Date: 2024-12-26 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00019020
TPB Recollections
60 years ago
1960 Jacksonville Riot … Remembering 60 Years Ago
Peter Burgess
1960 Jacksonville Riot … Remembering 60 Years Ago
This last week I read the following story from a local Florida newspaper on the Internet.
Trump poised to accept GOP nod in Jacksonville, Fla., on 60th anniversary of ‘Ax Handle Saturday’In 1960 I was an English university student visiting Canada and the United States for the summer vacation. Our student Canada Club had chartered two Air France 707s to fly our club members from London to New York around June 1st and then back to London around September 15th. We were allowed to work for the summer in Canada but not in the United States.
On Aug. 27, 1960, a mob of 200 white people in Jacksonville, Fla. – organized by the Ku Klux Klan and joined by some of the city’s police officers – chased and beat peaceful civil rights protesters who were trying to integrate downtown lunch counters. The bloody carnage that followed – in which ax handles and baseball bats were used to club African Americans, who sought sanctuary in a church – is remembered as “Ax Handle Saturday.”
A permit had already been approved for the 60th anniversary commemoration of those events when Republican National Committee officials tentatively decided to move their convention festivities from Charlotte to the northern Florida city. This happened because North Carolina public health officials resisted President Trump’s demand that they commit to allowing him to speak before a packed indoor arena amid the novel coronavirus outbreak.
Under a revised plan, which is still being finalized and has not been announced, Trump would accept his party’s nomination for a second term on Aug. 27, according to three sources familiar with the deliberations. One venue under consideration would be the 15,000-person-capacity VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena. Hemming Park, where local civil rights leaders have planned their commemoration, is a mile away.
This is already causing friction in the city of 900,000, which is about 30 percent black.
Racial tensions break into violence in downtown Jacksonville on Aug. 27, 1960. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
In 1960, Rodney Hurst was 16 and the president of the local Youth Council of the NAACP. He and several of his black high school classmates were sitting at a “whites only” lunch counter in Jacksonville when they were spit on – and then the violence began. Now 76, Hurst is aghast at the RNC plan. He said the commemoration event is more important than ever. “Donald Trump is a racist,” Hurst said in an interview Wednesday night. “To bring a racist to town for his acceptance speech will only further separate an already racially separated community.”
I recall the first night in North America. Two of us booked into an hotel near Times Square fairly late in the evening … and about eight of us slept there for the night. Next evening several of us took the overnight Greyhound Bus from New York to Montreal, which went quite smoothly until we got to the border at around 5 am. All of our group got a grilling from the Canadian authorities who had no way of checking whether our stories about being allowed to work in Canada were valid or not. Meanwhile the bus waited and waited and waited. If I remember correctly I had $50 to support myself for the next 4 months, and most of us had similar amounts of money … and of course no credit cards! Around 7.30 we were allowed to proceed … but everyone else on the bus was angry as hell. It was an uncomfortable ride from the border to Montreal.
Most companies in the USA and Canada were big employers of students during their summer vacation, much more than was usual in the UK at the time. We were starting our summer vacation a couple of weeks before Canadian students which made it relatively easy to get work. I got a job as a laborer with the Foundation Company of Canada where they were building the building at the Place Ville Marie in the center of Montreal. I had tried to work with them as a surveyor on their project to build a hydro-electric dam in Labrador, but they did not think my whitewater canoeing experience was much good, though I had talked with them about small boat sailing experience which was OK. My job as a laborer was mainly being the motive power for a wheelbarrow used to move concrete to where it was needed in the bottom of the foundation. But then I had the opportunity of a lifetime. I was pulled off my wheelbarrow job and made the ‘safety boatman’ on a project they had in the middle of the St Lawrence River. The project was to remove a ship that had sunk in the middle of the river near the opening to the newly opened St. Lawrence Seaway. This time I had a small workboat with outboard motor. I worked from 4 pm to 8 am … a double shift … 7 days a week … waiting for someone to fall into the water and need to be rescued. The St. Lawrence is a big fast moving river, and the engineering required to dismantle a ship that has sunk in these conditions is something of a challenge. Most important … I was being paid Canadian union wages with overtime and double overtime! I think everyone on the site was a French Canadian … in any event nobody would talk to me in English. But after a few weeks, one of the main workboats lost power and was rapidly disappearing down the river and they needed my assistance … at which point, miraculously, they all became fluent English speakers. How convenient!
After a few weeks I had accumulated more wealth than I could every have imagined. It was time to act on the phrase that was common at the time … ‘Go West, young man!’. One of the low costs ways for people to go West was to drive a car from the East to the West. In the East used cars were much lower cost than in the West. There was money to be made buying in the East and selling in the West, and many used car dealers engaged in this practice. Two of us arranged to drive a car from Montreal West to Edmonton, Alberta. We had to buy the gas, but otherwise it would be a free ride. We were allocated a 1955 Cadillac Deville. In England I owned a 1935 Morris 8 ( 8 horse-power, not 8 cylinders) which was about 1/100th the power of the Cadillac. I had never driven a car with an automatic transmission and so much power … and on the wrong side of the road! We drove away from the used car dealer quite late in the evening, ready to set off for the West early next morning.
Early next morning we set off … heading from Montreal to Sudbury, about 400 miles away. After about 100 miles there was an awful smell of something burning … it turned out that we had not released the hand brake. Why would we … the engine had so much power that we had not noticed any need to release the handbrake. The problem now was that our brakes were pretty much shot … and that is how we traveled the next 2,400 or more miles to Edmonton to drop off the car. In 1960 the Trans-Canada highway was not paved North of Lake Superior so we dropped down into the States for several hundred miles, rejoining the I finished the trip to the West Coast by Greyhound bus. Traveling through the Rockies was spectacular … especially what was then an unpaved road around the so-called Great Bend.
I remember taking the ferry from Vancouver to Victoria Island … and being fascinated by the fact that the ferry had been build on Clydeside in Scotland.