[3] Memorial ceremonies for the anniversary were expected to get the attention of international media,[4] and city officials excluded African Americans from planning of the festivities.

[3] The preparations focused mainly on the "Spanish past that endorsed pluralism and Pan-American brotherhood" while ignoring the history of slavery in the US and the Jim Crow laws still in force in the Southern states at the time.

Black people accounted for 23% of the population but racial segregation and Jim Crow prevented them from playing any sort of role in the local political and economic affairs.

A Tallahassee native, Hayling served as an Air Force officer, and then became the first black dentist in Florida to be elected to the American Dental Association.

He set up business in St. Augustine in 1960 and joined the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that year.

The local NAACP wrote a letter to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson asking that he cancel his visit to St. Augustine in March 1963 where he was planning on dedicating a Spanish landmark.

[3] While the campaign was successful at convincing Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to speak before an interracial audience in St. Augustine, it had no effect on the overall Jim Crow laws.

Hayling founded an NAACP Youth Council that engaged in nonviolent direct action, including wade-ins at the local segregated swimming pools.

[9] These four children were JoeAnn Anderson, Audrey Nell Edwards, Willie Carl Singleton, and Samuel White, and they came to be known as "the St. Augustine Four".

It was front-page news on April 1, 1964, when one of them, Mrs. Mary Parkman Peabody, the 72-year-old mother of the governor of Massachusetts, was arrested in an integrated group at the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge, north of town.

The massive nonviolent direct action campaign was led by Hayling and by SCLC staff, including: Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, C. T. Vivian, Fred Shuttlesworth, Willie Bolden, J. T. Johnson, Dorothy Cotton, and others.

In response, Hayling and King released a joint statement declaring "there will be neither peace nor tranquility in this community until the righteous demands of the Negro are fully met".

On June 30, Florida Governor Farris Bryant announced the formation of a biracial committee to restore interracial communication in St. Augustine.

Although matters were far from resolved, national SCLC leaders left St. Augustine on 1 July, the day before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

[28] With his dental practice financially destitute after the loss of his white patients, and the safety of his wife and children uncertain, Robert Hayling decided to move to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, in 1966.

[27] The black Florida Normal Industrial and Memorial College, whose students had been involved in the protests, felt itself unwelcome in St. Augustine and in 1965 purchased a tract of land in Dade County, moving there in 1968.

The motel and pool were demolished in March 2003, despite five years of protests, thus eliminating one of the nation's important landmarks of the civil rights movement.

[33] Throughout 2021 collaborating institutions are hosting a variety of programs, lectures, tours, and special digital humanities projects, and the group has also created a website that contains many educational resources.