History Jacksonville’s Atticus Finch

Jacksonville’s Atticus Finch

Some Stores of law and order are more fact than fiction.

BY SCOTT A. GRANT, J.D.

“T he one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience,” Atticus Finch tells Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird. In Harper Lee’s epic tale of the South and Southern justice, Atticus stands up to racism, his neighbors, and a code of conduct as old and immutable as the live oaks lining the street outside the courthouse. He acts in the name of justice, to defend a man who cannot defend himself. The story has all the traditional elements—a wrongfully accused

African American, an all-white jury, violence, intimidation, and the threat of a lynching. In the novel, Atticus not only represents Tom Robinson in court, but he also stands off a mob at the door of the jail.

I heard a local lawyer lament one day that Jacksonville never had its own Atticus Finch. My response came quick and certain. “Yes, we did,” I said. “And his name was Bryan Simpson.” John Milton Bryan Simpson was a judge in Jacksonville for decades. He was elected Judge of the Criminal Court of Record in 1939. In 1950, Simpson was appointed to the Federal Bench by President Harry S. Truman. And finally, in 1966, he was promoted to the Federal Court of Appeals, by President Lydon Johnson.

Simpson will become famous, and in some circles infamous, for the rulings he makes on local civil rights cases. He was responsible for integrating the schools in Duval and St. Johns counties. In 1962 he orders the implementation of the Supreme Court decision Brown vs. The Board of Education. The decision arouses the ire of whites and will lead directly to the climactic events of the summer of 1964, in which Simpson will figure prominently.

Klansmen exploded 26 sticks of dynamite under the house of Donal Godfrey, a six-yearold who was one of the first to integrate the previously all-white Lackawanna Elementary School in September of 1963. The trials of the five men accused of the crime ended up in Simpson’s Court. The men were charged with Conspiracy to violate the Civil Rights Act of 1871, (also known as The Enforcement Act or Ku Klux Klan Act), a Statute that had been little used since Rutherford B. Hayes was President. One defendant plead guilty and was sentenced to seven years. The trial of the other four co-conspirators dragged on through the long, hot summer of 1964. The bombers were defended by infamous KKK Lawyer, JB Stoner. Stoner was founder of the National States Rights Party and an active and vocal leader of the Segregationists during that fateful summer. J.B. found himself in Simpson’s Court numerous times that year, both as an Attorney and a Defendant. After months of trial, the all-white, all-male jury returned its notguilty verdict in a little over an hour. One juror suggested they would have come back with

a decision even faster, but they took a break to have a Coke. Stoner declared the verdict a “victory for the white race.”

On at least one occasion, the Ku Klux Klan attempted to burn a cross in Simpson’s yard. There are two stories about the Klan coming to the Judge’s house in Ortega. In one version of the story, Simpson faces down the mob in his bathrobe. His son, Bryan Simpson Jr., tells a different story. He recalls coming home one night around 11 PM and seeing a row of cars out front of the house and people milling about the yard. His first thought was that it was a party, and his older brother was going to get in trouble. It is possible there are two stories because there were two events. Bryan Simpson Junior’s recollection seems to be from the 1950s around the time his father was integrating parks and golf courses in Jacksonville. The Klan may have showed up a second time when the Judge was desegregating the schools.

As violence escalated into 1964, Simpson’s orders protecting marchers in St. Augustine are the first of their kind in the South. When segregationist Governor Farris Bryant balks at the order, Simpson threatens to jail him and hold him in contempt. Hundreds of State Troopers arrive in St. Augustine the next day. Judge Simpson also issues an order releasing hundreds of protestors from the St. Johns County Jail. Those prisoners are being kept in the open air during the day under a blazing hot sun, in a large cage called the ‘chicken coop.’ “More than cruel and unusual punishment has been shown,” Simpson wrote. “Here is exposed in its raw ugliness, studied and cynical brutality deliberated and contrived to break men, physically and mentally.”

It has been suggested that the judge was not an integrationist. That he believed in segregation, but not as much as he believed in the law. Simpson grew up in the segregated South. He was practically Florida royalty. His ancestors included a long line of senators and judges. He was described as “a handsome, aristocratic, whitehaired southern gentleman, with a personal charm and friendliness that never interferes with his decisiveness and quick intellect in the courtroom.”

He was born in Kissimmee in 1903. After graduating from Law School at the University of Florida, he went into private practice in Jacksonville. In law school, he got the nickname ‘cowboy.’ Not because of the maverick nature that would later define his years on the bench, but because he worked on a cattle ranch near Ocala during the summer to pay his tuition. He would return to school each fall with a farmer’s tan and a cowboy hat. In many ways, Simpson was the quintessential southern judge. He was known to whittle while he heard a case. And not the sharpened sticks a Boy Scout would fashion sitting around a fire in the woods. Judge Simpson’s whittling was far more advanced. His son, Bryan, remembers a pair of working scissors or maybe pliers that his father whittled out of a single piece of wood. “I have no idea how he did that,” he recalls.

While on the Criminal Court of Record, Simpson never took more than a week’s vacation at a time. When his family complained, he asked them how they would feel if they had to sit in jail for weeks waiting for the Judge to come back and hear their case. Later he would tell colleagues on the Appellate bench that he tended to favor the “little guy” against big business interest, because he identified with one, not the other. “I’m a Democrat,” he declared proudly, “by birth, by training and by intense conviction.”

Simpson received numerous death threats during his storied career. The Judge became “a lightning rod for the white backlash generated by school desegregation orders.” His family was scared. “I don’t think anyone who really wants to kill me is going to send me a letter about it first,” he told them. At the dedication of the Federal Courthouse named for

A Place in the Sun

After a two-year hiatus, the A.L. Lewis Museum at American Beach reopened in October. Lewis, president of the Afro-American Life Insurance Company and a self-made millionaire, created the African American resort on Amelia Island in 1935, a time when Florida’s beaches were still segregated. Lewis’s goal was to create a place where African Americans could enjoy “recreation and relaxation with humiliation” during the Jim Crow era and his idea eventually blossomed into a 216-acre oceanfront community of homes and public beaches. The community’s story is told through a collection of artifacts, historical photos and video, narration and archival documents. The museum is located at 1600 Julia St. and is open Friday-Sunday. u

the Judge, Bryan told the following story about his father. “My mother told me the story of a father and his son, both with lengthy criminal records, coming to our house at 11:30 PM on the night their son and brother was to be executed at midnight. My father’s sentence. Having learned who was there from the upstairs window, mother, fearing for their lives, wanted to call the police. Daddy said no, put on his robe and went downstairs, invited them in where they talked until the sentence was carried out. When he came back upstairs Daddy told her that it was just a grieving father trying to do what he could to save his son.”

The Bryan Simpson United States Courthouse was opened in 2003 and named in honor of the Judge. The building sits on the former location of the Woolworth’s made famous by bloody desegregation riots in 1960 and an event remembered as “Axe handle Saturday.” No doubt the judge would approve of the site. u

When you are nearly 150 years old, it can be a challenge to hide one’s age. So it was with the St. Augustine Lighthouse, the black-and-white striped beacon that has stood watch over Anastasia Island since 1874. Approximately $500,000 in exterior and interior renovations were completed earlier this year, including replacing some of the cast iron steps, removing rust, and applying four layers of special paint to the lantern equipment—paint that sells for $500 per gallon. In addition, the tower’s signature spiral stripe and red top were repainted. While maintenance to the structure is an ongoing affair, this is the most comprehensive restoration since the 1990s. She looks good as new. u

beacheshomes.com #fromcottagestocastles

Before After

Good As New

904.553.2032

elizabeth@elizabethhudgins.com 904.334.3104

sarah@sarahalexander.net

© 2017 BHH Affi liates, LLC. An independently operated subsidiary of HomeServices of America, Inc., a Berkshire Hathaway affi liate, and a franchisee of BHH Affi liates, LLC. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices and the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices symbol are registered service marks of HomeServices of America, Inc.® Equal Housing Opportunity. Information not verifi ed or guaranteed. If your home is currently listed with a Broker, this is not intended as a solicitation.