Facing History: Ax Handle Saturday

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.  National press outlets like Life magazine covered the story, as did newspapers around the country.  Eventually, stories about the day of riot began to be covered in local media.

That day was 27 August 1960, which became known as "Ax Handle Saturday."  That sobriquet arose from the white segregationist mob beating black people -- including women and even children -- with ax handles as well as baseball bats.  One white police officer who was, for a while, the only police officer downtown and who tried fruitlessly to call for back-up to police headquarters, asked some ax-handle-wielding white men why they had axe handles.  One of the white men replied that they had axes at home that needed new handles, so they had just come downtown to buy some.  As the number of ax-handle-carrying white men grew to, by some estimates 200 and by other estimates 300, it seemed there were a lot of axes in the area needing new handles.

The Civil Rights Movement began in earnest in the 1950s with the bus boycotts in Tallahassee, Florida, and Birmingham, Alabama and marches in several southern cities.  Passive resistance was being taught to young black protestors, on the model of Mohandas K. Ghandi's teaching of satyagraha ("truth force") in India.  The immediate contributory cause of the outbreak was a peaceful sit-in at the Woolworth's lunch counter downtown on 13 August.  Woolworth's faced what was then called Hemming Park.  The park is on the National Register of Historic Places as Hemming Plaza.  This central plaza of downtown Jacksonville was designated, in an error-riddled proclamation by the Department of the Interior, as James Weldon Johnson Park, named for a famous black native son of the city.

As the sit-ins continued up until and including 27 August, whites gathered at downtown lunch counters, to hurl curses and epithets at the black students sitting at the segregated counter.  Anger grew among the whites, and as the young black people, male and female, left the store, the axe handles showed up and the beatings began.  One young employee of Morrison's Cafeteria, which also faced on Hemming Park, was the last black employee to leave the store.  He exited by the back entrance, which gave onto the alley behind the cafeteria.  There, he was met by 15 white men with axe handles and baseball bats, and one white cop who, when the young man ran to him for help, would only advise him to get out of the area before the whites killed him.

That young man grew up to become Jacksonville's first black sheriff, Nat Glover.  

The mayor refused the NAACP's request for a biracial committee to discuss changes in Jacksonville's racist atmosphere.  However, downtown businesses and the black community did get together in spite of the mayor's disapproval.  And in March of 1961, by the actions of downtown businessmen who saw the handwriting on the wall, lunch counters in downtown Jacksonville were desegregated.

A mural near downtown keeps the memory of this regrettable history in mind.

"Ax Handle Saturday" is not a proud moment in Jacksonville's history, but one that must be remembered.  It is part of our city's history.

References and suggested reading:

Hurst, Rodney L., Sr. It was NEVER about a Hot Dog and a Coke (Livermore, CA: WingSpan Press, 2008).

 Retherford, Bill, producer and writer, Ax Handle Saturday, 50 Years Later.  Zinn Education Project: Teaching People’s History, https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/ax-handle-saturday-jacksonville/ (Accessed 2 February 2025.)

 Visit Jacksonville, “Jacksonville: the Flip Side of Florida.” https://www.visitjacksonville.com/ directory/ax-handle-saturday-mural-eastside-civil-rights-mural/ (Accessed 2 February 2025).

 Woods, Mark.  “A Day of Dishonor for Us, Too.”  Jacksonville.com: the Florida Times-Union, https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/columns/2010/08/27/mark-woods-day-of-dishonor-for-us-too/1118589007/ (Accessed 2 February 2025.)

 Harris, Jenese, “Civil Rights Activist Points Out Errors in Proclamation Commemorating Ax Handle Saturday.”  https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/2020/09/08/civil-rights-activist-points-out-errors-in-proclamation-commemorating-ax-handle-saturday/ (Accessed 2 February 2025.)

 U.S. Department of the Interior, Proclamation: Designation of James Weldon Johnson Park as Part of the African American Civil Rights Network, https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/7203547/Proclamation-from-the-United-States-Department.pdf (Accessed 2 February 2025.)

 Brotemarkle, Ben.  “Florida Frontiers: ‘Ax Handle Saturday’”.  https://myfloridahistory.org /frontiers/article/32. (Accessed 2 February 2025)

 Soergel, Matt, “What Happened on Ax Handle Saturday, Aug. 27, 1960, in Jacksonville?”  Jacksonville.com – the Florida Times-Union, https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news /local/2020/06/20/what-happened-on-ax-handle-saturday-aug-27-1960-in-jacksonville /112301630/ (Accessed 2 February 2025.)

 Jones, Antonette, curator, “Freedom is Not Free: Ax Handle Saturday,” (history and exhibit), Exhibits at the University of Florida Libraries, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, https://exhibits.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/axhandle/ (Accessed 2 February 2025.)

 Due, Tananarive, and Patricia Stephens Due, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.  (New York: One World Books (Random House), 2003.)  [Gives a first-person account of the training of young black demonstrators in passive resistance, and good coverage of the Tallahassee Bus Boycott.]