THE UNDERGRADUATE CHAIR
THREE Dartmouth students were the proud recipients of a four-day, all-expenses-paid stay in sunny St. Augustine, Florida, as the guests of that venerable city during the spring vacation. The three, Ned Greeley '65, Bill Jacoby '66, and Bruce Lawder '66, were among more than 40 northeastern college students who answered the call of Martin Luther King's Southern Leadership Conference to participate in the St. Augustine demonstrations and who were jailed as a result.
They had nearly a week in St. Augustine before the city decided to pick up their tab, and during that time they took in the sights, including the historic slave market; associated with such high-class company as Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, mother of the Massachusetts Governor; dined at, or at least walked into, some of the finest restaurants; and finally they got to see the now-famous municipal jail, from the inside.
Undergraduates had come from Yale, Harvard, Amherst, Smith, Mt. Holyoke, as well as Dartmouth, and ten or more college-associated ministers, including Rev. Richard P. Unsworth, Dean of Dartmouth's Tucker Foundation, were on hand. A Dartmouth alumnus and former WDCR general manager, George "Ted" Mascott '61, was arrested for "inciting to riot" and "disorderly conduct" while covering the demonstrations for Boston's WGBH-FM.
Organization for the protests was carried out at Dartmouth through the Political Action Committee of the DCU. The Undergraduate Council and the Tucker Foundation each provided $200 to finance the trip. Greeley, Jacoby, and Lawder left shortly after finals along with a fourth student, Gary Oswald '66, who contracted bronchitis upon arrival and was unable to take part.
While in Florida they saw a side to the segregation picture beyond even what they had imagined, and one which had escaped the reporters who came down only to photograph and talk with Mrs. Peabody. The Dartmouth students stayed at the homes of a Negro postmaster and a Negro carpenter. There they heard how Dr. Richard Hayling, leader of the local Negro action group, had been beaten by the Ku Klux Klan. Hayling, a dentist, had driven past a daylight Klan meeting listening to the speeches which were being broadcast over loudspeakers. When attempting to turn around he was blocked by two cars, apprehended, and taken before the meeting where he was beaten and flogged on the arms with a rubber hose. After being hospitalized for 14 days, he was arrested and charged with assaulting the 250 Klansmen. The Dartmouth students attended a hearing on the case.
They saw the bullet holes in Dr. Hayling's front door where two men had blazed away with a rifle and shotgun, and saw where the home of the first Negro children to enter the white high school had been burned to the ground. (Despite the discovery of an unexploded "Molotov cocktail" among other broken bottles, firemen blamed the fire on a heater located at the opposite side of the house from where the fire had broken out.)
If some of this seemed incredible, they soon saw for themselves. A Yale minister marching in a picket line was surrounded by four white men who burned holes in his pants with cigarettes and prevented him from moving on. Then the policeman on duty nearby stepped in - and arrested the minister for blocking the sidewalk.
Jacoby was stopped by a man on the sidewalk who swore at him, then ripped his shirt down the front.
During that first week the students spoke to white political and business leaders, ministers and educators, in an attempt to open lines of communication between the two racial communities, but without success. The students took part in picket lines, at the slave market and one in front of the city's tourist information booth, where they carried signs reading, "See St. Augustine's Scenic Negro Section." Two girls from Kentucky came over, picked up signs, and joined the marchers. Jacoby was among those who worked on organizing interest at the local Negro college, and it was in relation to the Negro community that they saw the biggest changes.
The mass meetings grew from 100 persons at the first one, to over 500 at the last they attended before going to jail. The Negro ministers had initially refused to support the movement. A week later two of them had offered their churches for the meetings. Everywhere the Negroes came up to the students and thanked them for being there, for showing that some white people cared.
Greeley reported that it was at the Negro high school that the movement had its greatest success. Hayling had given a special talk to some thirty high school students who had attended the first meeting, explaining the importance of their participation. From the time the students got on the busses the next day they sang freedom songs, which lasted through the day, and in each class students went up to their teachers and asked them to attend the meetings. For the first time the teachers, despite fear of losing their jobs, did come.
The final phase, for the students, was the attempt to desegregate St. Augustine's restaurants. Greeley was arrested at the plush Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge, where Mrs. Peabody was later nabbed. Jacoby entered the restaurant of Munson's Motel in an integrated group of seven, and they were seated. But it was the police who came to take their order. Lawder's group of six was served at the Chimes Restaurant - all of whose windows were broken that night. Locked out of the next restaurant, they were arrested on the sidewalk by police with cattle prods. The alleged harmlessness of these weapons was nullified, Lawder said, by the fact that the police aimed for the groin.
The jail in which they spent the next four days at the city's expense they described as "a clubhouse for the Ku Klux Klan." Here they were threatened in the cells by police and civilians alike, and saw 54 Negroes in a cell for four. One night nine of the whites were put in a seven foot square room where Greeley and Jacoby took turns sitting on the toilet seat, the only space available. Dean Unsworth visited them and reported to the College that they were well, but without mattresses and blankets. The College wired money for bail and the trio arrived back in Hanover after missing the first few days of the spring term. If their case is not moved to a federal court, they have to return for trial in early May.
Students arriving back in Hanover learned of the arrest from The Dartmouth. The barely-established Hanover NAACP chapter, largely a faculty group, enlisted student support in obtaining funds to pay bail for white and colored demonstrators. Students stood in the rain on street corners, in front of the Nugget, and knocked on dormitory doors to collect well over $800 which was telegraphed to St. Augustine.
A large crowd was present in the Cutter Hall lounge to hear Lawder, Greeley, and Jacoby tell the story of their trip. The three agreed that any meaningful change in the South would have to come from the southern people themselves, and that the North has its share of the problem. They had gone only with the idea of making some small contribution, of at least doing something.
The most important effect of the trip may have been the increased interest in civil rights it aroused on this campus. A significant percentage of students were among the more than 150 persons attending the official organizational meeting of the NAACP.
This is not the whole picture, however. Several students applauded John Birch Society founder Robert Welch's prosegregationist remarks, even as they had Governor George Wallace last fall.
One Senior wrote cynically to TheDartmouth "I'll bet hundreds of thousands of us white folks would be glad to join (the NAACP) if we were sure we wouldn't have to sit next to a nigger. ..."
It takes, as they say, all kinds.
Best Show of the Year award will undoubtedly go to the UGC for their presentation of Gov. George Wallace, but the Young Republicans are in contention for runner-up with the YR-sponsored performance of Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society.
Depending on who you read, 900 (TheDartmouth) to 1100 (The ManchesterUnion-Leader) crowded into Webster Hall in eager anticipation of perhaps hearing Dartmouth College denounced as a tool of the international communist conspiracy. Instead they were treated to a dull hour-long harangue on the evils of big government, and a steady trickle of students picked up their books and left. The question period almost saved the show. Here Welch proved himself a most artful dodger. Asked about an article authored by a John Bircher stating that President Kennedy had been assassinated because he was not handing over the country to the Communists on schedule, Welch told the questioner to ask the author. In regard to his own contention that Dwight Eisenhower was the witting tool of the Communists, he offered to mail a copy of his book. He refused to make a choice between Barry Goldwater, termed by the questioner a "red, white, and blue American," and Nelson Rocke-feller, "an avowed supporter of the United Nations and the Red Cross."
It was the three-day run of Dr. Strange-love the previous week that set up the biggest response when a questioner asked, "Sir, how do you feel about fluoridation and its effect on your vital body fluids?"
