On the same day that Yeshitela removed the canvas mural, his nephew Leon Waller, small forward for the undefeated Gibbs High School basketball team, squared off against all-white Clearwater High School in the Sunshine City Holiday Invitational Basketball Tournament. Before a “deafening” capacity crowd of 7,500 at the Bayfront Center, number-one ranked Gibbs defeated number-three Clearwater, 70-66. It was the Gibbs Gladiators’ first year in the previously segregated Florida High School Activities Association.
The Gladiators went on to win the State 2A title. Waller, “rebounding ace,” had broken his foot earlier that year. (Details in this poem about his injury, some basketball details, and how the high schooler might have celebrated his victory, are speculative; the rest is true.) The space in City Hall where Yeshitela tore down the mural remains vacant.
December 30, 1966—A Ballad
It was high drama,
political theater,
the stuff of an opera—
how Omali Yeshitela,
then Joe Waller,
reasoned in vain
with white leaders
in St. Petersburg,
Florida, insisting
upon the removal
of a WPA mural
that hung above the
central stairwell in
City Hall, “Picnicking
at Pass-a-Grille,”
patently offensive,
the usual stuff—
white bodies frolicking
on the beach, as jet
Black fiddle and guitar
players grin under
a chickee, their
faces smeared
with those garish
oval lips, there was
even a watermelon.
Omali was right.
The mural had to go.
And how on this day,
December Thirtieth
Nineteen Sixty Six,
Omali slashed down
the offending canvas,
a local visualization
of our horrendous
minstrel past, which
is of course the
clownish B-side to
bodies swinging
from trees, and
how Omali
marched down
Central Avenue,
this racial divide
still lined with
green benches,
where custom or
law would not allow
him to sit, and how,
for this act of art
activism, for this
cultural critique,
Omali faced the
trumped up charge
of Grand Larceny.
Two years lost
for terrible art.
And how that same night,
on December Thirtieth
Nineteenth Sixty-Six
Omali’s younger cousin,
Leon Waller, starting
small forward, re-
bounding ace for
the Gibbs Gladiators,
ranked first in the state,
laced up his Chuck Taylors,
tightening the canvas
around a foot he had
broken in February;
and how the Gibbs
starting five took to
the hardwood floor
of a sparkling new, sold
out Bayfront Arena,
Leon Waller, with
coiled leap and elastic
reach, shrewd in his
positioning, studied,
formidable above rim;
how before seventy-five
hundred witnesses,
the Negro team, in a
segregated league for
the first season, squared
off against all-white,
number three ranked
Clearwater—it was
a match for the ages.
And how the noise
was deafening, as the
Gibbs five commanded
the first half, only
for Clearwater to
claw back, then Gibbs
rallied, final score
seventy to sixty-six.
And how that season
Gibbs took state, old men
still reminisce about
the team from Sixty-Six,
about set shots played
off a bounce pass, give
and go, banked layups,
the carefully set picks, the
practice practice practice,
silencing the slurs heaped
on courageous teenagers,
and how the mural is still
missing, the stairwell
is blank. No art, no
plaque, no story, no
marker, just the tale
of two kinds of court,
activism and sport,
enveloped by art.
And how Leon Waller
went home that night,
December Thirtieth,
Nineteenth Sixty-Six,
buzzing from victory
(a few beers perhaps?),
unlaced his sneakers,
having made hometown
basketball history,
playing his small part
in the ongoing fight,
the sit-ins, wade-ins,
a sanitation strike.
Politics, not his gig,
but jubilant nonetheless.
And how, exhausted,
he elevated his leg
as the doctor ordered,
each of us to march
in our own way, he
had achieved his work,
and how he rested,
triumphant, with his
throbbing foot on ice.
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This article appears in Dec 21-27, 2023.