Chiles and His Florida: Oak Grove

To understand Southern politics in the past half century, you must understand the AME Church. As Jimmy Carter will tell you in his memoirs of a Georgia rural boyhood, the black ministers of Bethel AME Church commanded respect even in white communities for their integrity.

The AME Christian denomination, founded in 1816, was established in rebellion to the racist, pro-slavery bent of the existing Methodist church in America. Black members of St. George's Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia walked out of the church in protest when a key community leader, Absalom Jones, was hauled out by church trustees even as he knelt to pray. Absalom and a fellow protester, Richard Allen, went on to form their own church with Allen was its first pastor in 1794. By the Civil War, the church spread across the Midwest and Northeast's major cities. After the war, it spread rapidly in the South.

Given its history, it is no surprise that Bethel AME churches throughout the Deep South supplied countless foot soldiers to the US civil rights movement.

Lawton Chiles doesn't mention Oak Grove at all in his Walkin' Notes, although it's on highway 90 between Chattahoochee and Quincy. It's no more than a village now; it must have been smaller in 1970. But it's got a Bethel AME Church and that matters.

This small church probably doubles as a polling location. They've got a van.
Van = Get-Out-The-Vote.

The long road to Tallahassee.

A thick patch of pines.