Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center

Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center occupies the former Excelsior High School, built in 1925 as the first public high school for Black students in St. Johns County. The museum interprets more than 450 years of African American life in the St. Augustine area, from the arrival of people of African descent with the Spanish in the sixteenth century through emancipation, segregation, community building, military service, the arts, and the modern era.

The museum gives particular attention to Lincolnville, a neighborhood founded by formerly enslaved people in 1866, and to St. Augustine's pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement. Exhibits include material associated with the St. Augustine Four and the local Woolworth's lunch-counter protests, records connected to Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1964 arrest, and stories of local educators, musicians, athletes, veterans, and business owners. The setting in a historic Black school makes the museum itself an important part of the story it preserves.