Page 2 - NAACP_Rally

June 26, 1964: Governor orders extra

police into riot-torn St. Augustine

Gov. Farris Bryant ordered 80 more state troopers into riot-torn St. Augustine, a day after militant
whites and blacks clashed as blacks defied Jim Crow laws by staging "wade-ins" on the beach.
Wade-ins -- where African Americans and their supporters would deliberately go into the
ocean or swimming pools that whites had long decided belonged only to them -- were
apparently among the most offensive and provocative things that could be done to the poor fragile
white folk, who must have been worried about their pure white skin getting stained or something.
"Hundreds of white segregationists raced into a civil rights march last night, screaming and flailing
at Negroes in this city's worst outbreak of racial violence," the Associated Press reported.

A few days before, black and white protestors jumped into the swimming pool at the
Monson Motor Lodge and the motel's manager -- who was also president of the Florida Hotel
& Motel Association -- poured muratic acid into the pool to force them out.

A policeman jumped into the pool to make arrests and photographs of the melee were published
around the globe.
The riots erupted against a backdrop of racial tensions across the South coming to a boil.
Civil rights protestors had been staging demonstrations in St. Augustine over the previous year
demanding an end to segregation laws there. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested on June 11
at the Monson Motor Lodge restaurant. Ku Klux Klan nightriders were entering black
neighborhoods and shooting into homes, prompting NAACP members to drive them off with
gunfire.Three civil rights workers were kidnapped and murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.,
the week before.
the week before.
On June 10, the U.S. Senate voted to end Sen. Robert Byrd's filibuster of the Civil Rights
Act of 1964, capping a year of debate over the legislation first proposed by the late
President John F. Kennedy that outlawed segregation of public businesses and school systems.

But as the provocations by the white segregationists in St. Augustine showed, not everyone was
welcoming this new era of equal rights for all.
http://www.floridahistorynetwork.com/june-26-1964---governor-orders-extra-police-to-riot-torn-st-augustine.html

Youtube Video: https://youtu.be/jBJ9yLRDAEY