Two of St. Petersburg's black leaders can't see eye to eye on community advancement; a rift between them grows wider.
By MARCUS FRANKLIN
Published March 14, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - Darryl Rouson, president of the St. Petersburg NAACP, stood at center court at BayWalk, the only African-American speaker in a group of powerful white city leaders.
Flanked by the mayor, the police chief and the entertainment complex's developer, Rouson helped kick off a diversity celebration intended to make black people feel welcome there.
In front of BayWalk, a dozen black and white protesters from the International People's Uhuru Movement decried racial profiling by police and chanted "Uncle Toms must go!" They stuffed fliers into hands of passersby with a caricature of Rouson and the words "Jesus had Judas ... black folks got Darryl Rouson."
The scene last month reflects the nasty and increasingly public turn in the clash between Rouson and Uhuru leader Omali Yeshitela, two of the area's most visible advocates for African-American advancement.
Rouson, 48, took charge of a dormant NAACP in 2000 and raised its profile with a series of successful calls to diversify local institutions. He is now playing a role in bringing a new grocery store to a predominantly black St. Petersburg neighborhood south of downtown.
Yeshitela, 62, has long been influential in local civil rights struggles, from tearing down an offensive mural in city hall in the 1960s to criticizing police after the fatal shooting of a young African-American man in 1996. After disturbances sparked by the shooting, he often met with city officials and ran for mayor in 2001. He still speaks out on police issues but has been less visible since the election that year of Mayor Rick Baker.
Now Yeshitela and the Uhurus are publicly denouncing Rouson, and city leaders and other observers say the clash is threatening to overshadow pressing issues such as education and economic development.
Lou Brown, a 47-year-old St. Petersburg Realtor, counts both Yeshitela and Rouson as friends. Brown, who has known Rouson since childhood, supports some of the Uhurus' positions and is an NAACP member.
"I love and respect them both," Brown said. "But this has gotten out of hand. When you start getting into personality attacks, then the good you're doing can be obscured. . . . Ideally, there would be some marriage of the differing views into a strategy that benefits all."
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Differing strategies on how best to gain African-American advancement are hardly new, stretching from Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois about the turn of the 20th century to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X during the civil rights movement.
Six months after being elected NAACP president, Rouson met with Yeshitela to look for common ground.
They discussed similarities as well as differences: Both want greater prosperity for those black residents who haven't benefited as much as others from past civil rights struggles. They agreed to disagree but meet again to select an issue to work on together.
"It was the second meeting that never happened," Rouson said. The rift between the men stems, at least in part, from their views of the relationship between police and African-Americans. Yeshitela calls the city's approach "police containment" - aggressive policing of blacks to secure the peace and comfort of white tourists and residents.
"When he becomes NAACP president, he immediately begins to attack the concept of police containment," Yeshitela said of Rouson this month. "Rouson has come out defending the police, saying the issue wasn't police containment, it was black crime."
Rouson, in a recent interview, said police containment isn't the issue.
"Police containment assumes we are like ignorant unlearned animals running around in neighborhoods and streets needing to be dealt with in a barbaric manner and that we'll put up with it," said the St. Petersburg lawyer. "If you have self-containment, you don't have to worry about police containment.
"There are bad police officers who . . . are busting some black folks' heads out of prejudice and racism," Rouson said. "We need them gone now. But what I have learned is that there are a whole lot more good police officers than there are bad ones."
Those divergent views were the backdrop when police arrested three black men at BayWalk in October. Police arrested one of the men, Uhuru member Keith Stewart, after he intervened as police took another man they say was intoxicated to the ground. Stewart faces a charge of inciting a riot. Shortly afterward, the Uhurus began protesting weekly.
Last month, Rouson announced that the NAACP and Craig Sher, president and CEO of the Sembler Co., BayWalk's developer, would host a diversity celebration to battle the Uhurus' claims.
The Uhurus say Rouson put money above a civil rights issue.
Sembler has committed at least $200,000 of inkind services to a shopping center project that includes a Kash n' Karry slated for 18th Avenue S and 22nd Street. Urban Development Solutions, a nonprofit that Rouson helped create with a local businessman, is spearheading the project.
"It's hard to say how much of what Darryl Rouson does is as representation for the NAACP" and how much is for Rouson's personal gain, Yeshitela said.
Rouson wouldn't say how much he and his partners will profit from the project. But he said there was no agreement between him and Sher.
"There's no quid pro quo," he said. "Craig Sher is not saying to me, "Darryl, we're doing this for you over there, you'd better come down here and do this for us.' "
"Omali characterizes me as a sellout," Rouson later wrote in an e-mail. "I characterize (myself) as a collaborator of relationships seeking to benefit my people. But who would fault me for trying to make a living also to feed my family?"
The recent attacks disappointed City Council member Earnest Williams, who is black and represents a district that covers portions of Midtown, where many of the city's African-American residents live.
"It's taking attention away from issues we still need to work on," Williams said, referring to crime, health care and education. "We need . . . to work together to resolve them."
Another African-American council member, Rene Flowers, whose district also encompasses parts of Midtown, described the attacks as "unfortunate."
"There are people who have respect for one another and tend to disagree amicably and there are those who don't," she said.
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After the 1996 shooting death of a black 18-year-old by a white St. Petersburg police officer and subsequent unrest, Yeshitela and the Uhurus gained new prominence, particularly for their criticism of the officer and city officials. Yeshitela participated in discussions with city leaders about economic development and policing in mostly black neighborhoods.
In 2000, a new face arrived. As NAACP president, Rouson began meeting with government officials and business leaders, pushing for inclusion.
To some people, such as Don Shea, 52, president of the St. Petersburg Downtown Partnership, Rouson's approach was attractive.
Shea, who is white, joined the NAACP because "the strategies and tactics they use are inclusive of the broadest segment of the community possible," he said. He said he "supposed" he would work with the Uhurus, but they had never approached him.
Said Rouson: "I don't believe black people can operate on an island of Midtown with such self-sufficiency that it makes no sense for us to build collaborative relationships with those who are in power.
"This is not Atlanta, New Orleans, Chicago, or Washington, D.C.," Rouson said referring to cities with larger black populations. "I wish it were."
About 22 percent of St. Petersburg's residents are black; 9 percent of Pinellas County's residents are black.
"Would I like to see the black community independent? Yes. But if interdependence is dictated, you've got to work with it the best you can," Rouson said. "If we had a black bank with a black board of directors maybe . . . it would make sense not to build a relationship with the VPs at AmSouth. But . . ."
Yeshitela said he is not totally against working within the system, but said he still views it as harmful to African-American residents.
"Do I believe that America has the will to free black people - Africans - through working through the system? Absolutely, definitively no," said Yeshitela, but added, "One needs the democratic space to do any other kind of struggle.
"There's something wrong with African people so dispossessed that the solution for being kidnapped and taken into captivity is not self-determination but to deepen your relationship with your captor," Yeshitela said.
It's unclear whether Rouson - who quotes Martin Luther King Jr.'s principles of nonviolence and former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall - and Yeshitela - whose ideology more closely resembles that of black nationalist Marcus Garvey - will have that second meeting.
Yeshitela said he's willing to work with anyone who wants to eliminate police containment and bring about economic development that "uplifts the entire community."
Rouson said: "I believe one day we will find something to work on. But right now, he has a constituent base that he must feed and that feeds off him, and I have a constituent base that I must feed and feeds off me."
