WORDS FAIL
Reporters are used to people not wanting to
talk to them. Slammed doors, hang-ups,
unanswered emails are as much a part of
the job as spiral notebooks and deadlines.
But such reactions are typically associated
with people wanting to dodge unfavorable
coverage, or those recently impacted by grief.
Audrey Nell Edwards doesn’t fall into
either of those categories. Her reason for
refusing to speak to Folio Weekly for this
week’s cover story are far more complex
— and troubling. After rebuffing multiple
attempts to make contact, Edwards finally
opened her door to a photographer making
one last eƒffort to connect — and blasted him.
She would not participate in an interview, she
told him angrily, because the media didn’t
want the truth. All reporters wanted was
quotes during Black History Month. † They
didn’t want to expose the ongoing inequities
in St. Augustine, or the larger community’s
conspiracy of silence, or the racism that
continues to poison the city more than 40
years after desegregation.
It was, in all, a discouraging assessment
from a woman whose courage inspired the
leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and
who personally helped bring about change in
St. Augustine and the nation. As this week’s
cover story details, Edwards was one of the St.
Augustine Four, a cadre of teenagers whose
incarceration helped galvanize support for
black protesters mistreated by the system. Just
16 years old at the time of her arrest, Edwards
was labeled a criminal, merely for trying
to integrate a lunch counter. She ordered a
hamburger and a Coke, and spent the next six
months behind bars and in reform school.
Nobody can undo the ignorance and
cruelty of racial segregation. It is the salient
shame of the South, and gets no less awful
with the passage of time. But Edwards’
current outrage isn’t about the injustice she
suƒffered as a teenager. Instead, it’s rooted in
the very real knowledge that, ‚ ve decades on,
not much has changed. Sure, segregation is
gone, at least in its legally sanctioned form.
But life in St. Augustine is still powerfully
strati‚ ed by race. White and black rarely
mix in local restaurants, African Americans
still hold almost no political power, the city
still has zero black police o€fficers, and the
economic in“fluence of the city is securely in
the white man’s pocket. What’s more, the very
same people who threatened and taunted and
hurled bricks at Edwards and her compatriots
still live in St. Augustine. † They’ve prospered
over the past 50 years, owning shops, running
government, selling insurance, prosecuting
criminals. † They’ve suffered no punishment for
their behavior; never been called to account;
they’ve never apologized.
In fact, like the city they inhabit, they’ve
largely covered over their place in that shameful
history, simply pretending it never happened.
† e re are cities that went through
desegregation battles as agonizing as
St. Augustine’s — Birmingham, Selma,
Montgomery — but nowhere that those
battles are so thoroughly forgotten. It’s
possible for visitors and residents alike to
remain entirely ignorant of the city’s bloody
Civil Rights history — to know nothing of
the cross-burnings, the racist sheriƒff, the
deputized Klansmen, the amplified taunts
of “nigger” emanating from the downtown
square. It’s equally possible to know nothing
of the courageous eƒfforts by local youth
to change history through nonviolent
demonstration, and that the fact that their
efforts brought both Dr. Martin Luther King
and Jackie Robinson to town in support.
Indeed, as ‚filmmaker Jeremy Dean noted
in his 2005 documentary “Dare Not Walk
Alone,” the city appears to have no interest
in recognizing what is arguably its most
signi‚fioant chapter. “†They’ve just swept it
under the rug,” he said.
It was Dean’s eƒffort to document that
period that unearthed amazing archival
footage — including the vicious beating
of King deputy (and later Atlanta mayor)
Andrew Young. Captured on tape, the footage
in turn inspired Young to make his own
documentary, “Crossing In St. Augustine.”
That film, which screens this Saturday (see
p. 17 for details), was the first time anyone
interviewed the surviving members of the St.
Augustine Four — JoeAnn Anderson-Ulmer
and Audrey Nell Edwards.
The fact that Edwards wouldn’t agree to
our request for an interview is regrettable. But
it isn’t hard to understand. Deciding whether
or not to tell her own story aƒffords a measure
of control over the narrative, and reasserts
the stern, uncompromising spirit that was the
core of the Civil Rights Movement. Audrey
Nell Edwards became part of history for
refusing to make nice. We’re glad to see she’s
still at it.
Anne Schindler
themail@folioweekly.com
The same people who threatened and taunted and hurled
bricks at protesters still live in St. Augustine. They’ve
prospered over the past 50 years, owning shops, running
government, selling insurance, prosecuting criminals.
They’ve suffered no punishment for their behavior; never
been called to account; they’ve never apologized.
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