Seeing injustice, she acts

By SHARON TUBBS

© St. Petersburg Times, published February 19, 2001

Delores Fletcher, 49, is president of the National People's Democratic Uhuru Movement, a black socialist group in St. Petersburg. A city native and single mother, she became active in civic causes in 1968 when she joined the Junta of Militant Organizations, a predecessor to the Uhuru group. After years away from the activist scene, she rejoined it in 1997.

This is her story.

(It was) the height of the civil rights era, and people were marching right by my front door. . . . I just knew that I had a place in fighting for the freedom of our people.

I came out and tried religion, tried to be a good, quote, citizen, and goodness, doing little small things in my neighborhood. I was vice president of a residents association, tried to help start a Boy Scout troop in Jordan Park and different things. . . . I even got caught up in the anti-drug movement, drug marches and things.

I went on a drug march one night with these city employees and people from the neighborhood and the police. We're standing out in front of this house and these little kids are looking out the window, terrified of us -- not of their drug-dealing mama and daddy. Okay? Not of whatever crime situation we thought was going on in there. They were scared to death of us.

We were supposed to be coming to help. But standing out there, chanting and writing "Drug dealer get out!" on the sidewalk, you know, we weren't coming to embrace. We were like a force to attack. We thought we were doing something good for the neighborhood. We weren't doing nothing good for the neighborhood. We were attacking this family instead of going in there and fixing whatever was wrong that they had to be in that situation in the first place. You see what I'm saying? And the children picked up on it. They were peeping out from behind the curtains, looking out there, scared to death, hurt, you know? And it just blew my mind, and I backed up.

Whatever it is we're trying to do with so-called cleaning up the neighborhood, it's not working.

I have an 11-year-old son, which is a large reason why I'm here (with Uhuru). I cannot leave a world for him that is set up to destroy him, that is never going to allow him to be the fullest potential that he can be, that the economic structure of it is designed that only certain people are going to make it anyway.

I'm not going to change the world by wishing it was different. I have got to get active and make a difference. So that what I leave him will leave him room to be the fullest he can be, because right now, it doesn't leave him that kind of room.

- Interview by Sharon Tubbs, Times staff writer

PERSONAL HISTORY: The fifth in a series of first-person stories appearing in February, Black History Month.

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