Dare Not Walk Alone

Dare Not Walk Alone
Millions of visitors come every year to the nation's oldest city, St. Augustine, Florida. They wander down the narrow streets and marvel at the balconies and horse carriages and coquina stone fort, but they leave entirely ignorant of the most important modern event in the Ancient City's history: the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

St. Augustine was a great battlefield of that movement, like Montgomery and Birmingham and Selma and Memphis--but it is the only one of those cities that does not yet have a museum dedicated to telling the civil rights story.

That is not because it lacks significance: it was the demonstrations in St. Augustine organized by Dr. Robert B. Hayling and Dr. Martin Luther King that led directly to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed racial segregation in motels and restaurants, and also job discrimination (not just against blacks, but also against women, so it has really changed the face of the...

A Different Kind of Civil Rights Film
I think many kids today see civil rights marches as sedate affairs with much banner waiving and hymn singing; they don't get why the non-violence movement was so brave, so heroic. This movie shows the kickings and beatings that marchers endured without retaliation, creating scenes that decent Americans found intolerable, thus exerting enormous pressure on politicians, like LBJ, whose White House tapes are hear on the soundtrack.

As the great struggles in our nation's history recede further into the past they are packaged into familiar textbook images and well-worn phrases, becoming comfortably distant and increasingly irrelevant to the present. Watching this film I felt that the young director, Jeremy Dean, was determined to prevent that happening to the civil rights movement. Apparently, according to the interview that appears on this DVD, Dean found himself living in a battle ground of the sixties, hearing war stories from those who were on the front lines, people who...

My favorite uncle was one of the rabbis at the pool
St. Augustine was about to celebrate its 400th birthday in 1964 and because African Americans were treated so poorly there, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. thought it was the perfect place in which to agitate. Dr. King was arrested on June 11, 1964 at Monson's Motor Lodge. It was his twelfth arrest and his only arrest in the state of Florida. It was at that point that he asked rabbis and priests to come to his aid. He wanted them to agitate at Monson's in order to raise awareness about the horrendous treatment of blacks in the nation's oldest city.

Clyde Sills (my Uncle Mickey) was my mother's younger brother and he was a rabbi. My uncle had two very small children and a wife who didn't relate to or approve of his idealism. My uncle was very torn about whether or not to go to St. Augustine, and after giving it a lot of thought, he decided he couldn't turn his back on his African-American brothers and sisters. On June 18, 1964, I was in the den of my New York home with my then...

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