Juneteenth, patriotism, and St. Augustine

Happy Juneteenth, America! This is something to celebrate, the end of legalized slavery in the United States on June 19, 1865: a day when we came closer to being a country that matches the wonderful words in our founding documents. Created Equal. We the People.

Before we were even a country in 1711, Alexander Pope crafted the line, “To err is human; to forgive, divine.”

Indeed, nothing is more human than the erring. Making mistakes comes with the territory.

Granted, not all mistakes are innocent. Some are chosen. Sometimes cruelty is chosen. And those mistakes are far more difficult to forgive, the forgiveness part being divine and all. But generally speaking, mistakes can be our best teachers — if we set our hearts right and heed what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

I think back to Martin Luther King Jr.’s first civil rights leadership with the Montgomery Bus Boycott in December 1955. His organization was called the “Montgomery Improvement Association.” I love the simplicity and earnestness of that name. And I think it’s pretty clear that their work — their act of protest — ultimately made the city and the nation better. It pushed us closer to equality. In that sense, it was patriotic.

I also admire the American aspiration stated in the preamble of the Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union…”

Not a perfect one, mind you. A “more perfect” one. The goal is, as the Beatles sang, “getting better all the time.”

To me, that is why Juneteenth is also a patriotic day. It’s not an attempt to bury shameful history, to place it in an Orwellian “memory hole” and claim it never happened. Rather, it acknowledges the sin of slavery and expresses the goal of improvement, of becoming more perfect. Nothing could be more American.

I respect people and cities and countries that look unflinchingly in the mirror at hard history and use it as a path to betterment. Montgomery, Alabama, is a great example. What an anguished history that city has around slavery. And what an extraordinary job it has done in recent years — thanks in large part to Bryan Stevenson — with the Legacy Museum. I have been there a couple of times, and it’s such an important place. It’s hard. It’s heartbreaking. But it’s ultimately hopeful.

St. Augustine, the small and beautiful city that is the focus of my forthcoming book (Original City, Original Sin: King, the Klan, and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida), took a long time to look in the mirror. There were some dark moments, some ugly human behavior that some wanted to bury, to deny, to erase. Perhaps the biggest one was on June 18, 1964, 62 years ago yesterday. That was the day when the manager of the Monson Motor Lodge — who also happened to be the President of the Florida Hotel and Motor Hotel Association — poured muriatic acid into the Monson swimming pool to chase out an integrated group of Black and white swimmers. The image was caught on camera and appeared in newspapers all over the world, from Moscow to Washington, DC. When a mortified President Lyndon Johnson saw it in on June 19, he said, “Our whole foreign policy and everything else will go to hell over this.”

It would be so easy to shy away from that history.

It’s so important not to.

As of today, we have had 91,295 days of American history since the Declaration of Independence was adopted. I consider that one — June 18, 1964 — to be of the very most important. It was an incredible day of activism that also involved the courageous witness and mass arrest of a group of rabbis who had come to St. Augustine when Dr. King contacted his friend, Rabbi Sy Dresner. That night in jail they crafted a memorable letter called “Why We Went” that read in part, “We went to St. Augustine in response to the appeal of Martin Luther King…We came because we realized that injustice in St. Augustine, as anywhere else, diminishes all of us…We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria…”

On June 19, the day President Johnson saw photos from the Monson in the paper, the Senate finally voted to adopt the Civil Rights Act of 1964, arguably the most important legislation of the 20th century.

Down in St. Augustine that day, Martin Luther King got the news outside the IceBerg restaurant. The photo taken of him at that moment is my favorite one of the civil rights leader. A mightily burdened man, he almost always seems preoccupied in photos, but in this one, his face is a veritable symphony of joy.

Yesterday, June 18, 2026, there was a public recounting of these events in St. Augustine: the screening of a powerful documentary by Clennon King; a presentation about “The Splash Heard Round the World,” by Robert Swan who, as a visiting college student, witnessed the mayhem at the Monson; a reading of the eloquent letter from jail, led by Rabbi Allen Secher (who was one of the protesters in 1964) and Avi Dresner, son of the late Rabbi Sy Dresner.

The efforts to share all of this vital American history — and to help us all grow from it — have come from many sources. Chief among them has been the courageous work of the organization known as ACCORD, led by people like Gwen Duncan and David Nolan. That work has been going on for years, and it culminated in yesterday’s presentation.

It might not have been a perfect day.

But it was a more perfect day.

Learn more about St. Augustine civil rights and my new book, Original City, Original Sin: King, The Klan, and The Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida.

Also, check out another inspirational Juneteenth story from six (or six hundred) years ago, on June 19, 2020.