Friends and colleagues say her decades of dedication and tenacity were unparalleled.
By JON WILSON
Published August 20, 2003
ST. PETERSBURG - Iveta Jones Martin-Berry towered 5 feet tall, barely big enough, back in the day, to make her Gibbs High School basketball team.
No one was surprised when she did.
"She was a powerful force," said David Welch, a former City Council member who grew up a couple of blocks from the dynamo who became a hero to hundreds in the city's African-American neighborhoods.
A leader with a special love for youngsters and for her Campbell Park neighborhood, Mrs. Martin-Berry died Saturday after heart surgery. She was 67.
The news stunned many. Few of her friends knew she was having an operation.
"She never even said she was going into the hospital. She was just that kind of a person," Welch said.
To call Mrs. Martin-Berry simply a community activist would understate her role, say those who knew her.
She was an early president of the school district's Biracial Advisory Committee, recalled Eunice Burgess, one of Mrs. Martin-Berry's classmates from the Gibbs Class of 1953. In the early 1970s, the two worked to help calm schools during the first years of court-ordered busing.
"She would take time off her job as a pharmacist," Burgess said.
Mrs. Martin-Berry helped found Blacks Against Dangerous Drugs, reaching into her own pocket to keep the organization afloat during a financial crisis.
"She was willing to mortgage her house," said Earnest Williams, a current council member. Mrs. Martin-Berry put up $22,000. "You don't find people who are normally willing to give their all for their community," Williams said.
A Florida A&M graduate with a pharmacy degree, Mrs. Martin-Berry worked in a drugstore on 22nd Street S and later at the Winn-Dixie on Third Avenue S downtown.
As a member of a city planning committee in the 1970s, she pushed for the grocery store to serve the public housing complex across the street, recalled Corinne Freeman, a former St. Petersburg mayor and School Board member.
Eyes flashing, an imperative rise in her voice, Mrs. Martin-Berry won a reputation for tenacity when pursuing projects she loved.
"Oh, she never gave up. You could always count on Iveta. She'd stick with it all the way to the end. She wouldn't let you forget it," said Mike Dove, a deputy mayor who worked with Mrs. Martin-Berry on neighborhood projects.
A case in point: the McLin bathhouse near the Campbell Park pool. Once on a demolition list, the bathhouse got caught in a tug of war between the Campbell Park neighborhood association and a city home-repair team. Mrs. Martin-Berry's forces finally won.
Mrs. Martin-Berry established GED and mentoring programs for youngsters. She served as vice president of the Council of Neighborhood Associations. She battled to keep 16th Street Middle School, now John Hopkins, from being turned into a comprehensive school. She was the Community Alliance's education committee chair, became a founding member of the Faith Memorial Baptist Church, and served on the board of the Coalition for a Safe and Drug Free St. Petersburg.
She used to meet children getting off the school bus so they could get home safely. She was a member of the NAACP and was an occasional community columnist for the Evening Independent, the now-closed afternoon newspaper in St. Petersburg.
"An Energizer bunny," Williams said.
Her energy reached a spectrum of city leaders.
"I count her as something different and more than a friend," said Omali Yeshitela, Uhuru Movement chairman. "I cannot explain it exactly. . . . to know someone who actually commits themselves to the community, to her people the way Iveta did, it's more than just a friendship. It is the ideal I've always sought in people and an ideal I've always sought to live up to."
Mrs. Martin-Berry's awards kept mounting. A generation ago, the Ambassador Club named her citizen of the year and the local chapter of Zeta Phi Beta sorority named her woman of the year.
In 1997, she was given the Humanitarian award at the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership and Awards Breakfast.
"Iveta is irreplaceable," said Sevell Brown, director of the Florida Chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. "Her style, her commitment, her compassion, her giving to her community is uniquely her own and one of a kind. We are blessed to have known and worked with her."
