For 84-year-old Berdell Clayton, Mount Ararat Missionary Baptist Church on N Myrtle Ave is more than a building. It is where she grew up, where she found faith, and where she witnessed history unfold.

Born and raised in Jacksonville, Clayton has attended Mount Ararat for nearly her entire life. She began going to the church as a little girl when it was located at 21st and Davis streets. When the congregation moved to its current location in Northwest Jacksonville, she walked to services. She officially became a member at 18, just after graduating high school.

Now, decades later, she is preparing to watch her church receive a civil rights marker recognizing its historic role in the movement.

Now, as Mount Ararat prepares to receive a civil rights marker, Clayton sees it as long-overdue recognition.

The marker is being installed by the City of Jacksonville as part of the Jacksonville Civil Rights Trail, an expansion of the national U.S. Civil Rights Trail. The initiative highlights sites across the city that played significant roles in the fight for racial equality

Mount Ararat was selected because of its deep ties to the movement, including Dr. King’s 1961 sermon and the church’s role as a gathering place during a turbulent time in Jacksonville’s history.

Clayton plans to be there when the marker is unveiled.

“Oh yeah,” she said.

Clayton remembers a Jacksonville shaped by segregation.

“When we were growing up, we always had to go to the back counter if we wanted to buy something,” she said, recalling shopping trips to downtown stores. “Oh, it just wasn’t nice at all.”

As a young woman raising her family, she began to understand more deeply what was happening around her during the Civil Rights Movement.

“I didn’t like how they treated us,” she said.

She vividly remembers “Ax Handle Saturday” in 1960, when white mobs armed with ax handles attacked peaceful Black demonstrators in downtown Jacksonville.

“They beat those people,” Clayton said. “I was standing across the street in the park, and I just took off running down the street when I saw that.”

She also recalls local ministers being jailed for protesting segregation, including her own reverend. The NAACP would step in to bail them out.

“I wanted it to change,” she said simply.

Clayton was inside Mount Ararat in 1961 when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his sermon, “This Is a Great Time to Be Alive.”

“It was a fiery speech, beautiful,” she said.

She remembers the sanctuary being packed, with people standing along the walls and in the choir stand. One message still stands out to her decades later.

“He said, ‘We shall overcome… this too shall pass,’” she recalled. “I felt like when I received Christ, I felt like it was a new thing about to happen to us.”

When Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Clayton learned the news from her television.

“That was bad,” she said. “Who in the world would want to kill somebody like that? It was sad to me.”

Over the years, Clayton said she saw change come to Jacksonville, though not without struggle.

She remembers the fight to keep neighborhood schools open during integration. Leaders attempted to close historically Black schools and bus children elsewhere.

“Why would you close our school down?” she recalled asking. “We fought them.”

While she believes integration brought some progress, she says not everything improved equally.

“Some parts was good, and some parts, it did nothing,” she said.

After more than eight decades of witnessing Jacksonville’s evolution, she believes the recognition matters.

“I say it’s about time,” Clayton said. “I’m just happy that we are getting it.”

The Civil Rights Trail marker will be placed at the church on Feb 25 at 1 pm.