Managing Editor
Discussing the civil rights movement of the 1960s, three men shared their roles at the time during a panel discussion Wednesday evening at the Ritz Theatre & LaVilla Museum.
At least 100 people heard Stetson Kennedy, Dr. Arnett Girardeau and Charles Cobb talk about their experiences a half-century ago in the Southeast, including “Ax Handle Saturday” on Aug. 27, 1960, in Downtown Jacksonville.
“The significance is the connection of youth,” said Cobb, a journalist who worked on voter registration in Mississippi. He was 19 and his partners were 20 and 21 during a trip to Mississippi where a town mayor confronted them and told them to leave.
Cobb reminded the audience that college students and teenagers organized the sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters, which is what happened in Jacksonville. Rodney Hurst Sr., who led the discussion Wednesday, was a teenager at the time.
“Ax Handle Saturday” erupted in violence as a crowd of white men attacked the young blacks with ax handles.
Kennedy said the community and society have come a long way, but not far enough. He said more needs to be done. “We’ve got to get started tomorrow,” he said.
Kennedy, who is white, said he is 94 and “so thankful I lived to be a part of it.” Girardeau, a former Florida state senator, is 80.
Girardeau said he left Jacksonville for college but returned home the summer of 1960. He shared the treatment of blacks during desegregation. “It pains me to think of it today,” he said. “Race relations were terrible.”
Cobb said that until the 1960s, “civil rights was something adults did.”
But that changed. In the 1960s, “you see young people initiating, leading and sustaining civil rights struggles.”
Referring to the time, Cobb said “this is happening in city after city after city in the South.”
“Nothing like this had ever happened in the South,” he said. “The young people are getting transformed.”
“It was the young people that hit the streets and stuck their necks out and got clobbered,” said Kennedy.
Youth is the topic tonight at the Ritz. “Interactive Conversations and Caucus with The Generation X and The Now Generation” is scheduled 6-8 p.m.
Events continue Friday, the 50th anniversary of “Ax Handle Saturday,” at Bethel Baptist Institutional Church.
Events Saturday include the 45th Annual Freedom Fund Dinner at 7 p.m. at the Hyatt Downtown. Hurst said almost 900 people had already committed to attend.
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