The Uhuru Movement, leading protests in teen’s shooting death by cop, continues St. Petersburg’s decades-long fight for equality.

BY STARLA VAUGHNS CHERIN
FLORIDA COURIER

The shooting of another young Black man by police officers recently sparked another protest in St. Petersburg, a city with a strong history of Black activism and home to the Courageous 12, Black police officers whose 1965 landmark lawsuit set the stage for equal treatment among White and Black officers in the workplace. “Jail the Killer Cops Now!” and “No Justice, No Peace!” were the chants uttered during a June 9 protest outside the St. Petersburg Police Department after the killing of 17-year-old Javon Dawson. He was shot in the back by St. Petersburg police on June 7 at a high school graduation party.

Javon’s killing joins the list of police shooting victims in the St. Petersburg area. Marquell McCullough, 17, was shot 19 times in May 2004 by Pinellas County sheriff’s deputies during an early-morning traffic stop. Jarrell Walker was shot in the back three times in April 2005.

The protest was led by the International Peoples Democratic Uhuru Movement (INPDUM) along with Javon’s family. The Justice for Javon Dawson Committee is led by Ollie Godfrey, the teen’s stepmother as its president, and Diop Olugbala, INPDUM’s international organizer, who is the committee’s political action coordinator.

‘Reparations’ sought in teen’s death
Justice for Javon is calling for “reparations” for the victims of police shootings as well as jail for Javon’s shooter, St. Petersburg Officer Terrance Nemeth, and “real economic development” for Black-owned businesses and services.

“We do this because I’m afraid to be the next Javon Dawson or Sean Bell,” Olugbala told the Florida Courier. “This is not an isolated incident involving a rogue cop. It is an example of the brutal relationship between the police and African people.

“The police are used to protect the system of oppression of African people. The government uses terror like what Javon experienced to keep us from getting organized. Violence serves as a deterrent to stop us.”

Dawson had no prior arrests and had been promoted to the 11th grade when police say he fired gunshots at a graduation party. Javon’s brother and other witnesses say he had no gun.

Long history of mistrust
Police crackdowns and a number of arrests of Blacks led St. Pete native Fred Crawford to join the St. Petersburg Police Department in 1960. While working in construction, Crawford said he was enjoying music at a local ‘juke joint’ when he saw White police arrest Blacks for little more than singing out loud in the streets.

“White police officers were out there and they treated Black people so bad,” Crawford told the Florida Courier. “They would arrest them for little or nothing. If we were ever going to get out from the yoke of Whites, we had to join the police department.

“I refused to accept that if a Black officer stopped a White person he had to call a White officer to give a ticket. My partner, another Black officer, refused to arrest White men and called a White sergeant to give the citation.”

Twelve Black cops filed a 1964 lawsuit against the city, challenging the police department’s practice of assignment of Black police offi cers based solely on race. Winning on appeal in 1968, the officers paid weekly into their defense fund for the lawsuit and endured inordinate disciplinary actions. Adam Baker was the first to be fired a year and a half after winning the suit.

“If a Black person did half the stuff they did to us, they would kill them,” Baker told the Florida Courier. “It could make you sit down and cry to be held down and mistreated. Then you say, ‘The hell with it! Whatever tomorrow brings, so be it,’ and you do something about it.’

“We knew when you take an action like this there is always a risk. They were still lynching at that time, so with a backdrop like that, we could die and at the very least lose our jobs.”

History of lawsuits
In 1980, Doreatha Bennett, observed that her granddaughter’s school had no Black students in leadership, and she sued. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal ensured that they would forever be a minority by limiting their population in each school to a maximum of 30 percent.

“Twenty-one years after desegregation, they reported that there continued to be a dearth of Black role models in the schools and a climate of cultural tensions,” writes Evelyn Newman Phillips in “Bus To Destiny: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of the Political Economy of Ethnicity Among African Americans in St. Petersburg, Florida.”

In 2004, a lawsuit charging Pinellas County Schools failed to educate Black children and suspended them at higher rates than White children was granted classaction status, making it apply to all Pinellas County Black children who attend the county’s public schools into the future. The school district was ordered to find and implement solutions.

Doing time unfairly
The Uhuru Movement is a grassroots organization led by the Black working-class community. It was founded in Chicago in 1991 by the African People’s Socialist Party with international offices in Tuskegee, Ala. St. Petersburg’s branch was founded by Omali Yeshitela, who is part of a long history of freedom work in St. Petersburg.

Yeshitela was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1966, he was jailed when he tore down a mural in St. Pete’s City Hall depicting degrading caricatures of African Americans. He spent two and a half years in prison. Upon release, he was stripped of his right to vote for decades until then-Gov. Jeb Bush and three members of Florida’s Cabinet restored his voting rights in 2000.

Shootings part of ‘land grab’
The 1996 shooting death of TyRon Lewis by police brought about a violent local reaction and vocal protests from St. Petersburg’s Black community, as well as national attention to Uhuru and Yeshitela.

Blacks in St. Petersburg saw little of the economic development promises made by the city after the 1996 rebellion. Uhuru contends police actions are a part of the city’s efforts to gentrify and destroy African American neighborhoods. Yeshitela says that political and economic development—not police crackdowns—will bring peace to African American neighborhoods.

Termed “a land grab” by the Black community’s leadership, the city displaced the Black neighborhood where Tropicana Field, home of Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays, now sits. The city’s current plans include demolishing the field and replacing it with a new stadium with prime residential and retail space.

‘Not lazy and ignorant’
“Africans built the city of St. Pete much like we built this whole country. It exists on tourism and the health field, which requires cheap Black labor,” Olugbala said.

“Looking at the impoverished conditions we live in, it’s clear that we have not benefited from all the labor we have performed. It is not because we are lazy and ignorant, because clearly we are not. The mayor and the city plan to turn Midtown into a Palm Beach-type area. It’s a parasitic relationship and whenever they want to take more resources, the police intervene.”

Local respect, strength
Yeshitela served on committees instituted by St. Petersburg Mayor David Fischer and the St. Petersburg Housing Authority with the purpose of attracting jobs and investment to South St. Petersburg. He has chaired the political action committee of the Coalition of African American Leadership, made up of a number of Black churches and civil rights groups in the area.

Along with eight other candidates, Yeshitela made a strong run for mayor in February 2001. Although he did not make it to the runoff, he won every African American and mixed precinct but one in the entire city.