96 Evergreen Avenue

Zion Baptist Church, with its distinctive double towers, was built in 1921 to house a congregation originally organized in 1886. It was the last house of worship passed by many funerals on their way to several nearby cemeteries, including Evergreen Cemetery, from which the street takes its name. It was one of the churches where civil rights rallies were held in the 1960's when St. Augustine was the site of a major campaign led by Dr. Martin Luther King and Dr. Robert B. Hayling that resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Among those who spoke at a rally there was attorney William Kunstler, who had represented local Freedom Rider Henry Thomas in a 1961 Mississippi case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a later poem, Kunstler paid tribute to the role played by St. Augustinians in bringing "an evil era to an end," and concluded, "Sometimes it takes the courage of a few, to teach the rest of us just what to do."

St. Augustine, Florida · United States