On Saturday night at 10 p.m., Sen. Raphael Warnock was on Capitol Hill, fighting to pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill. On Sunday morning Reverend Warnock was preaching on Martha’s Vineyard.
More than 2,000 people gathered in the Tabernacle Saturday night to celebrate the structure's 125th birthday.
Grandparents, grandchildren, and everyone in between filled the rows, sitting on some of the same benches used in the 1800s, when the religious campers gathered under the oak trees and the canvas tent that predated the Tabernacle's construction in 1879.
"It had begun to look its age - and so have I," said the evening's host, newsman and Vineyard Haven summer resident Mike Wallace, complimenting achievements of the Tabernacle's current restoration project.
To keep abreast with the changing times, the Martha's Vineyard Camp Meeting Association has altered the way it brings in and hosts the summer programs at the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs.
"Things have changed because public taste is changing," said program director Robert Cleasby. "Many of the groups that used to come wouldn't be of interest today. I have been here for many years, long before I became program director in 1991, and I have seen that people's tastes have gone upscale like the Vineyard has gone upscale."
A near-capacity crowd turned out late Sunday afternoon at the Oak Bluffs Tabernacle to cheer an unprecedented event on the Vineyard - the first Freedom Fund rally to support equal rights for Negroes throughout the country. The sponsor of the affair was the Cape Cod branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The site was highly appropriate, for Oak Bluffs and, more specifically, the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association which operates the historic Tabernacle, have long epitomized the goals of equality that the NAACP actively promotes.
