Sights and sounds of Ax Handle Saturday etched in witness’s mind
Updated:
Tags:
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – There are some things in life you can’t forget.
For Rose-Marie Edwards, it’s Aug. 27,1960.
“We heard the noise and the people hollering and the yelling,” Edwards said. “Nothing like I’d heard before.”
Edwards was a waitress at a restaurant inside downtown Jacksonville department store May Cohens at the height of the civil rights movement.
In the summer of 1960, young Black teenage activists with the NAACP Youth Council spent weeks leading lunch counter sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters in downtown Jacksonville. On Aug. 27, cameras rolled as a group of white men attacked Black demonstrators, like NAACP Youth Council President Rodney Hurst, and even Black bystanders passing through downtown.