By MARY JO MELONE
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 16, 2001
The St. Petersburg area between Central Avenue and Pinellas Point is no longer called the southside.
The people who live there rejected the name as a putdown.
For a while the area was called the Challenge Area, but City Hall, having chosen the label, eventually dropped it.
The name had become an embarrassing emblem of the failure of David Fischer's administration to make even a nick in the drugging, the hooking, the joblessness and most of all the hopelessness.
The administration of Rick Baker, which vows to do what Fischer did not do, calls the neighborhood by a bland new name, Midtown.
Sharon Russ calls it home.
A couple of Sundays back, she looked out her back door and saw a woman half out of her mind on drugs sitting in her yard. The woman was taking off her clothes. When Russ offered to get her home, the woman said she wanted to go to a particular hotel on 34th Street where you set up shop by turning back the sheets. Russ called paramedics.
It was the middle of the afternoon.
One evening, when the neighborhood was supposed to be asleep, Russ was roused by the shouts of two men on the street. They were fighting over some stash of drugs. Russ' heart pounded. They would start shooting, she was sure. She scurried from her bedroom and peered out a window. One of the men ran off. There would be no shooting. At least not in front of her house. Sharon Russ went back to bed.
Russ is 40 years old and wears black glasses that make her look like she spends her days reading, thinking. She is prone to going her own road.
She was on her own road in March, when we first met. On election night, Russ, who is black, was waving a campaign sign for the mayoral candidate who had been successfully but incorrectly painted a racist, Kathleen Ford.
Sharon Russ picked up a picket sign again a couple of weeks ago and this time took it to announce her frustration with City Hall. One black kid had shot and killed another in Midtown, and a retaliatory shootout occurred a few hours later in which bullets sprayed a house where children were sleeping.
Sharon Russ is tired of the promises from downtown that have fallen like rain on dry earth, yet produced nothing, since the unrest five years ago.
She is fed up with those around her who point fingers away from themselves.
"The next time, who do you riot for?" she asked Wednesday.
"If we can't riot when a black kid kills a black kid, we can't riot when a white person kills somebody."
Sharon Russ spoke with the forceful delivery of someone behind a podium, but she was on the sheet-covered couch in her living room. I was her only audience.
But she has made enough noise since waving her picket signs to meet with somebody who makes the wheels turn: Goliath Davis, or simply, Goliath, as she calls him -- the police chief who, as the new chief of economic development, is supposed to restore Midtown.
Russ believes in Davis. She wants to believe even more deeply.
But if I were Davis, I would worry. Sharon Russ is watching him closely. She sees needs beyond shopping centers and industrial parks.
She wishes Davis would spend some of his time working with the mothers and children who have been abandoned by the men who were sucked into the drug trade.
She wishes Davis would turn his back on Omali Yeshitela and his perpetual racket.
She wishes Davis would stand against the drug dealers.
"He's going to have to have to put up or shut up," she said. "Businesses are not going to come until we show that we have a viable community, not crime-ridden or self-destructive."