Albert — who went by Al — was being transferred to the Sunshine City to manage a new plant there for his company, which made leather watchbands. But Winnie Foster, who had been introduced to social justice and racial inequality at an early age, could only think about the daily horrors that were inflicted upon African-American residents living south of the Mason-Dixon.
“I cried,” said Foster. “I said, I don’t want to go to Florida. It’s going to be racist… And it was.”
Yet they made the move south, to the one-story cinder-block house in the Bahama Shores neighborhood of south St. Petersburg where she still lives.
Next year will mark 50 years — more than half her life — since she, her husband and her youngest child made the move.
When she got here, she found some unexpectedly fertile ground in more ways than one — a city that, though scarred by Jim Crow, was hungry for peace and unity. In her own back yard, she had to figure out what grew best in the sandy soil, and over the decades she has become a key figure in the cultivation of St. Pete as a hub for progressive politics.
“Winnie is the matriarch of social justice in Pinellas County,” said activist Amy Weintraub. “There is no better role model of looking beyond your own life and finding ways to help. She is a beloved fixture, and I am so lucky to know her and be her friend.”
You’ll see her at campaign events for a local progressive candidate or panel discussions about equality, environmental conservation or freedom of the press. When it’s chilly out, she wears a vibrant purple coat — not that she wouldn’t stand out anyway, with her swept-back white hair streaked with silver, her deeply lined face and piercing gray-blue eyes. Widowed in 2011, she doesn’t drive, but instead gets to her many events with help from friends with cars. She’ll use a metal cane or a walker to get around. But she can’t stand it when people underestimate her physical abilities based on her advanced age or diminutive size.
“I’ve got my cane and I can use it as a weapon if I have to,” she joked.
On top of a short bookshelf in her home’s library-like front room sits a framed photo taken decades ago featuring her and James B. Sanderlin, the civil rights activist who in 1972 would become the first black judge in Pinellas County’s history. Within the pages of a photo album on the bookshelf are letters from Democratic U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist (D-St. Pete) wishing her a happy 90th birthday and commending her for her decades of service.
St. Pete Mayor Rick Kriseman — whose re-election campaign Foster supported last year — was at her 90th birthday celebration.
“Winnie doesn’t let anything stop her from making the world a better place,” Kriseman said in an email. “She has been a tireless advocate for social justice, voting rights, our environment, common sense gun laws, and so many other important causes. Every time I think she may be slowing down, she shows up again ready to help. I am honored to have Winnie as a friend and supporter.”
Her friends marvel over how she seems to know everyone in St. Pete, but she disagrees.
“People say to me, Winnie, you know everybody,” she told CL during a recent interview. “No, I don’t, because I meet [new] people all the time.”
She’s only just begun to plant the seeds — quite literally — of her latest endeavor.
Through the Sojourner Truth Center, the nascent nonprofit she is organizing with help from Carla Bristol of Gallery 909 fame and Trevor Mallory of the Pinellas County Democratic Black Caucus, she has built a large garden containing six raised beds in her side yard. Named for the abolitionist and women’s rights activist, the center recently won a Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service grant for its urban agriculture project.
The beds sport tiny purple broccoli, collard greens, dinosaur (lacinato) kale plants and other growing greens.
Moringa trees, with their lanky seed pods, line the perimeter of her yard. Foster said she uses the leaves in smoothies for an energy boost.
She invites local youth to help tend the garden, and lights up when teaching them about growing food. To her, this knowledge is crucial. She believes local youth — especially south of St. Pete’s Central Avenue, where food deserts reign — are suffering a deep disconnect that could have a detrimental impact on their physical, mental and emotional development. Naturally, she wants to do something about that; what better place to start than her own back yard?
“To me, she’s an inspiration,” said Bristol. “When you look at her age and the number of years that she’s been committing to helping this community, it is a no-brainer decision, to want to do anything to help her fulfill her vision.”
They hope the project will sustain itself while educating local youth about where their food comes from. At the Martin Luther King Jr. Family Fun event at Tropicana Field, the Sojourner Truth Center had a booth where she invited young kids to paint flower pots. Inside those flower pots were seeds of their choice: peas, broccoli, carrots, cucumbers.
After all, when you ask her what's her “secret” to staying vibrant and active over the years, she says it’s all in how you relate to the food you eat.
She spent most of her youth on a farm in Indiana, where her family raised most of the food they ate. She said she remembers “many an afternoon spent with my two sisters preparing vegetables for canning.”
The idea of raising one’s own food — or at least knowing what’s in it and where it comes from, and avoiding heavily processed, additive-ridden foods — stuck with her over the years, she said, even if she might eat a donut on occasion.
“She wants to educate us about health. It matters to her not just what we’re eating, but what we’re putting in our body. She takes it beyond wherever I would take it,” Bristol said.
Just as her passion for healthy food originated in her rural Quaker youth, so, too, did her passion for advocating peace and justice.
Born in 1927, Foster came of age in the middle of World War II. For her last two years of high school, she went to a Quaker boarding school in Ohio Quakers, of course, are categorically anti-war. She had classmates who were jailed for refusing to obey the draft. Some signed on as conscientious objectors; others were able to sign up to fight fires out West, Foster recalled. Civil rights leader and LGBTQ equality pioneer Bayard Rustin visited her school, and she got to meet him. Rustin, who went on to become an advisor to Martin Luther King Jr., inspired her.
“As he talked and told us some of the work he’s doing around the country, I thought that sounds cool, I’d like to do that,” she said. “And so I was focused on racial justice partly because of my Quaker heritage and knowing that Quakers in this country came here for religious freedom and the basics of their beliefs are that all people are equal.”
During that time, she became pen pals with a Japanese-American girl her age whose family “had been swept by Franklin Roosevelt’s move to remove Japanese people.” She remembers reading about how her friend’s family had all their possessions taken away and were forced to live in a horse stable.
“That was a very early, for me, a wake-up call for what government could do to people,” Foster said.
As a young woman in the 1940s, Foster didn’t have much in the way of career options. She went away to college for a year, but couldn’t afford to go back. Her father told her she had two options: go to nursing school or become someone’s secretary.
“A man standing over your shoulder telling you what to do? No, thank you,” she said. “Because my grandmother had told me once, don’t ever learn to milk the cow, because you will have to do it from then on. I decided that learning to type was like milking the cow. And so I never learned to type.”
So she married Al, her high school sweetheart, and they moved to Providence — where his mother lived — and they started a family.
In Rhode Island, her mother-in-law, Foster said, was an inspiration. She “was a woman who had run up against the problems of being a woman,” such as being turned down for a teaching position because she was married. She went onto become director of an agency similar to Planned Parenthood before becoming a lobbyist for her local chapter of the League of Women Voters.
The Fosters had three children while Al attended Brown University — Dena, who’s now retired and lives in northern Florida; Geoffrey, who works for the public defender’s office in Florida’s 10th Judicial Circuit; and Peter, who is president of Steelcon Building Corporation in Clearwater. Foster now has two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
In school, Al served as a page in the Rhode Island legislature, and through dinner table banter, Winnie learned about the intricacies of the legislative process. When he graduated from Brown, they bought five acres and built a rammed-earth house. She worked a few waitressing jobs over the years; she said she was waiting tables “in a working man’s lunchroom” when news of JFK’s death piped in over the radio. The family had been resistant to television prior to that, but they bought one so they could follow the coverage of the assassination, she said.
As the Civil Rights era gained steam, Foster was there to help it along.
“I remember making lots and lots of peanut butter sandwiches to put on the bus for people who were going to Washington for the Poor People’s campaign at the time of Martin Luther King,” she said.
Then, in 1969, came the dreaded move south.
In St. Petersburg, she quickly got involved with the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War, she said, and remembers cooking for them at the Unitarian Universalist Church of St. Pete, which sits by Mirror Lake downtown.
As a former northerner who moved south of St. Pete’s Central Avenue — which in many ways remains a vestigial racial dividing line for the city — the racial divisions were striking to Foster.
“It was so obvious, and as I began to do my grassroots organizing, I realized how divided the black community and the white community were, and so I began to try to find ways to build bridges,” she said.
At the time, while she was fighting for racial equality in the South, she said she didn’t encounter overt racism or suspicion from other activists. But given how deep the racial divide there was, she later found out there were a couple of African-American activists who couldn’t quite trust her because she was white.
Nobody treated her like she didn’t belong, she said, but years later she had a frank discussion with a fellow civil rights activist, an African American who was on his deathbed. She told him she’d never felt that people were talking about her.
That’s because you don’t know some of the things that people were saying, the friend, whom she didn’t name, replied.
“I know that that goes with the territory of being an organizer,” Foster told CL. “There are going to be people that attribute motives to you that you don’t have.”
While she sees progress, Foster said she thinks racial inequality is still rampant — albeit different. To her, Trumpism is a sign of how alive and well racism and other harmful ways of thinking really are, but amidst the negativity and division she sees citizens in places like St. Petersburg coming together to resist it, and that’s how she stays optimistic.
“Sometimes when the days are darkest is when a ray of sunshine can get through,” she said. “And so to me, the Trump phenomenon is an opportunity to those of us who reject almost everything he’s saying and doing and the changes that are being made to work at change in a different way, and I think that’s happening here in St. Petersburg, with people saying, 'OK, we can do this. We don’t have to wait for Washington, we don’t have to wait for Governor Scott in Florida. We can initiate things here in our own city and our own neighborhoods.'”
This article appears in Feb 1-8, 2018.