Ax Handle Saturday

Ax Handle Saturday:

Jacksonville’s Darkest Day

Thesis By

Brett Morgan

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of Bachelor of Arts of History

University of Florida

Gainesville, Florida

(Submitted April 20, 2016)

Abstract

In the grim and turbulent civil rights history of the city of Jacksonville, Florida, August 27,

1960 – Ax Handle Saturday – was the darkest day. On that day hundreds of white men armed with baseball bats and ax handles viciously attacked a group of high school African-

American students as the students staged a nonviolent sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in a downtown five-and-dime. Notwithstanding that Ax Handle Saturday is widely regarded as the turning point in Jacksonville’s race relations it has been largely forgotten in the collective memory of the city. Attempts to commemorate the events of August 27, 1960 have been met with a singular lack of enthusiasm by both white and African-American community leaders. This paper examines the events preceding Ax Handle Saturday; the events of that day; and the aftermath of the event. This paper concludes that Ax Handle

Saturday forced a reluctant Jacksonville to address its racial inequities by focusing national media attention on Jacksonville and forcing a response from city officials.

Table of Contents

AX HANDLE SATURDAY: ...... 1 JACKSONVILLE’S DARKEST DAY ...... 2 CHAPTER 1: THE INTRODUCTION ...... 6 CHAPTER 2: JACKSONVILLE PRIOR TO AX HANDLE SATURDAY ..... 9 CHAPTER 3: SITUATING AX HANDLE SATURDAY IN THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT ...... 13 CHAPTER 4: AX HANDLE OF SATURDAY ...... 17 CHAPTER 5: THE AFTERMATH OF AX HANDLE SATURDAY ...... 25 CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSIONS ...... 37 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 41

Chapter 1: The Introduction

Hemming Park, downtown Jacksonville, Florida

Alton Yates was doing what he knew was right as he walked into the Woolworth’s

Department store in downtown Jacksonville, Florida. Along with other members of the

Jacksonville branch of the NAACP Youth Council, Yates had come to participate in a sit-in at

Woolworth’s all white segregated lunch counter. The year was 1960 and Yates, in conjunction with thousands of other African-American youth across the country were protesting their treatment as second-class citizens. Once they had completed their sit-in,

Yates and his companions got up and calmly walked towards the store’s exit. Just as Yates walked out of the department store’s doors, he was knocked to the ground by a crushing blow to the head. As Yate’s head began to bleed, from what he would later discover was a blow from an ax handle, he watched as his companions received the same devastating

injuries he did. Yates and his fellow protestors had been attacked and beaten by a white mob incensed by their audacity to try and force the integration of lunch counters.

Defenseless and in fear of their lives, Yates and his fellow protestors headed to the

Laura Street Presbyterian Youth Center and safety.1 Their targets gone, the mob turned their anger towards innocent African-American men, women, and children simply out enjoying a day’s shopping. However, Stinson Williams, a bartender at the Seminole Club, later recalled that African-American individuals who were wearing white suits were left alone by the white mob because they were ‘in service’ and considered to be respectable

African-Americans. The Seminole Club, founded in Jacksonville in 1887, was the quintessential white elitist country club.2 Thus, while the white mob attacked most individuals at random, they did exercise some discretion in those they attacked. Innocent

African-Americans fled to the safety of Ashley and Davis Streets in the predominantly black

‘La Villa’ community on the north side.

As innocent shoppers were beaten by the mob, the Jacksonville police were conspicuous by their absence and lack of concern about the incident. This prompted a black gang called the Boomerangs, made up of African-American youth, to join the fray in an attempt to defend innocent African-Americans. The Boomerangs were a notorious gang of

African-Americans teens consisting of mainly high school drops outs that operated in the black community.3 They were widely regarded in the black community as individuals that should not be confronted. The Boomerangs engaged the white mob and met violence with

1 Rodney Hurst, It Was Never about a hot dog and a Coke!, (California: Wingspan Press, 2008), 77. 2 Max Marbut, “What’s the story on that old house?,” Jax Daily Record, 1. 3 Magistrate Leatrice Walton, interview with author, April 4, 2016.

violence. The ensuing hostility resulted in injuries to at least fifty people.4 By this point, downtown Jacksonville more closely resembled a war zone than a civilized metropolitan city.

When the city’s police department finally arrived on scene, only after reports of black men beating up whites, they began to arrest those participating in the violence, mainly targeting the African Americans. In total, the police arrested sixty-two individuals for their involvement in what became known as Ax Handle Saturday. Of the individuals arrested a majority were African-American. The members of the white mob were largely left untouched by the police. The racially motivated arrests by the police department did not stop the racial violence. Throughout the evening of August 27, 1960 hostilities between blacks and whites continued to break out across the city.

The next day millions of Americans opened their papers and read about

Jacksonville’s ongoing racial problems and the violence associated with it. Over the course of the next few days, Americans would continue to read about Jacksonville as sporadic instances of racial violence continued to occur throughout the city. Most shocking to readers was that these incidents were not occurring in Mississippi or Georgia or Alabama, instead happening in the tourist destination of Florida. To many, Florida was the Sunshine

State, a place for fun in the sun, a place to get away from the realities of the world, but to countless African-Americans living in Florida, the state typified the Jim Crow South.

Over sixty years after Ax Handle Saturday, the memory of that day has faded from the collective memory of Jacksonville’s residents. There exists only one memorial to the racial violence that occurred in Jacksonville, a small plaque in the city’s downtown

4 Marisa Carbone and John Finotti, Insiders’ Guide Jacksonville, (Connecticut: The Globe Pequout Press), 142.

Hemming Plaza. The city’s local schools do not teach students about Ax Handle Saturday, nor are there regular events commemorating the day. Instead, it seems that Jacksonville is content with letting its dark past be lost to the annals of time. To understand why Ax

Handle Saturday occurred, how it affected the city’s segregationist policies, and why it has largely been forgotten, the history of Jacksonville must first be understood.

Chapter 2: Jacksonville Prior to Ax Handle Saturday

Location of Jacksonville, Florida

Jacksonville lies on the banks of the St. Johns River in northeast Florida. A port city with numerous white-collar businesses, Jacksonville was in 1960 and remains, one of

Florida’s largest cities. It has long been home to one of Florida’s largest African-American populations. Founded by the British in 1791 as Cowford, the city adopted its modern name in 1831 in honor of Andrew Jackson, whom had forced Spain to cede the territory of Florida to the United States in 1821. After Florida seceded from the union in 1861, the Confederacy received strong support from the residents of Jacksonville, who were sympathetic to confederate cause.5 Union forces occupied Jacksonville for most of the war, viewing the city as vital to victory in Florida due to its strategic access to the sea.

Following the war, Jacksonville was subject to Reconstruction, which aimed to rebuild the ravaged South with the use of federal troops to ensure the rights of newly freed

African-American slaves. With the official end of Reconstruction, federal troops departed the city and white residents of Jacksonville began to construct a white dominated society and strip African-Americans of their newly gained rights. One major method of accomplishing this was by systematically disenfranchising the city’s black voters. Matthew

Corrigan states in his book Race, Religion, and Economic Change in the Republican South,

“through a combination of purging African Americans from voting lists, poll taxes, and unusual voting practices, black political influence in the city almost disappeared by 1910.”6

Like countless cities and towns across the south, Jacksonville instituted laws that marginalized black voters and left all political power in the hands of whites. According to census data, by 1910 Jacksonville’s population had reached 55,134, of which 25,841 were white and 29,293 were black, leaving African Americans as the city’s majority population

5 Matthew Corrigan, Race, Religion, and Economic Changes in the Republican South, (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2007), 19. 6 Ibid, 28.

but without any real political representation.7 Over the course of the next fifty years little would change for African-Americans in Jacksonville as they were constantly denied their legal rights.

During the Second World War, Jacksonville experienced an economic boom as thousands of new jobs were created with the United States Navy establishing three bases across the city; Naval Station Mayport, Naval Air Station Jacksonville, and Naval Air Station

Cecil Field.8 While the creation of these military instillations created an economic boom for the city, it helped expand the economic divide between Whites and African-Americans in the city. During the war, due to the shortage of male labor, many African-Americans found work in the city’s naval shipyards, helped in large part by the signing of Executive Order

8802 by President Roosevelt in 1941, which prohibited racial discrimination in the defense industry.9 However, after the war, owing to the city’s Jim Crow policies, a majority of the jobs derived from the new naval installations were given to whits men returning from the war. In addition, a majority of the naval personnel that arrived in the city as a result of the creation of the three bases were white. The arrival of these white Navy personnel contributed to the decrease in the percentage of the city’s African-American population.

When African-American veterans returned to Jacksonville from the Second World

War, they returned with the expectation that they would be rewarded for their service.

They expected to be given more rights as a reward for their valiant service of the country

7 Abel Bartley, Keeping the Faith: Race, Politics, and Social Development in Jacksonville, Florida, 1940-1970, (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000), 5. 8 “Naval Air Station Jacksonville History,” Commander Navy Installations Command, accessed December 1, 2015, http://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrse/installations/nas_jacksonville/about/history/his tory_by_decade1.html. 9 Bryan Higham, “Soldiers and Civil Right: The Impact of World War II on Jacksonville’s African American Community” (Masters thesis, University of North Florida, 2015, 33.

that repressed them. Further, many of these troops had been stationed in countries in

Europe where racism was not as prevalent as in the United States and thus many African-

American veterans returned home with new ideas about the rights they deserved and how society should be structured.

One such veteran was Elcee Lucas, who returned home after the Second World War and began work in the early 1950’s to register Jacksonville’s African-American citizens to vote as a part of Senator Claude Pepper’s voter registration drive throughout Florida.10 At one point, Lucas was able to register over 19,000 African-Americans in Jacksonville to vote over the span of a few months, an incredible achievement in a city as segregated as

Jacksonville.11 Men such as Lucas and Senator Pepper laid the foundation in the early

1950’s for the successes of the civil rights movement in the 1960’s in Jacksonville.

Unfortunately for the majority of African-American veterans returning home, including to Jacksonville, their hope of greater rights was not to be fulfilled. Despite serving their country in its time of need, many whites in America were eager to have life return to what they perceived as normal- which included a return of women to domestic jobs and a return of African-Americans to segregated occupations, education, and housing. After the horrors of war there seemed little stomach for radical changes to occur.

Four years after the conclusion of the Second World War, Haydon Burns was elected

Mayor of Jacksonville. In spite of garnering a significant proportion of the city’s small but increasing African-American vote, Burns continued the exclusionist racial policies of

10 Bartley, Keeping the Faith: Race, Politics, and Social Development in Jacksonville, Florida, 1940-1970, 36. 11 Ibid.

previous administrations by denying African-Americans even the most basic concessions.12

As Jacksonville entered the boom era of the 1950’s there appeared to be little hope for a change in the city’s racial policies with Haydon Burns as mayor.

William Haydon Burns was elected the 35th Mayor of Jacksonville on June 21, 1949.

Over the course of the next seventeen years, he would serve as Jacksonville’s mayor. During his tenure as Mayor of Jacksonville he would consistently lend his support to segregationists and attempt to stymie any attempts by African-American civil rights activists to secure the city’s black residents basic civil rights. However, despite Burn’s staunch segregationist policies, much of his power was derived from the city’s black voters, whom Burns consistently courted.13 The key to retaining his power lay as, Abel Bartley explains, “[in his ability] to maintain the White community’s respect without losing the

African-American vote, an incredible feat considering the social, political, and racial climate.14 The tenuous balancing act that Burns maintained for over a decade would fail on

Ax Handle Saturday and his role in and reaction to the racial violence that gripped his city would come to define his term as mayor and mar his later run for Governor of Florida.

Chapter 3: Situating Ax Handle Saturday in the Civil Rights Movement

The racial violence that occurred on Ax Handle Saturday did not occur in a vacuum, but rather is a part of the much larger Civil Rights movement in America that gained prominence in the 1950’s and 60’s. In the decade leading up to Ax Handle Saturday on

August 27, 1960, the United States experienced unprecedented changes in race relations.

12 Ibid, 60. 13 Ibid, 59-60. 14 Ibid, 60.

Major civil rights organizations such as the NAACP began to challenge the structural racism that existed throughout the country through direct action campaigns and the nation’s courts. Civil rights activists scored their first major victory prior to the beginning of the fifties. In 1946, the Supreme Court ruled in Morgan vs. Commonwealth of Virginia, that segregated interstate bus travel was illegal.15 Nine years later the United States Supreme

Court ruled in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education that separate but equal public schools were unconstitutional. The court ordered that public schools throughout the country be integrated with “all deliberate speed”. While deliberately vague, the Supreme

Court’s ruling was a major victory for civil rights activists. Less than two years later the

Supreme Court would deliver civil rights yet another victory when they refused to hear the appeal of the Browder v. Gayle case, which had outlawed segregated bus travel.

A year later in 1957, the United States Congress passed the first major Civil Rights

Act since Reconstruction, which authorized the Justice Department to investigate the disenfranchisement of African-Americans voters in the South and created the Civil Rights

Division in the Department of Justice.16 Across the South staunch segregationists, including in Jacksonville, felt that the federal government was eroding the moral fabric of their society. To them, there was no greater fear than the uncontrolled mixing of the races. The purity of the white race was at risk and they were prepared to violently defend the structures of legalized segregation. When the Civil Rights movement came to Jacksonville in the late 1950’s, the anger the movement was met with provided no surprise to black

15 “Morgan v. Virginia, 1946,” Legal Information Institute (184 Va. 24, 34 S.E.2d 491, reversed). 16 “Civil Rights Act of 1957,” Civil Rights Digital Library of Georgia (Civil Rights Act of 1957).

activists. The city’s segregationists had no intention of allowing Jacksonville to integrate and were prepared to meet any attempts at integration with violence.

At first glance Rutledge Pearson was an unlikely figure to lead Jacksonville’s Civil

Rights movement. In 1960, he was a young and lanky teacher at Isaiah Blocker Junior High

School in Jacksonville. Before his teaching career, Pearson had been a baseball star but had been forced to give up his playing career after he was barred from playing professional baseball in Jacksonville on account of him being an African-American.

Civil Rights Leader Rutledge Pearson

In the early 1950’s, he began work as a teacher for the Jacksonville Public School system, where he was assigned to all black Isaiah Blocker Junior High School.17 Pearson believed that race relations in Jacksonville could be changed. As a teacher he pushed his students to uplift themselves by inspiring them with the achievements of African-

17 Hurst, It Was Never about a hot dog and a Coke!, 28.

Americans.18 Not long after he began to work for the NAACP, Pearson began to encourage his students to create a branch of the NAACP Youth Council. Jacksonville’s branch of the council was made up of politically motivated young students who wanted to campaign for greater civil rights for African-Americans. Many of Pearson’s students became the founding members of the council, while others became leaders of the Youth Council during the pivotal 1960’s.

After the creation of the Youth Council, Pearson was installed as the council’s advisor; the council would form the vanguard of Jacksonville’s Civil Rights movement in the early 1960’s. The council, inspired by the 1960 Greensboro sit-in campaign, “organized the sit-in demonstrations in Jacksonville without the assistance, or collaboration of other organizations.”19 The council’s first targets were Jacksonville’s segregated downtown lunch counters. Less than a year old, the Youth Council attempted to directly challenge the city’s segregation policies.

The Jacksonville Civil Rights movement neither began nor ended on Ax Handle

Saturday. Instead Ax Handle Saturday served as the catalyst for the Civil Rights changes that would come to Jacksonville in the following decades. The racial violence that occurred on Ax Handle Saturday focused the nation’s attention on race relations in Jacksonville, and forced the city’s Mayor Haydon Burns to take small steps to begin the desegregation of

Jacksonville. When Haydon Burns was elected the State of Florida’s 35th Governor in

November 1964 an obstacle for further desegregating the city was removed and his progressive successor Lou Ritter instituted reforms, including fully integrating the city’s police force, aimed at desegregating the city. The aftershocks of Ax Handle Saturday and

18 Ibid, 28-29. 19 Ibid, 51.

Ritter’s positive changes during his time as mayor culminated in the desegregation of the city’s public schools in 1970, some sixteen years after Brown vs. Board of Education.

Chapter 4: Ax Handle Saturday

Jacksonville experienced its first sit-in on March 13th, 1960 when a number of local student activists conducted a demonstration at a downtown lunch counter. Over the course of the next few weeks these activists would conduct more sit-ins, mostly unsuccessful. By mid-summer, support for the sit-ins within the black community had mostly dried up and they ended.

However, during the end of the summer of 1960 the NAACP Youth Council began to plan a sit-in movement of its own. The events that led up to Ax Handle Saturday began on

August 13th, 1960 with the NAACP’s Youth Council’s first sit-in demonstration at

Woolworth’s Department Store. Woolworth’s Department store was strategically located on one end of Jacksonville’s downtown Hemming Park, the central location in downtown

Jacksonville. The department store housed a large lunch counter at the front of the store that served customers hot dogs and sandwiches to white customers and a smaller lunch counter in the back of the store that served only African-Americans. Rodney Hurst, the leader of the NAACP Youth Council during the sit-ins explained that Woolworth’s

Department Store was targeted because, “bottom line: Woolworth accepted money from

Black shoppers at one counter and rejected their money at another.”20 The leaders of the

Youth Council decided that Woolworth’s would be their first target.

During lunchtime on August 13, 1960 eighty-two members of the Youth Council calmly walked into Woolworth’s Department Store and sat down at the White only lunch counter.21 After sitting down, according to Rodney Hurst the waitress at the counter announced to the demonstrators, “coloreds are not served at this lunch counter. This is the white lunch counter. The colored lunch counter is at the back of the store.”22 Undeterred, the demonstrators refused to back down and the manager of Woolworth’s was forced to close the lunch counter. The violence that participants in the sit-in movement would experience two weeks later was demonstrated during the first sit-in as white patrons of the store hurled racial epithets at the demonstrators and poked and kicked them with sharp objects. As the demonstrators left the lunch counter after lunchtime ended, they experienced one last round of abuse as they were physically abused as they walked out of

Woolworth’s.

The members of the NAACP Youth Council had survived their first sit-in, but the stage was set to insure that future demonstrations would not be peaceful ones. Over the

20 Ibid, 55. 21 Alison Roseberry-Polier, “Jacksonville Students Sit-In for integrated lunch counters, 1960,” Swarthmore College, Global Nonviolent Action Database. 22 Hurst, It Was Never about a hot dog and a Coke!, 59

course of the next few weeks multiple sit-ins were held at Woolworth’s Department store, which were largely successful. However, there was one tense sit-in, where a white demonstrator participating in the sit-in movement was physically threatened by a large mob of white men.23 Richard Parker, a white college student at the time, joined in the sit-in at Woolworth’s on Thursday, August 25 and after the mob of white men threatened him, the Boomerangs, a local gang of Black toughs, arrived at the store and escorted Parker to safety.24 The stage had been set and two days later downtown Jacksonville would explode in racial violence.

Attack on Charlie Parker

On the morning of August 27, members of the NAACP Youth Council met prior to their planned sit-in at Woolworth’s. They planned to organize themselves prior to

23 Ibid, 67. 24 Ibid, 67.

the sit-in and name sit-ins captains. However, this meeting would be different from their previous meetings. That same morning, Rutledge Pearson and other adult advisors to the

Youth Council had traveled to downtown Hemming Park after hearing reports of suspicious activity in the Park. What Rutledge Pearson would tell the members of the NAACP’s Youth

Council would drastically change the plans for the day.

What Rutledge Pearson observed that morning when he drove past Hemming Park sent fear down his spine. The Park was crawling with White men, some in confederate uniforms, and many of the men were carrying ax handles. Arnett Girardeau, an adult advisor to the NAACP and civil rights activist, recalled that he observed, “a sign taped to a delivery style van parked at the Duval and Hogan Streets corner of Hemming Park [that] read ‘free ax handles’ and he could see bundles of ax handles in the shrubbery.”25 There were also reports that local police officers were present and talking to the men assembled in the park.26 No arrests or request to disperse were made by the police officers, who would mysteriously disappear later in the day.

Though Jacksonville city leaders would later attempt to portray the men that

Rutledge Pearson and Arnett Girardeau saw the morning of August 27 as outside perpetrators, the reality was that most were local men. A local white owned department store provided the ax handles and was responsible for handing them out to local residents.27 However, some members of the group of white men were from outlying towns and Southern Georgia and these men were in large part either members of the Ku Klux Klan

25 Ibid, 70. 26 Ibid, 70. 27 Alison Roseberry-Polier, “Jacksonville Students Sit-In for integrated lunch counters, 1960,” Swarthmore College, Global Nonviolent Action Database.

or the White Citizens Council, both white supremacists groups interested in maintaining segregation.

Staunch segregationist Warren Folks carries a Confederate Battle Flag

When Rutledge Pearson and Arnett Girardeau reported their findings to Rodney

Hurst, Alton Yates, and other members of Youth Council, many of the members of the Youth

Council were afraid. According to Rodney Hurst, Rutledge Pearson attempted to contact the

Sheriff of Jacksonville at the time, Dale Carson, to reveal his findings and discuss the situation, but Pearson was never able to reach Sheriff Carson.28 Hurst and other members of the Youth Council then held a vote on whether or not they wished to continue with the

28 Hurst, It Was Never about a hot dog and a Coke!, 71.

day’s sit-in. The vote, despite the risk involved, was unanimous in favor of continuing the day’s planned sit-in.29

The demonstrators were split into two different groups, one group headed to W.T.

Grant’s, a store similar to Woolworth’, a few blocks away from Hemming Park and another group continued ahead with the planned demonstration at Woolworth’s Department

Store.30 The demonstrators succeeded in peacefully shutting down the lunch counters at both department stores. However, when the demonstrators at W.T. Grant’s Department store exited the store, they were met by a mob of white men armed with ax handles and baseball bats.

The white mob attacks African-Americans in downtown Jacksonville

29Ibid, 71. 30 Carbone and Finotti, Insiders’ Guide Jacksonville, 142.

The white mob, angered by the weeks of sit-ins mercilessly attacked the demonstrators and any other Blacks they could find downtown. Black men, women, and children simply out for a day of shopping found themselves caught up in the violence. One such individual was Charlie Griffin (see below), an African-American high school student out for a day of shopping. He would later recall that a white man ran at him and struck him with an ax handle and when he attempted to defend himself other white men began to attack him.31 While some tried to defend themselves, a majority of the African-Americans began to head for the safety of the African-American north side of town.

African-Americans serving white people seemed to be the one notable exception to the mob’s wrath. The Seminole Club, one of Jacksonville’s oldest and most prestigious white-only social clubs, sat on the corner of Duval and Hogan streets at the northwest corner of Hemming Park. To the Seminole Club’s right was Woolworth’s Department Store.

Stinson Williams, an African-American bartender at the Seminole Club, worked the morning of August 27 and as he made his way home after his morning shift he walked directly into the melee.32 As a white man prepared to hit Williams, another white man intervened and prevented the assault by pointing to Williams’ white service jacket. At the time, African-American that wore white service jackets were in service to white families or clubs and as such were to be protected as they represented how whites believed African-

Americans should conduct themselves. Stinson Williams was allowed to peacefully return to his home without being accosted by the white mob.

As the violence in Jacksonville was in full swing, African-Americans downtown received much needed help, not from the local police department, who were nowhere to be

31 Hurst, It Was Never about a hot dog and a Coke!, 74 32 Magistrate Leatrice Walton, interview with author, April 4, 2016.

found, but rather from the Boomerangs. They had already proved themselves invaluable to the NAACP Youth Council when they protected the white demonstrator Richard Parker from an angry mob of white men. This time the Boomerangs, after they learned of the violence occurring downtown, descended on downtown Jacksonville and engaged in a melee with the whites who were beating African-Americans.

The violence now reached its climax with Whites beating African-Americans and vice versa. But now that Whites were being beaten, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office descended on downtown Jacksonville to end the violence. Some reports state the

Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office sent 200 officers to Hemming Park to quell the violence and that between 42 and 150 individuals, mostly African-American, were arrested. Though the police presence did quell much of the downtown hostility, Jacksonville would continue to see racial violence throughout the day at sites all around the city.

Charlie Parker after being beaten

Throughout the night of August 27, there were numerous reports of bricks and rocks being thrown at cars driven by members of the opposite race and of racially motivated shootings and stabbings. The next morning readers across the country would open the Sunday Edition of The New York Times and read the headline “Violence Flares in

Jacksonville” on the front page.

New York Times Sunday Edition cover story on Ax Handle Saturday

Chapter 5: The Aftermath of Ax Handle Saturday

The local white newspapers, especially the Florida Times-Union, did not report on Ax

Handle Saturday, instead they acted as if the incident never happened. Since the local papers were not reporting about the racial violence in Jacksonville, the NAACP set up a group of reliable sources in Jacksonville that would be able to report news to the national wire service.33 Large newspapers from surrounding cities such as Atlanta, Tampa, and

Miami immediately sent their reporters to Jacksonville to report on the racial violence occurring in Jacksonville. Jacksonville’s local black newspaper, the Florida Star, was the only paper to report on the city’s racial struggles. Thus, despite attempts by Whites in

Jacksonville to keep Jacksonville’s racial problems out of the press, news still managed to leak out and be disseminated to the nation.34 This allowed for publications such as the New

York Times to publish articles about Ax Handle Saturday the day after it occurred.

The day after Ax Handle Saturday, Mayor Haydon Burns and other city officials including Sheriff Carson met and discussed how they would handle the situation before them. While talking to the press Mayor Haydon Burns stated that the whites involved in Ax

Handle Saturday were all outside agitators, while Sheriff Carson was quoted as saying, “all the fellows we arrested were local boys.”35 In reality the whites involved in Ax Handle

Saturday were mostly local men involved in either the KKK or the White Citizens Council.

After requests by national African-American civil rights leaders, the Jacksonville

Branch of the NAACP Youth Council voted to temporarily discontinue their sit-ins and allow the Civil Rights Commission time to investigate the incidents that occurred on Ax Handle

33 Hurst, It Was Never about a hot dog and a Coke!, 90. 34 Ibid, 90. 35 Michael Newton, White Robes and Burning Crosses: A History of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866, (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc, 2014), 125.

Saturday.36 Unfortunately, this did not stop the racial violence that plagued the city as more racially charged attacks continued in the days after Ax Handle Saturday. During this time

Mayor Burns and other local white leaders planned and executed their response to the sit- in movement.

Over the course of the next few months White city officials enacted their revenge by arresting both Richard Parker, the White member of the NAACP Youth Council and Rodney

Hurst, the African-American leader of the NAACP Youth Council. Richard Parker was arrested in the days immediately following Ax Handle Saturday, since as a White man; he was a widely well-known member of the NAACP Youth Council. During his time in jail,

White jailers allowed other inmates to rough up Richard Parker, at one point beating him up to the point they dislocated his shoulder and broke his jaw.37 However, the Youth

Council was unaware of Parker’s arrest and when they did learn, a local African-American attorney, Earl Johnson, requested to see Parker but was informed that he was currently not in the jail.38 The city was doing its best to cover up its retaliatory actions.

When city officials did finally admit that Richard Parker was being held in the jail,

Earl Johnson was shocked to find that Richard Parker’s injuries had not be treated and that he was not able to properly eat.39 The police department, which had charged Parker with attempting to incite a riot, refused to release Parker from prison and the courts repeatedly denied attempts by Earl Johnson to have Parker freed. The case went all the way to the

Florida Supreme Court where even it too failed.40 However, by the time the case had made

36 Hurst, It Was Never about a hot dog and a Coke!, 95. 37 Hurst, It Was Never about a hot dog and a Coke!, 98. 38 Ibid, 99. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid.

its way to the Florida Supreme Court it began to generate national attention and the City of

Jacksonville decided to release Richard Parker in order to avoid more negative attention on the city.41 However, city officials would not stop with the arrest of Richard Parker, they then turned their attention to Rodney Hurst, the leader of the NAACP Youth Council.

Florida State University student Richard Parker

On December 8th, 1960 more than three months after Ax Handle Saturday, detectives from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office arrested Rodney Hurst. He was charged with violating the city’s new ordinance that stated sit-ins were a dangerous activity and if someone encouraged a minor to participant in one, they could be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.42 In addition to arresting Rodney Hurst the police department also arrested a thirteen-year-old African-American youth named Robert

41 Ibid, 98. 42 Ibid, 98.

Ingram.43 During his interrogation, police detectives convinced him to admit that Rodney

Hurst had persuaded him to participate in sit-ins. With this witness testimony in hand the police were able to move forward with a trial of Rodney Hurst on the charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. However, during the trial when Robert Ingram was asked to point out which individual has persuaded him to participate in a sit-in he pointed out an individual other than Rodney Hurst.44 With the incorrect identification of Rodney Hurst in court, the presiding judge had no choice but to dismiss the case against Rodney Hurst.45

The final case stemming from Ax Handle Saturday had finally been concluded.

However, while the criminal cases had all been completed, negotiations between the

NAACP and the City of Jacksonville’s Chamber of Commerce were only beginning. After the

NAACP Youth Council was asked to cease their sit-in campaign by NAACP leaders, they shifted their efforts to a selective buying campaign against white segregated businesses.46

This selective buying campaign was in essence a boycott and deprived many white owned stores of much needed income from black customers. After a slight cooling off period the

NAACP Youth Council also restarted their sit-in campaign. The renewed sit-in campaign by the Youth Council in conjunction with the selective buying program forced White business owners to the negotiation table.

In the spring of 1961 the NAACP and white business owners agreed to integrate the city’s downtown lunch counters. The agreement dictated that the lunch counters would be desegregated over the span of two weeks. During the first week, Woolworth’s large downtown lunch counter would be desegregated while other competing lunch counters

43 Ibid, 128. 44 Ibid, 130. 45 Ibid, 131. 46 Ibid,155.

remained segregated.47 A week after the desegregation of Woolworth’s lunch counter the remaining segregated lunch counters in downtown Jacksonville would also desegregated.48

In return for the decision to integrate the counters, the NAACP agreed that the sit-ins and selective buying program against downtown stores would cease. In less than a year,

Rodney Hurst and the other members of the NAACP Youth Council were able to accomplish what had not been accomplished in the decades prior to 1960.

After 1961, Jacksonville experienced a few relatively peaceful years until racial violence once again exploded in the city in 1964. Since the United States Supreme Court had passed Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, outlawing separate but equal public schools, Southern cities and towns had deliberately slowed the process of racial integration. On February 16, 1964 a bomb ripped through the home of Iona Godfrey, a local black civil rights activist.49 Fortunately, no one was injured in the blast, but the bomb did significant damage to the Godfrey home. At least as important, the message to the African-

American community was clear, Whites would not accept racial integration of public schools. That year Iona Godfrey’s six year old son had integrated Lackawanna Elementary

School.50 Now Iona Godfrey and her family were subject to White violence because she dared to challenge society’s expectations.

In the years following Ax Handle Saturday, restaurants and a majority of other white businesses remained segregated. The segregation extended to the Duval County Public

School System, which systematically attempted to prevent the integration of Jacksonville

47 Ibid, 160. 48 Ibid. 49 Abel Bartley, “The 1960 and 1964 Jacksonville Riots: How Struggle Led to Progress,” Florida Historical Quarterly, (Summer 1999): 57. 50 Ibid.

public schools. The attempts to maintain in the city’s public schools led to multiple lawsuits against the city of Jacksonville and eventually resulted in partial desegregation taking place by 1964. But even isolated attempts at desegregating the city’s public schools were met with extreme violence by Whites. In fact the city’s public schools would not even be officially desegregated until 1970 when a federal judge ordered the city’s schools be fully desegregated.51 But in 1964 the city’s public schools were only partially desegregated.

After the bombing of Iona Godfrey’s home, the city once again erupted in racially motivated violence. During the beginning of February many African-Americans had again begun boycotting segregated businesses in the city and the Godfrey bombing was the culmination of the built up tension.52

Tensions in the city continued to rise until they reached their climax on March 23,

1964. On that day, a large group of African-Americans protestors rallied at Hemming Park and then moved towards African-American schools in the area, picking up Black students along the way.53 The protestors then began to harass any whites they encountered. The

Whites returned in kind and soon a full out riot broke out between Blacks, Whites, and the local police.54 That night four White men fatally shot Johnnie Mae Chappell, a 35 year old black mother of 10, as she walked home along the side of US Route 1.55 She was dead before she reached the hospital.

51 Judith Bockel Poppell, “The Desegregation of a Historically Black High School in Jacksonville, Florida” (UNF Theses and Dissertations, 1998), 9. 52 Bartley, “The 1960 and 1964 Jacksonville Riots: How Struggle Led to Progress,” 57. 53 Ibid, 64. 54 Ibid, 64. 55 Ibid, 65.

Johnnie Mae Chappell’s husband examines her body

Johnnie Mae Chappell’s death set off more violence in the city as African-Americans spilled onto the streets in search of revenge. During the night African-Americans committed multiple acts of arson, attacked any whites they ran across, and set a fire outside the office Mayor Haydon Burns, who was blamed by many for the city’s racial problems.56 The next day, similar violence again occurred across Jacksonville and continued into a third day before finally fizzling out.

Rioting only took place for three days, but by the time it subsided it had left its mark.

On March 25th, Mayor Haydon Burns after long resisting the idea, ordered that a committee

56 Ibid.

consisting of Black and White leaders be created to discuss the city’s racial problems.57 This committee would be named the “biracial committee.”

Through this committee, Mayor Burns hoped to put an end to the racial bloodshed that plagued the city and the negative publicity it create. He was especially concerned about the effects of this violence on his upcoming 1964 bid to become Governor of Florida.

Though the committee would ultimately accomplish little, its creation marked a key moment in the city’s race relations as it was the first time that Blacks and Whites were able to sit on a committee formed by the city with the sole purpose of improving race relations.

Fortunately for the city of Jacksonville, Haydon Burn resigned as Mayor of

Jacksonville in the summer of 1964 in order to focus his attention on running for Governor of Florida. With the departure of Haydon Burns, the Jacksonville City Council appointed

Lou Ritter, a progressive Democrat, as Jacksonville’s next Mayor. He served as Mayor from

1965 until 1967 and during his three years in office he was responsible for the liberalizing of many of Jacksonville’s racial policies. Many in the African-American community considered Lou Ritter a welcome change from Haydon Burns as he was widely considered a mayor with an integrationist stance.58 During his time as Mayor, Ritter would fully integrate the city’s police department, integrate all of the city of Jacksonville’s advisory boards, and work to secure federal funding for low-income African-American areas in

Jacksonville. 59

The racial tensions that gripped Jacksonville during the early 1960’s forced Mayor

Haydon Burns and local white business owners to agree to concessions. The city’s lunch

57 Ibid, 69. 58 Ibid, 71. 59 Jessie-Lynne Kerr, “Former Jacksonville Mayor Ritter laid to rest amid college song,” The Florida Times-Union, April 14, 2016, 1-2.

counters were desegregated as were its restaurants, and a biracial committee was formed to provide a forum for both Blacks and Whites to discuss issues before they spilled over into violence or protests.

Change in Jacksonville’s race relations did not happen overnight. The immediate aftermath of Ax Handle Saturday brought national attention to the racial issues that plagued Jacksonville, but it would take years of work before many of Jacksonville’s worst segregationist policies would be abolished. It took four years for the city to create a biracial committee to discuss the city’s racial issues and ten years for the city’s public schools to be fully desegregated. The spotlight of national media attention forced staunch segregationist

Mayor Haydon Burns to agree to some concessions and when he became Governor of

Florida, it allowed the more liberal Lou Ritter to become Mayor of Jacksonville and open up the city’s racial policies.

Sheriff Nathaniel (Nat) Glover

Today institutionalized segregation is no longer a part of Jacksonville and studies have demonstrated that race relations in the city are in fact improving. Throughout much of Jacksonville’s history, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office was viewed as a defender of racial segregation in Jacksonville. At the conclusion of the Second World War, Jacksonville had zero African-American officers and by 1960, it only had a handful of black officers that were only allowed to work in African-Americans areas. Since the city began to desegregate the number of the African-American officers on the city’s police forced steadily increased.

By 2001, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office’s employed 295 African-American officers, which comprised nineteen percent of the police force.6061

In 1995, Nat Glover, a demonstrator on Ax Handle Saturday who had joined the

Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office six years later, was elected the city’s first African-American

Sheriff. He would go on to serve two terms before he ran unsuccessfully to become the City of Jacksonville’s first African-American Mayor in 2003. However, eight years later, Alvin

Brown, a former Clinton Administration advisor was elected the city’s first African-

American Mayor. By 2001, 23% of the City of Jacksonville’s elected officials were African-

American.

The city’s changing demographics are also a factor in the city’s changing race relations. According to a study completed by the University of North Florida for the City of

Jacksonville’s Human Right Rights Commission, the city’s African-American population increased by 84% between 1970 & 2000.62 The same study found that the city’s non-black

60 Jacksonville Community Council Inc., Beyond the Talk: Improving Race Relations, by Bruce Barcelo, Brian Davis, and others, (Jacksonville, Summer 2002), 15. 61 “Ax Handle Saturday,” The Florida Times Union, 2010, 1. 62 Jacksonville Human Rights Commission, Northeast Center for Community Initiatives, Continuity Amongst Change: A Five-Year Assessment of Race Relations in Jacksonville, Florida,

minority percentage also increased by over one thousand percent during the same time span.63 This study also found that the percentage of Jacksonville’s white population decreased from 77% in 1907 to 65% in 2000.64 The city’s changing race relations seemed to have evolved along with the city’s changing demographics.

However, while these statistics do demonstrate that race relations in Jacksonville are improving across the board, race relations still have a long way to go before they can be considered no longer an issue in Jacksonville. A 2002 study completed by the Jacksonville

Community Council Inc. found a greater percentage of African-Americans viewed racism as an issue in Jacksonville in 2001 (60%) than they did in 1985 (50%). The percentage of

African-Americans that viewed racism as a problem in Jacksonville reached its high point in the early 1990’s before it began to tail off again later in the decade. In 2002, more than fifty percent of African-Americans polled stated that they had experienced discrimination on the basis of race or ethnic background during their time in Jacksonville.65 The 2012 shooting of

African American teenager Jordan Davis, once again brought national attention to the city’s race relations. Jordan Davis, who was unarmed at the time of the shooting, was fatally shot by Michael Dunn, a white man, after a dispute over loud music. The case is similar to the Ax

Handle Saturday incident as the city’s race problems were explained away as being perpetrated by outside agitators; Michael Dunn was from Brevard County. Thus, while race relations are clearly improving, much work still needs to be done. Many believe that the local government needs to take a more hands-on role in improving the city’s race relations.

by Jeffry Will, Tracy Milligan, Charles Owen, John Talmage, Timothy Cheney, (Jacksonville, Florida, 2005), 7. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid 8. 65 Ibid, 114.

Chapter 6: Conclusion

Plaque honoring Ax Handle Saturday in Hemming Park (now Plaza)

Ax Handle Saturday was the defining moment in the city of Jacksonville’s race relations. After August 27, 1960 race relations in the City of Jacksonville would never be the same. No longer could whites in the city act with impunity towards African-Americans in the city. Whites now had to wonder if their actions would be reported to the nation as a whole. Ax Handle Saturday focused the attention of the nation on Jacksonville, Florida.

The state of Florida was and still is known for its tourism industry. The state has used a decades-long marketing campaign to create the image of a Florida as a premier vacation destination. The numerous campaigns introduced by the State of Florida attempt to paint an image of Florida where everyone is welcome, where it’s okay to sit back and relax, where one does not have to worry about the problems of the rest of the nation. The state has tried to cultivate an image that separates Florida from the rest of the traditional

South, from the institutionalized racism that permeated states such as South Carolina,

Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

The violence of Ax Handle Saturday shattered Florida’s carefully constructed image.

Americans expected to see the violence that occurred on Ax Handle Saturday in places like

Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma or other towns in the deep south, but they did not expect to see it in Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville, a city that catered to tourists and bragged about its excellent beaches was home to racial unrest.

Unfortunately, Ax Handle Saturday is not widely remembered today in Jacksonville.

Beginning in the fall of 1960, the NAACP began sending Rodney Hurst around the country to speak at NAACP conferences and tell the story of Ax Handle Saturday. Hurst’s speaking tour took him to many of the South’s most segregated states including North Carolina,

South Carolina, and Virginia.66 Hurst attended conferences with civil rights leaders like Roy

Wilkins, Martin Luther King, and Stokely Carmichael.67 The story of Ax Handle Saturday appeared as if it would remain prominent in the nation’s collective history.

However, as the civil rights era came to a close, Jacksonville’s black and white leaders alike attempted to act as if Ax Handle Saturday never existed. To many, Ax Handle

Saturday was an unpleasant topic that no one wanted to discuss and everyone wanted to forget. In the followings decades Ax Handle faded from the nation and the city’s collective memory, no attempts were made to honor the events of Ax Handle Saturday, it was as if Ax

Handle Saturday never occurred.

Starting in 2000, small attempts in Jacksonville have taken place to properly honor what occurred on Ax Handle Saturday. In 2000, the Jacksonville Historical Society and local

66 Hurst, It Was Never about a hot dog and a Coke!, 152. 67 Ibid.

African-American leaders reluctantly agreed to honor the 40th anniversary of Ax Handle

Saturday. Both parties appeared reluctant to drag up painful memories as many wanted to look towards the future rather than focus on the past. Fortunately, ceremonies were held in

2000 to honor the 40th anniversary of Ax Handle Saturday and in 2010 to honor its 50th anniversary. The 2010 anniversary also coincided with the release of a PBS documentary on Ax Handle Saturday.

Today, most of Jacksonville’s residents would not be able to tell you what Ax Handle

Saturday was. The few residents in Jacksonville that were participants in Ax Handle

Saturday or know about what occurred on August 27, 1960 are aging rapidly and most will not be around for the sixtieth anniversary of Ax Handle Saturday in 2020. The city’s public schools, when they cover the city’s history or the civil rights movement do not discuss Ax

Handle Saturday. Year after year thousands of new students graduate from Jacksonville public schools without even a cursory knowledge of the events of Ax Handle Saturday. In a few years all those that have firsthand knowledge of Ax Handle Saturday will be gone and with them their experiences.

It is imperative that the memories of those that were there on Ax Handle Saturday be documented before they are lost to the world forever. These memories must then be passed on to young students in Jacksonville when they are taught about Ax Handle

Saturday. They must understand the city’s racist past, so they know how far the city’s race relations have come and how far it still has to go.

America has seen a renewed focus on race relations, in particular concerns about the interactions between police and African-Americans. As a result of recent race riots in cities like Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland stemming from the controversial

deaths of Eric Garner and Freddie Gray at the hands of white police officers, organizations such as Black Lives Matter have been developed to point out that institutional racism still exists in America. During this renewed interest in issues surrounding race it is even more important for Jacksonville residents to understand what caused Ax Handle Saturday and more importantly how Ax Handle Saturday impacted the city’s race relations. By studying the past, Jacksonville residents will be able to better understand how to deal with the race problems that are currently affecting Jacksonville and the nation.

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