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History is what keeps the lights on in St. Augustine, Florida.

The so-called “Nation’s Oldest City” – a phrase that hits the ear better than “nation’s oldest continuously occupied European settlement” – has promoted itself as an open-air museum for snowbirds and road-trippers for nearly 150 years. From historic taverns and schoolhouses to the 17th-century stone fort that looms over the bayfront, history buffs and the Spanish Colonial-curious could find plenty of places to spend their money. So long as they were interested in a very specific time period.

St. Augustine was of critical importance to the Spanish, sure, but it also played a key role in the civil rights movement. Occasionally called “Florida’s Birmingham,” the town was rocked by clashes between activists marching for equality and diehard segregationists. Armed patrols defended Lincolnville, the city’s historic Black neighborhood, from attacks by the Ku Klux Klan. Images of protesters being beaten while attempting to desegregate local beaches made national headlines. One of the most famous photos from the entire era, of a hotel manager pouring muriatic acid into a segregated pool that Black protesters had jumped into, happened right along the city’s historic Spanish-colonial waterfront. That’s a trivia item that most of the town bigwigs would rather forget.

I received my entire education in St. Augustine. I walked past these infamous sites on field trips without a single word of acknowledgment from my teachers. It wasn’t until a local college student put St. Augustine’s sordid, segregated history into a sleek documentary film that local officials felt pressure to memorialize the movement.

But even in that environment, where 20th-century U.S. history curricula were closely watched by sheepish elders, we learned that Rosa Parks was hand-selected as an upstanding citizen who could best represent the Montgomery bus boycott.

Conservative commentators love to paint any form of planning, when it comes to activism, as evidence of a grand, inorganic conspiracy. Protests must be full of paid actors because someone bothered to print out some signs. Activists carrying medical supplies or legal firearms are looking for violence. Some, like docu-dullard Matt Walsh, have extended this logic to the organizers of the civil rights movement.

Walsh recently railed against the story of Parks’ decision to refuse to move from her seat at the front of a Montgomery bus, enraged that her willingness to face arrest is taught as the unplanned act of a tired woman who just wanted to get home. That’s how the story is sometimes taught… to elementary school students. Even in St. Augustine, shamefully devoted to shoving its own history under the rug, later history courses went into the movement’s tactics in some depth, sharing the larger story of Parks as well as spirited internal debates over the value of nonviolent resistance versus active conflict.

Walsh can only make claims like that because he thinks his audience is stupid. He assumes they weren’t paying attention when their history classes got slightly more complicated. He feels confident that his viewers like being mad more than they like being right, and they’re willing to make themselves look foolish to chase that feeling.

Walsh and others like him want viewers to lash out, to respond before they bother to think. Put more simply, they want them to act as if they were never taught anything and never knew any better. The trick will be finding ways to get a hold of Walsh’s audience and explaining that just because the voice currently at the front of the room isn’t always correct, that history doesn’t cease to exist just because the lecturer didn’t bring it up.

What do you think? Can Walsh’s audience be won? How would you combat pseudo-history from folks who never bothered to dig deeper? Sound off in the comments.

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