St. Augustine, Florida is a city of firsts. The oldest continuously occupied European-founded city in the United States is also the birthplace of our country’s first black child and site of the first racially mixed marriage.  It was the first sanctuary city for runaway slaves who won their freedom by converting to Catholicism and enlisting in the Spanish military.  Waterfront Fort Mose is also our promised land’s first free slave settlement. 

Given this honorable heritage it’s perhaps surprising to discover that following a series of firebombings, shootings, beatings and death threats in the early 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. called St. Augustine “the most lawless community in which we have ever worked.”

In frustration, King reached out on June 17, 1964, to a Reform rabbi convention in Atlantic City seeking backup for his Southern Christian Leadership Council. He was eager to turn back racist mobs attacking Black activists trying to integrate local beaches. The civil rights icon also wanted to defend colleagues like Andrew Young who were  beaten back as they attempted to lead protests to St. Augustine’s historic slave market. 

What followed next was at the time the largest arrest of rabbis in American history, and perhaps a high point in the alliance of Black and Jewish civil rights activists ahead of the historic signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

Among the 16 rabbis immediately answering King’s call was 29 year-old Allen Secher. Earlier, I flew to Chicago to meet Secher, who has the bittersweet distinction of outliving his 15 fellow St. Augustine rabbis. He and his wife Ina, both 91, now lecture and teach widely on topics ranging from the Holocaust to elder independence. 

Following a series of subsequent meetings, they accepted my invitation to join me on a June flight back to St. Augustine for the 62nd anniversary of his arrest. Unlike better known civil rights landmark cities such as Selma, Birmingham and Memphis, the St. Augustine story largely remains a footnote. Secher and the families of the other 15 rabbis want a new generation to know what was won — and to feel the full weight of what is now being dismantled.

To mark the occasion and to help make that story better known, I have cowritten and........

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