May 30, 1964 - The first week of the summer civil rights drive of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference ended in St. Augustine, Fla., today with results satisfactory to neither side.
Eleven Negro sit-in demonstrators were arrested this afternoon outside two motel restaurants, bringing the week’s arrests to 25. Despite picketing in the downtown area, there was no repetition by nightfall of the sporadic violence that had marked earlier demonstrations.
However, the presence of known Ku Klux Klansmen raised tension considerably. The activities of newsmen, who have been among the chief targets of the violence, seemed to interest them more than those of the Negroes.
About 100 Negroes held a civil rights rally today at the Zion Baptists Church on the city’s western edge. Ninety of them then marched around a Negro neighborhood singing, while state troopers, sheriff’s deputies, policemen, and carloads of whites cruised through the area.
Some 150 white toughs lounged along a two-block stretch in the downtown business district in anticipation of a Negro demonstration that never came.
Klansmen driving automobiles equipped with two-way radios cruised the city. J.B. Stoner of Atlanta was seen sitting in once car with two other men, one of whom was armed with a revolver and a sap.
Mr. Stoner, a lawyer who has defended Klansmen and other white arrested in racial violence, is the Vice Presidential nominee of the National States Rights party.
Officials of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whose president is Dr. Martin Luther King, concede that they have failed to arouse the widespread support among Negroes necessary for early success of their campaign.
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