“1963 is not an end, but a beginning,” — Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream”
A shoebox-sized tape recorder often accompanied Marty Dobrow to English class in the 1980s. At Wesleyan University in Connecticut, he carried it by the handle like a briefcase, setting it down on his desk to capture a favorite professor’s lectures.
Later, listening, mesmerized by their cadence, he often interrupted his tape — rewinding, playing, deconstructing, memorizing. Language that lingers is crafted as carefully as a song, he realized, even as his fellow students would play music on turntables in their dorm rooms, while his instrument just clicked and whirred.
When he discovered Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, he read it into the recorder, practicing its rhythm and repetition and then playing it back and playing it back until the words pulsed inside him like his own heartbeat.
It wasn’t just the sounds of the sentences, it was how their meaning soared across time; it was the way they rose “to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force” in Martin’s voice in 1963, and in Marty’s voice in 1983, because their message would always be transcendent: Love was a decision, and in the heart of darkness, to choose love was the true measure of freedom.
King’s words shook Dobrow’s spirit. They inspired him to write.
On Thursday, the veteran journalist and professor of communications at Springfield College launched “Original City, Original Sin: King, the Klan, and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida,” a work of nonfiction whose precision is a revelation. Dobrow’s investigation into what King would call “the most lawless” place he’d ever known amplifies voices that would otherwise go unheard. The fact that they are “on the record” is itself a reckoning, and Dobrow asks the reader to listen in, and listen again.
“In most cases, I was able to get people to share quite deeply, and I believed in their stories, and I felt like I could put together a mosaic,” he said.
Area connections
Ahead of his inaugural “Original City, Original Sin” events at Springfield College on Saturday and the Bombyx Center for Arts and Equity next Thursday, Dobrow — once a Gazette reporter — unpacked the scope of a project that has taken a third of his life to complete.
King kept getting into Dobrow’s head. His interest was piqued again when he learned that the pastor had spoken at Springfield College’s 1964 commencement. (Exactly 60 years later, Dobrow would speak on the same stage.)
In 2004, the new professor wrote about the orator’s unlikely delivery in the school’s alumni magazine. The college president, Glenn Olds, did everything he could to facilitate the speaker’s arrival, despite irate donors and King’s untimely arrest on graduation weekend.
“Years later,” Dobrow reflects in “Original City, Original Sin,” referencing a 2003 interview with Olds, “he claimed to have placed a call to St. Augustine Mayor Joseph Shelley, threatening to have King’s address filmed live from jail, forcing the city to deal with the attendant public relations nightmare.”
Olds is just one of a memorable cast of characters introduced at the beginning of Dobrow’s book, which hones in on the period between the March on Washington in August 1963 and the signing of the Civil Rights Act in July 1964. It was a “double-edged” cultural moment, he said, bookended by triumphs, but also defined by devastating events like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who had declared on national television only months earlier that civil rights were a “moral issue.”
After familiarizing himself with the canon over the course of a decade, Dobrow chose to focus on St. Augustine, the nation’s oldest city, where, he said, “history is its currency.” (One regular stop on the city’s long-standing “trolley tours,” for instance, is the Old Jail, which functioned as a “Romanesque Revival-style” prison that hid inmates behind attractive architecture until 1953, a complicated source of pride.) In 2013 he took his first of 12 trips to the city to conduct hundreds of interviews.
He transcribed every one himself.
In the book, published by Cambridge University Press, Dobrow introduces the unspoken “codes” between Black and white people in the early ‘60s:
“The only way to enter a white person’s house was through the rear door … At a downtown store like Woolworth’s, it was fine to shop for most things if you had the money, but not to sit at the lunch counter to order a Coke … When you were in line to pay, you had to scoot to the back if white customers showed up with merchandise.”
But as St. Augustine geared up to celebrate its quadricentennial in 1965, Dobrow writes, the façade was crumbling. In 1963, the Florida Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights declared St. Augustine “a segregated superbomb.”
While King and his team didn’t arrive until May 1964, his supporting cast was already in play. There are at least 30 key players in the book, but two standouts are Robert Hayling, a soft-spoken dentist who used his office as an NAACP headquarters to mentor youth, and Irv Cheney, a white minister from Daytona Beach who believed that all men were created equal.
Many characters pass like ships in the night, but Dobrow pieces together for the reader a collective narrative that speaks to the “soul force” King identified in “I Have a Dream.” That said, the author is brutally honest about the reach of rage.
In one particularly chilling scene, Hayling and three men observe a Ku Klux Klan rally in St. Augustine in September 1963, headlined by a minister aptly named Connie Lynch. As Lynch calls out “that burr-headed bastard of a dentist,” the Klan’s lookouts find the men and drag them into the rally, where a 20-foot cross burns on the lawn. “One of Hayling’s patients confirmed this was the man who had been giving them all the problems,” Dobrow writes. “He’s the dentist! Bash his teeth. Break his fingers!”
A few pages later, the author returns to the scene through the perspective of Cheney, who’s there doing “spy work.” Dobrow writes, “For the first time, Irv saw the defining symbol of his life — the cross — on fire … He told himself to stay calm, to concentrate, to do what he always did best: remember, remember, remember.”
When the violence began, Cheney rushed to a pay phone to call the local police — Sheriff L.O. Davis had long been Hayling’s patient, “on the house,” no less — but the dispatcher barely reacted. Thinking fast, Cheney said his next call was to the FBI. In blows to his body and his identity, the dentist lost 11 of his teeth and his fingers were broken by the time a cruiser showed up.
The next day, the St. Augustine Record — the local daily — reported all four to “be in a satisfactory condition.” The article continued, “The Ku Klux Klan rally was the first open meeting of its kind known to have been held in this area in recent years.” And then, unironically, “Another meeting was reported to be scheduled for tonight.”
Though it’s not on the cast list, one of the book’s main characters is the media. As a journalist, Dobrow takes special care to note that newspapers are history’s gatekeepers, and that in St. Augustine, the Record largely controlled the narrative. As part of his research, Dobrow spent summer breaks at the city’s historical society reading the archives on microfilm and typing notes furiously into his laptop. The news source of the nation’s oldest city was rarely objective.
He paced the city in the sweltering heat, silently counting the steps from one place to another, memorizing the map. “It was, by my gait, 120 steps from the St. Augustine Record to Dr. Hayling’s,” he said. “It would not have been difficult to [walk over] to question him. Like, ‘What’s your side of the story?’ But they wouldn’t do that. It was just not part of the culture. You had to go elsewhere, and that set me on a quest: Where was the story covered?”
He found publications like the Pittsburgh Courier, where a white reporter named Stetson Kennedy, who eventually infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, wrote under four names in an effort to publish the truth. In October 1963, after Hayling and his associates were convicted of assault against the Klan, Kennedy wrote in the Courier:
“When does the word of two outweigh the word of four? When the two are white Klansmen, and the four are their Negro victims, and the color of the judge and jury coincides with the color of the former, that’s when!”
Upon King’s arrival to St. Augustine, he used larger outlets like the New York Times and the Associated Press to his advantage, through photographers who could capture indelible images of injustice that helped shock the nation into action.
Ultimately, choosing to love means choosing to look at what we’d rather not see. “We are imperfect,” said Dobrow. “I think that’s baked into our founding documents when we talk about making a ‘more perfect’ union. It’s not ‘perfect.’ It’s ‘more perfect.’ We’re trying to get better. I think that we as a country are strongest when we live in that spirit.”
“The arc of the moral universe … bends towards justice” only when we push.
Learn more and buy the book at civilwriter.com. Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.
