St. Augustine, Florida, is a city of firsts. The oldest continuously occupied European-founded city in the United States is also the birthplace of our country’s first black child and the site of the first racially mixed marriage. It was the first sanctuary city for runaway slaves who won their freedom by converting to Catholicism and enlisting in the Spanish military. Waterfront Fort Mose is also our promised land’s first free slave settlement.
Given this honorable heritage, it’s perhaps surprising to discover that following a series of firebombings, shootings, beatings, and death threats in the early 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. called St. Augustine “the most lawless community in which we have ever worked.”
In frustration, King reached out on June 17, 1964, to a Reform rabbis' convention in Atlantic City, seeking support for his Southern Christian Leadership Council. He was eager to turn back racist mobs attacking Black activists trying to integrate local beaches. The civil rights icon also wanted to defend colleagues like Andrew Young, who were beaten back as they attempted to lead protests to St. Augustine’s historic slave market.
What followed next was, at the time, the largest arrest of rabbis in American history, and perhaps a high point in the alliance of Black and Jewish civil rights activists ahead of the historic signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Among the 16 rabbis immediately answering King’s call was 29-year-old Allen Secher. Earlier, I flew to Chicago to meet Secher, who has the bittersweet distinction of outliving his 15 fellow St. Augustine rabbis. He and his wife, Ina, both 91, now lecture and teach widely on topics ranging from the Holocaust to elder independence.
Following a series of subsequent meetings, they accepted my invitation to join me on a June flight back to St. Augustine for the 62nd anniversary of his arrest. Unlike better-known civil rights landmark cities such as Selma, Birmingham, and Memphis, the St. Augustine story largely remains a footnote. Secher and the families of the other 15 rabbis want a new generation to know what was won - and to feel the full weight of what is now being dismantled.
To mark the occasion and to help make that story better known, I have co-written and produced a one-man show, When the Rabbis Came to Town. Adam Bell stars as Secher at its premiere on June 17 at St. Augustine’s Waterworks Theater, after which the rabbi will join Bell for a post-show audience discussion. The play will also be staged on July 13 at Temple Am Shalom in Glencoe, Illinois.
The play will revisit a story that reaches all the way back to the day Secher was cut from the high school golf team because Jews were banned from the local country club’s course. It also touches high points like his Brandeis days when he escorted trustee Eleanor Roosevelt in his beat-up 1947 Chevy during a four-day campus visit.
Allen Secher meets Martin Luther King Jr.
He first met King in Albany, Georgia, in 1962. By then, a rabbi ordained at Hebrew Union College, Secher, and other ministers and rabbis were arrested after a protest in front of the Albany city hall and locked up in a packed cell with a broken toilet. Bailed out after a week wading in sewage up to his ankles, he received a hero’s welcome back home in Long Island.
Secher moved on to a new congregation in Mexico City, which went well until the day he began organizing a food drive for the homeless. “Do what you want, “ a local official told him. “Of course, if you go ahead, we’ll shoot you.”
By the time he answered King’s emergency appeal, Secher knew how to pack light for the segregated South, bringing along just a toothbrush. Allegedly tipped off by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Ku Klux Klan members tailed Secher and his fellow rabbis on the drive from the Jacksonville airport to St. Augustine.
They were met with a standing ovation by King and the congregation at the local AME church before spending the night with families in the black Lincolnville district.
“Our hosts gave their marital bed to myself and Rabbi Hanan Sills,” said Secher.
The following afternoon, June 18, the rabbis and Al Vorspan, head of Reform Judaism’s Religious Action Center, were arrested for staging a prayer service protest in the parking lot of the segregated Monson Motel. Nearly at the same time, black and white teens were busted for attempting to integrate the adjacent motel pool. The latter incident made global headlines after the motel owner appeared to pour hydrochloric acid into the pool to burn the protesters.
The rabbis and teens were driven to the St. Augustine jail by special sheriff’s deputies recruited from the Klan.
Not everyone in the local Jewish community welcomed the rabbis’ efforts. That evening, the angry president of a local synagogue burst into the defendants’ packed 100-degree cell. After addressing them as “kike rabbis,” he urged the men, now stripped down to their underwear, to tone down their prayers lest they disturb the sleeping deputies.
Secher said that later that night, he suggested they write what would become their Why We Went letter, which was started in jail and published on June 19, 1964.
“We came because we could not stand quietly by our brother’s blood. We had done that too many times before,” they wrote. “We came as Jews who remember the millions of faceless people who stood quietly, watching the smoke rise from Hitler’s crematoria. We came because we know that, second only to silence, the greatest danger to man is loss of faith in man’s capacity to act.
On June 19, 1964, the Senate, besieged with constituent calls after the St. Augustine incidents, passed Lyndon Johnson’s long-delayed Civil Rights Act 73 to 27. The president signed the bill on July 2, with King looking on.
While many Jews look back with pride on the Jewish contributions to a desegregated South, some of the rabbis, like Secher’s roommate, Hanan Sills, discovered targets on their backs. On returning to Milwaukee, he found the windows of his home and synagogue had been shattered, and there were bullet holes in his car. Both he and his children received a series of death threats.
In a blistering editorial, the B’nai Brith Messenger accused the 16 rabbis of “trading shul for pool, literally wading into the rights battle… with no yarmulkes. Martin Luther King gets better mileage out of some of our rabbis than do our congregations.”
'Defending what we achieved'
“Johnson’s bill signing in July 1964 triggered racist bombings of the newly desegregated Monson Motel,” Secher remembered. “In effect, the new law of the land was the beginning of a battle aimed at defending what we achieved.”
Since his jail time in St. Augustine, Secher has dedicated his life to tikkun olam, repairing the world. He served as a rabbi in Los Angeles and Chicago. In addition to producing an award-winning Auschwitz documentary and advocating for diversity and inclusion, he worked especially hard in Montana, where he made a failed attempt to retire with Ina in 2000.
For a time, as the state’s sole rabbi, he worked successfully with congregations statewide on a host of civil rights and anti-racism issues. One of his antagonists in his new hometown, Whitefish, was the inflammatory Richard Spencer, the alt-right white nationalist and one of the leaders of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Sitting with Allen Secher at 91, I kept thinking about what it costs a person to show up - not once, but across a lifetime. The Why We Went letter he helped draft in a sweltering jail cell remains one of the most dignified and prescient documents of that pivotal era. “We do not underestimate what yet remains to be done, in the north as well as the south,” they wrote. “In the battle against racism, we have participated here in only a skirmish.”
Sixty-two years later, the victories those rabbis helped secure are under open assault. Secher knows this. It is why he came back to St. Augustine, why he agreed to have his story told on a stage, why he will stand in front of that jail on June 18 and read the letter aloud again.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.