Rutledge Pearson was a talented professional baseball player and high school baseball coach, and an educator, civil rights leader, human rights activist.
Rutledge Pearson was born in Jacksonville, Florida on September 9, 1929. He was a talented professional baseball player and high school baseball coach, and an educator, civil rights leader, human rights activist and active member of local, state and national chapters of the NAACP.
As a young man, Pearson was a successful baseball player who played first base for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro League and later the Cincinnati Reds. In 1954, Pearson returned to Jacksonville to play for the Jacksonville Beach Seabirds, the city’s professional team. Because he was black, the team’s owners closed the baseball park rather than allowing Pearson to play.
His experience led Pearson to dedicate the rest of his life to fighting for civil and human rights. He became an active member of the Jacksonville community, serving as both a teacher and a baseball coach at the segregated New Stanton High School. He taught his students that there was more to history than what was in their approved history books.
In 1961, Pearson was elected president of the Jacksonville Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was later elected president of the Florida State Conference of Branches of the NAACP, and was selected to serve on the Board of Directors of the National NAACP. He advised the Jacksonville Youth Council NAACP during their peaceful sit-ins to protest segregation, during which the students were chased through the city by 200 white Klansmen carrying ax handles and baseball bats. It came to be known as Ax Handle Saturday.
Pearson was forced out of the Duval County school system in 1964, in part because of his activism. In May 1967, he was working to extend rights to laundry workers in Memphis, Tennessee when he was killed in an automobile accident.
Rutledge Pearson was nominated for the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame by his friend and former student Rodney Hurst and was inducted in May 2016. In Jacksonville, several locations are named in his honor, including a local school, a bridge, a city street, and the main city post office.
Content provided courtesy of Rodney Hurst, Sr., Pearson’s friend and protégé.
