A civil rights protest occurred on June 18, 1964, at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida. The campaign between June and July 1964 was led by Robert Hayling, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, C. T. Vivian and Fred Shuttlesworth, among others. St. Augustine was chosen to be the next battleground against racial segregation on account of it being both highly racist yet also relying heavily on the northern tourism dollar. Furthermore, the city was due to celebrate its 400th anniversary the following year, which would heighten the campaign's profile even more. Nightly marches to the slave market were organized; marchers were regularly attacked and beaten.
At the same time in the U.S. Senate, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was being filibustered. On June 10, the filibuster collapsed. The following day, King was arrested in St. Augustine. King had attempted to be served lunch at the Monson Motor Lodge, but the owner, James Brock—who was also the president of the St. Augustine Hotel, Motel, and Restaurant Owners Association—refused to serve him. King was arrested for trespassing and jailed; while imprisoned, he wrote a letter to Israel Dresner, a leading Reform rabbi, urging him to recruit rabbis to come to St. Augustine and take part in the movement. This they did, and, at another confrontation at the Monson, 17 rabbis were arrested on June 18. This was the largest mass arrest of rabbis in American history.Schindler, Anne. "The largest mass arrest of rabbis in US history", WJCT-FM, June 4, 2024. Accessed March 15, 2025. "In the spring of 1964, as St. Augustine celebrated its 400th anniversary and civil rights protesters clashed with violent klansmen, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. brought in rabbinical reinforcements from around the country. They joined civil rights organizers at the Monson Motor Lodge 'swim-in' on June 18, 1964, and all 16 of them were arrested." At the same time, a group of black and white activistsprotesters who had arrived from Albany, Georgianamed J.T. Johnson, Brenda Darten, and Mamie Nell Ford, jumped into the Monson's swimming pool. Brock appeared to pour hydrochloric acid into the pool to burn the protesters. Photographs of this, and of a policeman jumping into the pool in everything but his shoes to arrest them, made headline news around the world.
After the Civil Rights Act had been passed, St. Augustine businesses—particularly in the restaurant and culinary trades—were slow at desegregating. Eventually, the courts forced Brock and his colleagues to integrate their businesses, and soon after he did, the Monson was firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), who violently opposed desegregation. The state judge was unsympathetic to his predicament, however, feeling that Brock and his colleagues had brought the violence of the KKK upon themselves; they had taken advantage of it while it was in their favor, and could not stop it now that it was not.
On June 30, Florida Governor Farris Bryant announced the formation of a biracial committee to restore interracial communication in St. Augustine. Although the Civil Rights Act had passed, there were further problems for both Brock personally and Florida particularly. He had been repeatedly refused bank loans to pay for the damage caused by the firebombing, and declared himself bankrupt the following year. Also in 1965, although the city celebrated its quadricentennial, there was still a palpable underlying racial tension; the tourist trade had been badly damaged and it has been estimated that St. Augustine lost millions of dollars in tourism. Hotels, motels, and restaurants were especially badly hit.
Background
SCLC planning
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had decided to renew their campaign against segregation, and give "new dignity to the movement". The leadership was originally divided on where to target. James Bevel, for example, wanted to focus on one state—Alabama—whereas Hosea Williams advocated the Floridian seaside holiday town of St. Augustine. St. Augustine was approaching its 400th anniversary. Although much smaller than previous civil rights battlegrounds, such as Birmingham, Alabama, it was no less—and probably more—violently segregated, argues author Jim Bishop. Unlike Birmingham, racial power lay not with the mayor and chief of police, he says, but in:
Choosing of St. Augustine For King—recently named Time Magazine's Man of the Year—it was his preferred choice of "non-violent battlefield" for "expos[ing] Klan savagery to the eyes of the world". It was a highly segregated town, argues the author Thomas E. Jackson, and its celebrations would be restricted to whites only. It was deliberately chosen, continues Jackson, as it had "a business elite vulnerable to negative publicity because it was dependent on northern tourist dollars, a police force with close ties to the Klan, and a reputation for brutal extralegal violence". Social ethicist and theologian Gary Dorrien has described St. Augustine as Florida's "most violently racist city...a Klan stronghold policed by unabashedly racist thugs", where "Blacks who tried to enroll their children in public schools got their homes bombed". scholar Stephen B. Oates says of St. Augustine's law enforcement: However, suggests Webb, this was known to be a dangerous strategy. The Florida Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights informed them that St. Augustine was a "segregated superbomb...with an extremely short fuse".
Law enforcement in St. Augustine, says David Chalmers, can be summed up in the response to the Klansmen who rioted and the blacks who trespassed: the formers' bonds rarely rose above , while the latter's could "run into thousands". The Mayor of St. Augustine has been described by scholar L. V. Baldwin as a "biblical fundamentalist who tolerated such lawlessness while insisting that 'God segregated the races when he made the skins a different color'". received advance warning of the SCLC plans, including that protesters would include figures such as Governor Peabody's mother. The Boston Globe asked the mayor whether he had ever heard of her; he had not. When asked what would happen if, during the protests, she violated segregation laws, the mayor replied, "if she comes down and breaks the law, we are going to arrest her".
James Brock David Garrow has described Brock as "a relative moderate" in the St. Augustine business community, although he was personally a segregationist. Warren, similarly, has said that Brock was "a decent man caught between the violence of the Klan and the unwillingness of community leaders to find meaningful ways to end segregation", while Colburn says he was usually gregarious and "rather mild-mannered, religious man who suddenly found himself thrust" into a civil rights struggle. Chalmers suggests that, while he was willing to desegregate, "he dare not be the first". Brock later explained his position as he saw it: "if I integrated, there wouldn't be more than one Negro a month registered at the motel, but the first night I integrated, all my windows would be busted in".
Prelude
Beginning the campaign
The campaign in St. Augustine effectively began on Easter Sunday, March 29, 1964, and was deliberately aimed at the city's food and tourism industries, which, argues sociologist Ralph C. Scott, "were as much about race as they were about national and class privilege". This was also the first, but not last, time that the Monson Motor Lodge, at 32 Avenida Menendez—a "big posh lily white" motel—was to be targeted. Monson's was targeted because its owner, James Brock, was not only a prominent local businessman and president of the trade association, but the motel was regularly patronized by reporters, so was felt to provide easy access to the media. An interracial group, which included the 72-year-old mother of Massachusetts' Governor, Endicott Peabody, and the wife of that state's Episcopal Bishop, John Burgess, led by Reverend David Robinson, attempted to integrate the motel's restaurant. Peabody and Burgess and 37 others were arrested and the affair made national headlines. The mayor condemned the protests, not as local discontent over segregation, but the work of "scalawags" from the north. Colburn argues that "the arrest and subsequent imprisonment of this 72-year-old drew the nation's attention to conditions in St. Augustine as no other incident had. It was a watershed in the community's race relations." It was not long before leading members of the SCLC—Vivian, Williams, Lee, Shuttlesworth and James Bevel—arrived in St. Augustine and launched workshops on non-violent militant protest. Focussing on local businesses, such as the Monson, would, the SCLC concluded, apply fiscal pressure on the business community and persuade the local whites to see the benefit to granting concessions, and by the end of May the motel was subject to almost daily sit ins.
Jackson suggests that, as far as their strategy went, King and the SCLC had learned from the Birmingham campaign of the previous year that "vivid images of confrontation, with black and white protesters putting their bodies on the line against white supremacists moved the nation more effectively than inspired preaching or patient lobbying". To increase pressure on authorities, King and the SCLC turned to "wade-ins" to integrate public pools and beaches. In retaliation, large numbers of Ku Klux Klan arrived in St. Augustine in droves and commenced drive-by shootings in black neighborhoods, as well as attacking demonstrations with iron bars and bicycle chains. By now, argues the historian Michael R. Belnap, St. Augustine was "slipping into chaos". Confrontations occurred by day and night; one occasion, King only narrowly managed to persuade the young men not to go home and fetch their guns; Brun suggests that "had they done so, St. Augustine would have gone down as the most violent racial battle in King's nonviolent movement".
Sit-in protest King arrived in St. Augustine on Sunday, May 31, and stayed in Lincolnville, less than a mile from Monson Motor Lodge; Lincolnville was home to prominent leaders of the black community. Apart from St. Augustine, King is known to have visited several other cities in Florida. Such as: Tampa in 1961, Jacksonville and Miami several times. Dorrien posits that he was deliberately kept out of St. Augustine by his colleagues as it was deemed too dangerous to risk his life there.
At a strategy meeting he "spoke of touching white hearts with Christian non-violence". His audience, on the other hand, says Bishop, "wondered if King knew their town": white community leaders knew the SCLC's strategy. They also knew that bigger and stronger cities had eventually come to agreements with King in return for peace on the streets. St. Augustine, though, was "prepared to die on its feet rather than truckle to King", comments Bishop. King had made a tactical decision to get arrested to intensify the struggle. As such, he intended to take part in a sit in at Monson Motor Lodge's, a traditional—and segregated—motel and restaurant overlooking Matanzas Bay. At around 12:20, on June 11, King and his colleagues Ralph Abernathy, Bernard Lee, Clyde Jenkins, Will England, a white chaplain from Boston University, and five others arrived at the Monson for lunch. The SCLC had alerted the press to King's presence and several were there to witness King—who wore a black badge with the word "equal" in white—arrive. The motel manager, James Brock, was also awaiting him on the welcome mat. Brock told his visitors that they were on private property. Although Brock tried to talk privately to King—who introduced himself as "Martin King"—microphones were pushed between them. Newsmen jockeyed for position, amid shouts of "duck your head" and "get that flashgun down".