Marshall Bloom’s southern exposure: Schooled in prejudice

From New Hampshire Gazette

Third of four parts

A story Marshall Bloom wrote for the Amherst Student newspaper.  Credit: AMHERST COLLEGE ARCHIVES AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

In early 1964, the spring of Marshall Bloom’s sophomore year at Amherst College, a new battleground for civil rights was taking shape in the nation’s oldest city, St. Augustine, Florida.

A quaint community with plenty of Florida schlock, St. Augustine was settled by the Spanish in 1565, decades before Jamestown and Plymouth Rock. Beyond the tourist-friendly European history, St. Augustine also featured a troubled history with race relations. Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Taylor Branch has suggested that St. Augustine might have been the site of the first slave sales in the land now known as the United States. To this day, the city’s central square — La Plaza de la Constitucion — features an open-air pavilion known as the Slave Market.

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