary, just offer your bodies as living human sacrifice. Let people see us on the outside, what they are doing to us. See, we tried to keep this thing in tact. I have seen newspaper reporters beaten something terrible there, their cameras snatched and all this kind of stuff. I have seen even some reporters from I believe Sweeton(?) or someplace uptown, I was working up there one day, and some kids went across to Woolworths. They went into the Munson(?) and they locked the door, the Munson specifically, and they walked across the park, the play market, over to Woolworths. And once they got into Woolworths, they guy, Hansen, who was a Holiness minister, he was a deputy sheriff at that time, he arrested these newspaper cameramen, because they had followed these kids, and they had tried to get a piece of the action. He claimed that one of them had turned his camera on and hit him, or hit somebody. He knows better, surely it was accidentally, so he put the man in jail. See, every night, at our tour, we would have a strategy, and we would have something different every night, and we would just try to sit there and iron out, and figure out what was going to be everybody's reaction, how you would react to this thing. The day that the kids went in the pool, this was all planned out. We had these rabbis coming up. They were young rabbis, and they arrested Drew Munson(?). So at ten o'clock the next morning, Dr. King would be down on the seawall, he was there, and we got these girls, they came in from Savannah, Georgia and were good swimmers. We did not have any girls down here who were good swimmers. These were all good-swimming girls. So now when we dive up there, you are going to arrest this knight. They go up Page 28 there, and they arrest Drew Munson. Everything is going, these are all white people. Nobody pays any attention to them. So they arrest them, they arrest all the rabbis, they get all the young rabbis, and they arrest them. So the next morning at ten o'clock they had on their bathing suits, and we had a car arrive up there at ten o'clock. Everything is going very precisely. The car arrives at ten o'clock, and when they arrive at ten o'clock, immediately the police were almost right there. They were all uptown, and they had four all-days going, and these girls jumped right out of the car and jumped right in the pool. The rabbis jumped in the pool, and that was everybody in the pool, and you know that they are going to react. You know this white man is going to react to this thing, because he cannot stand it. He does not want this thing to happen. King was over there on the seawall. They were so busy watching these girls, they do not hardly pay attention. Some of the cameras go over to King, and some of the staff sit there on the seawall. They were sitting, all of them, right there waiting. When the action takes place, they want to see their reaction. A lot of people say that King was sitting back. No, he was not, he was right there on the seawall. Someone could even have pushed him over on anything, or whatever. You could have shot him, anything you wanted to do to him at that particular time, and then this when this policeman, a fellow by the name of Henry Bennett, he jumps out of the police car and tells them to come out, and they do not come out, and he just cannot stand it any longer, so he jumps over in his uniform. C: Is that when Watson threw that acid in the water? T: Well, maybe the same day he threw the acid in the water. The next day, no, they put alligators in the pool, but we did not want to go to the pool Page 29 that morning, we had something else to do the next day. Right, the next day or so we went down to St. Augustine Beach. We stayed my wife back there. She said she did not swim, so she was not going down on the beach. And these guys were working at Fairchilds, and they came right through the gate, and they let them off in some kind of way or other, and they had all these axhammers in the trunks of these cars, and they passed them out down there, and we chopped some wood. 'Ihe axhammers, boy, they worked some kids pitifully down there. A young white woman, I never will forget, I cannot think of her name, but she would be walking around with broken bones. Another boy, we had to send this one on back home, they had beaten him so much, and then that boy had a concussion; and he wanted to stay, but we just said he just could not afford to stay, we sent him back home. We had a lot of other white kids who came, we had a boy who came who was tending flowers, I think, I forgot. Gary Oswald was his name, he stayed here with us. Gary just could not take it. He got sick. Man, he was so scared, he just stayed in the house. He would just stay in the house, lock the house. Usually he was in the house. He would just lock the house all day, because this thing lit him up. I mean, all right, we had been accustomed to it all our lives. We were accustomed to police jumping out of their cars, a blackjack in one hand and a pistol in the other hand, and knock us upside the head. We were accustomed to that, we were accustomed to white people who walk uptown, and you would have tipped your hat and said, \"Mister,\" or something, or whatever the case might be, and he would kick you in the pants or something, because nobody is saying anything about it. Well, all right then, this was the thing that we were rebelling against. Page 30 C: Why the night marches? Why not other marches? T: It was the only way we thought it was going to be more effective. See, you had to take your tactics. C: To get publicity. T: Right, right. We were taking our tactics, and the general organizations, service organizations, whatever you want to call them, began to buy dogs, the Kiwanis Club, the Rotary Club, and I guess the Knights Clubs, I am not sure, and so forth, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and all this kind of thing. They would buy these German shepherds, and they would surprise you. You do not see the shepherds around there now. C: They bought those for the police department? T: Yes, they bought them, or the dogs were donated by the police department. C: Oh, somebody came ••• T: Yes, that is where some of them came from. The police and the city bought some, and they donated some. You do not see, we have got the same black people living right here that lived here before, and you do not see any dogs. They hardly use one. Now, with the drug problem we have got, they will not even bother to buy any dogs to find the drugs now. C: What was it like going downtown? Were the police there? Did they try to stop the whites from pounding the heads of the blacks and the other whites who were marching with them? T: I will tell you, the first night march we had, the first one we had was in October at the Lutton and Brown Ladies' Center(?), we caught them by surprise. We left Washington street, and we got on down to Dole Street, and the police station at that time was on Hipolica(?) Street, the police and fire departments were on Hipolica Street. They have got a parking lot Page 31 there, between the state board and Thirtieth Street. We walked down there, walked flat up to the van, and when they did see us, they did not even know what was happening, and there were a lot of cars that passed us on the street, and a lot of whites immediately armed themselves at that particular time. ~~~~~~~~~- This was the first night march I had ever participated in, when we were at the Lutton and Brown Ladies' Center(?). Then, after them, in 1964, the next one we had, the first one with King therefore, we got right there in the Lightly(?) Museum parking lot. My boy was a little boy then, about three or four years old, but the police were still going to stop us, on Cardillo(?) Street. So we left Cardillo(?) Street, right in front of where city hall is, or the county courthouse rather. We came over this big rock, and c. T. asked if we could have a prayer, and he and Jose and the rest of them got to get it together, still while we were stopped, right on the corner of King(?) and Cardillo(?) Street. So it was debated, \"Do not go on, we do not know what they are going to do to us.\" So we said, \"Let us have a word of prayer, let us thank the same Lord.\" So we did, we stood and had a word of prayer. This was something familiar to black people, black people are family prayers. Even the rusty ones checked on, because you do not hide the expression for the good Lord to do something, for somebody to help us. We sent the boys back, we said, \"Send the kids back.\" We decided we were going tonight, so we went. This time we caught them by surprise, but after that, boy, they would be militant. You could go up there in the city, and at night they would have all the benches and chairs and things that they could find, and they would have them all around the place blockading us. There were people running in reels, and they would Page 32 be loaded. These guys would have bricks, they had bicycle chains, they had lead pipes, they had some of everything, and we had people come rank us in the head and so forth, and tomorrow night they would be right back. C: Did you get any protection from the police department until the judge ordered them to protect you? T: No, this, is what they wanted, they wanted to stop this thing, they did not care, anything to stop them, kill them, beat them, anything. C: How about the city fathers there, the mayor, the commissioner and the city manager, were they doing anything to try and negotiate the problem, or get the police to enforce the law? T: No. Well, yes, they were enforcing the law, that was the law at that time, segregation was the law. This is what they were doing, geting the police to enforce the law, segregating, keeping the niggers in their place. C: Did you get any cooperation at all from the business community after you really began to •.• T: There were one or two people. For instance, a fellow had a shop, Friendship, or the Loving Shop, or something like that, down on St. George Street, Mr. , down right here. He was there at this ~------~ particular time, I think he taught a Sunday school class at one of the Methodist churches, and they ran this man out of town. Last thing I knew of him, he was in Ocala working at the Holiday Inn. I have seen him since that time. the state senator at that time, he spoke out against it, he thought it was wrong. We were at the college, in ----- history at Flagler College, I took a course, and they went by and broke Page 34 Jacksonville, because here, Judge Matthews was giving us hell. Weinberger, we were kind of shocked at him, he did the interview, and Meniacle, we thought he would be sympathetic with our case, but we had the first store cases in the city, and people would look at those. Next, we went to the local courts, the county courts, and Matthews, oh man, he has never gotten over this thing.","National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) -- American Broadcasting Company (ABC) -- Bi-Racial Committee -- Florida Highway Patrol -- Florida Memorial College -- John Birch Society -- Ku Klux Klan -- New England Group -- National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) -- Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) -- St. Augustine Four -- United States Air Force -- Lilian -- University of Florida -- Y.M.C.A. -- Kiwanis Club -- Knights Club -- Rotary Club -- United States National Guard -- American Civil Liberties Union -- Home of Robert Hayling -- Butler Beach, Fl. -- Florida Memorial College -- Ocala, Fl. -- St. Augustine Beach, Fl. -- St. Benedict School -- St. George Pharmacy -- St. Joseph's Academy -- Tallahassee, Fl. -- Savannah, Ga. -- Savanah State College -- Rock Hill, S.C. -- Pantry Pride -- Orlando, Fl. -- Flagler College -- Lutton \u0026 Brown's Lady's Center -- Woolworth's -- Integration of Monson Pool -- Bombing -- Civil Rights March -- Desegregation of St. Johns County Schools -- Florida Spring Project of the SCM and SCLC -- Easter Invasion -- Klan Assault on Robert Hayling -- Lie-in -- Night March -- Picketing -- Police Brutality -- Sit-in -- St. Augustine Quadricentennial Celebration -- Wade-in -- Drive-by Shooting"],"dc_format":["application/pdf"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/CNE/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":null,"dcterms_subject":["Civil rights--United States--Florida"],"dcterms_title":["Henry Twine : Transcribed Interview"],"dcterms_type":["Text"],"dcterms_provenance":["Proctor Library"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://civilrights.flagler.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15415coll1/id/1045"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":["Flagler College is not the copyright owner for this item, nor can the College provide a copy of this item. Please contact the contributing organization to obtain a copy and permission to reproduce this item."],"dcterms_medium":["transcripts"],"dcterms_extent":["31 pages"],"dlg_subject_personal":["Twine, Henry","Colburn, David R.","Davis, L. O.","Eubanks, Goldie","Hansen, Paul","Hayling, Robert Bagner","Kinard, William D., -1963","King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968","Lynch, Connie (Charles Conley), 1912-1972","Mathis, Charles C., Jr.","Peabody, Mary E. (Mary Elizabeth), 1891-1981","Shelley, Joseph, 1915-2007","Stuart, Virgil","Thomas, Hank, 1941-","Vivian, C. T.","Williams, Hosea, 1926-2000","Carter, Noll","Wade, Bill","Robinson, Buyan","Brunson, Charles","Chalmers, David","Dot, Jim","Johnson, Earl","Simmons, Guy, 1915-1997"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"ffc_crlsa_p15415coll1-1049","title":"L.O. Davis : Transcribed Interview","collection_id":"ffc_crlsa","collection_title":"Civil Rights Library of St. Augustine","dcterms_contributor":["Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, University of Florida"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Florida, 28.75054, -82.5001"],"dcterms_creator":["Davis, L.O.","Kallal, Edward, Jr."],"dc_date":["1900/2022"],"dcterms_description":["Interview with L.O. Davis, St. Johns County Sheriff during the height of the racial crisis in St. Augustine in 1964. Davis recounts his family history and his life prior to joining the Sheriff's Department. Davis explains the state of race relations prior to 1963-1964 and details many events that occurred during the Movement in St. Augustine. Davis describes many well known events associated with the St. Augustine Movement and gives great detail in explaining police procedures that were in place at the time. Davis gives numerous opinions on the Movement and the people involved.","Saint John lAB Bridges Page 1 This is an interview between Sheriff L. O. Davis and Edward Kallal, Jr., the inte.rviewer. There was no introduction. K: ... ?fuY:-r1!::.\\~. . \":.~,clr;t/,_......, t; tJJ..;,--( c-P0.1'1 I 'co. . f-­' bA~k+o~. OM I think thi\"is the governor a f1,.\\J .,,. Governor U rl\\! ) 7 D: K: D: Yeah. Uh huh. There's some things here you cttn take with you if you'd $end them back to m.o. K: All right. Yeah, I thi.nk that we'll get to al1 this in due t i me. D: Yeah. K: But I just want to make sure we cover most of the things we should. And I want to--you know I want to emphasi.ie before we begin that this~ I'm very new at thμ and I have to keep most of my questions on what I have read so far. And so I-- in order to ascertain whether what I've read in the newspapers and stuff a.re true, I going to have to, you know, ask a somewhat pointed question every now and then. And so, you know, if l offend you 1n any way, uh, you know, please just let me know. D: Yeah . IC: I ~11 back off and uh, but you koow, this is the only vay I know how to try to net down to the bottom line of this thing. That's all right with you~ You say your parents are froo St. Augustine. D: Yeah. K: Is th\u0026t correct? D: Ye:ih, both my parents, V1'J 8t\"3Ildfather and g.randmotber settled here. way back 1n the 1800's. K: Uh huh. D: The grandfather on my side of the fatsily~my father's side, uh, in our • .. SJ lAB Pa.ge 2 Bridges D: faaily history hODt•t•ad is the present site of Titu.\u0026vil.lc. K: Oh yeah. D: And he traded the ho.._.tead vitb Hr . Titus for a yoke of ozen. K: A yoke of oxen. D: Yeah , 3nd he came to St. Augustine end oettled out at Pt. Peyton . K: Uh huh. D: And Ft. Peyton i .1 tho aite where the Indian, Oaceola, vu captured under a flag of tnic•. K: Oh. D: And 1!!'J grandfather vu prucnt when the.y capturtd him. K: Really. D: And he used to gripe and raise the dev:f:l all t'ht time because they took Osceola under a flag of truce. Of cour••• he was t he kind of historian in the roat: of tbe !CUllily. K: YC4h. Th.ot'a int.oroating. Re didn't like t.hat vhen they, uh- 0: No, he- K: That 's a little bit cheating there. D: Well , thot wtt!I true in hietory. K: Uh huh. D: You know, they did captur·e Osceola under A flag of tru.ee. K: Uh, so you grev up in the St. Al!gustine are.a? D: Oh yeah. K: What's it--what va1 it like graving up tbcrc? D: Well, uh, of couna, uh, t came 31.on,s at o kind of a boad #ge , you see. I was in the clnaa or '31 at the University of Florida. K: Oh yeah. D: It was during tho deprueion days, and uh, 1 loft the.re with and worked for the COache.a people out at~in lola Junior College in Iola, SJ IAB Bri.dges Page 3 D: Kansas, and I stayed there two years and went to j unior college. K: Uh huh. D: Then I managed some coaching stuff in Okl ahoma and every place going down to the Univers ity of New Mexico. So I went do~ to Albuquequc , New Mexico . K: Huh. D: I went to the univem;,ty for t\\lO ycor\u0026 down there. K: It'•s hotte'C down there than i t is here, i sn't i t? D: Yeah. l t 's--vell, i t's right t here ~t the foot of the mountains; you know. X: Yeah. D: And real nice, but-- K: Wel l, then out of coaching, how did you get star ted in law enforcement ? D: Wel l , when I came home from New Mexico, I uh , coached a little team K: D: here f ree of charge-- St. Joseph ' s Academy. Yeah. ~.J Along with just that was--but uh, and ve ~ a pries t down t her e that uh , wanted me to get a just kept PI(\u003c cl\u003c; 1~d I job so bad he could tas te it. And fina11y he the StlnlO ~enator. uh, Fr azier, that I vas talking about was mayor of the city at the tiJl'le. K: Yeah . D: And they gave me a job on the~go t me a job on the city police department vorking nights so that I could coach during the day. And then I stayed down there a couple of years and I got $ln5.00 a month which was top pay for a full patrolman then. And uh, but before ~hat, you k.nov \\I'd been to three state universities and I was working in a clothing s tore one day a week for $2. 00. K: Hmmm. •., SJ IAB Br1.dges Pago 4 D: I cean tll:ie.a vere tough. When I ea:.e ho•, I rode the freight fro• Albuqueque. When l ca• home, I stopped at, uh, San Antonio ~ Texas. K: Uh huh. D: ~here the original march on Washington started. Ki Yeah. D: And there were at l e:ut, they said, 1200 people ther·c . And they'd built ehackl out of tin cut and stuff and lived out in the:-veU the jungle t .he.y called it. But. they had a regular little city outside the tovn. All the aerch.ants·, every day, vben they t.hrev out their beet• ind, you knov , the incdib1e•. Woll , when they bring it out, they bring it out in garbage trucks. You'd see at least half of those 1,200 people in there picking up old b~eto and lettuce heads, anything that thay could. I mean, uh, thing• verc reall.y tough. then uh , I caught a freight out of there and cue on into Nev Orleans, and then caught a ferry aero•• New Orleans. And then caught a freight on ioto Tall3hasse.e end Quincy. And thea. vhen I •, got t here, I hitchhiked on into St. Augustine. ·~ X: Ummm. Was it very toug.h hitchhiking'? D: No, people wer~--~' but the only bad part vas, of course, I K: D: l had-I was dirty--l'd be~ on tbe road about nine or ten days and I ne-ede:d a shave and a bath real bad. from riding th•t darn freight for so long. 4\"'-d a lot of UMs these big truck.I or aoae.thing vould pick me up and ay lut pick. up in Jack.S:onville. I got acros.a the o ld bridge there , and uh, f2:r:wt0 -J'l\\4/\\(_ vas a guy from St. Augustine rccogntzed me. Picked i::ae up and brou8ht me ri$ht to tho houoc. \\ nutt nust have felt good. Oooh aan, I uaa really J,.ec..J-, SJ !AB p3ge 5 Bridges K: Uh, when you got on the force, uh , dur '11'8 the night shift, what vould you do? D: l worked from 7:00 3t night '~il 5:30 in the morning. K: ~- D: Six days a week. K: Uh huh. D: And theo , of course, I had plent y of time to sleep before coach'ing th3t aft ernoon o.t 3:00. Theo uh, I got a job tdtlt' the Florida East Coast Railroed. K: Yeah. D: As a special agen.t- k1,nd of detective work, you know. The uh-that. job paid $200.00. It started off at $250.00 a month which was $30.00 a month more t han the mayor of-the city manager of our city was o.aldng. K: Well , that wasn ' t too bad. D: You don't know--1 i::ic\u0026\\ thirtgs were picking up for me then. K: Yeah. It sounds like it . D: I stayed down there~let 1 s see~abo u t five years and then I went in the Army. I was in the European theatre. 1 was wounded and then I got commissioned. K: When did you go into the 4tmy? D: Uh, a year--two months after Pearl Harbor__.,2. K: ~42! __ ·•-.. D: Yeah. 'cause he sent me in '41; K: Yeah , during '41 . That's right. So when you came back from the 3Xll'/, is that when you got into the sheriff's department? \\ D: Yeah. l ~rked for the recreation council before l was sent overseas, and then , uh, when election time e\u003c\u003e.me around,.·I ran for sheriff and ... ·. SJ lAB Bridges Pago 6 D: waa elect ed. K: That was in '46-- ' 47? D: Let'\u0026 see, uh, forty--1 was sheriff for tventy-one years- '48 I guess . K: '48? D: And then I took office in '49 and served front--twenty would be '69, yenh-'40-- K: How many men did you have under you then? D: I had one fellow . I had ono outside deputy ~nd tny$ol£ . K: Uh huh. D: And uh, one jailer who worked--lived at the j all and worked t here . K: Oh. D: And then uh. I had five deputies t h3t worked the outskirts of the count\u003e:;\u003e 2'.I 0 P•Y· You f:now we were •on the fee system then, K: Uh huh. ~ D: And the shed ff got $7. 00)/A. half on the rest. K: Oh really? D: Yeah . So uh. we uh- - thc outlying, whan the outside deputies--outlying K: D: districts made a chase, they got , uh, I t hink $4.00 and a half on D c/ase. And, of course, the fee system was a horrible thing because l.'.; here's a guy that aays well , 1111 work this week and pick me up five or s1x.f:/u//.€;'fou know. 1..\"·~ Kind of l ike a 'llil 31'1!er sys tem. / J1 .Jq.B1Ct1 Yeah, 1 t pick up five or six '1. and I'd make myself $25 . 00- $30. 00 each weekend; which i a bad, you knO\\i'. K: Yeah. When did chey SYitch over to , \\Jh ... - D: Well, uh-- K: Salary? o.l,o.._f\"\" D: About tuo years later, and uh--well. no it was ~a t erm-- \u003c1bout f i ve SJ JAB Bridges Page 1 D: years later, ' c~u$e , uh, we got on the t~l~-.:y . K: Uh huh. D: And the salary was $7 , 500.00 a year. The- and when I was uh, the first year I was elected, rcy total i ncome for the yaar was $3,680.00. K: Yeah ~~,. ?, D: Yeah, because it was f rom the sheriff's office. That was my income • . K: • lh:tn. D: But uh , my tot{Ll income was--out ·of th\u003clt I had to pay my-a office helper and 3 jailer. K: Those~they didn ' t · get paid except when you had to pay those out of your own pocket? D: Yeah. K: Hmmm. That's sooe.thing. D: That ' s with one--we got on that bud,get-$7,500.00 a. year. K: 'I1lat was a bad city. D: And then I hired all five of my outside deputies. I think I gave thee $225.00 a month--something like that. Which wasn't bad, you knO\\rl compared t o what they W6tC eetti08 before, especially. K: Sure. D: Well, most of the= actual ly wer e--w0rc uh, I guess~l bad one up there, Roy Landry and uh, he would actually, uh, hire people' to help catch thieves. He had a mania--he hated a car thief worse th~ anything in the world. ~ K: Y•ah. D: And uh, he would actually hire peopl e in their automobilea 4tld pu~ out.-0£-state stickert;, uh, things on t hem--tegs on them. K: Yeah. ·, SJ JAB Br!:dges Page 8 D: And order the~ to co.tch them. I w.i.s often wondering how in the. devil he have a--he spent $200.00 a month to catch one thief. Ue just, you know, he just hated then . K: Yeah. D: Ue had another job--he has a+ 41./--11. VLJr~ thing up there. He' s a head custodian and all that. K: Uh huh. D: But uh, and I had another deputy. He's still with. the sheriff's department. Hi.s nama is Moody. Uc lives out on the St. ·John' s River. K: Uh huh. D: And uh, he uh, lifted•cke whites on the river every day. You know, the buoys uaed to have be lifted by hand. K: Oh yeah . What were they gas or- D: No, I think they were kerosene. K: Kerosene?- D: Uh huh. K: Uh huh. D: And uh, he would, uh, fill the things and light these, uh, lights . K: Yeah. D: So uh , he's an old ti=er around here. K: Right. Well, what kind of--what kind of crimes did, generally speaking, did you have to deal with when, uh-- D: Well, uh, of course, we. h~d our ring of thieves then, but I think we had a lot better sources of information than ve have today. K: More people were more open about talking to you nbout vhat they'd oecn \\ and things. D: Yeah. Well, for one thing, they knew 1 wasn't going to ~ver mention t heir names . •.,. SJ !AB Bridges Pnge 9 K: llh huh. D: Then uh, they'd uh, --\"\"\"'\"\"\"'\"'-'-''-----\"espe.cially / ~ 1 we had a lot of bootlegging the fi'tst two yenrs I \"'\u003cUs here--:naking whiskey. K: Yeah. D: And uh, of course, uh, a hunter ~-ould never turn in a bootlcgg6r 1 cause they're hunting in the woods. And uh, if they accidentally rtln upon one or stumbled over one, you'd never hear about it. But uh, they would go to the man that owned the property and tell him th3t there wa;t'till ~ and then this guy would go tell the boot­legger he'd better· get it out of there by Thursday 'c3u.se l'm going to call the sheriff. K: llh huh. you D: And it might be Monday. And the.n Thursday he'd call/,_'\"ld say-tell you right vhere that still was . Some.times we'd -/(Ar --one day 'we tore up five stills in one day. K: That right? D: You know, just a--on--just on an ole flimsy piece of information and another thing they weren't, uh, so uh, they didn~t try to hide their stills so well. They, you know , now it's pretty terrific, but then son-of-a-guns, they didn't think a thing of setting up 4 great big still out in the woods And having 3 nice big road running tight through i t ond everything. K: Sounds like they were trying to do it big time , huh? D: Oh yeah, they had, uh, hod a ball vi th it. And we hnd several. murderers but we were lucky in ., aolving every one of them. \\ K: Solved them. D: We dt d real well with them. SJ lAB Bridges Page 10 K: Did the railro•d have. DUch of a problem with, uh, people st.ealing froD tbe=t? D: The railroad had quite a problem of stealins out of the-- 1\u003c: Depot? D:. The ca rs where they hDve t he meat s and stuff like thot in particular. At that time the railroad put in at Tupelo. They hod a train ferry running fro• Port Bverglade. K: Yeah. D: You re:me::iber? K: Way ia;.·.the eouth. D: And they'd run all thoe4 cars loaded out thero ond thtlll they'd--when K: D: they ' d come bock they' d bring them sugar--sugar and bananas and stuff like t hat-right bock to the eame landing. And uh, that vu a big focal point for tht6voa 'cause if they get in that car and uh, that t .rai.n 1.s runn.lng-vell. they wou1d throw that-they'd throw it off tha ei.dc-•throw it ~.ff th6 side until th•y'd thTow a half a carload of stuff off. And th~n they'd have these truck.I aAd other guy and th•t was our biggcat nteol, Uh huh. We never, uh, vo had one train that vent that wo figured ·va.s our bi,ggeat ,P~ -f o-r aod that vu a freight tt'\u0026in that had .stole. a delivery in lil=l. at 7:00 in the 110ming ) off ff,, s ief.1~, and uh, 7:30, and uh, that train--w didn't let the poor boy• ride. •ca.use that waa C{ Ii II our train, but uh . I 'd .So out in the lunglaf 1J4\"£1at 'tt: . Pierce. I I ther e ' d be two or three hundred of them out thora nnd I ' d tell them, \\ t'd say, now look, this train here goes stroight through Miami a~d stops at Palm Beach ond Port Everglade. But uh, 1 don't want you on this train. If you catch tb.U train, you' ro got.ag to jail. \"· SJ lAB Bridges Page 11 Uh huh . That kept them off. O: Then uh, they' d say, okay boss, okay captain. And the train'd So on. Now I 'm going to catch it. They 'd catch the next one. K: Yeah. D: That stopped there , you know. 'Cause you knOW', a real good hobo, uh, like uh, ve had--several times we had a train with maybe forty or fifty hobos going down to work in the muck over around the l ake, you know. K: Yeah. D: And uh, they would , uh, want to get off. They didn' t think a thing of throwing the brakes, you know , on that freight . Well, you know, and t hey'd get 104 or 105 cars on there . It held a lot of weight. they'd bust our t r ain in half just to stop it . And of course, they'd all t ake you know. Imagine in 150 or 160 miles trying to fig~rc out where they're going to decide to get off that damn train. K: ;/JI Pg fo .rfre 1 I- μ,'\"\"' . j v D: We didn't mind. We'd stop it any place t hey wanted us~you know, just s low down enough to let them unload. Of course, you always got a bunch if~~ k nt.ef of cause you a lot of troubles. K: Well, uh, say prior to 1960 , wha t would you say the race relation$ were l ike here in St. John's? D: Well, uh, I guess I w~s the--one of the first sheriff's in the state had a black deputy . K.: Yeah? D: And uh, he uh, was very efficient, and at his request, he never arres ted a whi te man. K: Uh huh. n: In other words, he didn't want a w~ite warrant, but until you got there, you know , ~r'-a_J_:~_~he'd hold he would hold them SJ lAJl Bridges Page. 12 K: Then you would roake the ac tua.l a.rres t. D: Yeah . K: Was he afraid of stirring up the ire of uh-- D: ,No, he just uh, he said he knew t.hc black people o.nd they were checking hiD, but um, but uh , of couraa I had the best source~ 4 lot better sources of information than he had . K: Uh huh. D: And uh, among the blacks, because, the uh, every one of these little ole jock joints and stuff, you know. And they played cards and they gamblod. And uh, we never clamped down on then. ~I'\\ ({ 111.Ji U -'just like t hey olways have. They had~they'd sneak their But they would, uh, I would \" II get informtion of a bot man was in town through Slim or so1tte.body. They call me and tell me say he's red hot, and we know he's wanted some where . K: Yeah . D: I'd get that information a lot quicker than a lot of 'tl1'J black deputies. He used to get mad, he say, I don't know where .ftV\\.f ,br.'(1 .... that man didn't tell me. But I soid who told mo. Well, the vords around . Yeah, be didn't tell me. I got the word from down io Daytona Beach area~ ~ , , In other words, they wasn't going to let anybody move in, you know, on thco . K: Yeah, that's good. l\u003e: They'd get that sra.vy tr~ic . K: Well. •on the other harld, you had this deputy--but were there any people that you knew over on your--as your dep6tie\u0026 that were, say, members of the Ku Klux Klan? D: Well, I don't think that the possibility that one of them 111isht. have bee.n\u003e but uh, he was from Hastings, and they were very- ... ·, SJ JAB Br~dges Page 13 K: Hastings? Where 1s Hastings? D: Eighteen miles out of here. K: South? D: Wcst--vhen 1t co=e through on 207. K: ]\u003e;,f ;f ? D: Yeah. K: Oh, it's near there. D: Yeah. I\u003c.: Yeah, I know. I\u003e: Uh, be could have been beC3use Uh, they were-they vorked black.a, you +1«t1•; °\"'r- knoW' .,ma. .tabor, potato c\u0026mps and everything. K: Uh hub. D: And uh, of course, at that time they were very op.posed • to them K: D: K: D: K: h ... v\u003c.. although they started a black high school out there-~USi two high schools out there )'\\.ArvJ YcM. And L./~ 7J.w~:ry --just about e.ll- in other words, we had-when ve had trouble with our local. black.S, there wasn' t any committee. They. didn't-­or whoever fe1t that be was damaged, ~entally /physically or anything else. he came and talked to us. Yeah. or You know /one of the mini\u0026ters . uh, (!(,;~fe{:ioe Gr~h..,. Okay. I ,. All right. D: He was the mayor. K: Well then, uh, generally spe3king, about 1 63 or '64, as a sort of a general overview, do you have any special impressions or cocce.nts that you'd like to make? · .•. .,, SJ !AB Bri.dges \" Pago 14 D: We had, uh, acw\u0026Uy, ve:-I guess we. had the be.It orde.r of any pl.ace that they ever de.ouatrated. Ve actually had no one killed except one vhite person. K: That was in the, uh, fall of 1 63 , wasn't it? D: Yeah, yeah. And uh, .or '64-yeah '63 or 1 6l1, nnyway that wa\u0026 the only death that ve had. K: Yeah, yeah. D: And uh, the uh, vhen tb.U thing started. ther• vu no one objected to the dei=o'llStrated or marching or \u0026Aytbing. but all of a sudden there vaa a big influx of whit• people. The.re vas one. from up in New Raven, Connecticut. He was the chnplain at llGrvard. Re came down. And then a bunch of white boys-young men nnd young women came down, e.nd uh, then what would happen when they would-thay lived down in the colored tOW\"O--black town. When they vou1d coae. to town with their little de.aot'lBtt:\u0026tion , they uh, would uh, have th:f.a, uh, id.ea of 3 colored girl vould a.arch vi th a white boy and Vice ver1a. K: Yeah. D: And then when atop and kiss K: Uh huh. they would set up i n tho bu.ainoau ecction, andf\"~~(';;ch other , you know ... • they loved to D: ,.~ For the sole pu:rpoae.1 of gcttlttgthese old redneck crack.era~ K: Boys. D: •• \u0026led up. Oh, and goe they'd-sooe of them get eo mad . I see the• ju.at sit down on the sidewalk and stut crying. K: Uh huh. D: And I don't think thoy ncver-311 this time-·thoy never looked around if they saw over two vhite people together. Ev~ if they were all the vay across that part, they'd Dake a beeline for those: three or more SJ lAB .Bridges hge 15 D: vhite people. K: Uh huh. D: To force us to move those vhite people so they could march there. K: D: K: Well, you know tho do111n thing kept getting hottor nnd hotter and people kept getting, uh, sorer and sorar until 1t really got bad. Then when I-thoy elapped an injunction on 'Oe. Tho uh , governor called ma. 11 1 s\u0026id ehe And vhen l got over there, ho said, \"What do you th.i.a,.,k 'l'' only euggution 1 h.ave is to re-.ve .. fro• aut.hor.ity. You're going to have to put somebody el1e over there-the highvay patrol. Wellt vo hod twenty-six highway petrol hero. 'leah. All of them in thot t·ow.. 11\\ey acted as--thoy know c~rybody here. ntey kne.w the people in the area. They were from PalAa and Gainesville-­around, but they bev vho to talk vith and who to, acd the guys had a lot of re.spect for the•, you know. But they 1tnt all t .bes.e total st-range.rs in h•r•, which uh-they moved out ,ou.r twenty-six highway uh- - 1/{ t\\ S j{: twenty-six-some of them that v ero. here ~lready out? D: Yeah, vh.ich voe a horrible thing to do becaueo not only do you got all these new onee in and the1c guys s t•rt ueing profanity ot them and cal.led \" ,, thc=i nigger- lover• and stuff and they hod.ft't been trained in riot control at that t1De. K: Uh huh. D: So, of course. uh, they deepised the n4tne coll-1ng ond o lot of t ime tl\\ey took i t out on tho pareon thot was do:lng it. uh1ch wos, in TAY opin\\ion, was wrons because you have t o put up wi.th that stuff if you're going SJ l AB Bridgea Page 16 D: to expect to handle t ,be ezploaive situ.atton. Well. you're going to be called namea. K: Yeah. D: I waa cal l ed thou11ando of them and ao was evel')'body clae. we had a t errific influx , o terrific group here t hat m.arched, and uh, marched vit.h the blacltl . K: Yeah. D: And they vere eia,.hc,\"•five peroeot vere businu•MA. K: llh huh. D: Here in St. Auguatino. K: And would t hey--they would just march along ~ -frq 'i?\u003e ... ? D: Mar ch along on the aide of the blacks and t ry to keep the--t z:y to prot e ct them. K: We.ll, why do you think t.hc, uh, the blacka atarted n.arching in the first plecet Why did things break down? D: K: D: and h e s tar ted the lllOV~lll\\~n t, I gur:Jo , b ut at tha.t time, I think the JflOVeme'n t consisted of Dr. U•ling, O•rber, and ul1-- k: Who 1s barber, t don't- D: that's not bis n-=e. K: ob, be was tt bhr bet? 0: Ycoah. K: Oh. D: Down on Central Avonue, and uh nar ber up on Wa•h1ngton Str eet. K: Uh huh. Dt They w r e th\u0026, uh. tha only three people t.hat t could find that vas, \" SJ JAB Br1.dges Page 17 D: you\"\"°\"• vu doing any f'll~ft-\u003criAJ and fuuiog around. K: You don ' t think, originally, th•y had very ouch widespread support in the block conu:m.tnity? D: No , bccl\\uae the bla.ck community dldn1 c es pecially like any one of the three. K: Uh huh. D: And uh, they didn't build up au.ch of a following. K: I kn01ot 1tnliug was a newcomer in the area. D: Yeah. K: But I don't knov a.bout the barber. Were they- D: Well, the.y were lcnovo. u kiad of rabbits end the local.a ;aaid no atten.tion to them. K: Uh huh. D: And it actually didn • t gain any ao·DK!ntuo until King nnd them came in. But uh, t'he uh , they h:td one guy. Hts na'Qle vaa, uh , I can't· thing of b.18 neme rlght Know. He' a froo out of Savannah, Georgia. tte' a still with the NAACP. He ran for office up in Atlanta recently , and 1 vould attend tha.ir meetings in the chuTchea. K: Yeah. D: And uh , l'd alvays go look. And be would alvay1 atart out his, you knov, they had little pep songs aod aang and danced and ovorythiog and ho (( would alvnyl start out by •ingling me out. And ho a aid , vben ve bury this m.an eix feet deep in we want. But we' Te going tha streets of St. Augustine , we'll get what .)) to have to bury him before we eon get v~at. K: Mna!ll. D: You lcnov, and vhich is actually thrcateaing \"I life. K: Dlat\"o \u003c1g!tC: hf .r \"-\" ~, 1JC..S • D: And uh, but uh , then the next ID.41' would speak one.I he'd get them a littlo \" ·. SJ IAB .. llr~.dges Page 18 D: tn0re upset and then Martin Luther-- ;~s K: Well, in 1 63. then, when uh, it was mostly just Haley and the two barbers. D: Yeah. And uh, they had no actual demonstration. K: ~ey had a fev ·sit-ins and stuff. D: Yeah. K: What kind of oeasures did you take to deal with those • .5~ • -~ } D: Well, it was a~it's a state law, in the first pl3ce, especially in restaurants or you know, where they serve food. K: Yeah. At D: /that time it was a direct violation of the l aw. K: Uh huh. D: And uh, we'd ask them to move on. Sometimes they'd move and som~tlmes they wouldn 1 t. K: Yeah. D: And uh, so we'd throw them in jail. D: The ones that uh, were in viola.tion of the lav. The owners \"WOuld sign affidavits. The owners would tn\u0026ke the complaint. fv . .,( K: Yeah. They would call you up and get yo/\to coim doun, huh? D: Yeah. K: l see. Well, in concerning this stu~f from '63, you know, I've r ead.) /t'k:tt. J:.t \u0026t ,-~,I a fev newspape·rs and you don't know--you don't ever know what you read in the newspaper or no~so i f you don' t mind, rou know, I'll ask you a few more little specific questions '63 and then 4 you know, see if you care to out if what I read is true. D: 'Yeah. 1Jb huh. Sure. about this $tuff in I ' ll ju$t answer....J.try to find ·. SJ IAB Page 19 K: All right. ----- -''fl_,. ;{-_~----- in one paper I forget_ which paper it was~le t 's see, uh, Jul y 1, 1963, uh, \u00266veral white youth\u0026 followed a car of blacks back t o Raling 's house, and uh, apparently they threw so~ bricks at them. nae whites threw a brick or something at the blacks and then somebody fired at the vhites. The whites wont away and they eamc back with their shotguns, and four blacks who were guarding Raling1s house were wounded. I belieVe that 's is that the way that happen~d? D: No. K: Do you rec.411 that incident? D: No, that's uh, that WASn't true . Haling's house was right down the street here..-two blocks from me. K: Oh ~e lived on the then D: He lived on the. corner of Whitney and uh,/Second Street over. K: Uh hub. D: And uh, he called me and I vent down ther e , and uh, they had a regular barricade.in there. ·. K: Ha1ing d1d1 D: Yeah, he had, oh, eight or ten bl acks in there, and they had all kinds of veapons. K: Ye\u003cll1, were they young blacks or? D: Mostl y. And uh, eo I asked Hal ing if he'd gotten hiG vife out of there. I think he had one kid, I 'm not sure. He said no so I aaid I'll get-- take he~ and get one of the deputies to com.a Pick her up and get her avay from here in case there is some shooting. K: Yeah. D: And uh , I caid would you mind tell ing me what happened? So he told ce that uh, these boys had come by and they'd shot the house up~;md l SJ lAB Bridges Page 20 D: said veil, if they ahot the bouae up, there aruat be so::ie aarks--soae 1tind of bullet aorka. K: Uh huh. D: ~e was talking 4Uout they went til rough the wlndows nnd everything and act ually, there wau o windm1 pane broken out, but it--3 rock fell insido so that killed that l .lttle story, but I stayed there until 3:00 in the morning and there YU no one came by there. No one shot at the house or anythillg. It: I thought that four black-four blacks, uh, the people who were guard.tog this house--were wounded. D: No, no one vao wounded. K: No one was Y\u003c\u003eundod? D: Dr. Haling and tha tvo barbers one tiu were having a Ku Klux Klan rally out here. \\itheR th• bovlln.g alley is. K: Oh yeah. n:tat'a Sept~er 18th, I believe. D: Yeah, and uh- K: That's the time when they got caught out there. D: Yeah, they drove uh, a mile and five eights or eomcthing around the edge of the aarah to get to the back end ovar a ro.al bad road·. It 1189 real hard to get in there) J1A /,\"-\u003c--/./.• r\u003c\u003e\u003c\u003elf\" Btld everything, .r.. r ,,, ($1\u003e that they could •ne.ak up to the Ku Klux Klan rally-of all· the da= pla«.S anybody'd vane ~ go. K: Bapeeial.ly if you're black. It 11 D: And uh, of course, they \u0026av thm and they et.artcd hollering nigger ond they grabbed cho tht'ao of them and uh, they bent tho tar out of t~em. K: Yeah . D: Uel1, they got the• up on top of t his hi11--about uh, t•d $\u0026y a good · .. SJ JAB Bri.dges Page 21 D: quarter of a mile from the highway . Well, I can't get an ambulance to come up there to pick th\u0026m up . K: Uh huh. D: And uh, l arrested two people. One \u0026an that said he had o mask on, and the other one, I thought was a· C\u003cU) tho.t had a mask on. And uh, but I bad no way to g~t them to the jail. K: Uh huh. D: And uh, so I sent uord down by one clansman who wa,s-he had on a whi te outfit, but he didn't have on a mask. So I wasn't--! was just arresting the ones that, you kno~, that had their masks 9n. K: Because of the anti-mask /q v...J ' D: Yeah, and uh, well, they uh, anyway, the t~'\u003c\u003e I arrested--1 sent word down for the deputy to COC'lte up and pick Or . Haling up . K: Pick him up . Oh y~ah . D: And these tv\u003c\u003e. So--bccause we couldn't get an ambul ance to COl'lle up there--black or white. Yeah. D: So 1 ookcd him if he could, uh, how fa~ thay could mo.ko t• It '• ., said sure. All three of them sot up but they were beaten. I 'm telling you. K' D: Very bodly , huh? You could lay two fingers in thc--whcre they were beaten in the head and stuff , but mostly it was , uh, I think they seid they hit them with chains--bicycle chains or motorcycle ch3ins because they vere rea l bad cuts, Gnd uh, the d~uty that caJ!le up to pick th~~ up tho eor on\u003cl drov~fXd now l don't have any Wly to get --he put them in to dte hospital. \\ K: Uh huh. D: So I got a guy in a pickup truck to give me a r ide down to the hospital. f( Jj In the meantime, l said damn I lost my tvo prisoners. .. S.J lAB Bridges Pogc 22 D: W'he.n l tot to the ho1pital, I asked tbm about--aatd both::the can and this other one vaa a VOD\u0026n. K: Uh huh. D: they both turned th~maelvea in here. )(; Yeah. D: And uh, posted $2S.OO bonds. K: Wel.1, v.as uh, Ha.ling a.nd the other tvo geotlcmn arrested during that aa::e incident? D: No. t\\o. X: I read that , you knov, ofter- D: When ve got them to tho hoapitnl--our hospital-- IC.: Yeah. D: Well, the doctor• refused to let the press in, and uh, so the uh, they said wel.l, t hey ~rcn't doing any good laying in the hospital if they couldn't give, uh, public stateaeota out. So, during the night, and t.he second night t .hey were there . well, we eneakcd theta out, and uh, got them to Jockaonvllte ot another hospital. K: Yeah. Yeah. D: And uh, s.o they were actually goi ng into tho hoep1tal here one or two nights at the llllOat. C.: Uh huh. D: But uh . they \"ere all Nck in to-.--n in e.i\u0026ht or tm days- K: But they weren't arrc1ted i ntb:tt incident? I reod vhere, uh, they'd uh, you knov, after errivin,g on the. sce.ne, they-a g:un had been found in t heir g l ove com~artment box\u003e I believe it WAO. And so they were subsequent1y arrcated for uh--- D: No, they-none of the three vere ever arrested that 1 know of. K.: H::amm. All rtght. uh , another inc.1.dient happened in July, uh when llaUng .' SJ lAB Bridges Pago 23 K: vas org~nizing these s it- i ns, which you say didn't have too much support but uh . 3nyway. Uh, l et 's see. Oh yes, it vas reported and again, l don't knov if it's true or not, but they r eported that uh , the police . and the sheriff ' s deputies were forced to use cattle prods. D: Yes. K: And dogs to- -on the re\u0026isters--vas this true! D: Yes, we used them on the whites espec ially . K : Uh huh. D: To keep them from croahing the lines in the marches . K: Uh huh. Vell , this is in '63. This is in sit-ins. D: Yeah. But we--we bad~ve did use the cattle prods on several sit - ins . K: Uh huh. D: Because they refused to W3lk and, you know, go to the car, and we also had the standing order that uh, you don't pick up the prisoners. K: Yell, why is that? Is there a security r eason-they mi \u0026ht try to grab the gun? 0 : Yeah, not only that but they can kick you. K: Uh huh. D: And they C\u003cln actual ly hurt you if you try to drag them or pick them up. K: Yeob. D: So uh, the f ederal court judge~ev e ry time this cattle prod came up-­at no t ime did the federal j udge ever rule against t heir use. K: He didn ' t? D: He said t hat they were a measure of protection for the officer and he saw no reason to reprimand this form-- \\ K: Btmmn. Well. that ' s i nteresting. I didn't know that. D: But we used t he dogs on the people that were molesting the ao.rchers. K: Oh yeah. Well. wh~t~I- -1--~\u0026ll , would you keep them on lea$hes~long •, SJ lAll Page 24 K: leashes ot--how did thot votk? D: Well, the:Y,~the dog$ verc trained. K: Uh bub. Brid,gea D: I oean excellent trained dogs. We had, uh , 1 think I Md nine :.ln rtiy aher1ff'• office. K: Were they b'lg doberm.ana or-- D: No they vcre gel\"!IMln shepherd$. K: Gere.an shepherds, uh huh-o: And the. polic• departmtnt hod scvt.n or elght - K: Uh huh. 0: 'Cause tho ones you can't control, you c.l'ln't use. But I 've seen one­ve asked then not to t ake, uh, you know, flash11ght pictures in the dog's face. you know. K: Uh huh. D: And I h3d, uh, this one deputy walking along with hie dog. And, of course, they always walk on the lelthanded side to the owner or the trainer. X: Yeah. D: And the dog ie here at your left leg, and the bl#cke vere o~ tho ina.ide of h1\". K: Well it--were on their right? D: Wa$ on--on his left. It: On the left elso-oo. tho •ane side of the dogs. D: Yeah. Uh huh. K: Oh. D: And thi\u0026 un ume up vi.th a flashlight camera, and fla•hed it right in. the do\u0026'• face. K: Dog's face. ·. ., SJ lAB Bridges Page 2~ D: It'• a \"WOnder he hadn't bittea. aoaae of the people , you know. Bec•use he vaa blinded for a SKond, but when he j•ped this nan, che dog--vtll ho knockL'd hi.a down. X: Yuh. D: And he vas standing right over him. Now if-when the--of course it-it knocked--it jerked the troiner down , too. K: Yeah. ,, \" 0: And uh, he said hold it, hold it, hold it, and thftt dog stood right there over that man with his mouth wide: open-- K: !lmmm. 0: K: 0: K: 0: k1 :J\u003e: l~ ~ on his face right there. (~./k right side, huh? 11 And uh, he says , uh, give bia a licked tbat guy across the face. I/ ki••· And the old dog \"te.ached out aod Really? ) AMlthft eui dl.dn',t,f••ch up to~ipo it off either. Q,~A.A/ ..f I ~ f.l\u003c ,e., ~ ( ( .. .;rt.~.; ~o stayed right there. And then when they--1 got him up and l said I don't want to see you around her~ anymore. K: Uh huh. D: I eaid , you know you could have caused yourself a lot of damage and you could have got soce people excited out there . too. Bet:ause these guys v\u0026re a.ctua.lly harassing them--vere •o•tly young people. I'd say frOG fifteen to tile.'nty-tvo or three year• old---cventy-four. K: Teenagorat .,...__ I): And uh. they would be in eana• of tve.nty-fiv• or thirty ~.lking along cuealn.g you and cussing the blacks--cua•tng you for protecting them and just n continuous stream of harassment. And one night when we had a ~ .A 1/ui .J\u003c- real big showdown, nw:iM e devils got hold of some fit\"ecr.:ackcrs. \" '• SJ lAB P•so 26 K: Yeah. 0: And they threw those firecraclc.ere in the.re, and those dogs- K: vent vi1d- D: lo the meantime. they sent us so-e doge c.hat vertn•t ve11 ttained over here f roa Raiford that- K: Prison? 0: Yeah. They weren't trained as well 08 our dogs. They hadn't li:id enough time. K: Yeah. 0: But uh, it was just a continuo\\1.8, uh, talking 'cause our dogs ~you'd go by--you could . uh. do anything you. wnted to them. and he'd just be vatcbing his master. You could kick him. out of the v.ay or ;iny·tbing elae. But when you started by ooe of theae guye vith theit' dogs. he'd tell you, \"Don't cot0e too cl ose to oy dog-don't coee too\" And it was, you know, it was uh, because they didn't have that good of control over their dogs. K: They vere worried about lt.) 4'.l,A h ? 0: And uh, they were worried about-·ond I don't know whether--if anybody vae bitten by any of t he dogs, it was by one of the.ire because they didn't hAvc the control over it . When our dog\u0026 went down thnt street, it was n-- it voe a terr1fic thing to vatch. K: HnDa. They had cooplete control ovor thecuo.lvea. D: Oh yeah . It vas - it vas--of course, there vaa a horrible tra~ning period. lt vaa the worst cistreataent of ao.taale I 'd e-.er seen 1o ay life. but boy vhen they got- K: They had to beat them pretty hard to gee th~ to do that. D: Oh, I've seen them down a trainer and break hia orm, b~te hiG hand, . crush ., hio finger\u0026 and everything else, but, you know, wh~lc they're training thnm. ., SJ lAS Bridges P•ee 27 D: 'Cau.se if, you know, the an.il:ulls will just t.ake 10 ouch. It: Uh huh. D: \u0026ut they'd get them so well trained th,t , uh, you could uh . he'd be . standing by thnt trainer nnd you could take a long bmaboo pole, and you could hit that dog. You could hit the mooter. You could hit all around him. And that dog just sit right there wotching, and of course-- K: As long as the ci.aater didn't tell him to do anything. D: You'd have all thla stuff vrapped on you, you know, .and {1nally he'd aay get·- and ma.a, that aon .. of .. a-gun va$ dovn on you before you. c.ould say \" J,... ,, SCA.-.. K: llm!mmn. 0: But it was a horrible treatment they give them. K: 1 imagine. D: It vas beautiful to watch them in action, though. It: I'• not in your way? CM\"\"\"\"' be..clc~ COVI v~ s .. .-fie,., ~ .... i\"d' \"- I e\"' v e - !/---. k. • ':::! :J D: No, uh huh. Re wa1 juat playing vi.th me. K: \\lell, I think I hovu one last--oh yeah. \"'e vore discussing Mr.lier that one fellow did got killed . Uh, he W30 riding through the bl~ck section of to•.m with n ahotgun on his 141p or S()fl)Qthina like thl'.lt. D: Yeah, he had--they'd uh, come back from huntiog and he had the shotgun behiee.n his fe.et, 11Uz1.l~ down. k: lbey had been hunting? D: Yeah. K: They had grune in the car? 0: No, they had no gaac. There was f our of them in the car. K: Uh huh. D: And they \"ent by £ubanke, who wa$ 4-- K: Coldie Eubank.I? '·· SJ 1AB Bridges P33e 23 D: Goldie, yeah . K: Oh. D: They '~ent by his house to, uh, cuss him. K: Uh huh. D: And they vent by the house and this guy wns on guard and h~ shot him across the--when he made the turn sotns back u p~ K: Wa$ he-a g1.1y .:it Coldbttnk.s hou Gc? D: No , this was a full block away, but he--t he black. w.-s just shooting anyway. One of Goldie ' s nephews. K: Uh huh. D: And uh , he'd uh, he shot and killed the boy on the outside of the car. It went r ight by t he driver, and went by this guy, and hit this guy, and it killed him. Well he tightened up on the gun ~\"hen he shot hi m, and the got went off in t he-- K: Went through the floor . him D: It went through the floor , and these t uys just drove/right strai$bt to the-- right to t he hospit~l. But then wa had a--•C worked and vork~ on the case 4nd had g,uys cOminS from cver~hcre , 3nd f1nally we found a black th~t lived next door to Goldie Euban\\s who had given Richard Eub$nks his-- K: That's his nephew. D: This gun. K: Uh huh. What was it--i t vns a rifle? D: No, a pistol. K: A p1~tol~ .and he hit him froo a block a\":.•ay? D: Juct cbot--he w.:)s juct shooting .it htm. K: Uh huh. D: Because they'd come by there and cuss~ him out, .ind uh, but hc~it -- actually it was a -- End of Side 1-Tape A SJ lAB !ridges Page 29 Beginning of Side 2-Tape A K: Well, anyvay, what were ve-- D: Actually it was n phyaica l impossibity for him to shoot. uh, to kill somebody that for, It's purely accidental. K: Trying to--yeah. II II 1 woe going to say nnd that vae o pistol. D: Especially with o handgun. 1C: Yeah- that'\u0026 a-I couldn't h.it that vall with a piatol, you know. D: Anyvay, ve- got tho--vcll, they gave 11e. the weapon. K: Uh huh. D: And we got his girlfriend. K: Yeah. D: And the--she dieoppearcd the day after she govc ue the information. And uh, she gave it to ua tn the presence of her bo1a, and uh- K: The lady th.at lived at the beach'? D: Yeah, Kiss Calhoun. K: Miss Calhoun. yeah, that's right. D: And uh, she was very, uh, proud--the girl v~• • very proud person. K: Uh huh. D: And uh, young lady, nnd she was also a good worker. K: Uh huh. D: And uh. in foct, ehe voe keeping a couple dollars a veek or so out of ho.r salary becau.se •ho •eked hta to. and she. had aaved quite a bit of aoney out of there--ot\u003eout $35.00 or $40.00 or somath1ng. But uh, the next aft ernoon after I hco\";d'f(.//i\"Ji h~hat ho l\\lld the venpon~af ter Eubanke had the wc3pon, ond uh. t h tt.t he had it that ntght. And t he other. man ooid tMt ho lookod out the window and e1n1 Eubank.\u0026 r unning af ter the s hootint. K: lccediately after the shooting. huh? ·. SJ l.llB :Bridges D: Who .1•-·wh.lch ie right--he lives about three blocks from there on Ceotral--the uh girl dieoppeercd. And uh. thc~our witness didn't CO!De to court the f irat day when he vaa supposed to testify aod ve ae:nt out ond got hla. A.nd he worked at one o( the local banks parking core and atuff like thot. And uh, so the judge put him in ja~l over night. And the next doy, the HMCP had an attorney here from Tal.lahassee who, uh, re.luaM to let hta telti!y vhe:n-vhac'\u0026 Ms naoe-the c.olored boy waa Cheater, and uh- K: Is t]\\at hla laat na11et 0: No, 1t'a his firat naae. I can't think of this last name, but be uh, when K: D: K: D: K: D: thia attornoy came in, said he vat--113nt1n8 to see his ellent-Chester. \\I II I said., vell he doesn't have an attorney. He doesn't need an attorney. He vasn' t accused of anythin,g. ,, He va1 teacify1ng for tho State. He said well I was hired to II So 1 went and I aaid, 1 asked Chester, I said, do you have an ,, repr·esent him. attorn~y? \"H e 11 ,, ,, said no. So 1 went back and told that attorney~ l said, you ' re not repre- acntin\u0026 him. '' I uoid,1 1 ho's o grown man, he 's married. I I And l told him that ,, ti he docen't want you to rcprcee1't hi•. with that , he aoeo upstoira and tolks h:$ or.I. trs dt.,..,,,, l just got through telling you. So .s-~s to the judge. And the judge odccsu'c anid hi.11 mother Rnd father hi?;ed hiat. Was thie judgo 1 ~ 80,Q/.#(,,_-ff.11 ?) ~ No, thia judge ia, uh. uh, ht UcibWtUC • Mel+~ let's 1ee L,/LJ wt.J 1Jv..tc1rcuit court judge ? I .. Mc'ho\"rn•? fl e..1 ~ . I I And uh, a.a.id you l'ULve to II let hi• talk to hill. Sol let hio talk ~to him, and he got up whcfn he CAM up to the trial •I testify because it vill incri•lnate ht.. ,, the attorney says be can't K: l!ooa. SJ lAB Bridges Page 31 gv.t- Vie ''1· ,, f\\e.'ef ~. you knov, ~ figured - :....,' fi--:S'-\"l- hav.ing the gun, .:i..:il:mmizc: ..,.,, 1.!U.t , D: as i t ~ incr ialin3te him. K: Yc:Ah. D: :Well, the judge ruled for him so we lost our case. But the Eubanks boy~ about three or four ui.onths later-- K: He was fishing on the bridge? D: No , he was shooting- -hc was out here at Florlda-at Normal College. K: Yeah . D: Re had it out here. And uh, he had a gun, 3nd he walkQd up to a car where there were five stude·nts. K: From the Normal College? D: Yeah. And he told the one in the middle in the back seac--he sat.cl you've been going around with my girl and uh, he said I'm sick and tired of it. And the other said I don ' t know who your girl is. You must me talking out of your hat. And with thot, Eubanks shot him and shot him in the it .. , jaw, and uh,/loft t he man paralyzed. He's from down in the state soc=eplnce-- Ft. Louderd4le ~ \\ e.;. . K: Yeah. D: So we got f inally got r id of Eubanks for-- K: For that. D: For five or ten yea.rs . K: Uh huh. D: We got for that K: Well after this name . D: Can~d. K: can.;(r\"d. ,; Canard. shooting. v/..ite. uh, theAman was killed, Glen Kenard, I believe, was his !--,apparently about four nights later or so the vhites retaliated and blew a few windows out of, uh . dancing placea or something. SJ lAB Bridge• Pogc 32 D: Yuh, tMt'a--uh huh. Yeah . they shot the jook jolots up. K: Yuh. D: They'd just ride by and shoot the vindows out. K: Now when you were investigating this--did you h3ve to orre$ t Haling? D: Did ~ling get in your way in that 1nvest1gntiont No, 1--uh, the only t1.e I evcr~ the only tlme I when he was sitting in the bar out at the .otel, arrested Ha.ling wa.s the foxakf.tfJfU.ounge. K: Yeah. D: Vith Mrs. Peabody and uh. the b1shopS~colored btthop's vife. K: Uh huh. D: From Ma.ssachusetts. And Haling, and a. white tirl thnt was wi th Mra. Peabody down here, and uh, she insi.eted thot I gee the Flor ida Statute•·•. K: Uh huh. D: .~.And read the full thing D: Because I talked to her a couple of times. and I begged her not to go out t o that jail. It wasn't a fit place for a vo11o1n her age. K: Uh huh. O: And uh. well, thi• day ehe--I said ~hy. vhy do you want to do thie? And K: she said, vell 1 have to because they told .._ they vanted me to go to jail s? I'a going to the jail U it'll help. Then when I got Mrs. Pt:Abody out .ic: jail, the--\u0026ll of the vh1t.c etl.la are fill.ed ao she and tMa girl-she wanted a bunk co alccp on, and I said vell you'll have to kick one of the old bate off o! it--'4111' old prostitutes nnd etuff we'd had in the jail ~ bt.-r~ ttnd uh, 80 \u0026ho was--and then ehc ooid Ghe wanted her friend, the bishop's wife in there with her. Yeah. D: And, of course, I told then, I s.aid do y'all aind il we bring the b~ahop'a \" SJ lAD Bri.clges \" I I ,, D: vife in here. and they ea.id yeah. bring her 1n here. We'll kill her . K: llmmo. D: ,. I/ And not only thot , ve'll kill this old battleaxe here , too. n ,. ve don't want no nlggera in here vi.th ua 1~1ch was a com:ion them to a.ay. They wore rough people. K: Yeah. They said thing for D: An.-yvay. th• uh, tho--ve bad Hartin Luther King out there in jail, and uh, he got a-it got kind of atlcky While he was out in jail. The blacks and vMt•I all c.,.. out thorc. And they were all r.a.islng hell . So I called the governor and 11ke.d hta to aend me an order tT~nsferring King to-- K: To Jackaonville , va1n't it? D: To Jacksonvill e, and uh, ' cauee that~all of them said thei veren't going to, uh , post bond . they were goin.g to stick it out. So I knev, uh, when 'Kin.g got up thcro. He couldn' t stand it 'cause he can't, uh, he's out-he' s up there bonded to my jail and they von't let him t.tllk to anyone. K: Ycoh. D: ' Cauue he' e ay pr:11oner. K: Yeoh. O: So he stoyed up there overnisht . end t hen he bonded him.self out tho next day , ond looves all of his buddies here, see. {(~s) K: Wasn't that ~hon he went up to Yale and got an hono,~ry degree? O: Yeah , uh huh. X: I believe that vtll the tiee wh~n he went up to get his honorary degree. Woll, uh, lot •a 1co. Uh, 1 believe during '63 again, uh, Judge Mathis, am I pronouncing itt \\ D: Kathie. \u0026: H.'lth1o. D: Ye.ah. · •. ,, SJ lAB Bridges Page 34 K: He uh, ruled that the juveniles couldn't picket. Uc oaid that, you kno'IJ, they couldn't participate in the ait-in. D: No, there vere--1 think there was tw girls that participated 1n o sit-in. K: Yeah. D: And uh, he brought them 1.n the.re--ve did. And they were-be vae juet as nice to them. He wa• also the juvenile judge and the COW1ty Judge, too. K: Yeah. 11 D: And he talb.d to them and ea.id, nov I'a goi1tg ,t,o turn you over to your parents provided that you don ' t do thl• •gaitl. K: Ye:lh. D: And they 10id they were going to do it anytime: they wanted _fo-'-''--\"\" ~ \" ,. ~ says oluly. So be a.cot thea ewer to the girl'• achool- cotte.c.t.lon school, and~~'hich caused 3 lot of stink 'cause the bl4cks would to and ~ayl4iy the deputy ond, you knO\\oi, that wos the vorkings . tc.: Yes. D: But I tell you the funay incident happened vhilc Mr•. Peabody was out there in jAil. Her son , vho is an ordoined £piscopolion =iniatcr-- K: WhO was alao the governor. D: And , well thia 1-s anothe.r eon. K: Oh a difforont one. D: And he'8 n boozer. And he'a got his collar on and he ' s going from bar II to bar.. Every tic:e he hits a bar, they tell hia, Kro. Peabody's eon is II on the way out to the county jail to aa.e bis 100thcr. So he get.a out there. nbout 11:30 or 12: 00 at night. So I 'm out tt there and I'm waiting Ond he II // c.occ\u0026 in and he \u0026ays, 1 wo.nt to talk to •Y mot her. And 1 said t 'm not going to wake your mother up at 11:30-12:00 at n.lght. II 4nd get in that cab and get yourself oway f rom here. You bet~~r go out I lle S3YS , l ' ll stay SJ lAB Page 35 D: K: D: , , right here 'til I see ay mother. l said, 111.is ten, drunk.a are not allowed ti in this jail unless they're behind the bats. Ho .... ~AA t'\u003c Ava-r\u003e f t1 rtM.s ~ .... 1.' (( ~4.f.) I aaid I can throw you in th.at cell in thftre and you' l.l sober up by morning and you c.o.n sec your mother. I said you ' re: going to lcava or you're going to j•ll. He says I-- When he .. td that, I said put h.ll:I in it. Boy, vhen l said that he was out the door. K: Uo was out the door. D: He told his mother the next aorni.a.g that her drunk aon cOQe staggering around. She didn' t like it much, but ho didn't come back out thore either. But you knOW', you'd be eurprised vhat a- how nuch t~ouble a bunch of teouge ldd1-'Young Ude can give you. K: Ycoh. D: 1 •an they can think up the darnedest thin\u0026•· They got socae-aoee uh, Highlight to nproy on~you know, it's a--rcal hot. I've forgot what the beck you call it. Anyway, they put it in these sp,r.a yguna and coae by and eprayed 1-t. And if 1-t got on your legs or something, it'd bli.etor you in '.just a fev minutes. lt vas tho darnedest-- K: Wa• it an acid type of thing? D: Yeoh. And uh, of coureo, in tha march , all the old bl~ck vomen all had baskets, and we'd stop them uptown. They'd ho.v• theee baskets fu.11 of half bricks and acid to throw- on you. K: You mruin the bldcks were corr y-ing \u0026.. t. ~ J i ti 1/-.¢.; r · ·' ? D: Yeah, QOt acid, the uh , potash. K: Oh, poteah. D: Yeah. And uh, t hey'd uh , have these da·rn, uh , bricka and we 'd dump t hem •, out t the atdevall:.s 1A little pUea~k.e Little p.1lea of the•. And then eo:A~tet S~J.oo~ome atons and pick them up and cake chem up chore. (!,,. ~~A' '- SJ lAB Pogc 36 ~ridges D: They had • big-he hod about t10-o or three bushels of rocks and stu(C they taken ovu-lce pick.1 . And always-it waa always the old old wocen that had tht•. X: That rigb t? D: But. you know, they--to shov you hov bad thAt things got-the city or the~l gave ordQre to my deputies that they vercn't to go over there and ju:sp in that ocean. K: Oh huh. D: Unless soc:.ebody vaa bein.g drovned or scve.rely but.en. Well, when they eaoe over to go evi .. ing, naturally, all thcee young men are over there in shor ts . bathin.s tninks. K: The young whitca? D: Yeah. K: Oh huh. D: Berc are the blacb in pants and sbirta and dr•••e.s and everyth:1n1!\u003e ao these guya are throvin.g sand at them, vh.ich b not a hottiblc thing. I mean a handful of sand is not goin\u0026 to kill a.nybody. K: It ain't going to hurt you, no. D: But there't alwnya D lot of , uh , and then vhan they'd get out in tho. voter, vell tho •t•te highway patrolman, inatead of stopping at the vater, and uying look we're not--doo't have, uh, bath.i.n.g suit.s. W• ean't go out thoro now to holp thca. They'd - you'd go out there. Veil, he.re's thie poor devil in full untfora, •ide.arm , billy. #ll that darn heavy unifona on. K: Uh huh. D: Out ther e tryin3 to compete vith:l.l bunch of kids that's been swimming all their live1.-A bunch of Mtnorc.;\u003ens and they' re dunking the devil out of this highvay p.atrol, and t:he bl.a.cit oou. \"· SJ 1AB Bridges tage 37 K: Oh yeah, the highway patrol vor,o getti.ng it D: Oh sure, Dan - -overseas and all, heck they can' t--What they going to do-­standing out there in the v'ltcr about seven or eigh t feet deep and thaeo I guys awtm•ing around, ond go underneath thee and jerk theQ under and ~ ~~~ K: They we.re that--they were out that far? t thought they ' d only get knee deep. D: No, they'd so out, tand then when they'd cOC1e in they'd go to, ~od they'd \u003c'Ill jump in the fresh wo.tcr pool. and they'd have to cle$n their weapon•·\\ and their unifores and cvoeyth.tng. K: Yeah . D: But uh, •ctually it was-th.Ina• like that, you ko.ov. you think back on them--werc really funny bec• uee no one was t rying to dr~ anyone. K: No? D: they'd--no one got even cl ose to being drowned over there. Of course. they tore 80Cle •utccobilee up over there. Ii:: Ye.ab. D: And uh , vhcn they'd 3ct, uh, one of the tvo black• , uh, boys separated-- K: D: They'd bop the tar out of tham. K: Yeah. D: You ltnov. K: Be.at on the• pretty good? D: Beat on them, and a lot of tirneo the blacks'd cOCllC out on top, too. There ' • eOflle pretty tough kids. They beat the tar out of some of the white boys. K: Uh huh. D: Wt had one g1rl vt called , uh, $111okey the ~.,r. She must b.:ave voighod 240 or SO pounds . SJ l.AB Bridges Pogo 38 X: Black girl? D: Yeah. She was cnoraou•, and l think she waa •bout seventeen or eighteen years old. And one day I was standing and all these \\ICre- -white boys were running around, you ·M·-lOW, «,,.,.;. n\\~\"\"·,~:.1:1J on one every time t hey sot n chance, and throwing ennd on them. And uho wau atend1ng up ther e . And some of thetll hod got them. some surveyor atoke1. K: Yeah. D: Actually they'to aot h~avy enough to hurt, but they're he.avy enough to bruise aod uh, bl-1.ster you U they hit you across the r~r end vith one. And she vs1 1tandins up cbi?:re and every time one of those white boys cace within rench of her , that big fat hand en.me out ond sh0 vould al#p the• on that hard beach and they'd roll just like.-j(/~~~) tin things, and boy, it wa,s the darnedest thing you 've ever seen/I flelI. natura1ly1 it vae funny. And l was up there laughing and tb~s old guy vas staoditlg and vatch.ia.g the.a and he said.\" b oy I'd give $50.00 if ti II I/ I could get her in the Xlan . And I said why? And he said , \"She could whi.P evet'y one of these niggers out here in no time . 11 lie said , \"LOok what •he' e doing to \"'Y boys.\" (7 ~'l-S') K: Who is th3t th~t iB tolking? D: An old Xlansman atonding up there . K: Yeah. t/ ,, D: He ~y$, uh, ••Y• bo1. t'd give $50. 00 to get her in that Xu JUux Kl4n . K: Were the boys on t .he b~ach harassing the bl•ckl--vere they mostly organized by the Klan or wre they just out by thcmiselves? O: No, no, li, ._K' . ., K: just olAt tpr.,. D: .,,T\\lo thirds of cha time, they, uh, vouldn't--anybody wouldn't even knov t .hat they went to the beach, except the: fact that thoy would ride around ·. ·~. . SJ lAB Br idges Page 39 D: the park three or four times to get a bunch of people int ereGted in them. So that--and then, by the ti=~ they got around the park 3 couple of t imes--we.11, by t hat time, the white boys wou.ld start organizing to follow them over there. K: Yeah. D: So ther e ' d be a motorcade of inaybc seven or eight loads of blacks and maybe t~'O or three loads of whitee. It didn ' t have to be too many whites to create a disturbance, you know. K : U?1 huh . D: Well , thcy'd- - boy they'd sand ball them and~ K: Would you--as a kind of a whole--wbat--do you th~nk the Klan ~~ D: No, none. They, uh, they were ninety-eight -fr.m. percen)\\out-of-t own. much influence in the white reaction or , uh-- K: Mostly from Jacksonville, weren' t they? D: Jacksonville ond Starke and Palatka and Bunnell. Anyway, they'd come II 11 over for a night of fun, you know, have fun. But they-- D: But like this stuff on the beach and stuff like that--what~you don't think th3t was o rganized by t hem. D: No , 'Cn\\D ...fi..·r ~ , 'it vas too s pont aneous. K: Spontaneous. That's kind of what I think. You read some~yo u read some people, and they get the idea thot\u003e you know\u003e the Klan had this whole think ...ar sballed and organized. D: No. K: Well, I only have one more question to ask-- I wante tt\u003e ask you about '63, and then we can move on to 164. Because I read at one place wher6~ uh, llaling made a comment that he had, you know, he complained-..I\" t2.~·f-'Jr:;,.,,.~ complained about police protection or socething 1 that he had formed himself his own little at111y. SJ lAB Br idges Pog• 40 D: Yeah, he had about eight or ten. I was down at his house the other ic.orning vhcn he coae-- K: Yeah, you were telling me about that one time. D: But uh, there were no--he had him about eight or t~ more ••• There was about three of them---three or four of them-- young men--that were on his littla GA _ _,,o2r-~j+·.:.·:.;·• c__ K: Were they mostl y under twenty-one or somevherc around thQre? D: I'd say they were between eighteen and twenty-four. K: Uh huh. D: Cood husky boys. They knew wh'1t they vere do·ing . K: Yeah. D: They took care of chc--of t bese~cause t he average white kids was a lot tnnal 1e r. K: Yeah. D: But these--these eight or ten he had , they took C4re of the i r end of it. They were pretty tough boys. K: Yeah. That ' s interesting. Wel l , just from the, you know, ~ct iv~tica that Haling could s t ir up and the two barber s, did you think that , uh, you know, all the marches and the wait- ins and wbnt not were going to come out of what you saw that happened in '63 or--? D: No, I didn't. 1 thousht th3t they wore losing ground, actually. K: Ub huh. D: Because uh , their spokesman wosn ' t, uh, he wasn ' t a person that they had a l ot of faith in, a,n, d uh, the kind that jus t says, well, K: Yea.h. he wasn't a man that could, uh, he was IP you're soing to do wb.3.t we tell you •••. II D: Or else ve going to make you crawl and stuff like that , you know, which d1dn 1 t sit good with the city commission at all. .. SJ l AB Bridges Page 41 K: Uh huh. D: And uh, 'cause everybody's doing all they can to help the\"m . K·: Oh, from ..,hat I r ead that, uh, sometimes Haling or Haling did have a pretty ha~d time. meeting ..,ith the commission to discuss the black griev.onces. D: Yeah , ..,ell, if he did, it was his own fault 'cause Joe Shelly was th'e K: D: K: aayor that year, and he was a--he always leaned over b3Ckwards trying to find out what they- '\"'What their a:Lms were and al.l the other city ~f$ com:missioty\\ were the same way, but uh, if uh, if t come before the city commission for a ~equest, t have to state what my request is. Uh huh. If \" 1 don't go up there and say, you white mothers going to do this or we going to tear this town down. We going to make you crawl on your hands It and knees and stuff. It was n direct threat all the t ime • . Yeah . And Haling .would, you kno.,, W~~COYN! i:r-::f\" (,\"./ce +f.. ;~ D: Yeah, he~-and uh, the uh , naturally, the city commission being human resented it. You don't like to be tol d in your 01.ll\\ city cooanlssion room ? that you're \u0026Oing to ~ithc~ do this or you're going to destroy your town. K: I 've never rc~d anything About this so Haling would actually go to the city commission me.eting\u0026 and say-- D: Yeah. K: t--you know- - if you don't meet this demand, you're all going to crawl or something to that effect? II N D: Yeah, he said we'll m.akQ you crawl on your hands and knees and be~ us. K: Ye.ah. D: They put on a--I 'm going to shO'W you how tough this town got . The biggest motel that we h3vc in St. Augustine at that titn.o w~s across the bridge on the lcf t-hand side and belonged to a tn.ln nam~d Earl Michaels. ·.•. .. ' •. SJ lAJI Bridges Page 42 K: Yeah. D: Earl Mich3cl went thirty- three days without one customer. The biggest mote1 we had in St. Augustine. K: This was during, uh , was '64? D: ' 63 or ·~. K: ~as it due to the black pickets or the whit~ counter-pickets? D: It wasn't due co any pickets. The K: Just a loss of business. D: The--they picketed up in Jacksonville at the airport and at the Mary-- St. Mary's River they said don't ·go near St. Augustine. Actually, the u.h .. -a lot of this was the s tate employees telling them what a tough time. ve's having down here. K: Uh huh. D: And uh, in St. Augustine. So they-- K: They just nvoidcd-- I\u003e: They bypassed us. I\u003c:: Yeah. D: But you k~ow, that's a horri ble thing when a man's got $150--$200,000 invested in a motel and he goes thirty- three days without one customer. K: That's\u003e tough { ~ ' t ''i;, to go that way. It i s. All right, well-well, since we're talking about Ualing, now we can get back to what we we-re discussing about earlier befor~ we had the tape on. What do you think were the, uh, affiliations between Haling and the NAACP and the NCLC and co~unis t organ~zat ions? D: We11 uh~ 1 don't know whether-don't know where llal:ln\u0026 came froc ~ , actually . K: Uh huh. D: We never investigated him because we didn't feel like he was too important, but he was a headline seeker, you know. ···~ SJ lAB Bridges 'Page 43 K: Woll--well J4f ~ irt f(J'V..tom what I recall I, you know, specifically ~~-f;-4~:_,R,~~~~~ that he woa a vetersn of the Korean W~r and he went to, uh, Florida State or--no, it must have been F. A \u0026 MU., uh, on a grant to, you know, to get his vet or--no--to get his dcncisc- -dentist license. And then, you know, some sort of contract ~so nt him over to St. Augustine. But anyw3y, now you can U:!:J. fin 1A.L • D: I just think he was a -- h «- - - Of course. he had the ... -had some good points. If he have--1 believe he would ~ve donti'a lot bet ter i f he would have had enough sense to realize that you ca1'l' t, uh, do this thing by force. K: Uh huh. D: You know. But uh, h~ felt that what he would do would antagonize tho white people so much that they would actually try to kill socebody, which they didn't do. All they wanted to do was have a good time, and b(Ul.t the tar out of people, that's all. But uh, he uh, the night I tried to talk to him down at the Flagler Hospital when he got beat so bad1 I a-sked him what the heck he was doing down there, and uh, be sa:id 11 II just riding around. We11, you don't take no Palmetto Route road and drive 3 mile ond ftve-oights just to ride around. K:: Yeah. D: 'Cause that's the only v3y they could have goti:there except right up through that mo.in alley. And uh, when I got out there, I left qy car down at the highway, ~nd uh, 1 left my gun in the car and took my--left my badge on. K: Yeah. D: And when 1 walked up that roadway- -that uh~th~t was the longest half nile I ever walked in my l ife. K: ~a.f ii ... 16'$. • SJ lA\u0026 Page 44 0: Because uh, all thoac. uh, Klansaen were thero, end I vas afraid. cocao K: D: of thCliOI vouldn't rocogaizo me. And uh, would they pass the •-or-d all t• I I the vay up--the ahariff's coming up--the sheriff's coming up. And a lot of them walked right by ma--never spoke or anything. Of cou~sc, they didn 1 t Mvc a IN16k on. 1lirew-I~,,. And vhen I got--vben I got up there, I didn't expect to see .anyone alive. K: Were most of the Klonaaen-uh--vere t:hey Ccoa Lhe local area or vere-did they come down from Jacksonville or-- D: They-- they came from--well, .far away as Lo.kc City, t )/\\1 t....5ine_ • Now I don't now how many would come from Jackaonville. Now I knew some cuie from La\" City and I b\\e1-1 soee C4IM froa Ocala. K: Yeah. D: And uh, because their, you know-, because of their car tags. K: Yeah. D: And uh, a lot of t1111C\u0026 they would have weapons in the trunks of their K: Yeah. 0: Jut by the aaiDC tok.C!n you can•t--you couldo't orrcet a man for having • veapoii in. hie car. J:: Would-did the u.n t-h.at you u\" from the St. Au;g areal D: Well, I guess there va1 isaybe forty or fifty out of the, uh, the big-- the' thtng--thc rC410n they caoe~-the Klan coac here, 1 think, vas becn.uae they figured it WOA 0 SOod place to get A lot of members. They-- ' ... K: __l- J\"\"-.'P-'S'---''f/-v-.;-f'·-_-____ with the:, uh, n.ltorcations a.nd stuff, uh huh. Di Yeah, they uh, ve.re charged $10.00 to join the Klan. K: Yeah. SJ 1A8 Bridges Page 45 D: And the flr~t night woa the night tlult the trouble started\u003e and then-- then tho judg• ordered me to, uh, go up there the n~xt night and have •ome deput101 pr•1ent. And uh. actually it was a~it got, uh-- it wasn't sticky at all. E'verybody ju,s, t gets up I 11eao. fo-r hour• ot a ti•. They just J urn4dMm and cusses th~ rdgg~s. II niggers~ nigger\u0026. It wa1 juat the aaa• thing being repeated a11 the time . K: Yeah. va.1 juat a for. of arou.seeent. They didn't: bother oe at all. nlaht \":.:':.:':.:'-- K: Uh huh. D: When tho judge ove.r-tMt SiJtp•on insisted that I belong to the taa.a. I finally told hiJD, I said judge, l VH\t out to a Klan rally at your orde.r. I said they wa.nted $10.00 to join. I said but I s:h1 Dr. Ra.ling and his t ·wo men ond the in1t1ot1on ia so horrible. that I don't believe I could atand it. K: Woll- \"'cll t.1hat do they do for the in1tl.ation? D: Nothing. t wao juat tDlking obout the three blaeks tha t got be3t. K: Oh-- oh, I sec. I see. D: So 1 caw the rosults of it. K: that was too much. huh. D: I said that's too tough for mo. 1 couldn't stand it. K: I eee. D: And he didn't llko it •uch. but I never sav people change s.o fast. The day we had, uh, Mrs. vhot you call it up here. K: Peabody? D: Peab,o, dy. Tbe judg.-ahc told the judge wby she cm::e down httc. and she said the, .• herlff told M two or three tiees that he was going t ·O put ae in Ja.11, •• K: Yeah. \" -. SJ ).All Bridges Page '6 II D: ,, ,And be8ged me not to do it--not to do what I was doing. And the judge II K: s31d to her~-and says--well. when yo,,u keep putting a rope around your neck you're bound to gee rope burns. ln other words. ever ything was fine the first day. The next day we so up there, we're all ~ bunch of no good so and suchcs. H=. D: And we had a--we have a guy that writes for the ~~right now. His name is Hank Draf\\4.\u003c K: Yo.ah. D: Hank Drain was here the whole timQ, He walked with me. a deputy. or somebody. And he often \u0026aid, \"The best thing in the wol'ld we could do is to put that guy underneath the jail--that Martin Luther King--\"\" · forever.\" He ha.ted him. He was the \\IQrst buzzard he'd ever seen- - a r at t lesnake in disguise and everything. K: Everything he could think, yeah. D: He despised him. The n1.ght that M.artin Luther King got killed, he called Chief Stt7'(art, .-i talked to St~art. He called ue and I said, '' II K: ''well I juet hc3rd about 1t. I said but Hank, by the sru:nc token, I I/ s~id you know what a buzzard he is and what we've put up with here . JI I I 11 II And uh, he sai yeah, I 'm going to burn him up. He said you watch . He a31d 1 l •m sick and tired of making a hero out of htm 1 • 1 The next day I don't sec anything of Hank Dra~ The following day here's this beautiful article how Hank--uh--W'I'itten .by lL\"lnk l\u003erain--just the opposite of what he told us for months and· months and ~onths here in St. Augustine. Uh huh . D: And vhat he told me. the night before. K: !.,,,,,,.. D: In. uh. on the phone. •., SJ lAB Bri_dge\u0026 Page 47 K: D: K: Well, :;; ~ .s \"\"a aaybe be figuTed bec•u•e he vaa dead he, you bov, he vasn't going to hurt the - --'e'-u_f_o,.z;..,g'I---- on ,.t-he way out. No. Mhat he figured Whon he--t think what happencd-- whcn he took h~s -- beautiful article in there and threw it on that editor's pape'llon. tho top of the d(!\u0026k--vhtn that-- He said thia is-- A c cu;h atscs• A t C•(l e { t't:. j C, e.t f' Cf~;) 0: Tb.is is the oppo•ite. He said you-Martin Luther Xing's a hero. Do you understand that? And changed hi.s whole line of thl.nklng. K: But do you think--6 you think that King !2!. affiliated vith coaauni•t help? D: Yes. I told you. 1 believe in ~Y OWn mind that, u~. when King attended that Communist ochool in, uh, Ten.nessce. I had picture\u0026 of it and I wa.s present on three different occassions vheo nevsmen asked ht.a if he attended the cocamuni•t school. K: Uh huh. D: And if that vae hie picture in there. And on every occassion, he 4aid it vas none of their bueineee. He cvadal tho question. He never denied attending the coanunist school. X: Uh huh. D: Another thing that up1et1 me about it. He violated a federal injunction Tbe federal eourt had an 1njunct1oo. ~ttJnst him, · '\"(kr~c.+s t.o •t•y out of Kcm:phis bceau.ae or the death -c:::p... by g.ol n3 to Keaph1o . . . C.f\\ J DI~ I 'lj hia X: Y .. b. D: He violated the federal laws and vent right on into Hcmphia and got killed . If you rcma=bor correctly, he hod just comb b~ck f rom a ' beautiful trip to Ru11ia . And he was in Russia for several veeks. And he ~e back from Russia and then I think he got the. uh, beautiful award for-a Nobel Peace Prize that year, whic.h he vas entitled to about •, SJ lAB Bridges Page 48 D: as much as any, uh, lawbreaker. TI1e--uh, you know, I hQar p~ople say why did you. do this? Why did you put him i n jail? \" Well, because you got 3 state law. A D\\3n calls you and says I vant this ~an in j~il. What arc you going to do . say no, I ain't going to put him in jail. I'm going to let him stay here. You can't do it. Not and keep your job. But uh, vc had real good luck with him. And uh . we--thosc .ire the only thl'ee blacks thilt I've heard of that were during that whole tioe that were really injured. And they got injuted because they went to a place they shouldn't have gone . Alri3kt. K: ~ Why do you think King chose St. Augustine to focus on during the sumt!'ler of • 64? D: Because of, uh, Dr. Haling's actions . .f.,.,- here/ispecific purpose of, uh, creating as much trouble as he could in 1 think Haling was brought down order to g~t this ball rolling. They had to start soaewher\u003c!, a.nd this was a real good place to start. K: Yeah. D: But uh-- K: Do you think it had something to do with the quadricentennial celebration and uh, possible uh, well, publicity therein or-- D: Lct'o see, our- - our uh, well, let's see--it was in uh '65. K: It was '65, yeah, when they had all t he preparations for it at1d stuff. D: Uh huh. But they did one thing they aaid they \"Was goi.ng to do. They made us crawl. They darn near broke St. Augustine. K: Uh huh. D: Which is sixty percent tourist town, and uh-- K: They dried it up. D: Boy, it was t(!trible . And you--you see, uh , big motels and not one car parked anywhere. SJ lAB Page 49 K: Hi:!mm. Bridges D: Out of thi rty-five or forty bit motels who've·1 got a lot of ooney involved. You knov things ore bad. K: People ore hurting, yeah. Well, how woul d you~how ~ould you asses1the way tho news media covered the--the uh, entire taffair. O: Well, actually the uh, the news media didn ' t do a bad job except th.:tt , u.h . they w3nted to cake pictures of t hese, uh:, white rabble rouser s which were strickly against it. K: v\\v;;f· .... D: They \\o'Ould take their cameras away from them and bust their cameras. Aad uh, they uh, it was just ti, .. - ·in other vords, they were acting against the'lll$elves. K: Uh huh. D: Because the more they've, uh, the more grounds they gave the,. uh, the K: s:~ j )\"LC , medta)for t1rit1ng against them. Well, the media vaul~ fe nat re 1ly golog to Write DOre obout them. D: Sure . K: Sure . Uh, well these--do you think the9e\" r abble ti tl.S rousers,,t:h:at. you call thcm--t hey wcre--t hay wer e pretty effective in sti rring thi~gs up or-- D: Oh yeah, but you know the uh, you would have been surprised at the people down io the park. In other wordS, the--we'd say we have, uh, thirty- five or forty people marchin\u0026 with the blacks around the park. Well, there might be, uh, seventy- five or eighty people, blacks and whites , in tha t march~-in that area. \\ K: Uh huh. D: And uh, there wouldn't be one-•wouldn't be over two out of every ten that ~'Ould ba f rom St. Augustine. K: Really? .•. SJ lAS Page 50 D: iccausc they wouldn't have enough to p~rticipate. K: Yeah. Bridges D: It ended up with old old people and kids under--around twelve or thirteen years old. K: Why? The other ones were in jail by then? D: No, they--they, uh, just uh, didn1 t participate in it. K: Hmm:i. D: Thcy--what they would do is uh, voul.d just create ·trouble. Like one day they decided to mrirch on the~out here at the bl.ack school. K: Yeah. D: And uh, we had a heck of a time because t hey were walking. And they were going to w3lk up to the park, valk around the pnrk, and valk back. Well, the farther they wo-lkcd they Ct\\'l'lle to colored town over ::here . The farther they walked up King Street. the bigger the group got. K: Was it marchers or the white group? D: The marchers. K: Oh, yeah. D: And uh, by the same token, the uh, the Florida Nocmol, they c:;.lled a.nd said they were going to mtlrch, but they didn ' t want these outsiders in their group. K: Uh hub. D: You uodersb'lnd what I mean? So it wa$ a lot of harassment between the Florida Norcal students and the blaCks thot wanted to get in the carch, too, so they can create a distubance. K: llmlml. D: And they call here and say 8Ct hitn out of here. We don't vane him in here. K: They ~\"Ould? D: Yeah. '•,, ··~ SJ lAB Bridges Page 51 K: How many stude~ts vere out there? D: Oh, I don ' t know. I gueS$, uh, 300 or 400. K: Uh huh. And they didn't-- they- -\\.lhcn th~y--when they would--well, they were m.:irching concurrently with, uh, King- -King's men? D: No, they weren ' t. They uh, they uh•-the president out there,(Penfe1:~~ K: Yeah. D: Uh, was strickly for the NAACP, of course. K: Yeah. D: But, by the same token, when he got ready to march, his girls and girl students and male students--thay w\u003c\u003euld tell him, and he would take~ it was all of the class. All of the teachers would march with them. You understand what I mean? K: It was the whole place. D: Oh yeah. They'd all come stand. And uh, they molested nobody. K: Uh huh. D: They didn' t have any arguments or any trouble. They would just go up to the, uh, the foot of the bridge, and uh, all of them would ., sing a few s~ngs, you know, school songs and sometimes rel1g1ous songs 'cause it was aM-I think it was a baptist- oriented school in the first place. K: Uh huh. D: And uh, then they 1d go on back. A lot of times they vould M.ve 4 bu.s come pick them ''P· 8ut they were the best behaved people you ever saw. K: And did th~ White hecklers ever give them any trouble? D: Never never bothered them in any way. K: Really? That's interesting. D: Never-- K: So the--so the white--the white counter-deconstrators would just key - orie tl+e,.e on the uh, SCLC., \"h; 'r a. \u0026lht g-roups. SJ lAB Bridge8 Pose 52 D: Yeah. local and- -uh . key on the locals and the out of tO\\olfl~ rs . K: Uh huh, bu t they'd leave the college students alone? D: Yeah . Never--never--1 don't think we ever had one incident out there. K: Mm:mn. So in t e rcs of, uh, in terms of, you know, wh3t kind of 1Z1easures you'd take, you've alteady said several times that you had--or you stated at least once that, you know, \"hon --when King was in jail you had to, you know, t ake him up to Jack$onv11lc becousc all t he riots and what not, but when he came into town, was it a different situation? Or did°you have to take extra precautions or did you have to, uh, how did his presence change things? D: Uh, well they--they uh became more vocal, and of course. when be travelled h~- l guess he had at least, uh, thirty people with him. K: Uh huh. D: Which is o big a.moun t for a little ole town like this, you know. And uh . ve uh, we didn't have to--hc--he uh, vas fairly abusive in his own way over the TV, you know, but he alvays struck me as being, uh, on some kind of, uh, dope vhen he vould speak on TV . I don't know whether you ever saw him or not. l\u003c: No, l 'm too ,Yc.:O\"u,,n,.s._ ____ _ 0: His--his eyes would just--boy, they would just glisten. Just l ike he-- but he knew what he was saying. And uh , the--and he had--he had some bully boys with hiei, \\1h , the, uh, like I was telling you , this uh thing after 11:00 at night, when Virsi.l and l were enjoined to--to leave him a lone, but we had to protect him. Tbey--one ntsht they almost got the whole hlnch \"'1.ped out . The blacks did. K: Ob yeoh. D: The--a11 of the mer chants in town were good friends of .Jimmy Brock who f'-~•\"5'\u003e~ r~n a motel--the ~. ···~ 1- ·-.. SJ lAB Bridges Page Sl K: Tho \"M'~ff Id\\.~n \"'!\" ' D: Right on Boy Street. K: Uh huh. D: And uh, they Dnrched up thero •bout 12:lO th~t night and uh . decided to go ~. Well, tbete p•ople arc 411 buaineRA people thst I'n c.alking about~ school teacher• and bu•ine•• people. K: More re1pectible. D: Te..s. They're in t:here and they have baseball bats. K: 1be ~•in••••en and aturft D: Tea. K: These voren ' t the young vhltc toughs or the JCXX or anyt~? D: No, that'• vhero t got ninety percent of 11lY narchers were froaii the bu.ainess people that protected the blacks. K: Uh huh. D: ~ben they were m.arch1ng--\"1ere businessmen f roc St. Augus tine t hat owned buainesacs all the woy around that pork--all t he vay up St. George Str eet- - Son Marco. They come every night just aa regular as a cl ock. K: to protect tho marchers? D: To protoct t ha marchore. K: But when-but when King o,nd h is group we.n t into t he ~n t hen they ver e holdin.g the baseball bncet D: Yeo sir. They aaid that if they-they ...,.rc.u ' t going to let them i n t her e . And l tried ond 1 told them. I D4id you guys are not going. I says you 're goint to get the whole bunch kill•d. K: Why did thoy aake a sudden reversal when one night prot ecting the'b1Bcks, then the next night ready to beat on thea? D: Wel-1, i.n t .he firat place , they--we arl'ested Hartin Lut he.r King at the M O. l\\S.,.., MnJsea place. --- --- --- -- SJ lAB Bridges Page S\u0026 K: Yeah. f'\\\u003e\u003c\"Sor\\ D: The next night there wan a fire bomb thrown in the M\u0026Oeon. K: Uh huh. D: Froa--lt dld quite cxtenaivc docwage. K: Yeah. D: Of cour•e, ve felt the blukl threv it in there because they arrested ling there. K: 1 thought-1 though that flre bomb hit a little later after the Civil Right• Act had paeted. D: No, thia vat be.for•. l'• eure it vas . Anyvay, tbc.s-e guys vere all. upset when they heard that they ~ere going, uh, the~tbe--vhat, uh , \\oil.at happened va.1 a black caoe-a vb.ice aan came in .end rented a room in the Hunson. K: Yeah. D: then he geta on the phone and call.1 the guys up and they com~ dovn, go 1n hia room, put on their bnthing auits, and go swimniing in the pool. Well, no--you c-0n't do that nt any QOtCl nnywhere, whether you're white or black. You can ' t, uh, h4vc visitors unless they tell you you ca.n. Tbit r•ieod A big otink thot a f ternoon. ln foct, they said they vere going to put an ellis,Ator in the pool. It JJ K: Is that when Brock octUlllly poured that ureatic acid i n there. (°(~../..~ J D: Ye.ah, yeah. And .uh , to keep them out. K: Yenh. D: And uh, now .\u0026rt:in Luther Hng was at.eying right across the bay on che K: Uh huh, D: Nov 1£ anybody vMted to. uh. beat Hartin Luther Ung up, he bad. four or five .. t\\ vith b.19 there. If anybody had vaoted to beat Kat\"tia Wt.her Ung • .. SJ lAB Bridges Posa SS D: up. or thrO\t hie in that place. all they bad to do i .• just t.:J!llk acroe.s Bay Street and puah hi• overboard off the st.a vall. K: Uh huh. D: No one molested hi111. K: l!mmm. D: tto one bothered hi• ot a.11. He l eft and th~n thcy--thc white can that rented the rooe aaid that they'd be back that night to see him. SO by that tiae people had-all the business people are getting pretty riled , md uh, th• y didn't i:arch 'til J..ote. And vhen they eau up, well these people vnrc all standing there. K: ~,~? D: Yeah, good bueinoe• people and-- X: That's intere.\u0026tin3. D: ~\"- / and they vere vaiting ao.d t be.gge.d thue people . I said you- I said 11t he bad part of i t is none of you guya that are leaders are going to go get hurt. You're not goin.g up there. You' re going to push these little kidS artd theae old men 4nd women up there.\" K: Uh huh. II D: That's what' you're going to do. You1 re aoJng to force them up there and these guy\u0026 aro going co knock the t ar out of them. And you ought, ,t o be ash.aced of your1elvea-taldng advantage of thee• poor old people. So l finally got tbea aoving and uh. they vent on down to uh-- K: That was t-hc block• thot you were telling that to? D: Ye4h. And so l.'O moved them on down to the slave mo.rket. K: Yedh. ~ovcd them on down the road . D: Which i s where thoy wanted to go anyway. but they just decided to walk on thic ci.on'• private propert y , and 1 tried to explain to t hem. that tlde i s not a street. 1hi• ia thisaan's prlvate property here. And. you've \" SJ !AB Bridges Page 56 D: got to honor it. You've got to have a little respect for it. K: D: Uh huh. 11 No, ~c'rc going to march on there. 1 sald, well it ' ~ up to you. 1 1111 don't have anythi ng elao II 11 tosi.y--just go right ohcad. You ain't goi ng to prot ect us? l ••id protect you against II protect you from--your ovn stupidity? whot. What am I going to K: Uh huh. D: I know if soael\u003eody co.ea to ay house ju.st like you, and you tell W.. to get out. l f he don't get out, you ' ro going to get •~thin.g to put him out. And th@t'• cX4ctly what they were going to do. 'Ibey were going to m.tke them volk--valk out of t here. K: Yeah. D: ____' i3=_i~.J-- ---- a lot of, uh, funny thin.gt happened , but uh, I st.ill uy that ub, l knov that uh, King went to that school. I know that Dr. Young vent to that school . And uh, uh, vhat is that guy's name from Savannah? There vas t r ouble every time I aav M.rt. K: Abernathy? D: No, , w11.s11 +-... Abernathy we~-----~ U: No. K: • U: K: D: Mo. No, uh-­H,,. S e\u003c; It wa s~ Willi .... f1\".SC R It was ~ Willia••· Ho.te\"- Ic was ~ Williama. those people left here And I'm going to tell you something else. When nnd they went to AJo.biuian, 1foJett Willi~u:ds v:.ts arrested in a 8tolcn car and he had car 's keye to eight other $tolen cars in h.is pocket. K: ll:m:D . '• SJ lAB Br:idges Page 57 D: And he was arrested between Savonnah and uh, Atlanta. And he told them that Mortin Luther King had the other eight sets of keys . K: 8-. End of Side 2-T•pe A On page 56 cwo c~ent• vtit• aade by •n unknovn speak.er. The \"U\" indicat.es this . •. SJ lAB Bridges Page S8 Sida 1-Tape B K: Where what wo missed on that tape was I believe you wera celliog me that Hoss--you didt\\'t think Uoo• w3s a Klansman. D: No, I don't think he vaa a ll.ansa.an bec•uae i t cost $10.00. And he-ub, another r eaeon I don't, uh, think he wa1, but I do believe this. 1 believe thot the, uh, group$ of Klan\u0026men or whether they were Klno\u0026men or not. came co Sc. Augu1tine they l ooked co Xenusto for. leadership and for locat i on. K: So when they came in thoy would kind of turn themselves over to Uoaa and Hoss \\.;ould then direct them. D: Yeah. K: They \"°uld~ 0: But by tho some token, I ncver--all the t ime, uh, that Hoss was in this thing , did I ever hear hia aoy anything that, uh, would 11ean the death ot somebOdy. K: Uh huh, O: Because ho--h,,1 aae.1£ :is not • violent por.on , yOUc know. And uh, ao he'd te.11 anybody I don't be.l1evc in killtna aDybod~ I think •e ought to I .\"J keep them here. We ought to beat the.tn up her~'jfd ha had everything lined up on the march and-- K: Ub hub. D: Of course, uh. anytime the blacks vould ace 3 group, that vas where t hey would go. They wouldn't, uh, they wouldn't bypass the group. Thciy wouldn't valk around thcc:a on the str eet or a nything . They'd valk over' then. K: Right. through them,· huh? SJ )A8 Page 59 Bridge.a Kt Well, again I, you know. l hovo to t r y to verify vhat l rMd in the paper. D: Yeah. K: I voo rcading--yCtlh , in fact that's the article I .vns ju$ t go1n.g toa a.sk about. The Alligator-ie that froo tM Alllsatort Is th.la the one from the Alligator? D: Yeah. K: And in hew:e I l\u003eolleve they ••id, uh. Yeah, in this article I. believe they eaid that, uh, you know, that you wcre--that II I/ you had-you hod to , uh, keep peopl e in what were called sv~ot boxes- - D: Yeah! X: Aod in the Outside pens. Cen you tell mo about that? D: Yeah, ve had the , uh, the~there were nine flights c~mc over with a prof easor f roa Cainesville. K: Y .. h. D: And uh, they were, naturall y they didn't belong to the colored , uh, the N~--they ~-ere ao.ething e.lee, they uid. lut they ca• ove.r for sympathy. And ul1, eo uh, tho professor had eight-aeven-- there were eight of them. Yeah. K: Uh huh. ;:;::t \\ D: And uh, they turnod themselveo in. They insist~d on going to jnil. And. 0.. ~ sympathy f\\\\Ol/4- Well, we got them out the.re, and ve, put theo up 1n the vhlte cell upstairs. K: Yeah. D: .Whero we had thrc6 or four other vhite prieoners and the colored vere next door. And uh, \u0026o-gee, about 3:00 in the t!)Oraiog they all 1tarted beatin3 on the valla nt one time and curolng and rateing devil. And so I v ent up ond there vere. two local boys that vas in jail up there. And \"· •, SJ lAB Bridges Page 60 D: they vere the one1 cccating the-- k: The altercation? D: The disturbance. K: Uh huh. D: They couldn't got to the blacks ~nd tho black• couldn't get to them, but they'd beat on the walls and cuss them for this and that. And the,n the blacks vould beat on the walls-ju.st keeping peopl.e avake, you know. K: Uh huh. D: And uh, so 1 ordordd them out. I said let'• go. I got a place for you two boys. I' 11 put y' oil in the sweat box. And At that time it vne n. legal deal. lt wo.1 t\\ cull box that I think thoy were made for four or five people at the most. K: Yeah. D: No beds id ther~juat bare floor. And uh, 10 they cam.e out and vh,e,n they did . vell the: profc•sor gets up and put• hie 1hlrt on. And he ~id okay 11 ti ii II boys let's go. l aaid where y'all going. Ue sald ve'rc gonna-if they're gonna b~ locked up, we're gonna be locked up. I/ K.: And the 9rofceoor and hio boys weren't t he onee that were raising tho liltink? D: No. 13: It vas ju.st the tvo locals:. II No. Buh uh. I aa ld vhy do you want to go over there to the sweat boxt ,, \" but Have you ever been in one? Re said no./ve'rc going. If they go, ve'll D: fl ,, II go. 1 said all right. Be oy guest. so I took them over there and put them in the sweat box and left them there 'til the ncl(.t morntrtg. They left town the next dny. K; Yeah. Did you--did you have to--d~d you use that event box much during these. uh-- D: No. I'd say thot vaa the only t:loe ve u.sed it. ,_ SJ lAB Pago 61 Br idges K: Yeah. What about--whnt about the, uh. pen outside the uh--1 read a report where, uh , you know, you vel'e-you had to , you know, put people out there during th• for 1 don't knOW\" vhat reason. J): Well, the---the--you take, uh, twenty-five or thirty people in one coll block-­K: Uh huh. D: And uh, that uh--·you have to clean that place out every day. Another thing, they vere cosplainiag abo1.1t not getting any exerc.is:e . Veil, the fence ie etW out th4tre. They atill use it for exercise, and uh_, so ve, uh, put tbea out there. And, of course, I was sorry a.s the devil. We'd leave the:a out there for, •ay, tvo or three hours, and then take another group out and le.ave thea in it. But uh, the uh, black vcmen and uh, black men was uh, kind of disgusting because I Md whit.e peopl.e working at tha ja1l--vh1te jailOr woman. And uh. they put on l ittle sex shove out there. So we finally had to quit. We couldn't put the acn out there ot tho aaoe ti.1ne vith the women. K: H::lmn. D: accnue• it wao, you know, it was filthy so ve \u0026topped 1t. The uh, and then , uh, they really raised a ruckuo . They vere--because they wasn't gcttin.g anough axcrciso, you know. So we'd send thc111 out in groups of fifteen or twenty and let them trot around the thing for fifteen or twenty cainutca and then co11W1; back in. K: llov 11.1ny cell blocka were in the jail? D: Oh . K: Arc in the ja11T D: Well, let'• aee. Ve had, ub. rooa for eighty. X: Eighty prieonore altogether? D: Yuh. ·.. SJ lAI Page 62 Bridge• K: And wa..~ thnt the iaaxiaum .:iaount you kept in you jail during these ti.es or vould you jutt ove.rflov1 D: No, uh, Some nights wc 1d. uh, before we could proceao them, we h4d one ving that we used for juvenilc1-vhite girl1 and vh.lte. boys. There weren't, uh, l think there's about six or eight bunk.a in t he big cell block. K: Uh huh. D: And then on the othBr aide, where we kept the juvc.nilco separated-- the girls from the boya--were two big cell• vitb four bunks in each one. K: Yooh. D: So when ve'd have an overflov, vc'd, uh, take the juveniles and t.ake them. to their parents and tell them to brlng them back. And then we'd move them up in the big area place, but th6y had no place to • l~ep except on the floor so-:- K: Uh huh . D: We didn't have bed facilities for chm. K: Did you h3v4 a p3ddod cell o~t there? D: Yeah, I hnd two of them. X: Yeah. D: Creach padded cells. They wera for t he, uh, insane-- IC: Uh huh. D: And uh- K: Oid•-would you use those for vhcn there vt11--vhen it overflowed? D: Uh, used theta the nt.gbt we had the \u0026\\\u003c:eat box inci.dcmt. X: Yeah. D: Couse the VOCLtn al.l 1t•rted raietng hell--they~ K: Put the \\IOCMln in the poddod cell.a'? D: 'l'enh. 'l'cah. Let those-- .. , SJ lAB Pogo 63 Bridge(l K: And that 's the only time you had to use those sweat boxes? D: Yeah. We left them, uh, we left them in there l'd say a ful.l hour. K: Uh huh. D: Because there' s no place to stand-- ! mean nothing you can do in a padded cell except walk around and around the loop, you know. K: M:!mun. D: Well, if, you t.ake, uh, ten or fifteen people jammed in one of those pl~ces and uh, it t akes just bbout an hour for everything to quiet right down. K: So you left them in about an hour and-­D: And brought them out . D: And brought them back out. Sounds like they-did all right. Uh, oh yenh, another newspaper, uh, they were talking about how several times, uh , the state police ~'\u003c\u003euld arrest somebody and turn them over to you on--whereupon you ~-ould, you know, release them for, uh, you know, as littl.e-- wit h, uh, you know, no bail or just, you know, let thezi go or something and, uh, it would--did this happen much? I don't know if this- D: Yes, it happened often. K: Uh huh. O: The uh, sometimes they would, uh , bring, uh, five or six blacks in. K: Uh huh. D: And uh, the uh, bondsman ~ould come, you knOw, write the bonds. If you couldn't get 1n touch with them, I'd always call up, uh, an influent13l bl-Ock and tell him I had five down there and 1 want, him to come to the court houGe the next QOrning and post bond. And finally they got a black bondsaan here . K: Uh huh. ·.., SJ lAU Bi-tdges Pogo 64 0: And I'd cal.l h.ia or the st•te wou1d cith• r call hiD and he'd say, p vell, if l can't cake it tonight, Y°\"' turn them loose and tell t,b, ea to aeet .e at t.be courthouse to.orrov and 1' ll post thctr bond.$. And-- vhich he vould . X: Yeah. D: So ~e've worked the $aoe process-- K: Wlth the whites? D: With the whitcc. K: Uh, ia uh-- 0: We never lost any of th~. X: Uh huh. D: And ju1t like l \"3$ telling you, the two Ku Jelux taanners that I arre1ted out at the: rally, they both vent to the county jail and turned t ,heuelvea 1.o :aod posted bond. K: Uh huh. Yeah. D: Both of the:n. I mean--vi.thout a deputy or anytbi:rg. had K: What About , uh, I re3d 3bout one fellow tha.c- -who/burned a stotc otficer with a:id? Uh, do you rccoll thnt incident? And appi:irencly found out)somebody got mad at you for apparently using this procedure. D: Uh uh. K: Do you recal 1 th.at or is it tt'uct D: l remember a st#te officer getting his finger bt'oXeo. t: Yeah. D: X: Up 1n the park, but uh-­That' a not the answer~ ' D: No, uh, thoy never bad acid. They called it Highlife. It's a--stuff you acooch on when a dog or something when he's molesting you. K: llighl1£c? Oh, kind of like tn..1CC7 D: Ye.oh. Similar. Only thing it vas .. -it would burn--oil of mustard, that 'e •., SJ lAB Pase 65 D: what it wat. K: 011 of mustotd? D: Oil of cu•tard, yeah. K: Oh. I •ce. What about one tioe that they aaid that a-- some vhite was drivina in and they had a--and the state police stopped him and they i)od 4 loaded ohotgun. five 104dcd pietols. and I think they a.aid they had five buahele of awnitlon or aooiething like t ,hat. Acd t ,bey turned the.a all over to you and the.y a.aid-the paper \"1d. that you released tbea and, you knov~ gave hill hie gun aod stuff back.- D: No, I-when thie--1 e\u00261:1e out there and the.y didn't Nve any charges against the people. K: Uh huh. D: And uh, none of the weapons were loaded and uh , they took them at the jail--the county jail--thcy took the five guns, I think i t va.s. And they ware all in the trunk. lC: Yeah. D: They took t ho vcapon1 from them. K: Yeah. D: And uh, told t hm t hot when they got r eady t o lt!Ave Sc. Augustine: t o come by and pick thei~ weapons up. K: Uh huh. D: And not to c0tne back to St. Auguetine again with weapons i n the car or oo thoir pereon. K: Yeah. And the anunition, y'all kept that, too? D: K: D: K: D: We didn't hnve Any asaunttion. Oh, they didn't h\u0026ve any amunition? Not vtMtn th•y got to ua. Oh. --- - --- ---- ·.. , i~~ SJ 1All 'Bridges Page 66 K: I see. .. D: There wasn't- K: So you just got the guns. D: Just got the weapons. No amuniti on. There va1n ' t any i n t he car. K: On May 29th then Moyor Shows--l\u003er. Shows. D: Yeah. K: Did the:y--did like he--he put you in charge or ail the police in the aru? The atote, local. and the. uh, acd the county? And thco,. I don't knov, thie 1a gettiog close to the heigth of the oa.rchee and so you called upon, uh. let's •ec, very speclfic sroups and local citizens and buainee~es for the special deputy, uh , forces? D: Ye:i.h, ve had Rotorinna, Kiwaniaos, J~ycecs, ve had--we vere desperate. K: Everybody. Did-..ould-- n: And you know, uh, the guys that were strictly e\u0026inst the earch that didn't vant to uk.e part in it,. they, you know. they we.re disgustin8 __. ..J~.1. .. )'OU up ?\"'~.S_ _- -th1:11y--every one of them vould call I a:o-d say look, don't count on me, J'D not goin\u0026 to protect those people. ,. K: Uh huh. D: I 'm not going to ptotect them . nod 1 don ' t intend to. I said okay. that's all right, but I've got to boave 1-0IM help somewhere. K: Yeah. D: And socetiaea th•y'd aay all right Elwood, just for you 1'11-\"\"Ve'll eo=e back and help you. 1(: What about , uh, vhnt About in r eports like, uh, what Sinpson brought out that they 'd .... aomo of t he boys from d1c ~ncient ¢.s.cy f\u0026unt1n3 ~lub tvrned up on thooo lioto--vas, uh--did you know that, uh, t hat they O: We1l,. uh,. l vu over there that day. Th4:y had• uh, Henusie give a liet. ·. SJ lAB Page 67 K: Uh huh. D: And uh, he didn't have list of those hunting club members so the judgu gave him a day to get it s\u003c\u003e_.,or an hour to set) so he got a St Augustine directory . K: Yeah. D: Telephone directory and he vent down nnd Wl;'Otc about 100 names. Well, the funny part of it \"'3S, t\\o'O of the U.S. M.arsha.lls--two of t he men '-'Orking in the U.S Marshall's office had been down to his place-- his \" hunting cam~ he called it. K: Yeah . D: Out w¢St and northwest of town and uh. had hunted deer there. So uh, I mean~and, and uh , of course. 1 didn ' t uh--he asked me if 1 belonged to it, and I told him no that I--that wa$ a deer hunting camp. K: Yeah. D: Aod t hunt bixds. I'm strictly a quail hunter . K: Yeah. D: Then uh, I said I know vhere the camp was . I could find it . I could go to it, but as far os ever belonging- - K: Belonging. D: l didn't belong. K: .Well, was--I wos talking in terms of your. uh, your special deputies . Uh, did- D: Well, a lot of them belong to that hunting camp. K: Ye.ah? D: Ye.ah, they, uh, sec. they get-- K: And they were willing to protect the blacks? D: Oh yeah . See, uh, the way these-- this hunting camp thing--like. they get one man who'll go--We've got several organizations here in St. · ... J SJ lAB Bridges P•gc 68 D: Augustine and I guess you have them in Cainesville, too , but this one m.an will go like to, uh, Cumber Lumber Company and say he had a tract of land out there so many miles long and so many miles vide. K: Uh huh. D: He'll go to him ilnd say I go t forty members that• uh, want to hunt this tract of land. And in retu.rn we will patrol it and keep people fro~ burning your titnbcr . K: Yeah. D: And uh-- K: So t hat's what Hoss and the boys did? D: Yeah. They--I think there vas about thirty-five or forty of them belong to it out there. K: Uh huh. And, well, I noticed that Simpson, uh, like, you know, literal ly accused, uh, the Ancient C1ty \\~nting 'lub of being, uh, you know. part of the Klan. D: Yeah. K: Do you think that was true? D: No. K: No? D: No. They ~as just a bunch of old cr\u003ctckers who lived out here in the woods. They banned thems\"elves and vhy they called it that--now that was another little five or ten dol1ar or maybe two dollar project of ) Hossos to get a few bucks in his pocket. You know--you know what I mean? K: Yeah. D: He'd just put out a little card and it was r~ally easy to do. But we must have at least fifteen of tho$e clubs right here in St. John' s County right today. K: Yeah. But old--but Hoss vas a--was a--vas one of your specia1 deputies ·. ., •., K: at one time, wasn't be.? Even though he w3s pretty much ngaillst the carch? D: l, uh, I never did, uh, deputize hill'.I. K: Uh huh. D: But I-I made a special deputy of h1m one night-one t i.me when- and I gave him a badge and told him to bring it back in. And we was having a little - too m.uch trouble with some whites .. K: Was it soce.-some of the wild young whit.a couote.rdea:onstrators? D: Yeah, and uh, I tol d him that, uh, 1f he couldn't stop them as the deputy sheriff, I was goin~ to hold him responsible for their actions. K: Oh yeah? D: And uh, be stopped them in about ten minutes. K: Rov much influence did, uh, he. \u003ci:xert over the young whites that were. caustng trouble? was he ·pretty influent:tal. with. them? D: Well, his, uh, kids we.re the ones th3t he 'WOrkcd through, see7 K: Yeah. D: Then he had a lot of relatives- their kids . And uh, of cour se they looked to Hoss for --wh.ateve.r he said ws gospel to th\u003cl:l:l. ... K: So he was their d1vtne l.1gbt so to speak. D; Ye.e.h, he did real well. He kept t he-the uh, thing do\\m to a minumum. l\u003c: Uh huh. And it's his boys that were involved 1.n thosa counter-demon.stra-tlona:? D: Oh ye.ah. Sure. Every one of thC!m. K: !!=, D: And they \"'ent-they went out and t hey got these kids 11rou-nd fUteen, sixteen, $eventee.n, ei,ghtee.n years old who'd go right along With them. K: Yeah. Uh, vhen goverament-vhat was it-about, uh, fifteen or twenty days after Mayor Sltelly made you, uh, put you in charge of all of them:-didn' t -- did, uh, that was when you asked Governor Bryant to reli~ve you of uh- SJ lAB rage. 70. D: I, uh, I asked Governor Bryant to relt-eve Pie and I knew what he was /\\e er. I trt{ f'C. . going to do before 1 got there becaus~and ha told me to eend the. out here and he W.$ going to take tae over . The hJ.ghway patrol pl ane--because, uh, there wasn't anyway I could, uh, do any good for it, you know? K: Yeah. D: The way thin.gs were set up and vi.th an injunction against me-. And when I/ . r valk.ed 1n, he uh, s:a.ys uh, do you know any other solut ion besides II I( putting someone. in charge over there? I said I don't know any other I I I/ Solution. 1 said 1 1 ,Stewar~-uh, Chief Stewat:,J' s hands arc tied- an·d II i mine are· tied . We can't do a thing, governor. He said well I just vontcd to te.11 you that I'm se.ndf:n.g, uh, Major somebody and- K: Jordan, I: believe it is. D: Yeah, and the highway patrol over. K: Yeah. D: !•ut the uh, the thing acted, uh, kind of bad be.cause if yo~ 'd-I bel.ieve ve.'d had bad a lot better luek. 1-f he.'d loft the tventy-six- K: Uh, those cwenty-stx troopers that M pulled do'\"\"°? D: That ~d been here, s:ec. They were here for four-at least fouJ:' months­caybe more. Consequently, they knew exactly what was going to happen because we'd hove our little briefing and uh., half the time. the uh-those guys-I mean they were businesslike but they \"·ere also firm tmd they weren't, uh, overbe\u0026ring and thcy--to ay knowl~dge I never say one of those tvcnty-s:ix men ever get in an argum\u003c!nt vith a white or a black. K: Uh huh. Hnmn. D: But uh, because if, £or instance, they'd cee an argument over here, and they'd S..'Ly okay Harry, straight~n thie guy out right o.way. You know, Crt\u003c.~v/ .::cMi on the civili.ans. ·., SJ Lill ]?age. 71 Bridges D: They'd been here long enough to know that who vas down there every night and ~ho's going to do this every·ntght. K: Yuh. D: And uh. K: So after they, uh, pulled those, uh, those twenty-six out, wre rcl4tiona sort of tense be.tween the local. policemen and the s t ate policemen? D: No, huh uh. t think ·.he sent­K: They got along pre.tty good? K; I think he sent sixty in here the firs t batch. K: Yuh. D: At-when he got the twenty-six out. And uh, there vere sixty in here, and uh, the major and I and Virgil didn' t heve, uh, too many meetings, but uh, I had a captain- he was a ca.pt.tin. and his name was Reddick. He came. over and be Md a- he came over 'be.cause we had a bombing of the far East Coast Railroad that same year, you know. K.: Yeah. D: llad a strike and stuff. And uh, there was another officer, Lieutenant somet hing--he '-'a8 from Palatka. And he kn.cw u.s. And we \\.lere all sitting up in a meet ing up at Virgil's. And uh. so the uh. the major hadn't been here very long. And uh, he was out a t the aTinory where al.l the pi:isoners were going through the annory. K: Yeah. D: Being processed through the. nrmory then. K:. Yeah. D And uh, eo that was his headquarters so someone calls the office and uh, said vell, the marches are on the. way. And, of course, I had been down there. that woul d tell me something 'cause tha newspapermen vere invaluable. They would be right down there in the meet :Lngs and they'd tell us when · .... SJ lAB Bri;dges J?age 72 D: they were. going to tlX'lrch and what time and so forth. And uh., so anyway,, the call came into the police station- said that uh, they were going to march-were marching;. So we stayed there And talked for a fev Jllinutes and I ea:id maybe we better go downtown, it's about time they we.re there. K: Yeah. D: And uh, the higbl.'ay patrol had come down, and rejected my, uh, special deputies- all my businessmen, ~ rotari4ns, Kiwani.ano, a1l those had just rejected them because thay cldn' t need them. So they'r~ all sitanding on the corner of Treaaury- K: Uh hub. D: And uh, Charlotte, down in that area. And \"'e cam.e down to t he park .. There vas fighting all over the park; K: Yeah. D: White,. blackt;, tiighway patrol- K: Was this the day when they had the--vhe:n that wb.1.te boy was-hod hi.s head cracked at the be.cb. by the, ub, state tr-ooper? D: No, that was a different time. K: Uh bub. D: But they were fighting all over that park. K.: Yeah. D: And uh, when I got there, wel.1, I'm trying to break up the f.1shts, and. uh, because bl acks and everybody else 1$ just raising some heck.. So I ran around to-and sent word around to bring lily special group and ul.1, they came around and said no, the b.1.ghvay pat'l'.ol.Den don't need us .. K: Yeah. D: About th.at time a big old tall boy mouths off and one of the highv.ay patrolmen wae vi th him--didn' t core for him.. And va threw him into the pa.trol car and ee.nt him on to the hospital . And uh, by that time •., SJ lAll Br~dges Paga ?l D: I. bad a guy, R.ay Roll.1D\u0026• .. vho 1\u0026· a busines811M1n and-from St .. Augustine-and he's over arguing an.d.......yi.th these whlt.e group' over in the other part of the park. and one of the h.i\u0026hW3.y patrolmen. co=ea up and throws a te.ar gas botnb a.nd hit Rol1ingo 1n the le,g with it. K: llml!lm. D: So be g-rabs it and throws it Mck at the. highway patrol. Here tb6y come aarching down-th.ar\u0026 are. four or fivo. abr.a•t, you know, ood just like it was a- It: A parade.. D: An. an=y deal, you la\\ow. He. th:cew that thing back. At them and be got mad. Be. got on the. other eidc. Here I u losing my best un because be got hit with the. teargas. K: Yeah. D: I tb\u003eugbt holy aack.e.rel, we'll never gee of thia one. So uh, the lieute.a.ant and the. capta.J.n and the. b1gbway patrol, tt\u003e.ey sa1d • uh., ve' ll va.it for you guys: up a.t t:be. offl.ce. And they turned around ud we.nt up back up to the police station. They v11n't about to get irtvolvcd in that. K: Thia vas- thie incident occui:-red after thc-thnt t11cy-tl\\B.t Btyant. put that major in charge? D: Ye.ah, 1-t smoothed dovn after tvo or three we.eke. It: Yeah. D: And see. tbey--.and th• ni.sht they had the bad t-roubl\u0026 th.ere, there. ve:ce. four of Uve highway potrolloen got into a bad spot. And 1:t was right on c.,,.-J.o ~e.. the. corner of Gt'tdoTa and King. And uh. so they yelled for me and t rushed down thcrQ and t: 'WCt\t 1n a_nd th.csa guys vere all standing back to Dack.. And uh, so- ~ Vere they surrounded by vUd vMtes? D: Yuh. all WJ.t ... .. SJ lAB Bridges !'age. 74 K: Un hull. n : Must have been twenty-fi.ve or thirty of them. K: 'R'ere they young toughs? D: Ye..\"th. tough as hell. And uh, one of the high\"1ay patri\u003elmen had come back with his stick to hit tllis guy and the guy behin$ him, a .-.h1.te boy, grabbe.d and jcrkod him flat on bis back. Then he turned him ro:ound and ,. ti he says here m.1.ster, you dropped your stick.. Well, that give them some.thing to, you know, a little relief--somebody-so they all started I• I I II laughing. gey, you dropped your stick. Hey copper, and stuff like that. \\I And uh, so I got there and r sai.d, 'uh, listen you guys. I s::iid I'm going 11 ,, to get you out of there. He S3.id no, w 're going t~ get out of the:ce. (I ,, l(e.'re going to shoot our way out. I' satd. it's no use shoot ing theae . \\1 (I •• II i:fds:;. r satd forget tt. Come on, let's go. I'll get you out of he.:re. So t tu.med at:ound and I said \"a ll right, I'• coming right through there and these guys nrc cominS through there. The first one raises a hand to any of the.= or throws a rock.. If 1 know who you are you 're going to 11 go out there and make some little ones out of big ones. And Wen I got them. out, this old big tall guy 00 looked .a.t mo and said 'i!ot damn I 'm ll If 11 one of the five and he sa.id t sure apprecicte it. I thank you. He said \\ f 11 l I 11 how in the world did we get in that spot? I said I don't know. They had just got ccparated from-in other \"WOrds, one of them had run at one of these. white kids, and- -which got him in the crowd. And then his buddies wanted to help him and the. first thing they know- K: They got surrounded. D: Yeah, they--there are. a vhole bunch of them, you know, just set a trap ' for them and they .fell .in. K: Thcs~ ~rtl mostly local white yo1.1ths? D: Yeah, uh huh. It was a-- K: Maybe Hosses sons and that kind of boys? •,, ' SJ l.All Bri.dges ~•sa. 75. D: Yeah. Now, Hoss, uh, most of these kids, of course, are just kids growing up around town. K: Yeah, right. D: You know. It wasn't a- K: Not tt l0.3:n conspiracy or- D: No, they weren't bad kids. rt vas just the idea that , ub, they'd found some.thing they could have a lot 0( fun in. K: Uh huh. D: And uh, not get hurt themselves. But uh, t he uh, highway patrol and I didn't-we didn't- that night, tho~h, 4.tter tMt, the uh-we got on pretty good terms 'cause that-1.t, the whole thtng: vas that , uh, that the.)\", ? don't knoW' vhy, but they thought they could co=c here. and uh, ·. just, uh, beat these kids down. lfell, we got-they-1\"'e didn't take our dogs out anymore. K: Wb.e:n di.d you stop doing that? D: We.J.l , they t ook cf\\Grge. K: Oh, vheo. the major took charge they quit using dog.s? D: Ye.ab. We didn't send any dogs down. lie didn't ecce.pt any Of our deputies or-for about throe or four-five nights. Then all of a sudden, be knows be needs us, you know. K: Yeah. D: He can' t --he can't-you can't do ~nythio.g with a bunch of kids. You can't K: D: shoot them. You can't hurt them. And those darn little devils are just like rubber balls. They'd-they'd bounce them a.round. They'd­All~'. o f sudden then your i:elntions rlth\",f:be state ve.re fairly ami.able­Oh ~ 1.1.e.J: . et'\" ic •. l:: la.. 0 • ' I K: J3:ut did this a...Dr-f' r\"\"i sr with he federal government, and uh, Judgo. .... Simpson, uh, how \\.'Ou.ld you a$sess his rolo ~he: whole m4tter? ·. ., ., SJ lAll Bridges ~.g .. 76 D: I think that Judge Simpson was promised a re..U. nice promotion which he got just a few months after that. He vent to the htth Gurt of .4,peals in New Orleans. K: Who do you think promised him? D: The federal gove.rnnent. Becau$e he couldn't possibly have changed that much in \u0026.ts attitude in tvo days. K: Uh huh. D: Re kne.v people in St. Augustine. He knew a lot of them that were sitting 1n the courtroom. And he allowed the blacks to do t\"tnythiog they wanted 1n that courtroom including put tbei:r feet on the desk and go sound asleep in that courtroom-the blacks could. And :the whites couldn't breathe. They couldn't do a thing. And if oae of them stood up or vent to the reetroOD\u003e there was always two or t hree b4cks to run there and get in t heir seats. And he upheld them each and every time. IC: Uh huh. D: He send the bailJ.ff dow, and he'd go down and he'd ball the Wile people out for-- Ji:: Trying to- D: And Judge Simpson knw all of those people. I mean. you knov. he comes-he use.cl to cooe to St. Augustine a lot. K: Wall, t.alking about. you Jal.ow, hj.s showing this favoritism, I read that, you know, in several newspaper articles where youJ~ Tr\\\"fa.c.-~ a favorite quote, and aloost anybody writing nbout it is where, ub, those two Klan rabblerous:ers, .J. B. Stoner and Conrad Lynch. D: Yeah. K: And when, uh, vhen Ro3s-- thcy 'd--vould always be seen b.anting a.round your office.. They, uh, you know,. they' d--is this true? Uh, you know, I read Lt in several pl-0ces. SJ l.AJl,. ~age 77 Bridges D: Well, I think, uh, Lynch and uh, both- I think both of them were in the office, uh, two ear nings in a row. K: Uh huh. D: 1 Uh, and i t vae about the Klan rally. They wanted to know if they could, uh, put out circul ars around tha park.. And uh- K: They advertised, ~uh, around th.at night. D: Advert i$e the rally. And uh, I called the uh, the city for them, and uh, the-they came back the next morning and, and uh, the. office was full of people. And they trust ha.ve. stayed ten or fi.ftcen minutes De.cause they wanted to sQe, uh, Judge Mathis and bis office was packed, too, of couYse. And uh, they uh, but uh, Hoss, that son, be~it didn't make any difference where. you were. K.: Be was around- D: Old Boes 'd sbw up all day--time. of the day or ~iglit. And the nt.ght that, ul\\, Marti.n Luther King was out there in jail, there mu.st ha'Vc been fifty whites and fifty blacks circulating around that jail. K: Uh hub. I\u003e: All night long. K: l!mD. ·D: Up and down c·bc streets nnd-- K: Those-I believe two nights, the uh, the Klan staged their counter--ca.rche.e 4.nd they- they m.'lrched inthe black section. Was it-was-? D: Oo.e ti=e. t. uh­K: One time.? D: Yeah. They, uh, came and asked me t.o march with them, ·and I told tQ,em I would. I'd been-they put it to me re.al strong. they said you' ve been marcb.tng with the blocks now you can march vith the whites. K: Uh huh. '·•. SJ 1J\\B Bridges l(aga 78 D: Th.at ' s perfectly okay. So I cal1ed down and I got five blacks that bad been march.il'lg continuously-all xoung blacks. They'd been marching continouSlly every night, and uh, 1 told them I wonted five of them to march vi.th us. K: Yeah. D: And I took those. five blacks and put them right at the head of the 11.st u:ith me. and we marched all the v~y through black. .COYn- 311 through the. bar ce.ctiono and down in Libcrio., and we c4.me back up to the park. K: So you were-you were pretty much. along that- tbose marches just for the secur·ity aspect or th4: whol e t hing? D: Well, uh, they uh, aee, you kcow, the blacks bad . a lot of confldcncc in J11.e-the local blacks. K: Uh bun. D: Th~y. bad as much confidence in me. as they did in anyone. K: Uli huh. D: 'cause t hey knev that t wa.an' t going to let t hem be in;jured if I could pooo:lbly help :Le. K: Yaoh. D: But uh, they, uh, gee I-i.t was touch and go sometimes 'cause, you know, some- one night there a taxi driver of all people-he almost tomed a war in up there. Re bails out and bails on- jucrps on a little fellow. and a black fe.llow that was walking right alongside of me. And uh, he was a little old skinny dried-up taxi driver. And uh, \\O\"hy he bailed on this bl ack, I don't know . I've forgotten his name.. Anyway, he uh, when he junped on him, we.ll I tried to push him avay. I said, Wil1y get avay from here now. When I. did, the black grabbed him, picked him up, and instead of staying in that line where we could pt:otect him, he gets him Ou the sidewalk where there's about fifteen or twanty whit~s . ···~ SJ lA.S Page 79 D: lfe started beating the. t4r out of this Utt.lo old vh.lte fellow. It: Yeah. D: And uh, of course, they ki.cked hilll around pretty bad. K: They all jumped him. Uh huh. »: · I sot him out of the tht.Dg-jam, and got h1D back in line, got hint down to the Lincolnvil.l• oroa. But uh, actu.a.lly, tho uh, the thing was so out of balance that., uh, 1t. was, uh, vasn't cvcm-l mean the way the thing was vr1tton up, you vould think that, uh, tho vh.ite people vero ju.st be.a.ting the.se people. to death. K: That's the •'BY it c01111 through-reading the a.cvepepera. D: And ye.ah. And uh, thoro wasn't anybody-I sue11 ae tDOny as the newspaper photographers. Ono time-one thing that made thtl'.l'I sore, they got tvo or three. l ocal guye and the:y go oa. the beach. they go ove.r there v::lth •beets - - JC,: t 88.V\" tbat picture.. D: And pose as the Ku IJ.ux Q.a:n. Well, boy the llatt, they bunting tbe guye that took the picturoo. K: loah. D: And uh, they alao hunting th.B guys that poeed for tho pictures. JC: those weren't really O.On•en? D: No. So, you knov, I au:n anything to crute a - JC: And ·so you would ••1 • generally, the vbitu wvo not as violut as they-- it #ppears to be or that- D: No, they wasn't . It.:wftan't that typ~ of violo.nco. It was a­K: More of a pueh- 0: Push and pull stuff, yeoh. K: Uh, so you would aay, in terms of your s~urity aeAsurea between, ··.uh, the black marches and the vh.ite marches you ~uld take pretty auch the same \"· SJ J.Aa Bri.dge..s Pag• 80 K: aort of security procoud.ons over any-thing :l1's..t\" you had to do for say t-he blacks. and th• vbite) 1C#U\u0026e appare.11t17 \\.then the vhites care:bed the blacks would aing to them o-r somethtn.g. D: Oh yeah. They did them the same vay that the whites did them. K: How do you me.a.a.? D: They sang to them, Md cura.ed them you vtdte ao and such, and curse the wb:.tte.s just lib tho vhitea cut:sed t 'bect--all the vay down .. r.: Really. D: And t .hen the blacb that. I had m.rching at the. head of the. line, they'd cal.l thell white mother AllA /\\Ny..M}. loveto •nd everything. They I cussed them for everything they could thi.nk of bccnuoe thCY. vere marching vith the vbitcs. So octually, it~bn-vc didn't Mve one bit of troufil.e. vi.th that whit• mArch until we got vay back down on Central AVenuo. and uh, a bunch of the buck.s bad gottet1 be!W\u003e! this old housa over thez1e and th•y hid a bunch of rocks. And tbe:y bt'ick.ed us pretty good. IC1 Uh bub.. D: And uh, the-one thing-the reason I think that it v ae k:Lnd of f;et up that way is because tho, uh, five guys I had marching with us, the. five blacks, when tboee. rocke started coaing, thay took off. IC: Yeah. D: I don't know wht.tb\u0026r they thoug~ that the vhitea were. throwing rocb at then or not, you 1c.:aov. 1(: Yeah. D: But uh, they took off, nnd the next time I talked to ft couple of the:n they oaid that tho rcoeoo thoy rnn, they thought it \\4118 vhi.te boys rock.ins-thro\" 1.ng rockG at them. 'They •aid but they found out it vas the blacks roc1d4g the vb.ice. line. ... SJ lAll Brf:dges Page. Sl. K: Oh yeah. Was-I-you know, what I read of those, uh, those white marches was that the blacks were real peaceful and stuff when the whites marched through and tho,y, you know, sans: songs. I, you know. we. lov~ e.verybody, and did- D: Well, we ooly ran into . Yeah, they loved to sing that to the Wite oarcl'tes. We love you and everything . Oh they'~ give them a fit. But one pl ace iet in the old bar down there, The Blue Coose Bar. And uh, there must have been thirty- five big old bucks down there. And they resented the fact of t hose guys marching down there. K: Yeah. ' D: And ot course, they l.\"l'tew a lot of the white men. IC: Tllat were actually marching? D: Yeah. K: Was tb.is- vere there a lot of lO.anS111en in this march per se or moatly the- D: TMs9- vel1 these, uh, if r remember correctly, I think they vc:re all locals except ma!fbe ten or fifteen or twenty. K: Yeah. D: They had a good peaceful group. They dd real well-just a- X: So anyvny the.cc black boys at the Blue Cooae Bar- D! Yeah t hey--they were kind of-- K: What? They'd razz: the-in or- ­D: No, they came out and said 'w' hy don't you come. on in and h.a:ve a drink, ,, \\\\ brother? And you won't drink. with us now, wi.11 you brother? I've had /)\u003c. many/\\ dr·i.nk. vi.th you o l d ti boy . And they'd rag the heck out of them, you know, all the way around. TheTe was three or four di:unks that got kind of abusi.ve and I told them-a coupl,e of blacks, I said take those guys in thei-e before we have so~e trouble. l said I got--I said there's too •., SJ l.A)I Page. B\u003cl D: many of them out here for you. I said go and get them back in there. But tbey--they give them A bo.d time in that one little spot. lkit the xest of the time they sang we love everybody and all kind of cute little them songs to. {. which burn thm up wrse than anything else. K: And so did they just Sot the~they just got the rocks thrown on them at the very end Of the march? D: Yeah. The darkee:t place they could find . Dog gone it. ( ( tf,,.((gkt) K: 011 yeah. I read another- I read in another a r ticle and again l don't kn0tot whether it's true: that, uh, you would actually let-allow Klansmen to use your--use Sheriff's Department cars. I .believe I read that in the, uh, Hous~ ((n•American's Activities Comittec. D: No, there's no- K: No substance to that? D: I never read that or heard it ' cause the, uh, Klansmen stayed strictly avay from me. But I h.ad to have a laison officer. K: Uh huh. \"t·\"•\\ D: And uh, I used Bellue!. and uh, I guess, uh, I did the poor devil an injusti.ce because he lost a lot of' friends, too, you kno-., •. K: Uh huh. D: ANd uh, but he- he- was pt:otty outspoken. H~'d $Cra1gh·un those th.inss up in a hurry for you. K: Yeah. Well, like what kind of problems would he straighten up? D: Well, when they got too rowdy or sc::cnething like that he'd- K: The whites? D: Yeah. Another t hing, they wae mostly a hi.t and run thi.ng, you kllow ~ K: Uh huh. D: You'd say, uh, there 'd be ten or twe.lve of these guys together stoinding up in the park in the dark, and they'd say when the Diddle of the line ., SJ lAR Page 83 D: bits St. George Street, we 'll go. Uh, before you know it, you knov, there'~. probably ba one man there. K: One policeman? D: And the whole ten or twelve. K: They rush a 11ttle spot, huh? D; They'd rush in there and force-say five or six blacks out through the other oi'de of the. line- K: And then they'd bMt on them? D: And bop them two or three times . K: And t hen keep on run.ning? D: And then keep on going. This, uh, h8d a - had one group ther e was funny o.s the devil. This, uh, kid about sixteen or seventeen year s ol d, and ub.1 this black-they'd singled each other out . And man they were battling. they,:wre having a real fight. Only trouble wa\u0026-i.a-they were about si:x fe.et apart, both of them got their eyes closed, but they were fighting real good for-I'm standing there and uh, laugM.ng a t t hem .and uh, but that-the white boy must Mvo thought he bit the black, but he hit me 1n the chest and about the same time, the bl.eek boy hi t me across the · back­Vbam. And boy when they di d, they opened t heir mouth- eyes- 'and s9w ) c (tl.\"t'\"' me. standing there. One of them vent one way and one thQ other!\\ Everybody in the 'Whole gang was just hooting and hollering. I said those arc· the two toughest fighters l ever sa•.1. The. only two people I ever saw that could stand six feet apart and fight five minutes and t hey were- (bo-f\\ (6.-\"'J,i) K: Wharm.tng at.-ay at each other. D; Ob, they just had a ball . \\ K.: that's intcrca:t1og . D: 'But there were some pretty tough boys on both sides. You knov, uh, t, like v a. had the Ford man here and he had a litt le short black who t(Orked for SJ l.AJl. Br~dges l?oga 84 D: hiJ!\\ out there, o..nd uh, he never had any trouble wt.th the man. Ue said the first thl~g he noticed one Sunday afternoon, uh, he G31d, uh, he'd go up to get some knock at the door 3nd h4.\\ra comes-h~ eoes to the front door'=\"-h.~t·and his wife, and he's from Georgia.. ~ opens the door a.nd II h ere's this darky 'W'ith. his wife all you need,\" f iguring he wanted to get dressed up. Re say hello, how much nn advance on his salaJ:y or something, If I/ you know. He said nothing. He said we just c\u003c1:1e. over to vi.sit. He aaid ?\"' H II I/ tiho do you want to vi.8it. He said you man. He \u0026aid QQ. You mean you II I/ vant to come in my house. as a guest? He said you better hit the road 11 ,, boy. I'll k.1ll you. He said man this is my home. I invite people to r• l?lY' house.. K: Uh huh. D; People don't come to my house without an invitation. He said don't you com~ back to work tomorrow. He said I don't plan on it. Re said I 'm working for the NAACP. I don't need you no more. IC: Yo.ah. D: Aod he bas never worked a day since. He's been back 1.n St. Augustine. I 've seen hi.Ill ten or fifteen times. He has a nice c.ar and-Ihunde.rbird-birk- Thunderb1rk, yeah. K: Mmmm. D: What' a his naoe. He never hit another liCk. R: Never worked 4g.iin, huh? D: No ~ he d idn't h~ve to work. K: Wha t, uh, what e ffect do you think, uh, the C.ivil Rights Act had on cooling things down? D; Wondel:'ful. K: Yeah . ... D: We got that Civil Rlgh~ I told Hrs. Peabody and Martin Luther King. We ·.. . .• SJ lA8. Bridges Png~ 85 D: va• going to Jo.cbonv'ill• in th• car vith oe. I told t.haa-1 said :i.f you peop1e v1ll \\o\"ait until-lt v•• July the- K: The second. , , D: July the \u0026~cond. I said if yl\u0026ll v1l1 wait 'til tho first day of July, you won't have nll this to contend with. 'Cnuae you knov t he act's ti ,, gotng to be passed. I 1aid all you got to do 11 ju8t wait a few mootha 'ttl July the. four-th\". then it was the se.cond or fourth. and uh, tb:1e thing v1l.l al1 be. finlahed.. And she. saidt id o you t .llink ao?' ' And 1 sai.d. ' 'y ea.H But they couldn't vait. They bad to force 1.t. But I- a lot of people have, uh. vrittcn ue lettet:s. aslc.ing mo to get in touch with Mrs. Peabody and tell hor they'll settle that thing up in Boston right away. All sha's got to do-ehe. going to get herself put in jail. A lot of them vr:ite-1, you know-- X.: I iu.81ne a l:ltt1e- End of Side 1-Tape B SJ L\\B.. rage 86 llt;idgea D: When. they got out there, , .,. ~n't make any qui.ck ?' enough to kn.OW\" all of his little t rtck.o and he hasn' t-- K: Qu:irks, huh? D: And uh, he said if you move too quickly, he's 11.able to gTab you. And uh, sbe said vhy he ' s been letting cie pet him all the way in-out here. He said \\re.ll , I l et you pet him. He didn' t let you pet him. He don':t like. it. He. don't like for anybody to , uh, touch h.iJ::I but , uh, his tra:tner. And uh, she S4id well. I di.dn ' t blO'\"' trult and h¢. o:.id th.a.t' ti ~tgn.t. And when he got out ha says watch IUJ:I. And man-I 'lllean they- :you don't have any trouble vith prisoners whe.n you have--when you got dogs. K: I 'd imagine. not . And so you think the, uh., Civil lights, uh, Act had a big effect on how the-on t'he ending of the violence? Or do you think Sitnpson bad a lot to do vl.th it? D: No, I don' t think Simpson had anyth.in,g to do with it. B'ver-ybody over here hated him. K: Yeah? D: Especially white people. And uh, but uh, that Civil Rt.shes thing-in about the 1!11.ddle of Ju.ly you \\ri'OUld never have known that there was one bit of ugliness in th.is town.. K: Yeab. ~ .. D: All of the. out-of-towner s left, Holing left. .ll\u003cJ\u003e(banks' left. They all went down in the state some.where down around Cococ:\\.. The vhole:-all of the Ting leaders left town . And when they-on both side.s-and when t hey le.ft town, cveTything went right back to nonnal. K: Wh.en- didn' t thty have a little problem integrating the motels there foT SJ lAB Paga 87 K: while after the, uh, aft er t 'he act pa.tuleJ, uh, there vars · a little problem with intilllidati on. D: Well, there were, uh, I don't think anyo.ne wa.s eve.r actually refused, I bu~ I d id hear that there vero quite a fw prices raised to $50. 00 a day and stuff like that. 'When the black.a caae in. K: Uh huh. D: But uh, the-I think the biggest thin\u0026 1n that whole. thinB was the, uh, the blacks and vhites- -white girl s-marching vith the bl.4.ck boys and the black boys marching with the white girls and that's w~ .... K.: That's vb.at really ril.00 thing's up', huh? D: And that kept this town so upset and oh, it was, uh, they just couldn't believe it. T?-ey couldn't believe any white person vould be that crum;my, you knov. K: Uh hub. D: And uh, of course, they would do anything to make them notice it. They'd hole! hands and they'd kiss and it was just-it was just pi\u003c:k pi.ck pick. They-and the-then when the highway pat.rol got- they would, uh, march all the cars for weapons- K: Yeah. D: And uh, one night thi~ guy--he must have \"''Cighed every bit of llS or 120 pounds-came to me and he said, uh, he had some-I had $1.00 And . sixty cents-worth of pennies in a roll. And he said that highway patrolma.n took it avay from him. K: Ye\u003clb. D: And uh, I said vel l did be-you give him your name and address? And he Mid ye.ah. t cai d wl.l . they-they'll get :it--you can get it back. And uh, fo.rther down thare was three l i ttle kids in the b~ck of :i station wagon and they vere all crying and t t:uik-. mother vbat' s happened to ·.,, SJ lAB Bridges rag\u003c' 88 D: them? And she ea id they had some. oarbl\u0026s back there. They ,;ere playing chinese checkers, and uh, th~y uh, h.a.d SOC'le marbles playing a ma:r:ble game o.nd the highway patro.bnan came alons and took their marbles away","St. Johns County Sheriff's Office -- Ancient City Gun Club -- Ancient City Hunting Club -- Flagler Hospital -- Florida Highway Patrol -- National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) -- Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) -- Special Police Force -- St. Johns County School District -- St. Johns County Sheriff's Office -- Florida Times Union -- The Alligator -- Daytona Beach, Fl. -- Lake City, Fl. -- Monson Motor Lodge -- Ocala, Fl. -- Old Slave Market -- Ponce de Leon Hotel -- Tallahassee, Fl. -- Starke, Fl. -- Bunnell, Fl. -- Arrest of Mary Peabody -- Integration of Monson Pool -- Bombing -- Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- Civil Rights March -- Civil Rights Rally -- Clash Between civil rights Workers and Segregationists -- Klan Assault on Robert Hayling -- Klan March -- Klan Rally -- Murray High Walk Out -- Night March -- Picketing -- Police Brutality -- Shooting Death of William Kinard -- Sit-in -- St. Augustine Quadricentennial Celebration -- Use of Cattle Prods -- Use of Police Dogs -- Wade-in"],"dc_format":["application/pdf"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/CNE/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":null,"dcterms_subject":["Civil rights--United States--Florida"],"dcterms_title":["L.O. Davis : Transcribed Interview"],"dcterms_type":["Text"],"dcterms_provenance":["Proctor Library"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://civilrights.flagler.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15415coll1/id/1049"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":["Flagler College is not the copyright owner for this item, nor can the College provide a copy of this item. Please contact the contributing organization to obtain a copy and permission to reproduce this item."],"dcterms_medium":["transcripts"],"dcterms_extent":["89 pages"],"dlg_subject_personal":["Davis, L. O.","Kallal, Edward, Jr.","Abernathy, Ralph, 1926-1990","Brock, James, 1922-2007","Bryant, Farris, 1914-2002","Eubanks, Goldie M., Sr.","Eubanks, Richard","Hayling, Robert Bagner","King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968","Lynch, Connie (Charles Conley), 1912-1972","Manucy, Holsted, 1919-1995","Mathis, Charles C., Jr.","Melton, Howell","Peabody, Mary E. (Mary Elizabeth), 1891-1981","Stuart, Virgil","Shelley, Joseph, 1915-2007","Simpson, John Milton Bryan, 1903-1987","Stoner, Jesse Benjamin, 1924-2005","Williams, Hosea, 1926-2000","Young, Andrew, 1932-","Frazier, Mary","Landry, Roy","Graham, Joe","Michaels, Earl","Drane, A. H. (A. Hank)","Rollins, Roy"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"ffc_crlsa_p15415coll1-1050","title":"Michael Gannon : Transcribed Interview","collection_id":"ffc_crlsa","collection_title":"Civil Rights Library of St. Augustine","dcterms_contributor":["Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, University of Florida"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Florida, 28.75054, -82.5001"],"dcterms_creator":["Gannon, Michael","Colburn, David"],"dc_date":["1900/2022"],"dcterms_description":["Interview with Michael Gannon, distinguished Florida historian. Gannon gives an in depth overview of the various groups that comprised St. Augustine and how each group felt about the civil rights movement in the city. Gannon discusses the role outsiders played during the Movement and the underlying factors that contributed to the violence during 1963-1964. Gannon discusses the roles various churches played in the Movement and the attitudes they held toward the Movement in general.","'· ----,- lA Interviewee: Michael Gannon Interviewer: 03vid Colburn ~~: - C: Mike, the last time we talked, I asked you the question about charac­terizing race relations tn St. Augustine prior to 1963. C: And I rememlSer saying t hat I thought on the whole, they were very good. Exceptionally good, except for what was the obvious prejudice of many wtti:t es toward blacks as being a minority race, and the fact t hat black.f.l for that reason, could not eat in the sam.e restaur ants. could not sleep in the same motels, could not use ~Y of the other public fac1l:ltles thot whites used. But in that, St. Augustine, as part of the South, was pa~ tfcipatin.g i n the general culture of tho South. But if you t~ko th4t general culture as a whole, I think that to the degree that it was poss·ible, the wfl~te people of St. Augustine had acheived a l!IOdus vivendi with black people that was exceptionally free of , of what, trouble, of abras ion and conflict. And as a matter of fac t, there was even a certain demonstrated affabil ity as, if you looked at the demography of the town, you could see that pr ior to 1963,blacks lived inter~per sed, intermingled among the white neishborhoods. While thei.r vere cert\u0026in obviously black qua.rters of the city. there were also many other quarters where black housing existed side by side with white housing, with neither group averting to i t in any public wAy, end without any downgrading of property values and so on. So, I think that, overall , St. Augustine had acheived about as good a vorking relat ion­ship and l iving relationship, blacks and whites, es was echeived in t he South. c: Okay, t remember you mentioni ng that the l ast ti.Cle. That's one of the things I f ound very interesting, and rather unique about a Southern town, lA Page 2 sjm to see that there was very l itt le racial segregation in houaing. We also talked briefly about Dr. Joseph Shelley, vho ... ·as head of c·he, mayor of the commission and you were characterizing him, you vere discussing hie, and the other members of the coanission. Would you care to go over that again briefly? C: Alri.Sht. ~ell, first, i f t recall, I said that there were a number of i dentifiable social groups or classes or sets within the community and that there was very little social mobility frOC\\ one t o the other. And i •f r could review those again, then I could place Joseph Shelley-. C: Fine, f ine. G: And t he general leadersht.p of the tovn within one of those groups. Now the first of those groups, I said, was the old, t · call them the old Engl±slt group, in that most of them have English names . are old ~irl'te An.glo~erJ:can fam.tlies dating b\u003clck to the territory and eD.rly statehood years. Many of them belong to the Trinity Episcopal Church in the city. Many of them lived on Water Street, directly north of the Castile de San Marcos along the bay. They were generally very well educated, Gnl1Shtenod, h~d no p~o­blems about racism . At least none that were public or ever came into view. H\u0026d, what would you s.ay, a liberal eophi.sticated approach to the world in general, and to St. Augustine in particular. That vas one group, and a very small group. C: Were they i nfluential? G: Not in city politics, no . They were not. they were influential culturall y, they supported the area, and they were generally well-to-do and so had the influence that ll'lOney always has. But apart f rom t hat, they vere not a Page 3 .sja signiftcant force in, in governnent or life 1n St. Augustine. They vere respected, looked up to. but they generally kopt co themselves, ond that 's one of the thins• I'm going to say about all of these indiv~dua.l sroups: that they generally kept to theasM.vea, eoc-1.\u0026li.zed am.on,g tne.- aelves, and had ve.ry little interaix vith the other eocial groops in the city. The second group 1 identified as the Min.orcan1, the meabers of the fa.1i.i'es, descendant• of the Hinorca.n fanilie• who elected to st.ay in St. Augustine: after the Amarlcon takeover of Florida. in 1821. And there are quite a few f\u00261tlies or MJ.norcan desc~nt. And they form a very distinct identlft•ble social or coaaunity group v.lthin tho city. They tend to be very self-centered, narrov 1n their unde.r\u0026tandiDg of thet1elve.s and their place 1n St. Au.guatine ' • htetory. SoeetJMa deftn1ive, but alvays proud and assertive, in th.at they are, gene.rally speaking, c·hc olde~t families in cite ctty-. As- fer .as their attitude toward cn.inority group1, and particularly che blacks i s concerned, they seem to have participated with t he old Eng­..._ lish fo.milies in cha genere.lly good relo.tione tlltltlivhite peopl e had to-vard the blacks in St. Ausuetine pr ior to 1963, but with the difference, vi.th this difference. That you have to look at the Kinorcens not as an absolutely, what' a the vord. that you can't look et c.hc Ktnorc.ans as a. monoli.th. Rather they ver·e a co:mnunicy that va1 hi\u0026hly stratUied accord-ing to education, weolth, opportunity to travel and so forth. Many of the Minorcan families perhnpa by dint. of the tradition or heritage that vaa inculcated in th~~ in their youth were very much St. Augustine centered. They had no gr eat intereet in travel, t o d~acover the virtues of other cul-tures. St. Augustine waa hoee . I always thhk of the Kinorcans when 1 lA Page ~ sjm think of that English lady who was once asked why fJhe didn't travel, a nd sfie said,\"Why should I travel when I 'm \u0026lt'eady hct'e?\" And l think that's the way t he Minorcans felt about , and $t ill feel about, about St. August.i ne. But t hat's again to make a generalization to which there are exceptions. The more enlightened, the more educ4t~ And the more wealthy of the Mtnorcan.s tended to travel and to do e.xcit~g and innovati'Ve things. But as you went down the line of education opportunity and affluence, and, ended at the 'Bottom., you had people who were ex.treacly narrow, e:x-tremely defensive and who's, not who's $Ole \u0026:i.t1sfaction, but vho'·s fre-. quent satisfaction was to find solace in that there were still other people Ueneath them. And those people vere the blacks. And thus there would be some Minorcans in this tragic episode who ~-ould appear publicly, and in a very devestating way for St. Augustine, as racists. And the class1-c J.l\u003c\u003eSs M~N'\u003c~Y example was the m.an known as ~ m .. 1use / • C: Ah, he was a Minorcan? C: Oh yes ~ very much so. - hl111v· .. e.. was a man who lived out in the country, outside, but near St. Aug/;:stine, who averred to a CBS t elevision intervim.rer in these days tho.t. there were children running around his house whose naraes he didn't even know . Who organized geons to beat up the a group of bullies who went into tovn armed with blud­-\u003c l,....v •a.,., niggers and so forth, and so to assert ·hi tiilf And you know this is part of the general Southern story, there have been lower classes of whites sometimes called in popular language \"poor white trash\", who h•ve got their kicks out of beat ing on the group who was below them . lA Pose s sjm And in that way giving th~mselves some kind of social respectnbility-f/ OS:S . , , ' tl\\4t there was somebody tha.t they were better than. And I think~ ~ and his ilk fell into that category. But I would hate for the ~t\u003eSS Minorcans all to be painted with the same brush as we must paint ~ \"*'~~=t There were other Minorcans, and are today whO are very enlighe-ened and vell- to-do, very successful fig:ur~6 . and they have done an inunense allOunt of good for St. Augustine. »ut that is a disttnct group. And by the way, talking about these groups, t his was such a tightly kni~ group of peopl e there was very little social intercourse between them and other groups. in the city. For exampl e, there was almost no sociol intercourse, not even social contact of any meaningful sort between tll.e Minorcans and the old Engli$h group . Now ~e come to the third group, and that is the professional and busin~sSlllan group. Nov here you have even a wider distribution of pc~ple, becauae the professional and businessm:en toget'her vit:h their famili.ea, were a very large. alaiost amorphous group, ~hich though\\ they participated in the general Southern culture of St. Augustine, were oever really part of the old history of St. Augustine in the way that the old English were, and the Minorcans we.re. They ~ere people whose homes were in St. Augustine, who loved St. Augustine for its atmos-phere, for its environment, for the, the beach and, and the company that they formed with other friends that they found there. 8ut they were not necessarily people whose l ong time roots were in the city, although mnny o f thom did h..~vo roots w~th~n the city. And of course you cannot. you cannot draw an absolute distinction between the Minorcans and the professional and lA Page 6 sjm Business l!len, because in point of fact, there were some M1norcans aa:ong the professionals 3nd among the businessmen . But the professional people And the tius±ness people were generally a separate caste or group in that they tended to Delong to tho s.ame groups such as Rotary and Kiwanis, and they tended to 3Ssoct3te socially between and among each other. And if you taRe tHat professional and businessman group, you find almost no Minorcans in it, and you ftnd no old English i n it. So, I would identify this as a special group. And it' s this group that gave the c:1:vic lea dership to tl1e ci·ty over the course of 1118ny years , in this present centucy·, and ~ can go To\u003c. B\"ack to t hem in a ltttle bi't to talk about ~ Shelley. The fourth group is the group that I called farmers And fisherman. Pardon me, loborers, farmers and fishermen. Now here, you're getting close to a group that, whi1e 1t never really ar t icul~tcd its' attitude toward the blacks in a ny overt or public way prior to 1963, was ready to do so ~f pr essed. Because these were white people who, who had goals, attitudes, philosophies of their own. They were people of the earth, people of the sea. They were people who worked hard, who scraped for a living. Who had very few of the creature comports and many that the professional ~ of t he HJ}prcans had. and business people had, and the old English, In some respects you can say, they were i n frequent , 1f not constant competi tion with the blacks for ~ployment, al-though there never was a racial con(rontation over cmploytnent between the t~\"O groups. This group became the most vociferous of the St. Augustiners in the black crisis of 1963-64. Still, it aiust be snid that this group was not the white group that fought in the streets. These were the people who criticized the blacks t'he loudest . These were the people who belonged I I lA Page 7 BjD to American Legion and the Oddf ellows and the Elks and groups such as tl\\at had occasion to come together and co discuss these issues and to speak about the blacks once black militancy came to the surface. And they did so very strident tones , but they did not participate themselves in any of the, or I won' t say 1n any, but in, in much of the. activity that followed. Althousn thero may have been e l ement s of this group in the, in the probleai . C: Tl\\ey we.ren't affil iated v:f:th Minuee's anctent ctty hunting club, then? C: Yes, SO'Ae of th~were, but most of the anctent c t ty hunting club C\u003c'IJn.e. f rol!l outstdc the ctty, outside the ciy. I'm talking \u0026bout the people within the city limi'.ts, now. The city of St . Augustine, because of the special point t hat r think needs to be made, namely that when St. August ine had tts violent confrontations, those confrontations occurred between groups, both of which came f r om. outside. But t here wer e people wit hin the city limits vho sympathized with some of the white actiViSl'll that took place, and this was the \u0026roup - l aborers, farmers and , and fishermen. Then you have, of course, the bl ack$ . And they, the bl-0.cks had a, I thi nk a l ong t :ll!l.e and generally honorable history in the city. They took pride in the work they did. They had a certain esprit and they lived in a community that they loved . They wouldn't go anywhere else. They thought St. Augus tine was about as close to heaven as, as a black person in America, could , could f ind. And so I think the blacks were generally a contented group, and prior to the arrival of the, I don ' t vane to c~ll th~ oglt~tors because that's a l oaded term, but i t's the term that w3s used by th~ white group, until the -1 Page 8 sjm arrival of those who would sensitize them to their legitimate gripes in k:!erican society, these blacks lived generAlly contented l ife with their lot, and participated freely with vhite people in various things that th\u0026y vere a1lowed to participate in • So those Are the five groups: old Engltsh, Minorcans, profQSSional and businessmen~ laborers, farmers and fishermen, and finally , blacks. NO\\.!, it \\r.lS that third group, the professional and businessmen who gave the city it$1 civic leadership. Not only because they were the members in the main of the city coantssion, And :oning board And other governing bodies, but they were the people of influence, who at the Kiwante Club and Rotary Club and various other gatheri~gs, social1 civic and fraternal, had the opportunity to say and do things thdt affected the direction of the city in total. It happened that in the early 1960' s. that St. Augustine, which has always been somewhat behind the times in just about everything, and by design, I might add, because there's consc.iously no' hurryin.g and scurrying in St. Aususttne. It happened that there was in the city a very active John Birch chapter, chapter of the John Birch Society. And this. you see, after the McCarthy era of the fifties, and whereas the ~ John Birch movement or the extreme conseNative or reactionary movement had been discredited 1n many quarters of Anerican life, it s till lived on with amazing strength Jn certain pockets of the South and the West , and St. Augustine vas certainly one of t hose pockets . The leaders of the J ohn Birch Society, ~nd therefore the leaders of the reactionary moveznent and therefore the people who were alwDys writing condemnatory l etters to the St. Augustine Record about the liberal or progressive direction th~ country was taking, the leaders were the physici.ans. They were the people like Hargrove Norris lA Page 9 ajm and Joseph ShQlley and Dr. caffaro, I forget his first nai:ie, but h01 s tn the directory, and others. That was a very vocal group. And the early 1960's vas a time of not very great political activity in St. Au-gustine, there were no special civic issues. The City was fairly much at peace, participating in general prosperity of the early sixties, tre-mendous tourist income, everybody was involved in m.ak:i:ng money. The only· people who ~ere t4lki113 ideology vere the people on the far ~ight: Hargrove Norris, Joseph Shelley and various others. C: If r can interrupt you for a second- G: Yeah, yeah. C: Do you have any idea why-there were three doctors-do you have anr idea why r tfiey were so con.seJyative? C: No, I don't and sometiody needs to do a study of that. Somel\u003eody needs to find that out . You're obviously the person, because I don't think anybody has really tried to determine. l us~ to ask, I was in school 1n those years, and, or I was over here at the, well, I was in school until '62, and then I was in St. Augustine my first in '63, and I used to ask r::ty mother; year back vhen I •·as: at the mission \"How come all the phj.icians are mouthing all these things? What's, what's the.tr probleni?11 and so forth. But I don't reme::i.ber my moci:'s answer. Maybe she knovs, or she can point you to some people who will know, because she does know the people who know the answers to these questions . And that would be a very interesting thing to know. Well, at that particular time, there were a number of businessmen who exercised leadership in the community: There were three 1n particular. And all of thea, t hough citizens of St. Augustine, exerci.sed their authority and lA Page 10 SjD influence in different dio1ensions or spheres. For \\l'e .... le.. example, t:a«'i- fope, vl'lo i·s a l ocal t ns-urance agent, was probably the most influential member of tlie Plortda Senate, beca·use not only of his natural talents as a leader '\\/e'l'lc..- ond an orator, suc because of his seniority. ~ Pope was not an inno- \" vativc l egi·slator. Shortly before his death, he ren\\inisced that he got .very few ?\u003ei·l ls pa.esed but he sure kil_led a hell of a lot of b8d bills. Tbat was tfie vay he put it. He wa.s known as the \"lion of St. John's\" 6ecause he came from St. John ' s county and he had a m.ane of white hair . And I knew him, I knew him well and honor and prize that friendship and lte, He was· a man who showed exceptional foresight, a progressive tccpcr of mind, and dtd a world of good not only for St. Augustine and St. John's County, Out for ttie st.ate of Flor1d4. The second person that t· would name wlto exerci sed exceptional leadership at thi.S time vas Herbert E. Wol fe. Herbert Wolfe was the chairmon of the Exchange Bank. He vas the president of the San M.arco Contracting Company, and also the owner of a large , sig-n. 1-ficant ranch. He h8.d immense political power, not only locally, but state-wide. He vas the treasurer for at least one governor ' s campaign fund, successful governor. He was successful in that the man ~-on the office. He contributed to the chests of a nwnber of other governors in their cmnpaigns. C: '/;:a'IR.;ope claims the Senate. in his memoir s that he helped sponsor Smathers campaign for G: That's right, I think he did. t think he did. I 'm quite sure that that ' s true. And so he, he held tremendous sway over local politics and local life. He ovncd a great amount of the city. As a matter of fact, a l ot of lA Page 11 sjm people feared Herbert WOlfe, and I think unreasonobly, because Herbert Wolfe ~s really very ethical, high-'mindcd and generous mtin with a s trong sense of community obligation. I think he 1 s been faulted unjus tly by many people for , for having intentions that I , I 1m not sure that Herbert E. Wolfe ever had, I always found him to be ~ gent.lemon, and a gentleman of htg\u0026 · ethical and tllOral standards . Well tn any event, he vas a man who pulled him.self up by his own bootstraps. He, I think I told you that story the l ast tine, which I c~r tainly wouldn't want to repeat for attribution, because it doesn ' t appear to do him any credit and it may not be altogether true, but he was plowing the far:m one day as a , as a young mAn and tfiere w.1.S a black sitting: on the fence watching hitn and Wolfe was having some dif ficulty turning the horse and the plow , or doing something, whatever , and the bl~ck was sitting on the fence and convincing a;nd telling him how to do it 6nd right then and there Herbert Wolfe quit plowing and walked away from the farm, and 84id, by God, he would never do anything else the rest of his life that a nigger could do better than him. So, he set out to do socne other things. And he was extremely successful at t hem. Toward the, he's still alive, as you know, and toward the end of his active public career , he was named the first c hairman of the Historic St. Augus tine Preservation Board. A Board which by strange irony, I'm chairman of , now. C: I didn't know that . G: And t his was reall y a very si3nificant work that he undertook. And he was sood at it. and he labored bard at it, and really did an except ional job at lA Page 12 sjm it. And St. Augustine ovee him the highest debt. As a matter of f3ct, j ust recently awarded hint the highest honor that the city can bestow, the · Order of La Florida. Only eight living peopl\u0026 can hold that award. They must be fifty-five y~rs of age and must have rendered truly distinguished sexvtce over the length of many years to the city ~nd only t~'O such people have 6een so honored, General Henry W'. McHi,llan, the recently· ·retiTed adjutant gener al and who's also a member of the Board noW', and Hertiert E. Wolfe, just two fllOnths ago. Well• those are two people who wielded pover. And then ve come dovn to the local level , strictly local level. And we find Joseph Shelley elected to the City Commission and then becoming mayor co~ mts\u0026toner. Now I don't remember the systefl\\ by which. the mayor commis\u0026ione.r vas named. C: He's elected by the other members of the commis\u0026sion. G: Re was? OkAy. I, I , I think that that's the way it was, that'·s i.y· re.col~ lect1on. And so Joe Shel1ey, either in turn, became mayor and unhappily was mayor dur~ng that time , or else he wos the first one of the new cOl!Uli\u0026- sioning, I, I just don 1 t recall. I 'D sure you know or will find out. In any event, he was mayor at th~ timo of St. Augustine's trial, and he va3 he wa\u0026, ha was the worst mayor that St. Augu3tine could httve had in that D:\u003eOment, because he was not a peacemaker, and be was not a mAn of vision, and he was not a man who, he was not a compassionate man. He was full of John Birch rhetoric and he was, his eyes were blinded by extreme right- wing ideo-logy. And he let things dissolve into chaos and violence and was not unduly perturbed when the violence happened. He was just the opposite of a civic leader. He was a c1v1cto1lower and of the worst order. I was, I vould always I lA Poge 13 SjQ felt fri endly with Joe Shelley and his wi fe, and I sympathized with them deeply wl\\e.n thei r son ,.•as fatal ly wounded in Vi:etnam and Joe f l ew out to the Phillipi nes to the hospital to which his son had been brought 4nd worked with the physicians day and night, you know, to save his boy , but he died . Later on, when l was in Vietnam, and l did a series of articles , one of which was on the field hosp·t ·tal , Da Nang, which was a, just tile most terrible thing I ever saw- in my life. And I·, I vrote 1~ up, and it was syndicated, and Hrs. Shelley happened to read it in the newspaper, and she said , that was the hospital that her boy had been brought to. They've always felt a certain bond w'ith me for that ~eason, and, you know it's hard t ·O say ho.rd things about, about a man wh9se b'een through tha t agony, and I think that's affected hiD. I thi.nk he's, t· think the death of his boy really took a lot out of Joe Shelley. And then the subsequent peace, if you want to put it in his terms, defeat t hat OC• curred in Vietnam was a1so, I think, d isabled him oentally or emotionally. I understand he's in a very bad way right now. You know, when you think that your boy gave his, gave up his life for no thing, it has a, a terrible effect. When I vas in Vietnam, all the guys up on the front l ines, the grunts, the marines and the army guys, they, they all said their private ir.oments that the war mC4nt n\u003c\u003ething to them at all. t hey saw no reason for it, it was senseless , it was use1ess, and I said,\"Well, why A~e you fighting?\", and they said ,\"To keep my buddy alive.\" that vns the only reason. They weren' t fighting for Amer ica, they weren't fight ing for-to keep their buddy alive, that was the one thing. And, and then, t he second t hing on their list vas, \"Because I'v\u0026 lost my best friend,\" or \"Because my buddy' s died lA Page lt. Sjot fiere somewhere and I don't want their, the loss of theiT lives to, to 11eon nothita,g. I've got to give 1t a titeaning,\" you know, and so they kept fi:gh ting. And I think Joe's been that way and I th.ink he's just gone i-nto a pit because of it. A lot of parents experienced thi:s. Well, c \"'-'fl'\"' ~-t ,D., that's wily, you know, I 've got to speak charitably · · · \u0026bout Joe Shelley. But how fte got i nto this, this bent of mind that he was in in the early sixties, I, I, I don't know. It was, i ·t wa.s the undoing of St. Augustine, that it did not have at the helm a man of insi\u0026ht, a ·man of compassion, a man of courage, a C'll1J\\ who would dare to go out and, you know, hol d back the cont\u003cmding forces and speak the language of reason. It didn' t have that ldnd of man. It had a very inadequate p\u003c\u003elice force, both c±ty force and county sheriff's force. Both were pitifull y undereducated, undertratned for what happened, and Joe Shelley failed . He vas not the only one who failed . the rest of the City Commission failed . Every civic leader failed . Unfortunately, as t said the last time, there had not yet 6 risen co the surface a civic leader such as John D. )laley proved to be in B the years immediatel y following this. Now John }laley was in the city at the time, but John was, he was young, he was a greenhorn in the city, he vas really just getting started. He had gotten his insurance company undet'V3.y. together with Peter Thompson, Tl.onrpson- Valey I nsurance Comp.any. And he was beginnin,s to test th~ ~aters of civic, you know, participation in civic affatrs. He was beginning to take an intere$t in politics and so for-th. After a these terrible years, '63-64, John f aley would thrust himself on the scene to try to 1,lave the city, which he did. And in 1965, h• was the mayor of the city and in the year afterwards, I think he wDs mayor, too. Page 15 sjm And ever si'llce then, he has been the conscience of the city, c1v1cally and polt ttcally. And if there's any one man I vould name as Mr. St. Augustine, it would be John D. !aley. It ' s, it's unfortunate for St. Augustine that he did not matur~~se events. there were some other people who, okay, I'm talking about that group of professiona1 and JSustnessmen. Tl\\ere were some, I'll talk about John ~oley and certain otHer$ wfio were up at the top of the list of peopl e who could have done somethiug. Unfortunately, the people who ho.d the influence and the power· and the momentUfl'I were the people at the lower rank of the professional and Busi~ess group. And Joseph Shelley was one, and another was NoDle Putt Calhoun, Noble Putnatn Calhoun. And if you want to know about wf\\J:te ractsm from t\u0026c professional and businessman's standpoint, in other ~ords, at the bottom of that stratum, talk to Noble J?utt Calhoun. ~ knev Putt very early on, because at the close, well i t's in the last year of the Second World War, I vas working at a radio station, I was a disc jockey and sports announcer and war analyst and everything else at WFOY, the only station in town. WFOY, wonderful fountain of youth, 1240 on your dial. And toward the end of my year there, a man came to work at the station, Putt Clahoun. Putt had just been discharged from the military, an early dis-charge. for what reason I don't remember, and Putt was a real southern guy, you know in those days, two hundred and fifty watt stations didn't Void have much pick on your announcers. The normativel\\in American radio was what was called the Chicago voice. And that was because radio ini-, originated in Chicago. And in the 1920's, early '30's, when the networks first started, the voices that the American population identified with big ttm0 lA Page 16 sjm rad.to were tlie people who hod the Chicago voice, and when the net\\.-ork headquarters tlloved to New York, the Chicago voice aovQd to New York. There was, in the early years. there was never a New York announcer on the air f ·t:'Qm New York, they were all Chicago net\"10rks . Md $0, in: al1, as a ·C'llltter of fact, that prevails even today. If you, i f you turn on a soutftern radio station i n any consnunity·of any· si~e, you'll never .he•r a southern voice, Very interesting. C: I've noticed that. G: Yeah. Southern peopl e always want to hear a Chicago voice . Fasc in at~g. Nobody's ever done a study -on this. I talked aDout it for years, but i t's tact that nobody really hat! studied. W'ell,Noble Putt C8-lhou.n, though, had a ~ery deep Southern drawl and it always l\u003eothe~ed me, Decause I could never understand how Alan Brown, the manager of the station would hire Putt Cal-houn. But Putt worked there as an announcer doing mostly cormnercials. I did all tfre DJ wor k, and I did Touchton's Telcqui:z and Today.'s War Cooun.entary. and all kinds of other nonsense. And Putt did most ly cotmtercials, and I· remember one day on this DJ show I had, the 12-40 club. It was the middl e of the m.ayora1ty race. This was in 1945, the spring of, about this time, 1945. There \\o'ilS a 11Utn running for tn'1yor, Wa1ter B. Frazier, who had been a pover in St. Augustine. He owned the Fountain of Youth, he owned the oldest tl\u003cse. schoolhouse, hi s son now owns ~ properties, And he'd tn(l.de 3 lot of money and injected himself into Florida politics and even ran for governor and was defeated. When he was mayor of St. Augustine, a number of til!les and he was running for re- election this particul4r year, spring, '45 lA P•ge 17 sjm and he dectded that he would not read hia own campaign speeche$. What tte would do, would be to ask me if I would read bis, his speeches for hiD on the air. And, about what a great guy, sort of thii;d person stuff, you see, wbat o great guy Walter B. Fr3tier was. And in return for that, he promised me a chicken dinner and three cartons of C4nel cigarettes. Well, the chi'cken dinner didn't appeal to me, but the three cartons of Cai:1els really dtd, because in those days . all the Camels were sent to the fi-gl'lting men, you know. And all we coul d get were Winga and fatimas and All Americans and things like this . So, I . t read his ca~patgn speeches for Him. He los t by the way. And I never got t he chicken dinner and l· never got 'the three cartons of Camels 1 whtch bothered -me no end . That was my ftrst taste of t he treachery of American pol i'ti'Cs. But I· did th.is. And t hen on the 12- 40, th.ts DJ' show t had in the afternoons, see. ,radio watt the only thing there wo.s in those day6. And al l the kido got out of school and I, theoret:l:cally, I was a senior in high school, but I dropped out because this was all ~ore important. Is chat stil l going? C: Yeah. C: And I ran for, I decided what the heck, here I am giving all these campaign speeches for Frazier, \"Why don't I r un for mayor myself?11 So, I, I publ icly announced my candidacy, and so on, and all the kids in town voted for me and i:torc. I rnean, they said they were goin.g to vote . They eouldn' t vote u:n-less they were twenty-one. Well, the vote came out and Frazier lost by a narrow margin. But I got t hirty- eight W1:'ite-in votes and they vere all from black people, in West Augustine ~nd Putt Calhoun found out about it and he c411e into the control r.\u003eom one day when I was working there and~said, be lA Page 18 safd, \"\"-'hat are you do1ng appealing to the niggers? What are you doing appealing to those n.1.ggers • those blick, stinking niggers?11 And that's the first time I've ever hc.nrd anyone in St. Augustine talk •bout blacks t~t way. Later on t found out that Putt had been in Australia the same time Steve O'Connell was in Australia and they knew each other. And Steve was teaching physical ed to a, to the troops, teaching them sports and keeping in condition. Putt Calhoun was a captain in charge of a company of Bl.a.ck soldiers. And it got to him, socehov. And Putt said a few things over the air, too, after this, which really gave me pause. I was \\o'Orried al\u003eout tl\\i-s. Well, when all of this came to the surface, Putt'·s racism came. to the surface, too. And I m~n in a big way. And Putt ~s a me:inber of the Trinity Episcopal Church and a member of the vestry, and that will give you a clue to a pri1D8ry force in the vest~y ' s decision to keep the niggers out. So tl\\at shows you a low point there, that professional and busineaSD.en. C: Well- G: I went o long vay. C: Right, well, we're about to leave '63 and go on into '64 and I think talk about the emergence, the ent(ance of King. Before we do, I wanted to ask you, the l.ast time we talked, you said that you didn't think anybody in St. Aug~stine thought anything serious ~'Ould happen in '64~ despite the events of '63. C: ~\"h hum, C: I was ~ond~ring if, in other words, I guess you're saying that they didn't take that Florida !dvisory fOmmission oQ Civil Rights vhich came to St. Au- \u003c - lA Page 19 sjm gustine in Augiust and made a number of recOllll:lendations to t he U.S. C.ivfl R±ghts Con:rntsston. I guess they didn't t .ake their observations seriously. Basically what they said vas to halt the spending of, ap-propri~ ting of federal funds for the 400th anniversary. They mentioned the dtscr1:mtnat1on out at Patrchild- St\"'i tis Corporation, they =entiooed di'scrimination wf'th±o St. Augustine. But apparentl y, most of St . Augustine di~n ' t pay much attention to that report. G: That's tnie, that's true. And they felt that these were the Same kinds of reports that vere being made about every city in the south. So St. Augustine dtd not, at that time, feel itself especially singled out. Al-tliou. gh i ·t, there were certain elements in the city that became very ner­ ·vous when the 400th annivers.oey was meii.tioned. C: Ul\\ fium. C: ! v3s one of those. C: Right. How about the, the flcrida East Coast Railroad strike, which started in February, actually $tarted, excuso oo, seartod in January of '63, and \"'\u003c\u003euld, would lost about two years. G: Maybe even more. C: Did that have any- yeah, right. Even \"longer. C: It took more, oh yeah, more than that, C: Right . C: I think it's the longest strike in American history. C: Right . Now, did that have any influence on people in St. Augustine? Were many eaployed by Florida \u0026\u003c1st Coast? C: Oh, yes, it had a lot of influence on the people. There were tremendous 1A Page 20 sjm numbers of people in St. Augustine wbo were, ~-ell, tremendous, I don't know. But a large number of people who were employed at the Florida East Coast Railway headquarters and that had always been a stable industry in the tovn. Th.at aad the Miller Shops of the Florida East Coast Rail way, the o4\u003e ~ Killer locomotive shops , you can still see the remains opposite the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge across Route 1. They were primary source of jo\u0026s tn St. Augustine. And the headquarters still is. But I don't re~ ber that there was any connection between the strike and the civil rights pYoolem. s,+lr-n)'.\u003e C: Ok4y . Do you think, do you think it sitrred up feelings in St. Augustine, or it left a floating body of unemploye.d loose who could be mobilized in an anti-civil rights cause. C: I ~'Ould say yes, ±f r knc~ that those two event s ~ere conjoined, because t· don't know. C: Right. C: But I think your reasoning is very good ond l , I never thought of that before. C: Okay. The other, one of the other things tha.t happe.ned 1n '\u0026.-. (end of sideI_ SIDE 2 C: - drawing infere,nces, in that rr.ost of the. violence that occurred vas at night, when all working people were free. C: Right . Cood point, good point. Another event in '63 that might have gone unnoticed by most St. Augustinians but it didn' t go unnoticed by blacks in particular, I've found reference to in the, considerable reference to in the lA Page 21 sjm Florida Star News, the Jacksonville black newspaper and the Pittsburgh Courriet' , the national black newspaper. And that was the impr:l:sonmenc of four young black$ f rom St. Augustine, teen- agers, vho took, who vere invol\"\"!d i n the Ha.ling-led protests of '63. They were under;aged. They were taken from their parents by Judge. Mathis and put in jail, and then we.nt to t ile federal, ~cuse me, the s tate prison$ for teenagers. One at Marianna, l believe, and I'm not sure where the other ones were. Two girls and two Ooys . And this, was this, did this go unno tic ~d by· mostT\u003e? C: I don't, r remember that, but I guess it went generally unnoticed. ~obody ralli·ed to the side of those , those boys. And Raley him.self was some.- thing of a newcomer. Quite, quite a rcmark86le and C\u003cM.lrageous person, but he did and said thi ngs ultimately that got him int o b_ot water with the NAACP, whtch for a vhtle he represented in t fie ci~y. c: 'IJll. \"\"\"'. Rig lit. G: l ' think Haley was a sport. He was l ike Haley's comet. He, ha went through the sky, you knov, and then disappeared . C: Uh hum. Yeah, he doesn't even live there anymore. G: No . But, no I don ' t remember that, I don't remember that . C: You know, they, it became, once they , once they were put in jail, they s tayed in jail for several m.onths . It wasn't a 1113tter of just being in there d3y, doys . And the judge put them in prison because their folks wouldn't promise to keep them out of further demonstrations . Well, anyway let's go on and jump into ' 64. figures. lA Page 22 sjm C: Wfiy do you think King became involved in St. Augustine? Martin Luther King . G: King, I think, needed a peg on which to hang passage of the Civil Rights l aw. It was foundering, or i t was making slow progress, and he needed to attract attention to a place ot a cause that vas more specific than hi'S general cause. And St. Augustine provided an easy and obvious target. Because i t wos about to celebrate i t s four hundredth anniversary, in th.e course of which federol funds had, or were going to be appropriated. And this he seized on. And in retrospect, you'd have to say that he was a very good tactician. But ·in retrospect also, you might argue that he was not a very good strategist. Re secured, or 1'11 reverse tflat, he wa\u0026 a very good strategist and not a very good tactician, because he secured pas$4ge. of the Civil Rights law, and I think largely, because of what he did in St. Augustine. But he l eft i n his wake, a ruined city, in many respects. A city that would take years to recover fro.'ffl what he did there, from the bad publicity that he brought there and caused to happen there. He left people who lived i n terror in t~e nighttime because of fears that had been engendered i n them by experiences that took place in the city. He left behind a quadracentennial that in great part was nothing that it had expectations of being and most of all, he l eft a city that was devastated by drastic decrease in tourism because of the bad image of the city and the reluctance of people to go there. And St. Augu$t1ne depends eighty-five percent for its survival on tourism. I th~nk he pi cked an easy mark. And I, I think it's, I think it's tragic that he chose- a place where racial relation in the ma.in were good and where black people as well aa vhite, today, lA Pose 23 sjm do not remember him kindly. For that, of course, you'll have to correct my opinion by talking with black people themaelves. But there are numerous things that I could say to that. I remember when Martin Luther King first came to the city. I never \u0026aw him t'hcre myself. I was 1n­cred1Bly 6usy With the Library of Florida History and with the build~g of the cross and the church and the mission, with the planning of the church' s role, the quadracentennial* the coordination of the church's role with the role to be played by the Castillo de San M4rcos, the St. Augustine Historical Society, the city government and the Historic St. Augustine Preservation Board, a nd yet of course I could not be anythit\\8 other than dismayed and troubled and very much a.ware of vhat \"'4S happening racially in the city. And as time want on, I became more and more aware, and ~ore and more troubled in my own conscience, because I real±zed bel atedly, I aliould, these are things I should have realized a long time before, but I rcalrzed under the press of events that I didn't like at all, that really the black people in America were, were, were treated like cattle. And this cried out to heaven for change, i f not for vengeance. I understood how1 I knew the history of the South enough to know what had happened and why it happened and, and of course t vas a voice for gradualism. We've got to solve these problems gradually, and I fell into the trap of, of excusing the lack of any change at all, under the mantle of gradualism. But I tried to be a peacemaker of sorts, within the l i mitations and all I can tell you now, is my experiences as I went around and saw what happened. Without going into the, the sequence events, of events that you can determine for yourself, because I remember l had foTgotten the sequence. Mrs. Peabody came down at F..astertime and that was before King came down and so forth. lA Page 24 sjm And a~l of those things are fairly open to the recoi:d. \\.i\"hat I reeem­ber, .1.Lthat when Hartin Luther, I reoembe.r being passionately involved wi'tlt t he quadracentenni-al., and being invited to Tampa to speaR with. President Kennedy about the quadracentenntal and the history of the ci·ty and our plans for it, and how he was actively interested in it, and prOl'llt sed to keep in touch with me about it and so on, and then four days l ater he vas shot . And that was , that vas the fiTst tragic thing that happened to ae, in t h.ta-, th.at sooething 1 bod collll\\itted myself to and I had found a champion in the h.ighe•t office in the land, . you know, to malle t hi'S nat:f:onally known. All of that just went down the tu6e. And then, I don 1 t know again, the sequence.of that ev(';tlt, but l remea.-- Ber that was ooe thing that happened. And th~n the entronce of Martin Luther King into the city caused tlie rest, or much of the rest of what we had planned, to go down the tube. Because vc didn' t get any federal mon.te.s as a consequence of what he did and the l oss of the president who was interested in us, 4lthough- C: Johnson, Johnson didn't provide any money? G: Well, he may hav0 provided a little bit. C: Uh hum. G: See, t he President told me he would come, Kennedy said, he said , \"Look, you set things up and I'll be thet\"e to help you out\", and so on. But wheo King came into the city, my feelings were mixed. On the one hand, in r:JfY mind and, in my mind I knew that he was, he was right in what he ~as doing. In my heart, I was wishing to hell he was doing it somewhere el ae. And you see, t here ' s the old problcn, the old dilemma, you know. The limousine liberal, 1A Page 25 sjm ,\\ such as I was. admittedly. I was wishing that allAthis could be done, but t hat my own inter ests would not be affect~ and of course that vas a stupid position to take, but it was the position that I, that 1 took and I· hnve a great deal of sympathy for peopl e whose lives \u003c\u003e.re upset, or whose plans are. are threatened or damaged or destroyed by a necessary socital change. I think I had o lot of trouDle wtth Kins on one count in parti·cular. And yet it may have been necessary to hi·s tactics. lle at'ougfit in demonstrators from Atlanta and elsewh e~e, to do the marcl\\ing. He drogooneld. corcatn local people, mostly yout hs from Flor1da Memorial College to morch with his people and those aarches were conducted in King style in a peaceful manner, but st.ill very. loudly 1n such a way· as to cause real concern, . i'f not fright among oonr of the citt-zcns of the c~ty . And my mother I· remember, was one who was terrtfi~d. I used to llave to go and s tay in t he house with her at ni'ght . We'd pull the blinds and turn out, leave the lights out and so £orth, as the groups of blacks \\o'Ould go by s houting and singing and yelling and so forth and there were other ladies, llWlny of thet!'I living alone who vere just frightened out of t heir wits by t hi s . Nothing like this h3d ever happened in St. Augustine, and they were, they were real1y frightened. I r emember that. And then l remember , on the other side the violent white me.n who Calltl(? in from outside the city, armed with their truncheons and their clubs, their chains and hov ~1•kl in the nighttime theynf all upon these lines of young black people and beat thea and see the young blacks running screaming and yelling from the scene and then I knew that the, the vhol e m.atter was \u0026oing r apidly out of hand. It vas a shameful display. The only thing I could think of to justify what ,_ lA Page 26 sjm r was vteving was t he fact that the people on both sides were from out of t cn.u, as nearly as I could t ell. St. August ine had become a battleground, a kind of Antio for t~\"O armies, neither of which was Italian. And I 've spoken about the failure of the, oh, well, I'll,I 'll stay w±tn the Ol4cks for a while now. Martin Luther King used to so into the black areas of the city and the black neighborhoods and decand money from, frOCl the people there. And you' l l find bl acks in the city today who 'll tell you ho~ he end his people went erouod and demanded peo ~ ple' s entire w(Ufare checks for this enterprise. After a tim.e, it didn't take long , the black people in St. Augustine became very d±senchanted vtt h -Mar tin Lutlter King, and they dtdn't support him, many of them. Mayb~ even ·most , ltut then agai'1l, you'd better talk to the bl acks. And I , I met blacks vho would not talk about, didn't want anything to do with him, fel t trum-melled and ashamed, dispirited about the whole thing. And t hat 's what I thought was the tregedy. That Martin Luther King wes, the tragedy for St . Augus tine, not £or the blacks in general, but the tragedy f or St. Augus tine was that Mar t\"in Luther King was using the bl ack people of St.. August ine i n a way that was not scr vill3 chem at all, in the short run. In the long run of cour se i t would , and i n a vay that everybody in the c ity thought was bringing ruin upon the city, and was provoking unnecessar i ly the vi olence that woe tokin3 place in the street\\!.' And t hen soon, eventuolly you had the classi c confrontation of black leaders and then such clowns as J.B. Stone and Lynch and various other r acist s who came t o town t o, to, t o pr~ach their garbage. And there' s no ques tion in retrospect that Martin Luther King saved the bl ack people of America, or he was largel y responsible for it. And lA Page 27 ojm many of the rtgbts that the people of, black people of this country had 111 consequence of the passage of the Civi'l Rights LaW' and other lavs th'at f oll oved soon aftorvcal\"ds , tMt the resiponsibili•ty for that is la.rgcly his and he deserves to be credited by history for t hat. But th4t does not remove the dileirma, the irony, the anom.aly, ~ha tever it is, certainl y. the tragedy of one ctty havi.ng to be destroyed. in a sense, that that m.i'glit liappe.n. Do you knov what I· mean? C: Ul\\ fium. G: In other vords, I 'm not saying t hat Martin Luther Ki:ng set out to do an evil thing, co manipulate a c ity for ev-tl purposCb\"', no. lfe. se.t out to use the city for noble purposes . But that city went down the d~~i~ for those purposes-. C: Can 1' ask you, whtle. \"1C1Te here, we're a little. ahead of ourselves, ti\"m~ wi\u0026e, but why, vhat vere race rel ations like after he left? Did they just deteriorate completely, or how vould you characterize them? G: They became very bad after he left. Where they' d been tvo tether con.genial groups, now looked at each other a$ across a no man's land. \\lhites were afraid to be seen speaking to bl acks, working wi th blacks. Blacks kept a very l ov profi1e, let it be known that they hnd nothing to do 'With Martin Luther King' s wor k\u0026 and thoughts. It W3S, it was a · tragic t ime. Now the fighting in the street$, I saw 4 lot of that fighting. Now in r etrospect, I wish to hell I 'd had t he mor al courage to do something about it, but I didn't. And I'll tell you why. I would have been shipped out of town by my bishop 1mmed1.ately. Now I, I put the blame on myself initially for not having tr~cd to do tQO~e than l did. l re.member President Currier of Florida 1A Page 28 sjm Mcoortal College once said something that was very generous, but I don' t tllink true, he satd: I· vas the only vhite 11\\intster \\;'ho stood up for the \u0026lacks in those days. And maybe that happened, but if, if tt did happen ~t happened in tather quiet remarks that I made or things that I aay have trted to do of an obscure nature. But there was an opportuni ty· for me to have. to have ttic-d to do souething:. and X didn 1·c do it. And I· didn't: do it , because I ~'\u003c\u003euld have lost everything t ltat I'd ~-orkcd for at the miect on and I would have lost m;y own presence in the city~ l' vould ~ave been shipped out of tovn the next day. \u003cii'°;' I C: Would you care to go i nto that, (why thcf i shop would do thtit? G: t Yeah,1 i'n thts· ·taatter, the b'i'Shop ~·os a cow8rd. l hope none. of these. things I · say wtll come out the way l ''m. saying them now-. You Know-, l''m., I'.m, I'·m just speaking 8S di~ectly and clearly as, 88 I can, so that you'll understand tne situation. But he, he acted in a very cowardly fashion. He vas a f raid. C..~·~ · Given a chance for greatness, he muff ed it. One third of the City ws t:\u003c•pttoc. He found loopholes for in4Ctioo. One of his loopholes vas the fact that most of these people vere from out of town. He had no in f lu~nce on them o.t.tJ one way or the other. But he could have had influence by courageousf,of one n.ituro or another. He also talked glowingly about peace, justice, all in the a8stract and felt his own conscience and the obligations of the church satisfied in that respect. His man at the cathedral\u003e the man who had t he cure of souls, the cure antmarum for St. Augustine, was Monseignur John P. Burns who is nov c·he pastor of St. Patrick's Church here in Gainesville. C: Right, right. G: And Burns locked himself in the rectory and hid from men's eyes. 1 rcmeeiber --- ---·---- lA Page 29 sja once in the middle of violence in the Plaza, looking up at the rectory wi.ndow and s3w him with the curtain drawn, looking out and then closing the curtain. And I'll never for get t hat. That was, that w•s the symb01 to me of the church's ca.re for what happened in St. Augustine in those days. C: Hov many \u0026lacks were Catholic in St. Augustine? G: I don't know, but a pretty good number . I would say may8e what ftve bun~ dred, may\u0026e, something like that. C: Uh Jluft, that would be a pretty good number. G: Yeah. C: How a.Bout tfie rest of the religious le.aders, Mike_ while we.''I'e talkf,n\u0026 about the Catl\\ol:tc Cfrurcn, let'\u0026 talk aSout the others at the Silme time. were they doins 4nything? G: No, the white churches. No, the , I' l l get to the Episcopal story in a moment, but I'd like to just stay on Hurley for just a second . C: Okay. C: I remember when Archbishop Hurley arrived at, from o flight on an airport, at :):M,~ airport ut Ja;ckaonville, Martin Luther King litid just gotten off of another plane, and Hurley and the, King were 1n the lobby of :Im..tso~ \u003e a very small lobby at t he same time. And Hurley raced and hid behind a pillar, and said,\"Don't let that man see me.\" So he really hid from this, he, he was afraid. Subsequently, he wrote a sert!')Qn for Monseignur Burns to give in the cathedral and it was the most abstract, cliche- ridden, ethereal sermon you ever heard about . You know, do good and avoid evil . Obey the ten commandments and if everybody does that, everything will take care of lA Page 30 sjm J:tself, whi·ch was a way of just separating himself utterly froa the sttuation and doing it, you know. in such a way that everybody could applaud it, you knov. and so on, for, for saying all the rtght things. Well, ftc said right things, but they had no application to, to the sttuation at hand. And I was no better. I'm criticizing him, but I was no bett~r . tn retrospect, I should have laid my wtiole career and job on the line, and gone out in the s treets and tri·ed to do some:thing to, to stop. C: Wl\\y do you suppose ~e acted in a, what you call a cowardly fashion? Is there any specific reason? C: Yeah, I think I know exactly. But you have to know a little bit about Josepll P. Ht,1rley, who's n very complex character, one of the 1aost fasciMtt-ng of the people i'n twenti'eth century Florida h1~story·.. And incredibly ACcompli'SOc.d and incredibly powerful man in Florida life. culture, politics. Well, Hurley was burned a couple of times . He started out, he started out in l ife as a, an assistant p~stor in Cleveland, Ohio, caught. the fancy of the bishop of the diocese, Mooney, who decided to make him his secretary. And Mooney was nomed Papal delegate, papal nuncio, to India, and took Hurley along. Hurley became secretary of the nuncioture in New Delhi, and then later. Mooney was transferred to Japan. All of this in the thirties. Then Mooney was named to Rome as head of the America.n desk at the Secreta;'ry of State of t he Vatican, and Hurley was left behind in 1'okyo as charge d' affaire. Then Mooney was translated to this country and named cardinal ArChbishop of Detroit and Hurley went to Rome, succeeding Mooney ae h~d of the American desk. And Hurley becrune a very strong anti-Nazi. Very interesting. I found OtLt: lA . Poge 31 •jm a lot of things about him by accident and I rem.ember, I resncmber on~ day, excuse this diversion, but one day in the 19SO's, I was skiing in St.ritzerland at Crindelwald and I was on, up on Mt. FUrst and watching ttie pre-Olympic skiers in their slalom trials . And I noticed a man up the slope, who I thought, whom I thought I recogniz~, and I went \\IJ) and t· staid, \"Exc1\u003ese t1te 1 but are you, by any ch:tnce, Slr Arnold Lunt?\" And fle a vowed that he was, and I said, \"Do you•.?\", oh, he. asked me vhere I was froo and I sai~ St. Augustine and that I was a secinariao stUdying in Belgiuu and so forth, and he said, \"Isn't that vhere that remark.al\u003ele man, Joseph P. Hurley went?0 , 1n his B·rittsh accmt, and 1· said,\"Ye!\u003e. \" And he said, \"Oh, I rcme=ber him well,\" ~e sa£d. \"I was a coJ.\"respondent for the Daily Mail in 1939 in :Rome and my paper asked .~e to be on the alert for any Vatican people who said anything at all ·ab\"out the Nazi·s. And one evening l was· listening to Vatican radio and on come~ tl.'ds Amertcan Monsefgnur, this Joseph P. Hurley, the head of American desk and the Secretary of State, blasting the .Nazis, just excoriating them up and down. And it was the first time there had ever been a public statement about the Nazis outside of a few very formal statements of the Popes themselves. So I ic:media.tely interviewed this man, and found him to be cxtraord1nti.ry.' Then var broke out .ind nurley \"'·as named co St. Augustine, and when he arrived 1n Sc. Au.sustine , it ws the expecto.tion of the Amel:ican church that he was going to be the new great American churctrnan, the new Cardinal Gibbons, a man of e.xtr~ordinary courase. All, almost all of Hurl ey's beloog~ngs were sunk by German submarines. They had coi:ae over on another boat and the boat went down. He lost most of his things, but he lA Page 32 sja arrived here shortly after, about six months his arrival at St . Augustine he was, he was asked by the NBC program, the Catholic Hour, the radio pro-gre111, the Catholic Bour, to give a talk. And he gave a talk. And the talk was ago.inst Nazi Germany. A.nd this was in 1940, and when the talk ended, Cetholtc Bour received tl'IOre Mil than it had ever received before, and almos t all of i:t, against Hurley. Almost all of itT from Cathol ic Irishmen. C: Ah, yes. C: lr~sh Americans. And I remcsnbe.r , I , I, I saw all of that, r have mi:crof±lm of all that correspondence, because Hurley kept it. there was something perverse about him in this sense th3t he kept all bod m.a.11, a.nd there were boxes of it and I have it a11 microfilmed. And I r emember or(\u003e letter in particular from a wotD.1n in his home town of Cleveland, a letter that said, \"To think that Minnie Hurl ey's ~y would stoop to ltck a. hitisb jock. \" And Hurley wos, wos dcvo\u0026t#ted by this. Nothing like th.is had ever happened. Ile had ridden the crest of succe.ss all his life. And all of a sudden, boom, the whole country, down on him. It, it, it killed his spiri~for a long while. He wrote a letter to Cardinal Mooney, just a, a weeping latter, I have a copy of it. And, in 1940. Well, then the war was over, and the man for whom he had worked as Secretary of State was now Pope, Fucell1, Pope Pius XII . And Pius Xll at the end of the \"\"ar, named Hurley Papal Nuncio to Yugoslavia, a very difficult problem there de.a.ling with the Communists, Tito, t he Croatians and the Slavs and al.l. of that . And F\\lcelli knew of Hurley's talents and naoed him, and Hurley did a fantastic job at the trial of Cardinal Stapenok and others, he wa.s heavily invol ved. And lA Page 33 sjm he earned the wrath of Tito for standing up for the Catholic people and s t and.tog up for justice and so forth , and he was really bltck in his el.e­ment again, and, and on the crest once more and then he did an incrediSly stupid thing. He took his aide, McNulty, J ·ohn McNul ty, he and Mch'ulty l eft tugos lavi~ to go on vacation ot Lugano in Switzerland. And when t hey went to return, t he border gwrds did not al.low them back in. And Hurley said, ''But I 'm the Papa1 Nuncio.\" They said ,\"We're sorry.0 See, once he was out of the country, Tito was under no obligation to let him back in . And Hur ley went to Rome, and Pius Xll refused to sec him. And he remained in Rome in a condition of shame and disgrace for months when f inally Fucell± made him an archbishop ad persona, meaning he ~as an archbishop, but in t t tle and rank without having archbishop' s territory or uu thor ity, and gave bina a gold chalice wtth, encrusted with .jewels, and sent h.tm Back to St. Augustine, vhere he arrived. And t'hat was a way· of saving face for Hurley. But Hurley knew that he was in disgrace and be, he never lived it down . And he never did another courageous thing in his life. And when he hid behind t he pillar in.Imeson Airport, it all fell in place. But he was the man who could have saved St. Augustine and I could have helped hiD and others could have holped hiJl'I. 8ut .he did not have the courage, and alas, neither did I, because I was, I was saying to myself,\"Discretion is the better part of valor. and I ' l l be able to carry on things and keep thea going. Don ' t be foolhardy, don't lose everything. Try to work behind the scenes.\" And subsequently l did try to work behind the scenes. And \u0026o, on one occasion, after the city had just gone completely to pieces, by the way Hurley wasn ' t the only one \" lA Pat• 34 sjm who was hiding. 1 re=ember one day, one night, I was standing in a doorway in the darkness watching the violence in the s t reets, watching Lynett and Stoner ranting, wetchtng the blacks marchJ.n.g by~ vAtching the whi-tes tome in wi'th the1T clubs nnd clubl\u003eing, watching the poli·ce try· to do this, watc hing the CBS camer4men taking it al1 in, the bright lights and so on. Watching this whole frightful scene from this blackened cor~er of a door11ay on King Str~et and a figure came, came up and sort of scurried by me into the next door\\lay. And after a while I looked around to see who it was, and it was General Henry W. MacMillan, adjut4nt general of the State of Florida, also watching from afar, you know? C: Uh huh. G: Well, in any event, the, I guess the one, I, I went to see Shell ey. appalled by what was happening and ashamed that nobody was doing ontthing con-structive, and I , I put together and 1, I meant to find it in time to give to you today. but I'll find it , put together a statem.ent called 11 A J)ecla\"r\u0026tion of Good Will\" to oxpress the, to give expre1;1sion to the voice of both the white 6nd thta black co1munities, as I saw it. And I begged Joseph Shelley to sell this to this, to the population of the city. to reverse the terrible publicity the city was suffering from and to stand up for an objective, careful, fair look at the, the rights that were being demanded and so on. And I went to his office and I presented it to him a~d he reDd it, and I begged his to do something. and he refused to budge. The only thing he said to me in reply was, 11lfov come the niggers oll ride around i n- '', I don't know if he said niggers, Negroes, niggers, he didn't say blacks in any event, because that wasn't the popular parl.ance at that 11 lA Page 35 sjm poi.nt. \"How come they all ·drive ar ound in big cars'?\" That was his r esponse. And I've always remembered that. So, then I remember we had the quadracentennial- C: I wonder if I could get you on the other churches for a second. C: Yeah, oh yeah that's right. C: 1 don't mean to belafior that- G: I ne~ to gee to th0 otfter churches. C: lf l •, l''11a just curious as to why the, yo~ gi.yc. ~e. ~ sood t'cnsc of vhtlt G: was happening'. tthe Cntholic Church, buc t , I think the other rolig1ous leaders had an o8ligatton, too, whJ:ch they l et go by~ and I wonder if ve could just talk about that for a mtnute. \\).'\\I-:~~ \\ Well, for one thing . ~. the reason why thei;e vas a s tronger obliga tion on the Catholic clergy to do something than on the others, was because the Catholic priests were not subject to the vote of their congregations. But the P'rotestant churches were . And they could dismiss their pastor just like th.at. And it would be a very rare white Protestant minister who would st.and up ~nd say something, U he knew it was violently opp0sed to the will and opinion of his congregation. He'd be out of his job the next corning. C: Right. G: Now, the only vhite priest or minister who did Pother Bullock of, and vhat is his first name, £p1scopal Church. C: You, you mean, Seymour, Charles Seymour? G: Or was it Seymour, Charles Seymour? anything of that sort .:wa!\\-.. v•\"' ---~ I 'll ramember it,~of trinity lA Page 36 sjm C: Yeah, Charles- Seymour, r ight . G: That's right. Hts predeceasor. I think. C: Yeah, Bullock, Bullock vas, Bullock followed Seymour. C: Bullock followed Seymou\u003c- C: Right. C: After Seymour left. Seyiaour stood up, against his vestry. C: Right. G: To petm±t the blacks to enter, it w3s Seymour. C: That's right . G: And, that was a courageous· act . Ile '\"·as S\\lPPOl'ted in that by his bjshop, whtch was more than Archbishop Hurley did for h~s catholic counterparts ·wfl'o mi ght nave done the same thing. And Seymour wos the only one, th.e only one who made an issue of admitting blacks freely i nto his church to worship. And his, his vestry opposed him, and Seymour left, under what circumstances, I forget. Don't know i f he waa- C: He went to Nev Orl eans after t hat, I'm not sure if he was called by a parrish down t here or exactly what . But , he, he's t here now, I beli~ve . G: You know, you should try to talk with hio and you should talk with Puck Calhoun and members of the vestry. I can give yO\\l names of l ots of people to whou you could talk in St. August ine. And I'd like for you to tolk to my mother's block ataid . if ohe w1ll agree to do it. But if she doesn't, she'll put you in touch with people who will. Louise, Louise was shocked by wha t Martin Luther King did . And, but she was also shocked by vhat the whites did, and at one point, oh yes, Martin Luther King told the black lA Page 37 sjm W'Olilen, tfle maids, not to go to work for the white iamilies, not to $how up. Loui:se did anyway. She was one of the few be.cause she snuck through tlie back streets to get to oy mother's house, and- C: So tltere was tremendous- pressure on the blacks. C: OR, tr\u003c=endoua, yeah. C: Okay. C: One, on one of thOse trips to my mother's house, Louise was assaulted by Ku 10.ux Klnnners who gr abbed her and dragged her into an automobile and sfte clawed herself away and ran. An old woman, too. She can tell you, if she'll open up, if she knovs that it won't be vritten-she's still scared. C: Is that ri.gbt? G: If you menttoned her this, she's still scared. That's why, you know, we'd have to be very deltc4.tc a.bout this, but, and 1£ she know\u0026 that she ~-ould never 6e quoted. She's so afraid, she lives in fear still, because of this and • •• Well, in any event, there's, not too many black, there are not too many church people, and there were, I think Charles Purrier at Florida Memorial was the wisest black in town. And the person who tried to do the most to keep things peaceful. But there were no •. whites wbo. whites eit her powerful or lay who took a , you knov really substantive, f'Gt dership. of lea- C: It's getting late and I know you're getting tired, so I figure maybe one more question and we'll call it quits. But, when it really got violent, we~e any of the, were. any of the businessmen· who could see that, that businesses were being 1.trtpa~red, affected by the racial conflict and the riots in the city, were any of them beginning to mobilize behind the scenes to put lA Page 38 sjm pressure on Shelley and, and government and the others on the commission? C: I , that's a question I can't answer . I don't know. C: Uh huh. Okay. C: I don' t r -e1Dealier. I remember, you know, it: was, what wtl\u0026 it, Brock- C: Jrunes Br ock. C: James Brock who vas really in the forefront, 1 chink you mentioned this the lase time, the fore front of the local motel operators in trying t o do something about bl ack rights. And he was going to make a motion at tl\\e f orthcoming meeting of the llotel and Motel Association of Florida wh_i'C\" he was president of that year t o open up mot e l s and hotels to blacks. And it was an irony that he, by 3 qui-rk, \\.'OS singled out as 4 vicious white r aci st. You see, St. Augustine was filled with these i~ontes. It seemed the harder you t ried to do one thing, the more you were painted with a brush for being t he other thing. And Brock i s a classic case. By the way, he' a back in town and has bought ___ _ C: Oh, is he really? C: He 's bought it. He ovns ft . C: How about A.H. Tibolt and the St. August ine Record . They seenwd to provide minimal leadership during this whole period of time. C: Yeah, well , that 's the story of that paper throughout i t s ' history. I wAS once the sports editor of that paper when I was in high school. It was Q joke. The paper was a joke then and it's a joke now. It's never done any­thing. The radio stations s~larly. Although Frankie Walker, I would say, Frankie Walker, in her vay, has done more than any media person in St. Augustine, in those years and afterwards to alert people to what was actually u Page 39 sjm happening . And Frankie has a , she has n high sense of what's right aod what's wrong. She voul d be 4 good person co talk with.","Ancient City Gun Club -- Ancient City Hunting Club -- John Birch Society -- Ku Klux Klan -- National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) -- Florida Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights -- WFOY -- St. Augustine City Commission -- St. Augustine Four -- St. Augustine Historical Society -- St. Augustine Police Department -- St. Augustine Record -- St. Johns County Sheriff's Office -- Castillo de San Marcos -- Florida Memorial College -- Old Slave Market -- Tallahassee, Fl. -- Trinity Episcopal Church -- Jacksonville, Fl. -- Gainesville, Fl. -- St. Patrick's Church -- Tampa, Fl. -- Arrest of Mary Peabody -- Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- Civil Rights Rally -- Civil Rights March -- Clash Between civil rights Workers and Segregationists -- Klan March -- Klan Rally -- Night March -- St. Augustine Quadricentennial Celebration"],"dc_format":["application/pdf"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/CNE/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":null,"dcterms_subject":["Civil rights--United States--Florida"],"dcterms_title":["Michael Gannon : Transcribed Interview"],"dcterms_type":["Text"],"dcterms_provenance":["Proctor Library"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://civilrights.flagler.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p15415coll1/id/1050"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":["Flagler College is not the copyright owner for this item, nor can the College provide a copy of this item. Please contact the contributing organization to obtain a copy and permission to reproduce this item."],"dcterms_medium":["transcripts"],"dcterms_extent":["39 pages"],"dlg_subject_personal":["Gannon, Michael, 1945-","Colburn, David R.","Brock, James, 1922-2007","Cafaro, Raymond","Hayling, Robert Bagner","Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 1908-1973","Kennedy, John F.","King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968","Lynch, Connie (Charles Conley), 1912-1972","Manucy, Holsted, 1919-1995","Mathis, Charles C., Jr.","Norris, Hardgrove","Peabody, Mary E. (Mary Elizabeth), 1891-1981","Walker, Frankie","Seymour, Charles","Shelley, Joseph, 1915-2007","Smathers, George A. (George Armistead), 1913-2007","Stoner, Jesse Benjamin, 1924-2005","Wolfe, H.E.","Burns, J.P.","Hurley, Joseph","Bailey, John, Sr."],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"ffc_crlsa_p16000coll5-106","title":"Paul Good Recordings : Tape 2 : Transcript","collection_id":"ffc_crlsa","collection_title":"Civil Rights Library of St. Augustine","dcterms_contributor":null,"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Florida, 28.75054, -82.5001"],"dcterms_creator":null,"dc_date":["1900/2022"],"dcterms_description":["This is the transcript for the second in the series of journalist Paul Good's tape recordings in St. Augustine during the summer of 1964. This tape consists of six parts: 1. The singing of a freedom song (00:00:00). 2. A mass rally at a church that includes speeches from an unidentified speaker, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Andrew Young (00:01:36). 3. Recording of night march sounds (00:12:30). 4. Paul Good interviewing protesters (00:20:00). 5. Brief of singing of \"We Shall Overcome\" (00:20:27). 6. Paul Good interviewing protesters (00:21:05).","Paul Good Recordings : Transcript for Tape 2 Part 1: Singing of a freedom song (00:00:00) [The first part of this tape from 00:00:00 to 00:01:35 consists of a group singing a freedom song]. Part 2: Mass Rally at a Church (00:01:36) Unidentified Speaker: [Unintelligible]…that makes it possible that we can love in spite of hate. And makes it possible that we can keep moving even when we're knocked down. And make it possible that even those within the community that can't do one thing can do another. That they are able to back us up [unintelligible] kind of philosophy we don't have to depend upon a few experts in a classroom or in a courtroom, that we can do the job of freedom for ourselves. And it doesn't matter how young you are or how old you are, you can march on anyway. I have a little boy that is just beginning to walk around good and my wife said to me, I ask how he is and she says, “He'll be ready for the picket line in about four months.” It is the kind of truth that you will that is not for Negroes alone, the truth never gives itself to one [unintelligible] speaks to the souls of people. Love, nonviolent love gives us the direction that we seek and moves us on to the next level of the movement. For it is love of which we have begun to the answer the questions of segregationists and white Americans. Let us listen now, white Americans always said to us, \"What do Negroes want?\" And a few years ago we said, \"We want what the law provides.\" And we were answering with the legalistic understanding. And so we, and then this doesn't excite us anymore does it? And so when they ask us now, “What do we want?” [Unintelligible] has the answer. He says, “What have you got?” Yes sir, what do you want, what do you got? Now I think this is where we are now: an equal rights movement. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the great understanding of nonviolent love looks at the hearts of those that attacked us and sees something far deeper. And when this man says to us, “what do you want,”he is asking us to give him the answer to his own question. And with love we can answer. When he says, “what do you want,” he’s saying, “help me, save me from the dilemma that I'm in as well as the dilemma that Negro America is in.” Martin Luther King: My fellow citizens of St. Augustine, I need not have to remind you tonight that that is a magnificent drama taking place on the stage of American history. And it is so interesting and somewhat ironic that the jails of the south which for so long have been considered symbols of segregation have now been transformed into instruments of social salvation. And it is a rich and rewarding [unintelligible] protest. But the thing that makes me happy is that you have yourselves together with such dignity and such discipline. It was beautiful to watch. You prove to be that kind of spiritual anvil [unintelligible] I mean physical hammer in this community. We go on with the faith that our own suffering is redemption and as a result of your suffering last night I'm sure that many people will come to see the need to work harder to solve this problem in our country and certainly this problem in St. Augustine. Now we face the moment of great decision. Now we face the moment when we must put on our walking shoes and get ready to make a definite witness. And I want to say to you that we have an opportunity and a challenge to fill up the jails of St. Augustine, Florida and I will not rest until we are able to make this kind of witness in this city, so that the power structure downtown will have to say, “We can’t stop this movement and the only way to deal with it is to give these people what we owe them and what their God given rights and their constitutional rights demand.” This is what we are insisting and this is what we'll get. [Cheering] Now I will call for Andrew Young. Andrew Young: The power of love can always happen in a nonviolent movement, but tonight must be an example of what must always happen in a nonviolent movement. That is whenever there is violence, the only recourse we have is to respond in greater number and with stronger determination than ever before. Now for a hundred years, they’ve attempted to frighten Negroes by the threat of violence. Now tonight we have some assurances from the sheriffand from a representative from the governor’s office that there will be protection. That there will be police protection but I for one want to witness to you and I think you can witness back to me that we have been protected all along, that many a night when the policemen were not anywhere around there was protection in our midst. That many a night when blows rained down on our heads and when kicks went into our stomachs, there was protection. I think that one of the most amazing things to me this morning when I woke up was that I hardly had an ache and pain on me anywhere. I remembered that I remember somebody kicking me in the stomach and I felt around looking for a sore place and there wasn’t any there. I did have a little knot on my head but it wasn’t too bad either, but what was more important was that there was a good feeling in my heart. There was a good feeling in my heart because of the way you acted and there was a good feeling in my heart because last night I for one witnessed the power of nonviolence in one of the hardest hearts that this city has to offer. As we crossed the street the first time, I saw a young fellow who hauled off and hit me. What happened when I got down on the ground, I don't know but he was one of those that was over me kicking. I got up and we walked down to the next corner and we attempted to cross and there he was again. There was a policeman standing right between him and a friend of his and he hauled off and hit me in my stomach and when I bent over he intended to kick me in my stomach. As we stopped, and when we didn’t fall even though both Reverend Hill and I were hit by a fellow standing by him with blackjacks, you continued to follow us and we walked together. Down the side of the park and there at the foot of the park there was the same guy waiting for us again. And we walked up to him and we didn't break a stride and we looked at him and continued to smile and I was waiting to get hit again and he just barely kind of pushed me aside a little bit. And we turned around and we told the people in the line to pass it back, “Don't anybody touch him.” And I know that something happened in the heart of this young fellow, that he was a fellow that was not any bigger than me, the kind of fellow that before I heard of before Martin Luther King, I would enjoy beating up his mouth and throwing [unintelligible]. And yet, that wouldn't have done any good, because I would have only made an eternal enemy. I would have only made a man so angry with me that he and I could never have anything to do and the chances are we would have had to fight until one of us was nearly destroyed. And yet tonight and in the days that follow I am sure, that just as Paul suffered a conversion after his experience in watching Steven martyred, I am sure that in the heart of this young man, some of the same spiritual turmoil is taking place right now. And not only for him but for the whole city of St. Augustine. And so if we turn back now, if we shrink in fear, if we give into the Devil in this time, then can we go back to a hundred years more of slavery. But if we stand together, and if we stand together strongly and spiritually and non-violent, we shall overcome in St. Augustine. We shall overcome in the state of Florida and we shall overcome in the United States of America and St. Augustine will be not only the nation’s oldest city, but one of its most democratic cities and I look forward to the day when I can meet this young man. As Fred Shuttlesworth said, what he's fighting for is he's looking forward to the day when he can sit down and shake hands with the Klansman that beat him with chains. And I think the day is not far off when some of these same people who are angry with us will smile at us and awkwardly come up to us and want to apologize. And so tonight as we march out we’re marching for freedom for ourselves, but we're marching for the freedom of this nation, and the freedom of all these misguided white people that, that have never seen Negroes as children of God. And so every man and woman and child tonight who considers himself a child of God under my boss, the time is now when we will stand up and bare witness and line up outside the church and march downtown. Part 3: Recording of Night March (00:12:30) [This is mostly the sounds of people walking around, some jeering from segregationists, and dogs barking.] Part 4: Paul Good Interviewing Protesters (00:20:00) Charlie: Yeah, I'm thirteen. I’m thirteen. Paul Good: Charlie, could you tell me what happened? Charlie:Well, when they was down there they threw bricks and all and they hit a white lady in the back and when I was fi’n to go start walking to get in line and they hit me on my ankle. Paul Good: Does it hurt much? Charlie: No, it don't hurt that much. Paul Good: This your first march Charlie? Charlie: No, I've been in several marches. Paul Good: Do you want to keep on marching Charlie? Charlie: Yes sir. Paul Good: Say that again. Charlie: Yes sir. Part 5: Brief Recording of “We Shall Overcome” (00:20:27) Part 6: Paul Good Interviewing Protesters (00:21:05) Paul Good: Can you talk? Can you talk and tell us what happened? Unknown Speaker: I was walking past the front of the flea market, when a white boy look around and next thing I knew he hit me.Paul Good: With his fist? Unknown speaker: Yeah, his fist. Paul Good: In the stomach? Unknown Speaker: No, he hit me right on the side of my jaw and he knocked me on the side of the [unintelligible]. Paul Good: Thank you. Paul Good: Can you tell us what happened? Unknown Speaker 2: The guy hit me on the ankle. Paul Good: With what? Unknown Speaker 2: With a stick. Paul Good: What, one of the police or one of the white men down there? Unknown Speaker 2: I think it was one of the policemen. Paul Good: Did the police come to arrest you? Unknown speaker 2: No, they didn't do nothing. Paul Good:Reverend England, what happened to you? Reverend England: I, they didn’t let me go, they said I couldn’t go tonight, but Gene Dawson got it. Paul Good: Where is he now? Reverend England: He's inside. Paul Good: You want to tell us what happened? Reverend Dawson: Well I, when I went to turn on King, next come a truck load of white boys on the truck. Some was driving, some was on the back of the truck, had a .22 pistol or .22 rifle, either one and shot me right in the windshield. Pow! Paul Good: Did it hit you? Tell us what happened. Did it hit you? Reverend Dawson: Yeah, the bullet really hit the windshield. Unknown Reporter: Where’s your wife? Reverend Dawson: That ain't my wife, it’s my sister. Paul Good: Did you report it to the police? Reverend Dawson: Yeah, I told 'em while ago. Paul Good: Did you describe the car to them?Reverend Dawson: It was on a pickup truck, looked like a Ford pickup. Paul Good: Thank you. Recording ends at 22:59.","Assault on Andrew Young during Night March -- Civil Rights March -- Civil Rights Rally -- Clash Between civil rights Workers and Segregationists -- Night March"],"dc_format":["application/pdf"],"dcterms_identifier":null,"dcterms_language":null,"dcterms_publisher":null,"dc_relation":null,"dc_right":["http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/CNE/1.0/"],"dcterms_is_part_of":null,"dcterms_subject":["Civil rights--United States--Florida"],"dcterms_title":["Paul Good Recordings : Tape 2 : Transcript"],"dcterms_type":["Text"],"dcterms_provenance":["Proctor Library"],"edm_is_shown_by":null,"edm_is_shown_at":["http://civilrights.flagler.edu/cdm/ref/collection/p16000coll5/id/106"],"dcterms_temporal":null,"dcterms_rights_holder":null,"dcterms_bibliographic_citation":null,"dlg_local_right":["Flagler College is not the copyright owner for this item, nor can the College provide a copy of this item. Please contact the contributing organization to obtain a copy and permission to reproduce this item."],"dcterms_medium":["transcripts"],"dcterms_extent":["8 pages"],"dlg_subject_personal":["King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968","Young, Andrew, 1932-","England, William","Dawson, Eugene"],"dcterms_subject_fast":null,"fulltext":null},{"id":"wgbh_tdcr_079","title":"Sheyann Webb","collection_id":"wgbh_tdcr","collection_title":"Teachers' Domain Civil Rights Special Collection","dcterms_contributor":["Webb, Sheyann","Washington University (Saint Louis, Mo.). Libraries. Special Collections"],"dcterms_spatial":["United States, Alabama, Dallas County, 32.32597, -87.10648","United States, Alabama, Dallas County, Selma, 32.40736, -87.0211"],"dcterms_creator":null,"dc_date":["1860/1965"],"dcterms_description":["Eight-year-old Sheyann Webb was among the youngest activists to demonstrate during the Civil Rights movement. In this interview, Webb recalls her decision to participate in the 1965 voting-rights march from Selma, Alabama, the resistance she encountered from her parents, and the violent force used by local officials to stop the march.","Major funding for this project is provided by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. 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