In Her Own Words: Remarkable Women in 20th-Century Florida

Bernyce Clausell, 1916-2015

Reverend Bernyce Clausell was a religious leader and civil rights activist who served the Tallahassee community and surrounding area for more than 50 years. Clausell’s civil rights activism began during World War II, while she worked at the War Department in Washington, D.C. After experiencing racial discrimination in the nation’s capital, Clausell and others protested segregation with lunch counter sit-ins. Then, in 1956, Clausell participated in the Tallahassee boycott of segregated city buses by using carpools or walking rather than taking the bus.

Clausell was a deeply religious person, and in 1958 she and her husband, Reverend James Aaron Clausell, cofounded Calvary Baptist Church in Tallahassee. Clausell, who graduated from Florida A&M University with a master’s degree in education, taught school for many years in Tallahassee, but over time she realized her true calling was in the pulpit. She became an ordained Baptist minister in 1972, and succeeded her husband as pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in 1978.

Clausell actively served Big Bend community members in need by collecting food and clothing for the poor and conducting prison ministries at Florida State Prison. She retired from the church in 1996, but continued volunteering in the community until her death.

The program for a special classroom unit on food for Bernyce Clausell's second grade class at Griffin Junior High School in Tallahassee, April 30, 1961.

The Sisterhood and Brotherhood Pledge composed by Rev. Bernyce Clausell from the program for the 9th Annual City Wide Sisterhood and Brotherhood Day at Calvary Baptist Church in Tallahassee, September 19, 1982.

Letter from Rev. Bernyce Clausell to members of Clergywomen's Council United regarding the Outdoor Outreach for Christ event in Tallahassee, April 6, 2000.

More from Florida Memory

• Photographs: Bernyce Clausell
• Selected documents: Program for the installation services of Rev. Bernyce Clausell as the first woman minister of a Baptist Church in North Florida, 1978
  Program for the celebration of Rev. Bernyce Clausell's one year anniversary as minister of Calvary Baptist Church, 1979
  Program for Revered Bernyce Clausell Appreciation Night in Tallahassee, 1980

At the Archives

• Clausell Family Papers 1932-2015, Collection N2015-7, State Archives of Florida.

Citation

1. ^“Alan Jenkins, “She is spreading the word of God,” Tallahassee Democrat, November 12, 1978.