Wade in the Water - June 22
Today’s Readings: AM Psalm 97, 99, [100]; PM Psalm 94, [95]; 1 Samuel 6:1-16; Acts 5:27-42; Luke 21:37-22:13
Today’s Reflection
‘We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.’ But Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than any human authority.’
‘So in the present case, I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them—in that case you may even be found fighting against God!’ —Acts 5: 28-29, 38-39
Have you ever done something that you were expressly forbidden to do, but you did it anyway because you knew for certain that it was the right thing to do? This is the situation Peter and his fellow apostles found themselves facing in Jerusalem. They had been doing “many signs and wonders” and as a result “people also gathered from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those afflicted with unclean spirits, and they were all healed” (5:12, 16). The apostles were doing what they knew to be the right thing, following in Jesus’ footsteps by continuing the work of healing he had commissioned them to continue in his name.
But all the attention and acclaim the apostles were drawing to the Way of Christ caused the high priest and his party, the Sadducees, to be “filled with jealousy” (5:17) and they threw the apostles into prison. But in the middle of the night, an angel “opened the prison doors and brought them out,” specifically commanding them to “‘Go stand in the temple and speak to the people all the words of this Life.’ And when they heard this, they entered the temple at daybreak and began to teach” (5: 19-21). When it was discovered that Peter and friends had left their jail cell and were out proclaiming the Good News again, they were hauled into the council to give an account and they simply stated: “We must obey God rather than men” (5:29).
This story reminds me of one of the many dramatic moments in the civil rights movement. In the spring and summer of 1964, Saint Augustine, Florida, was a focal point of civil rights activists organized by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders of the SCLC as well as the NAACP. While in other places around the South the focal points of integration efforts had included interstate and local buses, lunch counters, and public schools, the focus in Saint Augustine were public places related to tourism: a motel restaurant, public beaches, and a motel swimming pool.
On June 11, 1964, King and his associates asked to be seated at the Monson Motor Lodge’s restaurant and ended up being taken away to jail. As one news account at the time described King’s influence in Saint Augustine, when King preached in the city’s “stifling hot churches where they gathered to sing the old slave songs, mournful and sweet, and the new civil rights songs, spirited and challenging … He told them to purify themselves, to ‘prepare to offer your very bodies for freedom and be ready to be clubbed and kicked without retaliating’” (Jules Loh, LA Times, 5 July 1964).
Equally undeterred and inspired by King’s arrest, one week later, a small group of young activists decided to bring further attention to segregated facilities by orchestrating an integrated swim at the Monson’s pool. Two of the swimmers were young white men, Al Lingo and Peter Shiras, who were registered guests at the motel, and they then invited five African American guests to swim with them, including fellow activist J.T. Johnson. When the integrated group of young people waded into the waters of the pool together on that hot, humid Florida day, the motel’s manager James Brock came running to the poolside and started dumping muriatic acid, a pool chemical, into the water to hurt them or at least scare them out of the water.
Photographers on the scene captured drama, and images of the poolside conflict and an off-duty police officer diving in to take the swimmers off to jail appeared in both newspapers and evening news broadcasts around the country and the world. President Lyndon Johnson complained, “Our whole foreign policy will go to hell over this,” given how hypocritical it made the U.S. look on the world stage. Some believe that these dramatic images from the Monson pool helped push politicians in Washington, DC to finally pass the Civil Rights Act just a few weeks later, on July 2, 1964.
In the long, hot summer of 1964, it was imperative for integrationists to bring before the eyes of the nation and the world a vivid picture of why they could wait no longer for civil rights. Though they knew that blacks and whites swimming together was expressly forbidden by both the laws and the social customs of their time and place, these seven activists—and so many thousands of others—decided that they, like Peter and the apostles, “must obey God rather than any human authority” (5:29).
—Becky+
Questions for Self-Reflection
When have you chosen to do something you were expressly forbidden to do, but you did it anyway because you knew for certain it was the right thing to do?
How did you manage the tension between knowing the possible consequences of your action with your strong conviction that you were acting morally and ethically?
Daily Challenge
Learn more about the civil rights movement in St. Augustine, including oral history interviews with Al Lingo and J.T. Johnson, and some of the iconic photographs of that day, on the Civil Rights Library of St. Augustine online archive.
You can also read my chapter, “Wade in the Water: African American and Local News Accounts of the 1964 Monson Motor Lodge Swim-In” in the book Like Wildfire: The Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Sit-Ins (University of South Carolina Press, 2020).