June 26, 1964: Governor orders extra
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A few days before, black and white protestors jumped into the swimming pool at the Monson Motor Lodge and the motel's manager -- who was also president of the Florida Hotel & Motel Association -- poured muratic acid into the pool to force them out.
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A policeman jumped into the pool to make arrests and photographs of the melee were published around the globe.
The riots erupted against a backdrop of racial tensions across the South coming to a boil. Civil rights protestors had been staging demonstrations in St. Augustine over the previous year demanding an end to segregation laws there. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested on June 11 at the Monson Motor Lodge restaurant. Ku Klux Klan nightriders were entering black neighborhoods and shooting into homes, prompting NAACP members to drive them off with gunfire.
Three civil rights workers were kidnapped and murdered in Philadelphia, Miss., the week before.
On June 10, the U.S. Senate voted to end Sen. Robert Byrd's filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, capping a year of debate over the legislation first proposed by the late President John F. Kennedy that outlawed segregation of public businesses and school systems.
But as the provocations by the white segregationists in St. Augustine showed, not everyone was welcoming this new era of equal rights for all.
The riots erupted against a backdrop of racial tensions across the South coming to a boil. Civil rights protestors had been staging demonstrations in St. Augustine over the previous year demanding an end to segregation laws there. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested on June 11 at the Monson Motor Lodge restaurant. Ku Klux Klan nightriders were entering black neighborhoods and shooting into homes, prompting NAACP members to drive them off with gunfire.
Three civil rights workers were kidnapped and murdered in Philadelphia, Miss., the week before.
On June 10, the U.S. Senate voted to end Sen. Robert Byrd's filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, capping a year of debate over the legislation first proposed by the late President John F. Kennedy that outlawed segregation of public businesses and school systems.
But as the provocations by the white segregationists in St. Augustine showed, not everyone was welcoming this new era of equal rights for all.