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4 The Point of No Return On Friday,March 27,Mrs.Malcolm Peabody,accompanied by her friend Mrs. John Burgess, arrived in St. Augustine. They had been invited, she said, to come to St. Augustine by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and they had come to be arrested. The mayor was all too willing to accommodate her. He blamed the disturbances that accompanied their appearance in the city “on northern ‘scalawags,’ . . . who came down here with the idea of getting [put] in jail.”1 On April 1, 1964, the headline of the Daytona Beach News-Journal told the story: “Mrs. Peabody Is Jailed Overnight in Sit-ins.” The reality of the racial crisis brewing in St. Augustine for more than a year had been brought directly into America’s living room and onto my doorstep . The image of Mary Peabody—wife of an Episcopal bishop, aristocratic mother of the governor of Massachusetts, and cousin of Eleanor Roosevelt—being led by armed deputies from a restaurant to be incarcerated in the county jail was news that shocked the nation and much of the civilized world. She had been arrested, Tuesday, March 31, at the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge, along with three companions, William England, a minister; Robert Hayling, a local dentist and civil rights activist; and Esther Burgess , the wife of the first black Episcopal bishop in Massachusetts. Earlier that morning Peabody had tried to attend the 10:00 a.m. Easter week communion service at Trinity Episcopal Church. The service was canceled , and when they arrived at the church a vestryman told Mrs. Pea- 66 / Dan R.Warren body, “We do not want any demonstrations of any kind.”2 Undeterred, she and her companions proceeded to the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge. When the racially mixed group was refused service, they remained at the restaurant until they were arrested. The story attracted the attention of news organizations across the country to the growing racial crisis in St. Augustine. Soon, more than fifty media representatives from all over the world had descended on the city. They were eager to send their newspapers and television stations an account of the seventy-two-year-old Peabody’s defiance of the city and state segregation laws. This act of conscience by a member of one of America’s oldest and most distinguished family’s fueled the flames of civil disobedience that had been smoldering for more than a year in St. Augustine. Photographs of policemen restraining snarling police dogs while herding the genteel grandmother to a paddy wagon created a sensation throughout the United States and beyond.The jailing of Governor Endicott Peabody’s mother focused attention on the segregation practices of the St. Augustine. Members of the Senate, who were at that moment debating the civil rights bill, took notice. Tobias Simon of Miami, and John M. Pratt and William Kunstler of New York City, attorneys for the SCLC, immediately filed petitions for writs of habeas corpus in the federal district court in Jacksonville,seeking Mary Peabody’s release from custody and removal of the case from state to federal court. They also sought the release of others arrested with her. In a well-coordinated effort, hearings were immediately scheduled before federal district court judge Bryan Simpson. Peabody, who elected to stay in jail two nights rather than post bond, was taken by police vehicle to the hearing in Jacksonville on April 2. Others arrested were William Sloan Coffin Jr., chaplain of Yale University; David Robinson, another chaplain from Yale; Robert Hayling, the defiant dentist and civil rights activist from St. Augustine; and a fifteen-year-old demonstrator named Annie Ruth Evans. Evans was one of a growing number of young people whose acts of courage in defying the racial customs of St. Augustine were fueling the growing protest against segregation in the city. At the start of the hearing, the attorney representing the city made a serious mistake. He addressed Miss Evans as “Ruthie,” a long-standing The Point of No Return / 67 and degrading practice used in most of the South to address blacks. Instantly on his feet, Tobias Simon, an expert in constitutional law, vigorously objected to the form of address. He called the court’s attention to a recent Supreme Court decision prohibiting attorneys from addressing witnesses by their first names; Judge Simpson sustained the objection. He instructed counsel to address the witness by her surname, prefixed by the respectful title of “Miss.” Most southerners used this mode...

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