Martin Luther King’s Political Impact on 1970s Florida

By Kartik Krishnaiyer

Martin Luther King Jr. is one of only four Americans honored by a federal holiday. Some states have other Americans or Confederates to honor. For example, in Virginia Abraham Lincoln is not honored by President’s Day, but Robert E. Lee is honored on Washington/Lee Day. Here in Florida, the birthday of Senator Jefferson Davis, who was the President of the Confederacy is an official state holiday.

MLK Jr. day wasn’t universally accepted as a holiday in all states. Most notably among these was Arizona, who lost the right to host a Super Bowl, endured a boycott (which included countless College Football teams turning down a bid to the prestigious Fiesta Bowl), and lost billions of dollars in conventions and tourism thanks to a reluctance to adopt the holiday.

But Florida didn’t hesitate to adopt the MLK holiday. Coming just two decades after the violence in St. Augustine we chronicled yesterday, the shift in attitude towards civil rights and the King legacy in the Sunshine State was stark. The number of African-American political leaders in the state by the mid-eighties speaks for itself. But King’s real impact was among white politicians whose progressive ideas, which were only possible in a post Civil Rights era, moved Florida forward.

The 1970s were an age of enlightenment in Florida. The election of Pensacola’s Reuben Askew in 1970 changed the state forever. Gone were the reactionary deep south tendencies of Florida towards issues of government spending, race and corruption. In it’s place was Askew, a visionary leader who Harvard University ranked as one of the ten best state executives in the 20th century United States.

Askew didn’t have an easy time dealing with a State Senate that was led by the likes of W.D. Childers, Dempsey Barron, and Jerry Thomas. These conservative Democrats that controlled the process didn’t like Askew and his ideas. But the Governor had the people on his side and by taking his case to the voters and circumventing the conservative, backward thinking Senators he won. The Conservatives ran Thomas and Ben Hill Griffin in an effort to destroy Askew in 1974 but he only became stronger.

In the State Senate two Democrats fought against the conservative leadership. For their courage they were blackballed and were labeled “doghouse democrats.” They were Bob Graham from Miami Lakes, and Buddy MacKay from Ocala. Both emerged as statewide leaders thanks to their courage and their strong ideas for moving Florida forward in the 1970s.

In 1970 Lawton Chiles became a US Senator thanks to a bi-racial coalition of voters and over the next twenty eight years Chiles was among the most inspirational and thoughtful figures Florida had ever produced.

Martin Luther King’s legacy obviously extended to African-American leadership in the state. But in Askew, Graham, MacKay and Chiles, the post-MLK world provided Florida the leadership other Sun Belt states lacked to transform Florida from 1970 to 1998 into a bastion of progressive ideas and policies. Alas, with the election of Jeb Bush in 1998 and the backsliding of Florida’s Legislature towards the tendencies of Dempsey Barron, the progress of the 1970s, 80s and early 90s is being squandered.

Martin Luther King Jr. in St Augustine

The oldest city in what is now the United States provided the backdrop for a tense summer in 1964. Florida under the leadership of Governor Ferris Bryant was defiant in the civil rights era.  Bryant who followed the visionary Leroy Collins was a decided step back for the Florida. The Florida Legislature of the early 1960s was also especially hostile to Civil Rights.

In 1963 the NAACP targeted St Augustine as a community which could be used a powerful symbol of segregation in the south. The city  was about to celebrate the 400th anniversary of its birth.

Sit ins began at St Augustine lunch counters in 1963 much as they had in Greensboro and other southern cities a few years earlier. Unlike the relative enlightenment of the upper south, Florida was a Ku Klux Klan  hotbed and violence ensued. Under this pressure of violence, local African Americans began to rethink their strategy and the demonstrations began to die out.

At this point Martin Luther King entered the picture.  St Augustine became the focus of King’s movement for the long hot summer of 1964.After King targeted St Augustine’s beach and downtown for integration, violence from local white citizens once again flared up. The Florida Legislature in its special report issued during the 1965 Legislative session blamed black Muslims from Jacksonville and “northern agitators” for the violence.

However, subsequent investigations have revealed that the local white population had violent elements and that the local political leadership including the St John’s County Sheriff’s office (which was singled out for praise in the Legislative report) were in fact less than even handed. The situation in St Augustine was tense and violence against the civil right demonstrators had a similar galvanizing affect on passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the House (Senate passage would come later after a filibuster which included Florida Senators George Smathers and Spessard Holland was broken) that the Selma incidents would a year later on passage of the Voting Right Act of 1965.

A Federal Court sided with the demonstrators after local officials prohibited them from organizing and machining at night. Local law enforcement claimed that they could protect the demonstrators only during the day. After the court order Governor Bryant, stated that he would stand on his constitutional rights as the Governor of Florida and would reject the court order. The state officially in its 1965 report blamed the Court order on lawyers from “New York and Chicago.” Florida may have been on the periphery of the civil rights revolution prior to 1964, but state officials had learned to mimic the talking points of other southern leaders like Ross Barnett, James Patterson and George Wallace.

The beach integration efforts were thwarted by the local police who left several demonstrators in the water to potentially drown. One of the staging grounds for the summer was the Monson Motel, which was open to whites only.  There some white and black civil rights supporters went for a swim together  and the motel’s owner sought to intimidate the swimmers by pouring acid in the pool. Dr King was also arrested for appearing on the motel’s premises. The Monson was recently torn down and replaced by a Hilton. One wonders if this was done to avoid the embarrasment this hotel represented on an otherwise great and historic city, St Augustine.

St Augustine is one of the great historic cities in America. With that backdrop it provided a powerful symbol for Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. The events of the Summer of 1964 were an embarrassment for the state of Florida. The hostility Dr. King faced and the strength of the local Klan spoke volumes as to the state’s deep south mentality despite being historically very different from the aristocratic plantation driven deep south. Thankfully Dr. King’s efforts were not in vain and today Florida elects three African-Americans to congress and gave its electoral votes to an African-American in the 2008 Presidential Election.

Film from the state archives of St Augustine’s Civil Rights Demonstrations.

TOMORROW: MLK JR’S IMPACT ON FLORIDA POLITICS