And the Mural Came Down: Race, Removal, and Reckoning in the Sunshine City
2022; College Art Association; Volume: 104; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00043079.2022.2070398
ISSN1559-6478
Autores Tópico(s)Public Spaces through Art
ResumoAbstractAbstractIn 1966 Joseph Waller and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee removed George Snow Hill's Picnicking at Pass-a-Grille (1945) from St. Petersburg, Florida's, City Hall. For more than two decades, the mural had hung alongside its pendant, Hill's Fishing on the Pier (1945). Together, the paintings offered a vision of civic progress that denied Black audiences full participation in public life. Yet even in its absence, Picnicking at Pass-a-Grille troubles the present. The Sunshine City's deferred reckoning with its public artworks and urban projects of racial oppression is a local history with national resonances. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAndrew WassermanAndrew Wasserman is a professorial lecturer in the Department of Art at American University and cochair of Public Art Dialogue. His work has appeared in American Art, Art Journal, Journal of Urban History, and elsewhere [Department of Art, American University, Katzen Arts Center, Room 101, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20016, wasserman@american.edu].NotesI would like to thank the coeditors, editorial assistant, journal staff, and anonymous readers of The Art Bulletin for their assistance and, most importantly, their time in ushering this piece into the world. The development of this article spanned two contingent faculty positions. This article began with a summer research grant generously supplied by the Dean's Office of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Funding from a term faculty research expense account from American University made the image program possible. I recognize the availability of research funding is not the norm for most contingent faculty. It should be.1 The police suggested there were at least two additional men involved, supported by photographs of the men carrying the canvas. The day after the mural's removal, a local newspaper addressed how the police may have bungled the arrest and unwittingly facilitated the mural's removal. Jesse Moore, "Mural Theft Blamed on Tangled Airwaves," Evening Independent, December 30, 1966, 3A.2 "George S. Hill's Mural Depicts Southern Life," St. Petersburg Times, November 6, 1940; 15 and Geraldine Daly, "George Hill Murals Acquired for City Hall," St. Petersburg Times, March 3, 1945, 11.3 "Integrated City Hall Forces Improvement on Whites, While Blacks Live In Misery," Burning Spear 1, no. 2 (January 5, 1970): 5.4 Anita Richway Cutting, "From Joe Waller to Omali Yeshitela: How a Controversial Mural Changed a Man" (honors thesis, University of South Florida, 2000), 33–34.5 "Negro Group Finds Mural 'Despicable'," St. Petersburg Times, December 15, 1966, 3B.6 For anecdotes of previous complaints leveled against the mural, see Cutting, "From Waller to Yeshitela," 24.7 ". . . And The Mural Came Down," Florida Star, January 7, 1967, 1.8 Aruna D'Souza, Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts (New York: Badlands Unlimited, 2018), 7.9 According to one newspaper report, the painting was "seriously damaged" during Waller's arrest: the paint cracked and the canvas was crumpled and trampled. The mural was then retained as evidence. During one of the trials that followed, witnesses for the state testified that the fault for the mural's destruction rested entirely with Waller: he handled it too roughly during his exchange with the police. When asked about the painting in the early 2000s, a Pinellas County circuit court clerk said that the county had no record of the painting's location and assumed, as would be the fate of all unclaimed evidence from older cases, the canvas was destroyed. If true, the responsibility for destroying the work would lie not with Waller but with the state. See "Negroes in Jail for Pulling Down City Hall Murals [sic]," Florida Star, January 7, 1967, 1; ". . . And The Mural Came Down," Florida Star, January 7, 1967, 1; "JOMO Leader Jailed: Racist Mural Causes Unrest," Tri-State Defender, October 2, 1971, 5; Lennie Bennett, "A Legacy Takes Flight," St. Petersburg Times, October 13, 2002, 8F; and Waveney Ann Moore, "A Racially Offensive Painting, Yanked From St. Petersburg City Hall Decades Ago, Simply Disappeared," Tampa Bay Times, August 5, 2020, https://www.tampabay.com/news/community-news/2020/08/05/a-racially-offensive-painting-yanked-from-st-petersburg-city-hall-decades-ago-simply-disappeared/.10 On the unresolved legacies of the oppression of Black Americans in relation to public art, see Renee Ater, "Slavery and Its Memory in Public Monuments," American Art 24, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 20–23; and Victoria J. Gallagher and Margaret R. LaWare, "Sparring with Public Memory: The Rhetorical Embodiment of Race, Power, and Conflict in Monument to Joe Lewis," in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, ed. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blaire, and Brian L. Ott (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 87–112.11 For white supremacy's limiting of Black existence through civic presentations and, more specifically, public art, see Mabel O. Wilson, Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 8–16; and Modupe Gloria Labode, "Black Public Art in the United States," in The Routledge Companion to African American History, ed. Eddie Chambers (New York: Routledge, 2020), 289–300.12 Jennifer Van Horn, "'The Dark Iconoclast': African Americans' Artistic Resistance in the Civil War South," Art Bulletin 99, no. 4 (December 2017): 150.13 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenologies: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 37–51.14 C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp, "'Sensuous Contemplation': Thinking Race at its Saturation Points," in Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value, ed. C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 1–2.15 Martin A. Berger, Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography (Berkeley: University California Press, 2011), 47.16 "Negro Group Finds Mural 'Despicable'," 3B. Public defenses of the painting were voiced long after its removal. In a 1998 letter to the editor, one resident called for the city to faithfully recreate the mural. With reverberations of rationales used to defend Confederate monuments, the author firmly asserted that the painting "was not demeaning. That was the way it was. Destroying history does not make it go away. History is truth and should be remembered." Notably, the author offered a recollection of the painting markedly different from what Hill painted. He described a painting of "two young black boys dancing for pennies before a crowd of whites on the southeast corner of the pier." One year later, another resident objected to an editorial labeling the work racist. The author wrote, "I don't find the Hill painting objectionable; you do." Several days later, the newspaper published another letter by a local painter and college professor referring to Hill's painting as "about as racist as the photograph of a ranting Joe Waller." See Russel Fraser, "City Painting Was Historical, Not Offensive," St. Petersburg Times, September 2, 1998, 2; "Removal of Mural Was a Service to the Community," St. Petersburg Times, June 19, 1999, 19A; and "The Destruction of Art Should Earn No Honors," St. Petersburg Times, June 23, 1999, 11A. Even more recently, while reporting on the conservation of Fishing on the Pier, a local press outlet asserted that work was "not charged with racial undertones." Tampa Bay Times, December 19, 2013, W14.17 Fred Wright, "City Hall Mural Artist Confused By Row," Evening Independent, December 30, 1966, 3A. Born in Michigan, Hill graduated from Syracuse University in the early 1920s and spent the remainder of the decade traveling abroad, receiving additional art training at the Academie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. He returned to the United States in 1929 and moved to St. Petersburg in 1932. He lived in Florida until his death in 1969.18 "Advertisement for Bids: Municipal Utilities Building, St. Petersburg, Florida," St. Petersburg Times, November 24, 1938, 19; and Raymond Arsenault, St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream, 1888–1950 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017), 260.19 "Municipal Building Will Get Murals," St. Petersburg Times, April 17, 1940, 3.20 Sue Landry and David K. Rogers, "A Long Road of Rage," St. Petersburg Times, December 14, 1996, 1A.21 Robert R. Weyeneth, "The Architecture of Racial Segregation: The Challenges of Preserving the Problematical Past," Public Historian 27, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 11–44.22 Elizabeth Guffey, "Knowing Their Space: Signs of Jim Crow in the Segregated South," Design Issues 28, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 41–60; and Monica E. Jovanovich, "Traveling Through Time: The Art and Architecture of the New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal," Southern Quarterly 56, no. 2 (Winter 2019): 22–44.23 Fran Rowin, "New Deal Murals in Florida," Update 4, no. 3 (February 1977): 6.24 Diana L. Linden and Larry A. Greene, "Charles Alston's Harlem Hospital Murals: Cultural Politics in Depression Era Harlem," Prospects 26 (2001): 391–421; Sara A. Butler, "Ground Breaking in New Deal Washington, DC: Art, Patronage, and Race at the Recorder of Deeds Building," Winterthur Portfolio 45, no. 4 (Winter 2011): 277–320; and Butler, "Reimaging the Movement: Beyond the Art of Negro Advancement at the Interior Building," American Art 28, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 70–84.25 See Nina Silber, This War Ain't Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 36–45.26 Oral history interview with Ann Rice O'Hanlon, July 8, 1964. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Ann Rice O'Hanlon's mural in the University of Kentucky's Memorial Hall includes of a scene of chattel slavery. For recent discussions about the work's removal and the removal's influence on Karyn Olivier's Witness (2018), see Eli Capilouto, "Memorial Hall Mural: Our Past, Our Present and Why It's Time to Move Forward," UKNOW University of Kentucky News (June 5, 2020), https://uknow.uky.edu/campus-newsemorial-hall-mural-our-past-our-present-and-why-it-s-time-move-forward; Julia Jacobs, "Students' Calls to Removal a Mural Were Answered. Now Comes a Lawsuit," New York Times, July 6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/arts/design/university-of-kentucky-slavery-mural-lawsuit.html; and Karyn Olivier, "Removing an Offensive Mural from the University of Kentucky Isn't 'Racial Justice,'" Washington Post, July 6, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/06/removing-an-offensive-mural-university-kentucky-isnt-racial-justice/.27 Erika Doss, "Between Modernity and 'the Real Thing': Maynard Dixon's Mural for the Bureau of Indian Affairs," American Art 18, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 8–31; and Denise Neil-Binion, "Representation and Misrepresentation: Depictions of Native Americans in Oklahoma Post Office Murals" (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 2017).28 "Only Two Items Booked for City Council Action Today," St. Petersburg Times, March 4, 1941, 3.29 Geraldine Daly, "George Hill Murals Acquired for City Hall," St. Petersburg Times, March 3, 1945, 11.30 Wright, "Artist Confused By Row," 3A. This halting of federal funding is perhaps partly responsible for why a third mural, planned by Hill, was never completed. Reportedly half-finished in the spring of 1945, this was to be a scene of the St. Petersburg–Havana yacht race, which launched from the Municipal Pier. The scene of brightly colored yachts racing around red buoys would have been painted on a 30-by-8-foot canvas. It is unclear where in City Hall this third painting was to hang. Daly, "Hill Murals Acquired for City Hall," 11. The loss of federal funding would also have meant to loss of federal review, perhaps contributing to the inclusion of blatant stereotypes in Picnicking at Pass-a-Grille.31 "The Rambler," Evening Independent, April 9, 1945, 10.32 Daly, "Hill Murals Acquired for City Hall," St. Petersburg Times, March 3, 1945, 11.33 "Local Artist Painted Murals at City Hall," 11-C.34 "Appeal for the Pass-a-Grille Highway," St. Petersburg Daily Times, March 31, 1917, 6; "Pass-a-Grille Hotel Takes Over Patterson Apartments on Lease; Robt. Carroll Will Be Manager," St. Petersburg Daily Times, November 16, 1919, 1; and Arsenault, St. Petersburg and Florida Dream, 188, 192.35 Advertisement for Powell of St. Petersburg, Tampa Morning Tribune, March 11, 1922: 2; and "Pass-a-Grille For Pleasure," Evening Independent, September 20, 1912, 7.36 Scott Taylor Hartzel, St. Petersburg: An Oral History (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2002), 53; and "Pass-a-Grille May Be In The Picture," Evening Independent, February 12, 1912, 1. Noel A. Mitchell, a transplant to Florida from the mid-Atlantic region, funded the film. In St. Petersburg, he self-branded as "the Sand Man," a moniker he printed on the back of orange benches he installed in front of his office. This novel street furniture inspired copycat installations by other businessmen. The city responded by passing an ordinance in 1916 standardizing the color of the benches. City benches were then restricted to being green. Arsenault, St. Petersburg and Florida Dream, 136–37.37 A clear, if not extreme, example of Black labor sustaining white leisure appears in a newspaper report of a Black bellhop rescuing a white vacationer who nearly drowned in the Gulf of Mexico. "Bellboy Saves Woman But Man Is Drowned," Tampa Sunday Tribune, March 18, 1917, 1. See also Rosalie Peck and Jon Wilson, St. Petersburg's Historic African American Neighborhoods (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2008), 17, 33.38 Sue Bridwell Beckham, Depression Post Office Murals and Southern Culture: A Gentle Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).39 Karal Ann Marling, Wall to Wall America: Post Office Murals in the Great Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 109–11.40 For example, see "Baptist Choir Enjoys Picnic," Evening Independent, May 27, 1932, 2; and "Picnics Are Held At Pass-a-Grille," Evening Independent, April 6, 1934, 3.41 Arsenault, St. Petersburg and Florida Dream, 202, 308.42 Sherrod McCall, "Tea Monday Will Honor Mrs. Polly Knipp Hill," St. Petersburg Times, October 26, 1941, 13.43 A very different vision of the making of modern Florida, Denman Fink's Law Guides Florida Progress (1941), won the competition. For more on the Fink mural, see Fran Rowin, "New Deal Murals in Florida," Update 4, no. 3 (February 1977): 6–8, 10; and Susan Hale Freeman, "Monument to Three Artists," Update 14, no. 3 (August 1987): 3–5.44 Steve Glassman, "Blazing the Tamiami Trail," Southern Florida History Magazine 1 (Winter 1989): 3–5, 12–13. For the use of convict labor to build the Tamiami Trial, see Vivien M.L. Miller, Hard Labor and Hard Time: Florida's 'Sunshine Prison' and Chain Gangs (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 69–71; and Bruce D. Epperson, Roads Through the Everglades: The Building of the Ingraham Highway, the Tamiami Trail, and Conners Highway, 1914–1931 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2016), 178–80.45 John Davis, "A Change of Key: The Banjo During the Civil War and Reconstruction," in Picturing the Banjo, ed. Leo Mazow, exh. cat. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 52; and Michael D. Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 42.46 Homi K. Bhabha, "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism" in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 71–87; and Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1997), 259.47 Richard J. Powell, Going There: Black Visual Satire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, 2020), 2–4, 11, 30, 113–16.48 Jacqueline Francis, Making Race: Modernism and "Racial Art" in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012), 78–121.49 See for instance Carmenita Higginbotham, The Urban Scene: Race, Reginald Marsh, and American Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015); and Austen Barron Bailly, "Art for America: Race in Thomas Hart Benton's Murals, 1919–1936," Indiana Magazine of History 105, no. 2 (June 2009): 150–66. See also Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 92–93, 121–23; and Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representations: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 72–89. Black artists' use of racial stereotyping during the same period, see John Ott, "Labored Stereotypes: Palmer Hayden's The Janitor Who Paints," American Art 22, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 102–15; Phoebe Wolfskill, "Caricature and the New Negro in the World of Archibald Motley Jr. and Palmer Hayden," Art Bulletin 91, no. 3 (September 2009): 343–65; and Mia L. Bagneris, "The Great Colonial Minstrel Show: Reconsidering Africa in the Art of Palmer Hayden," NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art no. 41 (November 2017): 14–29.50 Higginbotham, Urban Scene, 48.51 Ibid., 36–53.52 The club garnered national attention for promoting energetic activities for the elderly. For example, see "Forgets His 92 Years to Win Game With a Two-Bagger," New York Times, January 1, 1933, S1; "Corporal Jubb, 92, Holds Foe, 80, To Draw in Whiskerweight Bout," New York Herald Tribune, January 8, 1933, B8; "St. Petersburg Fete," New York Times, March 18, 1934: 10XX; and Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 261.53 For performing Blackness as a white property, see Ayanna Thompson, Blackface (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).54 In addition to the team members in blackface, in the center of the photograph, a Black boy kneels and holds two bats. The author has intentionally chosen not to reproduce this image. For those interested in the photograph, it can be accessed at: Clyde Fairfield, Three Quarter Century Club team 'African Dodgers' wearing blackface – St. Petersburg, Florida, 1933, State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, https://www.floridamemory.com/itemshow/32001.55 Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), xv, 177, 182–83, 205–16.56 Arsenault, 208, 268; and Rosalie Peck and Jon Wilson, St. Petersburg's Historic 22nd Street South (Charleston: History Press, 2006), 18.57 The Black population continued to increase on pace with city growth. By 1945, there were nearly 15,000 Black residents of St. Petersburg. By the late 1960s, this number had doubled, with Black residents comprising about 15% of the city's 215,000 residents. 2019 census estimates put the population of St. Petersburg at 265,351 residents. 22.6% identify as Black. Arsenault, 307; Darryl Paulson and Janet Stiff, "An Empty Victory: The St. Petersburg Sanitation Strike, 1968," Florida Historical Quarterly 57, no. 4 (April 1979): 423; and United States Census Bureau, "St. Petersburg, Florida," 2020: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/tabletpetersburgcityflorida.58 Arsenault, St. Petersburg and Florida Dream, 128, 268, 306.59 Peck and Wilson, St. Petersburg's Historic African American Neighborhoods, 29–43, 85–95.60 "Charter of the City of St. Petersburg, Florida" (1931), 9.61 "Residential Segregation Seems Possible for St. Petersburg," Atlanta Daily World, December 23, 1935, 1. See also Pamela D. Robbins, "'Stack 'Em High and Sell 'Em Cheap': James 'Doc' Webb and Webb's City, St. Petersburg, Florida" (PhD diss., Florida State University, 2003), 97–99. The city convened an Inter-Racial Relations Committee, the primary purpose of which was to limit interactions between white and Black residents and enforce the 1931 charter revision. Arsenault, St. Petersburg and Florida Dream, 265.62 Pamela D. Robbins, "'Stack 'Em High and Sell 'Em Cheap,'" 97.63 For example, Dora Byron, "Tourists Share West Florida With Troops and Shipbuilders," New York Times, January 10, 1943, D6.64 Susan Aschoff, "Civil Rights, Civil Matters," St. Petersburg Times, July 27, 1999, 1D.65 John Lodwick, "Winter Vacationists to Find Relaxation from War Effort at Resorts in North and South," New York Herald Tribune, December 14, 1941, J1, 7.66 "Magnificent Buildings Being Erected in All Cities," Atlanta Constitution, September 10, 1922, 2–3; "Great Buildings Rise in All Southern Cities," Atlanta Constitution, February 11, 1923, D2–3; "Huge Structures Being Erected in Many Cities," Atlanta Constitution, August 12, 1923, D4–5; "Southern Cities Build For Future Greatness," Atlanta Constitution, February 11, 1924: B6–7, and "Romance of Development See in Cities' Building"; Atlanta Constitution, February 8, 1925, C7–8.67 Ray Price, "Municipal Pier, Spa, Solarium," St. Petersburg Times, January 10, 1943, 28.68 "Winter Travelers Find Sunshine City at St. Petersburg," Washington Post, December 5, 1926, R11; and Price, "Municipal Pier," 28.69 Price, "Municipal Pier," 28.70 "St. Petersburg Pier Proves Successful," Christian Science Monitor, March 23, 1927, 5A.71 At the top of his circular arrangement, Hill includes a brawny figure holding a fishing pole across his neck, his back turned to the viewer. It is possible that Hill has included of a nonwhite person; however, his lighter-colored hand and his presence on the pier at all suggests a white rather than a Black figure.72 The strict enforcement of these racial prohibitions was most clearly highlighted when the national press treated violations of the city's segregationist policies as literally newsworthy. For example, "Floridians Ease Up Jim Crow to Lure Votes," Chicago Defender, February 3, 1940, 8; "Nat'l Musicians laud Petrillo for Stand On Florida Jim Crow Law," Cleveland Call and Post, June 22, 1946, 3A; "The Stepped-Up Struggle for Equality," Afro-American, March 16, 1957, 5.73 Robbins Ralph, "I Am Glad That I Am White But . . ." Afro-American, August 11, 1956, 3.74 At the same this bathing beach was created, a small athletic field, including a baseball diamond, was also set aside for St. Petersburg's Black residents. "G.O.P. Candidate For County Tax Collector," Tampa Morning Tribune, October 11, 1916, 15.75 Alison Rose Jefferson, Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020), 19–28. See also Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).76 Andrew W. Kahrl, The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Chanelle N. Rose, The Struggle for Black Freedom in Miami: Civil Rights and America's Tourist Paradise, 1896–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015); and Gregory W. Bush, White Sand Black Beach: Civil Rights, Public Space, and Miami's Virginia Key (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016).77 "St. Pete Delays Order on Pool Integration," Florida Star, February 25, 1954, 1; "Judge Rules That Negroes Can Use Municipal Pool," Florida Star, February 5, 1956, 1; "St. Pete Negroes Demand End of Segregated Beach," Florida Star, June 14, 1958, 1; Daryl Paulson, "Stay Out, The Water's Fine: Desegregating Municipal Swimming Facilities in St. Petersburg, Florida," Tampa Bay History 4, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1982): 6–19; and Victoria W. Wolcott, Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle over Segregated Recreation in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 119–23.78 Wolcott, 161.79 Peyton L. Jones, "Struggle in the Sunshine City: The Movement for Racial Equality in St. Petersburg, Florida, 1955–1968" (master's thesis, University of South Florida, 2010), 13–16.80 The city did build a pool for Black residents in the 1950s. Jennie Hall, a white St. Petersburg resident, donated $25,000 for the project. The city contributed $55,000. Paulson, "Stay Out, The Water's Fine," 1–2, 6–7.81 Arsenault, St. Petersburg and Florida Dream, 306–7.82 Ibid., 307.83 See note 36.84 National Urban League, "Study of the Negro Population of St. Petersburg" quoted in Douglas L. Fleming, "Toward Integration: The Course of Race Relations in St. Petersburg" (master's thesis, University of South Florida, 1973), 23–24. See also Arsenault, St. Petersburg and Florida Dream, 206–8. In the present, while some residents consider the benches to be nostalgic objects, for others the benches continue to operate as symbols of racial oppression. See J. A. Jones, "After 41 years, Tiger Bay discusses racism in St. Pete," Weekly Challenger, July 11–17, 2019, 1, 7.85 See Robert Plunket, Walker Evans Florida (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000; and Sarah Gordon, "The Robert Frank Collection: The Guggenheim Trip, 1955–1957," National Gallery of Art, https://www.nga.gov/features/robert-frank/the-guggenheim-trip-1955-57.html.86 The Andrea Frank Foundation, steward of the Robert Frank estate, would not grant permission for the publication of this contact sheet in this article. The contact sheet is part of the Robert Frank Collection in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, accession number 1900.28.2155. In both this and another contact sheet in the collection, Black figures appear sparingly but notably: a Black driver with white passengers in his car, a Black pedicab driver waiting for passengers, and a young Black girl, hugging a post and standing alone. See also Robert Frank Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, accession number 1900.28.2337.87 Jack Kerouac, "Introduction" [1959], Robert Frank, The Americans (Göttingen: Steidl, 2019), n.p.88 Only the fishermen along the margins of the composition—a man in a hat on the right and a bald man with a ring of gray hair on the left, both turned away from the viewer—suggest an older population.89 Norman E. Jones, "Let's Talk Politics," Miami Times, January 27, 1967, 2.90 "'Great Citizens' Jailed," New Courier, May 20, 1967, 23.91 "St. Petersburg, Florida," WATS Report, November 29, 1966, 2, box 48, folder 13, SAVF-SNCC, Social Action vertical file, circa 1930–2020, Mss. 577, Freedom Summer Digital Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society, http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll2/id/68806. A recounting of St. Petersburg's civil rights history through labor strikes would not start in the 1960s. It would need to include early wage fights that were directly linked to the city's early twentieth-century building modernization program. For example, in 1919, recognizing that the building boom made construction labor necessary and valuable, Black bricklayers sought a daily wage increase of fifty cents. The local press, revealing its sympathies, referred to the striking workers as "arrogant." The strike ultimately failed. "Negro Laborers Ask $3; Hold Up Big Job," Tampa Morning Tribune, June 7, 1919, 4.92 "St. Petersburg, Florida," WATS Report, 29 November 1966, 2.93 Ernest Stephens, "The Case of the Campus Tour" from "SNCC Campus Program Staff Meeting, May 7,1967" in United States Senate, Committee on Government Relations, "Riots, Civil, and Criminal Disorders: Hearings before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations" (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 4037.94 "Antiriot Bill Action Called For—Carmichael Should Be Put Out of Business," (April 19, 1967) in Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 90th Congress, First Session, Volume 113—Part 8, April 17, 1967 to April 27, 1967 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1967), 10083–10084.95 "Hearing is Scheduled for Jan. 18 for St. Pete Mural Protestors," Florida Star, January 14, 1967, 1.96 "Green Acquitted in Mural Incident," St. Petersburg Times, June 30, 1967, 3-B.97 "JOMO Leader Jailed: Racist Mural Causes Unrest," Tri-State Defender, October 2, 1971, 5.98 Derrick Morrison, "By Any Means Necessary," Militant, October 22, 1971, 18; "JOMO Head 'Guilty,'" African World, October 30, 1971; and "A Struggle in Florida," Black News, January 1, 1972, 21.99 "A Struggle in Florida," Black News, January 1, 1972, 21. See note 9.100 Suzanne Crowell, "JOMO," Movement 5, no. 4 (May 1, 1969): 18.101 "National Chairman Joseph Waller Face [sic] 5 Year Prison Sentence on July 19," Burning Spear 2, no. 5 (June 1971): 12–13.102 Within a year, JOMO had members throughout the state and across state lines. Crowell, "JOMO," 18; and Tracy E. K'Meyer, Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945–1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 208–9.103 History of Black Revolution in St. Petersburg," Burning Spear 21, no. 2, special edition (1997): 8. JOMO's position was not to entirely isolate from white America. See "On Coalitions with Non-Black Groups" in "JOMO UHURU; A Pamphlet of the Junta of Military Organizations Its History, Its Beliefs and Its Future," 1969, John O'Neal Papers, Box 22, Folder 11, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, Louisiana.104 "JOMO's 7-Point Program," Burning Spear 1, no. 1 (December 22, 1969): 12.105 The latter was informed not just by centuries of racial capitalism but recent events. On May 6, 1968, after nearly a month of disputes over the city's limited transparency in reducing the hours and wages of its sanitation workers, this predominantly Black labor force initiated another work slowdown, which extended through the summer. This was the city's
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