Ingredients of a 1950s melodrama minus the music

These are the ingredients of a dark 1950s melodrama. No dramatic music necessary. Stir in harassment and rape, illegal gambling, wealth, racism, Jim Crow laws, a married woman, White doctor turned senator-elect, paramour rights, murder by bullets, victim threatened with jail or beat down if she complained, neighbors whispering behind closed doors, sensational trial, death sentence, mental illness. There you have it!

In the 1940s Ruby Jackson McCollum was an African American woman of wealth by way of her husband. As we say in the South she was “pissing in high cotton.” McCollum, her husband Sam and their children lived in a two-story stucco home surrounded by date palms, and a pond filled with goldfish. The McCollum’s were church going folks. They were upstanding citizens in Live Oak, population 4,000.

Money by any other name is still wealth

Sam McCollum’s owned a juke joint, a funeral home, sold insurance to Black folks, and owned a tobacco farm in a small farming town located in North Florida. Sam’s farm was the largest tobacco allotment in the county. They also owned a funeral home. He sat on the board of the largest Black run insurance company in Florida. Because Ruby was good at math she kept books for the family businesses. 

Clemon Jackson, Sam’s nephew, in an interview with producers of the movie “You Belong To Me”, said, “Each child had their own room. They had a lot of toys and stuff, and the best clothes and stuff, because she never shopped in Live Oak. She always went to Jacksonville. I think the name of the store was Monmaker in Jacksonville. The only way I took advantage of that was when the clothes got too small for Sam, Jr. they would give me the clothes. So I wore some pretty nice clothes”.

McCollum was educated at Fessenden Academy, a private school for African American students. Her goal was to be a school teacher, but she didn’t reach her career goal. However, life was good for the McCollum family.  She drove a new light blue Chrysler every year.  When Sam Jr. became college age he was accepted at UCLA in California.

Ruby McCollum

Ruby Jackson was born to Gertrude and William Jackson, August 31, 1901 in Ocala, Florida. She was the first daughter, the second born to the Jackson’s, who had five other children. Ruby was 20 years old when she married Sam McCollum. They moved to Nyack, New York, where their first son, Sam Jr. was born. After five years they moved back to Florida in 1940s. They lived in Live Oak in segregated Suwannee County, Florida. The state was dry; legal alcohol was not sold there until 2011. 

McCollum’s brother, Buck McCollum, had acquired a considerable fortune operating a lottery type gambling game called Bolita, a numbers racket. He was successful. He always paid the winners, and his customers were a mixture of Blacks and Whites. Sam learned the business, earning his own fortune. Considered a racketeer, Sam’s nickname was “Bolita Sam.” Sam McCollum moneyed the pockets of local police; a move that allowed him the freedom to operate without fear of his door getting kicked in by police or arrested.

Dr. Clifford Adams, the son of a wealthy, political family with loads of influence, was loved and respected by his Black and White patients. What people in Live Oak didn’t know about the good doctor was that he made himself a sideline partner in Sam’s gambling business. Being a Black man in living in the South Sam couldn’t tell Adams to take a hike up a mountain. The police and whomever else would have turned on him. Adams used to the money to run for senator, which he won. 
 

Ruby McCollum's fairy life comes to an abrupt end

The McCollum’s fairy tale life came to an end August 3, 1952 when Ruby McCollum shot Dr. Clifford Leroy Adams four times, foreclosing on his life, and the years of misery he had caused her. She went to his office with a 32 caliber revolver in her purse, entering his office through the “colored entrance.” Two patients sitting in the “Colored Waiting Room” said they heard Dr. Adams and McCollum arguing about a bill. She didn’t understand why they received a bill when neither she was nor her husband were treated. Amid the argument she demanded a receipt. The bill was never mentioned at the trial, nor was it produced by her attorney or the prosecutor.

On a TV show called “A Crime To Remember” it was revealed that Sam McCollum’s girl friend had a D&C performed after she got an abortion.  Supposedly Ruby McCollum opened the bill that was addressed to her husband. That was the bill she and Adams argued about. If this was true as depicted in the TV show testimony of the D&C was not broached at McCollum’s trial.  

When 42-year-old Ruby McCollum went to Dr. Adams office that morning she was pregnant with her second child by the doctor. According to  “A Crime to Remember” she wanted Adams to perform an abortion and “fix” her so she couldn’t get pregnant by him again. At her trial Ruby testified that she had a diaphragm, but Adams wouldn’t let her use it when he demanded sex.  After years of rape, abuse and terror, it was McCollum’s intent to tell Adams that she wanted him to leave her alone. But fate flipped the script. Dr. Adams had been coming to her home whenever he wanted. He knew that Sam was not home a lot, because hebusy overseeing his multi-business enterprises.

Dr. Clifford Adams

Adams told McCollum that he wouldn’t perform an abortion for her, warning that he would kill her if she tried to abort his baby. Dr. Adams shouted at her, “Goddamn, woman I am tired of you”! During her first pregnancy by Adams a physician associate, Dr. Dillard Workman, attended her prenatal care. When the baby girl was born the doctor refused to give McCollum a birth certificate.  Some Black folks in Live Oak suspected that Dr. Adams addicted McCollum to heroin or cocaine to control her, according to the TV documentary.

Carlton Jackson, another resident of Live Oak, voiced the same suspicion: “Well, the first thing I thought was 'Wow'. That doctor must have done something wrong 

. . . mighty bad. Then I was told that she was pregnant by the doctor. I was told, too, that he was giving her drugs. I was going into medicine . . . I’d worked with one doctor already. I know that some drugs was habit forming, so I figured he must have been giving her habit forming drugs. And it probably got to the place where she wanted a drug and he wouldn’t give it to her unless she did something. All this was in my mind. What actually happened, I don’t know. And eventually, since she got pregnant, she might have gone down and just wanted to end the whole thing”.

'Paramour rights' gave southern White males the right to rape Black women and young girls

Despite his wife giving birth Dr. Adam’s child, Sam McCollum was helpless to do anything. He knew the little curly haired, light skin child wasn’t his. He couldn’t kill the doctor or tell him to stop raping and impregnating his wife. The law was not on his side no matter how much money he had.

John Yulee, of Live Oak, who was interviewed for the movie “You Belong to Me” talked about a closeted secret that was no secret in the small town. “Black people used to say a White man touched that lady. You’re working in their homes, tobacco fields, they’re the boss. You can’t file a complaint. The boss was right and you were wrong. If a baby comes out light-skinned, you had to live with it”.

Tameka Hobbs, history professor at Florida Memorial University, and citizen of Live Oak said, “With Ruby there was so much shame with the Black community. Because of the sexual liaison they really did not want to talk about it”. In the early days, unlike today in the era of social media and networks, Black folks didn’t “air their dirty laundry” in public. No matter the sin or the deed it was hush-hush in the family. But there was behind the door whispering, and we know your secret stares".

The boisterous argument between Dr. Adams, 44, and McCollum concluded with Adams getting shot four times. He had a hundred dollar bill in his hand that Ruby had given him for a bill. She had demanding a receipt.  After shooting Adams, McCollum got into her car and drove home. Two of her children were in the car; the youngest was fathered by Adams. Many folks in Live Oak believed the bill was a ruse. She had $1,800 in her purse. The McCollum’s were known to pay their bills on time.

McCollum was arrested the same day at her home. She was quickly whisked off to the Florida State Prison Farm in Raiford, 50 miles in Suwannee County. In Live Oak the KKK would have dragged her out of the jail and hanged her before she could go to trial. Live Oak White folks were sticklers for Blacks following the rules of no race mixing, and staying in their place. No Black person could kill a White person and get away with it! A Black woman was jailed for six months when she was caught drinking from the “White Only” water fountain.

One true story in Live Oak’s past tells of a 15-year-old African American boy named Willie James Howard. He sent a Christmas card to White girl he liked. He paid for this innocent act with his life. On January 2, 1944 three White males dragged Howard out of his parent’s home at gun point. He was hogtied and taken to the Suwannee River. He was never heard from again. No one can explain what happened to him. His body was never recovered or found. The three White males were never arrested.

Ruby McCollum was whisked away secretly by specific police. She was a prominent Black woman. A public arrest would have attracted the media and strangers coming to their state, popping open a can of worms the small county wanted to keep sealed. McCollum supposedly had a black ledger with the names of all the White police, politicians and other folks they paid to keep their eyes closed and their mouths shut. The ledger was never found.

 While she sat in jail McCollum didn’t know that her husband died of a heart attack after fleeing to Ocala, Florida with their children. Hearing that his wife had been arrested for killing Dr. Adams, Sam rushed home to get his daughters, packed some clothes and a suit case full of dollar bills. The fast move was for their safety. History is replete with stories of the KKK or lynch mobs taking revenge on family members, or a Black community if they couldn’t get the person or persons they were after.

Imagine having money, a fancy home, husband and children, wearing expensive clothes, the freedom to travel, but not the freedom to reject the sexual advances of a White man. Ruby McCollum, even with her money, was subjected to the same kind humiliation Black women and young girl encountered living in the South. In the 1950s, some 88 years removed from slavery, a White man could have an African American woman arrested on trumped up charges, or beat her if she did not consent to him raping her without fear of judicial consequences.

'Ruby did not break down and weep piteously'

Zora Neale Hurston

When McCollum’s trial began s noted writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, traveled to Live Oak at the behest of The Pittsburg Courier editor to cover the story. Unfortunately, she could not interview Ruby McCollum or her attorney, Frank Cannon. The title of her series was "The Life Story of Ruby McCollum". Judge Hal Adams imposed a gag order on McCollum to stop her from participating in interviews with the media. Hurston had to sit in the segregated balcony in the courtroom.

McCollum’s Black attorney, realizing that he couldn’t mount a convincing case to an all White jury, all of whom former patients of the Dr. Adams, turned the case over to a White attorney named Frank Cannon.

Hurston wrote: “Ruby was allowed to describe how, about 1948, during an extended absence of her husband, she had, in her home, submitted to the doctor. She was allowed to state that her youngest child was his. Yet, 38 times Frank Cannon attempted to proceed from this point; 38 times he attempted to create the opportunity for Ruby to tell her whole story, and explore what were her motives; 38 times the state objected and 38 times the judge sustained these objection”. The objections frustrated Cannon. The judge has the power.

Hurston observed: “Ruby did not break down and weep piteously. There was an abrupt halt in her testimony, and something rushed from the deep of her tortured soul and inhabited her face for a space. The quintessence of human agony was there”.

 McCollum testified that she was caught between a rock and a hard place and the hard place was squeezing the life out of her. “I was so worried I had to either yield or maybe die. I suppose that was what would happen”. 

Zora Neale Hurston exposed a sin heaped upon all Black women and young girls. She wrote that the trial of Ruby McCollum “sounded the death knell for paramour rights”. McCollum was describing her ordeal with Adams' paramour rights.

Keith Black, the prosecuting attorney in this case, apprised folks in the courtroom that McCollum “shot Adams in anger over a disputed bill, which was supported by three witnesses during the trial. McCollum herself testified that she had discussed a bill with Dr. Adams that day, but maintained that she shot the doctor in self-defense when he attacked her. Residents in Live Oak knew that McCollum was a wealthy woman and she and her husband were known to pay their bill promptly”. (African American Registry)

McCollum testified of the times the doctor came to her home. “Dr. Adams came out to my house that afternoon, before the morning of the beginning of this sexual relationship, and he told me that afternoon, ‘I will be back in the morning as soon as I finish all of my work. I will be back and I will show you what I was taking about’. And he came back out there the next morning about 9:30 and took me upstairs and laid me down on the bed and began the intercourse. And when it was finished he left, and he said, ‘I will be back some other time. You call me some other time”, and I said, ‘Yes, I will.’

“I told him I had not received a birth certificate for my baby yet, and I was supposed to receive a certificate a month after the baby was born. And I asked if he would get it for me, and he told me ‘I have it, and I am going to keep it until you tell me . . . until you do as I say do.’” (Persphone Magazine)

Ruby McCollum’s trial was historical in a sense that she survived without getting lynched. She had two trials. But not because of a hung jury or acquittal. On December 20, 1952, the male White jurors, all 12 former patients of the deceased doctor, found her guilty of murder. She was sentenced to die in Florida’s electric chair. Her claims that she was repeatedly raped and forced to have a child by Dr. Leroy Adams fell on the deaf ears.

McCollum spent two years on Florida’s death row. July 20, 1954 the conviction and death sentence were overturned on a technicality by the Florida Supreme Court. It seems that Judge Hal Adams (no kin to the deceased) failed to go with the jury to inspect Dr. Adam’s office, the scene of the crime.

McCollum’s attorney, Frank Cannon, filed a motion of insanity on her behalf. That led to an examination by court appointed physicians. The procedure was agreed to by Randall Slaughter, the state attorney. McCollum was declared mentally incompetent. She was sentenced to 20 years in the Florida State Hospital for the mentally in Chattahoochee, Florida.

Her memories disappeared

Cannon visited McCollum in 1974. He had filed papers under the Baker Act, hoping to get his client released from the mental institution. A patient not considered a danger is eligible for release under the Baker Act. Upon her release, McCollum went to live in a rest home in Silver Springs, Florida. Her bill was paid for out of a $40,000 trust fund set up by William Bradford Huie, a writer who chronicled her story in a book titled “Ruby McCollum: A Woman in the Suwannee Jail”. He intended to produce a movie, adapted from the pages of the book.

A reporter with the Ocala Star Banner visited McCollum in 1980. He found that she no longer had memories of her past life. He was told that she suffered Ganser Syndrome, a mental disease that caused McCollum to suppress painful memories. While she was in the mental hospital, she had been subjected to shock treatments and heavily medicated, one of the medications being Thorazine.

Ruby McCollum died of a stroke May 23, 1992. She was 82 years old. Her remaining family members arranged for her burial behind the Hopewell Baptist Church next to the brother Matt Jackson, who died less than a year before she passed.

Sam McCollum, Jr. in an attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps was not as successful. Still living in his parent’s home at the time, he was caught with $250,000 cash. He was indicted in federal court on 10 counts of gambling. One of McCollum’s daughter’s was killed in a car accident, the other died of a heart attack.

Because there were no eyes witnesses to the Ruby McCollum/Dr. Clifford Adams tragedy, it is difficult to cite with accuracy, what happened exactly between these two people. Eric Musgrove, a citizen of Live Oak, who was interviewed for the movie “You Belong To Me”, said: “In looking at the Ruby McCollum trial, we’re never going to know everything thing that happened. The only two people that know exactly what happened are now deceased. A lot of what we talk about beyond the written records is going to be hearsay, misconceptions of what happened. But through all the conversation we’re never going to know every facet of what transpired between those two”.

If the 1960s were to switch places with 2016 the years would look the same, and feel the same, except now we have a Black president in the White House

“I object to violence because it offers to do good, but the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent”. Mahatma Gandhi
 
In the Deep South, during the decades of civil unrest, the lives and futures of Black folks did not matter. Yesterday is still today in the lives of too many African Americans. Throughout this presidential election year I watch on TV, and hear angry White folks wallowing in self-pity, complaining that life as they knew it is gone. They say they feel like outsiders. They want to take back “their America.” They are talking about the good old days of White supremacy, White privilege, and their assured firstness on the ladder of opportunity.
 
Demonstrations and protests were the only avenues available for Black folks. There were no firsts for them. Weaponless fighting 

Students participate in demonstrations in Florida

for their share of the American pie, gainful employment and the right to live decent lives were their goals. Black parents watched their children suffer with them, all the while answering their children's questions about why they were treated differently from White boys and girls. Black parents had to explain there was no Black privilege.  There will never be Black privilege for Black folks.

May 2, 1963, Birmingham, Alabama. Over 700 children--The Children’s Crusade--were arrested for participating in a protest. These children, like their adult counterparts, were beaten by police, bitten by police dogs and blasted with fire department strength hoses. The Children’s Crusade was the brainchild of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Their purpose was to resuscitate the failing anti-segregation campaign. More than 1,000 Black children were recruited and trained how to react when starring in the face violence, and name calling.
 
The plan was to have Black students walk out of classes, gather at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and then march downtown. But many of the students did not make it downtown. They were arrested and hauled off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. No matter how these children were treated they stood their ground, sticking to their vow of nonviolence. As a result of their participating in the protest the Birmingham Board of Education saw fit to expel and suspend them from school. The punishments were overturned by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The expulsions and suspensions had been decided by the Birmingham Federal District Court.  

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church is where four little girls attending Sunday School were killed by a bomb planted under the church’s steps by a Ku Klux Klan killer named Robert Chambliss. It took years for someone to be arrested and charged. Chambliss was charged with murder for his participation in the bombing. Unfortunately, he died in prison. Two more killers were arrested years later, and sentenced to life in prison. By the time they were apprehended they were old men.  

Everywhere African Americans have lived these stories revealed 100 percent of their history. Some incidents were too ridiculous to believe. Like the Black woman who refused to answer questions on the witness stand, because the judge referred to her by her first name. She wanted the same courtesy afforded the Whites who took the stand, all of whom were addressed as Mr. Miss or Mrs. Mary Hamilton asked that she be called Miss Mary Hamilton. The judge was not having that kind of sassy talk from this Negro gal in his courtroom! How dare she demand White folks respect her! Hamilton paid more than one price for demanding respect in the courtroom. The pissed off judge sentenced her to five days in jail, plus a $50.00 fine.

Hamilton did her time in jail, but she would not pay the fine. The NAACP legal defense team stepped in to defend her, and repealed her case to the Supreme Court. The contempt charge was overturned.

In 1964 three college aged students went to Mississippi to register African Americans to vote. Their names were James Chaney, 22, an African American from Mississippi, was a plasterer’s apprentice; Andrew Goodman, 20, was an anthropology student from New York, and Michael Schwerner, 24, was a social worker from Manhattan Lower East Side. These young activists are recorded in the chronicles of history. They met their untimely deaths at the hands of murderous hoodlums who terrorized Black people (and some Whites) living in the South.  

Goodman and Schwerner, both Jews, were shot once in the head. The most horrendous death was set aside for Chaney. He was severely beaten and shot in the head three times. The KKKers took the bodies to a dam on a farm outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi where they were buried in shallow graves. Their decomposed bodies were found a month after they were reported missing.  

The same fate awaited any civil rights activists trying to register Blacks to vote, fight against discrimination and desegregation. For well over two centuries evilness has been stacked like bricks on the shoulders of African Americans. White people made the choice to disparage Black folks, and then blame them for who they are. The outright denouncement of a race of people justified White folks animosity towards Blacks.

This leads me to ask: What kind of human being throws muriatic acid into a Whites Only

James Brock pours muriatic acid in pool to
chase out protesters.

swimming pool that Blacks attempted to integrate? That’s what five civil rights demonstrators ventured to do, along with two of their White friends at the Monson Motor Lodge, owned and operated by segregationist James E. “Jimmy” Brock, a native Florida.

What drives a person to have such a low regard for Blacks trying to have fun on a hot summer day, despite a racially intolerant law that declared they had no right to swim in Whites Only pools in Florida? Where was the humanness?

 Any Black person or civil rights group that endeavored to break the Whites Only law of segregation subjected themselves to the facing the same deadly fate as Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney. King and Abernathy were arrested for their efforts. Fortunately, they were not set free to travel a dark country road, only to get accosted by a bunch of Ku Klux Klan thugs waiting in the darkness to take their lives. This what happened to the young activists.

A Black dentist named Robert Hayling, along with three other members of the NAACP—James Jackson, Clyde Jenkins and James Hauser--came pretty close to facing death when they bucked the KKK at a rally a year before King came to St. Augustine, Florida.

“Organized demonstrations reached St. Augustine in the summer of 1963, when Robert B. Hayling, a local dentist and advisor to the Youth Council of the city’s branch of the NAACP, led pickets and sit- ins against segregated businesses. The Ku Klux Klan and other Whites responded with violence against demonstrators, which escalated through the fall of 1963, when Hayling and three other NAACP members were severely beaten at a Klan rally, then arrested and convicted of assaulting their attackers. In December 1963, after a grand jury blamed the racial crisis on Hayling and other activists, the NAACP asked for Hayling’s resignation. St. Augustine activists then turned to SCLC for support”. (MLK, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle) Hayling was asked to resign because he refused to take a vow of nonviolence.

“On June 25, 300 anti-segregationist marchers who had spent the afternoon rallying at the

Teenage demonstrator beaten the KKK

site of St. Augustine's former slave market, Slave Market Square, were violently attacked by over 200 White segregationists. The segregationists easily evaded police and physically assaulted the marchers. As the marchers fled, they were chased and attacked across the city's downtown area. Close to fifty of the marchers were injured, and fifteen were treated at the city's hospital. Several hours before the attacks on the marchers, seventy-five White segregationists had attacked a group of 100 African Americans who attempted to wade into the ocean at a local White beach, and twenty people were arrested. Such violent clashes between anti-segregationists and segregationists in St. Augustine continued throughout June 1964”. (Equal Justice Initiative)

It was the eve of the Freedom Summer 1964, St. Augustine, Florida. Martin Luther King, Rev. Abernathy, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and demonstrators planned a protest. King had announced their intentions at a press conference the day before. They were going to tackle the racial problems in St. Augustine, Florida.

“When, on 18 June 1964, a Grand Jury called on King and SCLC to leave St. Augustine for one month to diffuse the situation, claiming that they had disrupted racial harmony in the city, King replied that the Grand Jury’s request was an immoral one, as it asked the Negro community to give all, and the White community to give nothing. St. Augustine, they insisted, had never had peaceful race relations’’. (Global Freedom Struggle)

Before King arrived Robert Hayling sent out a call to northern universities and colleges to come to St. Augustine to participate in sit-ins and demonstrations rather than go to the beach. Hayling and SCLC got the cooperation they needed, but hundreds of them ended up in jail. Jail space was limited. That left many students standing outside in a cramped pens with the summer heat blazing down on them.

King targeted Monson Motor Lodge restaurant to integrate. When King and Abernathy

Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy
are refused service at restaurant

attempted to enter the establishment they were stopped at the door by James Brock, owner of the lodge and restaurant. The media was on hand to record the protest. In the meanwhile, Al Lingo, one of the White protesters, registered at the motel. At some point one of the rabbis with King got into a shoving match with Brock. Amid the distraction five Black and two White protesters, dressed in swimwear they had changed into, sprinted toward the swimming pool, and jumped in. White swimmers in the pool were taken aback by surprise. It did not take long for them to scuttle out of the now contaminated pool.

Abernathy wrote in his book And the Walls Came Tumbling Down. “… Hosea Williams hit on the perfect plan, one that would help us beat the heat and challenge segregation at the same time: We would integrate the motel swimming pools.

“But how will we do that?” I asked. “As soon as we walk down the street with our bathing suits on, the police will surround us and keep us from getting near a pool”.

“It’s easy,” said Hosea. “I’ve already got it worked out. A couple of our White friends will register at the Monson Motor Lodge. Then, we’ll go by their rooms, one or two at a time. We’ll change into bathing suits there and then step out the door and walk over to the pool. It’s just a few steps. Before they know we’re there, we’ll be paddling around the pool.”

An angry James Brock ordered the interlopers out of the pool. When they did not comply Brock stormed off and returned with a five gallon can filled with muriatic acid. He warmed them that he had acid in the can, and he was going to pour it on them if they did not vacate the pool. They ignored his demand. Brock poured the liquid into the water. Muriatic acid is undiluted hydrochloric acid used to clean masonry surfaces of pools. The red liquid evolved into a dark circle, spreading outward. However, the slow traveling circle dissipated before getting close to the civil right activists. A disappointed Brock expected the acid to burn their skins, thus forcing them out of the pool. He called the police.

The St. Augustine Record wrote: “King, who was jailed, wrote to a group of rabbis meeting in Savanah, asking them to help the demonstrators draw attention, including a planned swim-in at the Monson pool, which was located on the bay front. On June 17 a dozen rabbis arrived, knelt in front of the restaurant and began to pray to distract Brock while demonstrators jumped into the pool”. Brock told them to leave; that they could not pray on private property.
 
When the police arrived the defiant protesters told the police to come into the pool and get

White Crowd watch cop take off his shoes and gun and jump into
pool to force demonstrators out of the pool.

them if they were under arrest. One officer stepped to the edge of the pool, expecting to grab one of them. The group swam to the center of the pool as a strategy to avoid getting snatched out of the pool. A fully clothed cop, after pulling off his shoes and pistol, jumped into the pool, forcing the protesters to the edge of the pool.

In an interview with NPR, J.T. Johnson, 76, and Al Lingo, 78, the activist that rented the motel room. On a visit to StoryCorps in Atlanta, the pair recalled the hotel owner, James Brock, “losing it”.

“Everybody was kind of caught off guard”, J. T. says. 

“The girls, they were most frightened, and we moved to the center of the pool”, Al says.

“I tried to calm the gang down. I knew that there was too much water for that acid to do anything”, J. T. says. “When they drug us out in bathing suits and they carried us out to the

J. T. Johnson (left), and Al Lingo

jail, they wouldn't feed me because they said I didn't have on any clothes. I said, ‘Well, that's the way you locked me up’”!

Malcolm X, sensing that Martin Luther King was heading for trouble with local Whites and the KKK sent King a telegram: “We have witnessed with great concern the vicious attacks of the White race against our poor defenseless people there in St. Augustine. If the federal government will not send troops to your aid, just say the word and we will immediately dispatch some of our brothers there to organize self-defense units among our people, and the Klu Klux Klan will then receive a taste of its own medicine. The day of turning the other cheek to those brute beasts is over”.  

The Organization of Afro-American Unity Malcolm X, chairman, 
Theresa Hotel Harlem, NY

James Brock’s dilemma was far from over. He found himself caught between a rock and a hard place, and he could not hide under the rock. He had Black and White civil rights activists on one side; White militants and the KKK on the other side. The latter terrorists of the South turned demonstrators, and began marching with signs in front of desegregated businesses.

Even though Monson Motor Lodge was not integrated, incensed bigots threw it in with other integrated businesses. It is likely word got around that Blacks had invaded the swimming pool. James Brock was now hurting financially. It was sink or swim. He desegregated his lodge and restaurant, hoping business would improve.

“Within a few days he desegregated the Monson again after a judge ordered restaurants and motels to serve Blacks. For that his restaurant was hit with Molotov cocktails”, Dr. David R. Colburn wrote in his book “Radical Change and Community Crisis.” (The St. Augustine Record)

Brock later renamed the lodge Monson Bayfront Resort. Eventually sold it to another hotel owner, who demolished it to build the Riverfront Hilton Hotel. Brock died in September 2007 at the age of 85.

"But all of the news media were there, because somehow I guess they'd gotten word that something was going to happen at that pool that day. And I think that's when President [Lyndon B.] Johnson got the message”, Lingo said.

The following day, the Civil Rights Act was approved, after an 83-day filibuster in the U.S. Senate. The St. Augustine Movement was an umbrella of the civil rights movement. Its achievements were small, and did not successfully integrate St. Augustine’s schools and businesses. The movement lasted from 1963 to 1964. Closing with a story that fits perfectly into the Black Lives Matter movement, this head scratcher is about a Black man shot by police because he did not have a car to take his dog to the vet. The 1960s lives in 2016.

Black Man Killed in Birmingham, Alabama, during Arrest for Failure to Take Dog to Veterinarian

On January 27, 1967, Jefferson County sheriff deputies went to the home of Robert Lacey, a Black father of six, because Mr. Lacey had failed to take the family dog to the veterinarian after it bit a neighborhood child. The health department had instructed the family to take the dog in for a rabies test, but the family did not own a car and had no means of transporting the animal.

Newspapers tell the story of Robert Lacey 

The deputies knocked at the door as Mr. Lacey was getting out of the shower, and when he answered the door they told him to get dressed and go with them. Mr. Lacey asked why and told the deputies to just take the dog. The deputies said they weren’t interested in the dog and told him to get dressed. As Mr. Lacey was doing so, a gun he kept in his dresser fell to the floor. In response, the deputies pushed Mr. Lacey against the wall and attempted to handcuff him. Mr. Lacey offered to walk to the car with them, but one of the deputies said, “Boy, you gonna leave here with handcuffs on, dead or alive.”

Mr. Lacey was a large man; as the deputies attempted to wrestle him down, one of them fell to the ground, and the other then shot Mr. Lacey in the leg. The deputies later claimed Mr. Lacey lunged at them before the second shot, but Mr. Lacey’s family insisted Mr. Lacey fell to the ground before the deputy shot him again, “between the eyes.” Neighbors who ran to the house after the shooting were instructed by police to move the body before the coroner arrived.

Mr. Lacey’s death marked the second black man killed by Jefferson County law enforcement within nine days, and would be one of ten total law enforcement killings of Black men in the Birmingham, Alabama, area within a 14 month period spanning from 1966 to 1967. (Equal Justice Initiative)

As you can see these cops feared for their lives, and they had to kill the unarmed Black man, whose dog they had lost interest in by the time they arrived at Robert Lacey’s house. Black lives have never mattered in America.

1964 National Democratic Convention: Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony before the Credentials Committee

Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony in front of the Credentials Committee

Mr. Chairman, and to the Credentials Committee, my name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and I live at 626 East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippi, Sunflower County, the home of Senator James O. Eastland, and Senator Stennis.

It was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to become first-class citizens.

We was met in Indianola by policemen, Highway Patrolmen, and they only allowed two of us in to take the literacy test at the time. After we had taken this test and started back to Ruleville, we was held up by the City Police and the State Highway Patrolmen and carried back to Indianola where the bus driver was charged that day with driving a bus the wrong color.

After we paid the fine among us, we continued on to Ruleville, and Reverend Jeff Sunny carried me four miles in the rural area where I had worked as a timekeeper and sharecropper for eighteen years. I was met there by my children, who told me that the plantation owner was angry because I had gone down to try to register.

After they told me, my husband came, and said the plantation owner was raising Cain because I had tried to register. Before he quit talking the plantation owner came and said,  'Fannie Lou, do you know - did Pap tell you what I said'?

And I said, 'Yes, sir.' 

He said, 'Well I mean that.' He said, 'If you don't go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave.'  Said, 'Then if you go down and withdraw,' said, 'you still might have to go because we are not ready for that in Mississippi.' 

And I addressed him and told him and said, 'I didn't try to register for you. I tried to register for myself.' I had to leave that same night. 

On the 10th of September 1962, sixteen bullets was fired into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tucker for me. That same night two girls were shot in Ruleville, Mississippi. Also Mr. Joe McDonald's house was shot in.

And June the 9th, 1963, I had attended a voter registration workshop; was returning back to Mississippi. Ten of us was traveling by the Continental Trailway bus. When we got to Winona, Mississippi, which is Montgomery County, four of the people got off to use the washroom, and two of the people - to use the restaurant - two of the people wanted to use the washroom.

The four people that had gone in to use the restaurant was ordered out. During this time I was on the bus. But when I looked through the window and saw they had rushed out I got off of the bus to see what had happened. And one of the ladies said, 'It was a State Highway Patrolman and a Chief of Police ordered us out.' I got back on the bus and one of the persons had used the washroom got back on the bus, too. 

As soon as I was seated on the bus, I saw when they began to get the five people in a highway patrolman's car. I stepped off of the bus to see what was happening and somebody screamed from the car that the five workers was in and said, 'Get that one there.' When I went to get in the car, when the man told me I was under arrest, he kicked me.

I was carried to the county jail and put in the booking room. They left some of the people in the booking room and began to place us in cells. I was placed in a cell with a young woman called Miss Ivesta Simpson. After I was placed in the cell I began to hear sounds of licks and screams, I could hear the sounds of licks and horrible screams. And I could hear somebody say, 'Can you say, 'yes, sir,' nigger? Can you say 'yes, sir'?'

And they would say other horrible names. She would say, 'Yes, I can say 'yes, sir.' 

'So, well, say it.' 

She said, 'I don't know you well enough.'

They beat her, I don't know how long. And after a while she began to pray, and asked God to have mercy on those people. And it wasn't too long before three White men came to my cell. One of these men was a State Highway Patrolman and he asked me where I was from. I told him Ruleville and he said, 'We are going to check this.' 

They left my cell and it wasn't too long before they came back. He said, 'You are from Ruleville all right,' and he used a curse word. And he said, 'We are going to make you wish you was dead.'

I was carried out of that cell into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners. The State Highway Patrolmen ordered the first Negro to take the blackjack. The first Negro prisoner ordered me, by orders from the State Highway Patrolman, for me to lay down on a bunk bed on my face. 

I laid on my face and the first Negro began to beat. I was beat by the first Negro until he was exhausted. I was holding my hands behind me at that time on my left side, because I suffered from polio when I was six years old.

After the first Negro had beat until he was exhausted, the State Highway Patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack. The second Negro began to beat and I began to work my feet, and the State Highway Patrolman ordered the first Negro who had beat me to sit on my feet - to keep me from working my feet. I began to scream and one white man got up and began to beat me in my head and tell me to hush. 

One White man---my dress had worked up high - he walked over and pulled my dress---I pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress back up.

I was in jail when Medgar Evers was murdered.

All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?

Thank you.