Lay That Trumpet In Our Hands Analysis

It seems as though the Civil Rights Movement for African America rights was a never-ending battle. The time period that was the heart of the movement was in the 1950s and the 1960s. Numerous African American civilians participated in multiple ways to obtain the rights that should have been guaranteed to them. Although, main historical figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X succeeded in progression to the Civil Rights Act; state and local figures such as Harry T. Moore and the Foot Soldiers of St. Augustine were critical assets to the Civil Rights Movement as well.

Lay That Trumpet In Our Hands by Susan Carol McCarthy is about the Florida Civil Rights Movement. The story is about a young girl and her family fighting through a

Augustine is an extremely known historical town. Mainly known for the Spanish Conquistadors building their famous Castillo de San Marcos fort. However, what many people don’t know is the fight for Civil Rights that took place in this historic town. This town in Northeast Florida is a monumental example of the struggle African Americans had to face to acquire their rights. The Foot Soldiers were not an exclusive group of people fighting for their rights; it was a community side by side fighting for what was right. The Foot Soldiers broke boundaries that had not been broken in St. Augustine. From The Heroic Stories of the St. Augustine Foot Soldiers, it is put as “The Foot Soldiers monument in the historic downtown plaza of St. Augustine, Florida is dedicated to those whose names are not yet written in the history books, whose faces are not yet depicted on postage stamps, whose statues are not yet in our public parks, who are not yet celebrated with street signs in their honor.”9 The St. Augustine Foot Soldiers could be compared to the people activists in Alabama during their sit ins etc. Something that activists would endeavor on would be Beach Wade-ins. These Wade-ins are essentially how the Foot Soldiers handled the segregation of the beaches. Fred Martin recalls one of these Wade-ins at where a young man Arthur Funderburk was approaching the “white only” part of the beach when a group of men came towards him with clubs and things of that sort. He says a young girl that they called JoJo came in between the Arthur and one of the men exclaiming “You want to hit someone black. Well, hit me, not him. Go ahead, hit me.”10 People were willing protect each other to get a point across. JoJo in this situation was trying to see if the man would hit her or not. Another miraculous thing about the Foot Soldiers is that it was just not African Americans protesting or participating in rallies it was also white people as well. There were as well Mass Sit-ins that occurred in