By now, the story is familiar: In the early evening of Oct. 24, 1996, 18-year-old TyRon Lewis and 17-year-old Eugene Young were speeding east on 18th Avenue S. in a stolen Pontiac LeMans when a St. Petersburg police squad car, driven by Officer James Knight with his partner Sandra Minor, pulled them over. At the 18th Avenue and 16th Street traffic signal, both officers exited their vehicle.
Knight knocked on the tinted driver's side window and ordered Lewis out of the car. No reply. Officer Minor did the same on the passenger side, but again, no reply. Knight stood in front of the vehicle, on the left side, and put his hand on the hood. Lewis bumped the officer, by Knight's recollection about six times. Knight took out his weapon, pointed it at the windshield and again ordered Lewis from the car.
At Connie's Bar-B-Que on 16th, owner Melvin Hall looked through a window at the scene. "It just looked like a traffic stop," recalls Hall, and he went back to cooking.
The question of what happened next still invokes fierce debate. Young and some witnesses say Lewis took his foot off the car's brake and it rolled slowly forward; Knight and Minor say the car lurched forward in an attempt to run the officer down. Either way, three shots later, Lewis lay dead.
Almost immediately, several police officers arrived and blocked off the scene — standard protocol in a shooting. At the same time, the crowd of onlookers grew to about 100. Some of them hurled insults at police. Then came rocks and bottles. As more police arrived, some wearing jeans and T-shirts, so did residents of nearby neighborhoods. One of those residents was Kiambu Mudada.
"We heard [about] it here and jumped up and went," Mudada says of that night. "Things just started developing. Where people feel like they been done wrong, they have very strange ways of relieving it."
In the hours that followed, police, lacking riot gear, watched as the crowd marched and set fire to nearby businesses. The anger spread to the Bartlett Park and Wildwood neighborhoods. Before the sun came up on Oct. 25, roughly 30 homes and businesses had suffered from fire damage. Rioters set several cars, a police cruiser and a TV crew's van ablaze. An officer was shot in the arm, a newspaper photographer beaten and 11 more people suffered injuries from mob violence. Two hundred National Guard troops arrived in the city. The St. Pete-based International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement organized protests. Following the Nov. 13 jury verdict acquitting officers of wrongdoing, arson and assaults erupted once more.
That year, sleepy St. Pete became synonymous with racial violence.
Ten years later, the physical scars of the riots are almost indiscernible — most of the structures that sustained damage have long been torn down or rebuilt. Still evident, however, are the psychological scars.
It is rare a week goes by without some reference to the '96 riots. Police union officials blame the city's passive reaction to the riot as the source of myriad problems within the department. Whenever Mayor Rick Baker and his administration unveil a new Midtown project, there's an allusion to progress in the wake of the area's violent past. Even the words people use to describe that night can reveal intense feelings — police and the media call it a riot, the Uhurus term it an uprising, while others try to use the more moderate disturbances.
On the streets around 18th Avenue and 16th Street S., that night in 1996 is still fresh in many residents' minds.
"I think when African-American males are pulled over by police today, they still reflect on that day," says 44-year-old Mudada, now the president of the 13th Street Heights Neighborhood Association.
Still, Mudada says the inroads made by Goliath Davis, first as police chief and now as deputy mayor, did a lot to help the black community heal.
"Don't get me wrong — we ain't bosom buddies," he says of police. "They have made mistakes, but we have also made a lot of progress."
That progress has come to Midtown in over $100 million of investment, much of it readily seen in the neighborhoods surrounding the site of the shooting. The formerly vacant shopping plazas lining 16th Street between 15th Avenue and 18th Avenue are now home to numerous small businesses, most of which are black-owned. A new post office went up on the site of the former Roseland Club, a seedy bar. And city officials cannot stop praising the new Sweetbay supermarket and plaza at 18th Avenue and 22nd Street S.
"We've had a 100 percent increase in business in that area," Mudada says. "Sometimes we have to count our blessings."
But not everyone in Midtown sees it that way.
"Fuck that bitch!" scowls Jeremiah, a 25-year-old Wildwood resident, pointing to Sweetbay's purple and green sign. "That bitch is the highest damn thing. You can go to any other supermarket and it's cheaper. Man, we live next door to that bitch and we don't even shop there."
The other black men sitting on benches in front of Freddy's Car Wash on 18th Avenue nod in agreement. They still complain about police overstepping bounds, bothering them for parking infractions while murders occur two streets over.
"Cops need to stay in their own place," one of the men says.
Jeremiah says until the city fixes the public housing projects and decrepit apartment buildings in Midtown, there will be no real change.
"Every day is a struggle," he grumbles, looking out over the street. "Ain't shit changed."
That anger seems to waft down 18th Avenue along with the hickory smoke from Connie's Bar-B-Que. At the Blue Nile Food Store at 1600 18th Ave. S., clerk Ali Oliver says the tension is still palpable.
"There's an element that doesn't want the neighborhood to grow up," says Oliver, a South Jersey native. Oliver missed the '96 riots; he moved to St. Pete from Washington D.C. in 2000.
"There's an us-against-them attitude," he says. "More so than any place I've ever lived."
Mududa says that lingering tension might spring from worry over how the Southside will look in 10 years. Home values in the areas just south of downtown have risen dramatically — 800 percent in some cases. For older residents who intend to die in their homes, all the rising values have done is increase their property taxes. In neighborhoods that used to be 90 percent black, the influx of white residents, many of whom want police and code enforcement to follow, is sometimes seen as a problem. Where some people see revitalization, Mududa sees gentrification.
"You say 'revitalization' and I don't see it that way," he says. "I think we need to revitalize the values of our people. When you see a change in our living, then I'll say we're successful."
At Connie's, Hall dismisses those worries. People have moved out of Midtown, he says, but more are coming back.
"You can't get ribs without fire," he drawls. "But the one thing about Midtown is, the people in Midtown is not going to let anything change it. It will always be Midtown."
Read Scott Harrell's account of this night.
This article appears in Oct 25-31, 2006.
