Civil rights, civil matters

A young man's passion and a controversial apology fill a vacant wall in St. Petersburg's City Hall with meaning.

By SUSAN ASCHOFF

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 27, 1999

ST. PETERSBURG -- Thirty-three years ago, a black man strode up the steps of City Hall and ripped down a painting of white beach goers and caricatured black entertainers.

In the same building, just feet away, city leaders are now discussing whether the space should be marked with a plaque as a historical site in the local civil rights movement.

Some City Council members wish to apologize.

But they are stumbling over the words.

Some African-American residents say a plaque is inconsequential. Then they quietly confess that what is done now will tell them not about their history, but their future in a city still mistrusted.

They want to believe all the people of St. Petersburg can move forward together, if only the right words can be found:

We are sorry.

In 1966, St. Petersburg resident Joe Waller asked the city, in a reasoned letter, to remove the painting of big-lipped black musicians entertaining white people at Pass-a-Grille Beach.

"(It) depicts Negroes in a most despicable, derogatory manner," he wrote on Dec. 9. He expressed confidence that the mayor of "all the people" of St. Petersburg would do the right thing.

The late George Snow Hill described his work as a typical beach scene: "It was quite common to see families picnicking on weekends under the thatched roof shelters while roving musicians stopped to entertain. The picnickers enjoyed the music and showed their appreciation by giving money to the entertainers," Hill said in a St. Petersburg Times story. More of Hill's visceral murals, including a nude mermaid on the bow of a sunken ship, remain on the walls of the U.S. Coast Guard Station in downtown St. Petersburg. [Times files ]

Mayor Herman Goldner replied:

"I find nothing offensive in the portrayal of strolling troubadours and picnickers at Pass-a-Grille Beach," Goldner wrote. "I think you know that I, personally, am not a racist. I think . . . that all of our minority groups must mature to the point where self-consciousness is not a motivating factor for complaints."

Another letter, this one from Chester K. Guth, chairman of the city's biracial Community Relations Commission, followed.

The painting shows the beaches "are open to our Negro citizens," wrote Guth. "It also pays tribute to the tremendous capacity and talents of our Negro citizens to entertain."

Waller was furious. In a last and final appeal, he blasted their ignorance.

"The fact that our St. Petersburg beaches are open to our Negro citizens must rank as the best kept secret of modern times. For many years we thought we were banished to the south mole (now Demen's Landing)," he wrote.

"Moreover, it may interest you to know that racial unrest has existed in St. Petersburg for many years."

A couple of weeks later, on Dec. 29, 1966, Waller and other members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, marched on City Hall. They objected to $50-million in federal grant money going for downtown beautification and none to black neighborhoods a few blocks away.

Waller says he did not come to City Hall for the painting but was provoked to enter the building and pull down the canvas, which was pasted directly to the wall, when he saw white reporters and policemen laughing at an elderly woman's poor grammar at the gathering.

When the painted canvas pulled away from the wall, the sound it made was a roar, echoing off the marble staircase and reverberating in the silence. A woman standing on the staircase landing above screamed:

"Black bastards!"

Waller, grasping the toppled painting, wasn't sure what to do with it.

With the 8-foot-long canvas half-dragging and half-wrapped around his legs, Waller and a handful of other men made their way to Central Avenue. He was breathing hard and shouting. The canvas was intact, but the paint was chipping away under the stress.

Police Sgt. Les Hoffman was one of the first to reach him. Responding to a radio report of a theft, he pulled his squad car to the curb when he found the group between Sixth and Ninth streets.

Joe Waller, in sunglasses, carries the canvas down Central Avenue. "I am sure that the vast majority of our Negro citizenry are as ashamed of these persons who committed this act as we are," Mayor Herman Goldner said. The local NAACP opposed the "defacement of public property," but field director Marvin Davies added that the painting's depiction of black people was "despicable." [Times files]

The confrontation was "more noise than gunpowder," recalls Hoffman, now retired and living in Pasco County.

"I remember going down Central Avenue and I had him in tow or he had me in tow and the shop owners were looking and wondering what all the commotion was about," says Hoffman. "I was serious as all get-out. Someone bashed me in the head with one of the pickets. I lost my hat."

Waller, 25, and five others were arrested.

The case was among dozens double-teamed by Richard Mensh and Allen Allweiss of the state attorney's office. "We had a tremendous conviction rate," says Allweiss, now in private practice in downtown St. Petersburg.

The case against Waller was like any other, he says. "We had to show this was larceny, we had to show the mural belonged to the city, and its value," an estimated $11,000.

At trial, everyone was as nice as could be, says John Due, a friend and one of Waller's attorneys in the theft case. "Some of my frivolous motions were permitted -- they did not want any trouble. They didn't want bad publicity."

There were those in the black community who objected to Waller's actions, or at least to his timing. Days before he pulled the painting from the wall, a group of local African-American leaders announced that its removal was not a priority. The St. Petersburg Times said it viewed the new chapter of SNCC as only out for publicity.

"St. Petersburg is a service economy," says Due. "Black people then were very much dependent on those kinds of jobs and were wary of challenging the system."

Waller's trials and appeals lasted five years. He was convicted in municipal court and his attorneys argued all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court that his subsequent trial on state charges would constitute double jeopardy.

Despite winning his appeals, and Circuit Judge Robert E. Beach's assessment that "that was one of the ugliest paintings I've ever seen," the state was told it could try Waller on the grand larceny charge. He was convicted a second time on Aug. 30, 1971. The other defendants were found not guilty or given probation.

Waller spent two-and-a-half years in prison.

The blank space on the City Hall wall has stood through garbage strikes and ballpark referendums. It continued its mute tribute when white people pounded on the window of a nearby office protesting the firing of then-police chief Curt Curtsinger by a black city manager.

It endures in a town where African-Americans must remind the city to include black people on planning committees, and ask, in the late 1990s, why 40 percent of police stops are of African-Americans when they make up 20 percent of the population.

City Council began discussing what to do with the empty space about a year ago, prompted by a building renovation. One painting remains on the north side of the stair landing. On the opposite side of a bright new window is the blank, identically sized panel.

The remaining painting, also commissioned by the Works Progress Administration and by artist George Snow Hill, is done with the same exaggerated physicality as the missing beach scene. A muscular man traps a just-caught fish under his foot, a buxom woman seated below him and another draped over his bowed back. A newsboy holds a paper with a headline about snow gripping the North.

The 1940s work is a snapshot of St. Petersburg's ego.

For decades, the city had been obsessed with maintaining a "sanitized social environment" -- i.e., no Negroes -- for the tourists, writes historian Ray Arsenault in his book, St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream. In 1936, City Council voted to force all black people to live in a 17-block area west of 17th Street and south of Sixth Avenue South.

The plan for a black internment zone proved unworkable, but the message in St. Petersburg was clear. African-Americans could not swim at its beaches, try on clothes in its department stores or sit on its famous green benches.

"It was a time when you didn't know which way to grow up," says C. Bette Wimbish, an attorney who with her late husband, Dr. Ralph Wimbish, was active in the civil rights struggle.

"The lynchings had stopped, but people were still afraid, mostly for their jobs," she says. "At that time you had no access to any government official or office."

Trying to break through the barrier, Wimbish ran for school board in 1960. And lost.

"People would call on the telephone and say, "We're going to send the Ku Klux Klan', " she says. A group of leaders in the black community asked her not to run because she would "disturb the peace."

"Yes, I was afraid," she says. She did it for her children's future, she says.

In 1966, when the city rejected Waller's request to remove the mural, St. Petersburg still clung to the illusion that it was not part of the nation's racial war.

"No one thought about racial things. The white and black got along well together," says Hoffman, the police sergeant.

"I think the city has always tried," says Allweiss, "to alleviate racial dissension."

Before the mural incident, Allweiss had dealt with segregation's legalities as a city prosecutor. In 1962, 10 demonstrators were arrested when they hopped a fence at the whites-only Center Theatre. The theater owner, when asked in court if his refusal to admit them was due to race, said, "I cater to a type."

"Ultimately, it all got resolved and the theaters were opened," Allweiss says. "All that stuff was bad, but it eventually went away."

It was resolved, say the activists, because black people refused to go away. When a judge released the arrested youths but ordered them not to approach the ticket window, others did so over and over until black people were allowed inside the Center and St. Petersburg's two other movie houses.

Waller was unimpressed with the local NAACP's attempts to integrate theaters and lunch counters. The black community was waiting for whites to bestow equality, he believed, rather than demanding what was rightfully theirs.

The same divergence in tactics was occurring nationally. Frustrated by lack of progress even after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, many young black people traded the non-violent philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. and the NAACP for the aggressiveness of Black Power.

"I was a part of it," says Waller. "And when the mural came down, it did represent a departure."

From his jail cell, Waller would help found the Junta of Militant Organizations, or JOMO, and later, the National People's Democratic Uhuru Movement in St. Petersburg. He changed his name to Omali Yeshitela.

Wimbish ran for St. Petersburg City Council, and in 1969 became the first African-American member. She had to ask her colleagues to stop eating lunch at the Yacht Club on meeting days because black people were not allowed.

African-Americans in St. Petersburg find no contradiction in the refined Wimbish hoisting her immensely pregnant self onto a stool at the lunch counter of the Wm. Henry department store and sitting there for hours while waitresses pointedly ignored her and the impertinent Joe Waller storming City Hall to rip down a painting many considered offensive.

"Joe had a right to express his feelings," says Wimbish. "He should not have been sent to jail for three years. It's ridiculous."

But Waller's fractiousness begat a dangerously high profile, his friends say. In 1966, the year he pulled down the painting, he was arrested 11 times.

"There was a mission to dismiss Joe as much as possible" in the white community, says Due, his attorney. "One way was to ignore him. The second was to use any means to get rid of him."

At 57, Omali Yeshitela can still posture as though he'd rather take on the council in a street brawl than a workshop. In his lifelong push for civil rights, he is a fighter who has shoved his hometown's establishment more often than he has talked to it.

But today he says he is more optimistic about the future than he has ever been, and meets with the mayor and city officials on economic development, drug enforcement and other issues.

It doesn't make sense, he says, to "yell from afar" if he can sit at the table.

Earlier this summer, chief of staff Don McRae circulated a draft of the wording for the proposed plaque to council members. After recounting the removal of the painting in 1966, the draft reads:

(T)he City Council of the City of St. Petersburg adopted a resolution that directed the commissioning of this plaque as the city's expression of apology to the community and to Mr. Yeshitela.

Several council members objected to the inclusion of Yeshitela's name: They accuse the Army veteran of treason because of his socialist views.

The local NAACP favors filling the space with a scenic picture, as originally intended by City Council.

Allen Allweiss dismisses the debate. "I think they're a bunch of politicians who are doing something political. They're trying to appease and pander to their constituents.

"Mr. Waller is not owed an apology by anyone. Time marches on. There's nothing that requires people to apologize for something that happened 30 years ago."

Many have forgotten Joe Waller's removal of a painting but cannot forgive Omali Yeshitela's incendiary role in more recent history.

Black protesters threw rocks and bottles and torched more than 25 buildings in south St. Petersburg after police fatally shot black teenager TyRon Lewis during a traffic stop Oct. 24, 1996. Yeshitela and Uhuru members were in the thick of the disturbances. They later sentenced police officers, then-police chief Darrel Stephens and Mayor David Fischer to death in the electric chair. They picketed outside Fischer's Snell Isle home when police put the SWAT team on alert for the annual Martin Luther King Day parade in 1997.

The city does not invite sharpshooters to anyone else's parade, they pointed out.

"In many ways," says Yeshitela, "we are back to where we were with the mural" hanging in City Hall. Some council members will not listen to those who make them uncomfortable, he says, and "have gone to a place where I didn't think the power structure would go in the '90s, that somehow leaders have to be approved, that they decide who will represent the black people."

All residents should be proud that St. Petersburg had one of the most vibrant civil rights movements in one of the most residentially segregated cities in the country, says Arsenault, the historian.

There was Joe Savage, who led the garbage strikers in 1968, and Judge James B. Sanderlin, who represented them. Chester James pushed registration of black voters and George Perkins passed the hat to build a gymnasium for all-black Gibbs High School. Attorney Fred Minnis defended the movie ticket-buyers and headed the 1987 committee to name a street, over complaints of inconvenience, for Martin Luther King Jr.

And there is Omali Yeshitela, demanding to be heard, as he did so dramatically 33 years ago when he pulled a painting from a wall.

"I like the idea of a blank panel. It speaks volumes," says Virginia Litrell, president of St. Petersburg Heritage Trust.

"It is our history. It's thorny. It's uncomfortable. But it's ours," she says.

"We are living our city's history right now."

Times researchers Mary Mellstrom and Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.

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