WaPo: “James Jackson knew the code. Keep your head down. Move to the grass if White people approached on the sidewalk. Don’t say anything to the graybeards playing checkers.
It was a warm and windswept Wednesday, Sept. 18, 1963, following a day of torrential rains — more than 9 inches — in St. Augustine, Fla. Shortly after noon, Jackson was making his way past the city’s Plaza de la Constitución, which featured a towering Confederate memorial as well as the regular checkers venue, an open-air pavilion where Black people were once sold as commodities. Pretty much everyone still called it the Slave Market.
Jackson was getting tired of keeping quiet. He had recently joined the NAACP Youth Council, which in sleepy, touristy St. Augustine had awakened that summer under the leadership of Robert Hayling, a Black dentist.
…Maybe it was his downward gaze that allowed Jackson to see the scrap of paper scrabbling by in the wind. Picking it up, he unfurled it and stared in disbelief. It was a handbill advertising a Ku Klux Klan rally that night, just south of town in a clearing in the woods behind the Southgate Bowling Lanes off U.S. Route 1. “All white people” were welcome.
…
Measured, cerebral, Hayling took a look. He reeled in two neighbors from the adult NAACP, James Hauser and Clyde Jenkins. From fishing trips, Hauser knew the area of the rally well. He said they could observe the rally from a distance, and if there was trouble, he could get them out on a side path.
Jackson pleaded to go along. Hayling reluctantly agreed.”