A statue cast in controversy

When a group of well-connected people acted to honor the Evening Independent's legendary editor, the man, viewed through modern eyes, carried a taint.

By LENNIE BENNETT

Revised August 18, 2000

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 13, 2000

ST. PETERSBURG -- It seems a benign image: a barefoot boy with an earnest expression standing in front of a green bench. He brandishes the Evening Independent, its headline proclaiming the famous Sunshine Offer, which for 76 years gave free newspapers on any day the sun did not shine in St. Petersburg.

The scene, so detailed that it looks real from a distance, is a statue rendered in bronze by noted sculptor J. Seward Johnson Jr. It will be placed in front of the St. Petersburg Museum of History and dedicated on Sept. 9. It is a gift, valued at about $130,000, from a group of local men and women, most of whom grew up in St. Petersburg, who paid for it with private donations.

The project, 11 years in the making, was to have been a statue of Maj. Lew B. Brown, the Independent's legendary editor, whose gimmick gave the city an international presence.

But a letter from a relative newcomer to St. Petersburg raised a disturbing issue, never discussed: Lew Brown, he contended, was a racist who systematically undercut efforts for equal rights for blacks.

The statue's sponsors, wanting to avoid controversy, changed the image to the anonymous newsboy. The journey to that compromise choice was not easy. Their assumptions of the past were challenged and their beliefs about race received unwanted scrutiny.

This is a story of civic pride and generosity. But it is also a cautionary tale, a reminder that the past can be dealt with or denied but never erased, and that history is a collection of both fact and memory, seen through prisms of opinion, custom and perspective.

Perspective is a word both literal and philosophical, a technique used by artists to make something appear real when seen from a particular standpoint and, more ephemerally, it is also a means by which events and people are judged.

And how to judge Llewellyn Buford Brown?

"He did something historically significant," said Mary Wyatt Allen, who is a member of the statue committee and a guiding force at the Museum of History.

"Lew Brown put St. Petersburg on the map," said Betty Jean Miller, a former reporter at the Independent and the Times and a committee member. "I remember as a child when St. Petersburg was hailed in Ripley's Believe It or Not for the Sunshine Offer."

"One of the most racist (men) in the history of St. Petersburg," said Perkins Shelton, a local civil rights leader.

"At best, he's a mixed character," said Ray Arsenault, University of South Florida professor and author of St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream.

"He fell in love with St. Petersburg and loved it for the rest of his life," said Marion Snider, Brown's granddaughter. "I never heard one word from him about somebody over the color of his skin."

Lew B. Brown, as he was known, was born in 1861 in Arkansas. He was self-educated, having less than a year of formal schooling. His father died when Brown was 15, his mother moved the family to her native Kentucky and Brown immediately went to work for a local newspaper. At 18, he owned and edited his own paper. He married and had three children. Two of them died of diphtheria, and his first wife died of a heart condition.

When he arrived in St. Petersburg in 1908 at the age of 47 with his second wife, son and daughter, he had studied law and earned a license to practice from the Kentucky Supreme Court and owned and edited a second newspaper in Kentucky, the Harrodsburg Democrat. Loving the weather and seeing business opportunities, he decided to stay, buying the afternoon daily, the Evening Independent, for $10,000.

He was among a handful of residents who directed the course of St. Petersburg's development during the first part of the 20th century. As editor of the Independent, Brown, along with W.L. Straub, editor of the St. Petersburg Times, shaped public policy and determined public opinion since the two men controlled the most widespread sources of information at that time.

Brown's Sunshine Offer for decades would define St. Petersburg to the world. The phrase would spawn the appellations Sunshine City and Suncoast, which endure today.

In September 1910, he ran a full-page ad that promised to give away the newspaper for free on any day the sun did not shine before press time, which he listed as 4 p.m. The offer made national headlines and helped spur St. Petersburg's reputation as a tourist destination. The image became so well-known that letters addressed only to the Sunshine City, Florida, were delivered to St. Petersburg.

(The exact date of the ad is unclear. A microfilm search of old copies in Times files puts the date at Sept. 20; historian Ray Arsenault dates it in his book on Sept. 1.)

Brown also is credited as the force behind the construction of the Million Dollar Pier -- after the hurricane of 1921 washed away the old pier -- and of founding the first city hospital, now Bayfront Medical Center. The title of major was conferred on him by the governor when Brown financed the local Home Guard during World War I. He helped broker the separation of Pinellas County from Hillsborough in 1911 and, as president of the Board of Trade, developed a system of new roads in the county.

When he died in 1944, he was considered one of the great city fathers.

His son, L. Chauncey Brown, took over as editor, then sold the paper in 1950. Changing times made an afternoon daily less viable, and by 1962 the Independent was losing several hundred thousand dollars a year. The St. Petersburg Times acquired the paper that year, though the two papers had separate staffs and continued to be highly competitive. But after years of declining circulation, the Independent was shut down for good in 1986 and the Sunshine Offer, which had been invoked fewer than 300 times in 75 years, died with the paper.

Bob Pfeiffer, like Lew Brown, was not born in St. Petersburg, but he is every bit as much a son of the city.

He was 10 when he arrived in 1921 from Ohio with his parents, two brothers and sister. The Pfeiffer boys sold newspapers on city street corners for years. He is best known as an ardent supporter of his alma mater, St. Petersburg High School, coloring his hair and beard green and leading cheers at football games dressed as the school mascot, Mr. Green Devil.

Equally important was Pfeiffer's love for the Independent and his admiration of Brown.

Brown's granddaughter, Marion Snider, remembers that Pfeiffer approached her in the mid 1980s about commemorating Brown's contribution to the community.

"He wanted somehow to lionize my grandfather," she said. "He mentioned the sculpture as a possibility or naming a park."

She says that in 1988 or 1989, "I was at a hotel in Tampa and saw the work of a sculptor, Seward Johnson, including one of a man sitting on a bench reading a newspaper," she said. "I told Bob to go see them. He came back very excited."

J. Seward Johnson Jr. is a popular sculptor of "ultra-realistic" bronze statues. His lifelike figures of people in everyday settings are in parks and common spaces throughout the world.

After Pfeiffer saw Johnson's work, he wrote to the artist's representative in a letter dated Nov. 20, 1989, and secured an agreement from Johnson to create a statue of Lew Brown seated on a green bench -- another icon of old St. Petersburg -- reading the Evening Independent. The cost would be $100,000.

He raised about $20,000 during the next year, but fundraising efforts soon languished. Neither the Chamber of Commerce nor the city's arts committee had public money for the sculpture.

In 1996, Pfeiffer enlisted the help of two other former Independent staffers, Betty Jean Miller and Bethia Caffery. They went to Andrew Barnes, chairman of Times Publishing Co., who agreed to contribute $25,000.

In the spring of 1997, they formed a committee of well-connected men and women, among them Mary Wyatt Allen, Mrs. Snider and Ron Mason. Bill Mills Sr. agreed to serve as chairman.

Through Allen, the project was put under the aegis of the not-for-profit St. Petersburg Museum of History, its board agreeing to accept the sculpture as a gift and to place it in front of the museum on The Pier approach.

The group was optimistic enough to request that the sculpture be completed within a year.

In October 1997, Mills announced that the entire $110,000 had been raised and asked to step down as chairman. Mason took over. In an Oct. 8 memo to the committee, Mason wrote that Johnson had finished the small clay model that would, over the next few months, be translated into a life-size model for casting in bronze. He called for a committee meeting to discuss the sculpture's final details.

Dwight L. Lawton, 69, moved to St. Petersburg 10 years ago from Long Island for the climate. He has a long history of political activism and non-violent protest (see box). He had followed the Maj. Lew B. Brown sculpture project for several years as it was reported sporadically in the Times.

"I remembered the Sunshine Offer specifically because at first I was a tourist here, visiting my in-laws, and they mentioned the free papers. I read Ray Arsenault's book and knew Brown's history. I just couldn't stand it that nobody was talking about it."

"It" was what Lawton referred to in a letter to St. Petersburg Mayor David Fischer on Oct. 13, 1997: "Mr. Brown," he wrote, "was a racist."

The accusation dropped, as heavy as one of Johnson's metal statues, through the air of good will.

City officials distanced themselves from the controversy, saying it was a private project on private property.

Committee members, Mason said, "were stunned."

Historian Ray Arsenault said he, too, was "stunned" when he heard about plans for the statue. "Dwight had already written to the mayor when he called me and filled me in. I thought it was a terrible idea. Brown was the most vocal white supremacist in the city."

Arsenault's book recounts Brown's efforts to exclude blacks from voting during the early 1900s and of "race-baiting" in the 1912 lynching of a black man by a white mob.

Arsenault and Perkins Shelton attended a committee meeting in late 1997, which was to have been a victory celebration, to dissuade members from their plan.

"They were gracious," Arsenault said. "But they did not want to hear what we had to say."

"I have some very strong feelings," said Mary Wyatt Allen, "that you do not judge yesterday's actions by today's morality."

The consensus among the committee appeared to be that Brown was a product of his era, no worse on the racial scorecard than anyone else and far better than most.

W.L. Straub, for example, Brown's counterpart at the St. Petersburg Times, also endorsed whites-only voting and "in ways both subtle and flagrant treated blacks as second-class citizens," according to a history of the newspaper printed in 1984.

Arsenault acknowledged that Straub, too, could be considered racist yet still have a city park named after him: "Maybe if they had erected a statue to Brown in 1926 or 1940. But not today, not after everything that's happened."

Bethia Caffery, a committee member and a friend of Shelton's, found herself at odds with him.

"I have a lot of respect for Bethia," Shelton said. "But naturally she defends Brown."

"Undoubtedly there was a great deal of racism during that period," she said. "Why can't we move on?"

"It was treating Lew Brown as if he were a contemporary person," said Mason.

The controversy was hardest for Marion Snider, Brown's granddaughter.

"She above all knew and loved her grandfather," said Betty Jean Miller. "She felt he truly did look after black people."

Mrs. Snider, in defending Brown, recounted an incident in which he dived into the icy waters of a Northern lake to save his black chauffeur, who could not swim.

"I know there are racist people and I totally rue it," she said. "But my grandfather was not one of them."

"Because it was a paternalistic racism," said Arsenault, "and they treated blacks as children rather than as animals, it was somehow okay."

"I thought it was over," said Mason. "We realized we couldn't continue on with the Lew B. Brown sculpture. We were a bunch of well-meaning people who had spun off into deep waters."

Then someone remembered that Bob Pfeiffer's idea had always been to incorporate a newsboy into the design somehow. They regrouped and decided to have a sculpture of a newsboy holding a paper advertising the famous Sunshine Offer.

The green bench would remain.

For Shelton, the bench was another racial flashpoint, a reminder of the days when he could not have used it or any other downtown amenity. Arsenault mollified him.

"At best it's a bittersweet symbol and I sympathized with Perkins," said Arsenault. "But how far do you go? Practically every artifact in the city is tainted with Jim Crow."

Seward Johnson created a new clay model of a young boy, at no additional cost, using a photograph of Pfeiffer as a model.

The final hurdle was the plaque that would explain the Sunshine Offer to the public.

"Perkins insisted there be no reference to Lew Brown on it," Mason said. "Ray worked on a compromise that mentions him in the middle of the text."

"I told Perkins that a name on a plaque is not necessarily honoring a person," said Arsenault. "It's sometimes just recording history."

"I don't say I went along with it," Shelton said. "But I talked to Bethia, who is a friend, and just haven't continued a protest. If people want to take their money and spend it in such a demonstration ..."

Through it all, Shelton, Arsenault and Dwight Lawton were the only people who publicly protested the Lew B. Brown sculpture.

"Yes, that surprised me," Shelton said.

"I guess I was surprised," said Lawton. "But I'm white. I can't walk in their shoes, and there are a lot of other issues."

"They were all well-meaning," said Arsenault. "When they realized it would be hurtful, they responded. I think it was a good compromise to honor the Sunshine Offer."

"There was some real resentment about being told what to do since it was a private project," said Mason. "Marion was very accepting when Betty Jean and I told her about the change, but it was tough."

"We did not want to offend anybody," said Betty Jean Miller. "This will convey the spirit of the offer. It celebrates the city's uniqueness and the Evening Independent."

"I'm happy with it," said Bethia Caffery. "The focus has changed from the individual to the offer, and that is still as good."

"I think it is unfortunate that the original concept did not prevail," said Mary Wyatt Allen.

"You'll never see me go to Bethia and say, "Oh, you were right,' " said Perkins Shelton. "And I don't expect her ever to come to me and say that, either."

"I'm very disappointed, of course," said Marion Snider. "The basic thing was to honor my grandfather."

The sculpture is finished and awaits shipping from Johnson's studio in New Jersey.

It will be placed on a bed of brick and granite, amid a landscaped terrace in front of the St. Petersburg Museum of History. Technically, the city owns the land, but a legal opinion written July 13 by Mark Winn, chief assistant city attorney, states that the museum "leases certain grounds from the city. ... The lease does not prohibit the erection of the statue. Because it is not a gift to the City, the statue need not go through the procedure for gifts/donations of artwork ... and neither is it subject to any Council resolution."

Bob Pfeiffer saw the new design a year ago before he was incapacitated by a stroke. His wife, Ruth, said he was delighted with it. He is bedridden now and speaks in non-sequiturs. Even if he is physically able to attend the dedication ceremony Sept. 9, Pfeiffer, the man whose vision and enthusiasm carried the project for so many years, probably will not comprehend its significance.

Marion Snider and her two sons will attend, and she has been asked to speak about her grandfather.

Bethia Caffery and Perkins Shelton said they will go to the ceremony together.

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