Ax Handle Saturday

By the summer of nineteen sixty, the NAACP Youth Council in Jacksonville had been conducting sit-ins at downtown lunch counters for several weeks. The young people involved, most of them high school and college students, were following a playbook that had been field-tested in Greensboro, North Carolina earlier that year. They dressed carefully, sat down at the white lunch counters of the Woolworth's and Grant's stores near Hemming Park, requested service, and waited.

They were refused. They waited longer. They were refused again.

They came back the next day. On August twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty, a Saturday, a white mob, some carrying wooden ax handles and baseball bats, was waiting for them. The attackers moved through the lunch counter area and out into the streets around Hemming Park.

Klan affiliated men were reported among the attackers, though contemporaneous accounts do not clearly identify who organized the attack. The young sit-in participants, who had been trained in nonviolent discipline, did not fight back. Rodney Hurst, who was seventeen years old and the president of the Youth Council chapter, was present that day and recorded his experience in a memoir published decades later.

The police response was, by multiple accounts, slow and inadequate. Several of the attackers were arrested; the charges that followed were modest. No one served significant prison time for the violence.

Ax Handle Saturday is recognized as one of the pivotal events of the Florida civil rights movement. The Hemming Park area where it occurred is today a public plaza in the center of downtown. A historical marker was eventually placed there.

Rodney Hurst lived to see it.