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A team plays into history

Forty years later, Gibbs players are celebrating more than a basketball team.

By JON WILSON
Published July 19, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG - Forty years ago, the Gibbs High School basketball team began one of the hardest journeys a team could make.

St. Petersburg, like the rest of Florida and the South, was tiptoeing out of the segregation era.

All-black schools such as Gibbs played in their own league, separate from the all-white Florida High School Athletic Association.

In 1966, Gibbs became the first black school to compete against the white schools.

Elbert Crumb. Stepney Johnson. Leon Waller. Thomas Daly. Jerome Hillsman. They were the frequent starters.

Some of them grew up in the Jordan Park and 22nd Street S neighborhoods. On their slender shoulders, they carried the hope of a community.

Freddie Dyles was the coach. Charles Manning was his assistant.

Emanuel Stewart, a career educator who helped break through other racial barriers in St. Petersburg, was the Gibbs principal.

Together, they created a storybook legend.

During the 1966-67 season, Gibbs compiled a 27-2 record.

And in an amazing postseason run, playing in gymnasiums literally packed to the windows behind the high seats, the Gladiators won the state championship for 2A schools, at the time Florida's largest high school classification.

"Everyone knew they could do it. Everyone did not really understand the implications and how it would change history," said Ann Taylor, board president of the St. Petersburg Historical Society.

Taylor, the daughter of a pioneer African-American disc jockey in St. Petersburg, knew most of the players.

On Saturday, the 1966-67 team is being honored at the Gibbs Alumni Association's 13th Annual Picnic at Maximo Park.

It starts at 11 a.m. Minson Rubin, a 1963 Gibbs graduate, is the association president and helped organize the drive to honor the team.

Some of its memories include the racial taunts and ugly names spectators sometimes threw.

"It was hard, but I didn't pay attention to it, really. Half the time I didn't even hear them," Waller said.

Team members realized they represented a school and a community engaged in a cause bigger than sports.

The team, said Crumb, "was an integration breakthrough. It was being used as a tool to test the waters, so to speak."

One of the more electric sports events in St. Petersburg history occurred on Dec. 30, 1966. Gibbs played Clearwater in the final of a holiday tournament.

All-white Clearwater, considered a rich, upcounty school, was a traditional power, ranked No. 3 in the state by sportswriters. Upstart Gibbs was No. 1.

About 7,500 spectators stuffed Bayfront Center.

At the time it was said to be the largest crowd ever to see a high school game in Florida.

"We had to stop selling tickets. We reached our limit because of (Bayfront's) capacity," Stewart said.

People waited in the parking lot. They could hear a thundering "Whooomp," a war cry Gibbs fans shouted whenever a player took a shot or grabbed a rebound.

In the arena, one side was filled with white people; the other, with black people.

"The din was deafening," wrote the Evening Independent, the city's afternoon newspaper.

Earlier that day, civil rights activist Joe Waller, who later took the name Omali Yeshitela, had torn down a racially inflammatory mural at St. Petersburg City Hall.

There didn't seem to be any talk about his first cousin's action, Leon Waller said.

"If there was, it wasn't through me. He was doing his thing, and I was doing mine," he said.

The game was "the greatest show on earth," wrote the St. Petersburg Times. Gibbs won 70-66, barely escaping a desperate Clearwater rally.

After the game, opposing players shook hands. Some embraced. No incidents among fans were reported.

"There may have been one or two minor things, which I've forgotten about," Stewart said. "They played a good game, and we played a good game and that's what people came to see."

A couple of months later, Gibbs challenged the best at the state tournament in Gainesville.

The team defeated powerful, physically intimidating Archbishop Curley of Miami, 67-65, in overtime.

The final was almost anticlimactic. Gibbs swamped Jacksonville Terry Parker for the championship, 69-55.

Afterward, Terry Parker cheerleaders posed with Gibbs players and fans for photos. Congratulatory telegrams poured in - including messages from Pinellas County schools Dixie Hollins, Clearwater and Northeast.

The players still try to keep in touch, Hillsman said. He is a retired asphalt worker living in Clearwater.

Stepney Johnson moved to Los Angeles, where he is urban music president of Interscope Geffen A&M, whose musicians include Eminem and 50 Cent.

Leon Waller drove a Pinellas County school bus and is retired in St. Petersburg.

Thomas Daly is retired in Nashville.

Elbert Crumb lives in St. Petersburg and coached basketball at Osceola High School for 24 years. When school starts next month, he will teach drivers ed and physical education - at Gibbs.

Freddie Dyles, who coached Gibbs basketball teams until 1993, died at age 66 in 1999. Charles Manning died in 1996 at age 63.

Emanuel Stewart, 87, retired in 1981 and lives in St. Petersburg. In 1987, he was named the city's Mr. Sun for a lifetime of civic achievement.

Johnson said he hopes people in the old Gibbs community and throughout the city will remember the Gladiators of 1966-67.

"Honor and be proud of what that school and that basketball team did and how well it represented your city and the state, and what those kids had to go through to get that," he said

"Please don't wash it away. Honor those trophies."

[Last modified July 18, 2006, 20:32:49]