Credit: Burgert Brothers, Car Driving West Across the Gandy Bridge Viewed from Old Tampa Bay, July 10, 1934. Burgert Brothers Collection of Tampa Photographs. Image 203.

In August 1927, Father John Culmer, Vicar of St. James, drove across the newly built Gandy Bridge from Tampa to St. Petersburg. His mission: bring the Eucharist to Black Episcopalians denied a place at God’s whites-only table.

What did he think about as he headed west?

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty

Perhaps he considered the ancestors whose paths he followed: St. Augustine of Hippo, a north African bishop and, later, namesake of the St. Petersburg church that Father John helped to found; Absalom Jones of Philadelphia, who led the United States’ first Black Episcopal congregation; James Theodore Holley of Haiti, the world’s first Black bishop.

Stony the road we trod

Perhaps he envisioned, in the hot light of sunrise behind him, the cold realities that a Black church in a segregated city might one day face: that a young couple wishing to marry in the cathedral would be told to use the back door; that sister Episcopalians, as the neighborhood integrated, would load their whole building onto a flatbed truck for a two-mile move to the white side of town; that the church he founded would one day make its own move, as the city declared the neighborhood “blighted,” and took over by eminent domain the space it wanted for an interstate and a baseball
field.

God of our weary years
God of our silent tears

Perhaps he dreamed of a future he could not yet know: his success as Archdeacon of Southwest Florida and Rector of Miami’s St. Agnes, the largest Black Episcopal church in the South; Pauli Murray (Jane Crow hero in a collar not a cape), the Episcopal Church’s first Black female priest; Presiding Bishop Michael Bruce Curry, preaching at a royal wedding and reminding the world that Beloved Community takes continual work.

Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

Perhaps what he really wanted was breakfast: after the wine and wafer, a communion of catfish, grits, mango, and papaya – a tradition that St. Augustine’s would keep for a century.

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won

Perhaps, instead, Father John, driving over Tampa Bay, mused: water gives life, water destroys, water washes clean.

Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea

Perhaps Father John, crossing the Gandy, thought none of these things. Perhaps he merely opened his mouth wide and

Sing a song full of the faith
that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope
that the present has brought us.
—
Julie Buckner Armstrong is Professor of English and Frank E. Duckwall Professor of Florida Studies at the St. Petersburg campus of the University of South Florida. Armstrong is the author of “Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching,” among other works. Her most recent book is “Learning from Birmingham: A Journey into History
and Home.”