Temporary Truce in St. Augustine Racial Struggle

June 14, 1964 - Weary Negro demonstrators and white segregationists called off their scheduled protest marches today and gave the troubled city of St. Augustine, Fla., its first relatively peaceful day in a week.

The whites said they would not parade in the Negro district after exhausted civil rights demonstrators earlier decided not to protest at the Old Slave Market. It amounted to a mutual agreement for a day of rest.

However, three Negroes (top) sat in front of the First Methodist Church after they were not permitted to attend morning worship today. And Monson Motor Lodge manager James Brock (bottom left) sat in the lobby of his hotel and ignored a group of Negro integrationists that tried to enter his restaurant and be served. Policemen arrived after a short wait and arrested the group that was led by Rev. Laverty Taylor (bottom right).

At another church, police arrested three other Negroes, but demonstration leaders said their presence there could be explained as curiosity. They were just driving by and not attempting a kneel-in, rights leaders said.

Florida Highway Patrolmen continued a new get-tough policy of halting suspicious cars and searching them for weapons.

“We’re just over-programmed, and everybody’s tired,” Andrew Young, a Negro leader, said as he spoke to the handful of people who showed up for an afternoon session in St. Paul’s AME Church.

But a spokesman for Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference said today that a new busload of demonstrators from Williamston, N.C., will join the St. Augustine protest tomorrow.

Groups from Savannah and Birmingham are also expected.

Former baseball star Jackie Robinson is scheduled to appear tomorrow, and Dr. King, who was arrested Thursday outside a St. Augustine restaurant and is free on bond, is to return Wednesday. He will bring a group of rabbis.

In a speech today at Springfield College in Massachusetts, Dr. King said that many Americans were sleeping through the “great civil rights revolution like Rip Van Winkle.”

“Too many people find themselves living in a great period of social change but fail to adopt a new attitude necessary for that change,” he said.

He plans a similar address tomorrow at Yale University in New Haven, Conn.

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