Published Sunday, October 5, 2008

St. Augustine's role in civil rights history

Author puts the dramatic events of 1964 into perspective

In his cathartic book, If It Takes All Summer, Dan Warren attempts to explain how the nation's oldest city became a landmark on the road to civil rights.

Although blacks accounted for a quarter of St. Augustine's population in 1963, black community leaders were excluded from the committee planning the city's 400th anniversary celebration. This exacerbated long-simmering racial tensions and triggered demonstrations, during which so many protesters were arrested the jail could barely hold all of them. In March 1964, things reached a boiling point when Mary Peabody, the mother of the governor of Massachusetts, was jailed after trying to integrate a motor lodge. Peabody's arrest attracted national media attention and more civil rights activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., to the Ancient City. During the ensuing standoff between white segregationists and King's demonstrators, Warren, a young state attorney, struggled to keep the peace while staying true to his belief in social equality.

In a lean 240 pages, Warren's attempts to stitch together the story of St. Augustine's racial strife, an analysis of the states' rights movement, a memoir and a political history. To the first-time author's credit, he nearly pulls it off.

Warren, a North Carolina transplant, grew up in a household that taught him that it is a "mortal sin to act superior to another human being." When he went to Guilford College just outside Greensboro, those beliefs were reinforced by the institution's Quaker traditions.

He joined other students in the late-1940s in attempting to integrate Guilford County's social services. Rebuffed by an uncaring official who asked Warren whether his father knew what he was doing, he replied, "No, but if he did, he would advise me to do what my conscience dictated."

In 1952, Warren and his wife moved to Daytona Beach, where he opened a law office. Short on clients, he ran for city commission, hoping the attention would drive business to his door. This gained him political contacts, including one who would assume the state's top office. Gov. Farris Bryant appointed Warren to a vacancy as the state attorney overseeing the four-county Seventh Judicial Circuit, in 1962.

Although Warren describes his benefactor as a politician "bound to the racist traditions of the past," he doesn't recoil, despite his liberal leanings, at the opportunity to take the position. Warren also writes that he took Bryant's side against King in a legal battle pitting public safety against the marchers' First Amendment rights.

His reasons were noble. Warren had told the St. Johns County sheriff to redirect a nighttime march route to stave off a potentially violent confrontation between demonstrators and the Ku Klux Klan. Many of the marchers were children. Regardless of his motivation, Warren had aligned himself with the side working against integration.

Does this warrant introspection? Absolutely, but Warren doesn't offer any. What he does give is a vigorous denial that he was in "cahoots" with the sheriff "in a ploy to aid the Klan," as one of King's lawyers suggested during a federal trial involving the matter. In spite of these inconsistencies, the author provides a clear-eyed, insightful, lawyerly narrative on St. Augustine's place in the larger events of the year. He writes that the city helped illustrate the intolerance that forced Congress to pass the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

As for King, Warren had some brief encounters with the civil rights leader, but none of the recollections add much to what is already known. Warren writes that he wishes he could recount what King said, but the law mandates that the proceedings be kept secret, even more than 40 years later.

Despite its flaws, If It Takes All Summer stands up as much more than a slice of local history - few books on the local interest shelf have a foreword written by the national civil rights activist Morris Dees.

Warren proves it is possible to write a book that isn't great but is still important and meaningful.

jeremy.cox@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4083

Subscribe to Times-Union

Trending this week:


Jacksonville.com © 2017. All Rights Reserved.  Contact Us