(solemn music) - You can't ignore the experiences that people had in our history here in St. Petersburg.

You can't ignore the fact that it was great for some people, it wasn't great for everybody.

If we ignore what people have been through, then how can we help keep those things from happening again?

We had to tell this story.

(upbeat music) So I was born in Memphis, Tennessee.

I'm biracial.

My mother's Black and my father's white.

My brother and my sisters, they were all, you know, 100% Black.

And I was the lightest-skin kid on the streets.

Yeah, it was a little different.

But, you know, I grew up a Black boy in Memphis, Tennessee.

So I would visit St. Petersburg pretty regularly.

My father was living here.

Didn't really have a father figure in my life on a day-to-day basis, so they decided that it would be best if I moved to Florida, specifically here in St. Petersburg where he was living.

I ended up gonna high school here in St. Petersburg as well.

And then, I started gonna USF St. Petersburg for college.

And in that time period, I realized I had a lot of time in my hands, and so I needed a hobby just to kind of keep busy.

And, you know, when I first moved to St. Petersburg when I was in middle school, my father picked up home brewing as a hobby.

I didn't know what he was doing.

I was too young really to understand it or even care about it.

But I knew that he did this thing that he enjoyed.

And it inspired me to be like, "Oh, that's the thing that maybe I'll enjoy.

If he liked it, I'll probably like it, or at least I'll see."

I started going to home brew club meetings, ended up working at Southern Brewing and Winemaking.

I was able to help open a brewery for them.

And it was at this point right after we opened it that I realized, "I think I can do it.

You know, I think I can open a brewery.

I think I can put my fingerprint on it.

I think I can help this area build a foundation in this industry."

And then, luckily for me, I end up meeting my current business partners, Nate and Steve, and they specifically wanted to open a brewery in St. Petersburg.

And so we spent about nine months just getting to know each other, home brewing, hanging out.

Eventually, we decided to open Green Bench Brewing Company.

(mellow music) - The idea of the green benches belongs to a gentleman by the name of Noel Mitchell.

He was an entrepreneur, a businessman, who moved to St. Petersburg in about 1904.

He was the king of the original Atlantic City Salt Water Taffy.

So when he came to St. Pete, he tried his hand at real estate and development.

In 1908, he decided to put some benches outside, 'cause when people did come to his real estate office, they basically would go in his office and just like sit down to get out of the heat.

So anytime someone sat there, straight away, he'd get them to sign a contract to buy some land.

Other merchants took notice, they started putting their own benches out.

So all throughout downtown you found red benches, and blue benches, and yellow benches, and orange benches.

And in 1916, Mayor Al Lang basically told City Council that we looked like a circus tent, we looked like this Podunk, little town, and we needed uniformity.

So he pushed through the Green Bench Ordinance.

All the benches had to be the same size and the same color.

Green bench green.

(gentle upbeat music) - Literally the city would take out ads in newspapers and, you know, in snowbird towns and say, "Come to the city of the green benches," and label us the City of Green Benches, right?

That's how powerful of a symbol it was.

They became a symbol for coming together.

- Like a lot of history, especially in the South, including here in St. Petersburg, there's always two sides to history.

- If you ask about the green benches to say the African American community that remember it, it's a completely different story.

- Because while the green benches were used to market St. Pete as this beautiful communal town, the African American community weren't allowed to sit on it because this is a time of segregation and we're in the South.

(gentle music) - The only time the Black population of St. Petersburg were permitted to sit on the green benches is if they were caring for white children.

(gentle music continues) You never learn about Florida in US history when it comes to civil rights and segregation, probably because the state did an amazing job marketing itself as, you know, America's playground and vacation land.

But when you look at everything that happened here, I mean, we had lunch counter sit-ins, we had marches, we had the Freedom Riders arrive in St. Petersburg.

Of all the things that happened here and all the conversations that we've had about civil rights, the one thing that's still the flashpoint are the green benches.

(gentle music continues) As the 1950s rolled into the 1960s, there was a huge movement in St. Petersburg to make us a younger city.

So one of the first things they did was begin to remove the green benches.

The removal of the green benches had nothing to do with what was right or wrong, or integration.

The removal of the green benches is because the city wanted to get rid of the elderly image that we had.

They probably could have used it as a teaching moment to try and pull us together, because you can't hide it.

I mean, you know, it's something that needs to be brought out in the open and talked about, but I think it was just easier for the city to just destroy the benches.

(gentle music continues) - When I was growing up, my family didn't shy away from our history.

Matter of fact, we were constantly reminded of our history.

We were constantly reminded that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in our town.

I have a great uncle who, in Mississippi, was lynched.

Apparently, he looked at and spoke to a white woman, and he was dragged out into the fields and he was lynched.

And my family would tell this story a lot when I was growing up.

Because of the way that I was taught to deal with these traumas, which was to look it in the face, constantly be reminded that this is who we are, this is how we got here, it was almost impossible to not call this place Green Bench.

We couldn't ignore people's lives.

We couldn't ignore the experiences that they had.

We had to tell this story.

(gentle music) So I source those through like a fruit co-op, like a fruit and veg co-op for restaurants.

I never want anybody to hide how they feel about us calling this Green Bench.

I have friends who don't come here, who actually feel like by calling it Green Bench, we're celebrating it just for the same reasons they've always been celebrated.

Instead, we're celebrating it because of what everyone had to go through and what it means to our community.

A few things were vital for us.

The first one was making sure that we tell the whole story as often as we could, 'cause the goal was to always to represent St. Petersburg.

And we wanted the green benches to be exactly what they were supposed to be, a communal gathering place where everybody can come together and enjoy the beautiful weather, and each other, and everything that this amazing city has to offer.

The second really important thing for us was, it may been slightly more personal, a Black man owns Green Bench.

You know, this powerful symbol in our city that once wasn't for my people, I own it now.

And turns out we ended up opening the first Black-owned brewery in Florida.

(gentle upbeat music) At the moment, there's far less than 1% of all the breweries that are open in the United States are Black owned.

In the brewing community, there's some organizations that have been built to help diversify the industry as a whole.

There's a few that I'm personally a part of, I'm the vice president of Beer Culture.

The goal with Beer Culture is to prove and show that the culture of beer is only built by the people that are involved in it.

That you don't walk into the space of beer and see its culture and conform to it, you contribute to it, and by doing so, you alter its culture.

We provide scholarships and job placements in an attempt to not let that gap grow, we're trying to provide the industry with quality candidates of color.

(gentle bright music) I'm an extremely prideful person.

I'm proud of where I came from, and I'm proud of my family.

I'm proud of St. Petersburg.

I'm proud of the people that I work with in order to diversify this industry.

I'm proud that people care.

And I take pride in not just the products that I make, but the people that I share them with.

I don't know if there's a better way to honor what my family has done to put us in a position where we can do things now that we never could.

If I get to drink a beer to celebrate them, I don't know, you know, everybody's having fun.

(gentle bright music continues) - [Announcer] Support for "Greater St. Petersburg" is provided by Curtis Anderson.