Almost no film footage survives of ax handles Saturday.

Almost no photographs.

What little there is remaine locked away for half a century until now.

August 27th, 1960 A horrifying day in Jacksonville history.

The day white men, hundreds of them, roamed our city's downtow streets and beat blacks bloody with ax handles.

Precisely 1651 miles from downtown Jacksonville, Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, where?

Here, they're doing research that's truly out of this world.

It was our job to determine what effects space travel would have.

Only human body.

Alton Yates, Jacksonville native, then 23, airman second class.

The United States had fallen way behind in the space race.

We conducted all kinds of experiments.

We did studies to test the effects of rapid acceleration and deceleration on the human body.

The mission is urgent.

The Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite two years earlier terrified the US.

You are hearing the actual signals transmitte by the Earth circling satellite.

Fear literally is in the air.

But at Holloman.

Fear is found on the ground.

I did it 65 times.

The equivalent of 500 miles an hour.

And stopping at something like one and 2/10 seconds was like yo ran straight into a stone wall head on at hundreds of miles an hour.

But when Alton Yates is discharged in the fall of 59, he slams into something else a hatred just as dense and thick and impenetrable as any stone wall.

Driving from Holloma back to Jackson, wearing his Air Force uniform, he stops to eat at a greasy spoon.

A huge attack.

A professional football player a white guy walked up behind me and he used th N-word and told me if I didn't get my black so-and-so out of there, they would kick my.

Now this is something new.

Holloman, after all, was colorblind.

No.

In of any racial discrimination, segregation, prejudice.

None whatsoever.

For four and a half years.

But now he could barely make four and a half miles without a slur from a storekeeper.

I was made to feel as though I was less than an animal.

So alternates buy a loaf of bread, a jar of Jif, some jam, a few plastic knive and let that serve as breakfast, lunch, and dinner in this strange new world.

I promised mysel that if I could just get home, then I would give as much of my time and effort to trying to eliminate those kinds of conditions that I gave to trying to see to it.

That man could travel into space.

Back in Jacksonville, Yates met Rutledge Pierson, a prominent civil rights activist, a schoolteacher.

Just someone that every kid looked up to.

We thought he was the smartest person in the world.

Very verbal, very sociable.

A leader in the local NAACP.

To use the people.

Person.

And he liked to.

Talk and I like to.

Talk, and we liked the same thing.

So that's how we got together.

Also, quite the athlete played pro ball almost.

He did not get a chance.

To play with the Jets to be a CPA to Jacksonville Beach.

They turned the lights out of the park.

They didn't want.

Him to play on the team.

Tall, handsome, charismatic, a commanding presence.

With a beautiful baritone voice.

And a sympathetic ear.

A lot of adults don't listen to teenagers.

Pierson did.

And even though school board officials stood by his classroom door more than once.

Snooping and spying.

Checking for insubordination.

Rutledge Pearson's bariton tongue lashed the white system hard, starting with his unsparing assessment of the standard issue American history textbook.

He would hold up the book, and very dramatically, he would give you all the information on the book.

How many chapters, how many pages?

Just go throug a steel Minuteman in the hair.

Then he would slam the book down, and then he would tell us, leave it home.

Rodney Hurst, when he got to Pearson's eighth grade history class at Isaiah Blocker Junior High, he was a still precocious 11 year old.

So smart he had skipped a grade.

That was the the defining point in my life in really getting a chance to discuss at length in a classroom forum and setting what segregation and racism was all about.

And somewhere along the way, Pearson did the unthinkable.

He encouraged u to join the Youth Council NAACP.

I mean, that is just blasphemous.

Pearson was an advisor to the Youth Council.

By 1960, Rodney, then a high school senior, was council president.

Alton Yates, the Air Force vet, was vice president.

They met at Laura Street Presbyterian Church downtown, along with dozens of young blacks, some committed to the cause.

Some just curious but nearly all very, very young.

Most of these kids were middle school and high school age.

Maybe that's why they called Pearson the Pied Piper of the movement.

He challenged us to press forward.

Don't accept the status quo.

That's something that we as young people, we were just hungry to hear.

Hungry?

Well, go grab a bite at a downtown lunch counter.

Sandwiches, Sundays.

And best of all, the smoothies, milkshakes.

And to just one catch.

They only serve vanilla.

Jacksonville was probably one of the most segregated cities in the South.

Everything around me was segregated.

Including most everything downtown.

Back then, thriving.

Booming.

The swanky spot to shop and socialize.

But below, the glow of gleamin new buildings, glorious hotels, grand stores and glitzy restaurants loomed a shadowy netherworld populated solely by black shoppers.

For them a trip downtown was always dicey and definitely dehumanizing.

If you were black.

Be prepared to deal with discrimination from the top of your head to the tip of your toes.

They would not allow black women to try hat on.

They had to buy that hat without trying at all.

And the same with shoes.

You bought a pair of shoes and you took it home.

You found out that they were too small.

You couldn't take them back.

They were yours.

In the eyes of the salesperson.

It was contaminated.

Go outside the stores and downtown got even worse.

Try window shopping.

And the car with whites in it would yell out niggers get out the way!

Or drinking some water.

Black water.

White water.

Yes.

You ever try any of the white water?

I laughed because I worked downtown and ironically I had a habit an I guess I could talk about it.

I would go by the water fountain.

Every time I go by I change the signs.

So people come through the day that maybe racism colored water be bigger than white water.

But they it never was.

Question.

It was never questioned.

So you change the signs.

I do it every time I pass the waterfront.

That I would change.

Yeah.

But at the crux of all this, the thing that really stuck in your craw the lunch counters off limits.

If you were black.

You could shop all day long in the stores, but you couldn't sit down and eat at the lunch counter.

You would get angry about it, but then you would channel that anger by confronting the system in a way that took more courage than anger to do.

And that's what we did.

But as Rutledge Pearson always said, freedom is not free.

Trouble is, this transaction had an enormous price because children would pick up the tab.

The whole sit in movement began up in North Carolina and Greensboro.

Once it happened in Greensboro.

We were ready.

We wanted to move right then.

But Rutledge Pearson knew that sitting while black got an all white lunch counte required more than just sitting.

So did Arnett.

Gerardo, then 31 years old an advisor to the Youth Council.

Racial desegregation was not something that I could conceive.

At 31 years old, he was so entrenched.

But we were willing to take the steps to at least confront it, whether we won or lost.

So the kids devised plans.

We did not approach this haphazardly.

They denounced violence.

That was absolutely forbidden.

They developed procedures.

By something at another counter to show that you would accept my money at one counter and wouldn' accept it at the lunch counters.

And on Saturday, August 13th at the downtown Woolworth lunch counter.

The kids in the NAACP Youth Council set down.

The people were like, shocked when we showed up.

White stood behind us and they couldn't believe it.

Black stood behin us and they wanted to applaud.

But everyone, black and white, was speechless except for the waitress.

You can't sit there.

You can't sit there.

What are you doing over here?

And we said, no, we're just here.

And we want order and we have a menu.

She was really, I would say, in a tizzy.

She did not know what to do.

But the manager did.

Woolworth closed the lunch counter.

Turn the lights out.

Leaving the kids to face a grim crowd of increasingly angry white peopl who wanted their cheeseburgers with none of this nonsense on the side.

They just simply left.

They finished their food as fast as they could, and they left.

Or they told her to wrap it up and they'll take it with them rather than sit there.

We did what we came to do.

We came to occupy the lunch counter, and as long as we occupied the lunch counter, nobody was being served.

And Woolworth wasn't making any money.

That marked a turning point.

Discrimination did not disappear in Jacksonville that day, but it suddenly became way more expensive.

I was fired after the first sit in.

For two weeks in August, the NAACP Youth Council sat in at lunch counters all over downtown, leaving white customers agitated.

The white establishment antsy and Rodney Hearst, out of a dishwashing job.

Came back to work on Monday, and my job was it was gone.

Yeah.

For alternates.

A happier event occurred abou a week into the demonstrations.

He got married.

When you get married on a Friday and.

And that Saturday, your husband's out in the demonstration.

It's scary.

Even more scary.

The staggering war stories the kids accumulated over those two weeks.

They hurle all kinds of obscenities at us.

What did they say?

I don't want to use those words.

What did they say?

Oh, nigger lover.

Jungle bunny.

Why don't you all go back to Africa?

They punched us with sticks, with pins.

A couple of hoops.

Yeah, they're from the NAACP.

It stands for niggers acting like colored people.

This guy who walked with the cane, he hurdle the end of his cane down.

He walked behind each of us and stuck us in the back with his cane.

None of you ever said a word.

Never did anything.

Never did anything.

Never said anything.

Where were the police?

Nowhere.

And then it was August 27th, 1960, at sandal.

Saturday.

The Klan had said that they were goin to stop these niggas from March.

We knew it was going to be a terrible day.

Everyone's on edge.

That Saturday morning, Alton Yates tells his new bride to stay inside.

He said to me, do not leave the house.

Do not go outside.

Rutledge Pearson hears that something's going down at Hemming Park.

He drives there with our net.

Gerardo.

There were ax handle sticking out of the shrubbery.

And white men gathering, some in Confederate uniforms.

I saw more hatred in their eyes.

And anything else I've ever seen.

Not far away.

That's good.

A 27 year old police officer on downtown parkin patrol sees something strange.

3 or 4 guys would actually.

And I said, you know, this does not look right.

Back at Hemming Park, Spencer Meeks watches from the windows of JCPenney.

He sees ax handles going fast.

When you saw that, what did you think?

Lord have mercy.

There going to be some killing.

Meantime, Vance.

Good questions.

The white man.

What's this with the accent?

And they said, well, we have axes at home.

The handles are broken.

So while we were downtown we all just about Exhales.

Good goes to the Robert Meyer Hotel.

Picks up the payphone and calls headquarters.

And they sai well keep an eye on everything.

And reporting.

No I said no okay.

Returning to Laura Street Presbyterian Church.

Rutledge Pearson talks t the kids and the youth council.

All of them wanted to continue.

But not at Woolworth.

That's by the park.

Too close to the whites.

It was decided that we would go to the W.T.

Grant store.

So that these guys at Hemming Park wouldn't see us.

Officer.

Good.

Seeing more men with ax handles calls in a second time.

That's just now getting the crowd down here.

I think you need to bring in some people to disperse this thing.

And he says, keep an eye on it.

About then, the kids from the youth council, broken up in small groups, go to Grant's.

The mob saw them.

And that's when it starts.

Those kids inside Grant's have no idea what's about to hit them.

At first, you don't know what it is.

You could look up the street and see hordes of people.

They all had ax handles and baseball bats.

As the mob got closer and closer, then you could see tha they were swinging at everything that looked black downtown.

Even in all directions, and just as fast as we could.

You had to be wondering, where is my backup?

Oh, I was I was by now.

Downtown is out of control.

2 to 30 white men are hunting down black shoppers, black demonstrators, black women, black children and beating the daylights out of them.

Seeing the melee around grabs another group of youth council kids led by alternate retreat toward Hemming Park.

And we went to Woolworth and they came in and they started swinging in these hex sounds and these baseball bats.

And all ten.

Yates gets a blow to the head.

The pain, I don't remember.

It's the ringing in my ears that I do remember.

I saw them beat many blacks down to the ground.

They'd be rolling it down.

I stood there helpless.

Couldn't do the thing.

See their little addictive weapon issue.

Tic with their hands and.

Keep in mind, at this point, there's still apparently only one cop in the area.

I saw a black man walking down the street in a group, swarmed around him and started beating.

I was saying, let me through.

Let me through.

All right.

Stop.

Stop now.

And I picked him up.

Good.

Takes the beaten bloody victim over to JCPenney.

While he's inside, the white mob begins bashing another black man.

And I did the same thing.

Walked in the crowd, went in and told them to stop.

He calls headquarters a third time.

I told him, better get somebodys ass down here right now.

Soon after the boomerangs show up, a gang of black teens just no getting word of the white riot.

They're ready to rumble.

They took the ax handles from the whites and began to beat them.

And as the boomerangs arrive, so do the cops.

Lots of them.

Officer Gudes reaction.

Where in the hell have you been?

He says.

We've got it now.

And I said, yeah, I probably said back then, it's about damn time.

I'm.

The police move in and start arresting whites and blacks.

I. I remember seeing.

A young black guy come around the corner by jcpenney's.

He darted to the bushes.

They grabbed him, pulling him out.

I remember one of the fellow hit him in the head with an ax.

All the policemen was doing nothing.

Nothing stood there and looked around.

I hate to even address it but it was packed and I saw it.

And it was.

It stuck in my mind, just like before, getting hit with the action.

One way or another, the kids of the youth cops wil make it back to Laurel Street.

A lot of people weren't back yet, and we were worried and concerned about, about them.

It was, I cried.

It was, because you really didn't know where everybody was and what was going to happen next.

You know, it was, It was, it was scary.

By mid-afternoon, most blacks were out of downtown, including employees a Morrison's, except Nat Glover.

I was the last on to leave out of that back door.

About 15 whites immediately approach him.

Some prod him with the ax handles.

At that time, I wasn't too scared because a police officer was standing maybe maybe ten feet away from me.

I ran over to the police officer and I can't remember what he told me.

Just like it was yesterday.

You better get out of here before they kill you.

By nightfall, the police locked down Ashley Street the hub of the black community.

Jacksonville experienced quite a night of violent racial confrontatio by both black and white folks.

Black cars were shot at in, and white cars were hit with rocks or had Molotov cocktails thrown at them.

But whites with ax handles still lurked downtown.

Around 11 p.m., Spencer Meeks is still inside Penney's, hiding from the mob along with four coworkers.

We decided we got to go home.

Oh, five of us.

Good.

Bob Car doesn't pull a blade that long.

We could get them.

You were prepared to fight to die.

Prepare to die.

The five walk out as the white men look on.

What was going through your mind then?

When will I feel the first act down?

The whites curse them.

Spit on them, but do nothing more.

Nobody strikes right through the old ground.

But, But better than both our hands.

You think it was the box cutters?

I don't know whether you saw them or what.

But I think it was just faith in God.

That's what I think.

Alternates.

Makes it home around midnight.

Far as anyone knows, the kid in the youth console are safe.

He had been hit in the back of the head and he carries a scar even today.

What did you do?

Just held him, has held him and just was so thankful that he was.

He was okay.

Jacksonville made the national news.

And those ax handle gave the city a big black eye.

It was up to Mayor Hayden Burns, an outspoken segregationist, to put the proper PR spin on the story.

Manley is surprised that this outbreak and the first crisis was not uncontrollable fighting that broke out.

Let's get the record straight.

The police were successful in placing themselves between the two groups and maintaining a distance of about 30 to 50 yards.

Separation between the two groups and not a single membe of either group, came in contact with an individual of the opposite group.

Asked Charlie Griffin about that one.

A mob of whites with ax handles pummeled him.

Charlie was in the 11th grade.

His picture got in life magazine.

No one was killed on Ax handle Saturday.

As for how many injured?

50.

70.

100.

No one's really sure.

Arrest reports also differ.

The Times Union said 4233 blacks and nine whites.

That afternoon the black community held a mass meeting at Saint Paul A.M.E.

church.

The place was jammed.

It sent the message that blacks are no longer going to sit still.

The Youth Council asked blacks to stop shoppin and buying at downtown stores.

There is one color that everybody understands and that's green.

It was another one of those turning points.

The black community was now united and empowered.

I felt that at last, maybe I'm in control of my own destiny.

The Youth Council asked Mayor Burns to create a biracial committee.

If nothing else, just open lines of communication.

He refused.

We decided we were going to have a biracial committee without the blessings of the mayor.

So they did.

Some whites on the committee relished this historical opportunity for change.

Some didn't.

But for everybody it was awkward.

Most of them had never sat in a meeting across the conference table with blacks.

I mean, that just did not happen.

But finally, after months of negotiations, much of it quite heated, downtown lunch counters quietly integrated in March 1961.

And the day it happened.

Nothing happened.

No cursing, no riots, no kicking of shins, no sticking with pins.

The white waitress was fine.

She came and waited on us.

Was very pleasant.

White customers displayed indifference.

As for alternates.

And his first meal at an integrated counter, he certain of only one thing.

What did you have?

I don't remember.

It wasn't a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I can tell you that.

Unless there are people who are willing to risk something, to put something on the line.

Change does not take place with you.

In order for meaningful change to take place somebody has to step out there and be willing to take a chance.

Today.

Alton Yates is retired afte serving for Jacksonville mayors as an administrative aid and 32 years in the Air Force.

Gwen Yates was elected to the Jacksonville City Council.

So was Rodney Hurst.

Marjorie Meeks Brown became Atlanta's first female postmaster.

Spencer Meek was the first black head coach and athletic director at Ribault High School.

Arnett Girardeau became the first black man elected to the Florida Senate.

Nat Glover was the first black sheriff of Duval County.

Jacksonville buried th memory of Jacksonville Saturday, then spent the next 40 years in denial.

Dealing with it was just too much, too embarrassing.

Then, in 2000, the city came to terms with its past.

Not with a demonstration, but with a commemoration.

Most everyone from the movement was there except Rutledge Pearson, the Pied Piper.

Seven years after ax Handle Saturday, he was killed in a car wreck on his way to Memphis.

Imagine if he could have led his kids that one last time, 40 years later, when everyone extended a hand, not clenched a fist.

Freedom is not free.

Rutledge Pearson always said, nor is it fast.

But you.