Publication day for the cicada
This is my 24,041st day on the planet. Exactly three have been publication days.
One was in late 1996 with Going Bigtime: The Spectacular Rise of UMass Basketball.
Fourteen years later, in 2010, came Knocking on Heaven’s Door: Six Minor Leaguers in Search of the Baseball Dream.
Today, 16 years later, No. 3 has arrived—Original City, Original Sin: King, the Klan, and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida.
I write books according to the “cicada plan” – essentially 13-17 years underground, before emerging to begin singing (though not, I assure my amazing wife, to be mating and laying eggs).
This one has been a journey, by far the biggest work of my life. I want to observe the milestone by briefly revisiting 10 stops along the way:
#1 – The assassination (April 4, 1968)
It was a horrible memory, but it’s clearly connected to the book, which would form in my mind decades later. I was only 7, but I remember the special report about Dr. King’s assassination on our black-and-white television because of my mother’s wrenching reaction to the news. “Oh my God!” she called out three times in the most stricken voice I had ever heard.
#2 – The graduation list (late 2003)
Relatively early in the Internet era and relatively early in my teaching career at Springfield College, I stumbled across a list of commencement speakers. I didn’t recognize many of them. I did recognize this one: “Martin Luther King, Jr., 1964.”
3 – Microfilm adventure #1 (early 2004, basement of the library at the University of Massachusetts)
The FBI files were vast, disorganized, and often redacted so thoroughly that it was impossible to make sense of them. But as I panned through them for hours, I found some occasional gold. One such moment was the memo on April 2, 1964, about instructions to former Springfield College President Glenn Olds to renege on the invitation to King, ostensibly to “save that institution from embarrassment because of King’s connections and character.” That intensive pressure campaign, coupled with King’s arrest in St. Augustine on June 11—three days before the commencement—was a double drama that ultimately launched me on this quest.
#4 -- The first trip to St. Augustine (May 2013)
I had started writing about this civil rights saga as early as 2004 (a lengthy cover story in the Springfield College alumni magazine), but it didn’t blossom into the big project for a number of years. When I first set foot in St. Augustine, though, I felt the dangerous tug to write a book for the only valid reason ever to do so: you can’t not do it. The story was just too compelling. The oldest city in America, loaded with beauty, and graciousness, and contradictions. The Slave Market downtown. The incredible suppression of an uncomfortable story.
#5 – The Civil Rights Summit (April 2014), followed by the article in The Atlantic (June 2014)
This gathering for the ages, pulled together by Mark Updegrove of the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, included keynote speakers like President Barack Obama, former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, as well as civil rights icons like Bernice King, John Lewis, etc. Around the edges of the conference, I got to conduct a lengthy interview with one of the major players in St. Augustine, Ambassador Andrew Young. This included a memorably raucous conversation in an elevator with Mavis Staples. Two months later, I had my first national publication on civil rights, an article in The Atlantic. That led to a lot of good things. Chief among them was a wonderful email from David Garrow, who had won the Pulitzer Prize for a book about Martin Luther King in the 1980s.
#6 – Robert Hayling: the phone call (July 23, 2015), and the funeral (February 20, 2016)
Dr. Hayling was the heart of the civil rights movement in St. Augustine: a man who was vilified, terrorized, and almost burned alive at a Klan rally. He had grown an understandable distrust of outsiders, and did not return call after call after call from me. I tried everything. Finally, one morning when I was in a noisy hotel lobby in St. Augustine, my cell phone buzzed with “Dr. R.B. Hayling.” I made the fateful decision to take the call out in the parking lot, where it was absolutely blazing hot. I asked him how long he would continue to fight for civil rights that day, and the 85-year-old Hayling said, “Until the last day of my life.” We spoke for two unforgettable hours, after which my shirt was soaked with sweat. Hayling died five months later. When they planned his memorial service in St. Augustine in February 2016, I just had to be there. It was a beautiful and heartbreaking tribute that will live with me for all my days.
#7 – The first phone call with Irv Cheney (February 2018)
I have written about Irv elsewhere in this Substack, and he is the central focus of my accompanying audio series, THREE BY FIFTEEN: A Civil Rights Podcast. The final episode dropped today:
I assumed that Irv was long dead by the time I appealed to his daughter Jeannie with a detailed message. She returned my call with these unforgettable words: “I’d be happy to talk with you about my Dad, but would you rather talk to him yourself?” Thus began one of the most extraordinary relationships of my life.
#8 – The student trip to St. Augustine (March 2019)
I co-chaperoned a number of student trips to civil rights sites in the south. One of those was to St. Augustine in 2019, where my students and I were able to meet with a number of veterans of the movement. Three of these were women well into their 90s: Cora Tyson and Janie Price—both of whom had hosted Martin Luther King, Jr. when he was moved from house to house for his own protection in 1964--and Barbara Vickers, a neighbor and friend of Dr. Hayling’s who later designed the “Foot Soldiers Monument” in St. Augustine. (Note: Mrs. Tyson and Mrs. Vickers are both still alive at 103!) We also met with James Jackson, the last surviving member of the attack on four Black men at the 1963 Klan rally. It was one of the most powerful educational moments I have ever witnessed.
#9 – All the solitary time
I don’t even want to know how many hours went into transcribing the hundreds of interviews (old school: play, type, rewind—not AI), and all of the hours sitting in front of the microfilm machine at the St. Augustine Historical Society reading and typing hundreds of pages of notes on the non-digitized copies of the St. Augustine Record, etc. There were trips to archives all across the country. Piles and piles of books to read as I doggedly climbed the very steep learning curve. It’s time I will never get back. It was totally worth it.
#10 – The team effort from the most extraordinary team
My goodness. I come away from this experience with so much gratitude for so many: my wife, Missy-Marie Montgomery (who dug into this project with such tenacity, fascination, and spectacular editing), my family, my friends, so many people in St. Augustine (David Nolan and Gwen Duncan and many others), many more at Springfield College, the team at Cambridge University Press (chief among them, my editor, Cecelia Cancellaro—whose name I finally learned how to spell correctly), the Metamorphosis crew of Jeremy and Lillian, the rallying support of civil rights scholars from David Garrow to Jonathan Eig to Ken Burns.
As the cicada finally emerges today, my primary song is this: “Wow. Thank you, one and all!”
Comments