Tag Archives: Bob Gray

Ironic Innocence at Trinity Christian Academy

Posted on June 10, 2022 | 1 comment

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It was pastor Bob Gray who gave my mother permission to marry the man who’d become my father in 1972. I didn’t attend the school until after my mother died. My 1989 yearbook is dedicated to Dennis Cassell, Trinity Christian Academy’s first football coach, who’d soon be fired for speaking out against how Trinity’s coverup of decades of child sexual abuse. Ironically, I miss my own innocence, and my few friendships, from those years. 

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The Horrid Little History of the National Association for the Advancement of White People in Jax

Posted on March 12, 2021 | Leave a comment

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In the 1990s, the National Association for the Advancement of White People kept dragging Jax into national headlines. A school board member appointed a white supremacist to a task force on desegregation, a national racist hotline connected to a local elementary school and city officials apologized to the NAAWP when librarians defended black employees.

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Spiritual Lighthouse Church

Posted on January 29, 2021 | 2 comments

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It was home, in the old days, to Southern preaching, bluegrass mandolin, and séances. Bluegrass gospel musicians Billie and Gordon Hamrick were staunch  Southern Baptists, but Billie had “psychic visions.” The line of Spiritualist pastors here, almost all women, dates back to training by the famous psychic Edgar Cayce. In one of Jill Cook Richards’s first séances at the church, she says, her guardian angel came to her.

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Jefferson Davis Junior High School

Posted on February 28, 2020 | Leave a comment

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My father and I were the only white people on the basketball court. He was 40 years older, at least, than everybody else. I’m writing this story on his 96th. He died six months ago tomorrow. 

Of what beloved Jacksonville architect Taylor Hardwick thought of designing new schools with the names of Confederate leaders, there’s no record. The only black faces in 1960s Jeff Davis yearbooks are those of the custodial staff. And the school principal, Wilber C. Johnson, standing beside a Confederate flag and wearing blackface.

“We will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree. / We will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree. / We will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree, / As we march along!”

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New Story: First Baptist Church

Posted on October 10, 2019 | Leave a comment

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First Baptist Church has perhaps received more love and more hate than any other entity in Jacksonville. It dates to a ca.-Civil War split with black church members who retained the original name, Bethel Baptist. In 1923, Pastor W.A. Hobson welcomed 200 Klansmen in full regalia into his farewell sermon. In the 1980s, Pastors Homer Lindsay and Jerry Vines ignited a showdown with more “liberal” members of the Southern Baptist Convention. In 2019, what once seemed unthinkable occurs: the church plans to sell 90 percent of its downtown campus.

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Bebe Deluxe, Storybook Pride Prom, and the History of Gay Pride at Willowbranch Park and Library

Posted on June 29, 2019 | Leave a comment

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It’s the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, and at Willowbranch Library, an epicenter of gay rights history in Jacksonville, hundreds of supporters of gender and sexual minority young people rally in their defense after Jacksonville Public Libraries Director Tim Rogers canceled their sold-out Pride Prom.

Now there are two teen pride events, instead of one. The prom still takes place, at a now undisclosed location, a local church, and hundreds of supporters rally at Willowbranch Library to express their solidarity and love.

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Hope for Life Baptist Church, Where Bob Gray Preached His Last Sermon

Posted on November 2, 2018 | Leave a comment

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Referring to the pastor whose sexual abuse of children Trinity Baptist Church covered for half a century, Gary Hudson says, “I knew Bob Gray for 30 years. I had Gray speak at Hope for Life that Wednesday night, March 22, 2006. It was the last time Gray preached in a Jacksonville church, the last time he preached anywhere.”

Gary Hudson says reading his Bible led him to renounce his faith. “The busiest guitar tech in the Panhandle,” describes himself now as “a very happy peace-loving non-believer.” His book is “dedicated to all I have influenced to believe in the Christian gospel.”

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Hammond Boulevard Exit & the “Perfect Pedophile Paradise”

Posted on June 2, 2018 | Leave a comment

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Did God so love the world that he directed the Florida Department of Transportation to cut a new exit from Interstate-10 down to the northern entrance of what Dennis Cassell called Bob Gray’s “perfect pedophile paradise”? 

Whatever Tom Messer believed about God’s desires for his predecessor Bob Gray, whose sexual abuse of children Messer shielded from the law, he believes God wants 20,000 people daily to take the new I-10 exit by the church. 

So let’s do that. Let’s go. Here’s what we find.

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Blinded by the Lighthouse Replica / First Baptist Church

Posted on July 7, 2017 | Leave a comment

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Just before Christmas, 1998, several homeowners downtown and just to the north in Springfield said they’d “seen the light” and the light made them mad as hell.

One Springfield resident called the new First Baptist Church parking-garage lighthouse replica “extremely obnoxious, just this blinding glare flashing in our windows.” It seemed like the church had stationed “a spotlight […] right outside the house.”

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Posted on June 6, 2017 | Leave a comment

Click below for the fourth story in a series of seven about the KKK in Jacksonville. On June 13th, come to Coniferous Cafe in downtown Jax at 7 pm, to hear Tim Gilmore’s talk “The Klan in Jax: Its Repugnant Rise and Hysterical Collapse.

For most of his life, he’d not realized the full traumatic effect of the Klan’s bombing of his childhood home as retaliation for his being the first black child to attend Lackawanna Elementary School.

Can anyone feel the brutality and tragedy in the landscape? Does the Klan’s hate and the Godfreys’ fear and sorrow and determination remain in the soil or the air or the trees? I can’t tell, because I can’t not know what happened here.

 

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