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Letter to the editor

A warrior, a father, a fighter

Ralph Wimbish waged - and won - many battles at lunch counters, theaters and hotels. His son remembers them, and their cost.

By RALPH WIMBISH, Special to the Times
Published November 25, 2007

Forty years later, the tumultuous events of 1967 continue to dance about my mind as if they occurred yesterday. It was an amazing, historic year - unforgettable for me if only because I am the son of Dr. Ralph Wimbish. Anyone familiar with the history of St. Petersburg knows how important Ralph and Bette Wimbish were in the local fight against segregation. Thanks to efforts they helped lead, St. Petersburg's lunch counters, theaters, public restrooms, swimming areas, junior college and public hospital were integrated by 1967, the year my father died of a heart attack at the age of 45. To this date, I am convinced he would have lived longer if he hadn't spent most of his life fighting racism.

He was born in Cordele, Ga., in 1922. He and my grandmother Inez and my Uncle Ray moved to St. Petersburg in the late '20s. He grew up on Third Avenue S in the Gas Plant district, a black neighborhood that was later torn down to make way for Tropicana Field. He graduated from Gibbs High and then Florida A&M, where he met a pretty student from Tampa named Bette Davis. They married on Valentine's Day 1945. After serving in the Army toward the end of World War II, he went to Meharry Medical School in Nashville, Tenn.

Sometime after my dad graduated from Meharry and completed an internship at New York's Harlem Hospital, my parents began building a house in Tampa on the "white side" of 22nd Street, across from the College Hill housing project.

Mysteriously, the house burned down in 1948 on the night before my family was to move in. My dad always thought the owner of a nearby store, whom he suspected belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, was to blame.

I am sure this was the fire that burned inside my father as he began his battle for civil rights.

Shortly after I was born in 1952, my dad decided to move his medical practice to St. Petersburg.

Our family moved into a new house on the north side of 15th Avenue S and 32nd Street. Because of rigid, but unofficial, zoning restrictions that barred black people from living within 100 yards of 15th Avenue, we had a big front yard.

The black entertainers and athletes who came to town could not stay in St. Petersburg's segregated hotels, so my dad helped them find accommodations elsewhere. Many stayed with us. Our house guests included the likes of Cab Calloway, Elston Howard, Dizzy Gillespie, Althea Gibson and Jesse Owens.

All the while, my dad was campaigning against racial injustice.

An imposing 6-foot mound of testosterone with a mustache, he was a larger-than-life advocate of equal opportunities in health, housing and education. As the local NAACP president, he organized a nine-month boycott of Webb's City, the huge drugstore on the edge of downtown.

He drew national attention by teaming up with Bill White, Curt Flood and other Major League Baseball stars to end the spring training segregation that prohibited black ballplayers from staying in white hotels. He founded the Ambassadors Club, an organization of black professional men that became influential in many community-service projects before it disbanded in 2005.

In addition, he filed lawsuits and attended countless Pinellas School Board meetings to argue that black schools and their students were being shortchanged.

Because of my dad and friends like Robert Swain, Fred Alsup, Emanuel Stewart and Enoch Davis, lunch counters, restaurants, movie theaters, bowling alleys, Mound Park Hospital (predecessor to Bayfront Medical Center) and the "whites only" beaches around St. Petersburg were integrated during the 1960s.

My mother, meanwhile, was no ordinary '60s homemaker. While pregnant, she ran unsuccessfully for the School Board in 1960. She always found time for community meetings, fed our family of five, drove me to and from school, and attended my Little League games. All the while, she set her sights on law school. When she was in college, her heart was set on med school, but she opted for a job as a junior high school teacher in Tampa while my dad was at Meharry.

In the early 1960s, my mother wanted to attend Stetson Law School, not far from our home, but the school did not admit its first black student until 1971. Eventually she was accepted at the FAMU law school, and my parents made the tough decision to split up our family. With my sister, Barbara, already at Howard University in Washington, my kid brother, Terry, and I went to Tallahassee with my mother while my father remained in St. Petersburg to support us.

I hated Tallahassee. I hated to leave spring training, my friends and schoolmates back in St. Petersburg. Most of all, I missed my dad. Usually once a month and most holidays, we would make the 250-mile drive home or my dad would come to Tallahassee. We couldn't wait until we would be a normal family again.

Because of that, my mom was determined to zip through law school in just 21/2 years, all the while attending to the daily needs of my brother and me. When the summer of 1967 arrived, she had just one more semester to go. To the rest of the country, it became the "summer of love." To me, it was to be the last summer our family was whole.

And what a summer it was. It began with my sister's graduation from Howard and ended with her festive wedding reception at the Outrigger Inn, near the Sunshine Skyway, in early September. In between, I worked for Charlotte McCoy at Doctors Pharmacy on 22nd Street S. It wasn't my first job - I sold Cokes at Florida State football games the previous fall - but now I was earning $1.25 an hour as a part-time stock clerk. I played baseball that summer at Hoyt Field in Gulfport, and I smoked my first (and last) cigarette. The soundtrack of that summer was provided by the radio, particularly WLCY and WTMP. The Beatles' All YouNeed Is Love, James Brown's Cold Sweat and the long version of Light My Fire by the Doors were my favorites.

Unlike years past, I could go to Biff Burger on 34th Street S or Wolfie's restaurant in Central Plaza without having to use the back door. When I got my learner's permit, my dad took me to the parking lot at the Allstate Insurance building on 34th Street S and gave me driving lessons. Together, we watched the nightly news and saw the tragedy of Vietnam, the rioting in Detroit and the ascension of Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court.

And then there was golf. My passion for the game today wouldn't exist if my dad had not taught me how to play at Airco, a course he personally integrated. To some, he was St. Petersburg's version of Martin Luther King Jr. To me, he was Earl Woods. That August, we watched on TV as Charlie Sifford, at age 45, won the Hartford Open, becoming the first black to win a PGA tour event.

Before summer ended, I talked my dad into letting me stay home to start high school at Bishop Barry (before it became St. Petersburg Catholic) while my mother and brother returned to Tallahassee for the final three months. That fall we watched the final weekend of baseball's last truly great pennant race, when the Red Sox sneaked into the World Series. Later, my dad allowed me to take a two-hour train ride on my own to Gainesville to see my beloved Florida Gators, led by quarterback Harmon Wages, beat Kentucky.

My father was too busy to come along, but I always appreciated the time he spent with me as his civil rights activism and late-night house calls began to wear him down. Like me, he eagerly awaited the day when our family would be reunited just before Christmas.

On the evening of Friday, Dec. 1, my mother and brother flew to Miami to meet us so we could attend FAMU's annual Orange Blossom Classic football game the next night.

I should have realized something was wrong earlier that day when my dad told me his tongue was bleeding. As unusual as that was, we went about the day as if nothing were wrong. Later that night, at the Four Ambassadors Hotel, I fell asleep about midnight, only to be abruptly awakened by the screams of my mother. Paralyzed by fear, I couldn't get out of bed. The paramedics came and went, and when I heard the door slam closed, I finally mustered the courage to seek out my mother.

With no one to comfort her, she came running toward me. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she cried, as if she needed to apologize. "I tried to save him. He had a heart attack. I'm sorry."

I never had seen my mother cry and, suddenly, I was in tears, too. My best friend, my dad, was in an ambulance en route to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. Had he lived just two more weeks, our family would have been united again.

I stayed awake the rest of the night thinking about the future without my dad. Early the next morning, we boarded a plane back to Tampa and prepared for the funeral. It still amazes me how my mother kept her composure throughout those awful days. Immediately after we buried my dad, she drove to Tallahassee and took her final law exams. Despite her grief, she passed them all and came home with her law degree.

In 1968, she passed the Florida Bar exam and established a law practice in my father's office at 15th Avenue S and 22nd Street. A year later, she became the first African-American elected to the St. Petersburg City Council and began a long, distinguished career in local and state government.

It's just too bad my dad wasn't there to see it.

Times researchers Mary Mellstrom and Claire Giglio contributed to this report.

Sunday, November 25, 2007 NWE

On the cover On Jan. 3, 1961, Dr. Ralph Wimbish, president of the St. Petersburg branch of the NAACP, was served at the Maas Brothers department store lunch counter in downtown St. Petersburg. That same day, 14 other lunch counters in the greater St. Petersburg area also quietly integrated, ending weeks of sit-ins and picketing.

Fast facts

About the author

Ralph Wimbish, a 1974 graduate of the University of South Florida, is an assistant sports editor at the New York Post. In 2001, he was co-author of Arlene Howard's memoir of her husband, Elston and Me: The Story of the First Black Yankee. His mother, Bette Wimbish (right, in 1996), is retired and lives in St. Petersburg.

[Last modified November 24, 2007, 19:53:13]