By Susan Cooper EastmanJoeAnn Anderson and Audrey Nell Edwards spent the
summer of 1963 locked alongside male inmates in the St.
Johns County jail, with only a green shower curtain for
privacy. Juvenile Judge Charles Mathis called the 16-year-old girls
“niggers” and “Communists,” and accused them of plotting to
overthrow the government. Their offense: Participating in a sit-in
at the St. Augustine Woolworth’s lunch counter in July 1963.
Mathis deemed the girls delinquents, and sentenced
them to a year in a reformatory school. Though harsh, the
sentence reflected the mood of city leaders. Mayor Joseph
Shelley said that young people who participated in Civil Rights
demonstrations developed a taste for lawlessness, and were
on the road to “criminal acts, such as burglary, breaking and
entering, automobile stealing, assault and battery, and even
murder and rape.” St. Augustine Police Chief Virgil Stuart called
demonstrators “hoodlums” and “troublemakers.”
Before Judge Mathis sent the girls away, however, he offered
a choice: If their parents would sign a pledge to prevent them
from demonstrating until they came of age, he’d release them.
He also wanted the teens to testify that St. Augustine dentist
Robert Hayling, the youth advisor to the St. Augustine chapter
of the NAACP, had coerced them into participating in the
sit-in. Mathis wanted to set Hayling up on felony charges of
contributing to the delinquency of a minor — something that
he thought would shut up the activist dentist, and shut down the
city’s nascent Civil Rights movement.
Anderson’s and Edwards’ parents refused the judge’s offer. So
did the parents of Willie Singleton and Samuel White, two other
teens arrested in the Woolworth’s sit-in. Of the seven juveniles
among the 16 demonstrators originally arrested, these four
were the only ones to reject the judge’s offer; the only ones who
refused to betray their mentor, Dr. Robert Hayling.
Together, the teens eventually became known as the St.
Augustine Four — young activists willing to give up their
homes, their families and, to no small degree, their innocence
in the bitter struggle for Civil Rights. Rather than kowtow to St.
Augustine’s racist power structure, they chose to go to jail.
“We told our parents, ‘Don’t sign that,’” Anderson-Ulmer
recalls. “Why should they have signed? It was our Constitutional
right to demonstrate.”
That defiance kept the girls strong during their incarceration,
but their courage occasionally waned. One night, after 72 days in
the county jail, the warden knocked on their cell door. Though it
was very late, he told them to get up and gather their belongings.
They were instructed to drop all they owned on a bench in the
jail, and were hustled out the door and into a waiting car by a St.
Johns County Sheriff ’s deputy. In the Andrew Young-produced
2010 documentary, “Crossing In St. Augustine,” Edwards
recalled one officer saying, “You know we could kill these
niggers and say they were trying to escape, and nobody would
know the difference.” As the patrol car hurtled west into the
rural countryside, Edwards feared for her life.
The officer’s remark was true. Nobody knew the girls had
been taken from the jail — not the attorney provided for them by
the NAACP, and not their parents. Uteaner and Hurley Anderson
didn’t even learn that their daughter had been taken outside of
St. Johns County until long after the deputy delivered her to the
segregated reform school in Lowell, Fla.
Upon arriving at Forest Hills School for Girls,
Anderson and Edwards were put in isolation for
56 days. Anderson-Ulmer remembers the click of
the deadbolt on the door.
“I tell Audrey Nell that we went to hell and
back,” Edwards said in the 2010 documentary.
“We were locked up, caged and treated like
animals — for doing something you knew
was right.”
Life in the juvenile facility was harsh, and
sometimes brutal. Both women still bear
scars on their knees, reminders of being
forced to wax and buff floors until their knees
bled. But the worst was their sense of despair.
Anderson-Ulmer remembers her friend sitting
at the window in their room, staring out, saying
everyone in St. Augustine had forgotten them.
In fact, the arrest and detention of the
four juveniles galvanized the city’s Civil
Rights movement, and proved pivotal in the
national effort.
“It showed how low people would sink,”
says St. Augustine historian David Nolan, who
has done extensive research into the city’s Civil
Rights history.
Days after the youths’ arrests, more than
100 people demonstrated for six hours outside
the County Jail, The New York Times reported.
St. Johns County Sheriff L.O. Davis told the
Times that the protestors chanted and banged
on pots until after 2 a.m., at one point storming
the jail in an effort to break the juveniles
out. Protestors also filled the hallways of the
courthouse in the days after sentencing, and
the parents of the four teens occupied the
offices of Judge Mathis, demanding he release
them. Mathis (whose son, Circuit Judge Robert
Mathis, retired in 2005 after three decades as
a prosecutor and judge) refused, saying the
teens were beyond the jurisdiction of the legal
system; only the governor and cabinet could
commute their sentences.
The story of the St. Augustine Four was
carried by The New York Times and The
Pittsburgh Courier. The national office of
the NAACP denounced it. Martin Luther King
wrote a letter of protest. Even baseball legend
Jackie Robinson criticized the teens’ sentences in
his weekly newspaper column.
During the six months the girls were locked
away, the local story became part of a larger
narrative. The Florida Advisory Committee to
the U.S. Civil Rights Commission held a daylong
hearing on race relations in St. Augustine
in August, and issued a scathing assessment.
The committee warned that the bigotry in St.
Augustine was “considerably worse than in
most if not all other cities in the state,” and
recommended that the federal government
withhold all money from the state until the four
high school students were released. The city was
a “segregated super-bomb aimed at the heart of
Florida’s economy and political integrity,” the
committee warned, adding, the “fuse is short.”
The Advisory Committee didn’t command
the attention of Florida’s leaders. Florida Gov.
Farris Bryant refused to meet with the Advisory
Committee, and when asked about the report
at a September 1963 press conference, he said
he hadn’t bothered to read it. A supporter of
racial segregation, Bryant hewed to the belief
in the absolute authority of states’ rights. In
a speech before the U.S. Senate’s Commerce
Committee the week after the arrest of the
St. Augustine Four, he staunchly defended a
business owner’s right to discriminate on the
basis of race, comparing it to a customer’s
right to avoid a restaurant if they disliked the
restaurant owner’s moustache or his prices.
But Bryant’s desire to protect white privilege
collided with his instinct for boosterism. He
once described Florida as having one foot
in the Old South, and the other in the space
age at Cape Canaveral. Bryant wanted to sell
the world on Florida as a perfect paradise of
sunshine, Southern friendliness and suburbia,
and he’d hung his hopes on the 1964 New York
World’s Fair. He believed the Florida exhibit
would so dazzle fairgoers that millions of
Americans would be compelled to move to
the state. The $13.5 million exhibit included a
110-foot citrus tower topped by a giant orange,
a bevy of shapely bathing beauties, three
completely furnished model homes, a flock of
pink flamingoes and free orange juice.
The state was also luring tourists in national
and international advertising campaigns. Just
in time for the holidays in 1963, the Florida
Development Commission offered any Floridian
free Christmas cards featuring a picture of Santa
Claus sitting on a beach.
The PR campaign was successful. The state
attracted some 13.5 million tourists in 1963,
including some 450,000 people to downtown
St. Augustine. But even as Bryant turned a
blind eye to the mounting racial tension in
the state and in St. Augustine, the unrest was
getting harder to ignore. In November, Jet
Magazine published a feature on St. Augustine’s
heavy-handed reaction to the demands of the
black community for access and inclusion,
and the story specifically mentioned the St.
Augustine Four. Bryant faced scrutiny from the
national press about the teens’ harsh sentences.
And a growing chorus denounced the
treatment of demonstrators in St. Augustine,
saying it tarnished the image of Florida.
The pressure got an additional boost from the
city’s own promotional efforts. As St. Augustine
prepared for the 400th anniversary of its
founding in 1565, the dissonance between what
the Ancient City was and what it wanted others
to think it was quickly became untenable.
Today, there are 31 markers throughout St.
Augustine commemorating key moments
in the Civil Rights campaign. But there
were no signposts during the bloody period
between July 18, 1963, and July 2, 1964, when
Pres. Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights
Bill into law. St. Augustine wrote its own history.
There had been sporadic sit-ins at lunch
counters in St. Augustine for some years, but
the demand to right the wrongs against black
residents escalated during preparations for the
400th anniversary. In 1962, Congress established
a Quadricentennial Commission to manage
the event, and agreed to spend $350,000 in
federal money on the celebration. Britain and
Spain were going to build exhibits, several Latin
American countries were going to participate,
and Pan Am airlines pledged to build an exhibit.
It was going to be an international party to
celebrate the history of the oldest city in the U.S.
But not everyone was invited. Not a
single black member was appointed to the
Quadricentennial Commission. And not a single
black person was invited to attend the kickoff
banquet for the event at the Ponce de Leon
Hotel — featuring Vice President Johnson, the
ambassador of Spain and other dignitaries.
The local chapter of the NAACP
protested the exclusion of blacks from the
committee and from the celebration. Calling
it “undemocratic,” the group asked Pres. John
F. Kennedy to block federal dollars from
being spent on segregated public facilities.
The Oldest City should be a showcase of
democracy, not oppression, they wrote.
It wasn’t just a political gambit. It was an
appeal for historical accuracy. When Ponce
de Leon spotted St. Augustine in 1512, there
were black men among his crew members.
(The founding of the city dates to the invasion
of Pedro Menendez de Aviles in 1565.) The
Cathedral Parish Archives recorded the birth
of the first black child in St. Augustine in 1606,
and the first free black town was established at
Fort Mose in 1738. Dan Warren, state attorney
in St. Augustine during the Civil Rights era
and author of “If It Takes All Summer,” notes
that St. Augustine’s blacks grew crops, quarried
the coquina rock to build Anastasia Island
and felled trees to build the city. The city’s
African Americans expected their history and
contributions to be part of the anniversary
celebration, says Warren. “Blacks in St.
Augustine had contributed mightily to its
long, long history,” he observes, “and it was a
slap in the face that they were excluded.”
Pres. Johnson’s staff negotiated with
representatives of the city and black Civil
Rights leaders. In exchange for a promise not to
picket the March 12, 1963 kickoff event, black
leaders were told it would be integrated. The
city ultimately offered blacks only 12 tickets to
the banquet, though an unlimited number were
available to whites.
When the 12 black guests arrived at the
banquet, they were escorted to an alcove off
the main hall, and surrounded by FBI and
Secret Service agents. They could overlook the
festivities, but they could not participate in them.
After the banquet, dentist Robert Hayling
and others attempted to meet with the St.
Augustine City Commission, as Johnson’s staff
had also arranged. When the group arrived for
the sit-down, they were greeted by a secretary
with a tape recorder.
Those slights were enough to convince
Hayling that opening the doors of St. Augustine
to racial integration would require a fight.
A former second lieutenant in the U.S. Air
Force, Hayling said, “I thought I had earned
citizenship, but when I got to St. Augustine, I
realized I hadn’t.”
Impelled by the city’s racism, Hayling
became the movement’s leader, a fiery and
determined activist. He vowed to spend his last
dime desegregating St. Augustine. When the
Ku Klux Klan threatened to kill him, Hayling
told a newspaper reporter that black leaders in
St. Augustine would arm themselves, “shoot
first and ask questions later.” He said local
activists weren’t about to die like Mississippi
Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers, who’d been
murdered that June.
Hayling’s approach almost got him killed
— on Sept. 18, 1963, he and three friends
were caught near a large Klan rally and
brutally beaten with chains and clubs before
a robed assembly of Klansmen. His efforts
also created a rift with the state and national
NAACP leadership, who considered Hayling
too confrontational. But he refused to back
down, and proceeded to channel a small town’s
outrage into a national platform for change.
It was no surprise, then, that city leaders
tried to build a case against him using the
testimony of his young adherents. Contributing
to the delinquency of a minor was a serious
charge. Speaking in the 2010 documentary,
Hayling acknowledged that the refusal of the St.
Augustine Four to betray him was an essential
act of courage.
“If they had,” he said in the film, “my goose
would have been cooked.”
It took six months before Gov. Bryant acted,
but on Jan. 14, 1964, he and his Cabinet
ordered the release of the four juveniles.
The world had changed while they were away.
Pres. Kennedy had been assassinated, Robert
Hayling had been beaten almost to death by
the Klan. There had been shootings, too. White
toughs fired into homes in the historic black
section of Lincolnville. Shots were also fired into
Hayling’s home, narrowly missing his pregnant
wife and killing their dog. And when a carload
of whites was riding through Lincolnville with a
loaded shotgun in October, one of them was shot
through the head and killed.
The girls weren’t cowed by the danger. As
soon as they were released from reform school,
JoeAnn Anderson and Audrey Nell Edwards
joined the demonstrations. They marched
through downtown with other protestors, and
participated in sit-ins at restaurants and wadeins
at all-white St. Augustine Beach. “You’d
think we’d be so happy to get out of jail after
those six months that we wouldn’t be so happy
to go back in,” says Anderson-Ulmer. But their
incarceration only steeled their resolve. “We
were just ready for change and somebody had
to step up and make it happen,” she says.
The risks increased as momentum grew.
Though the city’s police chief had attempted to
block night protests, a federal judge overturned
the ban on June 9, 1964, and the marches
resumed immediately. The scene overwhelmed
St. Augustine’s 27-member police force. (The
city used money budgeted to hire a black police
officer to instead buy and train 15 German
shepherds for crowd control). Sheriff Davis
deputized more than 200 men to assist the
police force — most of them members of the Ku
Klux Klan. According to a June 1964 story in
Life magazine, some 90 percent of those tasked
with “keeping the peace” were Klansmen. Even
the “potbellied” sheriff acknowledged attending
Klan meetings.
“There is one especially frightening thing about
the violence that has transformed this sunny
resort city into a place of racial riot — bloodshed
and bitterness — of guns and police dogs, of
stompings and flying bricks,” the Life story
began. “The perpetrators have not been a random
collection of white goons choked with random
hate against Negroes and against marchers for
Civil Rights. For the first time in the South’s recent
bloody history, the demonstrators have been up
against a carefully organized mob. They have
been, in fact, marching against the Ku Klux Klan.”
Hayling responded by ramping up his
efforts. When the state and national NAACP
expressed disapproval of his confrontational
tactics, he quit the organization. His group
attended a convention of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference in Orlando to ask for
assistance from Martin Luther King, then
wrote a letter to the Massachusetts chapter of
the SCLC, asking them to bring northeastern
university students to St. Augustine that spring.
Martin Luther King worried that the
violence in St. Augustine would derail the
Civil Rights bill that was stuck in the Senate,
so he sent his top deputy, Andrew Young
(later mayor of Atlanta and U.S. Ambassador),
to cool things down. Young arrived in town
intending to quell the demonstrations. As he
said in his documentary, “This wasn’t a fight
we started or wanted. Dr. King was looking at a
bigger picture. And although he had visited in
May to show his support for Dr. Hayling, what
he saw made him fear that St. Augustine could
ruin everything we’d been working for.”
But the city’s movement had developed its
own momentum, and could not be stopped,
even by allies. Unable to shut down the marches,
Young found himself leading one. On June 9, he
led 300 demonstrators from Lincolnville up to
King Street. There they met a wall of Klansmen.
Young told the other demonstrators to wait, and
approached the group, believing, he later said,
that he could reason with the men. Instead, he
was viciously cold-cocked on the back of the
head, then set upon by several men who kicked
him repeatedly. It was the first time that Young
had been physically attacked in a Civil
Rights demonstration.
By that point, the national media had
already trained an eye on St. Augustine. Mayor
Joseph A. Shelley was partly responsible. In
May, he’d threatened to have the mother of
the Massachusetts governor arrested if she
came to town in support of the marchers.
When Mrs. Malcolm Peabody arrived in St.
Augustine, there were more than 100 media
representatives there to cover the story of her
arrest. Interestingly, as Time magazine noted,
this one event forced the local daily to finally
begin covering the tumult in its own town. “It
is almost an axiom of the integration struggle
in the South: wherever a city’s newspapers
have pitched in to help, wherever editors and
publishers have worked to stretch the limits of
local tolerance, there has been a minimum of
violence,” noted a critical July 10, 1964 story. “In
St. Augustine, Fla., the Record is a modest little
daily (circ. 7,000) with more modest ambitions.
It has tried to ignore the South’s biggest story, on
the hopeful assumption that if nobody pays any
attention, the race problem just might go away.”
Suddenly, there were nightly national news
reports from St. Augustine. The treatment of the
demonstrators appalled viewers. Coupled with
similarly awful reports out of places like Selma
and Birmingham, the nation’s distaste over the
reality of racial segregation reached critical mass.
Buoyed by public sentiment, Johnson shook the
Civil Rights Act loose in the Senate and signed it
into law on July 2, 1965.
“It outraged the morals of the nation,” says
Dan Warren. “We couldn’t project ourselves
as a democracy to the rest of the world with
the brutality that was taking place in the
oldest city in the country.”
Soon after the Civil Rights law was signed,
Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership
Conference left town. The press corps
followed. But the struggle wasn’t over. St.
Augustine demonstrators tested restaurants to
see if they’d opened their businesses to blacks.
Those that did were picketed by the KKK. The
Klan, invigorated from the previous summer’s
events, marched through the streets. Gov. Bryant
disavowed the Civil Rights Act and said he didn’t
think Martin Luther King deserved the Nobel
Peace Prize. Chief Stuart agreed, telling The New
York Times, “I consider it one of the biggest
jokes of the year.”
Today, JoeAnn Anderson-Ulmer lives in
a comfortable house near the Trout River in
Jacksonville. She chose not to remain in St.
Augustine, a city to which she gave so much,
saying she can’t abide the residual racism that
exists there.
“People don’t understand the pain that we
suffered and that our parents suffered,” she says.
“We were incarcerated for such a lengthy time.
People can’t imagine the stress we were under.
People called you all kind of names and said
what you were doing was wrong and that you’re
breaking the law. There’s just stress in people
treating you so badly, so cruelly.”
Anderson-Ulmer’s younger sister, Fay Davis,
agrees. She recalls how her parents worried
about JoeAnn, and how her mother wept over
having to leave her daughter in the care of
someone who despised her because of her race.
“I remember how my mother cried and
prayed,” says Davis, who was nine when her
sister was arrested. “I didn’t live with the agony
and pain of being incarcerated,” she says, “but I
lived with the frustration of my parents of not
knowing where your child is.”
The episode politicized JoeAnn’s parents.
Davis remembers her parents and her brothers
and sisters leaving their West Augustine
home just about every night to go to rallies
and demonstrations. “I knew they were going
there to demonstrate, to make things better
for us,” she says.
The arrest also affected the teen boys who
were part of the St. Augustine Four, though
nobody quite knows how. Willie Singleton and
Samuel White were sent to the notorious boys’
reformatory in Marianna, but they never spoke
about what happened to them there. The St.
Petersburg Times was a finalist for a
Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for an exposé
on the Dozier School for Boys, where
Singleton and White spent six months,
and the abuse that took place in a
cinder-block building they called the
White House. From the time they were
released on Jan. 14, 1964, until their
deaths, Singleton and White maintained
their silence.
Audrey Nell Edwards is also
reluctant to speak. Although she sat
for an interview in the Andrew Young
documentary, she refused to speak
to Folio Weekly. She didn’t respond
to numerous telephone calls and
visits to her home. Then, on a recent
Sunday, she opened her door and told
a Folio Weekly photographer that she
doubted the newspaper wanted to
hear the real story of what happened,
and criticized the media for coming
around seeking quotations during
Black History Month. The children
and grandchildren of the people who
attacked them still live in St. Augustine,
she said, and they still hold power.
Historian David Nolan says Edwards’ refusal
to participate is indicative of her strength. “It
takes a certain kind of steely determination to do
what she did,” he notes, “when all you had to do
was sign your name and get out of there.”
On the street where Edwards lives, there’s
a historic marker that tells the story of the St.
Augustine Four. Gwendolyn Duncan, president
of the group 40th Accord, which placed the
markers, has worked to call attention to the city’s
Civil Rights history. In an email, she wrote that
the story of St. Augustine’s Civil Rights heroes is
an “American story about ordinary people who
became extraordinary.
“Their actions should be acknowledged and
shouted from the rooftops,” she continued, “until
all students, visitors and countrymen across the
nation know what type of people walked and
still walk amongst us.”
Anderson-Ulmer didn’t speculate about
why her friend wouldn’t talk for this story,
but she herself is sometimes conflicted about
her role. She declined to attend a Dec. 9
ceremony in Tallahassee where Gov. Charlie
Crist and his Cabinet formally apologized,
with “profound regret for Florida’s role in
sanctioning the injustices perpetrated upon
the courageous African-American citizens
of St. Augustine and St. Johns County.”
Anderson-Ulmer said she didn’t see the point
of it, adding that she didn’t want to take off
work to go. But she speaks at schools and
churches about her experiences because she
wants to educate people directly. Her younger
sister encourages her to keep talking.
“I always tell her: You tell your story. You
lived it,” says Davis. “Tell your story every
chance you get, because someone needs to
know what happened right here in grand old
St. Augustine.” o
The film “Crossing In St. Augustine” will be
screened at 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 15 at Memorial
Presbyterian Church, 36 Sevilla St., St. Augustine,
followed by a panel discussion coordinated by 40th
Accord Inc. Local historian David Nolan, former
state attorney and author Dan Warren, and Civil
Rights Freedom Fighters Purcell Conway, Shed
Dawson and Audrey Cullar Willis will participate.
Susan Cooper Eastman
sceastman@folioweekly.com
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