Extraordinary Stories. Little-Known Characters. Uncomfortable Truths.
Original City, Original Sin
King, The Klan, and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida
2026
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"Martin Dobrow reveals St. Augustine as a crucible of the Civil Rights Movement, where national injustices met local courage. Told through the actions of everyday people and known heroes, he shows both the triumphs and challenges of answering history’s call. Woven with journalistic rigor and lyrical wonder, this is a timely and beautiful book.”
Ken Burns
“Superbly written, 'Original City, Original Sin' is a compelling history that powerfully and poignantly captures the fundamental humanity and courage of those who stepped forward to challenge the racist mores of the segregated South. The intense civil rights struggle in St. Augustine, Florida, finally receives its due as a landmark chapter in the Black freedom struggle.”
David J. Garrow, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
“Important, riveting, and insightful. Martin Dobrow has written a deeply engaging and well-researched study of St. Augustine, Florida, one of the crucial sites of civil rights struggle in the 20th century. 'Original City, Original Sin' recovers the story of how America’s oldest city attracted the Klan, grassroots civil rights activists, journalists, and Martin Luther King Jr. to the front lines of an ongoing struggle to redeem the national soul. Dramatic and well told.”
Peniel Joseph, Founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, University of Texas; author of Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution
“It’s not easy to find bold new ways to write about Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights struggle, but Martin Dobrow has done it. With painstaking research and splendid prose, he paints a vivid portrait of King and the people surrounding him at a pivotal time in King’s life and in our nation’s history. I couldn’t be more excited about this book.”
Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of King: A Life
"Dobrow carries readers on a journey through a local story with nationwide implications… Original City is
a page-turner filled with insights about living with and defying the violence of Jim Crow America.”
Robyn Spencer-Antoine, author of The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland
“There are book manuscripts and proposals that I read out of a sense of collegiality with fellow authors and others that I read out of intense curiosity and interest. Marty Dobrow’s fits both categories. By the time I finished I had only one thought. I want more, and I can’t wait to read this complete book. It will brilliantly illuminate an important and overshadowed chapter in the civil rights history of America.”
David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, New York Times bestselling biographer
“It’s a breathtaking and revelatory excavation of a lost time in civil rights history. The segregated struggles in St. Augustine had been left in the shadows by historians, but Dobrow, through interviews, site visits, and lively, empathetic prose, has illuminated the city’s heroes and villains and brought it all back to life. I will remember Dr. Robert Hayling’s spirit for the rest of my life.”
Patrick Parr, author of The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age and Malcolm Before X
“Original City, Original Sin is a profound and vitally important book. With the benefit of hundreds of interviews and years of archival research, Martin Dobrow gives us a new insight into one of the most important – but far too little known –chapters of the Civil Rights era, the bloody and often terrifying struggle to desegregate America’s original city. In doing so, he provides a complex and fascinating portrait of some of the individuals who swirled around Dr. Martin Luther King during the St. Augustine campaign, from a closeted white peace activist (who would go on to become a pioneer in the alternative newspaper movement), to a black dentist and Air Force veteran who braved Klan beatings to bring justice to his adopted hometown, to a teenage girl who missed the start of high school because she was in prison after a sit-in. Here, on vivid display, is the best and the worst of America, a story both haunting and uplifting.”
Matthew Goodman, New York Times bestselling author of Eighty Days and Paris Undercover
“Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Movement campaign in St. Augustine, Florida, America’s oldest city, has long been an overlooked chapter in Civil Rights history. But it should be as indelible as Birmingham and Selma. Thankfully, Martin Dobrow elevates it to its rightful place. With stunning detail and poignant clarity, Original City, Original Sin tells the inspiring, often chilling story of St. Augustine as a crucial battleground in our nation’s long battle for racial justice.”
Mark Updegrove, President & CEO of the LBJ Foundation and ABC News Presidential Historian
Meet The Heroes of St. Augustine
Martin Dobrow reveals St. Augustine as a crucible of the Civil Rights Movement, where national injustices met local courage. Told through the actions of everyday people and known heroes, he shows both the triumphs and challenges of answering history's call. Woven with journalistic rigor and lyrical wonder, this is a timely and beautiful book. - Ken Burns
Through the years, wise people have warned us to heed history’s call.
Santayana famously said, “Those who refuse to remember their past are condemned to repeat it.”
“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner wrote. “It’s not even past.”
George Orwell’s haunting words from 1984 echo through our modern day: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
And so, St. Augustine—America’s oldest city, a precious place—speaks to us profoundly here in the year of our nation’s 250th birthday. This is a city named after an African saint, a person of color. It is a city that had the first freed community of former slaves on American soil, but it is also a city where slaves were brought to future America well ahead of 1619 (and its famed “Project”). It is a city that fought on both sides of the Civil War. It is a city that has, even now, an open-air pavilion in its central plaza known as the “Slave Market.” And it is a city that in 1964 became a violent battleground for civil rights, involving Martin Luther King, the Ku Klux Klan, and an extraordinary cast of characters.
The Research Journey
This is a story borne of thousands of stories over almost half a century.
In a way it began on April 4, 1968, the day of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Even though I was only 7 at the time, the moment was indelible, and it is the first anecdote I share in the book.
In another way it began in 1999 when I started teaching at Springfield College. A few years later, I learned that Dr. King had been Springfield’s commencement speaker in June 1964, right at the height of his fame and the peak of the civil rights movement. When I began to look into that story, it became clear that this was a major moment not just of local history, but of American history.
And in still another way it began in 2013 when I visited St. Augustine, Florida, for the first of more than a dozen extensive research trips. I conducted hundreds of interviews, many of them well over an hour. I transcribed almost everything myself. I read and read and read some more. I watched a slew of films about civil rights. I visited civil rights museums and archives across the country. I perched myself in front of the microfilm reader at the St. Augustine Historical Society for such long sessions that I emerged positively seasick on a few occasions.
I found inspiration galore from some of the extraordinary people I met along the way. But I also encountered material that left me reeling, buckling my spirit.
People have asked me if this is a book about Dr. King, and I have always said that it’s not. There are some extraordinary biographies about King. (Check out the works of Jonathan Eig and David Garrow, for instance—you will learn a ton about MLK.) In a sense, Original City does feature King as the proverbial “sun,” but the book is far more about the planets that orbited around him in St. Augustine. This crew of people, Black and white, young and old, gay and straight, became a force for American democracy the likes of which we have seldom seen. It was by diving deeply into their stories, that I found my own, the story of a lifetime.
