On August 27, 1960, in an event that became known as “Ax Handle Saturday,” white attackers responded to peaceful lunch counter demonstrations organized by the Jacksonville Youth Council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People by spitting on protesters, yelling racial slurs, and beating them with wooden handles that had not yet had metal ax heads attached. The violence, first aimed at the lunch counter demonstrators, quickly escalated to include any African American in sight of the white mob. Police stood by watching the beatings until members of a black street gang called “The Boomerangs” attempted to protect those being attacked, at which point police night sticks joined the baseball bats and ax handles. Sixteen-year-old Rodney L. Hurst, president of the Jacksonville Youth Council, led sit-ins at “whites only” lunch counters in Woolworth’s and W.J. Grant Department Store to protest racial segregation. Hurst was inspired by history teacher Rutledge Pearson, who encouraged young people to join the Youth Council and the civil rights movement, telling them that “freedom is not free, and if you are not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” It is believed that the Ku Klux Klan organized the violence to scare, intimidate, and cause physical harm, and that law enforcement were at least accomplices to much of what the Klan did. Although the events were documented in Life Magazine and newspapers from major cities across the country, reporters from the Jacksonville Times-Union and the Jacksonville Journal were not allowed to cover the story.