• FLORIDA TIMES UNION ARTICLE   10/05/08

In Jeremy Cox’s review of my book “If It Takes All Summer” (Sunday, Oct. 5, 2008) He describes the book as “cathartic” but a failed effort to “pull it off” in attempting to stitch together an analysis of the racial strife that occurred in St. Augustine in 1963-64.  The failure, in his view, is by not taking King’s side against Governor Bryant’s “in a legal battle pitting public safety against the marcher’s first amendment rights”. Despite my “liberal leanings”, he writes, my failure to “recoil” when presented with the opportunity to take the side against the racist positions of the past is the reason.

The failure, I suggest, is a revisionist attempt to view the civil rights movement in St. Augustine in strictly “Black” and “White” hues. It has been 44 years since that event took place. The blurring of these events can be explained by simple demographics: more than half of all Americans alive today were not even born when the civil rights movement took place. Freedom to protest and petition the government for redress of grievances under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is not absolute. It yields to the “clear and present” danger test. As Chief Justice Holmes wrote, the First Amendment does not protect one who yells fire in a crowded theater. Marching at night, with small children in the van, through the narrow dark streets of the old city of St. Augustine, presented me with “a clear and present danger” to the demonstrators. My order directing the demonstrators to take a different route, one that we could protect, was the correct moral and legal decision.

Andrew Young, King’s chief Lieutenant, who headed the march that night, admitted to me after the hearing that they were wrong in placing children in the march that night. The one thing, he said, they could not justify was placing young children in danger.

Apparently the reviewer believes the potential death of small children is a small price to pay for seizing the opportunity to take King’s side and establish my “liberal” credentials by ignoring the “clear and present” danger that existed that evening.   I need no catharsis to cleanse by soul or to engage in revisionist history to “pull off” a correct moral and legal analysis of that tragic event.

Dan R. Warren, Author