50th Anniversary of Ax Handle Saturday is approaching this August

[sheclown]

The Official Rodney Hurst Website

The civil rights movement in the late fifties and early sixties is a history of brave and unselfish Black leaders fighting against racism and segregation, and for the equality of all people in the United States.

Most Black and White citizens of Selma, Birmingham, Memphis, and Atlanta are acutely familiar with the violent civil rights struggles that occurred in their cities. Though the struggles in those cities may be more familiar, Jacksonville was not immune to the same type of cruelties.

Ax Handle Saturday I want to share with you a facet of Jacksonville's history very few are willing to discuss, let alone embrace. Although its darkness may give Jacksonville's reputation a black eye, the eye-opening details, when synthesized, provide a remarkable history worth telling.

The peaceful protests of teenagers who dared to challenge segregated white lunch counters is not a myth or an urban legend. Nor is the attack by more than 200 whites with baseball bats and ax handles on 34 Black NAACP Youth Council members on August 27, 1960.

Today's generation must understand the circumstances and the times that led to this racially explosive and violent day in Jacksonville's history. Regardless of what you have heard or seen about sit-in demonstrations, it was never about eating a hot dog and drinking a Coke! It was always about human dignity and respect.

Please refer to my Blog page for updates on the 50th Anniversary Activities Commemorating the 1960 Jacksonville Youth Council NAACP Sit-in Demonstrations and Ax Handle Saturday ...and the Celebration of the Jacksonville Florida Branch NAACP 45th Annual Freedom Fund Dinner.

The Struggle Continues…Rodney L. Hurst, Sr.

more:  http://www.rodneyhurst.com/

[sheclown]

Ax Handle Saturday

Jacksonville has a history of racial segregation and violence. Because of its high visibility and patronage, the Hemming Park and surrounding stores were the site of numerous Civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s. Black Sit-ins began on August 13, 1960 when students asked to be served at the segregated lunch counter at Woolworths, Morrison's Cafeteria and other eateries. The were denied service and frequently kicked, spit at and addressed with racial slurs. This came to a head on "Ax Handle Saturday", August 27, 1960. A group of 200 middle aged and older white men (allegedly some were also members of the Ku Klux Klan) gathered in Hemming Park armed with baseball bats and ax handles. They attacked the protesters conducting sit-ins. The violence spread, and the white mob started attacking all African-Americans in sight. Rumors were rampant on both sides that the unrest was spreading around the county (in reality, the violence stayed in relatively the same location, and did not spill over into the mostly-white, upper-class Cedar Hills neighborhood, for example). A black street gang called the "Boomerangs" attempted to protect the demonstrators.[7] Police, who had not intervened when the protesters were attacked, now became involved, arresting members of the Boomerangs and other black residents who attempted to stop the beatings.[8][9][10]

Nat Glover, who worked in Jacksonville law enforcement for 37 years, including 8 years as Sheriff, recalled stumbling into the riot. Glover said he ran to the police, expecting them to arrest the thugs, but was told to leave town or risk being killed.[11]

Several whites had joined the black protesters on that day. Richard Charles Parker, a 25-year old student attending Florida State University was among them. White protesters were the object of particular dislike by racists, so when the fracas began, Parker was hustled out of the area for his own protection. The police had been watching him and arrested him as an instigator, charging him with vagrancy, disorderly conduct and inciting a riot. After Parker stated that he was proud to be a member of the NAACP, Judge John Santora sentenced him to 90 days in jail.[1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Jacksonville,_Florida#Ax_Handle_Saturday

[sheclown]

Published Friday, August 25, 2000

40 years ago this weekend, Jacksonville gave itself a national reputation for violence


By Alliniece T. Andino
Times-Union staff writer,

Adults in Jacksonville's Laura Street Presbyterian Church asked the young president of the NAACP Youth Council 40 years ago if he and other youths still wanted to demonstrate at two downtown department stores' all-white lunch counters.

The sit-in demonstrations had started Aug. 13, and protesters had been kicked, spit at and the targets of racial slurs.

This day, Aug. 27, 1960, a crowd of white men, some from the Ku Klux Klan, held ax handles and baseball bats as they gathered in Hemming Park.

It was about to become violent, with 50 people injured and 62 arrested.



-- Tara McParland/staff Alton Yates (left) and Rodney Hurst recall the events of Ax Handle Saturday, the day when both men escaped a bat and ax-wielding mob of whites determined to break up lunch counter sit-ins near Hemming Park.

"At the time, we did not measure whether or not what we were going to do or what we did would cost us," said Rodney Hurst, who was the youth council president at 16.

He said the students were on a mission and would have disobeyed their elders if directed to remain in the church.

Later called Ax Handle Saturday, the day was the most tumultuous moment in Jacksonville's efforts to integrate.

In commemoration, the NAACP, the National Conference for Community and Justice, the Jacksonville Historical Society, the Human Rights Commission and the Jacksonville Urban League are hosting a series of events tomorrow. Laura D'Alisera, NCCJ executive director, said she wants all Jacksonville residents to attend the ceremonies to learn the history, gain insight and to show how far the city has come in 40 years.

ORAL HISTORYClick the icon above to listen to Alton Yate's recollection.

* RealPlayer required.

Ax Handle Saturday symbolized a wake-up call in Jacksonville's civil rights movement for many residents who either were unaware or hid from the changes at hand, many say.

"I think this was really the first time that Jacksonville in a very serious way faced the fact that blacks -- who were about 45 percent of the population then -- were unhappy with the way things were," said Spence Perry, 58, who lives in Hagerstown, Md., and witnessed the riot as a college student.

Within weeks after the clash, white and black committees started meeting to discuss how to integrate the city's private and public establishments. In April 1961, Hurst and the NAACP's youth council secretary Marjorie Meeks ate lunch for a week at Woolworth's white counter to prepare segregationists for the evolution to integration.

And when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, the laws changed about separate water fountains, bathrooms and stores for the races.

"That [Ax Handle Saturday] shows what happens when white folk and black folk don't talk. It also forced this community to own up to some of the racial problems it was having," Hurst said.

He recalled that members of the youth council left Laura Street Presbyterian in groups of twos and threes that morning. About 30 headed to the W.T. Grant store on Main Street and another group went to Woolworth's on Hogan Street.

Hurst and others bought items at Grant's to show the business would take their money at the register. However, once the students sat at the lunch counter for white clients, the workers placed closed signs on the counter, the overhead lights went out and the salt and pepper were slid away.

For about 10 minutes protesters waited until they were satisfied Grant's would not reopen for lunch that day and the day's business earnings were gouged.

Hurst said a group of white men swooped toward the black students as they exited the store.

Hurst ran and was eventually picked up by an adult member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Meanwhile, a few blocks away in Woolworth's a group accompanying a 24-year-old Alton Yates, vice president of the youth council, sat down at the white lunch counter.

"We got the usual runaround from the waitresses. Some of them taunted the kids to get them to do something foolish," Yates said.

That lunch counter was closed, too. But Yates and the others stayed, until the action outside heated up.

"We were trying to get kids out of the store when our attackers came in," said Yates, who was hit in the head while pushing his way out.

Members of the black gang the Boomerangs swooped in as a buffer between the fleeing students and the white mob of about 200.

"We were out there trying to save a community," said Perry Raines, a Boomerang member. "Everybody had to run; if you didn't, you wouldn't live."

Students sought the white Memorial Church at Monroe and Laura streets, less than a block away, as a safe haven, but to Yates it seemed like a mile. They couldn't go the shortest distance through Hemming Park (now Hemming Plaza) because that's where people were being beaten, he said.

"I really did not think adults would attack children with baseball bats and ax handles," said Yates, pointing out that some protesters were as young as 13. "That was particularly unreal to me. It was an horrific thing to watch."

Perry said seeing the violence in a peaceful place was jarring.

"Seeing this idyllic green square, a very peaceful kind of context, seeing it dissolve almost into a battleground, was disturbing," he said.

Several sources said police, some of whom were at the scene, did not intervene in the melee.

Sheriff Nat Glover, who was 17 at the time, told the Times-Union last year he was not involved in the demonstration but walked from his job at Morrison's cafeteria into the angry crowd on his way home. Glover was struck on the shoulder and then on the head.

ORAL HISTORYClick the icon above to listen to Sheriff Nat Glover's recollection.

* RealPlayer required.

He ran to a police officer for aid but was told to leave town, "before they kill you," Glover said.

"Whites were looking for any black. They would surround him, knock him down, kick him, whack the hell out of him," said Stetson Kennedy, a white correspondent who covered the event for one of the largest black newspapers, the Pittsburgh Courier.

Arnett Girardeau, a 31-year-old NAACP member at the time, said the crowd of whites filled the intersection at Laura and Adams streets, stopping cars. A confrontation between the crowd and about a dozen Boomerangs started.

Girardeau, who served in the Legislature for 16 years, applauded the bravery of the Boomerangs, who jumped in to protect the young non-violent protesters. The crowd outnumbered the Boomerangs and forced them toward the edge of the black neighborhood where gang members enlisted supporters in a pool hall.

It wasn't until Girardeau said "blacks started holding their own" amidst the crowd that police started making arrests -- several reports said 14 whites and 48 blacks were arrested that day.

Pictures of the incident were frozen on the pages of Life and Time magazines and stories covered front pages of The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and the London Times. Back home, the event was splashed in black newspapers, on television screens and on the radio airwaves, and received a front page story in the Times-Union without pictures.

Details about Ax Handle Saturday are not well known in Jacksonville, partly because much of city's history has been written from a white perspective, said University of North Florida history professor Jim Crooks.

And Kennedy said Ax Handle Saturday has been covered up, "I suppose a society likes to cover up its evil doing."

http://jacksonville.com/tu-online/stories/082500/met_axhandle.html

[sheclown]

http://rodneyhurst.blogspot.com/

[videojon]

Tonight WJCT will be airing a documentary on this subject put together by local colleagues. Should be interesting.

http://jacksonville.com/print/433703

By Matt Soergel

Not much in the way of film or photographs exists from 1960's Ax Handle Saturday in downtown Jacksonville. But a WJCT TV-7 documentary, "Ax Handle Saturday: 50 Years Later," does gather much of what there is.

More: Read the Times-Union's special report of the 50th anniversary of Ax Handle Saturday

The half-hour show contains rare archival footage shot by a Jacksonville TV photographer, as well as Hearst newsreel film that was in the archives at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Those moving images provide the documentary with some considerable power, as do the to-the-point interviews with some of those who remember that August day.

It will air on the PBS station at 9:30 p.m. today, 2:30 p.m. Saturday, 6:30 p.m. Sunday and 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 3.

Writer-producer Bill Retherford and editor-cinematographer Rich Conner tell their story chronologically, showing the tensions before Ax Handle Saturday and what happened after it, including the desegregation in 1961 of the downtown lunch counters where black protesters gathered the year before.

The documentary could have been much longer than 30 minutes, Retherford acknowledges. The story is that important, both symbolically and in its actual historical import, and there are even more stories surrounding it. Still, "Ax Handle Saturday: 50 Years Later" is a well-told contribution to explaining why we should still care about it.

[tufsu1]

This is indeed a sad day in Jacksonville history...although it may have sped up racial integration (especially at lunch counters).

One interesting thought is that our downtown started to decline in the 1950s....but really began to cliff dive in the 1960s....reasons include national trends as well as land use/transportation policies...but I wonder if this event had a psychological long-term effect hurting downtown....it is clear that riots in Detroit, Baltimore, and L.A. sped up their urban decline.

[sheclown]

Although it sped up racial integration at lunch counters, it really sped up racial segregation in the cul de sac.

I'm knocked out by the courage this young group had, and their parents, and their advisers.

Fifty years is a brief bit of time.  We still have racial issues, class issues -- marginalized people still face obstacles in Jacksonville.

But the story that speaks to me isn't so much the injustice of the times, because there is always injustice.  What really moves me is the story of the courage of the school kids to face their fear and make a whole city, likewise, face its own.

[Jaxson]

Growing up, I was completely unaware of Jacksonville's place in the civil rights movement.  It was almost a given for me to learn about Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery, Atlanta and Little Rock.  Not only is Jacksonville routinely missing from the civil rights narrative, one would be hard pressed to seek out events that happened in Florida.  I am glad, however, that we are taking steps forward to remedy this.  For far too long, we treat Florida history like a timeline that starts with Ponce de Leon and jumps to Mickey Mouse - with nothing in between.

[fieldafm]

I watched the PBS show on Friday night.  I went to Hemming Plaza Saturday and couldn't imagine what it would be like if something like that happened today.  Literally where people were gathered to play chess there would have been ax handles hidden in those bushes ready to be used to beat to death the people sitting on those tables 50 years ago.  That's hard to comprehend.

My dad used to say that growing up, he didn't have much social interaction with African Americans until he joined the Air Force.  He nor my family were segregationists, its just that there normal social routines did not regularly intersect with people of different races by the design of govenment laws.  It's hard to understand how it was to live in an era like that.  I went to Dos Gatos the other night and just happened into a fun/interesting conversation about relationships, grandmothers, manhood and scotch with a couple sitting next to me at the bar... 50 years ago that was a conversation I probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to have b/c I am white and they were black.  How very surreal is that?

[BIG CHEESE 723]

Times Union 2-26 2013:
WJCT TO REVISIT AX HANDLE SATURDAY
A longer version of a previous documentary will be broadcast.
Airs on WJCT TV  (Comcast Channel at 8 p.m. THURSDAY and March 19 it will air on Comcast Channel 212 at 7 p.m. Friday and March 4th.
This documentary has been lengthened from the original version.
I plan to watch as a reminder of what an infamous day it was for Jax.  Warren Folks, may you burn in Hell.

[Jdog]

Creating a family field trip to show my son the history of slavery, segregation, integration, etc. and trying to get him to physically trace it through Jacksonville.  He is learning about civil rights in school and is in love with MLk and, at age six, wants to create a huge time-line on poster board and mark off all the places he can visit.  Wondering if there is any monument or even a landmark sign for this event...

[Tacachale]

^There's a historical marker in Hemming Park.

[thelakelander]

Creating a family field trip to show my son the history of slavery, segregation, integration, etc. and trying to get him to physically trace it through Jacksonville.  He is learning about civil rights in school and is in love with MLk and, at age six, wants to create a huge time-line on poster board and mark off all the places he can visit.  Wondering if there is any monument or even a landmark sign for this event...

I just put together a similar presentation for a Gullah Geechee group from Bethune Cookman last month. My time period ran from the 17th century through the 1920s, with a focus on the evolution from slavery and the Reconstruction, up to the Harlem Renaissance.  I'm at Nissan right now, but I'll email my material later this weekend if it can help you guys.

[Jdog]

Yes, perfect, thanks a bunch!

[sheclown]

Read Rodney's Hurst's personal account of this: "It Was Never About a Hot Dog and a Coke."  Since Jacksonville's participation in the civil rights struggle during this time was driven by teenagers, (Jacksonville Youth Council NAACP) including Hurst who was a 16  at the time, the story is that much more compelling for children (and adults too).

http://www.amazon.com/Personal-Account-Demonstrations-Jacksonville-Saturday/dp/1595941959

https://www.facebook.com/It-was-never-about-a-hot-dog-and-a-Coke-105651809498593/

from his book"

"As we approached Hemming Park, ... we saw several white men wearing Confederate uniforms. Other whites walked around Hemming Park carrying ax handles with Confederate battle flags taped to them.  A sign taped to a delivery-type van parked at the Duval and Hogan Streets corner of Hemming Park read "Free Ax Handles." p.70

The violence caused more than 50 people to be injured and 105 arrested.