Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! Ax Handle Saturday

WYTS: Jacksonville Jaguars. Original post here.

(Mural is on the Eastside Brotherhood Club on A Philip Randolph Blvd in Jacksonville, FL.)

 

Maybe once the Jaguars finally move to London, we can discuss the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. But for now, they’re in Jacksonville, and there's plenty we can do with that. This is Ax Handle Saturday.

I feel like I’m on Jackass with these intros: “I’m Johnny Knoxville and this is Ax Handle Saturday!”

With our Civil Unrests, we’ve had a sloppy, out-of-order history of race relations in the US. We’re missing a major chapter in this tale, which is the Civil Rights Movement itself. We last saw the South post-political coups in Atlanta and Wilmington, with the violent imposition of Jim Crow upon its citizens. That situation could not last forever, as the political alliance between pro-business conservatives and racist lower classes was always tenuous. Both major parties had left and right wings and eventually one was going to turn hard against Jim Crow. Also, it was just embarrassing during the Cold War. The US was engaged in a global battle to control the destiny of the human race. Which vision of modernity would dominate: classical liberalism or communism? Which “end of history” is going to reign forever after? You’re saying you're the leader of the “Free World” with all this segregation bullshit? 

No, the global Empire needed to look clean and both major political parties by the 1960s were distancing themselves away from all this.

In 1939, one of the first Sit-In Protests took place at the city library in Alexandria, VA, just south of the US capital. This saw Black patrons dare step over the color line. Five men were charged with disorderly conduct, but never convicted. Similar protests in the next decade occurred in Columbia, NYC, Chicago – Northern cities, you’ll notice. In 1954, after Brown v Board of Education, Sit-Ins became much more common. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized a Sit-In at a drug store chain called Read’s in Baltimore in 1955, successfully integrating the chain. This quickly became the common tactic of non-violent protest between CORE and the NAACP and other famed organizations, usually by students, often extremely young students, and it was very effective. Gandhi - with some good geopolitical luck thanks to a couple World Wars - had torn down the British Empire with these kinds of saintly protests.

Anyway, we're talking about Jacksonville, not the most exciting or important place in the country then (or now). It is named after a president who brought war to this place in the early 1800s. It was one of the few places in Florida to see much action during the Civil War, the Union captured it a few times. By 1960, Jacksonville was a city of a little over 200,000 people with an important navy base. Alabama and Mississippi would be the most famous battlefields of the Civil Rights Movement, but Jacksonville had the same problems of any other Southern city.

The stage for our drama is Hemming Park, named after a Confederate soldier and spy, Charles C. Hemmings. The park had a 62-foot-tall Confederate monument and was a kind of informal center of Jacksonville near the courthouse, and importantly, the lunch counters. (City Hall is here now, but in 1960 that was more retail space.) Woolworths department store was here, so was a chain called W.T. Grants, and a cafeteria chain called Morrisons, all serving whites-only. They seem like cool retro-chic places based on the 1960s photos, but you don’t see in the exterior shots that they were deeply segregated. Black patrons could not even try on shoes or hats at these places, you had to buy them off the rack and hope they’d fit, or find a good cobbler. God help us if a white man might accidentally touched Black flesh even second-hand.

On August 13th, 1960, students appeared at lunchtime at the various eateries and sat down, openly defying the color barriers. This was the classic move, smashing the social norm and forcing the store or the city to respond. They spoiled a lot of white people’s lunches, waitresses had no idea what to do, and patrons walked out in disgust. During the next two weeks, the sit-in protest continued, with the response turning from confusion to violence. The protestors were spat at, called all sorts of things, some guy stabbed at their backs with his walking cane. On August 25th, Richard Parker, a white college student and an NAACP member, was targeted by a small mob in Woolworths, seemingly planning to lynch him. Parker was pulled out of the store by a supportive Black gang, the Boomerangs, saving his life.

Saturday, August 27th is the date that lives in infamy… or not really, Ax Handle Saturday is still relatively obscure. The White Citizens Council (as racist as it sounds) had met a week earlier, plotting to stop these Sit-Ins however they could. Eventually the KKK became involved – yes, the KKK, they’re finally here! I know you’ve been waiting for them and now, over 20 stories deep, they get to be direct characters in these riots. We know this because the FBI was monitoring the Klan at the time, along with monitoring the Civil Rights Movement. They had an informant, Clarence Spears, who reported that violence was coming. The Bureau passed the info to the Jacksonville Police, and then at the next Klan meeting, Spears had to sit with his best Poker Face on because his Klan buddies were suddenly aware they had a rat. Spears would quit his informant job soon after this.

Jacksonville PD apparently had one cop in the area the afternoon the riots began. And that’s pretty incredible since the courthouse then was only blocks away.

Ax Handle Saturday got its name because the crowd of about 200 angry white men gathered with ax handles. Just the wooden parts, they left the ax heads at home, this would have been way worse otherwise. They also had bats, just any blunt object made out of hard wood. Many of these guys were KKK members but I could not verify if any of them wore their robes to the event, I’m guessing it’s not easy to do battle in those things. They gathered in Hemming Park and then went off to brutalize as many Black youths as they could find. They charged into the stores to beat the counters back into Whites-Only sections. But really nobody was safe whether they were at the Sit-Ins or not, random people on the street were just as likely to be attacked. Some of these protesters were as young as 13 and were beaten to the ground by red-faced adults.

As the police arrived, suspiciously slowly, they did little to stop the violence, or even joined in with their night sticks. The Boomerangs, that gang I mentioned a few paragraphs back, put up a decent resistance and fought back, allowing many students to escape. Once the African Americans were able to hold their ground, the police swooped in and began making arrests.

It is hard to get exact details on how long this lasted. There were close to 100 injuries, no deaths thankfully, and dozens of arrests. About 4:1 majority of those arrested were black, who had done nothing wrong. The main battle around Hemming Park seems to have only lasted at most hours, but random violence and attacks around Jacksonville went on well into the night, maybe into Sunday. Richard Parker was one of those who got arrested, charged as if he was the mastermind of the riot. He was then sentenced to 90 days in prison. He spent some time on a chain gang and some racist fellow prisoners broke his jaw in reprisal.

By the way, this one of those stories where the good guys win. In 1961, despite all the ax handles in the world, the lunch counters in Jacksonville were integrated. More Sit-In Protests would happen across the South, especially once the Freedom Riders got going in 1961 and soon the Interstate Commerce Commission ordered the end of Jim Crow.

In 1964, after the Civil Rights Act was passed, Jacksonville had to integrate its water fountains at Hemming Park. By the late 80s most of the big stores had been lost to White Flight and shopping malls, one of those vacated stately retail spaces is now the City Hall right by the park. There was also a big problem with an invasive species, the European Starling, which according to Wikipedia conquered most of downtown. I’m unclear what that means. Maybe flocks of rabid starlings were devouring Duval-ians alive, reducing them to skeletons in mere seconds as a grisly decoration by the Monument, I dunno. The city pulled down trees and put up concrete. That goofy Jacksonville Skyway monorail built in 1989 has a station there. I’d like to ride that before it is inevitably shut down to be replaced by a terrible AI taxi system. That's probably going to fail too and Jacksonville will be left with buses as its only public transportation.

In 2020, having a park named after a Confederate dude was looking increasingly gross, so Jacksonville renamed the space after James Weldon Johnson, an early 20th-century NAACP leader. The Confederate Monument was torn down too. Trump and his ilk have been fighting to get those things back up, so watch this space.