WAR DEAD MEMORIAL: The Late St. Augustine Mayor Shelley's Son Writes the St. Augustine Record

Writing from North Georgia, the son of the late reactionary St. Augustine Mayor Joseph Shelley has a column in today's St. Augustine Record, the day before the opening of the City of St. Augustine's "Journey" exhibit on 450 years of African-American history.
I won't leave you in suspense.
No, Mayor Joseph Shelley's son did not apologize for his father's rebarbative racism, which he brandished here during 1963-64.
Southern segregationist "Jim Crow Law" reached its nadir under Mayor Shelley and St. Augustine, Florida oligarchs, who chilled, coerced and restrained protected activity under the First Amendment -- with a local judge even sending four school children (the "St. Augustine Four") to juvenile prisons as punishment for protesting segregation at Woolworth's lunch counter.
Mayor Joseph Shelley was a card-carrying member of the right-wing John Birch Society (whose founder, Robert Welch, and delusional beliefs were called crazy by conservative National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr.).
Mayor Joseph Shelley was guilty of the worst sort of governmental arrogance. American Apartheid here made African-Americans' lives a living hell. Yet Mayor Shelley ranted against equality, habitually violating the Fouteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
Racist Mayor Joseph Shelley and his fellow St. Augustine City Commissioners and the City Manager were guilty of refusing to meet with African-Americans. They placed a tape recorder in an empty room when they were promised a meeting after Vice President Lyndon Johnson's visit here -- blacks were supposed to tape-record their grievances for the racist all-white city government.
Our city's patron, Saint Augustine, himself wrote some 1600 years ago, "An unjust law is no law at all."
Mayor Joseph Shelley, Florida's U.S. Senator George Smathers and other racists empowered the Ku Klux Klan.
Segregationist U.S. Senator George Smathers, a putative Democrat and JFK friend, actually signed the Southern Manifesto (which LBJ refused to sign, along with both Tennessee Senators Albert Gore, Sr. and Estes Kefauver).
In 1964, Senator Smathers offered to pay Dr. King's bail money if King agreed to leave the State of Florida and never return.
In St. Augustine, the White Establsment, Mayor Shelley and U.S. Senator Smathers and the St. Augustine Record effectively egged on bomb-throwing white racists. Undeterred, courageous civil rights protesters were beaten, jailed, nearly burned to death, shot at, cattle-prodded, fired from their jobs, blacklisted and run out of town. The St. Augustine Record's then-owner printed propaganda, including advances for KKK ralles, printed directions to the beach house where Dr. King was staying (resulting in arson and gun-shooting) and, further invading privacy and risking lives, actually printing the names and addresses of black children desegregating local schools, resulting in firebombings (and firings and blacklisting of their parents). Florida Memorial University was run out of town for supporting non-violent protests.
The KKK, John Birch Society, racist lawyer-bomber J.B. Stoner, the local Rod and Gun Clubs, and Hoss Manucy's Raider's ran St. Augustine, rioting against civil rights marchers. They worked hand-in-glove with racist Police Chief Virgil Stuart (for whom they named our Police Headquarters) and then-Sheriff Lawrence O. Davis. (St. Johns County Sheriff Lawrence O. Davis was in 1970 removed from office by the Florida Governor Claude Kirk and Florida's State Senate by vote of 44-2, despite lying denials (claiming Davis was "exonerated" by the State Senate and that Davis "held the town together" during 1964), appearng for years on the website of controversal St. Johns County Sheriff DAVID B. SHOAR (an habitual prevaricator serial tortfeasor whose misfeasance, malfeasance and nonfeasance was the subject of a New York Times-PBS Frontline investigation on his refusal to reecuse himself from handling the shooting of a deputy's girlfriend).
In 1964, after the arrest here of the mother of Massachusetts' Governor, Mrs. Mary Peabody, St. Augustine Mayor Joseph Shelley actually travelled to New York and told NBC News on the Today Show that there were "no racial problems" in St. Augustine!
Segregationist St. Augustine Mayor Joseph Shelley issued a May 28, 1964 ukase ("Mayor Issues Statement on Seriousness of Taking Part in Demonstrations," St. Augustine Record), threatening jail, criminal convictions and lifetime blacklisting for young people demonstrating, falsely claiming African-American young pople "are coerced, induced or otherwise appealed to by violent (sic) radical civil rights leaders to go out and deliberately break" segregation laws and claiming police reports proved they all became violent criminals. Mayor Shelley's hysterical racist rant, printed in the Record, demanding that African-American parents not let their children be involved in "so-called peaceful demonstrations whcih may later evolve into violation of state laws," saying otherwise they are "involved in crimes against both God (sic) and man (sic)."
"Against both God and man?"
So much for blasphemy by bigots and segregationists (in South Africa, Apartheid rulers even censored the Bible, changing one line to read "I am suntanned, but I am comely!")
What a liar.
What a racist reprobate.
What a self-aggrandizing narcissistic self-promoter.
So what did Mayor Joseph Shelley's son write about to the Record this morning?
Healing?
Forgiveness?
Fairness?
Equality?
Honesty?
Justice?
African-American history in St. Augustine?
"Nope" times seven.
The son of Shelley wrote to support appropriating city money on moving the war memorial in the Plaza de la Constitucion, adjacent to the Old Slave Market.
That was it.
"How trite," as my mother would say.
The St. Augustine's war memorial is a small coquina reproduction of one of the city gates. It has been in that spot, at the corner of Cathedral Place and Charlotte Street, for some 75 years.
In connection with the restored Bridge of Lions, FPL and DOT installed electrical boxes nearby some eight (8) years ago.
No one noticed.
No one cared.
No one complained.
But recently, some local veterans have belatedly complained.
Thank you for speaking out.
Yes, the electrical boxes are ugly.
Yes, the electrical boxes should be boxed or covered and screened. How about a sculpture on top to go with the war dead memorial, perhaps with a flag-draped coffin to remind us of the real human cost of our Nation's wars?
But without asking the City administration, two veterans pressure-washed the monument, which Vice Mayor Nancy Sikes-Kline pointed out could easily have damaged the coquina.
How sad that veterans have nothing else to contribute to our civic life.
Where were local veterans' organizations when the City was violating civil rights?
Where were they when a prior City Manager, WILLIAM B. HARISS, ran St. Augustine as a dictatorship?
Where were they when WILLIAM HARRISS (now one of SHOAR's henchmen) was violating the First Amendment and arresting artists and entertainers on St. George Street?
Where were they when WILLIAM B. HARRISS was dumping 40,000 cubic yards of solid waste in our Old City Reservoir, while intimidating local activists speaking at City Commission meetings?
AWOL. (Absent without leave).
My father, for whom the South Jersey Chapter of the 82nd Airborne Divn. Assn. is named, taught me to stand up to bullies, and not to cower to power. Local veterans groups here never spoke out against oppression in St. Augustine. In fact, during 1964, the American Legion post here was part of it. Drunken violent KKK members satisfied their need for cheap beer at the American Legion, conveniently located near the Slave Market Square.
You have the right to remain silent, but we wish you wouldn't.
How nice that Mayor Joseph Shelley's son, writing from North Georgia, says he still loves St. Augustine.
How sad that Mayor Shelley's son blew the opportunity to say one (1) word to promote healing here in our Nation's Oldest City.
Monson Motel owner and Florida Attractions Association Jimmy Brock's offspring apologized (in Jeremy Dean's film, "Dare Not Walk Alone") for him pouring muriatic acid into the Monson Hotel swimming pool (June 18, 1964), amid civil rights demonstrators who waded in (the same day as the largest mass arrest of rabbis in American history).
That lady's gracious apology promoted healing. So did Andrew Young's apology in his documentary, "Crossing in St. Augustine," for focusing so much worldwide attention on the unfortunate Mr. Brock, who personally said that he wanted to integrate but was threatened by the KKK and corrupt local law enforcement.
Dr. King said that St. Augustine was "the most lawless" city in America.
Bad leadership by Mayor Joseph Shelley made it worse. This bigoted obstetrician gave St. Augustine a well-deserved bad reputation.
Obviously his son is in deep denial.
Not a peep from him about environmental and environmental racism problems we've been working on solving in St. Augustine.
Just a tedious tendentious barb about moving a war memorial, a subject that sent one of our veterans into a frenzy of emitting overstated pejoratives against city officials.
Why move the veterans memorial? Screening the electrical boxes is the simple engineering solution.
Moving a 75-year old coquina monument is fraught with the risk that the coquina shell walls will crumble.
Noving the St. Augustine War Memorial makes it looks like our veterans are racist, and not comfortable with having "their" memorial located just the other side of the Slave Market from the Civil Rights Foot Soldiers Monument.
Hence, if the City moved the St. Augustine War Memorial based on such specious grounds, it would make it look like the City was knuckling under to racists, of the ilk of the late Mayor Joseph A. Shelley, and the KKK members who got drunk at the American Legion before throwing bricks and punches at civil rights workers in 1964.
This could mean a civil rights lawsuit under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Leave the St. Augustine War Memorial where it is: the case has not been made from moving the monument. This is not even a tempest in a teapot -- it is a snare and a delusion.
Screen the electrical boxes and then we're done.
Put a scultpure on top and we've got a revivifed monument to St. Augustine's War Dead.
So the Record ran this superficial Sunday column from the son of St. Augustine's racist former Mayor Joseph Shelley on: (a) the day before the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday and (b) the day before the opening of the "Journey" exhibit on 450 years of African-American history here.
Why?
Nothing else available?
This is, at best, execrably bad timing and bad sociology. By printing the column from Mayor Shelley's son, the Record at best unwittingly and de facto gives aid and comfort to racists here, as evidenced by Shelley's line about the "real locals" here.
What did he mean by that fatuous statement, in his column ("Names on the monument deserve our respect")?
Here it is, in context: "My family roots run deep in the St. Augustine soil and you 'real locals' know what I am talking about if you remember reading any of my father's (the late Dr. Joseph A. Shelley) letters to The Record. It is in his spirit and his rich years of having been a community leader, local doctor and active politician that I write ths letter."
Are progressive, younger, newer, hipper or darker-pigmented St. Augustinians not "real locals" in the eyes of David P. Shelley?
How ethnocentric.
How insulting.
How deeply offensive and divisive.
It's like ultra-rightists who insist on dividing, calling themselves "real Americans," as opposed to all of the other Americans.
The direct reference to Mayor Shelley's letters to the newspaper assumedly embraces his threatening criminal arrests and lifetime blacklisting of demonstrators in his May 28, 1964 letter, quoted above ("Mayor Issues Statement on Seriousness of Taking Part in Demonstrations," St. Augustine Record),
The David P. Shelley column today is not so subtle after all -- this "dog whistle" to ex-Mayor Joseph Shelley's few remaining local supporters suggests that perhaps a few ultra-rightist plug uglies would like to manufacture political capital out of a few electrical boxes located near the war veterans' monument.
The KKK will never elect a Mayor or Commissioner again -- the chances are de micromis.
As former City Manager William Pomar once said, "The Bohemians have won."
Was this dull column really "fit to print?"
As LBJ said after Selma, "We SHALL overcome."
Today St. Augustine has two monuments to civil rights heroes and sheroes in our Slave Market Square, where the KKK once ran rampant, supported by Mayor Joseph Shelley.
Mayor Shelley is now but a bad memory, which was briefly revived by a frivolous, irrelevant editorial page column in today's newspaper.
What do you reckon?
You tell me.
Ed Slavin
www.cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com
Box 3084
St. Augustine, Florida 32085-3084
904-377-4998

POSTSCRIPT: Commissionrs Monday night approved moving the memorial 75 feet to the northwest along King street, directly opposite our Civil Rights Foot Soldiers Monument. Commissioners do not have jurisdiction over the park west of Government House. Putting the War Memorial there would have intefered with public access to the fountain, recenty rehabilitated with a donation from John Valdes, the visionary builder and PZB member who is running for City Commission. I pointed out that the literature indicates people don't like cutting off access to water features like fountains.