Martin Dobrow’s highly engaging chronicle of America’s “oldest city,” St. Augustine, relays the promise and heartbreak of the Civil Rights Era in equal measures. A well-conceived microhistory that captures the mood of the entire nation during this highly charged period of history, Original City proves that a thoughtful writer can narrate the past at the same immersive “first draft” pace that characterizes prize-winning journalism. While Dobrow frequently reflects on his story’s high-stakes implications, he doesn’t limithis gaze in order to advance a narrow academic argument. Instead, he creates a compelling narrative, a plot- and character-driven account of how ordinary Black (and white) citizens of St. Augustine, aided by a handful of activists and journalists from other parts of the country, changed the course of history between the spring of 1963 and the summer of 1964.
Nonetheless, in light of recent resurgences of white supremacy and Christian nationalism, readers can’t help but be struck by his story’s disturbing echoes with the events and trends of the present. The racist fervor of the Klan, with its tactics of intimidation and mob violence, plays a key role in shaping Dobrow’s account. Similarly, the political intransigence and willful ignorance and indifference of St. Augustine’s so-called moderates, which served the segregationists’ cause as effectively as the Klan’s campaigns of terror, can’t help but remind readers of the climate of political dysfunction that allows hate to fester in our own time.
Dobrow counterbalances his book’s chilling descriptions of racist terror with his attention to the stunning, hard-won, and downright inspiring achievements of the non-violent campaigners who put an end to legalized segregation in the 1960s. In the face of the physical attacks, death threats, and humiliations that so many of them suffered, the activists’ consistency and doggedly principled behavior is a powerful testament not only to the abiding and transformational strength of their leaders’ vision, but to their own individual fortitude. From Robert Hayling, the Black Air Force officer and dentist who was falsely convicted of “assaulting” the white supremacists who threatened to castrate and kill him, to the four schoolchildren who served several months in detention as a result of their sit-in campaign at the St. Augustine Woolworth’s counter, Dobrow highlights the extraordinary acts of resistance that a host of ordinary people undertook to break the back of segregation.
While Dobrow never claims a special role for them in the story he tells, a significant number of his account’s central characters happen to have been Jews. Among these, Marshall Bloom, the Denver-born son of a hardware store owner and homemaker, played an important part as one of a handful of journalists who took great risks in order to tell the rest of the world about St. Augustine’s climate of racial hatred. Bloom traveled to St. Augustine at the height of the city’s troubles with a contingent of civil rights activists from Amherst College. Witnessing and writing about the situation in the city sharpened his journalistic skills and radicalized his politics. Bloom’s Jewishness may have been a contributing factor. It certainly was for another one of Dobrow’s main players — the New Jersey Reform rabbi Sy Dresner who, among other things, was arrested at a protest in Tallahassee. After meeting Martin Luther King, Jr. in a jailhouse in Albany, Georgia, Dresner invited him to speak at his synagogue.
Since St. Augustine’s founding by the Spanish in 1565, the city’s Black residents have experienced every variation of racial injustice imaginable, from the rapaciousness of the Conquistadors, to the industrialized slavery of the Confederacy, to the terrors of the Klan and its night-riders. The events of the early 1960s marked a watershed period in that long succession of repressive regimes, and Dobrow’s account of a single year in the city’s history shows how a determined group of local individuals forming alliances with sympathetic parties at a time of nationwide social tumult can remake the world in the name of love, hope, and justice. Original City’s greatest surprise is that its story has remained untold until now.
Michael Hoberman is a professor of American literature at Fitchburg State University and an adjunct professor of history at Yeshiva University. His latest book, The John Muir Trail’s Jewish Founder: the Uplifted World of Theodore Solomons, will be published in 2027 by the University of California Press.
