Robert Hayling ran civil rights operations out of Ancient City Baptist Church on Sevilla Street — a tan-brick Romanesque Revival building organized in 1887, still standing, still in use. Lincolnville, the freedmen's district founded in 1866 on land that bordered orange grove plantations, became the ground-level stage for what followed. In the spring of 1964, Hayling and local activists called for outside help; Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC came. Hundreds were arrested. Images of demonstrators facing violence — including muriatic acid poured into a segregated pool — went out to the world. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At the center of the old city, the open-air pavilion in the Plaza de la Constitución still stands, built in the early nineteenth century for food, goods, and enslaved people. It offers no announcement. The work done in 1964 cannot be separated from the history it was answering.
