'Ax Handle Saturday': The Klan's Vicious Attack On Black Protesters In FL 60 Yrs Ago', Wash Post
‘Ax Handle Saturday’: The Klan’s vicious attack on Black protesters in Florida 60 years ago.' By Sydney Trent, Washington Post, Aug. 27, 2020.
-- A Jacksonville police officer stands with Charles Griffin, after he was attacked on Aug. 27, 1960, during a lunch counter protest by civil rights activists in Fla. (Florida Historical Society). --
The Florida Klansmen had armed themselves with ax handles.
It was Aug. 27, 1960- a year of lunch counter sit-ins by civil rights activists. The opening salvo had been fired on Feb. 1, when 4 Black college students sat down at a Whites-only lunch counter inside an F.W. Woolworth five-and-dime store in Greensboro, N.C. By spring, sit-in campaigns led by young African Americans had been organized in cities all over the South- including Lexington, Ky., Little Rock, Baltimore, Richmond & Nashville. Surprised White onlookers spat & spewed racial epithets at the demonstrators & sometimes physically attacked them. But as spring blossomed into summer, white supremacists farther South, having watched the protests achieve success elsewhere, switched to high alert.
Images of lunch counter sit-ins fueled the civil rights movement. So when young Black people began staging sit-ins at a Whites-only Woolworth lunch counter in downtown Jacksonville, Fla., that summer, the Ku Klux Klan organized.
On the morning of what has become notoriously known as “Ax Handle Saturday,” more than 200 White men wielding wooden ax handles launched a vicious attack on Black protesters and passersby. Before pulling the plug on an in-person convention in Jacksonville, President Trump was scheduled to speak there on the 60th anniversary of Ax Handle Saturday, angering local activists. Now he will accept the nomination in a speech from the White House, which is surrounded by fencing after repeated Black Lives Matter protests. In 1960, the Klan attack in Florida signaled a sharp turn in the cascading sit-in movement, from spontaneous acts of racism to coordinated white supremacist brutality, according to Stanford University history professor Clayborne Carson.
- See VIDEO, Wash Post: The history of the lunch counter sit-in: The concept of racial profiling dates back decades, & it’s prevalent throughout U.S. history. (Allie Caren/The Washington Post)
“As [the protesters] began to achieve some success in the upper South, then in the Deep South areas, resistance became more intense,” said Carson, who is also founding director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research & Education Institute at Stanford. The lunch counter sit-ins that spring had inspired members of the Youth Council of the Jacksonville NAACP to launch nonviolent direct action of their own. Their adult leader was a man named Rutledge Henry Pearson, a young history teacher, devout Christian & Negro leagues baseball player. In history class, Pearson, a civil rights activist, would sternly counsel his students that “freedom is not free.” He would tell them when classes began to leave their system-issued books at home while he created new lessons for them in Black history.
Among those who revered him was Rodney L. Hurst, the 16-year-old Youth Council president at the time, whose 2011 book richly described Pearson, the sit-ins & the spectacle of brutality that followed. Pearson taught his students that Hemming Park, a centerpiece of the downtown shopping district that included Woolworth’s, was named for Charles C. Hemming, a local Civil War veteran who in 1898 donated a towering Confederate monument to the city. To instill pride, Pearson also informed them that Jacksonville was the hometown of James Weldon Johnson, the Black activist & poet who penned “Lift Every Voice & Sing,” popularly known as the Negro national anthem.
Woolworth’s, which anchored one edge of Hemming Park, had 2 lunch counters, Hurst wrote, one at the front of the store with dozens of seats near the windows marked “WHITES ONLY,” & one in the back past the segregated water fountains & restrooms with just 15 seats & no windows for Black customers.
-- Sitting at the Jacksonville Woolworth’s lunch counter on Aug. 13, 1960, are Rodney Hurst, ctr right, head of the NAACP’s Youth Council, & fellow activist Alton Yates. (Florida Historical Society). --
.. Two days later, on Saturday, Pearson again received calls about suspicious activity- this time at Hemming Park. “We saw several white men wearing Confederate uniforms,” recalled one member of the Youth Council in Hurst’s book. “Other whites walked around Hemming Park carrying ax handles with Confederate flags taped to them. A signed taped to a delivery-type van … read ‘Free Ax Handles.’"...
More, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/08/27/axe-handle-saturday-klan-attack-civil-rights-protesters/
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