As the 450th anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine approaches, we are reminded of the role that the St. Augustine civil rights demonstrations played in passing the 1964 Public Accommodations Civil Rights Act. We discovered that the largest known arrest of rabbis in the history of the United States happened here in St. Augustine on June 18, 1964. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also jailed in St. Augustine, contacted Rabbi Israel Dresner to urge other rabbis to participate in civil rights demonstrations protesting segregated conditions in the nations oldest city. Their protest is not commonly known: it was not described in either David Colburn’s Racial Change and Community Crisis: St. Augustine, 1877-1980 or Dan Warren’s If it Takes All Summer. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the participation and subsequent imprisonment of these seventeen individuals in civil rights demonstrations, the Saint Augustine Jewish Historical Society will present a two-day program to inform the public regarding the significance of this historic event. While the ten surviving and one administrator will be invited and funding sought to cover their expenses, only five rabbis will be requested to speak at both events. On Tuesday, June 17, 2014 Rabbi Merrill Shapiro will moderate a panel discussion by five of the surviving rabbis who will relate why they responded to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s request to join African-Americans’ civil rights demonstrations in St. Augustine. They will comment on the philosophical significance of justice in Judaism that prompted their decisions and will convey their views of the historic impact of this act of civil disobedience. Dr. Paul Ortiz, Director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program and Associate Professor of the Department of History at the University of Florida, will serve as commentator for the rabbis’ narratives and will provide historical, social and political context for their experience. On Wednesday, June 18, 2014 SAJHS will host a public event at the location where the rabbis were arrested. The event will include a reading of the rabbis’ letter written that evening from the St. Johns County jail, a document similar to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s letter from the Birmingham, AL jail. During our two-day program all the surviving rabbis who participate in this celebration (including the five who speak on the panel) will be interviewed by staff of the Samuel Proctor Oral History program and their oral histories preserved at the University of Florida. While the Justice, Justice 1964 program highlights the participation of Jews in the civil rights struggle in Florida, it also clarifies both the philosophical principles of non-violence and the centrality of justice in Judaism. These rabbis will explain the significance of this act and its consequences for themselves, their families, their congregations and the American Jewish community in general. The panel will discuss the implications of the following statement from the rabbis’ letter as applied to current issues: We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act. Both events are open to the public without charge.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:37:11 +0000
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