Thankfully, at long last, St. Augustine’s city government is reinventing itself, which augurs well for the 450th celebration and creating a St. Augustine National Park and Seashore.
Folio Weekly editor Anne Schindler rightly skewered and smoked our City of St. Augustine (June 14) for being snookered by the notion of Don Wallis’ secretive First America Foundation to run our 450th Commemoration. “Secrecy is for losers,” as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said.
St. Augustine officials deserve credit – and a bouquet -- for candidly admitting they made a mistake by contracting with an inexperienced entity to privatize four historic celebrations. It takes courage to admit you’re wrong. I salute our City Manager, Mayor and Commissioners. I’ve lived in St. Augustine since 1999 and I see healing in our local government. We appreciate City Manager John Regan, who has worked to heal our City’s divisions.
A group of diverse local residents prepared to sue the First America Foundation for Sunshine and Open Records violations. We were also prepared to sue our City over a planned Sunshine-violating trip to Spain, but it was cancelled last year when our lawyers asked for public records.
We didn’t sue. Why? Our City officials saw the merits of our arguments. Democracy worked. Our elected officials have now vindicated our constitutional rights to Government-in-the-Sunshine and Open Records.
Finally, St. Augustine residents are being heard and heeded, and our government is reforming itself.
Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Under City Manager Regan, St. Augustine’s Environmental Racism is ending. Our City learned its lessons from illegal dumping and emissions of solid waste, and semi-treated sewage effluent and raw sewage, which rendered Lincolnville “the pollution peninsula.” Our City and County are working to bring water and sewer service to West Augustine. The scourge of racism is being healed and longstanding discrimination is being ended.
Two new civil rights monuments now grace the Slave Market Square, one to the Civil Rights Foot soldiers and one to Rev. Andrew Young, our former United Nations Ambassador and aide to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was savagely beaten here on June 9, 1964. A National Civil Rights Museum is planned here.
The City’s “Lift Up Lincolnville” plan promises to provide equal services and respect for the historic African-American community, whose residents marched with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The worst street in our county, Lincolnville’s long-neglected Riberia Street is being rebuilt properly, complete with paving, sidewalks and drainage -- an $11 million project.
Many City and regional problems will be solved by building a St. Augustine National Historical Park, National Seashore and Scenic Coastal Parkway, with a world-class National Civil Rights Museum and Native American Indian Cultural Center.
America’s newest National Park -- comprised of current state parks and forests and water management district lands -- will create jobs, making historic and environmental tourism the engine to revive our tourist economy on a sustainable basis, sharing St. Augustine’s 11,000 years of history with the world.
We will prepare for disasters, preserve wetlands and watersheds, preventing erosion and flooding. We will protect threatened and endangered species, from whales to bald eagles to beach mice to bears. We will solve transportation bottlenecks with battery-powered trolleys.
We will teach history and nature to future generations with a National Civil Rights Museum here in St. Augustine. Only 2% of high school seniors know about Brown v. Board of Education.
We will inspire students with all of our history — Native American, African-American, Spanish, Minorcan, French, English, Civil War, Roman Catholic, Greek, Jewish, Protestant, nautical, military, Flagler-era and Civil Rights history.
We all know that St. Augustine is the home of the first seat of government in the United States (Government House), the first Catholic Mass, the first Catholic missionaries, and the first system of weights and measures and the first public market. These stories about our Hispanic and Roman Catholic historic heritage will be shared, deepening students’ appreciation of American history in all of its rich diversity.
St. Augustine’s National Civil Rights Museum will tell the story of slavery (which began in what is now the United States on the day of St. Augustine’s founding on September 8, 1565). We will tell the story of the end of slavery, the beginning -- and the end -- of Jim Crow segregation, by federal laws enacted in 1964 in response to St. Augustine’s racist bullies’ violent response to peaceful civil rights protests led by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Andrew Young.
In St. Augustine, the end of Jim Crow segregation was accompanied by beatings, brickbats, shootings, death threats, attempted immolation, intimidation, blacklisting in response to peaceful picketing and non-violent persuasion, aimed at ending “Jim Crow” laws, which resulted in the daily humiliation of St. Augustine’s African-American residents forbidden to go to church, buy groceries, eat in a restaurant or go swimming with “white” people” in the ocean (yes, the ocean was segregated too).
These harsh “Jim Crow” rules were enforced on pain of harsh incarceration under unjust criminal laws adopted by Florida’s legislature and harshly enforced by Florida courts.
“An unjust law is no law at all,” as Saint Augustine himself wrote. Thurgood Marshall and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP’s( lawyers, strategists and funders worked for decades to undo these “unjust [Jim Crow] laws.”
Nowhere were unjust Jim Crow laws enforced with such a vengeance as in St. Augustine, Florida which led Dr. King to call it “the most lawless” city in America. This is where courageous civil rights “foot soldiers” marched into the face of their oppressors and shared the love that led Jim Crow to crumble, under the television cameras, which never blinked, showing acid poured into a swimming pool where African-Americans were swimming, people beaten for swimming in the segregated ocean at St. Augustine Beach, and the mother of the Governor of Massachusetts and hundreds of others were arrested for seeking restaurant service or peaceful picketing.
A large, world-class Civil Rights Museum here will tell the arc of our African-American history, including the first slaves brought to what is now the United States of America (on September 8, 1565, the day St. Augustine was founded); the establishment of the first free black settlement in America (1740 at Fort Mosé); hundreds of MInorcan indentured servants’ heroic trek from New Smyrna Beach, voting with their feet in 1777; the end of slavery; Jim Crow segregation and the end of Jim Crow segregation, brought about when President Lyndon B. Johnson broke a Senate filibuster based upon what happened here in St. Augustine – the first time in American history that a Senate filibuster against a civil rights law was ever broken.
I reckon that Anne Schindler’s concluding paragraphs about St. Augustine’s future were overly pessimistic. Our City of St. Augustine was long the butt of dozens of deserved “brickbats” from Folio Weekly. Our City is now healing. It gets better.
Citizens have the power to make St. Augustine more like a “shining city on a hill”, in John Winthrop’s words. Let’s make our 450th birthday a transformational event, a gift of America’s newest National Park to our grandchildren and their grandchildren. www.staugustreen.com
Yes, we can!
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