Promise of Trouble

"If Christ walked the streets of Jacksonville," a Jacksonville priest told his congregation, "he would be horrified." Dark rumors ran through the streets of Florida's third largest city last week. The wounds of violent race riots were open and ugly, and there was promise of more trouble to come.

Under its sleek veneer of progress--the tall new buildings, the bustling St. Johns River traffic, the tony seaside country clubs--Jacksonville is more akin in spirit to nearby cracker towns in south Georgia than to cosmopolitan southern Florida, and seems to have reverted to type. Its newest school was named after Civil War General Nathan Bedford Forrest, and even the kids knew that "Fustest with the mostest" Forrest was one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan. Mayor Haydon Burns is a 48-year-old segregationist with his eye on the Governor's chair and a shuddering distaste for doing anything to promote racial amity. Police Chief Luther Reynolds is a 62-year-old, greying Andy Gump, a man who "does not believe Jacksonville is ready for integration."

Epidemic. Jacksonville's Negroes have also been slow to catch up with the times. Sit-in demonstrations stirred up most of the South before Jacksonville even got a taste of them last winter, and the Jacksonville version failed miserably. Then, last month, in the middle of a lacklus ter summer, Jacksonville's Negroes were moved to try again. The demonstrators got no help from local whites, and tension mounted. A pair of Negro youths, running from the cops, accidentally knocked an elderly white woman through a plate-glass window; a white woman and a Negro woman got into a hair-pulling match, and the town boiled over. In a sudden rush of business. Sears Roebuck sold 50 ax handles in 15 minutes. Sit-in demonstrators on their way downtown were met by a club-wielding mob. By the time the police got around to stopping the riot, Jacksonville was suffering from an epidemic of broken heads.

The Negroes retreated to "Niggertown" on the northwest edge of the city, announced that no whites were welcome.

Cars driving along the new expressway that knifes into the city from the north were stoned and shot at. White taxi driv ers venturing into the Negro section were burned by potash. Fire bombs were tossed. A Negro ex-convict named Charlie Davis led a shooting raid on a white filling station, got shot in the head himself and was killed when his car crashed into a utility pole. Negro gangs gave up fighting among themselves, banded together against the common enemy and roamed the streets looking for trouble. In a single day 50 people were injured and 90 put in jail.

Truce. By week's end business was far below normal in Jacksonville, Governor LeRoy Collins had alerted the National Guard, and the city's 400-man police force was enforcing an uneasy truce. N.A.A.C.P. agents, in town to call off further sit-ins and to try to keep Negro gangs under control, blamed the situation on Jacksonville's stubborn segregation. Despite his police chief's report that "all the fellows we arrested were local boys," Mayor Burns insisted that the trouble had been started by whites from out of town. Whoever was right, the promise of more trouble remained.

"He who forgives ends the quarrel," proclaimed the bulletin board outside the Snyder Memorial Methodist Church. Few people in Jacksonville last week seemed ready to forgive.

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