Free Pillar of Fire by Taylor Branch Page A

commanding general at the National Guard armory—excitement had grown almost unbearable since the marathon creation of her letter asking Johnson not to give his approval for $350,000 in federal assistance to celebrate the four hundredth birthday of a city that still excluded Negro citizens by legal segregation. There had been three formal readings of her draft at a board meeting, plus a consultation with a Negro college president to make sure the language was presentable, and when Johnson replied only days ago that “no event in which I will participate in St. Augustine will be segregated,” a jolt of hope dissolved into panicky questions. Did Johnson mean that the Fairchild defense plant would have to integrate its workforce before he would visit, or merely that Negroes might accompany him to the plant? Was a visit to a segregated company by private invitation not itself a segregated event? Did the pledge mean that at least one Negro would be added to President Kennedy’s all-white Quadricentennial Commission? Was the commission an “event”? What about the “white only” signs downtown—did they make it a segregated event for the Vice President to stroll near the Slave Market?
    The implications of Johnson’s pledge burned so hotly through the wires that the chief aide to Florida Senator George Smathers soon turned up on Fannie Fulwood’s doorstep. Later came George Reedy, a silver-haired ex-socialist from Chicago, long in the service of the ex-segregationist Vice President from Texas. Both talked long hours to please the NAACP delegation, but it seemed that every time either one called contacts in Washington or white St. Augustine, who in turn were checking with other contacts, new semantic obstacles arose. Word once came back that any Negroes who did attend the big banquet for the Vice President must do so as “guests” rather than as paying ticket holders, which raised new questions about whether a social exception broke segregation. Whose guests would they be? What if the Negroes preferred to pay on an equal footing? Negotiations dragged on so long that Fulwood had to duck out to catch up on her cleaning.
    These talks themselves marked a drastic leap for the local NAACP, which had stood aloof from the two previous blips of racial protest in town. In 1960, a mob had punished and dispersed a spontaneous student sit-in at Woolworth’s that was inspired by the publicity out of Greensboro, North Carolina. Some months later, to dispel the mood of abject failure he found back home on returning from school, a gifted local student named Henry Thomas decided to apply some of the more precise nonviolent techniques he had observed as a freshman at Howard University in Washington. With recruited friends, he synchronized watches for a convergent movement on McCrory’s, but Thomas alone showed up at the lunch counter. Worse for him, the manager was amiably puzzled about what this familiar local Negro thought he was doing, then amused when Thomas advised him to call the police. Everyone laughed when Thomas stretched forth his hands to be handcuffed, and the officer, whom he knew, merely waved him along to straighten things out. Finally in jail, Thomas endured a look of mortal disappointment from his mother as she apologized to the desk sergeant, a neighbor, for the inexplicable lapse of decency that had come over the first Thomas ever to reach college. After an extended jailhouse sanity interview by the white family doctor of his childhood, Thomas was released to enduring ridicule from both races.
    Since then Dr. Joseph Shelley, the makeshift sanity examiner, had been elected mayor of St. Augustine, and Henry Thomas had become a battered, unsung hero of the 1961 Freedom Rides—other than John Lewis, the only one of the original fourteen Riders to survive both the Alabama ambushes and the medieval privations of Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary. Left behind in the