\u201cAx Handle Saturday\u201d<\/a> in 1960, when white mobs armed with ax handles attacked peaceful Black demonstrators in downtown Jacksonville.<\/p>\n\u201cThey beat those people,\u201d Clayton said. \u201cI was standing across the street in the park, and I just took off running down the street when I saw that.\u201d<\/p>\n
She also recalls local ministers being jailed for protesting segregation, including her own reverend. The NAACP would step in to bail them out.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted it to change,\u201d she said simply.<\/p>\n
Clayton was inside Mount Ararat in 1961 when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his sermon, \u201cThis Is a Great Time to Be Alive.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a fiery speech, beautiful,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said, \u2018We shall overcome\u2026 this too shall pass,\u2019\u201d she recalled. \u201cI felt like when I received Christ, I felt like it was a new thing about to happen to us.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Clayton learned the news from her television.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was bad,\u201d she said. \u201cWho in the world would want to kill somebody like that? It was sad to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the years, Clayton said she saw change come to Jacksonville, though not without struggle.<\/p>\n
She remembers the fight to keep neighborhood schools open during integration. Leaders attempted to close historically Black schools and bus children elsewhere.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy would you close our school down?\u201d she recalled asking. \u201cWe fought them.\u201d<\/p>\n
While she believes integration brought some progress, she says not everything improved equally.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome parts was good, and some parts, it did nothing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
After more than eight decades of witnessing Jacksonville\u2019s evolution, she believes the recognition matters.<\/p>\n
\u201cI say it\u2019s about time,\u201d Clayton said. \u201cI\u2019m just happy that we are getting it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Civil Rights Trail marker will be placed at the church on Feb 25 at 1 pm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For 84-year-old Berdell Clayton, Mount Ararat Missionary Baptist Church on N Myrtle Ave is more than a building.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":89981,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[73520,30275,116,118,117,73519],"class_list":{"0":"post-152381","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jacksonville","8":"tag-berdell-clayton","9":"tag-civil-rights","10":"tag-jacksonville","11":"tag-jacksonville-headlines","12":"tag-jacksonville-news","13":"tag-mount-ararat"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}