Gobsmacked

Standing before the National Museum of African American History and Culture after my third visit, in July of this year. It is a mighty museum that does so many things so well. But the general omission of St. Augustine from its story is baffling.

There are some great words in the English language to indicate being extremely surprised.

“Stupefied” is one. (Love the sound.)

“Bewildered.” (Something to be said about the advice to “be wild.”)

“Gobsmacked.” (Need I say more?)

It’s almost worth it to experience extreme surprise just to be able to use words like these in context.

But not quite.

Not when the surprise is accompanied by disappointment. Not when the surprise is so consistent that it becomes, in time, no surprise at all.

Such is the case with the frequent—almost constant—omission of St. Augustine from the nation’s historical civil rights narrative.

The historical error begins at the beginning, with a very basic question: When and where did our nation begin?

Typically, we’ll hear these answers:

1776

Here we are, after all, in the 250^th year of our country, measured from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.

We know the beautiful (if aspirational) words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal…

So we begin. (Or so we are told.)

1620

Plymouth Rock. The Mayflower. The Pilgrims. That first Thanksgiving dinner with the Wampanoag people.

Nation of immigrants, after all. The melting pot.

It’s a sweet story.

1607

The British were coming, the British were coming.

Okay, that’s a bit out of context, but they were coming to Jamestown, Virginia. In 1607.

Sure, we weren’t a country then, but that was land of the future United States settled by Europeans.

Sounds like a viable origin story.

1619

Well…you remember the 1619 Project a few years ago from The New York Times?

In many ways, that was a master class of scholarship. I learned so much from the brilliant Nikole Hannah-Jones and many others. The basic premise, uncomfortable as it was—and is—for many to hear is that slavery was the engine that built this nation, and that we should trace our origin to the arrival of the first African slaves to arrive on our shores. In the words of New York Times Sunday magazine Editor in Chief Jake Silverstein at the front of that magazine:

It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong and that the country’s true birth date, that moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619.

Which was, the Times informed us, the date when the FIRST African slaves arrived in the future United States at Point Comfort.

But is THAT true?

The Slave Market sits front and center in the Plaza de la Constitución in St. Augustine, Florida, the nation’s oldest city.

1565

That is the date of the founding of St. Augustine. That city, founded by Spanish explorers, sat in future Florida in the future United States.

Were there African slaves coming in on that ship?

Almost certainly, yes.

A Substack post is not the place for the deep argument here (feel free to pick up my new book for a fuller explanation), but let’s just consider this quote in the Atlantic from Pulitzer-Prize winning historian, Annette Gordon-Reed, from 2021:

St. Augustine, Florida, was not at all a part of my early education, but it’s where race-based slavery, as an organized system, began on American soil, established by the Spanish as early as 1565.

Thousands of years ago

Let’s just add one obvious, but often conveniently overlooked, fact about our nation’s origin. This beautiful land and the people who inhabit it was not discovered by the Europeans in the 1500s or 1600s. For many thousands of years beforehand, native people lived on this exact patch of the planet.

This land is your land. This land is my land.

**

In a way, though, my larger concern is not really about the nation’s origins—or about “the nation’s oldest city,” St. Augustine, in the 1560s.

It is about The Sixties, though.

In part, about the 1860s, and the Civil War when “one nation, indivisible” became tragically, almost permanently, divisible.

In larger part it’s about the 1960s and the civil rights movement: an era with overpowering resonance to our present moment.

I argue in Original City, Original Sin: King, the Klan, and the Fight for Civil Rights in St. Augustine, Florida (out next month from Cambridge University Press) that the civil rights saga there in 1963-64 is one of the great under-told stories in American history.

But it is a hard fight, in part because even the vast majority of historians have missed the boat about what Dr. King himself called “a great moral drama.”

For instance, consider “Eyes on the Prize,” the landmark civil rights documentary that came out in 1987. This was an enormously influential 14-part series that, according to the PBS website, “covers all of the major events of the civil rights movement from 1954-65.”

It is an incredibly well-researched series. It is riveting.

But somehow it completely overlooks the St. Augustine story.

Second case in point: Taylor Branch. He is a hugely influential historian. His trilogy, America in the King Years, published over more than 20 years, is staggering in its scope. And to be sure, it does include some powerful content about St. Augustine. But in 2013, when Branch released his slender primer, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement, he did not devote any of the 18 chapters to St. Augustine. The city was mentioned once, on a single page, in a single sentence.

I am not saying that I am the only one to excavate this material, or that I was anywhere close to the first person. Some great work has been done to preserve this history, especially at the local level. The ACCORD Civil Rights Museum, which opened in 2014 in the former dental office of Robert Hayling (an astoundingly courageous man who was one of the most underappreciated figures of his era) is tiny, but it is a mighty place for American history. Kudos to the tireless Gwen Duncan and her family for keeping this place alive.

Standing in the sacred space of Robert Hayling's old dental office, with Irwin Brunson --a St. Augustine civil rights icon --and Gwen Duncan, who has been instrumental in running the ACCORD Civil Rights Museum since 2014.

So, too, at the Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center. It provides essential history, living history, documented superbly. It absolutely deserves to be part of our historical narrative. Executive Director Regina Gayle Phillips and her staff have my deepest admiration.

Some local historians have fought the good fight for many years, none with greater tenacity than David Nolan.

Outside of the local community, the Pulitzer-Prize winning historian David Garrow wrote powerfully about St. Augustine long ago, but even he acknowledges that much of an amazing story has gone untold.

There are some worthy books about St. Augustine by people like David Colburn and Dan Warren, and great film contributions from the likes of Clennon King, Andrew Young, and Jeremy Dean, among others.

But overwhelmingly, that story has been underrepresented, if not erased entirely, especially at the national level.

Today, September 24, is the 10^th anniversary of the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I think the Smithsonian museums are national treasures, some of the greatest teaching tools available for people to learn about our country. This one, in particular, is an absolute jewel. It is so well-researched, so thought-provoking, at times so devastating (e.g. the display of the Emmett Till coffin).

But somehow, even here—of all places—the St. Augustine story is almost completely overlooked.

In a panel about “Protest Marches and Campaigns,” the museum notes Albany, Georgia, in 1961; Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963; Washington, D.C. in 1963; Mississippi in 1964; and Selma, Alabama, in 1965.

Nary a word about the great moral drama in the nation’s oldest city in 1963-64.

This is how this important part of civil rights story is told at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Then we see a powerful display specifically about the key years of 1963-64, arguably the height of the civil rights movement. The museum informs us about so much that happened during this pivotal time. The “Children’s Crusade” in Birmingham in May of 1963. The murder of Medgar Evers in June. The shining moment in history at the March on Washington in August. The devastation of the bombing of the church in Birmingham in September. The national rupture from the Kennedy assassination in November.

We swing to 1964 and see powerful material about Freedom Summer in Mississippi, about the three civil rights workers who were killed there, about LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act.

That was arguably the most important piece of legislation of the 20^thcentury.

There is a strong argument that it would never have passed—not at that time, anyway—were it not for the incredible courage of local people in St. Augustine in 1963 and 1964.

About which…we see nothing at all in the museum.

I’m surprised, and I’m not surprised.

And I’m hopeful that Original City, Original Sin can help to provide part of a long-needed historical corrective.