By Michael Daly
Special Correspondent
The Daily Beast
On the same day President Trump is scheduled to give his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination at the big arena in Jacksonville, Florida, another group will meet in a nearby park where Klansmen in Confederate uniforms handed out ax handles for a racist rampage exactly 60 years before.
The permit for the Aug. 27 gathering at Hemming Park was secured by one of that murderous white mob’s targets on what became known as Ax Handle Saturday. Rodney Hurst was the 16-year-old president of the youth council of the NAACP back in 1960. He will be joined this year as in previous years by Alton Yates, who was then the group’s 23-year-old vice president.
“I got hit in the back of the head with an ax handle,” Yates told The Daily Beast of that day six decades ago. “If you’ve ever seen stars before, it’s unbelievable. It’s something a young person never expects to have happen to them.”
Yates survived, but three people are believed to have died as a result of the attack and as many as 100 were injured. Hurst says that an admitted FBI informant named Clarence Sears would tell him years later that the Ku Klux Klan had hoped to spark a race war in the city.
Two weeks before the mob’s attack, Hurst and Yates and several dozen other young people had begun daily sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in downtown Jacksonville. Hurst had been a member of the NAACP Youth Council for five years, having joined when he was just 11 at the suggestion of his eighth-grade American History teacher, Rutledge Pearson. Hurst had skipped ahead in school and he further proved to be a prodigy as a civil rights activist, becoming the group’s president at 15. He had been in that position for a year at the time of the first lunch counter sit-in.
“They called me the kid,” Hurst later told The Daily Beast.