Festival offers a rich stew of diversity

The Florida African American Heritage Celebration features a vibrant milieu of art, music, dance and film. Expect a crowd, though. The event is growing each year.

By ADRIENNE P. SAMUELS
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 21, 2003

With a week left in Black History Month, there's still time to attend one mega celebration.

Organizers say the Florida African American Heritage Celebration will be a one-stop shop for black history and entertainment. With tale-sharing griots walking the crowd, imported African art for sale, children's crafts and gospel choirs singing praises, this cultural festival has something for everyone.

"Whatever it is, we're going to have it there," said Randolph Lightfoot, one of the festival's organizers and a trustee for the newly opened Pinellas County African American History Museum.

The festivities begin at 10 a.m. Saturday at Pinewood Cultural Park in Largo. This marks the event's fourth year.

The celebration started in 2000 after Lightfoot and fellow researcher Sandy Rooks collected oral histories of Pinellas' oldest black residents. Those oral histories led to the collection of turn-of-the-last-century pictures depicting life for black people in early 1900s Florida.

It was the lure of those yellowed pictures that brought the first 1,200 people out to Largo three years ago. They came from St. Petersburg, Tampa and Clearwater to help identify grandparents, cousins and friends who were in the pictures.

The next year, vendors and black history programming were added. Organizers were floored when 8,000 people showed up.

This year's program will be the biggest ever, said Sandra Lightfoot, president of the Pinellas County African American History Museum. Lightfoot has been working on the event ever since last year's one-day festival ended.

"I'm just so excited right now because so many wonderful things are happening," Rooks said.

The festival will include a moment of silence for astronaut Mike Anderson, who died aboard the Columbia. Anderson was scheduled as one of the headlining guests for the festival, and NASA said it was too late to ask another black astronaut to make the trip.

Organizers will hold a special memorial for Anderson on Friday at the Heritage Celebration children's day program.

"He was really excited about coming," Rooks said. "We've been on the phone with NASA about this from day one."

As part of the celebration and street festival, several exhibits from the newly opened museum will be on display at Heritage Village. One, called the Gallery of African American Leadership, showcases local black people who hold or have held key government positions.

Participants will also be exposed to a special "Midnight Ramble" film festival highlighting Bronze Buckaroo Herb Jeffries. Starting in the 1930s, Jeffries was the first black actor to play in a singing cowboy movie. He later went on to be a frontman for Duke Ellington's Orchestra. Several Jeffries movies will be showing nonstop during the celebration at the Gulfcoast Museum of Art.

Though the celebration runs from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., the Bronze Buckaroo event is called a midnight ramble as a reminder of times when black people had to go to the show after midnight because they weren't allowed to mingle with white patrons during normal business hours.

Florida Highwayman artist James Gibson will also be there to talk about painting Florida's landscapes.

Live jazz and gospel stages, drum making, dances from the African diaspora, hair braiding, a street festival and a high school step show are highlights of the day. The workshops and the movie marathon are free.

On Sunday, the festival extends into a special concert by the Boys' Choir of Tallahassee, who will perform at 3 p.m. Sunday at the Royalty Theater Opera House in downtown Clearwater, 405 Cleveland St. Prices for the boys' choir concert are $10 for adults, $8 for students and seniors.

Except for the boys' choir, the $5 per person high school step show and various vendors, the events are free.

It all happens from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday at the Pinewood Cultural Center (the three-part Heritage Village, Florida Botanical Garden and Gulfcoast Museum of Art), 12175 125th St. N in Largo. For more information, see www.pinellascounty.org/Unity.htm.

-- Adrienne P. Samuels can be reached at 445-4157 or samuels@sptimes.com .

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Paper: Date: 02/21/03+

Page: 1 Section: LARGO TIMES+

Byline: CHRIS TISCH

Notes:

LARGO -- Prosecutors will not pursue criminal charges in the unusual November case of a man and two female friends who restrained the man's wife with electrical tape so he could take her to a doctor

The State Attorney's Office last week dropped false imprisonment charges against Terry R. Hemphill, 54, Jamie J. Popa, 34, and Laurie Lynn Miller, 33. A domestic battery charge against Hemphill also was dropped.

Largo police arrested the three after finding they had bound Hemphill's wife, Cathleen, with electrical tape. Police were summoned to the Largo home after a neighbor reported seeing a suspicious vehicle in the area.

When police arrived, Hemphill was standing outside the home. When an officer approached Hemphill, he invited the officer inside. There, the officer saw Hemphill's wife with her hands bound behind her back.

Hemphill told the officer his wife had been acting erratically and needed to see the doctor. Hemphill said he enlisted the help of Popa and Miller to get her there.

Officers determined Hemphill's wife was being taken against her will. Hemphill and the two women were arrested.

But at a later State Attorney's interview, Hemphill's wife said she did not want her husband prosecuted. She signed a waiver giving him the right to have contact with her.

Hemphill moved to New Mexico, where he was born, soon after his arrest. He is living there now with his mother and could not be reached for comment Thursday.

The attorney representing Hemphill, Popa and Miller also sent a letter to prosecutors questioning the woman's credibility.

When prosecutors tried to reach the woman by phone, their calls were not answered. Prosecutors sent a letter to her home, but that, too, was not answered, said Chief Assistant State Attorney Bruce Bartlett.

For those reasons, prosecutors could not go forward with the cases, Bartlett said.

"I think when you throw this up to a jury, I don't think the jury is going to feel criminal intent was an issue," Bartlett said.

Mrs. Hemphill had told police that her husband had previously abused her, though she had not reported it to police. She reported it instead to the Church of Scientology, of which the Hemphills are members.

Mrs. Hemphill also said in statements that Popa and Miller were members of the church. In fact, she said Popa was a "field minister" with the church.

Bartlett said Mrs. Hemphill finally contacted prosecutors Wednesday and wanted to prosecute the three, but that her inconsistency made it a case they could not pursue.

-- Chris Tisch can be reached at 445-4156 or tisch@sptimes.com .

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