Refusal to Bury Note

While stumbling around the Internet today I ran across "Refusal to Bury." It brought back a lot of memories because I am the Ron Martz cited in the piece.

When that story was dropped in my lap I was in my second month of my first newspaper job after dropping out of college after two years. The story resonated with me because I had spent three years in the Marine Corps prior to college (1965-68), the last 18 months working in the Casualty Section at Headquarters Marine Corps (they sent me there because I could write a simple declarative sentence and type with all 10 fingers; an oddity in the Marine Corps at the time).

I remember the day Mrs. Campbell walked into the newspaper office and told her story first to Dick Lundin, who was a part-time correspondent for us who wrote about community affairs in Port St. Lucie, Fla., a planned community just south of Fort Pierce. He wrote the first piece about it and then the story was handed to me, in part because of my military background.

I particularly remember how dignified Mrs. Campbell was through the whole thing while so many other people were going crazy.

I spent the bulk of my 40 years in the newspaper business covering military affairs mostly for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, including seven wars or regional conflicts at one time or another. I've also co-authored  six books on military history/international affairs.

If you are in contact with Charles, please pass along my thanks for doing the piece and best wishes to him.

Semper Fi,

Ron Martz

Ron, you are cited seven times in the story, I hope accurately and it did you justice. It would be less of a story or possibly not a story without your reporting. If you have any suggestions or corrections, additions, I'll be glad to entertain them. Refusal is a chapter from a mostly unpublished combat memoir written for a friend of mine, Terry McClish (deceased). MEA has lately decided to publish Tay Ninh, another chapter in the memoir.  

MEA gets around. Two years ago, Refusal caught the attention of Florida Congressman Mast in connection with a ceremony to open a Black museum in Ft. Pierce.and honor Pondextuer, subject of Refusal. It was read there.  

Best,

Charlie Jacobson

Thank you for the very kind note. Your piece on the controversy over the burial of Mr. Williams was spot-on. Somewhere in my quite cluttered basement I still have all the original clips of those stories.

This was the first in what would be several racial incidents that summer and fall as Fort Pierce was pulled kicking and screaming out of its old segregated ways into what many of us hoped would be a more enlightened era. 

Although Fort Pierce is on the coast, in 1970 it was not really a beach town. The town and surrounding St. Lucie County were run primarily by white landowners with interests in citrus or cattle. There had been a federal court ruling earlier that year that the city's segregated schools had to integrate for the 1970-71 school year. Previously, whites attended Dan McCarty High and Blacks attended Lincoln Park Academy and their sports teams competed in separate leagues. The new school was dubbed Fort Pierce Central.

The Williams controversy erupted in the weeks before school was to start and only added to the tensions in town. And, as so often happened during that era when schools were integrated, there were fights/disturbances at the new school among whites and Blacks. I hesitate to call them riots, although some did, because they were more pushing and shoving and yelling than actual riots. Nobody pulled out guns or knives. Occasionally I'd find myself in the middle of these things trying to report on them, which always ended with the local sheriff's department separating the two sides.

What really brought the students and the city together after that difficult summer was the high school football team. In the fall of 1970 the newly integrated team went to the state finals, where it lost. The following year, it went to the state finals again after winning the district title in a game that I consider the best football game I have ever seen, high school, college, or pro. A field goal attempt with no time left on the clock bounced off the crossbar giving Fort Pierce a 27-25 win. The state championship game was a runaway for Central. Something like eight of the players on that 1971 team ended up in the NFL and a bunch more got college scholarships.

My story about the state championship game (it was a small paper and I covered news and sports) ran above the masthead on the front page. I am convinced that had it not been for that team and its coach, Calvin Triplett, that there would have been a lot more racial problems in Fort Pierce than there were.

This is probably far more than you ever wanted to know but  thought I would pass it along to provide some historical context.

SF,

Ron Marz 

What an acknowledgement Charlie. You have essentially uprooted a history in which has otherwise been for lack of better words buried. The correspondence and conversation which your story has rekindled is what a story is meant to do. I'm glad to have a small part in this.

cheers,

Kent Walker