Maude Burroughs Jackson: In her own words

MIDDLEBURG – From May 1963 until July 1964, protesters in St. Augustine endured physical beatings and verbal assaults. They did not fight back, however, based on Dr. Martin Luter King Jr’s explicit non-violence instructions at the time.
By suffering through the violence and hate-filled rhetoric that embodied our nation’s Civil Rights Era, the protesters’ ability to literally turn the other cheek garnered national sympathy. This was a major factor in the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
A young woman from Clay County bravely marched in St. Augustine with those protestors, met Dr. King, and went on to inspire generations.
Maude Burroughs Jackson was interviewed by Clay Today’s Mary Jo McTammany during January and February of 2007. This is her story in her own words:
“This may not be for your newspaper, but just think of three black men going and invading a Klan meeting - Dr. Hayling, Little Jimmy Jackson and Big Jimmy Jackson. Oh my God, did they beat those men. They beat them up. I still can’t figure out why they did that. I think what they wanted to do was to see if some of the people claiming to be Klansman befriending us and giving them information really were what they claimed or just deceiving and tricking them - find out if they were friends or enemies, to see for themselves. Little Jimmy still makes a joke out of it. He says that as long as they were beating us up about the head and everywhere, he was all right. But when they started talking about castrating him, he knew it was time to run. He laughs about it. He dropped by here last week. He still works. He drives a school bus for the high school over there, and he brings kids to Middleburg High.
“They bombed Dr. Hayling’s house. He had to leave St. Augustine, or they probably would have killed him. I didn’t think life should be the way it was. I just thought things should be different. It was a good thing I had the Movement to work with; otherwise, I probably would have been in jail anyway. Because when I was younger and saw a sign that said “white only,” I went there – to that restroom, to that water fountain. When we went downtown in Jacksonville to shop, they would have a filthy, tiny bathroom for blacks. I would take one look and know I couldn’t go in there, it was too filthy. Those bathrooms weren’t cleaned for weeks at a time. I would go right in the “white only” door. Just act like I couldn’t read or didn’t know any better. And if I wanted a drink, I would get water from the white fountain just because it was clean.
“The three things that I experienced that I thought were inhumane were the dogs, the cattle prods, and that chicken pen in the full Florida summertime sun. When the St. Augustine police arrested demonstrators, they used dogs and cattle prods. It wasn’t easy in St. Augustine. The public didn’t see, hear or know all the things that went on. I wasn’t that concerned about eating out in restaurants. You can keep your food. I didn’t need to go to your restaurant. I can eat before I leave home. Besides, if someone in a restaurant is upset at you, they could spit in that food. But, if I am here spending money in your store and I’ve got to go to the restroom, and sometimes we would have walked 30-40 minutes from Mom’s house to get to downtown Jacksonville – I have got to use the restroom. I used to ride the Greyhound bus some weekends to go up to Augusta or Tampa. I was only 19 or 20 years old and felt like I was grown up and could go wherever I wanted. But I had to sit at the back of that bus and was not allowed to use the restroom on the bus. When you finally get to the bus station, you have to go to the colored restroom – which had not been cleaned since the station was built. Just nasty. That was the thing that bothered me the most – those bathrooms.
“Dr. King always said there were good white people who just didn’t know or realize what our everyday lives were like. He never put everybody in the same category. He would always tell us there were good, well-meaning white people. He said in his sermons that when good white people see and begin to understand the injustices, they will bring about change. That’s what the Movement was all about – bringing people together. So many white people tried to help, to comfort. Even during the sit-ins, there were just regular white people in St. Augustine who would come and join in. They would just sit down at the counter, and because they wouldn’t serve us - they wouldn’t order anything. There were some whites that participated in the marches. I would have thought they would have been afraid for their lives, too.
“There were some people that I surely would like to see again. During the spring break in ’64 I met some Ivy League students from Dartmouth and Smith College. That’s when we marched in Tallahassee one day, then came back to St.Augustine to march and demonstrate and get arrested the next day. Bill Jacoby, I’ll never forget him and a girl named Faith. They kept saying, ‘Come and leave from here. We will help you go to school at Smith.’ But I knew that I would stay right here with my family. I was at home for the summer vacation in 1963 when the children were arrested, and four of them who refused to cease participation in the Civil Rights Movement were sent to reform school. As I understand it, the children decided and the parents supported them. In a meeting with one of the girls last year, she said that if she had it all to do over again, she would do it exactly the same way. I really didn’t talk much about the Movement and what we were doing in St. Augustine when I was home in the summers. And my Mom was very upset when she found out I had been arrested the first time. The rest of the family just figured – well, that’s Maude. When I went to jail, it was Easter weekend, and I, of course, didn’t turn up for the family get-together. I was sitting in the St. Augustine jail that Sunday when they came and said, “Maude Burroughs, you have visitors.” I didn’t even know we could have visitors.
“It was Mama and my brother Eddie. Eddie was a minister by then, and I think that is why they let me have visitors. Anyway, Mama was there to bail me out. She had seen the arrest at the Monson Hotel on the television news and thought at the time that one of the girls looked a lot like me but … she didn’t really believe it until I didn’t show up for Sunday dinner. I had to explain to her that I couldn’t let her do that because I had been assigned a specific time to spend in jail, and then the Movement would bail me out. By the time the visit was over, she had come to accept it and, like the rest of the family, decided, “Maude’s just going to do what Maude’s going to do.
“Some of those days were good days. Some were bad. Colored people just needed to know they had the opportunity to do things with their lives. It is sad, though, that after laws were passed – people didn’t even take advantage of it. It was just the idea – I can do it if I want to do it. If I need to eat, I can get a decent meal. If I need to sleep there, I can. To know if they needed to, they could. It makes me impatient with young people today who don’t take advantage of their opportunities. Oh, you just don’t know. And when children have the opportunity to better their conditions and will not do it – it upsets me more than you can imagine. They just don’t understand that it hasn’t always been this way. You have to earn respect to get respect….you can’t just sit back.”
“I look at some of the kids – they don’t want anything especially if they have to work toward getting it. Life can just drift on and they’ll just drift right on with it. I tell them – I started working when I was nine years old. I deserve everything I have. At least, I applied myself. I didn’t sit back and wait and wait. I went with my sister-in-law to clean newly-built houses in Orange Park. That’s how I earned money to go to college. At the time, I had no hint of the sheer power of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s lasting influence on the culture. Even when he won the Nobel Peace Prize I just didn’t realize that I was sitting on the floor in that little office in St. Augustine talking with a man who was destined to become a bigger than life legend. He was just so down to earth. To him, the Nobel Prize and the money was more about what it meant for the Movement than for the man. One day in front of the fence outside the office he said, “We all earned this together.” He never took personal credit. His humility made us see him as a man, not a legend.”
“I read a poem once that reminds me of him and I have made it my personal poem of life. It is entitled “Myself” and written by Edgar A. Guest:
I have to live with myself and so
I want to be fit for myself to know.
I want to be able as days go by,
always to look myself straight in the eye;
I don’t want to stand with the setting sun
and hate myself for the things I have done.
I don’t want to keep on a closet shelf
a lot of secrets about myself
and fool myself as I come and go
into thinking no one else will ever know
the kind of person I really am,
I don’t want to dress up myself in sham.
I want to go out with my head erect
I want to deserve all men’s respect;
but here in the struggle for fame and wealth
I want to be able to like myself.
I don’t want to look at myself and know
I am bluster and bluff and empty show.
I never can hide myself from me;
I see what others may never see;
I know what others may never know,
I never can fool myself and so,
whatever happens, I want to be
self-respecting and conscience free.”
“All of my things from that period of my life were destroyed when we were over in Okinawa. They were at Daddy’s house, and they say that the rats got in them. All my mementos from high school and college were lost. When you live in the country, rats and roaches are things you expect. Whenever they found evidence of rats in a trunk or drawer – they just burned everything in it. I did buy some of his sermons, and I always share them with people, but they never bring them back. Dr. King was arrested at least twice that I know of because I was arrested then, too.”
Maude Burroughs Jackson still lives on the property she grew up on in the Hilltop Community, located in Middleburg. Her father and Grant Foreman were pioneers in that area. Today, Hilltop is still an almost exclusively Black community and the only such one in Clay County.”