The weather was warming up and so, inevitably, were the race demonstrations. Among spring's first and ugliest was the one in Jacksonville, Fla., last week. There, the violence seemed to be caused in almost equal parts by the numskullery of a politically ambitious mayor and by the hooliganism of Negro teenagers.
For five weeks the city had been the scene of peaceful sit-ins, marches and picketing by N.A.A.C.P.-led Negroes. Targets of the demonstrators were Jacksonville's segregated hotels, restaurants and movie houses. Negro youngsters began hit-and-run sit-ins, swarming into whites-only lunch counters, demanding service, and fleeing before the cops could get there.
An Ultimatum. Now enter W. (for Willie) Haydon Burns, 52, six-time mayor of Jacksonville and currently a candidate for Florida's Democratic gubernatorial nomination, who went on local television to deliver a stern ultimatum. "There will be no more demonstrations like last week," he declared. "They will not be tolerated." At the same time, in his capacity as police and fire commissioner, Burns deputized Jacksonville's 496 firemen as special police.
Since Burns had been notably casual in his attitude toward Jacksonville's blooming racial conflict, his action infuriated the city's younger Negroes. Explained Ernest Lent, executive director of Jacksonville's Human Relations Council, later: "The leaders kept their anger under control, but the young people couldn't help but react. For a lot of them, of course, this was just an excuse to raise hell."
They began raising it 40 hours later, when three Negro youths were arrested for tossing Molotov cocktails and paint-filled light bulbs at two Burns-for-Governor headquarters. Crowds of Negro students began massing outside their schools, and Burns ordered police to "disperse them or arrest them." To their credit, the cops acted with restraint. Only when the kids scattered and reassembled downtown did the paddy wagons roll up and the arrests begin. After scores of screaming, singing, arm-flailing youngsters were hauled off, the rest left. Soon minor violence, mostly rock throwing at passing cars, broke out over the city.
"516." That night Mrs. Johnnie Mae Chappell, a Negro housewife with nine children, was walking along U.S. Highway 1 outside Jacksonville, her arms laden with grocery sacks. She dropped her purse, and as she bent to retrieve it, a car roared by; shots rang out, and Mrs. Chappell fell dead. Carlos Gonzales, standing outside a nearby bar, was shot in the head at the same time. Before dawn, a dozen buildings were fire-bombed by rampaging Negro youths, and cops found themselves using a new emergency radio call: "516," meaning "juveniles with incendiaries."
In the midst of it all, Mayor Burns took to TV to make a campaign speech, blandly assured Floridians that what was happening in Jacksonville "wasn't a riot" and "looked like a group of students after a football game." Incredibly, Burns charged that what violence there was had been inspired by some of his Democratic opponents for Governor in an attempt to embarrass him politically.