Jacksonville, Florida

by Carl Blackburn
(Bal Harbour, Florida)

I was just a young kid from upstate New York when I joined the Navy in 1960. After boot camp, I was assigned to a destroyer in Mayport, the USS Myles C. Fox DDR-829.

Mayport is a little fishing village not far from the mouth of the St. Johns River where it flows into the Atlantic Ocean. Mayport Naval Air Station has a large boat basin where destroyers and aircraft carriers can be berthed.

The first thing that struck me about Jacksonville was how southern it was. For example, one weekend I was downtown and walked into a place called the Deluxe Bar. I think it was on Bay Street. I sat on a stool at the bar counter, but there was no bartender and no customers.

Then a bartender showed up through an open door at one end of the bar counter. He told me that I was in the wrong bar; I was in the "colored only" section of the Deluxe. I opened a door and walked in and there was another bar, identical to the first, with a few customers, all white sitting at the bar.

Segregation was everywhere. Public schools were separate, restrooms in the bus station had "Colored" and "White" signs, as did drinking fountains.

To top it all off, I saw a Confederate Memorial Day celebration at a park in downtown Jax. Hundreds of men were wearing Confederate uniforms and the band was playing Dixie.

I went to the Florida-Georgia football game in 1960, and both marching bands played Dixie. The oddest thing to me was hearing the Georgia band play what I knew as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", and northern song of the Civil War, but which the Georgia fans called "Glory glory to old Georgia". What a trick on old Abe Lincoln and William Tecumseh Sherman!

On top of the Jacksonville racism of the time, the USS Myles C. Fox was also segregated. Black sailors lived in the foreward part of the ship; no white sailors were in those quarters.

Modern Jacksonville is still southern, but much more enlightened. It's a good city to visit or to live in.