MLK: urban myth or truth?

Today is the day we celebrate this monumental man. The above image has been floating around. So sweet. I could see it being a true story (but it could just be a myth, you know the world is full of emotional manipulators, so…).

On the serious side,

If you didn’t already know, MLK’s St. Augustine trip was at a pivotal time.

King visited St. Augustine for the first time on 18 May 1964. Speaking at a Baptist church on 27 May, he told the congregation that segregation would soon be over in St. Augustine “because trouble don’t last always” (King, 27 May 1964). In the early morning of 29 May, the house SCLC rented for King in St. Augustine was sprayed by gunfire. On 11 June, the day after the Senate voted to end the filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, King, Ralph Abernathy, and several others were arrested when they requested service at a segregated restaurant. Throughout June, SCLC led evening marches to the Old Slave Market, often facing counter demonstrations by the Klan, and provoking violence that garnered national media attention.

As the violence continued, King appealed to the federal government for assistance, asking the White House to pressure prominent white citizens to negotiate in good faith. Although by late June 1964 King was eager to leave St. Augustine and focus SCLC efforts on Alabama, he did not want to negatively affect the passage of the Civil Rights Act. 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,” he insisted, had “never had peaceful race relations” (King, 19 June 1964).

You can read the article that came from here.

Time has passed and events almost forgotten by St. Augustine.

Now this is no urban myth. St. Augustine,” he insisted, had “never had peaceful race relations” He’s right. Watch at about the 22 minute mark:

Always seems to come down to greed.

You know, St. Augustine is rich with history. How did it turn so racist? Many don’t know the story of Fort Mose:

Sometime between March and November of 1738, Spanish settlers in Florida formed a town named Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, two miles to the north of St. Augustine. Initially, it consisted of 38 men, all fugitive slaves, “most of them married,” who had fled to Florida for sanctuary and freedom from enslavement in the Carolinas and Georgia. It came to be known as Fort Mose.

The enclave was the first line of defense between the Spanish settlers in Florida and their enemies, the English colonists to the north in Carolina (which did not officially split into North and South Carolina until 1729, and then the Southern part of South Carolina split in 1732 to form Georgia). Fort Mose was manned entirely by armed black men, under the leadership of Francisco Menendez, who became the leader of the black militia there in 1726. It deserves to be remembered as the site of the first all-black town in what is now the United States, and as the headquarters of the first black armed soldiers commanded by a black officer, who actively engaged in military combat with English colonists from the Carolinas and Georgia.

That was taken from here, if you want to know more about America’s first black town.

How can we not have accomplished much in 50 years?

RIP Dr. Martin Luther King.