Guest: Pledging our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor

Lance Thate, Chairman
Town Crier Committee
St Augustine, FL

Once upon a time in Old St Augustine Florida, Historic City News readers will recall a stucco covered brick-and-mortar structure that stood tall when boats still accessed the Plaza Market.  It was a structure that stood tall and watched St Augustine’s only high-rise bank building being built.

• A structure that once stood tall when there was a Woolworths on the square with a lunch counter.

• A structure that once stood tall when Dr Martin Luther King, Jr came to town.

• A structure that once stood tall and watched a hundred or so black folks and a few white protestors circling the Plaza during the first Dr Martin Luther King Jr Day celebration.

• A structure that once stood tall and watched over generations of black and white citizens inspired to blend and form unions during the civil rights movement.

• A structure that once stood tall and watched tolerance grow in passing people who did not understand what was taking place.

• A structure that once stood tall and watched a deeply disturbed racist from Gainesville together with communists from Jacksonville who called for its demise.

• A structure that once stood tall and bid Americans to remember 46-dead soldiers and respect two Christian crosses.

• A structure that once stood tall as is was falsely labeled “racist”.

• A structure that once stood tall and called out to “We the People” for salvation.

• A structure that once stood tall whose message became strangled in steel and hidden with wood.

• A structure that once stood tall to bear witness to the history of the Nation’s Oldest City.

The structure was a sentinel of truth for all the people.  After 141-years of service, it was brought down by just three.  Although parts of the Memorial still reside on the sacred site, it no longer stands tall for patriots who marched in its support.

Only brick and mortar, the broken relic knows well that if the history it has witnessed is replaced with the alien philosophy of Communism, then “We the People” will become slaves to the elitist masters with names like, Rawls, Upchurch, Freeman and Kline. Now is the time for us to stand tall as did our forefathers; pledging our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to the Republic for which it stands.  God bless that Republic.