06/01/2026
St. Augustine and Civil Rights: The Mass Arrest of Rabbis at the Monson Motor Lodge and the Pool Incident
BLOG POST: St. Augustine Historical Society
— Written by Robert Covert, Collections Manager and Editor-in-Chief
The Civil Rights Movement in the United States during the twentieth century saw a great deal of change, upheaval, and violence. At the national level, Black leaders like Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, and Martin Luther King Jr. worked alongside local grassroots activists across the nation to bring about an end to segregation, discrimination, and institutionalized racism, relying often on non-violent civil disobedience.
Frequently, Black civil rights advocates were met with violence by white supremacists and anti-segregationists wherever they planned and carried out demonstrations. In the 1960s, the national Civil Rights Movement and its fight against white supremacy arrived in the nation’s Oldest City.
St. Augustine, as civil rights leaders saw it, was a typical strongly segregationist small southern town that relied on tourism dollars to survive. The city’s upcoming quadricentennial celebrations in 1965 and the planning leading up to them provided a perfect means to draw attention to segregation in the city and the South as a whole, displaying the violence that demonstrators were met with and hopefully spurring the passage of the national Civil Rights Act. St. Augustine ultimately proved pivotal in the greater struggle for Black Freedom in the 1960s and specifically in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for exactly this reason.
🗝️Read the full blog here: https://staughs.com/st-augustine-and-civil-rights-the-mass-arrest-of-rabbis-at-the-monson-motor-lodge-and-the-pool-incident/
