It’s the last weekend in August. Think of what you did on Saturday, then remember...or learn about the last Saturday in August 60 years ago.
This past Monday August 27, 2020 marked the 60th Anniversary date of what has come to be known as Ax Handle Saturday.
Plainly said, the day is a namesake for what turned out to be an organized, brutal assault by an ax handle wielding white mob, on to African American shoppers in the middle of a Saturday afternoon in central downtown Jacksonville Florida.
The events of the day were not by any means a “race riot”. It was a rampage of racial hatred.
Needless to say, the event is not well known nationally. It was not on the scale of the Tulsa Race Massacre which will have its 100 year anniversary in 2021, nor the Rosewood Massacre which occurred in 1923, two years after Tulsa. No one was killed on Ax Handle Saturday, so it didn’t qualify as a “massacre”.
Ax Handle Saturday was much more contemporary. Tulsa and Rosewood occurred just about 100 years ago. There are probably vanishingly few survivors or witnesses to Tulsa or Rosewood who are still with us. Ax Handle Saturday occurred within living memory.
The assault was provoked by one of the early lunch counter “sit-in’s” of the civil rights struggle.
- The sit-in was organized entirely by the local African American community.
- They weren’t staging their protest for national news coverage.
- There was no Civil Rights iconic personality there. No Martin Luther King nor John Lewis-like presence to bring the national spotlight to the protest.
- It was entirely local. They were doing it for themselves. They were doing it for equal rights.
- The local leader and inspiration for the action was a local teacher named Rutledge Pearson, who was tired of empty promises.
There has been a willful collective amnesia about the event because it "revives old hurts", which is another way to say that it was just so damned shameful that the dominant white establishment decided to completely bury it... whitewashing history, as they say.
A look back at the events of that time, and in light of current events, can show us how far we have come, and how much more work there is to do in the never-ending task of making “a more perfect union” and the struggle for civil rights.
A brief summary of the incident from Wikipedia:
Ax Handle Saturday, also known as the Jacksonville riot of 1960, was a racially motivated attack that took place in Hemming Park in Jacksonville, Florida, on August 27, 1960. A group of white men attacked African Americans who were engaging in sit-in protests opposing racial segregation. The attack took its name from the ax handles used by the attackers.
Because of its high visibility and patronage, 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. They were denied service and kicked, spit at and addressed with racial slurs.
On 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. Although police had not intervened when the protesters were attacked, they became involved, arresting members of the Boomerangs and other black residents who attempted to stop the beatings.
This is a photo of Charles Griffen. “The Story Behind Ax Handle Saturday’s Most Famous Photo” adds context to the image and the events of that day.
As per their usual practice, Jacksonville’s local papers, the Florida Times-Union and Jacksonville Journal, barely covered the attacks. Mayor Haydon Burns downplayed what had happened, likening it to the rowdiness of an annual Florida-Georgia football game . On television the next day, he denied there had been any violence at all, telling the media, “not a single member of one group came into contact with a member of the opposite group.”
However, outside publications like The New York Times, St. Petersburg Times and Life Magazine were there to punch through the veil of willful blindness. In its September 12 issue, Life chronicled the events in a brief pagelong piece that included two photographs of Charlie Griffin. Neither the photographer nor the writer are identified.
The first image shows Griffin being attacked by an older white man in the street. “As other whites look on, a Negro who happened by is pummeled by a segregationist,” reads the caption. The second photo is the famous one above, depicting the aftermath: a bewildered-looking Griffin, face gashed, shirt spattered with blood, being escorted by a police officer. The caption succinctly reads “Rescued by cop: Charlie Griffin… had his head bashed by an ax handle.”
The following short documentary, produced for the 50th anniversary, features reminiscences of people who actually lived the experience and offers a stark and eye opening snapshot of the daily humiliation of being black in segregated Jacksonville Florida 1960.
The incident lead to a positive outcome, as afterwards the local African American community very quickly organized a boycott of downtown Jacksonville white merchants...and won. As Gwen Yates in the film says: “There is one color that everyone recognizes, and that’s green”. For the African American community in Jacksonville it was an awakening to the realization of their collective power.
The documentary ends with a followup on the laudable lifetime accomplishments of persons involved in the incident, such as Rutledge Pearson, Alton Yates, Rodney L. Hurst, Marjorie Meeks Brown, and others, most of them very young at the time.
One of the narrators Rodney L. Hurst, wrote an account of his experience as an 11 year old activist during the lunch counter sit-in that prompted the vicious ax handle attack: “It Was Never About a Hot Dog and a Coke!”. Those words are included on the mural shown above in the title photo.
As stated in the above documentary:
“Jacksonville buried the memory of Ax Handle Saturday, then spent the next 40 years years in denial. Dealing with it was just too much...too embarrassing. Then in 2000 the city came to terms with its past. Not with a demonstration, but with a commemoration”.
This Florida Heritage Landmark was installed in Hemming Park in 2002 as a commemoration of the positive changes as a result of the incident.
There were objections from the white community about the plaque installation because “it brings up old hurts”.
However, installation of that plaque must have been bittersweet to the African American community as Hemming Park is where the white ax handle mob assembled.
The park was originally named “City Park”, as it was located right in the center of town, however...
...The area was renamed Hemming Park in 1899 in honor of Civil War veteran Charles C. Hemming, after he installed a 62-foot (19 m)-tall Confederate monument in the park in 1898.
That landmark plaque commemorating the civil rights struggle stood for 18 years in the shadow of a Jim Crow monument, in a park named after a confederate Civil War veteran. Having personally seen that monument, I can tell you it towered over that small city park.
I used the past tense in the previous sentence, because on June 9, 2020 the Confederate monument was taken down after 122 years in the center of the park, in the events following the death of George Floyd and resultant Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Jacksonville. After the removal of the monument, the Republican Mayor of Jacksonville said:
"The confederate monument is gone. And the others in this city will be removed as well,“ Curry said. ”We hear your voices. We have heard your voices.”
In addition, on August 11, 2020 the Jacksonville City Council voted to change the name of the park to James Weldon Johnson Park, after one of Jacksonville's most famous and accomplished residents, James Weldon Johnson.
James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 – June 26, 1938) was an American writer and civil rights activist. He was married to civil rights activist Grace Nail Johnson. Johnson was a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he started working in 1917. In 1920, he was the first African American to be chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer. He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novels, and anthologies collecting both poems and spirituals of black culture.
The Florida Heritage Landmark Plaque still stands in that newly renamed park.
As Martin Luther King said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”… but with some snags... the monument may be gone, but presently the descendants of the Hemming family are suing the city to fight the name change to the park.
Jacksonville is at least coming to terms with its collective amnesia of this incident.
This years commemoration was particularly poignant in light of recent events. Held at James Weldon Johnson Park, it is not a civic pride thing, it is a painful necessary reminder of Jacksonville’s racist past. The speakers all tried to bring a positive message, remembering the young activists who dared to challenge the existing power structure, and the positive changes that occurred because of it, rather than dwelling on the horrors of the actual incident.
For those who don’t have the time to watch the longer videos posted, here is a short news clip that consolidates the story I told above and ties it in to the recent commemoration shown in the clip below.
This summer “The Axe Handle Saturday Series”, in commemoration of the 60th anniversary, featured numerous contemporary articles by Rodney L. Hurst, on the time line of events leading up to that day: literally first hand, blow-by-blow memories, and posing the question “where do we go from here?”.
Vice-President Joe Biden recently acknowledged the anniversary on this past Monday, August 27.
In addition…
This year’s anniversary saw the delayed reckoning from the Florida Times-Union, which mostly ignored the incident and the subsequent local civil rights movement it spawned.
In an editorial published last week, the Times-Union apologized to its readers for coverage that it called “journalistic malpractice.”
“Because of this bad decision, newspaper readers elsewhere in the nation had more information on the sit-ins than readers of Jacksonville’s premier newspaper,” the Aug. 21 editorial stated. “Imagine a doctor’s office refusing to treat patients. Imagine a fire station refusing to answer a call. The Florida Times-Union committed an act of journalistic malpractice so egregious that it deserves a formal apology. Yes, 60 years is a long time to wait for an apology.”
Read the editorial in the link above, it’s a self-scorcher. It took until the year 2000...40 years...for Jacksonville’s flagship newspaper to admit the incident really happened as it did. 20 years more to admit they were wrong...seriously wrong. All I can say is...better late than never. There are some signs of progress in their tacit admission of “Journalistic malpractice”. This was not a boilerplate “nopology”. Here is the final snippet:
A diverse workforce helps a newsroom provide more comprehensive coverage of a community. Indeed, our coverage in recent decades on news and editorial pages of issues about our community that is rich in diversity has helped shape public opinion, election outcomes and policy changes.
But we can’t say the same for what the Times-Union did 60 years ago.
The sit-ins in 1960 worked. Lunch counters in Jacksonville were integrated. It took courage from incredibly brave young people to do that. But it was no thanks to the Times-Union.
For failing to adequately cover the sit-ins and the unjust violence that sought to stop them, The Florida Times-Union apologizes.
We ask for forgiveness.
Ironically ...and unfortunately... this year’s 60th anniversary date and commemoration corresponded with...and was overshadowed, by all the hoopla surrounding the 2020 Republican National Convention...so Ax Handle Saturday was lost in the news cycle.
Remember that the convention was scheduled to be in Jacksonville on that date, and there were admonitions that it would overlap with Ax Handle Commemorations. I’m at least grateful that the convention location was relocated due to Covid risk.
I could go on and on as to how unsettling it would have been for the bloviator-in-chief to be in Jacksonville on that infamous date , presiding over his coronation, bellowing his racist dog-whistle bile, during a time of pandemic …
...but I won’t….. waste any time on the fool.
I’m reminded of what former President Barack Obama has often said: “Don’t complain...VOTE!”
Eyes on the prize.
GOTV