by David Ball
Staff Writer
When Patricia Pearson was just a young teenager living in Jacksonville in the 1960s, just answering the phone could be a frightening experience.
Often, the voice on the other end spouted racially charged death threats against her, her family and especially her father, civil rights activist Rutledge Pearson.
“In the ‘60s, the city was divided into two communities. If you were black, you used the back door of white businesses,” she said. “But regardless of these efforts, the tide of racial segregation, discrimination...had turned.”
It was because of the work of activists like Rutledge Pearson that the tide did turn in Jacksonville and across the nation, and the former NAACP president who now has a public school and city park named in his honor was remembered at Thursday’s Jacksonville Bar Association luncheon.
To celebrate the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, Bar members heard from Pearson’s daughter as well as a former student, Patricia Moman Bell, who learned under Pearson when he taught social studies in segregated Jacksonville classrooms.
Pearson’s widow and brother were also in attendance and were thanked for their personal sacrifices during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Reggie Luster, the Jacksonville Bar’s only black president since the group was founded in 1897, led the invocation.
On each table, a note asking “Have you lived in a time or place where you had fewer civil rights?” spurred much discussion among the attendees. Stories included racism against black attorneys and judges, sexism against the few women at law schools in the 60s and 70s and even classism told by the children of poor, working-class parents.
However, the most inspiring stories came from Pearson’s daughter and student.
The stories told how Rutledge Pearson found his first success as a baseball player in the American Negro League. He got a chance to play ball in Atlantic Beach with a farm team of the Milwaukee Braves, but he was ultimately barred because of his race.
The end of his baseball career led Pearson to become a teacher and also an advisor to the NAACP, which later made him president of the Jacksonville branch.
“He never raised his voice and never needed to. He commanded respect,” said Moman Bell. “Just as attorneys are, Rutledge Pearson was the embodiment of the constitution. That is his legacy.”
Pearson organized sit-ins, picket lines and was involved with the famed Axe-handle riot in Jacksonville in 1960. He even represented the city during Martin Luther King, Jr.’s march on Washington in 1963, when his most famous speech, “I have a dream,” echoed through the nation’s capital.
He later got involved with ensuring the rights of black workers’ unions. It was during a trip to Memphis to help striking laundry workers in 1967 that he died during a suspicious car accident. While the FBI found no foul play, the local Ku Klux Klan was eager to write to Pearson’s family and claim responsibility.
“I remember he was asked if he liked the life of a civil righter,” said Patricia Pearson. “He said, ‘It’s just like skimming off hot grounders at third, but without a glove.’”
But in front of the racially diverse faces of attorneys and judges in the crowd, Pearson’s most poignant encapsulation of her father came at the beginning of her speech, when she talked about how Rutledge viewed his home city.
“He believed this city could become a place where people of all colors could live, work and love,” she said.