Jim Crow Government in St. Augustine, Florida Persists

American history was made in St. Augustine, Florida, where the first settlement of freed slaves was founded by Spaniards in the 1700s. This was the last place where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested before Congress and President Lydon Johnson enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Yet our City of St. Augustine, Florida continues to treat African-Americans as second class citizens.
Top managers are all-white and all-male, resembling a 1920s corporate boardroom.
Recruitment, as of the City Attorney, does not conform to legal standards for EEO searches.
Our City does not have a Human Rights Ordinance, like other Florida jurisdictions.
Our controersial St. Augustine, Florida City Manager WILLIAM B. HARRISS running City Hall as his own "'Ole Plantation." Like George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door, HARRISS blockaded African-Americans and other civil rights advocates from erecting a monument to civil rights foot soldiers, falsely claiming the Plaza de la Constitucion (a/k/a Slave Market Square) was limited to colonial history, when it has monuments to Confederate and other war dead. When in 2005 City Commissioners directed that there be such a monument to civil rights foot soldiers, HARRISS haughtily insisted it must be raised by private fundraising. After arresting and beating people (including Andrew Young, later UN Ambassador and Atlanta Mayor), our City of St. Augustine refuses to spend public funds on a civil rights monument.
HARRISS dumped the entire contents of the old city dump into the Old City Reservoir off Holmes Blvd., a still-unprosecuted environmental crime that was a stunning example of environmental racism. When it was referred the matter by the National response Center in 2006, criminal investigators with EPA and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) did not bother interviewing HARRISS or any of the City Commissioners. That coverup is unravelling, under investigation by the FDEP Inspector General. (see below).
HARRISS became City Manager without national search or proper Sunshine notice in 1998. He's never had a performance appraisal, other than an attaboy plaque last year in the midst of a pending criminal investigation. HARRISS pledged his support for preserving history.
Yet haughty, heavy-handed HARRISS left African-Americans out of the City's official history, which is mandatory for persons to buy when they sit for the license to be an historic tour guide.
The St. Augustine Record's editorial page editor, Margo Pope, rightly editorialized on this subject in Febeuary.
See the editorial, below.
HARRISS also blockaded efforts to fly Rainbow Flags on our Bridge of Lions, which resulted in a federal court finding our City violated the First Amendment in 2005.
Is it time for tatterdemalion WILLIAM B. HARRISS and his errant enablers to go? What do you reckon?