A recent visit to St. Augustine inspired me to learn the history of its notorious “old slave market.” This open-air pavilion stands in the center of the historic section of the Ancient City and has long been a place of controversy.
Many people, including St. Augustine residents, claim this was a building designed as a holding pen and auction house for enslaved Africans. However, this is not quite historically accurate.
St. Augustine has always had a public market since its founding in the 16th century, and Spanish colonizers brought, sold, bought and owned America’s first slaves, both Native and African.
However, a permanent masonry structure did not exist there until 1824. Its intended purpose was to provide a sanitary place for the sale of meat, fish, and vegetables, not as a holding pen or auction house for slaves.
But regardless of its intended purpose, newspaper documents and city records prove that enslaved people were indeed sometimes sold there—a few even named, such as 19-year-old Malvina and Gabina, who were sold to the highest bidder there in 1836.
Additionally, the market served as a site for public corporal punishment. Two enslaved men, called only Daniel and Joseph, were whipped there for attempting to escape their plantations in 1849. It also hosted meetings for the “slave patrol,” white citizens who apprehended any person of color in the streets after curfew without a pass from their master or guardian.
The slave auctions were held there from the 1820’s into the 1840’s. After the Civil War, St. Augustine began transforming from a quiet relic of a colonial town to a bustling tourist destination for wealthy Northerners. The use of the term “slave market” does not appear in written record until the 1870s, used by savvy postcard salesmen to create a both a morbid and nostalgic fascination about the place. In those days, slavery was romanticized as a relic of bygone, gallant, and simpler days.
The original market structure burned down in a devastating fire in 1887, and was reconstructed a year later. But the “slave market” would remain a focal point in the struggle against racial injustice well into the next century and beyond.
During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, the “old slave market” of St. Augustine was a central setting in the heated fight against white supremacy.
Protestors commemorated the human beings sold there on its steps. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Andrew Young held nightly marches there. The KKK met there as well, rallying to gain members and intimidate anyone who opposed their racist ideology. It was also the center of the 1964 “St. Augustine Movement,” which resulted in bloody clashes between white segregationists and the Black and white nonviolent protestors.
In 2011, St. Augustine installed its first public civil rights monument adjacent to the market, honoring the struggle for equality on this site of white supremacy. However, debate about this controversial piece of our Nation’s dark history rages on even today.
Historians, tour guides, and locals disagree about what to call the site. Some feel the term “slave market” is sensationalized, since it was built intended for the purpose of selling meat and produce—and not as a slave holding pen and auction house, as some describe, though slaves were occasionally sold there. Instead, their opinion is that it should be called simply the “public market.”
However, others prefer not to bring up this ugly aspect of St. Augustine’s past at all so as not to tarnish the city’s pristine reputation. Despite historical records, some refuse to believe that slaves were ever sold there. The site is often not mentioned in tours, rarely labeled on tourist maps, and even as recently as 1986 was denied by then-mayor of St. Augustine, Kenneth Beeson. There was even an attempt to rename it the “flower market.”
Some feel the building should be torn down entirely, as it is too painful of a reminder and shouldn’t be celebrated as a tourist site. Culminated, all of these views are troublesome for the city’s Black history advocates, who worry that the importance of this site its being whitewashed or even totally erased.
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