Because that weekend bordered on sweltering, we didn’t spend as much time as we would have liked to poke through the back alleys of the Old Town. When we left, we felt we’d missed a lot and vowed to go back.
After the weather broke in November, we decided it might be the right time to make that return trip. This time we booked a hotel on the water within sight of the Bridge of Lions for a couple of nights, just on the edge of Old Town. We figured that way we could explore at leisure and retreat to our hotel if we got hot or tired. This was only our second overnight trip since the pandemic hit. Really since Karen retired. We were very much looking forward to a more in-depth exploration, not quite realizing how much might have changed in interim, whether with the place, with society, or within ourselves.
For the drive over, we opted to avoid as much of the interstate as practical without going too far out of our way. The quickest route on Apple Maps followed I-4 to Daytona then up I-95 from there. Which would include a scenic tour of Malfunction Junction of Tampa followed by the Death Race of Orlando with the Damnation Alley of Lakeland in between, where inevitably someone would try to kill us each time we made the pilgrimage to Brevard. So, we quietly deleted that option from our list.
Instead, we chose an alternate that took us up the Veterans Expressway past Brooksville, over to I-75 to just short of Ocala then onto a maze of two-lane county roads that would drop us just west of St. Augustine for not much more time. Karen was somewhat familiar with the route having used similar on her drive back from one of her final field trips to North Carolina for work before she retired. Easier now that she had discovered the convenience of Siri calling out directions on the backroads during her recent trip to Massachusetts.
While this gave us a pleasant drive beneath the spreading oaks of central Florida, this is an area that put the Red into redneck, at least judging by the 2020 election map. Which I wouldn’t have much thought about without the constant reminder of Trump signs littering the roadside.
And I don’t mean a few bereft and forlorn, forgotten throwaway campaign signs on the shoulders or easements. I mean full, fresh, 3’x5’ or larger wood framed placards. One was backdropped by the unholy trinity of a Confederate flag, a Gadsden flag (Don’t Tread on Me), and a Thin Blue Line flag fluttering atop fifty foot or greater poles, marking territory much like the white and yellow calvary crosses dotting the landscape outside any and all manner of primitive Baptist churches. On another an ambitious individual had taken the time and effort to carefully paint out Pence’s name, I assume on January 6th. Several more had already upgraded their cult of personality American Idol campaign signs to the 2024 editions. With at least one shiny new sign boldly declaring “Trump is my President” to all passersby. The transition from Pinellas, even from the wilds of Seminole, a year after an election was like the tale of two Americas.
Having driven the backroads of this state before, we somewhat expected this, though perhaps not with the insurrectionist intensity. As we drove deeper into the remote rural landscape, I was left with the distinct impression we had entered the Dead Marshes of Florida on our quest. Knowing fully that should we linger, our tiny candles would be snuffed out.
But we didn’t expect those mycelial roots to have snaked their way into St. Augustine, although perhaps we should have.
Like all but the largest, most populous Florida counties, St. Johns is increasingly sanguinary red. And I mean in the bloodthirsty sense of the word. The moderating influence of Duval or the I-4 corridor has yet to spread this far. St. Johns is still more likely to look to Alabama than Alachua as its guiding light.
I’m not sure this was always the case. Back when St. Augustine first began its most recent redevelopment and revival, it seemed to take its cues from Baltimore’s Inner Harbor or Jacksonville’s Riverwalk, revitalizing what was otherwise an old, jaded, touristy southern town, albeit with a unique colonial history, into a quirky, somewhat hippie holdover arts community blended with its proximity to Flagler College, a private liberal arts institution occupying the old Florida Industrialist Era Ponce de Leon Hotel built by Henry Flagler.
In Florida, Flagler is most noted not as the founder of Standard Oil but as the founder of the Florida East Coast Railroad (FEC) which fueled the first Florida land boom. The construction of which heavily relied on convict leasing. In the then segregated Old South, that generally meant free black labor supported by an apartheid legal system. Which perhaps should have been the first clue of what we found today.
Our second perhaps might have come from five years before the college’s founding. During the Civil Rights Era, St. Augustine had a deeply checkered past. In 1963-64, the city found itself in the front lines of that social conflict. Some of which we knew from our previous visit, some of which we learned more of after we checked into our hotel.
The Hilton Bayfront was constructed on the site of the old Monson Motor Lodge which had been demolished in 2003. Only its steps remain, preserved as a memorial and a reminder. The steps where MLK was arrested in June of 1964, followed a week later by the largest mass arrest of rabbis in US history. In fact, St. Augustine was the only Florida city that MLK was arrested in. A neat trick considering Tampa/Hillsborough (along with four other Florida counties, one of which includes Naples) remained under federal monitoring from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 until its effective dissolution in 2013. Andrew Young, the then director of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, was also arrested in St. Augustine that year as he had been in Selma.
Which all stemmed from peaceful anti-segregation protests surrounding the city’s 400th anniversary and a student sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. Some of those juvenile participants in the latter required the intervention of the governor and the cabinet to eventually reattain their freedom. Those protests escalated over the next year as local Klansmen (read white supremacists) grew increasingly violent and issued quite credible death threats. Their nightriders terrorized black neighborhoods by shooting into homes until residents returned fire to drive them off.
Undeterred, the Klan eventually cornered and beat four activists with clubs and chains, resulting in the Klansmen having their charges dismissed but their activist victims being convicted of assault. Sprinkle in an arson and an attempted mass drowning when activists tried to integrate a local beach and a picture begins to develop.
But all that is ancient history now, even though most of it occurred within my lifetime, although not my memory.
(And mind you that I am writing this against the backdrop of the Rittenhouse trial and the Arbery trial, both of which have that Throwback Thursday feel, as does much of 2020 and before.)
It was wandering around Old Town that the past and the present of the drive over began to collide, thankfully not violently.
The first change we noticed from our previous visit was the number of homeless camped out on St. George’s Street, the central avenue of the Old Town market district. Part of that could have been seasonal. Florida’s homeless population ebbs and rises with the onset of summer’s heat and humidity and winter’s transition of construction jobs from north to south (requiring more day laborers). Or maybe part of it was the economic dislocation of the pandemic. Part but not all.
These were predominately men, predominately white, predominately my age or older by appearance. Most were panhandling, though not aggressively, with one busker. Most were veterans or visibly supported them, perhaps from prior service, perhaps for more tactical reasons to elicit donations. Most chatted amiably with the more integrated city workers doing cleaning, repairs and maintenance before the shops opened.
We were stuck by the number of bikes, dogs and cellphones sprinkled through that population. Passing strange for people literally sleeping on the streets, at least until we thought about it. Cellphones are often bought and maintained by concerned family members so their loved one can keep in touch, or call for help. Dogs have been guardians and companions for thousands of years. The over/under of feeding one likely pays off in security and psychological comfort. Bikes are cheap, easily maintained modes of transport for either seasonal migration or for getting back and forth to work. Homeless isn’t always synonymous with unemployed.
These are the Americans our country has made great again.
It was also striking that we saw no police patrolling Old Town except along the thoroughfares at the edges, either in cruisers or on foot. Which was very much in evidence the second night of our stay when a local with a megaphone, perhaps the busker, began loudly harassing some of the black population with things like “at least I don’t sit around all day collecting welfare… You’re sitting on his lap but he’ll leave you for a ho…” Several times in succession starting at 11 p.m. and ending around 1 a.m., in the cobblestone alley by an Italian restaurant right outside our first-floor window.
But the biggest change that struck us was in the merchandise for sale at half a dozen or more stores along the strip, declaring their profane rather than profound political opposition to the current Administration, and their deeply committed support our previous President and our governor. Vehement and vitriolic, with no laissez-faire capitalist counterpoint in sight (i.e. they weren’t just trying to profit from whichever side was paying).
Which perhaps shows how truly wealthy this area has become, and how well its economy is doing, as they could afford to alienate 40-50% of the population with their unwelcoming displays, never mind any internationals (of which we saw and heard many). In this, they seemed to aspire more to the Redneck Riviera model of Panama City than something more egalitarian in Orlando’s Magic Kingdom.
Both of us also noted there were very few black tourists except at the Castillo. Which was odder with the interspersed Civil Rights plaques, monuments and artwork, some conspicuous, some more hidden if you know where to look. More so because the historic conflict I described above directly led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including footage broadcast internationally from the Monson Motor Lodge when protestors forcibly integrated the pool while the manager poured in acid to drive them out.
Except that like in the aftermath of most such conflicts, when the cameras stopped rolling and the public moved on, many of the principal local activists and organizations were either left destitute by white boycotts or felt profoundly unsafe enough that they moved to marginally more welcoming points south like Ft. Lauderdale or Miami-Dade. So, at best a pyrrhic victory.
Now three blocks from where MLK was arrested, three blocks from where Andrew Young was beaten and arrested, these businesses openly decry their contempt for the ideals these men sacrificed for. Openly support the ideals of insurrection. Openly declare that anyone who believes what I believe is suffering from a mental illness, as evidenced by a huge hand-crafted sign overlooking St. George’s Street that says exactly that.
These displays, as well as the displays on the drive over, are embraced by people who not only distinctly stood against the anti-racism protests in 2020 (and before) but by some who took up arms against them, like the “good people” bearing tiki torches in Charlottesville, the vigilantes in Kenosha, or the insurrectionists at the Capitol on January 6th. All beneath the same flags, chanting similar slogans, whipped up and praised by the same authoritarian leaders.
Not in search of justice or equality. In search of something much more Ayn Randian. Under the guise of personal freedom, they stand against everything that made this country great, a shining city upon the hill once upon a time. Though even that was always a fairy tale when viewed up close from the ground.
The difference is that the older Civil Rights movement, the movement now represented by BLM banners and Juneteenth flags, not Confederate, Gadsden or Thin Blue Line standards, strives for equal rights for all, not the selective rights to discriminate for a self-martyred few. I’ve built enough in my lifetime, and destroyed enough, to understand the difference between sacrifice and selfishness.
I’m not saying we won’t go back; there’s too much history and culture we’ve left untouched. I’m just saying that if we do, we’ll be more circumspect.
© 2021 Edward P. Morgan III
