St. Mary's Missionary Baptist Church
N 29° 53.315 W 081° 18.808
17R E 469733 N 3306480
This church was one of the cornerstones of the Civil Rights movement in St Augustine.
This Church was one of the cornerstones of the St Augustine Civil Rights movement.
Waymark Code: WM2T5Q
Location: Florida, United States
Date Posted: 12/17/2007
Views: 61
In addition to being a national tourist destination and the continental United States' oldest city, St. Augustine was also a pivotal site for the civil rights movement in 1964. Despite the 1954 Supreme Court act in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that the "separate but equal" legal status of public schools made those schools inherently unequal, St. Augustine still had only 6 black children admitted into white schools. The homes of two of the families of these children were burned by local segregationists while other families were forced to move out of the county because the parents were fired from their jobs and could find no work.
This church was founded on May 25, 1875, and led by the inspiring Reverend Ivory Barnes its first minister. The present edifice, occupied beginning in 1937, has held high the banner of Christ inspired in its earlier days by the spirit of the Emancipation Proclamation and The Reconstruction following The Civil War. St. Mary's occupied a unique position at the foot of Lincolnville, and stands tall as a beacon of freedom and hope.
During the era of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in St. Augustine, this church, through the stout-heartedness of its minister and NAACP leader, Reverend Thomas A. Wright, and other local leaders, was the site of mass meetings and a respite for the foot soldiers on the road in the quest for civil and human freedoms. These crusading examples, sustained through St. Mary's Missionary Baptist Church, ordains it the Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement in St. Augustine.
Civil Right Type: Not listed
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