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Trump poised to accept GOP nod in Jacksonville, Fla., on 60th anniversary of ‘Ax Handle Saturday’
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Trump poised to accept GOP nod in Jacksonville, Fla., on 60th anniversary of ‘Ax Handle Saturday’
On Aug. 27, 1960, a mob of 200 white people in Jacksonville, Fla. – organized by the Ku Klux Klan and joined by some of the city’s police officers – chased and beat peaceful civil rights protesters who were trying to integrate downtown lunch counters. The bloody carnage that followed – in which ax handles and baseball bats were used to club African Americans, who sought sanctuary in a church – is remembered as “Ax Handle Saturday.”
A permit had already been approved for the 60th anniversary commemoration of those events when Republican National Committee officials tentatively decided to move their convention festivities from Charlotte to the northern Florida city. This happened because North Carolina public health officials resisted President Trump’s demand that they commit to allowing him to speak before a packed indoor arena amid the novel coronavirus outbreak.
Under a revised plan, which is still being finalized and has not been announced, Trump would accept his party’s nomination for a second term on Aug. 27, according to three sources familiar with the deliberations. One venue under consideration would be the 15,000-person-capacity VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena. Hemming Park, where local civil rights leaders have planned their commemoration, is a mile away.
This is already causing friction in the city of 900,000, which is about 30 percent black.
In 1960, Rodney Hurst was 16 and the president of the local Youth Council of the NAACP. He and several of his black high school classmates were sitting at a “whites only” lunch counter in Jacksonville when they were spit on – and then the violence began. Now 76, Hurst is aghast at the RNC plan. He said the commemoration event is more important than ever. “Donald Trump is a racist,” Hurst said in an interview Wednesday night. “To bring a racist to town for his acceptance speech will only further separate an already racially separated community.”
The RNC did not respond to a request for comment. Trump has strenuously denied that he is a racist.
The optics are messy against the backdrop of the nationwide protests and the larger cultural reckoning sparked by the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.
It’s part of a pattern. Trump told reporters on Wednesday that his first campaign rally since the start of the coronavirus pandemic will take place next Friday in Tulsa. In 1921, that city was the site of one of the worst race massacres in U.S. history. A white mob descended on an affluent black neighborhood. As many as 300 people died. The June 19 rally also happens to coincide with Juneteenth, a holiday widely celebrated in the black community to mark the day that the last American slaves were freed. Oklahoma is not a battleground in the general election, and the county that includes Tulsa has seen an uptick in new cases since the start of June, but the state’s relaxed restrictions mean the Trump reelection campaign can assemble the big crowd that the president has been craving.
There’s another significant wrinkle as it relates to Jacksonville: One reason that the RNC gravitated toward the city is because Mayor Lenny Curry is the former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida and has been eager to host the national convention. Early Tuesday morning, responding to protesters and calls from players for the Jacksonville Jaguars, Curry ordered the removal of the bronze statue of a Confederate soldier that since 1898 has been the centerpiece of Hemming Park. Speaking to a crowd of Black Lives Matter activists later that day, where the “Ax Handle Saturday” commemoration is scheduled for August, the GOP mayor pledged that that he will remove all remaining Confederate monuments throughout the city, according to the Florida Times-Union.
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