Pubdate: Thu, 20 May 1999
Source: Weekly Planet (FL)
Copyright: Weekly Planet Inc. 1999
Contact:  1310 E 9th Avenue  Tampa, FL 33605
Fax: (813) 248-9999
Website: http://www.weeklyplanet.com
Author: Susan Eastman, EMERGING ALLIANCES

A New Generation Of Black Leaders Is Influencing Public Perception And
Policy In St. Petersburg.

Ernest Fillyau knew why the Tampa Bay Devil Rays weren’t winning, why
schemes for economic redevelopment never  seem to work, why St.
Petersburgians still don’t feel confident about who they are as a city –
despite the  sugar-sand beaches nearby and weather reports that fill anyone
living north of the Mason-Dixon Line with abject longing in the dead of winter.

"God won’t let it happen," former St. Pete City Councilman Fillyau told
fellow council members.

The heavenly patriarch, Fillyau believes, won’t let St. Petersburg off the
hook until it does right by its black community. Too many promises
abandoned. Too many projects chipped down until they were next to nothing.

The wounds go deep.

- - When the city’s garbage workers went on strike in 1968 and riots
threatened, their ultimate victory was bittersweet. The city finally came to
the negotiating table, but when the workers returned to their jobs, many
found they no longer had jobs. Even more lost out a few years later when the
city mechanized its sanitation service.

- - Desegregation of the school system heralded a new era of race relations
when it was implemented in the 1970s. But as the decades wore on, it became
painfully obvious that black children paid the highest cost. 

- - When Interstate I-275 bisected the city, its path decimated much of the
historic black business community on 22nd Street South. When baseball
dreamers needed a stadium to woo a team, it got built on the ground where a
historic black community lived and buried its dead.

- - The city declared a war on drugs in the 1990s. The black community got the
brunt of police squads given a mandate to break the hold of the street level
dealer. 

- - When police killed black motorist Tyron Lewis after pulling him over for a
minor traffic violation in 1996, civil unrest threatened to engulf the city
as buildings burned and shots were fired at police. Federal officials swept
into town promising to help rebuild. But after much fanfare about involving
the community in the  decision-making process, it turned out that most of
the promised $20 million in aid was funneled into existing programs.

In February 1999, when Fillyau made one of his last speeches as a city
council member, hundreds of people crowded into City Hall. They were there
to debate whether the city should sign a contract to allow a non-profit
organization founded by the National People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement to
operate an African Market Festival weekly in Campbell Park on 16th Street
South. The city had to decide whether to allow a business venture to set up
in a city park and whether to provide $100,000 in city services for three
months to the festival.

Several council members expressed reservations about the festival. They
feared it would become another Chunky Sunday, the weekly gathering of
African American youth that began at Bartlett Park and caused concern about
drinking, drug use and other crimes. Instead of shutting down that event,
Police Chief Goliath Davis suggested rotating it to different parks. Several
council members began picking apart the market festival contract. Fillyau
couldn’t take it anymore. 

History got the better of him.

"Let’s not think of all the ways to kill this project," he implored. "Let’s
find a way to make it work."

When the council approved the market festival after the three-hour public
discussion, at least one vociferous critic of City Hall believed a page turned. 

No, Omali Yeshitela, chairman and founder of the National People’s
Democratic Uhuru Movement, doesn’t believe the white majority council
suddenly had a change of heart. He took the vote as a sign the city’s black
community is reemerging as a political power.

In the aftermath of the disturbance that rocked the city in 1996, new
alliances formed in the black community among a new generation of leadership
– mostly African Americans from the baby boom generation who came of age
imbibing the social critique of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely
Carmichael and Malcolm X. People from what had been regarded as a radical
fringe, such as Omali Yeshitela joined forces with business people such as
Lou Brown, who owns a real estate firm, and Grady Terrell III, a fuel oil
dealer, who had not been actively involved
in politics. Social activists Gwendolyn Reese and Marva Dennard also joined
the group, as did representatives from African American churches with social
missions, like the Rev. Manuel Sykes of Bethel Community Baptist Church, and
Bishop John Copeland of the Macedonia Freewill Baptist Church. Together
these citizens formed the Coalition of African American Leadership Inc.

In city government and administration, changes also boded well for
strengthening the position of this new leadership. Mayor David Fischer gave
the city its first African American police chief when he appointed Goliath
Davis to the job on June 16, 1997. Two younger African American City Council
members – Frank Peterman, 36, and Rene Flowers, 34 – have assumed the seats
long held by David Welch, 70, and Fillyau, 72.

This group of leaders may have reached the age where they are ready to
accept the mantle of leadership from their elders who led the struggle for
African American civil rights in the 1960s and 1970s.

"It’s kind of the natural course of things," said Leontyne Middleton,
director of the Enoch Davis Center on 18th Avenue South. "We had some
circumstances that moved us along and made us grow up a little sooner than
we thought we were going to have to." 

The 1996 uprisings will have marked a change in the black community, the
Coalition of African American Leadership believes, if the community becomes
conscious of its political clout.

The Coalition flexed its muscles repeatedly in the two years following the
civil disturbance. Its members endorsed Mayor David Fischer’s reelection,
criticized the federal Weed and Seed anti-drug program, consistently backed
decisions of Police Chief Goliath Davis, including his rejection of Weed and
Seed money, and raised questions about the funding of the Jordan Park
redevelopment project. The coalition also backed the African Market Festival
idea. This week the coalition questioned whether racism is motivating
complaints that Chief Davis interfered in an internal affairs investigation
of a black officer accused of dealing cocaine.

"The real issue is whether we can come into the discussion with our interest
recognized," Yeshitela said. "We have a responsibility and a right to be a
self-interested and self-determining people. Anything less goes against
human nature."

For a long time, poor African Americans have been defined by a model that
looks at their community as suffering from illness, Yeshitela said. Using
law enforcement to clean up drugs and fight crime to rid the community of
the symptoms of the illness guided a political agenda whose basic tenet was
to put more police on the street and to lock up lawbreakers. That policy
doesn’t take into account the poverty, lack of opportunity and racism that
underlie many of those issues.

Weed and Seed continued the paradigm of the black community as a pathology. 

The city stood to receive $100,000 to fight drugs and crime specifically in
the black community through a Weed and Seed federal grant. Additional money
would be available to seed the community with new projects once the drug
culture had been uprooted. In Tampa, near the College Hill housing project,
Weed and Seed money was used to build a $435,000 coin laundry on a corner
that had been a drug-dealing drive-through. 

When St. Petersburg Police Chief Goliath Davis said he didn’t want the Weed
money, the white community was baffled. Who wouldn’t want money to fight
crime? Davis said that the Weed approach only locked up people who really
needed treatment for drug addiction. If they spent time in prison and came
out chemically dependent, the cycle would continue. Weed and Seed also
unfairly targeted the black community for drug enforcement. When Pinellas
County Sheriff Everett Rice offered to take the money if St. Petersburg
didn’t want it, Davis said he was interfering in city business. 

Because of his familiarity with the city’s black community, Davis knew that
many residents there would understand his point of view and agree with it.
Davis said he had to spend a lot of time "north of Central Avenue," in the
city’s predominantly white neighborhoods educating people about his views on
Weed and Seed. Now those ideas don’t seem so radical, he said.

"The thing that most everybody now recognizes is that there is a need for
secure drug treatment facilities to deal with drugs and crime in our
society," Davis said. "The idea that two years ago was considered grounds
for running me out of town is now accepted thinking." he said.

Davis picks his fights well, said Chimurenga Waller, president of the
Florida chapter of the National People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement and
brother of its chairman Omali Yeshitela.

"Goliath Davis is a very good politician," Waller said. "He knows when he
can do something and when he can’t. ... He knew that black people didn’t
want it. He knew the African American working class and poor didn’t want it.
Even the David Welches didn’t want it."

Davis’ stand meant something to people who had long complained that the drug
war unfairly targeted their community. While the city did finally accept
Weed & Seed money to be used for drug enforcement citywide, the city also
got promised $100,000 to build the drug treatment facility. 

"I was proud he did that," said Perkins Shelton, 70, who began working for
the NAACP in the 1970s and recently retired. "It was forced on the black
community. It was identifying us as criminals."

Drugs are not just a problem in the black community, Shelton said. While
weeding would lead to more arrests of black drug users and street level
dealers, it wouldn’t touch the distribution chains bringing drugs in.

Instead of tying economic development to increased law enforcement,
organizers hope new businesses will sprout in the black community. The
philosophy underpinning that effort is that crime and drug dealing in the
black community will subside if the community can offer its young people
economic opportunities. 

"One makes the assumption that community cannot change and will not change
and needs cops to contain them," Yeshitela said. "The other assumes this
community will change."

The African Market Festival will help small business owners get a start by
providing cheap retail space. For a $15 fee for a booth, anyone can set up
shop on weekends. Organizers believe the market festival will be a test
market and jumping-off point for black business owners, some of whom may
later seek out storefronts in the community to sell their products. The
festival is aligned with the Coalition’s beliefs that the solution to many
of the problems faced by the black community is an economic one and that the
route to economic development should be open-ended and inclusive.

"It allows everyone to (set up a booth). You don’t have to agree with Omali
or anyone to participate in this process," Yeshitela said. "This is a
struggle to democratize the whole economy of the area so that they don’t
have to kiss anybody’s ring or ass to make money."

During segregation, Jim Crow laws kept the black community nominally
"separate but equal." The black community was limited by law as a consumer
group to buying primarily from businesses operating in the segregated black
community. Longtime residents recall in that era that the black community
supported a bustling black downtown business community on 22nd Street South.
In just three blocks along the street from Fifth to Eighth avenues South in
1957, there were over 35 businesses: three physicians, two florists, several
restaurants, a furniture
company, a grocer, a tailor, a couple of taverns, two photography studios,
several beauty parlors, a shoe store, a shoe repair shop, a laundry, a
television store, a department store, a rooming house and a movie theater
that doubled as a performance venue.

Today, in the city’s Challenge 2001 economic development area, bounded by
Central and 30th avenues South and Fourth to 34th streets, there are only
212 black-owned businesses. Too many of those, said the city’s economic
development director Joe Johnson, tend to be limited – there are
restaurants, beauty parlors, barber shops, car washes and car detailing
businesses, but the variety that a consumer base of 10,004 households might
use just isn’t there any longer. Desegregation, the arrival of the
Interstate system and other factors, such as the
difficulty of getting bank loans, eroded the old economic base. In the
intervening decades, the black community has not been able to rebuild that
strength despite myriad programs and promises that each new economic
development – the renovations of the Pier, Bay Plaza and the Dome – would
bring jobs and opportunities.

The African Market Festival is a homegrown idea that has the potential to
change the dynamic in a way that the multimillion-dollar dome and the
arrival of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays has not, its organizers say.

"It was the start of the fulfillment of dreams by people who never thought
they had dreams," Lou Brown told the City Council on April 8.

The Market Festival put 60 new businesses into the black community on its
first weekend on April 3 and 4, Yeshitela said. With produce vendors,
Caribbean food, African clothes, dolls, literature and other goods, the
Market Festival displayed a diversity of products and services that hadn’t
been seen in the African community since desegregation. 

As the Coalition of African American Leadership made its views known to
boards and councils and commissions, there were signs they had gotten the
ear of key white leadership. 

Yeshitela, who was a bit of a persona non grata because of his radical
revolutionary views before the 1996 civil disturbance, found himself meeting
with Mayor David Fischer explaining his ideas.

In actions that went against expectation, Mayor David Fischer stood with
Chief Davis when he rejected Weed and Seed and backed him again when Davis
fired several police officers who had falsified time sheets.

City Council member Jay Lasita, from the mostly white western edge of town,
even borrowed a buzzword from the Uhurus in a City Council meeting on April
8 when he said he favored a policy of economic opportunity over
"containment" in the black community.

When the City Council considered the African Market Festival, the Uhurus had
support from an odd corner. St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce board of
directors chairman and St. Petersburg attorney Rick Baker said the market
was a good idea.

"The chamber has some astute, progressive guys who realize that it is going
to involve black and white businesses to make St. Petersburg prosper,"
explained the Rev. Manuel Sykes, a Coalition member. "That is different
thinking."

A new wave of activism first swept through the city’s black community when
it came together to get Police Chief Ernest "Curt" Curtsinger fired and then
to defeat his bid for mayor. Curtsinger had suspended sensitivity training
for police officers, overlooked African Americans when promotions were
handed out and insulted numerous leaders within the black community with his
dismissal of their concerns. The black community felt they were looking at a
racist whose leadership only strengthened those tendencies in a police
department whose relations
with the black community had often been strained.

"What I saw did happen around Curtsinger was that he brought out into the
open what had been before more covert, more subtle," said Gwendolyn Reese.
Curtsinger was more open, more in your face blatant about these things.

"It was a slap, and it slapped us out of complacency."

The black community turned out in force to demand Curtsinger’s ouster.

"We came together during that time," she said. "There was the NAACP, the
SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), the Urban League joining
together with other groups and saying we are dissatisfied with the treatment
of the black community."

The community returned to more everyday concerns after the Curtsinger issue
was resolved. When Tyron Lewis was killed by police officers in October
1996, the reaction was immediate. The night of the killing, fires engulfed
buildings and shots were fired at police. People like Reese, Brown and Sykes
stepped forward, not to ask for calm as traditional leaders had done in the
past – but to explain why the reaction to the killing had been so explosive.

"When rebellion came about, we were ready," said Reese said. "The ground was
fertile. We were ready to come together. We were ready. If the old
leadership wasn’t going to do it, we were."

As the Coalition began to weigh in on issues facing the community, members
found themselves at loggerheads with some traditional leadership in the
black community. Former City Council member David Welch opposed the African
Market Festival. NAACP president Garnelle Jenkins favored Weed and Seed and
supported the Jordan Park demolition plan. 

In order to put the black community into power, Coalition members say, they
have to wrest control from a black leadership resistant to relinquishing it.

People like Welch and Jenkins have grown out of touch with the community
they serve, Sykes and Yeshitela say. Under traditional leadership, programs
have been funded and plans put into place without wider community
participation in the discussion.

"There were community leaders who either didn’t know or weren’t concerned
about the whole community, who don’t care as long as their agenda is met or
their program is funded," said Rev. Manuel Sykes.

The only discussion those leaders had with white leadership was premised on
the notions of the black community as a pathology, Yeshitela said. Those
black leaders spoke the same language as the white leadership, he says, and
regarded the poor black community and its crime, drugs and unemployment from
much the same point of view as that of the white community.

At times, the analysis of the differences between the old leadership and the
new have gotten nasty.

Sykes said the traditional leadership had identified with the white
community more than it identified with the poor African Americans who were
the object of programs to rid the community of drugs and crime and provide
methods to climb out of poverty.

"The white community picked the black leadership, and they sold us out," he
said. "It is the same thing as the house nigger and the field nigger that
you read about in history books."

As the old leaders gained privilege and influence because of their
blackness, they guarded their positions in a way that made it difficult for
other points of view to be heard, their critics say.

"They are the ones who know the right phone numbers, who would get the first
word about a project that was going to happen. If you wanted to get
something done, you had to go through those guys and kiss the ring,"
Yeshitela said. 

While they left much of the community out of the discussion, such
relationships comforted the white community, Yeshitela said.

"It was a cozy relationship, cozy for the folks in power who could say ‘I
know what the black community wants because I talked to Garnelle Jenkins or
David Welch.’"

Although the Coalition frames disagreements with traditional leaders as a
power struggle, some of the conflict may also indicate the difference
between the situations and the values that influence different generations. 

In the past, the black community presented a monolithic front to the larger
community in the fight for civil rights. At the public meeting on the
African Market Festival, those with competing interests within the black
community spoke of their differences in a public session. The Sixteenth
Street South Business Association opposed the market when it was originally
planned to take place on 16th Street South because they feared it would
block access to their businesses. A youth football league, the St. Pete Li’l
Devils, feared that a market in Campbell Park would interfere with their games.

Issues facing the black community aren’t as clear-cut today as they were in
the past, said Perkins Shelton, who arrived in St. Petersburg in 1970, just
after the county finally decided to implement a school desegregation plan.
Because of that, it is more difficult to mobilize the monolithic solidarity
and passionate commitment that marked that era.

The African American community spoke unequivocally in the Civil Rights era
and stood together through organizations such as the NAACP to fight for
basic civil rights.

"We wanted to have a seat in the front of the bus. We wanted to eat out at
the hamburger shop. We wanted our kids to have the same schoolbooks and
supplies as everyone else," Shelton said. "No ifs, ands or buts about it. 

"These were God-given rights" 

When discussions turn to other problems – education and busing, crime and
drugs, the breakdown of relations between men and women and the fracturing
of families – the answers aren’t so easy to come by. When the discussion
revolves around economic development, ideas can differ greatly. Depending on
a person’s perspective, one issue can seem to overshadow the rest.
Convincing others can be difficult.

"This is not an issue-focused time," Middleton said. "There are several
issues out there."
 
Welch, who owns a business and has other property on 16th Street South, said
when the market festival moved to Campbell Park, it was no longer a problem
for him. The idea, he says, never bothered him. Welch says he understands
and respects the agenda of the Uhuru Movement and the Coalition of African
American Leadership, but he thinks they are too quick to dismiss what they
perceive as an out-of-touch leadership who failed at securing real gains for
the black community.

"We did something, and we are still doing things," he said. "Look at how
many boards they sit on. They are still in there fighting for what they
believe is right."

Welch is chairman of the Pinellas County Workforce Development Board, past
chairman and current member Pinellas-Anclote Water Basin, an arm of the
Southwest Water Management District, a board member of the Tampa Bay
Regional Planning Council, and treasurer of WEDU-Ch. 3 public television
station and board member the state Joint Educational Partnership for
Enterprise Florida.

Welch says old-timers with contacts and expertise could help St.
Petersburg’s black community obtain grants and loans. The Joint Educational
Partnership for Enterprise Florida makes loans to small businesses, he said,
and St. Petersburg should be right there getting some. 

"There is enough money out there for us to do all types of things," he said.

Instead of ideological battles against each other, Welch said, everyone with
anything to offer should be welcomed to the table.

"I’m willing," he said.

As for criticism aimed at his character and intentions, Welch says that
people who question his commitment don’t bother him.

"I could sit in any meeting and you could talk all you want and put me down
– it doesn’t bother me," he said. "What really bothers me is that we are not
getting the things done we need to get done, and money is not being spent
where it should be spent."

Using a model from his youth in Chicago witnessing the Daly political
machine in action, Shelton believes that the black community needs strong
leadership to bring it together around carefully selected issues. That is
the most effective way, he believes, to force change.

But unlike the 1960s, when the leadership of key organizations set the
agenda, the leaders of the Coalition of African American Leadership say they
envision their role differently.

Sykes said that even in his church he has turned away from a leadership
model that elevates the pastor above the congregation as a charismatic
leader who embodies their values.

Instead he looks to his church members for his voice and his direction.

To keep their leadership engaged, the Coalition of African American
Leadership engages the community in dialogue. The idea is that participation
in the process will be the wellspring for involvement in pushing the agenda
that the Coalition adopts.

Today, the fruits of the 1960s struggle has given the black community many
voices well able to articulate its needs, desires and agenda. Only in honest
discussion can the power of the community be tapped, Sykes said. The
Coalition hopes to bring that community into the dialogue over its future.

"If you really hear from the community, you will get a better sense of what
the community is concerned about. There are many intelligent and astute
people there who deserve to be heard before decisions are made with respect
to their community."

The old-style charismatic leader exemplified by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
may not be the leadership model that will serve the black community best as
the 21st century dawns.

"I don’t think that kind of leadership will work," Sykes said. "I think you
are going to have more  collaboration."

Keeping the momentum behind the Coalition may prove difficult, as the crisis
of 1996 that brought them together recedes in memory.

In 1997, over 400 people attended public meetings sponsored by the Coalition
of African American Leadership to discuss the black community. The second
year, 200 participants met. The Coalition will have its third annual
community dialogue to discuss the direction the black community will take in
the upcoming year. The discussion will take place On May 22 at 9 a.m. at
Campbell Park as part of the African Market Festival.

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MAP posted-by: Jo-D