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NO GREAT FEAT to DO WHAT'S RIGHT

IN a NEW BOOK, DAN WARREN RECOUNTS HIS

1964 LEGAL BATTLES AGAINST SEGREGATION

and the KU KLUX KLAN.

Story by Sara E. Butner with photos provided by Dan R. Warren

June 19, 1964. Dan R. Warren ’50 has a serious dilemma. Florida Governor Farris Bryant had appointed Warren, then state attorney for the Seventh Judicial District, his personal representative in St. Augustine, where protests over the city’s segregated anniversary celebration had erupted into violence.

Judge Bryan Simpson has issued an order protecting the right of pro-integration demonstrators to march without interference from police. Unfortunately, the Ku Klux Klan has also descended on St. Augustine. Warren and Sheriff L.O. Davis fear for the ability of law enforcement to protect the peaceful marches, especially those at night time – but they’re wary of violating Simpson’s order.

On this steamy night, Warren goes to see the marchers himself. As they walk through the cramped streets of the Old City, he can hear the frenzied shouts of a Klan rally in a nearby park. Under Warren’s direction, Sheriff Davis refuses to let the marchers proceed down the street that will take them past the Klan. It’s an action that will land them all in federal court, with Warren defending the governor against a contempt of court charge. “I told Judge Simpson that I didn’t want the blood of those children on my hands, and that’s the way I felt about it,” Warren says.

Warren recounts the incident in his new book, If it Takes all Summer: Martin Luther King, the KKK and States’ Rights in St. Augustine, 1964 (University of Alabama Press). The memoir of a critical battleground in the Civil Rights Movement is the first such eyewitness account by an insider – Warren describes dealings with figures such as King, Simpson and Ku Klux Klan leaders. The book is a riveting examination of how, when placed in a situation with no easy solution, one’s principles are the only way out.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy speak with the manager of the segregated Monson Motor Lodge. Both were arrested shortly afterward.

Warren was born in Concord, N.C., and raised in Greensboro. His family lived simply on the modest income his father earned as a mail carrier. Despite a resurgence in Klan activity in Greensboro during the Great Depression, Warren’s father refused to join; other boys taunted him because his father wasn’t a member.

Neither of Warren’s parents attended college, and they strongly encouraged their children to get an education. But the family’s limited means seemed to make that impossible. World War II intervened; Warren’s two older brothers joined up as fighter pilots, and at age 17 he enlisted as well. “It was the first time in my life I ever lied to my mother, when I told her they’d let me finish high school [first], which they weren’t going to do,” he says. “When she found out, my mother was really upset, and she confronted me. I said, well, you know, it’s the military. And I was off and running.”

After the war, Warren was eligible for college tuition under the G.I. Bill, his long-time dream of attending college and becoming an attorney now in reach. Warren writes fondly in his book about several Guilford professors that influenced him – David Stafford, Marjorie Mendenhall Applewhite, Ernestine Milner. “Guilford had a great impact on my life,” he says. “The thing I remember is that [faculty] gave you individual attention. They would invite you in for tea, and they would sit down and talk about your career and what you wanted to do and how you were going to achieve it … I was always impressed that they always had time for you. They would engage you one-on-one as an equal. I really felt so comfortable at Guilford.”

Guilford also saw the somewhat inauspicious beginning of Warren’s political career, when he and classmate James Rawlins ’50 ran for president and vice president of the men’s student government. A friend who had her pilot’s license suggested that Warren drop campaign fliers from a plane onto campus. “I thought that was a great idea, so we had 500 leaflets printed up,” he says. “The day that we chose to drop the leaflets was a very gusty day. When I dropped them, the wind caught them and it took them over to Mr. Coble’s dairy farm [down Friendly Avenue]. And not a single flier landed on campus. They all hit Mr. Coble’s pasture. [The dean] called me and said, ‘Dan, I have to congratulate you on your idea, but who’s going to clean up all these fliers in Mr. Coble’s pasture?’”

Martin Luther King Jr. examines a bullet hole in the window of a St. Augustine house he was to occupy. He was not present at the time the shot was fired.

Warren’s Guilford years also opened his eyes to the injustice of racial discrimination. As part of Stafford’s sociology class, Warren and classmates joined with students and faculty at N.C. A&T University and Bennett College, both still all-black at the time, to integrate the board of Guilford County’s Department of Public Welfare. Warren and an A&T history professor met with the board’s chair. Warren describes presenting their case, insisting that integrating the social services was the right thing to do.

“The chairman said it would not work,” he writes. “… He said that the board met once a month for a dinner meeting and there was no eating place in Greensboro that would serve blacks and whites together. If that was the reason, I replied, the answer to the problem was simple: eliminate the dinner meeting. He was rather astonished that I could entertain such an idea…

“He knew my father and asked: ‘Does your father know what you are doing?’ ‘No,’ I replied, then added, ‘but if he did, he would advise me to do what my
conscience dictated.’”

Though he loved Guilford, the G.I. Bill would only fund five years of his education. If Warren wanted to go to law school, he would have to forgo his final year at Guilford. (At the time, many universities admitted high-achieving students with three years of college.) Applewhite, Warren’s advisor, encouraged him to go on to Stetson University’s law school, which Warren completed in 1952.

He initially ran for local office to make contacts for his fledgling law practice. The same year he finished law school, Warren was elected town commissioner in Daytona Beach, Fla. He built friendships across race and class lines, including with Mary McLeod Bethune, then president emerita of Bethune-Cookman College.

“[Eleanor] Roosevelt came down to spend the night with Dr. Bethune,” Warren recalls. “I was mayor pro tem of Daytona Beach at that time, and I was the official host for the city … She used to call me ‘young Dan Warren.’ She said, ‘You know, young Dan Warren, you don’t know what it is to have the wife of the president of the United States in my home.’

“Well, I knew that Dr. Bethune was one of the most important women in the world at that time. She had a world-wide reputation. And I said to her, you know Dr. Bethune? I rather suspect the honor is Mrs. Roosevelt’s. She looked at me and she didn’t say anything. And about that time in walked Mrs. Roosevelt. And these two women embraced – two very powerful women in the world. And I would give anything if I’d had the foresight to have had a camera in that moment.”

Klan leader J.B. Stoner addresses supporters at a 1964 St. Augustine rally.

Warren rose quickly through the region’s political ranks, making the acquaintance of Governor Bryant. In 1961, Bryant appointed Warren to fill the unexpired term of the state attorney. He was responsible for prosecuting criminal and civil cases in four counties, but occasionally filled in on prosecutions in other parts of the state as well. By 1964, Warren and wife Mary had six children.

Starting in the mid-1950s, Warren and other Daytona Beach civic leaders had been working to integrate public and private facilities. Warren worked with Bethune to establish Community Services, a political action organization focused on black voter education.

“Civic leaders and the churches came together in Daytona Beach, and we resolved the segregation matter without any difficulty. But St. Augustine was another story. You were just up against a brick wall. The mayor just absolutely wouldn’t have any dialogue with anyone in the black community about improving things. And that was the situation that I found myself in.”

St. Augustine would celebrate its 400th anniversary in 1964. But the committee planning the observance – partially funded by the U.S. Congress – was all-white. “Stop and think about it,” Warren says. “If you were black – you had contributed to the building of St. Augustine, and now they’re going to have the 400th anniversary of its founding, funded by your tax dollars – and they’re going to have this big birthday party and you’re not invited. In fact, if you attempt to attend you’re going to be arrested for trespass …”

As spring turned to summer, what started as civil disobedience by local African Americans escalated, thanks to an influx of the Ku Klux Klan. Several white civic leaders (including Sheriff Davis) belonged to the Klan. Though it was on the attorney general’s list of terrorist groups, the Klan’s demonstrations were protected under the First Amendment. But the Klan’s activity grew more violent with the arrival of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

King saw St. Augustine’s symbolic value during the same period that Congress was debating passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. His presence drew national attention to St. Augustine and legitimized the demands of the pro-integration forces there. Unfortunately, it also further radicalized the Klan. Increasingly, Warren found himself trying to balance the Constitutional freedoms and immediate safety of both factions. “My days and nights were in a whirl. It was a difficult time for everybody,” he says.

Warren also had to balance the demands of his job and family, a task brought home when he learned that Klan operatives planned to target them. “We had a wildlife officer who’d infiltrated the Klan … and he said listen, this is serious. They’re out there in the woods plotting on killing you and your family. He was really concerned for us.” Warren sent Mary and the children to live with his family in Greensboro for the rest of the summer.

Civil rights activists rally at a St. Augustine church in June 1964.

Warren empanelled a grand jury, which recommended that the city form a biracial commission to create dialogue and find a peaceful path to integration. Between the lawsuits possible under the newly passed Civil Rights Act and pressure from boycotts, local businesses gradually integrated themselves. But bitterness lingered in St. Augustine for years.

It still frustrates Warren to think about how much of the crisis could have been averted had citizens of St. Augustine simply talked to one another about their concerns. “You just couldn’t have any dialogue,” Warren says. “If you even attempted to do it you were just ostracized by the community. I had never run into anything like this in my life … I just couldn’t understand [the mayor’s] attitude. I couldn’t understand the churches’ attitudes. They just locked their doors.”

“If you can’t sit down and talk about a problem and try to find mutually acceptable solutions, the only other alternative is violence.”

Warren resigned his post in 1968 to go into private practice. “That’s all I wanted to do from the time I was 15 – I wanted to be a trial lawyer. That’s what I did. I tried cases all over the country – Savannah, Charleston, Montgomery, Alabama. I even represented the Church of Scientology and went out to California.”

He says that his only regret from St. Augustine is that he didn’t “crack down” on the Klan and its front organizations sooner. Despite the threats to himself and his family, Warren says he never seriously considered backing off. “I was concerned for their safety, but I never thought about pulling back,” he says.

“Stand your ground. Knowledge is truth. If you feel that you are right, then you stand your ground. That’s what life is all about … I don’t think it takes any great feat of power or courage to do what’s right. To me, you do it. It doesn’t make any differences what the consequences are. That doesn’t even enter into the equation.”