Part 1 Here
Part 2 Here
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Traveling to Miami to settle some of his accounts, Anton Cermak did not see himself as conducting the official business he had been elected to as Mayor of Chicago. His pass on the Illinois Central had been issued to “Mayor of Chicago” with the assumption that the IC’s old friend Big Bill Thompson would be making use of it, and they had neglected to take it away from Mayor Cermak.
The first politician to ever deploy the “I didn’t come over on the Mayflower but I got here as soon as I could” line, Anton Cermak was a distinctly colorful character, an ostensible reformer with a highly checkered past, who governed as a sewer socialist even if he refused to admit such sympathies. His victory over Big Bill Thompson – on the shoulders of his fellow immigrants who, it turned out, did want “a World’s Fair Mayor” – was the last time until a blizzard elected Jane Byrne that the Mayor of Chicago wouldn’t be handpicked by the machine.
He had backed the wrong horse at the Democratic convention in 1932, his co-religionist Al Smith had been his choice, but Chicago was struggling. A right-wing revolt aligned with the defeated Mayor Thompson had significantly slowed collection of property tax, and Cermak sought federal assistance.
It was in service of that goal that he was traveling to Miami to meet the President-Elect. He slept most of the way down, his sixteen hour days on the fifth floor of City Hall trying to figure out how to stretch a budget pulled apart by the tax revolt had worn him down, he was realizing, to nothing. And then the train was turning South again, and pulling into the station in Gainesville for a meal and he was waking up ravenous.
As he gobbled down a plate of salisbury steak and rice and greens, he saw a poster behind the cook in the dining room with a lighthouse, striped in black and white swirls, rising over a giant Spanish-style manse and a small fort. St. Augustine, said the top of the poster in a sea-green font, Relax In Old World Luxury, said the bottom. He thought as he brought the salisbury steak – salty but otherwise under-spiced compared to what he was used to in the beer halls of Pilsen on the South Side of Chicago – to his mouth that he could really use an extra week there, relaxing. He would go to St. Augustine on the return trip, delay for a while, sit near the beach and remember his wife and how she loved the sea.
The little city was real to him as he got back on the train, and realer still as the train cut over to run along the coast toward Miami, and he was imagining vacationing, promise in his pocket to fill the municipal coffers with this New Deal of Roosevelt’s as he waited next to the stage in Miami, and he was thinking of climbing to the top of the lighthouse in St. Augustine, the one he’d seen in the poster in the station in Gainesville, as he extended his hand to shake FDR’s, and then he was thinking of nothing at all, the bullet famously redirected at the last moment by the whack on the arm holding the pistol delivered by a sharp-eyed woman’s swift purse, the assassin hitting the Mayor of Chicago instead of the future President of the United States.
In Miami today there is a monument at the spot where Anton Cermak was gunned down. The inscription is “Thank God it was me and not you” and perhaps that is a charitable interpretation of whatever Czech words issued from his mouth in the general direction of President-Elect Roosevelt as he fell clutching his chest, the anglophone Chicago Tribune reporter assuming a string of expletives and wanting to present a brave face to the world, when really what the falling mayor gasped with one of his last breaths was “I would like to have seen St. Augustine.”
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A. Philip Randolph, still the President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters after all these years, and Dr. Robert Hayling, a local dentist, were sitting down to a simple lunch in a small cafe on Riberia Street in the first week of December, 1963. Riberia Street south of King (named for the King of England by Tories), of course, in the Lincolnville section of St. Augustine. They were there to plan in comfort. Randolph, a child of Crescent City who had left for greener pastures, was on vacation and enjoying the town. Dr. Hayling had reminded him that it was a working vacation, and so they were working.
It was Randolph who had gotten Jackie Robinson to denounce the imprisonment of four teenagers who sat in at a Woolworth's, and it was Randolph who had connected Dr. Hayling directly to Martin Luther King. Dr. Hayling needed that connection to be made because the NAACP had threatened the revocation of the chapter of its St. Augustine branch. Dr. Hayling had had the temerity, after getting kidnapped and publicly beaten by the KKK, to insist on armed self-defense for the residents of the Lincolnville neighborhood, particularly on those nights when the Klan sent riders through the neighborhood shooting and throwing bombs.
They were planning for a visit by Dr. King to St. Augustine in the new year, and the problem kept coming up that they had never known someone from far away who had come for a visit. There wasn’t much in the Green Book about St. Augustine, and they’d been fighting this battle on their own. They’d been heard about and talked at from all around the country, from every corner of the movement, just for standing up for themselves.
They lived, Dr. Hayling reminded Randolph, on a peninsula, surrounded by rivers and then by one of the most viciously and actively and aggressively racist communities of white folks in the entire country. Dr. Hayling was beginning to describe the details of his kidnapping by the KKK (and his later arrest by the Sheriff of St. John’s County for “assaulting” a mob of hundreds with his back as they hit him) when there was a loud rumble in the gravel parking lot outside and a pickup truck hauling a trailer pulled in.
On the trailer was a gleaming-if-slightly-battered Carolina blue 1963 Chevrolet Bel Air with the number 34 painted on the side in Unocal orange. A tall, balding man with a wide mustache stepped out of the pickup, and a second man, shorter and wider and darker, with an Esso ballcap on, got out of the passenger side. They walked around to the racecar, checked it was tied down well, and came inside. Dr. Hayling was up to greet them as they came through the door.
Dr. Hayling smiled past the taller man at Randolph and asked if he wasn’t standing in front of the fastest Black man in America. As a racing fan he was pretty sure he was, but he also knew that he would annoy Randolph a little by saying a race car driver – whose machine topped out around 75 miles an hour on a good asphalt track – was faster than any Sleeping Car Porter in Randolph’s Brotherhood when a streamlined engine pulling Pullman cars could hit 120 on a flat straightaway. And then Wendell Scott told the dentist that as of this past Sunday in Jacksonville he was standing in front of the single fastest man in America regardless of color or creed.
Dr. Hayling offered to buy lunch for the race car driver and his one-man pit crew so that he could hear the story he’d already read in the paper, and Wendell Scott was happy to tell it. He had won, he said, but they had given ol’ Buck Baker the trophy until he protested, and they went back and counted the laps again and saw that it was, in fact, Wendell Scott who had crossed the line first, and then gone on to drive two more laps entirely while waiting for the checkered flag. They had revised the results, he said, and given him the money but left the trophy with Buck.
A. Philip Randolph turned slowly to Scott and said that there was no way they’d let him smile at a white lady anyway, and a knowing smile broke on Scott’s face as he remembered that Miss Florida had presented the trophy to Baker at the end of the race.
Dr. Hayling asked Scott why he was back, and he said something about meatloaf and reminded the dentist that he’d been in town working the weekend before, on the dirt track oval in St. Augustine, but he hadn’t gotten to see much of the town. He’d eaten some meatloaf over at the track they said was from this cafe, though, and it reminded him of his grandma’s so much that he had to come back. He couldn’t possibly stay too long, though, this was a detour already (though a celebratory one) through to Daytona to pick up replacement camshafts before he turned back north toward Savannah Motor Speedway.
They ate lunch and talked racing (Dr. Hayling was a fan of Scott’s and asked if he’d finally be getting real sponsorship after this win, and perhaps a car that wasn’t a hand-me-down from one of the other racers) and then the driver and his one-man entourage left and by that time Randolph had figured it out.
They can come if they mean to go somewhere else, he told Dr. Hayling, and they went to work. Dr. Hayling would invite Spring Breakers to visit him on the St. Augustine beaches, to come from far and wide and integrate Amelia Island and St. Augustine Beach and Vilano before they had their fun in Jacksonville and Daytona and Panama City.
–
The kids came, as requested, in solidarity with the folks who lived there but not to stay. Some of them ended up having to, so many were arrested integrating the beaches that a special camp was installed outside the jail. Eventually the power in the town just decided they’d drive hundreds of the Spring Breakers into the ocean, hoping they would drown. None did, there on the beach, those who could swim helped those who could not. The sheriff let out the folks from away, and hoped they hadn’t seen, but they’d known the place for what it was as soon as they got there.
Others came to learn for themselves how they could help by their actions. Among those arrested for sitting somewhere, together, which was illegal, were the mother of the governor of Massachusetts and three of her Main Line friends, all wives of Episcopalian bishops.
Dr. King, who had come down to help in person, was arrested at a restaurant attached to a motor lodge in an old house built in the Flagler style, imitating the Spaniards but with elements of colonial revival. Dr. King had been trying to integrate the restaurant along with local activists.
From the jail in St. Augustine Dr. King wrote a Rabbi friend of his about the meaning of supporting the movement right there. The county made the largest mass arrest of Rabbis since the destruction of the second temple a little while later. They saw the place for what it looked like while they were there.
It’s hard to say that anyone else didn’t, after the manager of that same motor lodge famously spilled hydrochloric acid into the pool, so offended was he at the idea of people swimming together.
The circumstances, and the individuals who were responsible for them, chased Dr. Hayling out of town. And while it was bitter, he knew he’d figured the place out. He cheered the passage of the Civil Rights Act and was personally honored by the committee celebrating the 400th anniversary of the City (after the Governor of Florida, C. Farris Bryant, heard from President Johnson that he better make them) and then he disappeared to practice dentistry peacefully for another 20 years elsewhere, down the coast a ways, far away, near the new and growing communities working on the Space Coast.
The owners of the town papered over the problems of St. Augustine, and never really tried to do any more solving than they’d already tried, commissions and dialogue and anything, anything but action. Everyone who passed through had no choice but knowing what they were getting into.
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