One-Place Study: Jacksonville, Florida

My family, minus my father who died in California a couple months before, arrived in Jacksonville in the summer of 1954.  Mom bought a house -- first house she had lived in that wasn't rented since she left her family home in Pensacola, a new Navy bride, in 1937.  The house was on the southside, just around the corner from my grandma and aunt in the neighborhood known as Colonial Manor.  I was 7 years old. Jacksonville's downtown at the time was a collection of buildings from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.  Cohen Brothers, the toniest department store at the time, was in the St. James Building, an elaborate structure taking up one city block.  The building was one of the most magnificent in town after the Great Fire of 1901.  It opened in 1912, and was designed by Henry John Klutho, a young architect schooled in the designs of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, who had come to Jacksonville for the architectural opportunities created by that devastating fi...

I was 13 years old, watching television on a hot August afternoon in our home on the south side of Jacksonville, Florida.  The station I was watching overrode the program with breaking news.  Violence had broken out downtown, racial violence that escalated rapidly.  There was a warning for everyone to stay away from downtown due to the violence.  Not much more was said. I briefly thought about going, to see what was going on, but my mother nixed that idea.  And, considering the nature of mob violence, that was probably wise.  But I learned all I could about it, which was difficult for a while, as news of the event was suppressed in Jacksonville.  The city administration of Mayor Haydon Burns, in those days, reflected his segregationist opinions.   Tidbits of information about the violence leaked out, passed by word of mouth, almost like a clandestine samizdat , facts passed around an underground network in the old totalitarian Soviet Union....