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OUR VISIT '.i'O ST. Aur:rt::STINE by Mrs. Donald J, Campbell
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Friends of Christ Church--our Rector has asked me to tell you what I can of our experience in st. Augustine, Florida, this past week. As some of you may know, Mrs. Peabody and Mrs. Burgess and Mrs. Rowe of our parish here and the Rev. WaITen McKenna of Holbrook and nwself went to that city exactly a week ago today. If you were to tell me I've been gone only a week, all I can say is I feel as though I have been gone a whole year, so intense was the experience and so much happened in that short period of time. I think nw one danger may be today that I will try to cover the whole thing. I will try to speak to you about just the things that made me feel the situation most keenly so that I can· bring it to you, We Anslfered a Call for Help
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Now first of all I want to make it very clear that we did not go down under our own initiative. We went in answer to a call for help from the leaders of that city. The members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which is under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, sent us a call for help, because for three years they had been trying to make this most segregated city give in to some very reasonable demands, to integrate the place; and they were making virtually no headway, So a letter came in, I think about the middle of March, to Mr. Virgil Wood, who is the president of the Massachusetts Unit of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He sent letters throughout all New England to all the ministers, calling for help on the part of white people. You see, Southern white churchmen, even if they are integrationists, are not in a position to go and take part in sit-in~ and so forth. They live there. It is an impossible situation for them. But we can go down and witne.9 s to their belief and ours, because we don't live there. We can back out of the situation. So they wanted us to go nown and help in a three-week endeavor, beginning Holy Week and then this past Easter Week and it is still going on in the following week. In the first week about twenty white people, clFJrgvmen and college students, went down and joined the Negro young people, and soti'3 Negro older people under the leadership of Dr, Robe>t Hayling, a dentist of that city who has been their chief leader, and Mr. Hosea Williams of the Sou~hern Christian Leadership Conference, who is one of the Martin Luther King men, These two very magnificent men have hoe" .le>ading this endeavor down there, Then in the second week, Easter Week, college students and clergy went down, and then we four older ladies. We were rather unique. I don •t believe ~eople of our age have taj{en part in this sort of thing before. I really think it ~ad_ra~her a touching effect. The Negro people were so surprised that we were willing to do it, but actually it is much easier for an older person whose children are grown.
The~ in. the third week, I particularly want to put in a plea for more students, seminarians, and clergy to go down. They don't need very many of us; if they only ~now that there are some white people who are with them. I think this is a very important point, that it isn't a battle of black against white in an
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Given at the 9:30 and 11:15 a.m. services at Christ Church Cambridge, U,.esachtJnctt,.,, SnncJ,,y, Jlpril 5, 1964, '
-2effort toward civil rights, but black and white together who believe in full citizenship for every member of our country. Most of the people got out of jail when we le~ this past week, with the exception of nine juveniles. The whole town is stirred up about this thing as they are trying to keep these nine juveniles in jail regardless of bail. ~ow that's against the law, You can't keep people in prison without bail for~ minor infraction of the law, only very serious criminal~, So this is a very.seri?us thing; and if we can have some more witnesses, perhaps the community ';'111 give in on this point. If there is anybody interested !!! going ~ £!! ~· .! ~ you will contact me:· ··· · St, Atigustine I would like to give you very briefly, before I tell you some of the things that we did, a little bit of a history, St, Augustine is older even t:ian New England. These people are in the oldest part of the country. St. Augustine was founded in 1565 by a Spanish officer. It is a beautiful little city: If we had been there on a sightseeing tour, I would like to have looked at it. I barely saw it out of one eye, as we went around, The population is about 15,000; 51 000 are Negro--2/3 white and 1/3 Negro. They live in separate ~ections and we spent· several days living in two parts· oftovm. We harl our meetings in Negro sections and we would move out into the white section and talk with the white people. So even though our time was brief, I felt that we felt very deeply both sides of the situation before we left, It is a very truly segregated city. They call it the oldest segregated city in the .South, Dr, Robert Havling - Courageous Leader About three years ago Dr. Hayling, who is a very courageous young dentist, had a good practice there--he was making $9,000 a year before he got involved in this-~half of his practice was with white people and half with Negro. I don't doubt that perhaps 2/3 of his salary came from the white people. '.!'he minute he got involved in this thing naturally he lost all of his white clientele. And as soon as this demonstration is over he is going to have to leave town. There is absolutely no possibility of his earning his living there. He had four years in the Air Force and was an officer. In the services we treat our Negro citizens as they should be treated, Then they come back into the community and they can't even go into a restaurant with a white friend, It 1 s absurd. We ask them to give their lives and then we don't even treat them with dignity. It is a most impos·sible thing to ask these men to come back and take it. This young man is very intelligent and before the week was over I had the most tremendous respect for that man 1 s courage. I'll never forget it. If you think we women had any courage. We were relatively safe under the wings of Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, * No one would ever hurt ~s. Malcolm Peabody, On a coup~.e of days I breathed deeply that we were .relativ?lY safe; but now I just ache for the Negroes who are there behind, because reprisals are being taken. I'll tell you about that a little bit later. . . Dr. Hayling began about three years ago to become deeply involved in this f:ght, bu~ made virtually' no hea"'"7ay. The only progress made was to get token integration in the public schools. Six Negro children have been taken into the white public schools. But what happened? The family that sent the first two Negro children had their house burned down, I talked with the mother of these
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The moth er of Gov. Peabody of Massachusetts.
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-3two boys. As a matter of fact, she and I went to prison together. She is a.very fine person and she is absolutely thrilled that her little boys could get into this first-rate school·~ I also said, 11 How do white children treat your little boys?" And she said they get along perfectly. She said, 11}fy little boys are very happy there. 11 So whoever burned this house down were probably angry white people who saw that desegregation was coming. I don't know. Nobody knows who burned the house down. It happened at night. The family got out safely. But her children ar<> still going to school. Now isn't that courage? The Goals One thing that has been achieved in this community, (I don't know whether it is a token situation.) is that most of the adult !Jegroes are registered, That doesn't seem to be a key problem. But here are the demands that Dr. Hayling told us that they are asking of his city, and .they seem to me very reasonable d~mands. They want genuine integration in the schools, insteAd of just this token situation. They want genuine integrationin the hospital. They want desegregation of public facilities and a clear statement-Of what public facilities are. The Negro'citizens pay taxes, but are they allowed in the public parks for which they pay taxes? I don't quite know what publ~c facilities are. I mean I don't know whether a restaurant is, but it would seem to me that a restaurant which is open to the public should be open to Negroes too. That isn't a thing for which you pay taYes; and every time we would speak to a drugstore owner or a restaurant owner he would say, "This is privately mmed. We can do as we please." There is no headway there. They want civil sf•nr:i.ce mmminations open to people regardless of color. They have been trying to~;;;-S-alfc)g°ro on the police force with no success. They want a fair hiring policy-in employment; and they do want ~ equitable policy in deariiig with picketers and demonstrators, because that is permitted in this°'Country. It is a way of voicing :mur complaint. And these young juveniles being held without bail at the present time is an example of not equitable treatment of demonstrators. Dr. Hayling Attacked But what has happened to Dr. lfuyling beside the loss of his job? A few weeks ago his house was fired upon from an automobile passing by his house in the night. Nobody was hurt, fortunately, Only his wife an~ two children were ·home, but his dog was killed and he has since removed his entire family. You learn quickly not to ask your colored friends where they live, because you don 1t want to put them in danger. I have no idea where he has taken his family. Then a dreadful thing happened, The IG.u JQux IG.an exists in this part of the South ~nd there v:as to be a. meeting of the IG.u IG.ux Kl.an. Dr. Hayling found out about it and decided that with three Negroes of the community he would go and listen and see just wha~ they were planning to do, ju~t what members of the Negro congregation they were going to go after. He went in an automobile and unforti.tnately was seen~ and some of the white men from the meeting took him at gun point into the ~eeting and there these four men were stripped and beaten very severely. Dr. H~yling was two weeks in the hospital recovering from it. And yet when you meet him! I sat beside him when he was arrested. It w•s his fifth arrest and I could feel th7 tension mounting in him as he waited for the police to come. And yet he contim;.ed to talk simply and sweetly with M!'A• Peabody, looking at pictures of her children anc1 g:andchildren. The onl.y thing that gave away his tenseness was 1occasionally looking out the window to see when the police had arrived. I don t know whether I have ever seen q'1ite so much courage.
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Actually I .'aon 1t fear the Negro· cause wlHm the leaders are men like . Dr. Robert Hayling and Mr. Hosea Williams, the man fron1 ·Atlanta that Dr. J\lartin Luther King sent. When men of'that caliber are leaders, men of great courage and, fortupately for all of us, believers in non-violence, I_ fee~ perfectly sure the Negroes will win their cause. But I hope they will win it m th our help. and that it doesn't have to be too long. Because if it isn't with our help and if we don't push this thing through, there is gning to be bloody rioting on the streets. I couldn't have believed there was such .tension and feeling of hate. I feel af'I though I have been down where there is a war. It >•rasn 1t even a cold war. It was a very ·hot war and it was going between the two parts of town, the white and the black. When I got home, I was disturbed, not because we had been hurt. or even because we had done a great deal peysically, It was because of the tremendous tension. So imagine hOW' they feel, facing this steadily for three years, as they have been doing there •. We had our meetings in a little hall in the Negro part of town. I learned that no white people dared to walk in that part of town except ourselves. Fortunately the Negroes knew us. And the only place I felt really safe and could· take a deep breath at night was when we came back to the mass meeting.· There, surrounded by all this Negro community, we felt safe and welcome. But, of course, we were all struggling. Non-VioJ~en~:thods _
In the morning, Mr. Hosea Wiliiam!" would gather the young people and our white students and \'TOuld teach nc;n· ,-iolent methods. They would go out to picket, They would go out to march. If a at•1gle person was attacked or hurt, no one of the other young people couln _go to his help, because that would mean a riot. In prison I was with a Yale Divinity School professor's wife and she told me how a white man jumped out of a bakery truck and struck and very badly manhandled a boy, This Yale boy had a very hard time of it. He was exceedingly hu,.t, but he managed to stair throughout his time in prison. And no one of the others could go to his rescue, because that was what Hosea Williams had to1d them. They must not come to his defense. The teaching is remarkable and, as I said, Mr, Hosea Williams is a person of ·eiitraordinary spiritual quality. As long as Negroes of that kind are coming to the fore, the Negro needn't worry, Integration will come. I am absolutely convinced. Restl!'lll"ant Incident I will give you one or two incidents of what we actually did, They didn't ask the Bishops' wives to go and picket. That was the young people's part. They asked us in a natural group (the four of us who are friends), to go out to the hotel ahd the restaurant to see if we could go in and have a meal together, if we could get accommodations for the night, if we could get into the theater. · We went to McCartney's drugstore--a nice drugstore in the center of town that had a very attractive small restaurant. We went in and sat down and ordered our meal, Now many of you know Mrs. Burgess. She is a very light Negro, She could be taken for Spanish. They di.cn 1 t notice that she was Negro. They took our lunch o-:de~, they_ brought a very at·cracti.ve meal and Mr11. Peabody realized that they di~n t r:alu~ Mrs. Burgess was Negro, So she said, ''lVe· are going to have to clarify this pomt. 11 When the vraitre"s came back she said, "I'm very
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-5happy to see that you're willing to serve Negroes here." The waitress looked startled and she said, "Oh, that's not our policy." And she immediately disappeared and I could feel Esther stiffen beside me, waiting for the blow to come. We all knew what would happen, but Esther knew it more than any of us. The manager came out and turned to her and said, "Do you consider yours!'llf a Negro?" And Esther said, "Yes." And then he said, "I will have to ask you all to leave." And Mrs. Peabody said, ''We haven 1t eaten our lunch. We won 1t pay for it•" He said, "That's perfectly all right. I want you to leave innnediately and I will pick up the check." Can you imagine the humiliation for Mrs. Burgess to have her friends asked to leave. She felt a humiliation and I felt an intense humiliation for these white people who had asked this of her. When you are with Negroes you feel how they feel. I have never experienced a more intense understanding of what it must mean to be a Negro. And eW..rywhere we went 17hen we were turned down Esther would se:y, "Now you see. This is what we get wherever we go." Mrs. Burges" Arrested In the afternoon we went back to our headquarters and had lunch. The connnittee decides just who is going to be arrested. '.l'hey kept ask:i.ng us, "Mrs. Campbell, will you be willing to go to jail ? 11 And I said, ''Well, I am very anxious to help you, I don •t particularly want to go to jail." And they said, ''Well·, this is a decision each of you must make." They realized this and each of us thought in terms of our family. Esther and I were living in the home of a Negro family, we were together, and at night we were talking it over and Esther said, "Of course, this means even more to me than it means to you." And she said; "I think I'm going to do it. 11 She wasn •t pressuring me at al],. And I said, "I don 1t think rrry husband wants me to. I don't think I will do it." You never know what 1 s going to happen from day to day. That same afternoon we went to the place where Esther decided she was eoing to be arrested and Dr. Hayling decided he was going to be arrested, as well as the two Yale chaplains and a young Pembroke girl. Those five were going to be taken. We went to a very plush motel-a $22.00 a day place; -and went in and sat down at a table. 'The manager came in and I never saw a man more uncomfortable in his life. He said, "I'm going to have to ask you people to ]eave." And Mrs. Peabody said, "Why must we leave?" And he said, ''You have Negroes in your company. We will be happy to serve them in the kitchen and vre will serve you here." Mrs. Peabody said, "I wouldn't think of having my- friends go into the kitchen. They are here as rrr:r guests. We are going to have lunch together," He said, "I am very sorry. You are going to have to leave," She said, "Well, I shall wait until the police come." So then he went and called the police and he hated to do this. But he called the police and then when the police came she said, "I understand I don't have to leave until I hear the law read," He nidn't have the ordinance there, so the sheriff had to go back and get the ordinance. W~ sat there conversing and on the surface we were having a good time,
~~tas I said to Dr. lliYling, "I feel as though I'm sitting on top of a volcano,"
a was e~actly the way it seemed,, But meantime we were talking together and we asked him how many times he had been arrested. He said this was his fifth arrest.
Pretty soon the police came, The sheriff read the ordinance and then Mrs. Peabody said, "I have heard the ordinance and now I will leave peaceably." So some ?f us got up and left and we watched the police take Mrs. Burgess and put her :m a polir.e car wH.h Ilr, Hayling. Esther Burgess sat beside an enormous
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police clog. It so happens··she likes dogs and she was not afraid, but I was horrified to see her put in beside this great big dog. It's a terror tactic. Nothing happened to her and she said she didn't mind that too terribly much. Then the white prisoners were taken off in another car. You can imagine how we felt. New Perspectiv.a We had so much to think about that I didn't have time to get a perspective on what we'd don.e. The neJft morning 1'11'. Hosea Williams came up to me. Looking very grave he said, "You know, our Negro community is very distressed that of you four ladies that came down from Massachusetts the Negro woman has gone to jail willingly and none of you have. 11 Well, I knew in a minute what we had to do. There was no question about it. And I said, "Well, I just want to talk to my husband before I do this." And Mrs. Peabody said she wanted to talk to her family and Mrs. Rowe wanted to talk to her family. I mean you don't do this sort of thing without consulting the people whom you might hurt. They realized this, and we talked to them, I'll never forget Mrs. Peabody's face when she .found that the Governor was willing to let her go ahead and her husband was willing for her to go ahead to do what she felt was1right. It is not easy for people of our age to make the decision to go to jail when all your life you have believed you should obey the law of your country, when you have raised your children not to go to jail. It was the hardest thing I did, I think, to be taken into jail, to be fingerprinted, to have my photograph taken front and side and to be given a number to wear, It sounds funny, but to us it was terrible. Because it is a terrible thing, when all your life you have obeyed the ),aw and trained your children to obey the law, to decide your duty is to break the law. It was worth breaking the law only because I believe that this country must be truly democratic and that the law we were breaking is wrong. Hosea Williams was absolutely delighted. come when we told him we were going to do it.
In fact, he was quite over-
The Episcopal Church is Locked Before we went to jail we had decided we were going to go to church. My intention had been to go with Mrs. Burgess to see whether an integrated group
could go into a communion service. On Easter Sunday down there ·groups of black and white students had tried to go to Easter services in all the churches. The Presbyterian church, I understand, took them in. We talked to the minister of the Episcopal church and he said, 11We were full." Now, was that an excuse or was it true? I have a terrible feeling it was an excuse, but Easter Sunday you are quite likely to be full. On Easter Tuesday we went around to the church for the mid-morning communion service and there was the sheriff, who was quite a friend of ours by now. We recognized him on the front steps. He thought we were just three white women.and so he went to his car and went away. Then I went up to the door and it was locked. So I took Mrs. Peabody and Mrs. fiowe, and we went around to the parish house and I said, "I want to ,see the Rector." We saw the Hector and we saw about ten Vestrymen. They were all there. Mr. Seymour, the Hector, said, "There is no service this mornj ng. It 1 s been canceled." We asked, 11Why?" He replied, "We understood that Mrs. Peabody was coming with a mass demonstration of Negroes." Now where they got such a story I'll never know. But h1 situations
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-7like these, rumors grow out of nothing. ProbabJ.y somebody had said we were coming with Mrs. Burgess and this thing grew into an absolutely untrue rumor, and they were' scared to death, scared for thei.r church property. And we didn't blame them, except that it ;vas so totally untrue. When cor.ununications break down and the white people can't talk to the black people, all sorts of things get exaggerat.ed and truth doesn 1t exist. We'talked for about an hour with these Vestrymen. At first their guard was up, but Mrs. Peabody smiled sweetly at them and they just dissolved; and Mrs,' Rowe was talking veey amiably with the gentlemen there. They were people we would have met very cheerfully, they would have liked us under ordinary circumstances. And I think they did like us before we left. I would have liked to have had a chance to go ·on talking more. I honestly believe that with some of them we got across. They said, ·~Vby did you come down from Boston? Why · did you come down from the North and interfere in this situation?" We replied, "We came in answer to a plea for help, but we didn't come as Northerners to say that you are wrong in the South. We came because we're Americans, you 1re Americans, and your Negro population are Americans. We feel so keenly about th~s subject that we want to urge you to set up bi-racial committees and go after these things that the Negro community is asking. If we don't concern ourselves with these issues there is going to be bloodshed on the streets. Ther<'l is going to be a great· deal more trouble than you have now in your comn1unity, unless these things are corrected." We went back to that motel in the afternoon; and Mrs. Peabody and I and Dr. Burkholder from the Harvard Divinity School and five Negro ladies were arrested in much the same fashion as the people had been the day before. The Jail Experience I'll only speak briefly about the jail experience. It wasn't very bad. I don 1 t doubt for a minute that thew looked after us a little better than the others. I don't know, It was a sePregated jail. Our jail had beds for eight and we were thirteen. That meant-that Gome people had to sleep on the floor. We were almost all civil righter"' in that cell and most of them were college students. And I've never rnet e :'iner bunch of youngsters in my life. They learned that in the next cell, where the Negro women were, there were beds for sixteen and forty-six women were there, These "Oung girls decided they would give up their mattresses and send them over n~xt door. That meant that they would sleep on the floor in a blanket. The floor was concrete. It was not warm. Florida was very cold that night. When the trusty comes along to bring you your meal you can ask him a favor. These girls said, ''Will you take these mattresses next door, so that the women there can be more comfortable?" And they did. They took the mattresses next door.
. There is only one other thing I would like to say about the prison expenen7e. When night time came and lights were out at lOtJl'.l and we were lying on our 17ttle hard bunk~ (and believe me they were v<'Jry hard), in the blackness of the m.ght the women· in the cell next, the Negroes, began to sin"• You have all. ?eard N~gro spirituals, but I have never heard them under more Doving circumstances in nv life. They sang softly and all the sorrow of the spirituals came right through to you in the jail cell. The jail was built for 116 people, we had 212 or more at the end. You nan imagine how crowded the men's quarters were upstairs.
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telegram from Martin Luther King and this
"May I take this opportunity to thank you for your creative Christian witness. You are ... giving the whole nation magnificent demonstration of Christianity in action by your willingness to engage in a creative non-violent demonstra~ tion and to go to jail for what you believe. You are bringing our whole nation closer to the realization of the American dream. You are saying by your words and deeds that all men are brothers and that as long as racial segregation is alive the health of our democracy is in jeopardy. May God bless you and give you the strength the intenseness of the present moment demands." Martin Luther King ~e
Kinds of White People
We met three kinds of white people. There were the older people who were die-hard segregationists whom we couldn't even reach in conversation. There were moderates, of whom I'm sure there are many, who see the picture is changing, but they want to go slowly. The only thing I could say to a very nice man who was giving me this argument-11 Let us go s1owlY''-was, "The world is moving too fast. There is not time to go slowly. They have waited a hundred years and tl)ey aren't going to wait inuch longer. It will be bloody revolution unless we are willing to have bi-racial committees and work out this thing together." I think s:> me of them heard us, Then we met another band of Southerners and again I must say I never saw such courage. Our very last night we were taken into the home of some white integrationsists. A very wealthy man took us to a beautiful home. I thought, our whole week being over, that I could relax. We did relax. Our hos~,,hostess and their son were perfectly delightful to us. It wasn't until the next morning at breakfast that I realized what this meant--their taking Mrs. Peabody, Mrs. Burgess ( a colored lady) and ll\Yself into their home as guests. We were sitting down to breakfast and our host sat at the table and right beside him at the window was a rifle. I looked at it and I guess I looked a little horrified. My hostess said, "John thought he ought to be prepared for anything." That meant Klu KlUJC Klan and fear of reprisal. He had put his whole family in danger, because he believed in this cause. You think some of us had a little courage. We come home, but they are there and they are raising their son. He is an awfully attractive yonng boy of seventeen and he was absolutely thrilled to have the three of us ln his house. 'He is growing up to be the next generation to work for this thing. And they are raising him to believe in integration in spite of the tremendous dangers.
Now I have only one last word •. You will ask whether we achieved. a~.ything. 1 t. s too soon t<;> say. We will have to wait to see. But I do know one positive !h_i_~ that_ '!e. did. We ga~ moral ~upporl;_ 1£ ~very discOuraged Negroes. Before e WeHt to Jll1lthe 'Negro <'v,JHnnni 1,y'~ ns in warriilY'an<l were very ilriendly to us, Afte1• we ""171<> ou·• · hearts; we were their · friends. · 0 of J"ai"l th • · ey to ok u s t o th • eir I