Six All-White Zimmerman Jurors Walked St. George Street, Ate at Mojo's, and Visited Ripleys, but what if........?

Visiting Mojo's Barbeque, St. George Street and Ripley's, George Zimmerman murder trial jurors visited St. Augustine for some four (4) hours one weekend while they were sequestered, the Seminole county Sheriff's Department confirmed today.


The weather was threatening and the Ripley's visit was substituted for a plan to visit the Castillo San Marco. Due to wosening weather conditions, jurors left town early.

When I last saw it, Ripley's “Believe It or Not!” Museum was one of the most culturally-biased places I have ever seen, complete with repeated ethnocentric references to “natives” and at least one shrunken head.

Thus, the jurors' St. Augustine visit was a missed opportunity.

Imagine if the all-white, all-woman jury was able to see our Castillo, oldest masonry fort in the continental U.S., which was built by slaves.

Imagine if the all-white, all-woman, Zimmerman jurors visited Fort Mose, home of the first freed African-American settlement, founded in 1738.

Or visited Lincolnville, home of the first African-American community founded by freed slaves after the Civil War, formerly called "Little Africa."

Or visited two Civil Rights monuments in our Slave Market Square (one to Andrew Young and one to the Civil Rights Foot Soldiers), memorializing the courage of the people who stood up to Jim Crow segregation, with nightly television new footage helping President Lyndon Johnson break the Senate filibuster and enact the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Seeing even one of those more culturally diverse places might have made the six sheltered Central Florida white women on the jury a bit more sensitive to African-Americans.

I am glad the juors got to see St. Augustine during their deliberations after the 22-day trial of George Zimmerman for murder of Trayvon Martin (which resulted in an acquittal by an all-white jury in Seminole County, formerly a hotbed of KKK activity, as reported by my late mentor, Stetson Kennedy).

I just wish the six all-white jurors got to walk in Andrew Young's steps on the Andrew Young Crossing Monument.  I just wish they had a chance to peer into the faces and the bas relief of our Civil Rights Foot Soldiers Monument, which stands in front of our Slave Market.

You and I can't blame the jurors or SCSO one bit for not seeing those places -- except for Fort Mose, not one of them appears on the website of the culturally insensitive St. Johns County Visitor and Convention Bureau, Inc., whose multi-million county tourism promotion contract expires September 30, 2013 at 11:59 PM.

To learn more about the secretive maladroit St. Johns County Visitor and Convention Bureau, which makes discriminatory marketing decisions, and allows discussions of pricing in its meetings, "an invitation to conclusion" that should not happen, according to the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, please see below.