(This story was first published in the Tallahassee Democrat on June 30, 2015)
The Rev. Bernyce Clausell was a pastor known as Tallahassee’s “Black Mother Teresa.”
Clausell, who had been in good health until an apparent stroke, was 98. She died at her home on Joe Louis Street, just down the street from where she and her late husband founded Calvary Baptist Church in 1958.
A longtime civil rights activist, Clausell participated in the 1956 Tallahassee bus boycott. She was renowned for her work with the poor, spearheading food and clothing drives in the Big Bend for decades. She conducted prison ministries at Florida State Prison and worked on behalf of homeless issues in Leon and Gadsden counties.
Clausell, a thin woman who stood barely 5 feet tall, earned the tag of the “Black Mother Teresa” in 1984. Clausell had read a story about the “poorest town in America,” a black community near Tunica, Mississippi, called “Sugar Ditch,” where impoverished residents lacked running water and sewage ran in the streets.
She immediately collected food, clothes and supplies and led a caravan of volunteers to Sugar Ditch. Clausell established a relationship with the residents and returned several more times with food, clothing, toys and household items.
“Pastor Clausell was a mentor, a missionary, a merciful and mighty servant of the Lord,” said the Rev. R. B. Holmes Jr., pastor of Bethel Missionary Baptist Church. “Since I arrived in this city 29 years ago, it was Pastor Clausell who stood by my side as we addressed the challenges and pressing needs of this community. Her gift of leadership made this city a special place to call home.”
Bernyce Hall Clausell was no stranger to poverty. Born in 1916 in Thomson, Georgia, she was the sixth of nine children. The family moved when she was an infant to Columbus, Ohio, where her father worked odd jobs and her mother did laundry for white people — before she died of tuberculosis when Clausell was 6 years old. An aunt took Clausell and two siblings to New York, where she was raised and first got involved with the church.
In 1942, she moved to Washington, D.C., to work for the War Department — and initiated her civil rights activism by joining white Quakers in protesting segregated lunch counters in the nation’s capital. She later took a job with the Council of Negro Churches, where she met her future husband, James Clausell, a handsome pastor 28 years her senior.
They were married in 1945. After World War II, they moved to Pensacola, and in 1954 to Tallahassee. Clausell, who had studied at Howard University during the war, resumed her education at Florida A&M University, where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education. She taught for 21 years at four schools in Tallahassee (Riley, Pineview, Griffin and Belle Vue) before retiring in 1977 after the first of her four heart attacks.
In 1958, Clausell and her husband founded Calvary (Missionary) Baptist Church on Joe Louis Street. But because her husband was also pastoring at churches in Pensacola and South Georgia, he often left his wife to run Calvary Baptist Church.
“She helped everybody; she was just a true person,” said Pauline Parker, a retired hospital worker who was among the first members of Calvary Baptist Church, and later a frequent traveling companion of Clausell. “She loved to help people. If she had anything you needed, she was there for you.”
In 1971, Clausell said, she was called by God to become a pastor, even though the Florida Missionary Baptist Church had no women pastors at that time. The main resistance she encountered came from her husband, who said: “Oh well, I guess you have to join the Methodist Church,” which allowed female ministers. Clausell shrugged off his opposition and went to study in New York, where she was ordained a Baptist minister.
“I felt like I didn’t have to change denominations,” she said, “because God knew I was a Baptist when he called me.”
In 1978, when her husband retired as pastor of Calvary Baptist Church, the church unanimously elected Clausell to succeed him — and he approved.
“You’ve made a good choice,” he told the congregation. “She’s as good as anybody else you could get. She knows all about how to run a church.”
Clausell’s husband died a year later, and she served as pastor of Calvary Baptist until she retired in 1996. The church moved to a new home on Dale Street in southwest Tallahassee in 2008.
Clausell remained busy in retirement. She was a fixture at community town hall meetings about issues in the Black community and press conferences about civil rights. In 2006, she gave a stirring rendition of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech a the annual meeting of the Southern Christian Leadership Council. She sat in the first row every year at Tallahassee’s annual Emancipation Day celebration at the Knott House. She was a guest speaker at numerous Tallahassee churches, and available for consultation on a wide range of issues.
“One thing I learned early in our relationship was that she had a lot of influence in the community and people respected her,” said the Rev. Julius H. McAllister Jr., pastor of Bethel AME, who met Clausell in 2008. “She had a real heart; she was genuine and authentic.”
In 2012, Clausell published her autobiography, “No Time To Die,” inspired by the example of her grandmother, whose autobiography decades before had been the source of most of what she knew about her mother. She celebrated the book signing at a reception hosted by her daughters, Aaronetta Frison and Mary Lewis, and attended by many of her 10 grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren and six great-great-grandchildren.
Clausell founded three organizations for Christian women. She collected awards by the boatload from the NAACP, religious and civic organizations. In April, Clausell was one of 10 women honored by the Oasis Center for Women & Girls, in its annual Trailblazers program.
“Rev. Clausell embodied the epitome of what it means to be a Christian,” said Delaitre Hollinger, curator of the Taylor House Museum in Frenchtown. “Tallahassee has lost a tremendous trailblazer, and selfless, community activist. She will not be easily replaced.”
Gerald Ensley was a reporter and columnist for the Tallahassee Democrat from 1980 until his retirement in 2015. He died in 2018 following a stroke. The Tallahassee Democrat is publishing columns capturing Tallahassee’s history from Ensley’s vast archives each Sunday through 2024 in the Opinion section as part of theTLH 200: Gerald Ensley Memorial Bicentennial Project.
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