Karen Rieley
The following received Honorable Mention in Prose Category of the 2022 JAXNEXT100: A celebration of Jacksonville’s past, present and future competition.
Of the slogans that have marketed Jacksonville in the past 50 years: “The First Coast,” “The River City,” “The Bold New City of the South,” “Where Florida Begins,” and now “Jax. It’s easier here,” several describe location and, so, are indisputable. Not so “The Bold New City of the South” and “Jax. It’s easier here” that, at the very least, attempt to make us seem better than we are and, at most, hide some dangerous truths.
The Bold New City of the South? When City leaders wanted to consolidate with Duval County in 1968, inner city minority voters were persuaded to vote yes by being promised that they would gain political representation that had been lost with “white flight” to the suburbs. Consolidation happened, but most of the promises made to inner city voters didn’t, and City funds largely went to satisfy white voters in the suburbs rather than providing funds for necessary services in the inner city.
A bold Southern city would have embraced integration. Instead, on Ax Handle Saturday, in 1960, when Black demonstrators sat in at the lunch counters of Woolworth and W.T. Grant, a crowd of enraged white people, organized by the Ku Klux Klan, attacked them with ax handles and baseball bats. The local newspapers barely covered the attacks and then-Mayor Hayden Burns denied any violence at all. In 2018, the real truth about the racial riot was painted on a mural on Eastside Brotherhood Club proclaiming “It was never about a hot dog and a Coke!”
In the early 1900s, Florida Avenue, known then as “The Avenue” and now as A. Philip Randolph Blvd., was the commerce center for Blacks living east of Hogans Creek. A shooting on Oct. 31, 1969, essentially destroyed it. A salesman who had parked to call on a business believed his vehicle was being burglarized by a Black man named Buck Riley. He tried to shoot Riley, and when Riley ran away from him, the truck driver began firing his gun into the crowd.
The crowd flipped the salesman’s truck and set many of the buildings on fire. Rioters looted and threw rocks through the windows of businesses. Vehicles were burned, a policeman was struck with a brick, two people were injured by gunfire and 11 people were arrested. Charges were dropped against Riley and the salesman, but businesses and residents left out of fear.
In 1919, lawmen who charged a black man with molesting a young white girl moved him from Jacksonville’s jail to St. Augustine before a lynch mob could form. But when a mob overran the jail trying to take the molester, instead of leaving empty-handed they made a jailer hand over two other Black men – Cook and John Morine – who had been arrested over the killing of a white insurance agent.
Cook and Morine were strung up, shot and tied behind cars that dragged their bodies around town, leaving Cook’s remains outside a hotel overlooking the Confederate Soldiers memorial in Hemming Park, now renamed James Weldon Johnson Park.
More than 100 years later and two years after Mayor Curry said all Confederate monuments need to come down, only the James Weldon Johnson Park monument has been removed.
The current marketing slogan for Jacksonville, “Jax. It’s easier here,” is baffling. Our history shows that progress has not been easy here. Many have done hard, dangerous work to get to this point, and much more work needs to be done.
Far too many negative things have happened in too short of time – COVID, negative politics, dangerous climate change, women’s loss of control over their own bodies, discrimination and violence against our fellow humans, attempts to make it difficult for some to vote, and leaders more concerned about their own power and success than those who elected them.
Can we find it in ourselves to have hope for the next 200 years? Naturalist and UN Messenger of Peace Jane Goodall says that real hope requires action. She began a youth program called Roots & Shoots in 1991, to empower young people to affect positive change in their communities. It has since become a global movement with hundreds of thousands of children and young people active throughout the world.
However, we adults shouldn’t fall back on the adage that “children are our future.” We must all step up rather than say we’ve done all we can, we know we’ve failed, and we’re counting on the next generation to fix things.
Today, businesses are starting up and growing on A. Philip Randolph Blvd. The first participants in the Project Boots homeownership program will break ground in late 2022 on their new homes. The Historic Eastside Cultural Center is open and teaching about art, Black history and more. Organizations like Florida Blue, Lift Jax and LISC are investing money in the community with the goal of ending generational poverty.
Hope is the stubborn determination to do all we can to make it work, like those in Historic Eastside determined to bring their community back even better than it when it started.
Hope is a much deeper source of strength, practically unshakable, much like Martin Luther King’s message of hope: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”
Desmond Tutu said, “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.”
Omid Safi said in the On Being radio show and podcast, “For hope to be real, there has to be a prison. And we, in the prison. We hope that light will, someday, triumph over darkness, that love will gain victory over hatred, that compassion will gain over apathy.”
Let us hope that “The Bold New City of the South” will become a place where it is “easy” – pleasurable, safe and supportive, for all to live.
“Return to your fortress, O you prisoners of hope.” – Zechariah 9:12
Karen J. Rieley 