Ed's note:
In 1964, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said St. Augustine was "the most lawless city in America." Now, we're a "compassionate city," rejected for membership in the top 100 Florida "redneck cities," a fact the estimable St. Augustine Record says it regrets.
St. Augustine Record fishing columnist, Opinion Editor and ex-Editor JAMES SUTTON'S mentor at Flagler College was Flagler College Vice President A.H. "Hoppy" Tebeault, Jr., Flagler College Gargoyle newspaper advisor-censor, and former St. Augustine Record Publisher.
A.H. "Hoppy" Tebeault was a vicious Jim Crow segregationist and white supremacist whose St. Augustine Record called civil rights activists "outside agitators" and worse, allying itself with corrupt Sheriff LAWRENCE O. DAVIS, publishing the names and addresses of African-American school children desegregating local schools (resulting in parents being fired, blacklisted and firebombed).
Neither "Hoppy" Tebeault nor the successive corporate owners of the august St. Augustine Record ever apologized for being a propaganda organ for the Ku Klux Klan, providing advance notice of KKK rallies and giving front page notice of Mayor Joseph Shelley's threats that students protesting records would have criminal records and never get a job.
Because when you're the unhappy mentee of an unhappy, uncouth, unkind, uncaring, radical reactionary rebarbative right-wing retromignent redneck peckerwood newspaper publisher -- and utterly and hopelessly provincial -- the last thing you ever want to do is admit error.
Right, Jim?
Personally, I'm relieved that St. Augustine is now officially a "Compassionate City" and no longer qualifies to be a "redneck city."
"We, the People" have won some 60 victories since a federal court ordered Rainbow flags to fly on our Bridge of Lions from June 8-13, 2005, a First Amendment victory the Record opposed, just as it does not support 2009 and 2015 court decisions vindicating the rights of visual artists.
Yes, the Record (which shares space with the anti-artist Chamber of Commerce) actually allied itself with commercial landlords in criminalizing art and music in public places.
Criminalizing public art and music was a damnably stupid decision.
It has rendered St. George Street into one lengthy tacky t-shirt mall, as Cathy Brown says.
How odd for a newspaper to be against First Amendment rights.
Shall we call it a redneck peckerwood excuse for a newspaper owned by troglodytes and run by second-raters?
What do y'all reckon?
Racist Georgia lawyer J.B. Stoner speaks in Slave Market
He was later convicted of Birmingham bombing.
Note Sheriff's badge on belt of man at right and
"Gadsen flag" favored by Tea Party today.
Monson Motel owner James Brock pours acid in pool,
an overt act mentioned by President Johnson in taped phone call to
Georgia U.S. Senator Richard Russell, helping end Senate filibuster
and enactment of Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Racist Mayor Joseph A. Shelley, M.D.
Posted September 30, 2016 10:23 am
Alas, a ‘Best’ list we did not make
St. Augustine Record
St. Johns County, and St. Augustine in particular, should make the People Magazine cover for “Best” places, at least in the Sunshine State.
We’ve got best beaches, holiday lights, college, school district, flip-flop chic beach town, art, culture, historical resources, livability index, B&Bs — you name it, we’ve been “it” at one time or another.
We are, however, distressed, to find that our area was completely left out of the latest demographic study, this one offered by Roadsnacks.net.
It determined Florida’s “Most Redneck Cities,” and we did not place even in the top 100.
This less-than-scientific survey did, nonetheless, attempt to set criteria for its investigation, looking for statistical data on important categories. It began with criteria from the definition of “redneck” from Merriam-Webster dictionary: A white person who lives in a small town, especially in the southern U.S., who typically has a working-class job, and who is seen by others as being uneducated and having opinions and attitudes that are offensive.”
It also based statistical data on stereotypes. So it parsed the data base on small towns, the number of dive bars per city, number of mobile home parks per capita, number of tobacco stores per city, number of guns and ammo stores per city, as well as the number of Piggly Wigglys nearby.
Okeechobee won the sweepstakes as Florida’s No. 1 redneck city. With its 5,613 population, it ranked first in guns stores per capita, fourth in fishing shops, second in mobile home parks and had a high school graduation rate of 73 percent (which actually isn’t bad at all; the state average in 2015 was 77.9).
The remaining members of the Top 10 in descending order are: Clewiston, Arcadia, Starke, Inverness, Quincy, Brooksville, Perry, Westville and Mascotte.
We’re happy for Starke, our only regional contender; but, frankly, chagrined it was Northeast Florida’s only real contestant. Starke’s strengths were its fourth-place ranking for guns shop in the state, its fourth place in fishing gear and its 18th ranking in tobacco stores.
We think the data was flawed, because the researchers were not really attuned to nuances of redneck reality. Tobacco stores are no real indicator of actual tobacco use when, in fact, Kangaroo stores sell more shiny-topped cans of dip than any specialty outlet. Gun shops are statistically poor indicators of gun sales when measured against local garage sales, swap meets or the family weapon shows up at the old Armory.
And, in the case of St. Augustine, we feel we were gypped by the researchers’ narrow and stereotyped grasp of “redneckedness” as anything other than an inland phenomenon.
We certainly realize that a very clear redneck sub-species — and among the finer in terms of F-150 lift kit gadgetry, mullet net sorcery, datil pepper cookery, Cracker cattle mastery, shrimp boat wizardry and architects of both small churches and big deer camps — owes his lifestyle and lineage to those Iberian seafarers who carved a living from this stubborn land 450 years ago.
We hail the Saltwater Redneck, upon whose tanned shoulders this city was truly built. We had working-class people with offensive attitudes and opinions when Okeechobee’s citizens were still speaking without vowels and living on oyster middens. And we demand a recount.
Culture counts.
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