Meanwhile, Hosea Williams drilled more than 150 teenagers who skipped school that day to conduct a climactic march, honoring their four friends who had been locked away for the entire fall semester. As in Savannah, Williams preached ecstatically on nonviolence as a glorious kind of militant perfection, and he placed a large collection bucket up front to gather up knives, rocks, and rulers—anything the most hostile segregationist might construe as weapons. Willie Bolden, the former Savannah bellhop who had bonded himself to Williams in a new movement life, walked up and down the aisles coaxing students to surrender even pens and pencils before they marched off in double file down the sidewalks to the Old Slave Market. There they sang hymns, including an up-tempo “We Shall Overcome,” then marched before bystanders through the downtown streets to the majestic Ponce de Léon Hotel, through its doors and on into the enormous dining room where Vice President Johnson had spoken the previous year. The hall having emptied on word of their approach, the marchers sat down and waited alone in good order—careful not to wrinkle the white linen or touch the crystal—until Sheriff Davis and his men surrounded them with cattle prod “persuaders” and the full squad of fifteen police dogs. After quiet consultations between student leaders and the few white New England volunteers with them, the marchers decided that they could not submit to arrest there without inevitable muss to the place settings. They passed the word to stand up in unison, push back their chairs, and file outside to be arrested in the driveway.
News of the impeccable student witness was relayed to Elk’s Rest about the time Mary Peabody returned from Trinity Church. William Sloane Coffin had arrived there along with Robert Hayling, who had paid a cash bond out of the county prison. In private, asking permission to speak straightforwardly, Coffin told Peabody that the arrest of Esther Burgess from her group sent a demoralizing message to the local integration movement: the Negro alone suffered, while her white friends accepted a privileged escape. Peabody confessed that her experience thus far had strained her belief in persuasive dialogue, especially since some of the Trinity vestrymen had refused to shake her hand. “I think I’d better call my son,” she sighed. Within minutes, she informed Governor Peabody of her predicament, worrying out loud that her controversial deeds might injure his political career. His encouraging response brought mist to her eyes. “Thank you, Endicott,” she signed off. “You’re a wonderful fellow.”
Florence Rowe decided that she could not go through with the arrest, but Hester Campbell determined to stick with Peabody. With a Harvard divinity professor making a third white volunteer, Hayling scoured Elk’s Rest for Negroes willing to fill out an integrated arrest group. He found no takers, the remaining adults intimidated and the supply of teenagers depleted by the morning march. Before offering to go back himself, Hayling ventured into a nearby kitchen where the humblest women supporters were cooking chicken and cornbread snacks for the evening mass meeting. He begged them not to let Peabody’s important gesture go to waste, and painted images of glory, asking whether they ever dreamed of going to jail with a governor’s mother. Finally, Georgia Reed, a diminutive home seamstress crippled by polio, who walked laboriously on heavy canes, spoke up with powerful effect. Her example inspired four of her fellow cooks. Drivers excitedly sprang up to rush the five women home and help them change into their best outfits for the occasion.
During these midday preparations, phone lines continued to hum between Florida and Massachusetts as politicians took over from the worried bishops. Governor Peabody warned Florida Governor Farris Bryant of his mother’s intentions, and Bryant promised to protect her from serious harm. Governor Bryant still thought Peabody did not quite grasp the acute political sensitivity of what Bryant called “the civil rights thing.” He was having similar trouble getting Walter Jenkins and other White House aides to understand why Florida’s elected officials were refusing to serve as delegates to the upcoming Democratic convention. To Bryant, these racial matters required a sixth sense that was essentially Southern. He advised Mayor Shelley and other St. Augustine leaders not to arrest Mary Peabody at all, no matter how incensed they were with her. Jail was exactly what she wanted, he warned, and they should let her sit in at restaurants or motels until she got tired and went home—all night if necessary. With everything seemingly agreed to, it exasperated Governor Bryant all the more to learn that his St. Augustine friends got their backs up within minutes and arrested the Peabody group. Their stubbornness left Bryant feeling more victimized than the prisoners.
Inside St. Johns County jail, the newly arrived Georgia Reed and the four volunteer cooks spread word that the governor’s mother was being fingerprinted and booked behind them. Nearly two hundred demonstrators filled the segregated jail to double its capacity, with sixty-five Negro men jammed into one large cell for sixteen, and fifty-seven Negro women in a smaller cell with only four beds. When Peabody appeared in the hallway, and paused to speak with Esther Burgess on her way to a cell for white female prisoners, a hush fell over the incarcerated Negro women. By social standing and seniority, most of them looked to Katherine Twine to say something. Going to jail had more than healed the year’s humiliation since she had backed out of the Lyndon Johnson dinner the previous Easter, letting her husband attend without her. This time, Twine the postman had to stay home to protect his federal job. The sight of Peabody through the cell bars—“every inch the Boston blueblood,” according to one arrest story, wearing sensible shoes and what the New York Times called “a muted pink suit”—reduced Katherine Twine to momentary awe. All she could say was, “You look just like Miss Eleanor Roosevelt.”
“We are cousins,” Peabody replied.
Fifty reporters clamored outside for jail interviews. Within two hours of the booking, their news bulletins stimulated demands for briefings by the Justice Department and the FBI from U.S. senators concerned about Peabody’s welfare, and St. Augustine sprang up instantly among the leading national news stories, alongside the death watch for a comatose General Douglas MacArthur and reports of a United States-favored military coup in Brazil. The New York Times noted that Senator Hubert Humphrey formally commenced final debate on the civil rights bill with a speech of three hours and twenty-six minutes, opening with the Golden Rule quotation from St. Matthew (“Do unto others…”), and the Times placed on its front page a large photograph of Mary Peabody in custody, flanked by Sheriff Davis with a cattle prod in his hands and a cigar in his mouth.
In Washington, during an unseasonably late snowstorm, CBS television news pledged that its correspondent Roger Mudd would report nightly for the duration of the Senate filibuster from an outdoor perch on the Capitol steps. Emissaries from Walter Cronkite, Mudd’s colleague, guaranteed Mrs. Peabody an appearance on the nightly news if she would bail out in time to film a network interview at a Jacksonville studio. She declined, sending word that she preferred to stay in jail with her new friends.
AMONG THOSE most shocked by the news from St. Augustine was the church lawyer Jack Pratt, who as a seminary student had reported to the celebrity prisoner’s husband, Bishop Malcolm Peabody. With the permission of his CORR employer Robert Spike, Pratt flew south the next morning, April 1, and reached the jail just as it bulged with eighty-eight new demonstrators, pushing the week’s total to nearly three hundred. Aside from seventy marching teenagers, the new arrivals included Chaplain William Sloane Coffin and Yale professor Jacques Bossiere, who delivered to Mrs. Peabody a reading copy of L’Etranger by Albert Camus, in French. At a crowded cell block press conference, Peabody mortified Sheriff Davis and amused the reporters with the comment that she had enjoyed her breakfast of hominy grits even though obliged to eat with her fingers. Davis, who made a show of his hospitality toward Peabody, hastened to fetch proper utensils and offer an apology. Later, while Pratt advised his client to downplay her chipper camaraderie with Sheriff Davis, in view of his sharply contrasting treatment of Negro prisoners, a visitor introduced himself as another Peabody. “I understand you’re representing my mothe
r,” said Rev. George Peabody of New York. “What are your qualifications?”
Pratt himself felt the sheriff’s meaner side. Well past midnight, on the concurring authority of local judge Charles Mathis, Sheriff Davis refused to release any civil rights prisoners without stiff cash bonds ranging from $200 to upward of $2,000. He thought the whites might as well stay in jail—“These bums will all be back here for holding hands with niggers,” he said coldly—and he avoided discussion of the Negroes altogether. Pratt, with fellow itinerant counsel William Kunstler, pointed out that these extreme bail restrictions would buttress their petition to remove all the cases from state to federal court. Civil rights lawyers had developed the removal petition as a standard tactic, relying on a Reconstruction statute designed to protect former slaves from the vengeance of ex-Confederate judges.
Impressed, Sheriff Davis relented to approve a few standard, discounted release bonds written by a surety company, but by the next morning—after Peabody’s second night in jail, with five prisoners sleeping on the floor even in the white women’s cell—Davis again blocked all releases. His deputies tried to confine the lawyers in order to forestall their protest in court, to the point of shoving Kunstler and Pratt headlong across the waiting room. With the help of an early-bird reporter who investigated the commotion, the lawyers talked their way out to attend the emergency removal hearing in Jacksonville.
U.S. District Court Judge Bryan Simpson, a tall, white-haired Truman appointee known for his laconic habit of whittling on the bench, rebuffed the argument that civil rights defendants could not obtain a fair trial in state courts. “Somebody goes and sticks their head in a noose and then complains that the rope burns their neck,” he told Kunstler and Pratt, “I don’t see how they have a great deal to complain about, as long as fundamental due process is accorded in the trial procedures.” Simpson also brushed aside testimony about police dogs and crowded cells, saying he was not about to second-guess or restrict the performance of local officers. Yet he did display a protective interest during the testimony of the fifteen-year-old prisoner, Annie Ruth Evans, sternly admonishing lawyers for the State of Florida that they must abide by that week’s new Supreme Court ruling, which required counsel to address Negro witnesses by courtesy titles instead of first names. The Florida lawyers stumbled so painfully over the words “Miss Evans,” that it seemed to awaken a cautionary balance in Judge Simpson. While he formally remanded all three hundred cases back to Judge Mathis in St. Augustine, Simpson extracted a promise that local prosecutors would delay trial and punishment at least until May, affording Kunstler and Pratt time to pursue removal to federal jurisdiction on appeal.
This glimmer of judicial sympathy was more than enough to sustain a small celebration back in the St. John’s County jail. Mary Peabody bailed out to address a mass meeting that night at First Baptist, where she praised the courage of St. Augustine’s movement. “I feel as if a wall were crumbling,” she said. Pratt accompanied her on the flight back to Boston the next morning, to be greeted by Governor Peabody, Bishop Peabody, Rev. Virgil Wood, Rev. James Breeden, a phalanx of reporters, and a full motorcade of Massachusetts law enforcement. Martin Luther King sent a public telegram to the governor—“I have been so deeply inspired by your mother’s creative witness in Florida”—and “Grandmother Peabody,” as a fresh national celebrity, soon extolled the promise of St. Augustine on NBC’s Today show.
ADRENALINE SUBSIDED from Elk’s Rest as soon as Peabody and the spring break volunteers returned to New England, and press observers focused on the harsh fact that segregation still stood. “Protesters Fail in St. Augustine,” declared the front page of the New York Times. Rest and bail jitters preoccupied the fresh veterans, so much that a frustrated Hosea Williams could not coax new jail volunteers from the mass meetings. King withdrew him temporarily after Williams publicly scolded local Negroes for undermining their own movement.
Local whites rallied to the offensive through April, beginning with a forceful statement of personal belief by Mayor Shelley. “I consider myself a segregationist,” he told reporters. “God segregated the races, as far as I’m concerned, when he made them a different color.” Yet Shelley also insisted that because his city lacked official segregation ordinances, the trespassing demonstrators must have some malicious ulterior purpose. In a rebuttal appearance on the Today show, Shelley argued that his city had enjoyed racial harmony before it was targeted by outsiders. Florida newspapers embraced his defense in headlines: “Mrs. Peabody’s Act Seen Harmful to All.”
A reelection drive by Sheriff L. O. Davis became the most visible campaign of the spring Democratic primary. He wore a gun openly for the first time in his long career, saying he intended to protect himself from the likes of Hosea Williams, and told friends the daily tensions were worse even than the grisly case of the mangled pieces from forty-odd bodies that had washed up on local beaches two decades earlier, which he had attributed in the wartime hush to Nazi submarine attacks on offshore merchant vessels. Davis campaigned aggressively to secure white support. He told Negro audiences in Lincolnville that he did not seek or want their votes, using the epithet “nigger” to drive home his meaning. A vote count well above 70 percent made Sheriff Davis a significant new political force after the May 5 primary. Bristling confidently against the threat of renewed demonstrations, he deputized a volunteer militia and gave known Klan leaders the run of his office.
A quieter state of emergency gripped St. Augustine’s leading citizens, many of whom generally avoided the new white militiamen as uncouth drunkards and roughnecks. Answering his doorbell on a Sunday afternoon, the owner of the local Ford dealership was dumbstruck to face one of his lowliest employees, who had ventured into the prime neighborhood not to the back door—and not in a desperate quest to secure a salary advance—but to say with aplomb that he was there for a social visit, just to talk.
“Who do you want to visit?” asked the incredulous Ford dealer.
“You.”
Horrified, the dealer fired the man summarily, and soon thereafter also fired Negro foreman Bungum Roberson, the pioneer parent of local school integration, on the assumption that Roberson was helping Robert Hayling pump brotherhood fantasies of primitive religion into every tranquil corner of society.
At Trinity Episcopal Church, the Ford dealer followed the guidance of the most learned Sunday School teacher, Dr. Hardgrove Norris, who buttressed his conservative theological teachings with arcane tidbits from anti-Communist literature. Knowing the names of three elderly women who had once served as nominal owners of the Communist Daily Worker, for instance, Dr. Norris held that Mary Peabody fit an established pattern of old ladies as conspiratorial “catspaws” for the Communist party. With A. H. “Hoopie” Tebeault, editor of St. Augustine’s newspaper, Norris in May pushed a resolution through the vestry to shut off church contributions to the Episcopal diocese until it withdrew from the National Council of Churches. He detected socialist tendencies in the sermons of Rev. Charles Seymour, Trinity’s rector since 1949. Seymour, in a rare public hint of conflict within white churches, told a television interviewer that “any or all of us ministers may be leaving town soon at the request of our constituents.”
FROM HIS SPEECH-MAKING tours, King sent a succession of scouts to evaluate prospects in St. Augustine. His traveling aide Bernard Lee reported that adult leaders were thin and badly organized. Another King representative recommended a grand campaign to achieve negotiations with white officials while rebuilding the movement by door-to-door canvass. The city rejected negotiations, however, and all but a few Negro adults shied away from Hayling’s leadership. Some NAACP stalwarts, such as Fannie Fulwood, never missed a Hayling mass meeting but refrained from demonstration as unwise. Others feared Klan violence and job reprisal, or were swayed by whites who demonized Hayling, and a few succumbed to partisan rivalries. Internal NAACP reports speculated with transparent satisfaction that “King is now having to back down from his endorsement of Dr. Hayling in order
to save face.”
The St. Augustine project faltered for lack of a sponsoring minister within King’s councils. During their two-day annual meeting in mid-April, the SCLC board members scarcely mentioned even the high-profile alternatives for renewed demonstrations in Birmingham and Danville, or a march on the U.S. Capitol to break the Senate filibuster. James Bevel lobbied for his Alabama voting crusade—to achieve historic redress for the Birmingham church bombing, he reminded King—and also to repair the national image of nonviolence after a rash of wildcat “brinksmanship” protests, which were feeding a white backlash. Board members knew, however, that Bevel would get nowhere while feuding so intensely with SCLC’s executive director, Wyatt Walker. They relegated his Alabama plan to hallway caucuses along with other touchy matters, such as SCLC’s empty treasury and columnist Joseph Alsop’s public charge that King was harboring Communists.
Gathered at the Bibleway Church of Washington, D.C., the SCLC board members conducted business sessions through the usual exchange of collegial sermons, in a kind of pulpit variation on the baronial customs of Congress. One preacher dramatically summoned King to undertake a public fast against the Senate filibuster. Another hailed the previous year as a vindication for SCLC’s model of crossover leadership from churches into politics, and a third proposed an SCLC expansion drive targeted through the Baptist ministerial associations. Wyatt Walker closed his lengthy review of four years’ service with final notice that he was quitting effective June 15. For nearly nine months, since his first resignation in September, Walker had postponed departure while he secured another job. Out of respect for King, he only hinted at grievances over what he saw as chronic forgiveness toward aimless or insubordinate free spirits, particularly James Bevel. Walker maintained with philosophical resignation that King was losing touch with practical standards to the point of appearing scruffy at the edges—no longer so fastidious about new suits and silk ties, even a trifle indifferent about a frayed collar. In a farewell address of fiery pulpit oratory, Walker recalled the triumph of Birmingham with such impact that Ralph Abernathy rose to declare that Walker was indispensable, and begged him to withdraw his resignation. Daddy King headed off a stampede of acclamation with booming declarations that Walker deserved to make up his own mind, and interceded with a prayer of adjournment that assigned Walker’s fate to heaven.
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