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Journal of e-Media Studies, Volume 7 Issue 2: Accessible Civil Rights Heritage

Clip 5. Sipping the Sulfur Water: WCKT’s "St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent; Report 1.”

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Insurgent Leisure, Aquatic Angst: Postwar Newsfilm, Civil Rights, and Coastal Imaginaries

by Stephen Charbonneau
Florida Atlantic University

Abstract
Introduction
Fugitive Visions of Florida
>Newsfilm geographies
>Archival material and its challenges
>The scenic and the topical
>Time and space
>"Harvest of Shame"
>Coastal versus urban
“Trouble” in Delray Beach and WTVJ’s “News at Noon” (1956)
>Insurgency
>The wade-ins
>Camera as witness
Florida’s Birmingham: WCKT’s “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” (1964)
>Grassroots resistance
>A history lesson
>Florida's Birmingham
>From exposition to observation
>Elevating the crisis
>The weight of screen time
>Aquatic civil disobedience
>An insurgent presence
Conclusion: Kneeling in the Surf
Introduction
This study is the result of a close analysis of newsfilms made accessible through Dartmouth College’s Media Ecology Project (MEP). This database of digitized historic newsfilm documenting the daily struggles of the civil rights movement includes a wealth of footage from the Sunshine State, showcasing its prominent position in this history of social change. These archival sights and sounds register a deep history of resistance to racial segregation and inequality as well as local attempts to mediate and mitigate such struggles to maintain the prominent position of white civic elites. Over the last year and a half, MEP’s database made it possible for me to review South Floridian newsfilm from the 1950s to the 1980s. This essay explores four newsfilms from this collection, which features a few of the most prominent “wade-ins” along the coast of South Florida during the fifties and sixties. This work is only beginning, and it has been made possible thanks to the efforts of Mark J. Williams, MEP’s director, and John P. Bell, who provided invaluable support in digital curation. The contours of this essay are, in part, informed by the digital affordances of the annotation system, whereby key moments from these archival newsfilms are highlighted and placed in a broader context. This digital pedagogical approach dovetails with a critical stance that insists on reading such newsfilms against the grain, unpacking their mythologies, and resituating them within local history.
Fugitive Visions of Florida
Colonial visions of Florida consistently offer us a tangled scene. Michael Grunwald’s statement that the Everglades is “not quite land and not quite water, but a soggy confusion of the two” is certainly apt.¹ Floridian imaginaries have been frequently represented as not quite paradise and not quite a swampy nether world, but an unruly blend of both. Elizabeth B. Heuer has highlighted this tension in midnineteenth-century depictions of Florida as “a lush tropical paradise” and “an inhospitable land of death and decay.”² The former image serviced settler colonialism, while the latter was indicative of northern condescension and racist theories of “social evolution.”³ Such tensions continue to inform our collective perception of the Sunshine State and its entanglement with broader histories of racial emancipation, post–World War II modernity, and transatlantic cultures.
More than most regions of the United States—or as much as any—Florida compels us to consider its place in these histories on its own terms, with its contradictory qualities featured rather than forgotten. Revisiting Floridian histories means first and foremost recognizing stories of racial resistance and the “fugitivity” that surfaces from within a Black Atlantic perspective.⁴ Here I am explicitly following the lead of Jillian Hernandez in her recent article, “Fugitive State: Toward a Cimarrona Approach for Florida Cultural Studies,” in which she observes that the “role of Black Floridians in advancing the project of Black liberation, both in previous eras and the present day . . . has been overshadowed by dominant representations of Florida as a site of racial violence and victimization.”⁵
While recognizing that this problem is not completely “unwarranted,” she warns that the “ubiquity” of such representations “overshadows radical histories and marginalized figures, often Black women, who have the potential to inform contemporary race struggles.”⁶
Newsfilm geographies
Recent developments in film and media studies are encouraging scholars to consider media practices within specific local configurations, offering the potential to counter, complement, or otherwise revise dominant narratives. The enhanced availability of historical moving images from throughout the twentieth century, thanks to the digitization efforts of regional archives, has opened new lines of inquiry for film and media scholars, allowing us to thicken and deepen our appreciation for how local struggles were spoken about and relayed in real time. Close examination of such newsfilm and television news footage necessitates the tracing of peculiar continuities across multiple registers, traversing the local, regional, and hemispheric.
Such complex “newsfilm geographies”—following the editors of Rediscovering US Newsfilm—offer us a methodological approach that is suited for the study of South Floridian depictions in a wide array of moving images. Such an undertaking is daunting considering the region’s admixture of racial segregation and deep history of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous resistance, as well as the pan-American visions propagated by “white civic elites.”⁷ Newsfilm and television news producers working during the upheavals of the sixties negotiated these intersecting and conflicting historical forces in ways that often had to acknowledge insurgent acts while cementing the paternalistic legacy of white oversight for some time to come.
But we must also admit that the very gaps and oversights in Floridian representations highlighted by Hernandez are mirrored in the digitized archival newsfilms that are the impetus for this study. The simple fact of the matter is that these newsfilms are not the be-all and end-all. They are not accurate indices of the realities they pretend to represent. They bear the weight of the intrinsic biases of midtwentieth-century, postwar America and, as a result, they certainly do not register the voices of the marginalized and the radical histories Hernandez insists need telling.
Archival material and its challenges
Furthermore, one must always bear in mind the contingencies of the research process and the archival practices of cataloging and organizing these digital materials. Very often programs are interrupted or broken up into distinct segments that are not determined by their original broadcast. The visual and aural quality of so many duplications—from kinescope (a filmed record of live television broadcasts) to VHS to digital—often leaves much to be desired, perhaps rendering compositions or narrations abstract, muffled, staticky, and hard to comprehend without multiple viewing sessions and careful transcriptions. Findings are also dependent not only on what is available but on one’s search terms. Different search terms yield different results, and that very fact haunts one’s ability to make any useful generalizations about what one finds or is lucky enough to encounter.
And yet by acknowledging the limitations of these archival objects as well as my own vantage point, we set the stage for a more productive conversation about the knowledge and questions generated by this research. These drawbacks undercut our ability to craft a linear historical narrative or even an unperturbed argument concerning such artifacts. As Katherine Groo states: “We do not (or not always) need to recuperate objects and identities to do justice to them. After all, historical recuperation can do its own kind of harm.”⁸ Proceeding with caution, within a specified geohistorical frame, we can offer some attenuated insights that both tease out the problems of studying historical newsfilm and underscore the contradictions and uniquely Floridian tensions that prevail within particular locally produced programs.
The scenic and the topical
Consider, for instance, the legacy of actualities as a precursor to newsreels and later newsfilm. The bifurcation of the scenic and the topical that film historians recognize in actualities is dissolved in the discursive and aesthetic imaginings of Floridian newsfilm. Whereas “scenic” was typically associated with the presentation of spectacular geographies and environments, “topical” offered depictions of current events.⁹ No doubt the boundary between these two tendencies is intrinsically imprecise. But such imprecision is especially prominent in archival newsfilm featuring the region of South Florida and its histories. The transatlantic status of the region and the appeal of our shorelines thoroughly mark the presentation of current events to local audiences.
The scenic is often topical, whether the issue at hand is climate, housing, or the economy. Newsfilm coverage of civil rights protests during the sixties equally imbricates the ecological with the informational. Direct actions contest the cruel borders of racial segregation, where seaside vistas and hotel amenities are explicitly marked as white spaces of leisure and recreation. Put simply, the background often intrudes into the foreground. In this manner, the Floridian newsfilms reviewed for this study are truly “capacious,” a label Cooper, Levavy, Melnick, and Williams affix to the newsfilm as a whole, recognizing it as a televisual genre that “is not regimented by the length of a ten-minute reel, but rather by the clock time of the television schedule.”¹⁰ While the latter use of the term refers to the newsfilm’s alignment with a different temporal regime, my extension of it here speaks to the unique constellation of historical, cultural, and archival questions that converge in such moving images.
Time and space
My initial review of MEP’s holdings of South Floridian newsfilm was overwhelmed by their breadth and range, the earliest of which were made in the 1950s and the latest in the 1980s. But upon closer reflection, this body of work yielded a clear set of motifs, patterns, and racial logic around events central to the history of civil rights in Florida and the manner of their representation in televisual news form. Many of the programs featured in this collection were anchored by Wayne Fariss of WCKT-TV (now WSVN-TV) and included programs such as Outlook, which offered special reports on the events of the day. As I will elaborate further in a series of examples and clips, the tense of such specials was not determined by the logic that is often associated with live broadcast television. Rather, there is a distinct documentary conveyance of a proximate past: a feeling of the events’ intrinsic nearness (spatial and temporal) to the life of the anchor and the audience (conveying a strong sense of locality), but with a greater degree of distance and reflection than one normally can achieve from more traditional live broadcasts.
“Harvest of Shame”
In this sense, Edward R. Murrow, Fred Friendly, and David Lowe’s Harvest of Shame (1960) offers us both an example of this type of televisual documentary and a model, moving forward, for productions after 1960, and that famous program’s depiction of migrant life in Florida only helps secure its pertinence to these newsfilms, especially the Outlook report “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent.” The broad shape of these programs prefigures or echoes Harvest of Shame—depending on the broadcast date—in their paternalistic advocacy for resolution and a “commonsense” cessation to the conflicts unfolding across streets, schools, fields, and sandy shores.
Coastal versus urban
Nevertheless, in a deviation from Harvest of Shame, there was a clear coalescing in the Miami Dade College Wolfson Archive around the coastal and the urban, shorelines on the one hand and cities on the other. Whereas the former refers to coverage of demonstrations and direct actions in coastal communities such as St. Augustine and Delray Beach, the latter centered the persistent plight of segregation in the urban depths of Miami, where voices of liberation, moderation, and white supremacy all mingled.
But the distinctiveness of these two clusters is about more than their geographical character. Rather, their respective rhetorical frames reinscribe the logic of segregation through the varied ways in which Floridian shores and cities are presented to the audience. The shores in these newsfilms represent a natural order and colonial legacy in which African Americans’ presence in the frame is indicative of insurgence. Indeed, the touting of St. Augustine as North America’s “oldest city” in these programs echoes its fixture within the colonial imagination as well as its alliance with persistent racial hierarchies and their territorial entrenchment. The aquatic dimensions of these communities—both oceans and pools—dually signify their proximity to empire, leisure, privilege, and the natural world. Indeed, the question of “access” to shores and the oceanic vistas they afford is wholly tethered to a segregationist logic and affirmed through reference to St. Augustine’s colonial history. The coverage of wade-ins in the newsfilms, even while it affirms the intrinsic necessity of such struggles, is nevertheless unsettled by the resulting disruptions, violations, and acts of civil disobedience.
Conversely, the coverage of civil rights struggles in Miami over education, housing, poverty, policing, and social services is less determined by the frame of insurgence and more by melodramatic inevitability. Racial laws of gravity, tinged with performative regret and melancholy, cast a shadow over these broadcasts in which the tropical paradise gives way to an urban “swamp” or land of death and decay. A frustrating acceptance or regretful resignation sets in here that, while centering Black misery, seems all too content to naturalize and rigidify the prevailing landscape of racial inequality and segregated urban space. As one might anticipate, housing comes into focus in this latter cluster as the urban is framed as proximate to the African American “home,” whereas the coastal is expressed as a site of intervention, disturbance, and insurgence, where belonging is a contested notion.
“Trouble” in Delray Beach and WTVJ’s “News at Noon” (1956)
The stakes of the coastal are underscored in one of the earliest Wolfson newsfilms dealing with civil rights. On July 3, 1956, WTVJ broadcast a segment titled “News at Noon,” and it is both representative of other newsfilms covering clashes over segregation as well as unique in its promotion of the news itself as a mitigator and settler of racial conflict.¹¹ The segment focuses specifically on the fight over de facto segregation and racial disparities in the coastal community of Delray Beach and the surrounding area, including Ocean Ridge. While the segment’s title, “News at Noon,” suggests a focus on the immediacy of certain current events, this installment blends a concern with the events of the previous evening with a broader account of developments that have occurred over the past few years. The segment is remarkable for what it includes and excludes as well as for the way in which it narrates these events from the vantage point of mediation, often framing civil rights advocates and African American activists as insurgents and outsiders.
Following introductory comments from an unseen narrator, the anchor for the segment—Del Frank—greets the audience by sharing news of a “successful settlement” of the stubborn “race problem in Delray Beach,” putting an end to “forty-five days of tension in that resort community.” But more than this, Frank is pleased to share that WTVJ had an active role in the attainment of this resolution. “WTVJ News director Ralph Renick,” notes Frank, “came to play quite a part in the racial settlement.” In fact, as we learn by the conclusion of the segment, Renick is credited with organizing a meeting between the white leadership of the city of Delray Beach and the African American civil rights advocates working for the Delray Beach Civic League. The segment even features footage from the meeting in which Mayor Mike Yargates specifically acknowledges and touts the presence of the film cameras during his meeting with the civic league. He praises the presence of “that recording machine” and the benefits of having such a concrete document or “record of what had transpired.”
But the immediacy of the segment’s coverage of the previous night’s meeting is framed within a broader narrative of the struggles of the past year. Over the course of the first six minutes of the segment, Frank runs down the highlights of the racial tensions, leaving out key events as well as acknowledging the violence with which white residents reacted toward the presence of African Americans on beaches that were legally open to anyone. In fact, Frank’s narration barely acknowledges the pain of decades of de facto segregation that kept African American residents off Delray’s shores, especially those that were the most accessible and closely watched by lifeguards. Instead, he praises the community of Delray Beach for “set[ting] aside two-thirds of its beach area for public use.” Frank’s condensation of the region’s struggles over de facto and de jure segregationist practices downplays their severity and violence. In the decades leading up to this broadcast, there had been extensive organizing against lynching, racial wage gaps, and voter suppression or “white primaries” throughout Florida.
Insurgency
The opening narrative offered by Frank, in conjunction with the imagery and footage presented, serves to reinforce the perception that African American efforts to be treated as full and equal citizens in Delray are fundamentally insurgent. Local African American struggles and acts of resistance are largely missing from Frank’s overview, which normalizes the segregationist status quo. The terms he uses are especially striking as he speaks of the “gradual” or inertial drift toward a whites-only municipal beach in Delray, thus naturalizing what is otherwise a political process. He juxtaposes a claim that African American citizens went swimming “almost at will in the ocean,” with the qualifier, “though mostly in isolated spots,” and in doing so, reflects an implicit colonial curation of geography according to racial hierarchies.
The illustrative imagery accompanying Frank’s brief historical overview features a map that highlights the proximity of Delay Beach to Miami and its placement along South Florida’s shoreline. The sequence’s establishing shot of Delray’s municipal whites-only beach features an idyllic view of the ocean crisscrossed with palm trees and an American flag perched upon a sturdy flagpole. Illustrative footage of whites swimming in the water, building sandcastles, and sunning themselves on the beach complements Frank’s opening comments.
The painful absence of any person of color in the segment ends approximately three minutes in when our view of the municipal pool shifts to six African American men standing together on Delray’s shore. At this point, Frank notes that “there was trouble on the southern end of Delray’s municipal beach” a week after US District Judge Emmett C. Choate threw out the lawsuit filed over the city’s de facto segregation. The pivot to “trouble” just as African Americans are depicted on-screen for the first time in this program and on Delray’s whites-only shore underscores the insurgent view of an African American presence, not just on the beach but in the frame itself.
Considering the extent of Frank’s narrative about the region’s struggles with racial inequality over several years, it is striking that our first few seconds of African American representation are coupled with the conveyance of disturbance, or “trouble.” Up until this moment, the presence of African Americans has been decidedly spectral, lacking voice or physical depiction. In this sense, “trouble” unsettles the recreational tone and reassurances of access for the privileged white audience. The beach set aside for African Americans was earlier shown strewn with seaweed and ocean detritus, whereas the city’s main beach offered cleared shores ready for sunbathing and the building of sandcastles. Coupled with the representation of the city pool, aquatic spaces are carefully crafted white realms whose connotations of comfort are seemingly sidelined by the proximity of African American families. Here the line between swamp and paradise is delicately drawn. The introduction of African American representation on the screen at this exact moment fosters an alignment between the program and the community of Delray Beach: both view any African American presence as insurgent.
The wade-ins
Frank proceeds to elaborate on what he means by “trouble.” In this instance, he’s referring to the famous Sunday wade-in that took place on May 20, 1956, a month and a half prior to this broadcast. He narrates:
First, a group of Negroes showed up, several jumped into the water, went swimming. Next on the scene, a group of white teenagers. Words exchanged between the two groups indicated violent actions might well develop. With tempers reaching a boiling point, Delray Police Chief R. C. Croft and two policemen arrived on the scene. Croft asked the whites and the Negro groups to clear the beach and they complied.
To complete the picture offered here by Frank, thirty-five African Americans were involved in this aquatic protest, or wade-in. “Nearly one hundred white citizens [were] standing by” while “tempers” flared, although—as mentioned earlier—there were no laws on the books officially declaring the beach a segregated space.¹² The illustrative footage throughout this part of the program briefly shifts from filmic to photographic. In fact, the shot cited of African American men on the beach is a still rather than a moving image.
The following two shots, both of which depict the May 20 confrontation, are also stills. The first features a dramatic composition in which two sides, Black and white, are facing off on Delray’s shore. The camera’s placement in relation to the action is like the prior shot of the African American men facing the ocean: the camera observes the action from a position that is perpendicular, flattening the image and diminishing depth in the shot while highlighting its pictorial qualities.
The third and final still image from the wade-in is altogether different—equally dramatic in its emphasis on the unfolding racial confrontation but accomplishing this through an over-the-shoulder shot that plunges us into the discord. Here we peer diagonally and at a slightly upward angle at a young African American man standing his ground against a white man who is only visible to us from behind. Despite the individualization of this composition, a community of African American supporters is visible behind the young man.
The still imagery also registers an epistemological shift in the status of the image. Whereas the moving images shown previously served a largely illustrative purpose centered on the scenic—shores, signs, and pools—the stills nudge the visual landscape of the program toward the topical and the temporal, granting us an admittedly partial and fragmented view of a confrontation that unfolds in the presence of a camera. Instead of a verbal description of past events juxtaposed with what might as well be stock footage of Delray Beach and Ocean Ridge, we experience a sensation of proximity and real-time documentation, even if it is significantly constrained by the static nature of the imagery.
Camera as witness
The conclusion to the segment fosters an even greater awareness of the camera and its ability to capture events as they happen. As noted previously, Frank signals early on where we are headed by celebrating the dramatic role played by Renick in which he offered to moderate a meeting between the city commission of Delray Beach and the Delray Beach Civic League. Frank’s promotion of WTVJ News as a stabilizing and evidentiary force in the standoff over segregationist practices in Delray dovetails with Mayor Yargates’s proclamation that the “recording machine” is a guarantor of transparency and accuracy in the coverage of the meeting. The anticipation is heightened by the awareness that the meeting occurred only the night before:
Both groups then accepted an invitation to meet last night at 9 pm in the commission room of Delray City Hall. Both sides insisted that the session be held before WTVJ newsfilm cameras so that no misunderstanding could arise and—for the thousands of persons in South Florida—could have the opportunity of witnessing what might be the end to a . . . human relations problem.
The final result celebrated by Frank is that a “five-member committee will be appointed to investigate ways and means to obtain the Negro ocean beach [and the] Negro swimming pool will be built immediately.” The city will also drop the “controversial ‘Exclusion Resolution,’” which was Delray’s attempt to formalize its municipal beach as whites-only. The recorded footage presented includes the mayor himself specifically thanking Renick and WTVJ for engaging in an act that will “go down in history as a public service.” The news crew, Mayor Yargates exclaims on camera, “came up with their equipment to record a story and they did something that no one was able to do for the last forty-five days.”
In Frank’s final commentary for the segment, he insists that “both sides should be congratulated. . . . If the opposing factions will meet face-to-face, it is possible to achieve a solution through compromise and understanding.” While upholding a veneer of even-handedness, WTVJ and “News at Noon” utilize a “both sides” posture to affirm a segregationist logic while appearing to endorse a vague feeling of compromise. What is not compromised, however, is a supposition that the geography of pleasure, recreation, and leisure associated with Floridian shores is one that precludes African American freedom of movement and participation.
From the framing of Black presence on-screen and on the beach as “trouble” to the supposed resolution of the conflict in city hall, this installment of “News at Noon” reduces social discord over racial segregation down to a mere “human relations problem.” In doing so, it cements a colonial imaginary in which African American proximity to the coast threatens insurgence. The interior space of the “commission room” where the meeting between the city and the civic league takes place literally and figuratively contains the confrontation, ensuring it does not spill outside and jeopardize the delicate line between scenic and topical. Nevertheless, trouble persists, and the still imagery of the protestors’ wade-in confirms that insurgence cuts both ways as threatening and liberating. Here Floridian fugitivity refuses victimization and claims unruly access in the face of unjust racial borderlines.
Florida’s Birmingham: WCKT’s “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” (1964)
Eight years after the broadcast of the “News at Noon” segment about Delray Beach, a slightly different picture emerges as the civil rights movement focuses on a prominent coastal community 270 miles north. In the early sixties, efforts to desegregate and advance racial equality centered on St. Augustine, the oft-proclaimed “oldest city” in America. It earns this label by virtue of its status as the earliest known European settlement in North America, having been established in 1565. This reputation is more than an empty slogan or mere rhetorical adornment. Rather, this perception of St. Augustine is central to its status as a popular tourist attraction, which fuels the local economy. In fact, the coinciding of the city’s quadricentennial in 1965 with the peak of the civil rights movement was central to local desegregation efforts. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it, the goal was to: “remind the nation of the reason the civil rights bill came into existence in the first place. For this task, we chose the nation’s oldest city.”¹³
WCKT’s news program Outlook broadcast a three-part series on the intensifying struggle in the months of May and June 1964. In this historic moment, the local, national, and global reverberations over what was happening in St. Augustine all converged. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and several of the most recognizable names in the civil rights movement—including King himself—joined local efforts to pressure city leaders to address the persistence of racial inequality and end segregation. The timing of these grassroots efforts coincided with a legislative push as leaders in the United States Senate were primed to debate and vote for the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was passed on June 19 after a fifty-four-day filibuster and later signed into law on July 2.
WCKT’s three-part series “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” was broadcast over the course of approximately seven weeks. The first part, “Report 1,” was broadcast on May 9, 1964, the second on May 16, and the hour-long final installment on June 28.¹⁴ Whereas WTVJ’s “News at Noon” affirms a segregationist logic while championing its own role as a facilitator of compromise, this series adopts a more moderate stance as its rhetorical address subtly shifts over the course of its three installments. Specifically, I discerned a clear progression from the first part’s romantic colonialism to the third’s sharper critique of the segregationist status quo and the city’s white leadership. No doubt this evolution is a by-product of the social and political developments unfolding over the course of the pivotal weeks in which the series’ installments were produced and broadcast.
Grassroots resistance
The framing of African Americans as a fundamentally insurgent presence in relation to the coastal realm of nostalgic tourism, aquatic leisure, and colonial vistas is fully evident, perhaps even more so given St. Augustine’s place in a broader Floridian imaginary. And yet the representational gap is significantly lessened in these programs as the producers and camera crews devote a significant amount of screen time to observing the hard work of organizing nonviolent forms of resistance by a wide array of grassroots activists with experience on the ground, in St. Augustine as well as elsewhere around the country.
The series eventually invites the audience to spend time with the organizers and see them discuss, debate, and mobilize an entire grassroots apparatus. Phone calls, strategy sessions, and maps are all featured in this series, inevitably presenting an observational record of African American activist agency. What one gets, then, is a disconnect between the welcoming of a Black perspective and presence on-screen and the persistence of a historical hostility toward African Americans whenever they venture into beaches, pools, and other privileged spaces of leisure.
A history lesson
The first installment of “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” opens with a focus on the city’s deep history as a colonial outpost and slave market. The sound of a horse’s hooves trotting on cobblestone streets is heard as we see an African American coachman driving a horse-drawn carriage through St. Augustine. Palm trees and parked cars line the streets. The presence of cars with the carriage on the screen echo the commingling of past and present that pervades this segment.
An unseen narrator tells us what we see: “Now here is the oldest square in the US today. It was established in 1598 [and] slaves were traded here in the 1800s.” This introduction, however, quickly pivots away from the slave market and burrows deep into the past by directing our look at the Fountain of Youth: “Here is where Ponce de León landed, 1513, over four hundred years ago. In 1934, twenty-six years ago, they were digging here to plant orange trees.” The historic swivel that results from this opening narration—careening from 1598 to the 1800s, then back to 1513, and finally landing in 1934, all from the vantage point of 1964—laces colonial romanticism and mystique with fleeting but direct acknowledgment of the central place of slavery in the development of St. Augustine.
As Holly Markovitz Goldstein notes in her article and visual essay, “St. Augustine’s ‘Slave Market’: A Visual History,” the slave market is typically overlooked in St. Augustine, and this helps us see the significance of this opening.¹⁵ The introduction asks us to recognize the material evidence of the slave trade in our midst, even as its focus is unsteady and recoils too soon in favor of colonial nostalgia. As the host stresses at the outset: “For a dollar and a half tourists may view the famous fountain and sip the sulfur water which the sixteenth-century explorers believed would give everlasting life.”
Florida’s Birmingham
The host and anchor for the series, Wayne Fariss, draws on St. Augustine’s deep colonial history to frame the crisis of the moment. Early on, he calls attention to the city’s “stability and . . . deep-rooted resistance to change,” especially in light of “its leadership . . . in the hands of the oldest families.” Fariss makes clear that this leadership’s legacy is bound up with slavery when he states that “St. Augustine has been successful in preserving a pattern of race relations that dates back to the days when slaves were bought and sold in the city square.” Race relations, he notes, are: “founded on the notion of superior white and holds as long as the Negro holds his place. Racial segregation is deeply ingrained in the whole fabric of life of St. Augustine.”
Observing that civil rights demonstrations have grown commonplace nationwide since 1954, Fariss’s exposition reviews the recent history of protest in the city in a manner reminiscent of WTVJ’s “News at Noon.” Sit-ins, marches, arrests, and meetings, as well as the city’s backlash, are all featured in his discourse. Fariss specifically notes the use of “police dogs to break up the sit-ins [as well as the city council’s passage of] a law prohibiting demonstrations of any kind without a permit.” Violence creeps in as well when Fariss recognizes the brutality of the police, the Ku Klux Klan, and the bloody retaliation of protestors through specific examples: “A Negro minister was injured when he was struck in the face with a cattle prodder . . . Negro homes in St. Augustine were shot at; a Negro leader was badly beaten at a Ku Klux Klan meeting; a white man was fatally shot.” All of which leads Fariss to conclude that “by the end of 1963, St. Augustine was rapidly developing national recognition as Florida’s Birmingham.”
Racial tensions were rising, and the city was “likely to explode in 1964.” Throughout this exposition, a subtle but significant deviation from the previously discussed news program is the inclusion of footage of protestors in the streets and their encounters with police and police dogs, where the cameras are met with both threatening and welcoming looks. From this vantage point, there is a greater willingness to feature the nonviolent actions of the protestors than the earlier program from WTVJ.
From exposition to observation
But it is in the third installment of “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” that we get a better sense of the historical texture of the times. As I noted earlier, this series represents a significant step forward from the earlier example of 1956’s “News at Noon,” but the representations of the civil rights movement ebbs and flows across the three installments considering the fast-moving historical circumstances the producers of Outlook are attempting to follow.
The treatment of African Americans in St. Augustine as a fundamentally insurgent presence within a coastal and colonial framework by the city commission, business leaders, and the Klan is critically addressed by the third and final segment. At the same time, the program also thickens its engagement with the civil rights movement by growing beyond Fariss’s white paternalistic exposition and reversing the earlier reduction of a dynamic assemblage down to individual leaders, such as Dr. Robert Hayling, as important as he is.
Instead, what emerges here—in a critical reading that moves both with and against the grain of the show—is a loosening of the expository grip of the first two programs as evidentiary editing and talking-head shots give way to observational footage of civil rights activists coordinating, strategizing, and envisioning their next steps. In doing so, a consideration of both the specific local reverberations of St. Augustine as well as the national, even global, implications of the turn of events in this coastal community is elevated by the program’s tempering of its previous expository and narrational conventions. Representational problems persist as the production is still anchored by Fariss and weighed down by an insistence on moderation when reckoning with the legacy of Jim Crow. Observational aesthetics supports such distanciation, but it isn’t exactly neutral either, considering the representational power of Black agency and activism put on display.
Elevating the crisis
Whereas the second installment of this program opened with the direct address of segregationist Mayor Joseph Shelley, the introduction of the third features Martin Luther King addressing supporters and cementing the city’s status as a key front in the national fight against segregation. In this opening segment, King states that he has “returned from . . . New England [where he] had a chance to talk with . . . some of the very outstanding leaders and people of our nation.” In these exchanges, King shares that he communicated a profound “truth” that African Americans in St. Augustine and their allies “are determined to march the streets of this city until the walls of segregation come crumbling down.”
As the program gets underway, footage of protestors in the streets clashing with police accent the narrator’s proclamation that the audience will get an “exclusive behind-the-scenes look at Martin Luther King’s challenge to segregation in the nation’s oldest city.” King’s depiction as a figure who can elevate the crisis into a “national issue” is supplemented by his place at the front lines as the narrator notes that he was recently “arrested during a sit-in attempt” in St. Augustine. The linkage between the national and the local, strategy and tactics, is further highlighted as the relationship—as well as the tension—between King and Hayling are noted at the outset of Fariss’s commentary. Fariss insists on a gap between the quality of the SCLC’s national and local leaderships, reducing this gap to a distinction between the personas of King and Hayling. Buttressed by a juxtaposition of their dueling profiles, Fariss claims that “prior to Reverend King’s arrival, St. Augustine’s pot of racial troubles boil[ed] sporadically under the leadership of Dr. Robert B. Hayling, the local chairman of the [SCLC].” A strict dichotomy emerges in this commentary between Hayling’s supposed “intemperance” on the one hand and King’s innate ability to “[open] the door to a peaceful solution.”
Nevertheless, events leading up to this broadcast compel Fariss to pivot rather significantly in his assessment of circumstances on the ground. King’s “presence,” he acknowledges, brought the “racial crisis to a head quickly [but also] dramatically” when on June 9, 1964, nearly three weeks prior to this broadcast, “four hundred hymn-singing marchers . . . were met by a gang of rock-throwing, fist-swinging men.” The failure of city police to “intervene” quickly meant that “demonstrators were beaten to the ground and kicked” by “segregationists” who were also quick to “[attack] newsmen.” Fariss’s characterization of the attacks on June 9 is delivered over footage showing an assault that appears to be from that night. The note on the violence endured by the news crews underscores the stakes of representation while also unsettling the program’s innate tendency to position itself as above the fray.
The weight of screen time
One of the significant elements that makes the third installment of “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” stand out is its length, approximately twice that of each of the first two parts. To a substantial degree, this reflects the program’s partial embrace of an observational approach in which its narrational impulses are restrained as the subjects in front of the camera proceed with their organizational labors on behalf of SCLC. While these scenes are clearly edited and fully integrated into the broader expository contours of the program, they nevertheless contribute durational heft as substantial screen time is dedicated to quiet consideration of the care and deliberation that goes into mobilizing a community to bring about social change.
The first such example is a sequence in which the camera crew observes as Reverend Andrew Young leads a meeting of key SCLC personnel in planning a march through St. Augustine’s old slave market. While Fariss punctuates the scene with clusters of exposition to ensure that the audience knows who’s on-screen and what is happening, the sequence is generally free of such narration and observation for nearly six minutes of screen time.
While heavily reliant on military metaphors such as “chain of command” and “commander-in-chief,” Fariss’s minimal narration nevertheless encourages the audience to register this scene as evidence of “careful planning” and indicative of the intensive labor that goes into developing “strategy” in grassroots movements. Contradicting his earlier, infantilizing comments about the civil rights organizers on the ground in St. Augustine, Fariss reassures the audience that this is “not a group of amateur idealists.”
From this perspective, it is remarkable how much time is spent allowing the audience to listen to Reverends Young and C. T. Vivian as they lay out strategies with regard to marches in the streets, fasting in prison, and the filing of affidavits in the courts. It is rare for audiences to be granted even a partial view of the work that goes into organizing, much less within such a pivotal historical context. Undoubtedly, awareness of the camera and the importance of drawing attention to their work inform the conversations we witness on-screen. And yet the subtle use of continuity cuts and intimate sound recordings impart a different epistemological relationship to the organizers, one that grants an impression of access and insight into African American agency, mobilization, and resistance in the face of a segregationist city.
Aquatic civil disobedience
The program juxtaposes internal deliberations with external displays of civil disobedience as the confrontations heat up heading into the final days before the Civil Rights Act is officially passed by the Senate and signed into law. Approximately two weeks prior to broadcast, on June 17, Fariss reviews how twenty-nine civil rights activists, Black and white, “staged a wade-in at [the] previously all-white [St. Augustine Beach].” Given the lack of interference from police and the fact that “most white bathers left the water, but otherwise ignored the demonstrators,” Fariss declared the wade-in the “first breakthrough in the long fight to end segregation in St. Augustine.” But Fariss continues and reminds us that this was not the end of the story. Since the initial wade-in on June 17, he laments that the “quiet beach has given way to violence.” It is at this point that footage captured from subsequent wade-ins and clashes is shown in support of Fariss’s narration. Police have begun to regulate the beaches by “ward[ing] off the demonstrators” and establishing a “solid line of patrol cars to make [a] divisional line between the white segregationists and the demonstrators.” Marchers were increasingly met by hostile whites on St. Augustine Beach, leading to further arrests and clashes.
These coastal transgressions were followed by the famous swim-in at the segregated Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine on June 18, 1964. Photographs taken by Horace Cort documented owner James Brock’s dumping of muriatic acid into the pool and onto the swimming protestors. One of the most iconic of his photographs featured Mimi Jones of Georgia, who had traveled to St. Augustine to support the integration efforts led by King.¹⁶ This broadcast, occurring ten days later, features footage of this incident and allows the audience to see Brock’s actions on-screen as well as the brutal police response. Initially, seventy demonstrators, including “fifteen rabbis from New Jersey showed up at the motel to pray.” Their actions led to mass arrests, and footage in this segment shows Brock and police shoving and pushing protestors. Filming is handheld, improvisational, and mobile as the demonstrators are broken up.
Next, Fariss narrates the swim-in at the motel, recognizing Brock as “frantic with rage” as he “[dumps] an acid cleaning agent into the water” while also describing the “rough . . . [way] swimmers were dragged . . . from the water to waiting police vans.” He also calls attention to the anger directed at the camera crew, specifically the experience of “WCKT newsman, Roger Burnham, who filmed these scenes, [and] was manhandled . . . by a white observer” while also being “struck twice by law enforcement officers.” On this note, the sequence pivots to an observational approach in which a relatively stable view of these events is portrayed along with synchronous sound from the scene. We see Brock pour acid into the pool and a policeman jump in and tackle a demonstrator—we subsequently learn the officer was off duty and has associations with the Klan. The chaotic scene, what Fariss terms the “wildest [incident] in over a week,” is followed by a quiet interior moment in which King and Ralph Abernathy are shown reflecting on the turn of events at Monson Motor Lodge. Both King and Abernathy praise the demonstrators for their determination and nonviolence while pledging to report the incident to the Justice Department. The observational scene holds for nearly five minutes and is reminiscent of our earlier view of Young and Vivian.

The juxtaposition of these two observational scenes links the act of civil disobedience with quiet reflection, thoughtfulness, and resoluteness of leadership. Indeed, the tendency to reduce our perception of the demonstrators to passive victims of racial violence is undercut by King and Abernathy’s reflection on the protestors’ cool heads and insistence on staying the course in the face of segregationist rage.
An insurgent presence
The pair of coastal breaches featured toward the end of “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” document the degree to which African American presence in these aquatic spaces is viewed as fundamentally insurgent and transgressive. In this sense, the prevailing segregationist regime remains the same as what we saw depicted in “News at Noon.” And yet the gradual movement into interior spaces where we witness the labor of mobilization introduces Black agency into the representational field of newsfilm and offers a countervailing perspective—one more open to the urgency of social change, even if this is frustrated by the persistence of white male paternalism in the guise of Fariss.
Conclusion: Kneeling in the Surf
From the fountain of youth to coastal insurgencies, the aquatic framing of the series highlights the privilege of who gets to “sip the sulfur water” and who does not.¹⁷ The shifting newsfilm geographies expressed in both WTVJ’s “News at Noon” (1956) and WCKT’s “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” (1964) alternately fortify the segregationist borders of the coast and acknowledge their precarity to varying degrees. The former program reinscribes the insurgent presence of African Americans in recreational spaces through its endorsement of administrative and civic compromise, thanks to the evidentiary and mitigating power of the camera. “News at Noon” specifically held African Americans out of frame until its inclusion of still imagery from the 1956 wade-in and concluding coverage of negotiations at city hall.
Interior spaces are much more present throughout WCKT’s later series, where they function less as a form of containment and more as a refuge for civil rights workers, organizers, volunteers, and sympathizers to huddle up, strategize, and coordinate while embracing the presence of the camera crew. The way in which this show is granted access to deliberations on the part of civil rights organizers showcases the movement’s deep awareness of the value of representation, perception, and public pressure, particularly as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 teetered before passage. Discussions and depictions of phone calls, letters, affidavits, and messages directed at the Justice Department and other important players in Washington, D.C., tease national resonances out of the local, as does King’s unwavering commitment to Hayling despite the promotion of a rift between the two in the news coverage.
Following Jacques Derrida in Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, both series, perhaps despite themselves, surrender “to the coming of what comes” and “bear witness” to the inevitable insurgence that contests the boundaries of aquatic privilege and exclusion.¹⁸ The seesaw of televisual artifactuality accounted for by Derrida, in which mediation both constructs and defers, is inscribed here on multiple levels, but most notable are the observational segments of these otherwise expository news programs. “News at Noon” defers in the mildest of terms to the disruption of the Delray Beach wade-ins, offering slight glimpses in the form of still imagery that nevertheless offer us collective visions of African American insurgence. The observational nature of these images, captured in real time and real proximity to the actions, introduces a fleeting sense of the “untimely,” of an insurgence that is coming but does not fully fit into expository news time.¹⁹ The observational scenes from “St. Augustine: Fountain of Dissent” represent a significant amplification of what was a small glimmer in “News at Noon.”
No doubt, as I have already stated, these newsfilms offer limited, compromised, and contingent visions of life in South Florida in the fifties and sixties. They are clearly mainstream, local representations of the civil rights movement and, to a significant degree, appear disposable. But the tensions highlighted in this essay also suggest that there is value in these digital revisitations, that looking at such documents from the vantage point of our present conditions has utility so long as we acknowledge our own precarity and that of the artifacts themselves. Such archival interventions tease out the differences and tensions in “mainstream representations,” which—as Hernandez states—otherwise “deny the continued vitality and resistance of Black Floridians that are embodied in organizations such as the Dream Defenders and (F)Empower.”²⁰ As the study of localized newsfilm geographies demonstrates, these stories are not new. Rather, they are part of a deeper history of Black liberation in a state that continues to resist easy categorization.

A list of external links featured in this essay can be found here.²¹

Stephen Charbonneau is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Florida Atlantic University. His work on media activism, participatory media, and documentary film has been published in several anthologies as well as leading journals in film and media studies. He is the author of Projecting Race: Postwar America, Civil Rights and Documentary Film (Wallflower/Columbia UP, 2016), and co-editor of InsUrgent Media from the Front: A Media Activism Reader (with Chris Robé; Indiana UP, 2020).

Title Image: "Wade-in at St. Augustine Beach on June 17, 1964", Associated Press
Insurgent Leisure, Aquatic Angst: Postwar Newsfilm, Civil Rights, and Coastal Imaginaries © 2025 by Stephen Charbonneau is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
The Journal of e-Media Studies is published by the Dartmouth Library.