Lincolnville and the 1964 St. Augustine Civil Rights Campaign

St. Augustine is the oldest city in the United States, and in nineteen sixty-four it was also one of the most violently resistant cities in the American South to the civil rights movement.

The local leader was Dr. Robert Hayling, a dentist who organized wade-ins at the segregated beach at St. Augustine, night marches past the old Slave Market pavilion in the central plaza, and sit-ins at restaurants along King Street. The response was not passive. Klan members, including a local leader known as Hoss Manucy, attacked marchers with clubs. At the Monson Motor Lodge swimming pool, the motel's manager poured acid into the water while Black and white activists swam in it together. The night marches proceeded through burning crosses and shouted threats.

Dr. Martin Luther King Junior came to St. Augustine in June of nineteen sixty-four. He was arrested. From the St. Johns County Jail, he wrote a letter to a local rabbi who had asked what the city could offer the protesters: the letter described St. Augustine's resistance as a test of whether the country was serious. King called it one of the most recalcitrant cities he had encountered.

The St. Augustine campaign, historians of the Civil Rights Act have argued, provided critical momentum for the bill's final Senate passage that July. The legislation was signed into law on July second, nineteen sixty-four, weeks after King's arrest in this city.

Lincolnville, the historic Black neighborhood three blocks south of the tourist core, was the movement's base: its churches, its meeting halls, its people. Most visitors to St. Augustine's Spanish monuments never walk the three blocks to see it. The neighborhood is on the National Register of Historic Places. Its residents lived all of this.