Ax Handle Saturday

The sun beamed on me, hot and high, in the north Florida sky. Sweat trickled down my skin beneath my clothing, my breath hot in my mask, but my discomfort did not deter me from the crowd of socially distanced and diverse hundreds who gathered in James Weldon Johnson Park. We came to pay tribute and honor to the elders who had come before us. The elders who were mostly teenagers on that day in 1960 when they were beaten by a riotous mob of 200 racist, adult men armed with baseball bats and ax handles in an event that has come to be known as Ax Handle Saturday. 

Last Friday marked the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where the Rev. Dr. King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. That march was  organized by Jacksonville native A. Philip Randolph who knew intimately the struggles of Black people in the United States. His hometown, my current home, was the site of Ax Handle Saturday, just three years and one day before the historic March on Washington.  What happened in Jacksonville on August 27, 1960 was intentionally and deliberately hidden from history; censored by major media corporations at the time. 

The 60th commemoration of the brutal event this past Thursday is just as important as the commemorations of the March on Washington and Bloody Sunday and the other countless acts of white racist violence launched against Black people throughout the Civil Rights movement. These commemorations are an acknowledgement of the responsibility Black people took on their backs and heads that finally led to the securing of civil liberties long promised to Black people, but easily denied, despite the words of the Constitution and its Amendments.

Rodney L. Hurst Sr. is a historian, author, and civil rights activist who led the peaceful demonstrations of the NAACP Youth Council in Jacksonville. His 2008 memoir, It Was Never About a Hot Dog and a Coke, is largely the only account of what happened that fateful day. A day that he had been preparing for when he joined the local chapter of the NAACP youth council at age 11. He says the youth council was an extension of the American History and Civics classes taught by renowned Jacksonville Civil Rights activist, and former Negro League Baseball player, Rutledge Pearson.

“It was part of the evolution when you were a young Black person, especially involved in the youth council,” Hurst said when we spoke on the phone a week prior to the commemoration. He later met students who were involved in NAACP college chapters. “I met what we called the Greensboro Four. Ezell Blair Jr, and [David] Richmond and the four young men who started the wave of sit-ins on February 1, 1960.”

These meetings and the youth council conversations about race and racism inspired the youth council to follow in the footsteps of the Greensboro Four. They began staging their own lunch counter sit-ins in Jacksonville, beginning August 13, 1960.

“In Woolworth’s in downtown Jacksonville the white lunch counter had 84 seats,” Hurst said. “The colored lunch counter in the back of the store behind the garden supplies, and the aquarium, and the pet supplies...it had 15 seats. No windows. No view. Just there. So we said that was insulting that Woolworth’s would accept our money but only where they wanted us to shop. When we started the sit-ins we always made it a point to buy something in the store to show that they accepted my money at counter A, but would not accept my money at counter B.”

The sit-ins in Jacksonville were conducted by mostly high school students who were members of the youth council. Hurst became president of the youth council at age 15, and he led the sit-ins just two months after he graduated from high school at age 16. (Yes, he skipped a few grades as a child.)

Hurst said, “This youth council, this youth, slash, young adult council were really children. But we understood enough about racism.”

The racist corporate culture at Woolworth’s and the local businesses that surrounded what was then known as Hemming Park — named for Confederate veteran Charles C. Hemming — led the youth council to boldly take over the seats reserved for whites in an attempt to usher in a new future for the so-called Bold New City of the South.

Another Jacksonville Civil Rights activist, Ben Frazier, was only 10 years old in 1960. He remembers attending the demonstrations at the time with his mother, who was following the leadership of Pearson.

In our conversation before the commemoration he said, “In my mother’s eyes, and the eyes of many others, Rutledge Pearson was Martin Luther King in the flesh if you lived in Jacksonville, Florida. We admired him, his tenacity, his courage, and his leadership.”

Frazier’s mother exhibited that same courage, leadership, and tenacity when she brought her son to the demonstrations despite his father’s objections.

“I remember on occasion going to Morrison’s cafeteria where we were apparently told to go for a demonstration under the agents of the NAACP,” Frazier said. “Morrison’s cafeteria being a place where if you were Black you could work, but you could not eat. [I was] holding mom’s hand [and] seeing the Ku Klux Klan go by [in] full regalia in a flatbed truck and my mother telling me, ‘Benny don’t be afraid.’”

Frazier says Hemming Park itself, with its recently removed 62-foot Confederate monument, was segregated.

“One side was for colored folks, and on the other side, it was for white folks. There were colored water fountains and water fountains designated for the use of whites only. The same for restrooms. There was the white cab company, The Yellow Cab company, that didn’t transport Blacks, and on the other side, it was The New Deal Cab Company for colored folks. And of course, all around this park were places to eat as it was still segregated and that segregation was the target of the marches, protests, and demonstrations, spearheaded by the NAACP.”

Hurst and the other participants and leaders in those marches, protests, and demonstrations felt that they were embodying Mr. Rutledge Pearson’s mantra which was to be a part of the solution and not a part of the problem. However, problems and “good trouble” soon found them.

“The morning of August 27, after we had sat in for two weeks at all of the department stores in downtown Jacksonville that had lunch counters, Mr. Pearson got a call that morning from a person who told him there was some strange goings-on in downtown Jacksonville in Hemming Park,” Hurst recalled. 

He said Mr. Pearson rode down to Hemming Park and saw white men in Confederate uniforms and a station wagon parked at one corner of the park. A sign next to the station wagon read, “Free Ax Handles.” Hurst said Mr. Pearson along with a Black dental student, Dr. Arnett Girardeau, also saw a policeman at the scene.

“They saw a policeman riding one of those three-wheel motorcycles or four-wheel motorcycles that policemen would have at that time and just having a conversation with these white men in Confederate uniforms handing out [bundles of] ax handles but not interrogating them based on what they [were] doing,” Hurst said.

Upon returning to the youth center at Laura Street Presbyterian Church — just blocks from Hemming Park — where the youth council met, Mr. Pearson warned his group of young activists that “something could happen today.”

Even with that warning, and the potential risk to their safety, the youth council proceeded with their planned sit-in.

Hurst said, “We sat in at a department store named W.T. Grant’s. As we walked out of that department store...we saw running down the street 200 white males with ax handles and baseball bats.”

The defenseless Black protestors — teenagers and young adults  in their early twenties — were locked out of all of the surrounding stores as they were beaten and bludgeoned by this angry, racist, riotous mob.

The events of Ax Handle Saturday were unreported in local Jacksonville media and the national, “white,” press, save for a single photo of a bloodied Black man, named Charlie Griffin, published in the September 12, 1960 issue of Life magazine. However, Griffin was not a protester, but a Black shopper in downtown Jacksonville who was caught up in the fray.

On the lack of media coverage of what happened Hurst said, “The local newspaper the [Florida] Times-Union, Channel 4, and the NBC affiliate Channel 12, they made a conscious decision to black out all news about the sit-ins, so there are no articles in the news archives of local newspapers.”

Save for the coverage in Life magazine, Ax Handle Saturday was generally only reported in the Black press: The Pittsburgh Courier, Jet and Ebony Magazine, The Amsterdam News, The Chicago Defender, and The Florida Star. Clippings and archives of those articles are hard to come by in today’s digitized culture. Hurst said he had to use the Library of Congress to find some of those detailed reports to corroborate his own memories to write his memoir.  

“When Ax Handle Saturday began, there were reporters here in town who had been reporting to their newspapers; white reporters and their white newspapers,” Hurst said. “One of the real problems in the Civil Rights Movement was that other than Black reporters who were covering the Civil Rights Movement, who were members of the Black press, you had no Black reporters for ABC, and CBS, and NBC and your local television. There were no Black newspaper writers for different newspapers [and] for the most part we did not trust white reporters.”

60 years later, national news is getting to be more balanced. 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who has been charged in the shooting deaths of two protesters and injury of a third, got national attention — just as the police shootings of Jacob Blake, Breonna Taylor, and others are staying in the public eye.

But, there is still risk for Black reporters who do this work such as CNN’s Omar Jimenez, who was arrested on live television while covering the protests over the death of George Floyd. It is not lost on me that I worked for two years as a producer at the same NBC affiliate that decades before blacked out coverage of Ax Handle Saturday. During my time there, two of our largest stories were the murders of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis. As a producer, a Black woman, a mother, it was always my goal to tell the story but also honor the humanity of the victims, these teenage boys, who were killed under the dubious grounds of their perpetrators “standing their ground.”

As I sat in the park last Thursday, I noticed that journalists, reporters and photographers, from all three of our local television stations were present, as well as from the major newspaper, the local weekly, and several other independent or online outlets. One reporter was a Black woman, another reporter a Latina of Cuban heritage. Together, we all gathered to document the remembrance of history and the progress made in a park where the Confederate monument had only been removed in June in the wake of the unrest sparked by the police killing of George Floyd.

Many in Jacksonville’s Black community considered it a pandering move because a day after the monument came down it was announced that the RNC would hold its convention activities in Jacksonville. President Trump would have given his acceptance from the stage of the Vystar Veterans Memorial Arena on August 27, 2020, the 60th anniversary of Ax Handle Saturday — instead of from the White House — if COVID-19 cases had not spiked in Florida, and Jacksonville specifically, in July. 

During the commemoration, Florida Congressman Al Lawson, who represents Jacksonville, mentioned that President Trump had reached out to him asking if he could use some of his remarks about Ax Handle Saturday in his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination for President for a second term. Lawson said in his remarks that he did not respond to the request. 

At the somber ceremony, teenage Jacksonville artist Keedron Bryant sang his song, “I Just Wanna Live.” The final lyrics of which are: 

I just wanna live, God protect me
I just wanna live
I just wanna live

The song, wrenched from the depths of his young soul, is more than words set to music. It instead is a prayer, a plea, an invocation over his young, Black, male life. A kind of life that is too often taken for granted as we wrestle with the reckoning happening across this country in response to the wave of unarmed Black people being killed by the police and neighborhood vigilantes.

The latest victim to make national news, Jacob Blake of Kenosha, Wisconsin was only injured. His life was spared by the seven police bullets fired into his back in front of his three children, but life as he knew it was destroyed as he is paralyzed from the waist down. In response, protests have been waged and demands made in his name from Black communities and allies across the country.  

The work of Black Lives Matter, their assigns, and supporters is protected by the First Amendment and the right to peaceably assemble. Protesting is not the same as rioting. Though some protests over the spring and summer have devolved into riots, I refer you to Martin Luther King Jr. and his infamous quote that the riot is the language of the unheard. Life is more valuable than property. Property damage can be repaired, lives lost cannot. Therefore, the protesters demand and their demands fall on deaf ears.  The same demands being made now in the name of Jacob Blake were made a few months ago in the names of Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor. (The police in her case have yet to be arrested for killing her in her sleep while administering a no-knock warrant.)

The demands from thousands of protesters nationwide and even globally are not new. To be treated equitably, fairly, humanely. Demanding life and justice is not new for Black people in the United States. It harkens back to times of Ax Handle Saturday and Bloody Sunday and people like John Lewis, and Charlie Griffin, and Rodney Hurst.

“Black Lives Matter is an extension of what happened before them,” Hurst said. “Civil Rights and direct demonstrations, the sit-ins, the picketing, the marches, the wade-ins, the kneel-ins, they were extensions of Black folk who came before us fighting for human dignity and respect.”

Hurst says we are still fighting today for what we have been fighting for since the end of slavery 155 years ago. His continued fight and activism is told through his subsequent books, Unless We Tell It, It Never Gets Told, and his latest offering Never Forget Who You Are: Conversations About Racism and Identity Development, co-authored with Rudy Jamison, the assistant director in the Center for Urban Education and Policy at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.

I spoke with Jamison after a soil collection ceremony for one of Jacksonville’s eight lynching victims, Benjamin Hart. He said to me, on that sacred ground where blood was spilled 97 years ago, that it is important that we commemorate the events of Ax Handle Saturday even if they were blacked out from the annals of history 60 years ago.

“I don’t think we can address contemporary racial issues looking through an ahistorical lens,” Jamison said. “We have to factor historic acts into that equation if we’re going to be honest with each other.”

Hurst said, “He [Jamison] looks at racism from his 50-year-old eyes, and I look at racism from my 76-year-old-eyes. It gives a perspective.”

Nationally acclaimed spoken word artist Ebony Payne-English provided perspective when she shared “Dear Jacksonville,” a poem she had written years before. She retired it — performing it live for the last time — at the commemoration.

Her line in the piece: “My parks you now refuse and use the confederate monuments as excuse” is a direct reference to the legacy of Hemming Park. She said the retirement of the poem was fitting as the Confederate monument she wrote about has come done, and the park has been newly crowned James Weldon Johnson Park — after the Black Jacksonville native and son of the Harlem Renaissance, who wrote the words to Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing:

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us

60 years ago, in our dark past, 38 NAACP youth council students were assaulted with bats and ax handles by men old enough to be their parents for trying to integrate lunch counters in major department stores surrounding a segregated park. They taught us that the sacrifice of your own body to the hands of brutality may be necessary to bring a stop to the violence against Black bodies in the present. 60 years later, the present has brought us the clarity of understanding that there is still more work and more sacrifice required.  

Ben Frazier said, “With reference to what these folks marched for, it has yet to be realized. There is still need for more agitation. Still need for more education. Still need for more organization and, so far as community is concerned, to bring to light these ghosts and heinous and horrendous and horrific injustices that are still very much prevalent today as they were yesterday.”

This work in the face of what is happening now can be tiresome. Rodney Hurst says being tired is okay, but we should never let ourselves become weary. 

His sentiments were bolstered by Marjorie Meeks Brown who was the secretary of the NAACP youth council in 1960. She said during the commemoration, “Until we deal with the ugly parts of our past, the casualties of racism will continue.” 

She minced no words when she told us that we "had not arrived” at the so-called promised land of racial equality and social parity. Brown, and every other speaker who took the podium, urged everyone gathered to vote. 

As the commemoration wound to a close and the crowd dispersed, we were left with the feeling of recognizing the racial relics of the past and dealing with them in the present. We were given marching orders in this uber political climate to exercise the right so many were willing and did die for, and reminded, as Mr. Rutledge Pearson reminded his young students who joined and demonstrated with the NAACP youth council more than 60 years ago, that “freedom is not free, unless all are free.”

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