“Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.”
—Bondei proverb
I had just been arrested again when I heard about the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in September 1963. For a moment, I felt paralyzed with disbelief. As much as we’d been going through, I still couldn’t believe the people who opposed us could go to such lengths, bombing a church and killing innocent children.
Theater demonstrations had brought me to jail again. By now, mass demonstrations were becoming a more common sight across the United States. In addition to the demonstrations in Birmingham and the March on Washington, thousands of people were taking part in marches and pickets all over the South. Injuries against protesters were mounting, and jails were being filled to capacity.
In Tallahassee, students returning to campus after the summer break turned out in impressive numbers to be arrested in theater demonstrations, in wave after wave. First, on Saturday, September 14, about 200 of us went to the Florida Theatre to protest the theater’s segregation policies. I’d had a wisdom tooth extracted that morning, but I went straight from the dentist’s office to the Florida Theatre. Even though I never got my painkiller prescription filled, I didn’t give my tooth another thought.
This time, the movie showing was The Day Mars Invaded Earth, and I’m certain it must have felt that way to many white onlookers who gazed at the thronging crowd of Negroes. A photograph of that day clearly shows me and John at that protest. I am wearing my dark glasses, as usual, and there is a very determined expression on my face, and a crowd of students is behind me, clapping and singing in front of the theater. Many of the students there, like FAMU business and education sophomore Doris Rutledge (who would later become a lifelong friend), brought money to purchase a movie ticket, then remained to protest when refused. When police tried to disperse us based on the injunction issued the spring before against large-scale protests, some of the students opted to leave, but 157 of us were arrested, including me, Doris Rutledge, Rubin Kenon, and Calvin Bess. Doris has told me how a police officer struck the inside of her left leg with his nightstick while she was being herded into a police van. Nothing was broken, she says, but it was so painful that she was afraid she might lose the leg, and the bruise lingered a long time. She suspects that her leg never healed properly from the blow; she had never had leg problems before, but her left leg remained weak and has thrown her off balance in the years since. “I’m thankful I have this leg,” she told us at a civil rights reunion at my home in 1997, surrounded by activists who had stories of their own to tell. “It is a memory of trying to go someplace where everyone should have had a right to participate: going to a theater. I was beaten by a cop because that was all I wanted to do.”1
Word of the arrests spread back to campus, and 450 students came to the jail to protest. Of those, ninety-one were arrested for disturbing the peace when they marched near the jail. The following morning, the day of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, 250 students returned to the jail to protest. Most of them left after Rev. C. K. Steele, Rev. E. G. Evans, Rev. David Brooks, and some Florida A&M deans pleaded with them to avoid arrest, but a hundred students refused to leave, sitting calmly on the ground or praying, and they were arrested. The total number of students arrested in those two days was 348.2
Tallahassee’s involved adults had their hands full with the mass protests, and it was considered a crisis in the city. Rev. Steele, remember, had been supportive of our direct action protests in the past, but clearly he believed our actions at that time were becoming too radical, resulting in expensive arrests. Some of our other adult friends in the community also believed we should have adhered to the judge’s injunction, but we felt that our willingness to face arrest would accomplish more than programmed demonstrations of fewer than twenty students.
The decision was controversial, since the split between the more conservative NAACP and organizations like SNCC and CORE was growing at that time, and we had to rely many times on the NAACP and its lawyers to help us get our students out of jail. (One of the NAACP lawyers who was often there for us was Charles Wilson of Pensacola.) But Miss Young, FAMU’s assistant registrar, understood. She made pleas on our behalf, telling NAACP officials, “These students, they want to do something. They’re daring, and they want to do something, and this is what they did.”
On October 3, Judge Ben Willis handed down his convictions. He was hardest on me and Rubin because we were considered the organizers. We were sentenced to $1,000 fines or six months in jail. The others who had been arrested at the theater were divided into groups. Those who had participated in the May theater demonstration, like Doris Rutledge, were fined $500 or three months in jail. A third group was sentenced to $250 or forty-five days in jail. The remaining 119 students received suspended sentences because Judge Willis believed they had been victims of “faulty leadership.” He warned them, “You are not forgiven.… You are given the opportunity to prove you can conduct yourselves in a lawful and peaceful manner. You have many opportunities to serve your race, your community, your state, and your nation, all of them dignified and peaceful.”3
Immediately, thirty-seven of the students decided they would go to jail rather than pay their fines, including Doris. It was a difficult decision, but Rubin and I decided we could do more good if we did not spend that time in jail. Not only did we hope to remain active as organizers, but we both were scheduled to begin student teaching in the field. I had an internship in Jacksonville, I was finally scheduled to graduate in January, and I really wanted to prove that activists could take part in demonstrations and complete their studies. But where would we find the money to help get so many students out of jail? CORE, as usual, had very little.
Miss Young and fired FAMU professor Richard Haley worked frantically to raise money, spending late nights at the CORE office on Floral Street waiting for telephone calls from the national NAACP office, the national CORE office, and any other organizations that would hear their pleas. Very late one night while they worked, Miss Young recalled, there was a knock at the door. They both looked at each other, nervous.
“Haley told me to go in the back, in the mimeograph room. He said, ‘Go back there and unlock that back door, so if there’s trouble, you get out of here. I’m going to answer the door.’ It was just that dangerous during that time,” Miss Young said. When Mr. Haley opened that door, he got one of the surprises of his life: Two white Tallahassee residents, a banker named George Lewis II and an entrepreneur named James Shaw, were standing outside the office in the dead of night. The men gave them $7,000 in cash.
“They didn’t want it to be known,” Miss Young said. In fact, I discovered later, it was such a secret that even Mr. Lewis’s wife, a very liberal woman named Clifton Lewis, knew nothing about her husband’s donation at the time. “He might have had to borrow it, or he might have had to sell stock. I don’t know what he did. And I didn’t know he did it, but I sure am glad he did,” Mrs. Lewis told me years later, when we interviewed her not long after her husband died.
Despite being firmly established in Tallahassee’s white power structure, at the time of the theater demonstrations George Lewis had recently suffered his own setbacks because of his political beliefs and activism. Mr. Lewis had chaired a committee that released a document entitled the Report on the Florida Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, which severely criticized state officials and the lack of civil rights progress in Florida, comparing the state’s practices to those in Mississippi and Alabama. As a result of his position on that committee, Mr. Lewis was removed as president of Lewis State Bank, the family bank. (He was named chairman of the board, but that was a non-voting position, and therefore one with less power.) CORE had its account at Lewis State Bank, and it was one of the very few institutions that was willing to lend Negroes money in times of need. But on that night, George Lewis and James Shaw had come through with an outright gift, not a loan.
“I’ll never forgot that night,” Miss Young told me. “We sat there after they were gone. I said, ‘Haley, there’s a God somewhere. There’s a God somewhere. There’s a God somewhere.’ ”
One thing many people forget when they think in terms of the civil rights movement is that there were many whites, as well as Negroes, who put their lives and livelihoods at risk. All of us worked together, whether it was the white FSU students who bought movie tickets for Negroes to try to gain entrance, white students who went to jail, or the white community members who gave time and money to help the cause. But you see, I never simply saw it as a black cause, because any system in place to oppress blacks ultimately oppresses everyone. I have always believed that none of us can be free until all of us are free. Many Tallahassee whites had learned that lesson during the 1960 jail-in, when they were not permitted to visit us to show their support. The white ministers and rabbis who came to Tallahassee during the 1961 Freedom Ride learned it when they were trying to order food at the municipal airport, and they later served jail time for that “offense.” James and Lillian Shaw (who later became two of Tananarive’s godparents) had always understood the oppressive nature of discrimination, and so had George and Clifton Lewis.
George Lewis II was president of Lewis State Bank and chairman of the Florida Advisory Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and the Lewises were both very involved. In May 1963, for example, Clifton Lewis participated in what CORE called the “Courtroom Project,” where whites purposely sat in the all-Negro section of the courtroom to protest segregation. They had long-standing community connections: George Lewis had been the college roommate of C. Farris Bryant, who later became a segregationist governor of Florida. The Lewises’ activism was a cause of concern among some whites in Tallahassee. They were once warned by a newspaper reporter that their telephones were wiretapped because of their involvement. Asked to describe one of the most frightening experiences of her involvement, Clifton Lewis, who at eighty-two, at this writing, is still politically active in Tallahassee, remembered being at home alone at dusk when she got a telephone call from an acquaintance. “He said, ‘Mrs. Lewis, are you there by yourself?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘You have a lot of glass in that house, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ ” Mrs. Lewis said—the caller was aware that her secluded Frank Lloyd Wright home had an entire wall made of glass. “And he said, ‘Well, I’ve just gotten the grapevine from Gainesville. You better get down in that cellar. They’re headed your way with a bomb from Gainesville. I’ve just called to tell you.’ ” Then the phone clicked off.
“I didn’t have a car,” Mrs. Lewis says. “I was here by myself. I don’t know where George was, but thank heavens there were no children here. And we didn’t get a bomb. But that was very scary.”
Their young son Ben, too, paid a price because he attended Leon County High School after it finally integrated in the fall of 1963. In part, Ben was targeted because everyone knew his father was on the Civil Rights Advisory Committee, and in part because of his own beliefs. When three Negro students were scheduled to attend the school, school administrators warned the Negro students’ families that they could not take physical education or have physical contact with white students, and that they should avoid the bathrooms because their safety could not be guaranteed. As for the white students, the principal told them they should ignore the Negro students. No one was to speak to a Negro. No one was to smile at a Negro.4
In the cafeteria, if a Negro student tried to sit at the table, the white students got up and moved, and young Ben Lewis didn’t agree with that. He tried to do his small part to make the Negro students feel welcome, his mother says. “Ben would go sit at that table with them. But he wouldn’t talk to them or smile,” she says. Still, that small gesture was enough to arouse white students’ ire. “He was afraid for his life to go to the restroom at Leon High, because that’s where they would get him,” Mrs. Lewis recalls. As Ben was leaving school to walk home one day, a car pulled up beside him and four young white men jumped out. Much to Ben’s horror, they forced him into their car at gunpoint. After the car screeched away with Ben held in the backseat, the car passed a group of Negroes standing beside the street. The captors rolled the back window down. “Go on, say it, you nigger lover! Call them niggers. Call them coons. That’s what they are. Say it!” they ordered. Reluctantly, but honestly afraid that the gun might fire even accidentally, Ben did as he was told. “Niggers!” he screamed out the window.
Only then did the young men let him go. Ben didn’t tell his mother that story until he was in his forties, after his father had died. But his parents did know about another incident, when Ben’s car got stuck in the sand at Alligator Point, a secluded spot where he’d gone to “spoon” with his girlfriend, his mother says, and some white men beat him up and destroyed his car. His date, luckily, was unharmed.
Despite the threats to their family, like the Steeles, the Lewises always stayed involved. George Lewis died in 1996 at the age of eighty-two, before I could interview him for this book, but he and his family were more unsung soldiers in the civil rights cause.
In the fall of 1963, only hours before the theater demonstration and the resulting arrests, some white students from the University of Florida in Gainesville, 150 miles southeast of Tallahassee, came to town. One was a tall woman with white-blond hair named Judith (Judy) Benninger, another was her boyfriend, a curly-haired man named Mike Geison, and the third was a lanky, pleasant-featured young man named Daniel (Dan) Harmeling. After spending the summer working with the Ocala NAACP branch and Bettie Wright with Dunnellon CORE, Judy and the others had come to Tallahassee to learn leadership skills and to take part in activities. “I was opening up my paper at least once a week, or once every two weeks, and seeing yet another demonstration or action Pat was involved in, so I actually went looking for her,” Judy told me and Tananarive in an interview in 1990, explaining how we had met. At the time we interviewed her, Judy was very ill with breast cancer, and her friends had assembled a video crew to document this brave woman’s place in Florida history, both in civil rights and women’s rights.
Judy had taken the lessons she learned in civil rights to the women’s movement, coauthoring a paper with Beverly Jones in 1968 entitled “Towards a Female Liberation Movement,” which has been widely anthologized and is credited with helping to launch the women’s liberation movement. She cofounded Gainesville Women’s Liberation in 1968, the first women’s liberation group in the South. She also became another of Tananarive’s godmothers. (Tananarive had several, since so many people I knew from the Movement wanted to feel like a part of our daughter’s life.) “I was sort of pushing myself on Pat, and following her around trying to learn from her, and also trying to get to know her because I had never seen a woman lead like that. I had spent the whole summer watching men lead and do a very good job of it, but there was something for me about the fact that she was a woman. And she was also, as far as I was concerned, the best that I had seen, male or female, in terms of really teaching as well as mobilizing,” Judy said.5
A demonstration was planned the very day Judy arrived in Tallahassee, so the group from the University of Florida got a very sudden, unexpected initiation from us. As Dan recalls, he and his twin brother, Jim, had recently started attending NAACP meetings in Ocala, and Dan had come to Tallahassee to get even more deeply involved. Tallahassee was an eye-opener to him, Dan told me later. “In Gainesville, when we would have ten or fifteen people, with each person who joined the picket line, we’d feel just this enormous sense of strength. Now we were in a group that had literally hundreds of people willing to demonstrate,” he says.6
The next thing he knew, the demonstrators in front of the Florida Theatre were being warned that they were about to be arrested. Immediately after the warning, before Dan could make a conscious decision, he realized he was being herded toward a police van. Dan hadn’t planned to get arrested in Tallahassee, but once he realized he was getting arrested, he wanted to show his solidarity with the other students. Because there were so few white demonstrators, there was room for Dan at the Leon County jail instead of the fairgrounds, which was where I’d been sent with many other Negroes. He was jailed along with two other white male participants, Florida State University students Steve Jones and a soft-spoken young man with a slight build named Frank O’Neil, who would soon take my place as chairman of Tallahassee CORE. Once he was inside his cell, Dan says, the sobering reality of what had happened finally hit him. “Realizing I was being locked up, I just felt this overwhelming sense of being a prisoner,” he says. “All these gates were things I couldn’t open, and I was in a place where I was being held—whether I willed to be there or not. I remember waking up all night long listening to that clanging of the doors as they brought more people in.”7
Neither Dan nor Judy had ever been jailed before that day, and neither had many of the other participants from FAMU. Some had taken part in the May protests, but others had only become involved as a result of recent mass meetings and rallies. John and I had tried to get the word out that arrest was a possibility, explaining that CORE did not have the funds to bail people out of jail, but some of the students who participated had not been present at those informational sessions, unfortunately. As I mentioned earlier, this became a real bone of contention with groups like the NAACP, because frantic parents deluged the NAACP with telephone calls, expecting to get their children out of jail. As far as the NAACP was concerned, CORE whipped the students into an emotional frenzy, but then took no responsibility for them. Besides, the NAACP had long held that courtroom action, not direct action, was the means to equal rights, and we students were considered too unruly.
Judy’s mother, Ernestine Benninger, had been raised in the Baha’i faith, and she believes she passed on that religion’s principle of equality among the races to her daughter. Still, she was completely unprepared for the 2:00 A.M. telephone call that awakened her and her husband in Gainesville. The man on the phone was Dr. Marshall Jones, and he was a faculty member at the University of Florida who was very involved in that campus’s student movement. He told them that Judy had been arrested in Tallahassee and that she was in jail, but he gave no other details. “Our first reaction was ‘Oh my God!’ ” Mrs. Benninger recalled. She hadn’t known her daughter was in Tallahassee, much less why. She and her husband called the Leon County jail immediately, only to be told it was closed until 9:00 A.M. “So we lay there like boards until about 6:00 or 6:30, and got up and went up there. And she was really scared, because that was a Saturday night, and the women in the jail knew why these girls were there, and they really harassed them about what they were doing and why they were doing it.”8
Judy’s arrest reached the newspaper in Gainesville, to her family’s mortification, but they were relieved to discover that Judy’s name was misspelled. Still, some people her family had considered friends simply had nothing to do with them after that. Later, Judy’s father, Lawrence Benninger, told his wife and daughter that he’d been in line for a vice presidency at the University of Florida, where he was a professor, but he was withdrawn from consideration after Judy’s arrest.
Judy was among the students from the theater demonstration who chose to stay in jail rather than paying her fine after the trial. After their convictions, Judy and the three other white women arrested at the demonstration—including FSU students Rosemary Dudley, Mary Ann Stevens, and Elaine Simon—were tormented in jail. The guards promised that any prisoners who beat them up would be granted favors, so at night two women in a nearby cell tied razor blades to broomsticks and jabbed through the bars, stabbing at the civil rights demonstrators from a distance. Judy and the others were forced to crowd together at the edge of their bunks to avoid the weapons.9
Judy stayed in jail for a week after her trial before her parents came and paid her fine to free her. She later told me she was furious when her parents paid the fine, calling their act “unforgivable.” She and others had agreed they would stay in jail until everyone could get out. “A lot of people had gotten out by that time, but I felt that the white people should stay until the end. I was very embarrassed that my parents had done that,” Judy said.
Dan Harmeling, Steve Jones, and Frank O’Neil also chose to go to jail rather than pay their fines, a decision that became frightening right away. As soon as they were escorted to the cell block, the other white inmates began screaming to the guards, “Let them in! We’ll take care of them!” Their stay after their initial arrest had been without incident, but the mood had changed drastically. Dan recalls that Steve Jones insisted, “We’re not going to go in there. If we go in there, all we’ll get is beaten up.” The guard agreed. Instead of locking them in the regular cells, he took them to what he called a “security area,” which was solitary confinement. Dan and Steve Jones were placed in one cell, which Dan says was like “a closet,” and Frank O’Neil was alone in the other. Inside those cells were no lights.
“Our food was brought to us and put through a slot in the door, and then if we wanted to see what we were eating, what was on our plates, we had to hold our food out of the slot and then look as the dim light shone on the food,” Dan recalls. They got no exercise because they were not allowed to leave their cell. They had only beds, a commode, and a small sink for drinking water. After five days, they agreed to pay their fines.
Doris Rutledge, a Negro student at FAMU, was determined to stay in jail, but she too could remain only a little more than a week because her mother paid her fine, and she was forced to leave. So many people were in jail, Doris recalls, that a Negro woman locked up with them complained that police had gone out and arrested her just so she could cook for all the inmates. To protest her incarceration, Doris staged a hunger strike during most of her stay.
There was one point of relief: Word circulated among them that higher-ups had given orders that no harm should come to any of them, in no small part, I’m certain, because of the fear of bad publicity. Still, some of the civil rights prisoners did not just adjust well to being in jail, and Doris remembers hearing one woman crying. Impatient with the woman’s tears, Doris brashly announced, “I don’t feel sorry for anybody except Ruby McCollum!”
To Negroes in Florida, Ruby McCollum was a legendary example of how a Negro woman had been wronged by a racist system. The noted Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston had written about Ruby McCollum’s trial for the Pittsburgh Courier in 1952, and my family had followed that trial closely.
On August 3, 1952, Mrs. McCollum, a Negro woman from Live Oak, Florida, whose husband had built a small fortune running numbers, shot a white doctor dead. The doctor, Clifford LeRoy Adams, was a popular man planning to run for governor. She never denied killing him, and prosecutors claimed she’d done it over a doctor bill she didn’t want to pay, but the case had never felt right to those of us who heard about it. It came out later that Mrs. McCollum had been sentenced to die without having the opportunity to tell her version of what had happened: that she and Adams had a long-standing affair, he was extorting money from her, he beat her, she’d already had one child by him and was pregnant with another, and she had reason to believe he was planning to kill her. (Mrs. McCollum lost Adams’s second baby in jail.) Live Oak’s white establishment was desperate to keep their relationship a secret, so those details were not permitted in court, just as Mrs. McCollum’s history of mental problems had never been brought out. After a long fight by journalists and her attorney, Mrs. McCollum’s death sentence was overturned and she was committed to a mental hospital.10
When Doris said she didn’t feel sorry for anyone but Ruby McCollum, the other protesters got the message and grew silent. At that instant, Doris noticed a quiet woman she’d known from the campus, Kay McCollum. Doris had a sudden realization: This was Ruby McCollum’s daughter. She had never made the connection before, but she suddenly recognized Kay’s name from the book she had read about Ruby McCollum. Doris and the soft-spoken young woman made eye contact. “I apologized to her, and she said there was no need to,” Doris says. “That was a real different kind of experience for me, because there was just so much pain and history. In my mind, even though I thought I had experienced some kind of discrimination by not going to the theater, these people have destroyed her life.”
Kay McCollum, in her willingness to go to jail to change the system that helped destroy her family, was taking her life back. Maybe, to her, that was a way she and her mother would both be free.
In the fall of 1963, I was assigned to a student internship in social studies at a high school in Jacksonville, where I was ironically assigned to civics teacher Rutledge Pearson, who happened to be the state NAACP president. Mr. Pearson believed in having his students see their government at work, and consequently my first official activity was to accompany him downtown with his civics classes to Mayor Haydon Burns’s office. (Burns later became governor of Florida.) I had been in Jacksonville only about a week when I was called back to Tallahassee, where I was notified that Rubin Kenon and I had been indefinitely suspended from FAMU.
The Board of Control wanted us out, and Dr. Gore bowed to their pressure. Although I wish he had been stronger, I have tried to appreciate, over the years, what a difficult position he was in. It was bad enough that after our arrest Dr. Gore told the press, in a statement showcased on the front page of the Tallahassee Democrat, “What [the students] have been doing is a waste of their time and ours and is not in the best interest of our institution or of the students.”11 Giving lip service to the power structure was one thing, but now he was interfering with my ability to complete my studies. And I was so close to finally getting my degree! Rubin, too, was crushed. “It was a thing that broke out tears,” he says.
Rutledge Pearson, the state NAACP president and my student teaching director, was also outraged. He wrote a letter to President Gore, stating, “It is not our intention to idly stand by while these two young Americans are caused to suffer for rebellion against a system of living which is not of their making.” He then threatened if we were not reinstated to launch a statewide boycott of FAMU’s famed annual Orange Blossom Classic parade in Miami. He sent copies of his letter to both President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, but Dr. Gore was not swayed.12
Unfortunately, Rubin actually suffered a nervous breakdown. Soon after learning he had been suspended from school, all the stress of the previous months caught up with him. He committed himself to a mental hospital in northern Florida, but during his two-month stay, he never lost sight of his goal of equality. When he wanted to visit the institution’s library, he was told there was one library for white patients and one for Negro patients, and he was enraged. He organized patients into pickets to protest the segregated libraries. “I’ll never forget, the administrator was a Harvard graduate, and he said, ‘I want to help you get out of here. What can we do to get you out of here?’ ” he recalls.
Rubin’s hospitalization was very hard on his mother. “My mother cried all the time. She would come to see me and start crying,” he says, pointing out that she had remained calm during the large-scale protests, when he felt the danger was much greater. “And I would wonder why she was crying, because I was okay. Now you start crying!” he says.
I can only imagine how Rubin’s mother felt. At this point, with more bombings and attacks against civil rights activists in the news, my own mother probably would have been happy to see me leave behind my life as a civil rights activist the way Priscilla had after the police officer kicked her. But Mother never wavered in her support, and after I poured out my heart to her on the telephone, she sent me an inspirational postcard printed with the saying, “TOUGH TIMES NEVER LAST … BUT TOUGH PEOPLE DO!” On the back of the postcard, she wrote her typical encouragement, Have Hope and remember the saying on this note—there are better days ahead.
Rubin and I tried to fight through legal means. Right away, Tobias Simon filed a temporary restraining order in U.S. District Court to try to enjoin the Board of Control, Dr. Gore, and FAMU from carrying out the suspension. A month later, a federal judge in Tallahassee dismissed our lawsuit, refusing to allow me or Rubin to return to FAMU. Some FAMU students showed their support for us by staging a “sleep-in” outside Dr. Gore’s home, but to little effect. FAMU’s faculty senate met and issued a vote of confidence in Dr. Gore, supporting our suspension. For now, at least, Rubin and I were out of school.
I had at least one bit of good news: On November 15, 1963, John officially became a member of the Florida bar and a practicing attorney. Since we were no longer eligible for student housing, John and I rented our first real house at 3108 Galimore Drive in Tallahassee. We got a second German shepherd we named “Freedom.”
One afternoon in November, I was at home having a rare moment of relaxation, watching As the World Turns, when a newscaster interrupted with shocking news from Dallas: President Kennedy had been shot. It was November 22, 1963. I sat for a moment in disbelief, then I called John in St. Augustine, Florida, where he was defending his first official client. We could hardly believe what had happened. I held my breath, praying that the president was still alive, that he would survive. Soon the word was official: President Kennedy was dead.
President Kennedy’s actions on the civil rights front had often been too slow for our liking, but we had held out hope that he would carry out his promises to push through civil rights legislation. Like many Negro activists in Florida, I’d written President Kennedy a letter that June, asking him not to grant federal money to a 400th birthday commemoration scheduled in 1965 in St. Augustine because it would signify “federal support to this celebration of four hundred years of slavery and segregation.”
I was stunned. I could not believe it. It was pure chaos. In my lifetime, this was the first time a president had been killed while he was serving in the nation’s highest office. I knew politically who would succeed him, but John and I both had the same thought in our minds: What would happen to the nation and the struggle now? We realized how many others felt the same way as our phone continued to ring for weeks and weeks, with callers asking that same question. Although President Kennedy had moved much more slowly than I had wanted him to, a lot of us thought he was a good friend, and that this possibly would be the end of an era when we would have access to the president and to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who dispatched federal help in times of need. The tone for justice had been set from the top.
The day after the assassination, November 23, I received a telegram from James Farmer, who was at that time the national director of CORE. (In 1961, Jim Robinson had been removed as CORE’s leader, in no small part because the organization decided it should have a Negro director.)13 Farmer’s note really captured my feelings. It read, The assassination of a president is a tragedy not only for his family but for all Americans.… We believe this assassination was the result of the president’s efforts to bring about a more democratic America and we hope that this nation will rededicate itself to those ideals of his. Our prayers go out to Lyndon Johnson in the difficult days ahead.
And the days ahead would be difficult, indeed.
John had been scheduled to appear in court the same day President Kennedy was assassinated, and he knew something was wrong when he arrived at the St. Augustine office of his client, a fiery Negro dentist named Robert Hayling. He found Dr. Hayling red-eyed and teary.
When we spoke on the telephone the day of the assassination, John told me that not a single one of the prosecutor’s witnesses—some of whom he believed were Ku Klux Klan members—appeared in court after news of the president’s death. “Maybe the reason the prosecutor’s witnesses didn’t show up is because Kennedy’s assassination shocked them enough for them to realize that they, too, have been part of this nation’s madness and they were ashamed to come to court,” John told his client at the time.
Dr. Hayling scoffed at his young lawyer’s naivete. “Due, the reason those suckers didn’t show is they are out celebrating Kennedy’s assassination,” the dentist said.14
Dr. Hayling, the advisor for St. Augustine’s NAACP Youth Council, had been badly beaten at a large Ku Klux Klan rally staged to celebrate the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where the four little girls died. Can you imagine anyone wanting to celebrate such a horrible terrorist act at a rally? Dr. Hayling had tried to observe the rally with three colleagues, but instead was captured by Klan members and badly beaten. His activism had very nearly gotten him killed more than once. One night, someone drove past his house and shot through his doors and windows, killing the family dog, a boxer who had rushed, barking, to the front door inside the house. If his wife hadn’t left their bedroom moments before to use the bathroom, he says, she would have surely died in the shotgun blasts, too, because their bedroom was riddled with bullet holes. His harrowing story, unfortunately, set the tone for the violent days to come.
Dr. Hayling, who’d been raised in Tallahassee, first moved to St. Augustine, the nation’s oldest city, in 1960 with his wife and two children, opening a dental office as part of a program to repay his state-funded student loans to traditionally Negro Meharry Dental School. St. Augustine had grown progressively more dangerous and violent in the early to mid 1960s, when his NAACP Youth Council, and later, Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, began challenging the segregated policies of public accommodations.
At the time Dr. Hayling first moved there, on the surface St. Augustine appeared to him to be one of the more tolerant cities in the South for Negroes. There were integrated neighborhoods, with Negro and white families living side by side; and more than half of Dr. Hayling’s dental patients were white. A popular dentist who preceded him had also been Negro, and residents were accustomed to being treated by a Negro dentist, rare for the time.
But Dr. Hayling wasn’t satisfied with moving to town and opening a thriving practice. A former Air Force lieutenant known for his short temper when it came to matters of segregation, he became the advisor to the NAACP Youth Council, made up of adolescents and young adults, and he guided them on their quest to integrate the city’s restaurants and motels.
They had the perfect platform: In 1963, two years before the city’s 400th birthday, the city was seeking federal funds to celebrate its quadricentennial in style. With banquets and major events in the planning, Dr. Hayling outraged the white establishment by contacting federal authorities to insist that St. Augustine should not receive federal assistance because it was so segregated. National NAACP leadership urged Dr. Hayling to keep a low profile. The message: “Don’t rock the boat. Let these people have their celebration.”
However, Dr. Hayling’s profile was anything but low. In response to fears that violent whites might retaliate for the effort to block federal funding, Dr. Hayling was quoted in the local newspaper as saying, “I and others of the NAACP have armed ourselves and we will shoot first and ask questions later.” Dr. Hayling denies that he ever said such a thing: “Anyone who knew me knew that didn’t sound like Dr. Hayling,” he says, dismissing the statement as a Wild West embellishment. (The accurate quote, he says, was that he’d said he would use “all the vim, vigor, and vitality at my command” to protect himself and his family.)15
Dr. Hayling and other activists pressed, picketing and protesting, and it wasn’t long before sleepy, “tolerant” St. Augustine showed its true nature: “When we said we wanted to sit down at a restaurant or go to a hotel or motel, we uncovered a hotbed of Klansmen,” Dr. Hayling recalls.
In September of 1963, soon after the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church tragedy, downtown St. Augustine was blanketed with leaflets advertising a large Ku Klux Klan rally in a cow patch about a mile and a half south of St. Augustine, where Dr. Hayling recalls that a large, towering cross had been erected and set afire. NAACP Youth Council members who had been picketing downtown came to Dr. Hayling with the flyers, and Dr. Hayling and three other Negro civil rights activists—Clyde Jenkins, Jimmy Jackson, and James Houser—decided to drive near the rally site to monitor it from a distance. “People have asked me, ‘Why did you try to go to a Klan rally?’ ” Dr. Hayling says, but he insists they never intended to attend the rally, just to spy on it.
They would all get a much closer view than expected.
As they drove, they noticed several cars parked on the shoulder. White men with shotguns posted on the side of the road saw them coming. The man driving Dr. Hayling’s retractable hardtop Ford sports car got nervous and said he thought he knew a side road, so he gunned the gas and veered off the highway, U.S. 1. None of them realized that ditches had been dug into the ground to keep intruders from sneaking close to the rally undetected, and their car got stuck. Before they knew it, they were surrounded by another group of men armed with shotguns.
Niggers, get out that car.
The four activists were searched, their wallets taken. Unfortunately, Dr. Hayling recalls, the foremost piece of identification in his wallet was his NAACP membership card. Not only had they stumbled into enemy territory, but they could not hope to claim ignorance. Suddenly, their lives were in real danger. “So much happened so fast, I don’t think we had time to be frightened,” Dr. Hayling says.
Like prisoners of war, they were marched to the rally site. Dr. Hayling, remembering his military training, tried to maintain a psychological advantage by marching in a proud and authoritative manner, hoping to intimidate the group, but only moments before their arrival, a Klan leader had been berating the approximately 250 townspeople attending the rally, telling them that if they had any guts, that “nigger dentist” who was stirring up all the trouble would end up with a bullet in his head. Now, as if by script, Dr. Hayling arrived in person, and standing near the front of the crowd was a girl on whom he’d recently done some crown work, alongside her mother, and they both recognized him immediately. Instead of trying to defend him, they pointed their fingers and began shouting, “That’s the troublemaker! That’s Dr. Hayling!”
With the women goading the men, the attack began. Dr. Hayling and the others were piled together “like a cord of wood,” Dr. Hayling says, and a barrage of blows from fists, feet, baseball bats, and axe handles began to rain down on them. Pounded across their heads, faces, chests, and torsos, the men grew bloody and semiconscious. Dr. Hayling heard someone say, “He’s a right-handed dentist!” and his attackers set out to cripple his hand with their blows. Have you ever smelled a nigger burn? Go get some gasoline!
The racial tension in St. Augustine, as in many southern cities at the time, was like a noxious gas wafting through the air, and the poison was feeding upon itself at that rally. It was a recipe for death.
Yet Dr. Robert Hayling was not to be martyred that day. By chance, he and the members of his party weren’t the only ones who had decided to monitor the much publicized Ku Klux Klan rally. Also in attendance, shocked at the violent turn of events, was a white minister from Daytona named Rev. Irvin Chene Jr. A civil rights sympathizer who recognized that a calamity was about to happen before his eyes, Rev. Cheney slipped away from the rally and found a telephone to call for authorities.
He didn’t call local police, Dr. Hayling says; he knew full well that members of the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Department, including the sheriff himself, were Ku Klux Klan sympathizers, and a few were probably already in attendance. In fact, according to FBI files cited in Bearing the Cross, Sheriff L. O. Davis was friendly with Holsted “Hoss” Manucy, who was the Exalted Cyclops of the Klan in St. Augustine.16
Instead, Rev. Cheney called the Florida Highway Patrol in Tallahassee and asked that officers from surrounding police jurisdictions be dispatched right away. When news of the police officers’ approach crackled across police-band radios in St. Augustine, Sheriff Davis finally stepped in to pull the crowd away from Dr. Hayling and the others. He arrested several Klansmen for assault, but Dr. Hayling and the others were also arrested for the same charge.
Police drove them to the nearest hospital in St. Augustine, where they were treated for their injuries, but authorities didn’t think it was safe for them to stay there, so a local Negro mortician was enlisted to drive them to a Negro hospital in Jacksonville the next day, his hearses substituting for an ambulance. Dr. Hayling’s injuries included such facial disfiguration that he could not work for weeks, and there was damage to the muscles and ligaments in his right hand.
“I still have indentations from sutures in my skull I’ll take to my grave,” Dr. Hayling says today of his violent encounter.
Dr. Hayling’s car was destroyed by Klansmen, but a police search turned up a .25-caliber pistol in his glove compartment. Dr. Hayling had not reached for that weapon in self-defense when the armed Klansmen pulled them out of their car; he’d forgotten all about it, he says, and even so he would have known it was no match for shotguns. Putting their heads together to defuse a public relations nightmare, St. Augustine authorities told Dr. Hayling he would not be charged for illegal weapon possession if he and the other activists dropped assault charges against those who had beaten them at the rally. Still, in November, while the Klansmen went unpunished, a jury convicted Hayling for assault and the judge levied a $100 fine.
Despite the odds stacked against his client, John had gone to St. Augustine to argue the dentist’s case. But at a time when life itself was so tenuous, justice was too much to ask.
Contrary to the inspirational note I’d received from Mother not long before that awful November, very, very difficult days were ahead. Two weeks after President Kennedy’s death, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, stood before Congress and proclaimed, “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.”17 The eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—guaranteeing that Negroes could not legally be barred from employment or service in restaurants, hotels, and other public facilities on the basis of race—was President Johnson’s first priority. Many of us hoped the new law would bring a hasty end to the discrimination we had been fighting. But the civil rights movement was about to get bloodier than ever.