Wednesday marks 65 years since a mob of white men attacked Black teenagers for attempting to integrate lunch counters in downtown Jacksonville, an attack known as Ax Handle Saturday.

The Duval County School Board will hold a groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday to mark the beginning of a new place to learn for sixth through eighth graders.

Many are surprised today to learn that Ribault High School in Northwest Jacksonville was a white-only school in the 1960s. Patricia Pearson, whose father was iconic civil rights leader Rutledge Pearson, helped change that.

The first mural featured on “Mural Monday” was the mural of Bill Murray is on display in Murray Hill.

The biggest honor was a proclamation from the United States Department of the Interior that commemorates the day Ax Handle Saturday happened. But according to local civil rights activist Rodney Hurst, the 1960 NAACP Youth Council president who was 16 years old when he and others were attacked on Ax Handle Saturday, the proclamation has multiple errors. The second line in the proclamation states Ax Handle Saturday resulted in the eventual integration of public accommodations citywide.But Hurst said thats false. And the proclamation states the civil rights movement in Jacksonville began with Ax Handle Saturday. Hurst said facts are needed for a moment in history that has shaped the local and national civil rights movement for generations to come.

The Pittsburgh Courier, an out-of-state African American-run newspaper, was one of the only news organizations that covered Ax Handle Saturday. I am sitting in the front row and the judge said, Alright young man, for the record, point out Rodney Hurst, Hurst recalled. After Ax Handle Saturady, the fight for equality continued. Though local media did not cover the events of Ax Handle Saturday, the event received courage from out-of-town news organizations like The Pittsburgh Courier. Hurst continues to educate locally and throughout the country about the Civil Rights movement, specifically Ax Handle Saturday.

It was Aug. 27, 1960, a day that became known as Ax Handle Saturday. The violent attack was in response to peaceful lunch counter demonstrations organized by the Jacksonville Youth Council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Sixteen-year-old Rodney L. Hurst was president of the Jacksonville Youth Council, leading sit-ins at “whites only” lunch counters in Woolworth’s and W.J. In 1959, the year before Ax Handle Saturday, Nathan B. Forrest High School opened in Jacksonville, celebrating the memory of the first grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. It is believed that the Ku Klux Klan organized the violence of Ax Handle Saturday.