This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St.

Petersburg, Sarasota.

[music] [music] I don't have to serve anyone I don't want to at this counter, that means colored like you either stand or get nothing.

So many people do not know about what happened on February 29th, 1960, in Tampa, Florida.

Everything that we have, someone had to do it before someone had to take a risk.

It was just our time to step up.

We are going to be treated like human beings when we want to eat and drink.

Just something I had to do and I had to take those chances.

That's what I did.

This story, which is largely untold and unknown, needs to be told.

[music] [music] I'm stealing yours.

Let's go.

Hustle, people on set...hustle.

[music] Coming into this project, I didn't know too much about where the progress came from.

[music] You know, we hear so many stories about civil rights, and there's movies and songs about civil rights, but something like this.

A lot of people just didn't know what was going on.

This show just brings so much to light that we not only as people from Tampa, but from the country, should know.

[music] One of the most important things.

I think, that researching this play taught me was that this is an area that has had some important history.

There's real gravitas in this area.

The civil rights movement was here, too.

It wasn't just in Alabama and Mississippi.

And it wasn't that long ago.

[music] If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

That's basically the philosophy that I was taught as a kid.

[music] Oh, boy.

[music] This is just a wonderful tribute to folks who have made a difference in this community, and I'm just extremely honored to have been selected to be one of them.

[music] I know what my purpose in life is, and that is to fight for equality, dignity and respect.

So I pursued it from high school through today.

[music] The Tampa Bay area is one huge resort.

[music] Separate but equal doctrine permitted segregation in all areas of life in the south.

[music] There were basically two different worlds, one black and one white here in Tampa.

[music] In the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place.

[music] In 1954.

Brown versus the Board of Education was passed down by the US Supreme Court, which was theoretically supposed to integrate all public institutions.

Schools had to be opened to children of any race.

But there was no timeline for when this had to happen.

So it didn't happen.

The schools were still segregated, facilities were still segregated.

The invisible line of Jim Crow ran through the entire city.

[music] So there was a lot of frustration with when will this change occur?

A lot of negroes now don't want to accept that standard anymore.

We're going to have our own standard.

It was at that turning point in America where young black people stood up and said no more.

And so the young people decided we're going to try some new things.

[music] And then we go to the new scouts are there?

Yes, ma'am.

All this trouble would be eliminated if the colored people of Florida would just stay in their place.

This struck me as a perfect subject for a play.

The 1960s sit in demonstrations that desegregated downtown Tampa lunch counters.

I was a child in Tampa when these took place.

I didn't know they happened, and I don't think anybody that I know was aware that they had happened.

Let's do it.

All right.

How do we feel at one four?

Do not travel down the path.

Stay out.

Stay out, stay out.

I don't trust the white courtroom.

I'm 22 years old.

Do I have to wait till I'm 40 before some white men and limousines decide I have the right to eat a sandwich at a dime store like a human being?

So we're seeing.

It's great, it's great.

[applause] The movement was gaining momentum.

The idea was nonviolent protest.

And you really think you can get high schoolers to do all that with you?

I don't know.

At that time, in 1960, in Tampa, a leader was right in the middle of us, and he probably didn't even consider himself a leader until he started the lunch counter movement here.

And that was Clarence Ford.

[music] We're looking at our 50th wedding anniversary album.

[music] Uh, Clarence and I got married in December 31, 1960.

Yep, and believe it or not, the reason that we got married then was because he claimed that he wanted to claim me on income taxes.

[laughter] [music] We moved into our own house in the house the night of our wedding.

Yeah.

He tried.

[laughter] I did, yeah.

And we've been here ever since.

Yeah.

[music] The sit ins, it was going around nationwide.

Sit ins everywhere.

And so I think he came to the conclusion that if they can do it, why we can't do it.

Right.

[music] This was in February of 1960 and the first ones had already occurred in North Carolina.

And you begin the sit in demonstrations in Greensboro.

[music] People know Greensboro because of the civil rights movement that started right here, the modern civil rights movement.

The sit in movement.

[music] This event at this site is known across the world.

There are only a few of these museums where the museum is actually housed in the landmark.

So our major artifact is the building and the lunch counter room that's been preserved here.

[music] The anti-war and also called the Greensboro Four.

Those students are the ones who actually pulled it off.

They're the ones who got it started.

The Greensboro Four.

They had decided that they wanted to change the status quo.

[music] Unlike sort of working with institutions, which is what the civil rights movement under Dr.

Martin Luther King was doing at the time.

Students... college students in this case decided that they would intervene directly to enforce their understanding of their rights under the Constitution of the United States.

The previous generation was all about fighting it out in the courthouse, whereas the younger people of the day wanted something more decisive and more public.

And they would do that by occupying the seats at the lunch counter, which was racially exclusive.

It wasn't segregated in that sense, because there wasn't a division between black and white at the lunch counter.

It was prohibited, so it was access denied.

If we were able to enter some establishment, there were rules.

There certainly were rules there.

Rule number one use the restroom before you leave home.

Because in many of the stores, there were no restrooms that blacks could use.

Number two, don't go downtown hungry or thirsty because you could buy food, but everything you bought was to go.

You couldn't sit down and eat in the store.

So if you wanted to target a place that could have a vast implication, you would go to the Woolworths.

Woolworths was a major department store in the country at the time.

We think of it as a modern day Walmart or a target or something like that.

Having a lunch counter, it was just part of what was built into the department stores.

You saw it in all of them.

[music] So it starts on February one.

The ANT4 come in, they sit down and they're told that they cannot be served.

They can buy their food somewhere else in the store and take it out.

They said no, they would stay.

And they stayed as long as the store stayed open.

And finally, the manager of the store closed the store early with the expectation that no one would come back.

[music] The next day there were a few more students, and then day after day there were more and more students.

[music] These young students had learned that we are better as one people.

So the nonviolent piece was quite important.

That was a dramatic way of challenging people to look black people in the face and see them as human beings.

The idea of nonviolence goes a long, long time back.

But the first one that we know of that took place in the United States, was one conducted by Octavius Catto in Philadelphia in the 1850s.

He is sometimes referred to as the Martin Luther King of the of the previous century.

The trolley system in Philadelphia excluded black people, and he decided that it should not do so.

And so he sat in at the trolley, spent overnight, wouldn't leave, and then ended up desegregating the trolley system in Philadelphia.

So it goes back as far as that.

And we are still insisting that violence is self-defeating.

You had a lot of incidents where people are trying to provoke the activists into some sort of violence or some sort of unseemly action.

There was a fear that young people could not peacefully protest, and I think they showed them that they were very capable of doing that and that it would work.

[music] Less than 30 days after Greensboro Tampa followed suit.

[music] Tampa Bay's many fine beaches and a wide selection of accommodations make the Gulf Coast a perfect family area.

[music] Tampa Tribune in an editorial said, we have no race problem here in Florida, which was hilarious.

I mean, ironic to the nth degree.

There's no way these crackers still want to keep us poor and hungry and locked out of everything important.

They were keeping black people out of the life of Tampa, and therefore they thought they had no race problem.

Instead of realizing they had an enormous race problem.

Tampa was first founded in 1824 as a town, and that was at a time when Florida still was a slave state.

[music] Yes, the Civil War ended with the freeing of the slaves in 65.

But in 1877, a crucial decision was made in Washington to withdraw federal troops from the South who were enforcing integration and who were making sure that the slaves were free.

And from that moment, every evil force in the South began to reassert itself over the African Americans.

And that led to the Jim Crow segregation that led to the lynchings that led to the Klan.

[music] Is there to be no escape from living near Negroes?

And what if the dream of middle class respectability.

Jim Crow segregation.

Locked black people out of so many opportunities.

There was job discrimination in most areas.

The Port of Tampa employed African Americans as longshoremen.

The other place where you would find African Americans working was in the cigar industry.

Cigar factories play an important part in Tampa's economy.

African Americans, Cubans and other groups, Italians, Germans migrated to work in the cigar industry.

In the early days, you would find blacks sitting next to whites.

As time went by, however, the city fathers decided that that was a little too much integration, not just in the factories, but outside of the factories.

[music] Among the Cubans who came here to work in the cigar factories, there were Afro-Cubans.

[music] Being black and of Latin culture, it was a very difficult the la light skinned, white appearing Cubans.

They had to follow the Jim Crow Act.

Even though they spoke the same language, even though they may have come from the same country.

Here in America, they had to be divided into blacks and whites.

[music] Because of segregation black people in Tampa, you know, of course, lived in black neighborhoods.

White folks often referred to the black area as slums, but they were communities.

And that's often forgotten.

[music] Central Park village, that's where most black people lived.

So you got an opportunity to mix and mingle with everybody.

We walked the same streets and we went to the same places to have fun.

And we did have two black high schools.

George S. Middleton High School and Howard W. Blake High School.

[music] I feel like it was just like a regular school because that was the only thing I knew.

This yearbook is 65 years old.

[music] They signed their names.

That's an autograph.

[laughter] That's Barbara, right?

With that big smile.

Let me see, I think I oh, here I am, here I am.

I found me all the way over here with a picture of a tassel.

[music] We would all be together at functions.

Some of us went to each other's proms and of course, the basketball games.

And some of them Either girls or boys from the other places.

[music] I wanted to get out there and rally the troops to get behind the team.

And I loved it.

[music] I was on the baseball team, on the tennis team.

That's what shaped me, shaped my life.

I was fortunate that our teachers that really, really cared about us because of segregation.

Many people who were qualified to do much greater things doctors, lawyers, business professionals, they were not allowed to do that.

So we had some of the best teachers imaginable in the public schools in Tampa.

[music] The black communities, the black teachers, they taught us who we were, how important we were, how intelligent we were, that we could do anything and we can go anywhere.

I remember Miss James from second grade.

You're going to be somebody one day, Arthenia, even though you do talk a lot, because that was the thing that I was loquacious, as they said back then.

But every teacher pushed me.

My mother was a teacher.

The teachers took care to make sure that every student learned.

The students understood that the promises of American life were not distributed equally, and those institutions were very important in flowing into what became the civil rights movement here.

[music] Central Avenue began developing in the 1890s.

Just about everything that was important to us.

All those things were right there on Central Avenue.

It was the black mecca.

[music] As a teenager, you look forward to getting grown so you could be a part of Central Avenue.

Where they had nightclubs.

Henry Joyner's Cotton Club.

The Cotton Club was the center of my universe and so many other people.

Some of the most famous musicians and entertainers ever performed here.

Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, James Brown, Temptations.

[music] That's the way African Americans went to enjoy ourselves and eat in a lot of other things.

That make me shame.

What we could not buy on Central Avenue.

A lot of our shopping we did on Franklin Street.

When we stepped outside of the bubble of Central, it was a different world because that's where all of the prejudice and discrimination occurred.

[music] I don't remember any stores that wouldn't sell a black person a dress or a suit.

They were happy to take your money as a customer, but as so you didn't have the right to try on clothing and not purchase it.

The thought was that if a black person put on a jacket, no white person would want to wear it and you could buy food, but you couldn't sit down and eat in the store.

In front of a Woolworth's.

There were benches out there.

You couldn't sit on those either.

Those benches in front on the street, blacks couldn't sit on them.

You had to stand up.

[music] In Tampa in 1960.

If you were African American, you were not allowed in movie theaters, bowling alleys, Lowry Park Zoo, public beaches, private restaurants, swimming pools, you name it.

[music] I was raised by African American people that worked for my parents.

You know, these were like my grandparents.

You know, I loved them.

So we had a different perspective than a lot of white people in the South.

I'd always heard about Alabama and Mississippi, you know, being these racist places, but I never realized it was right here.

Big time.

[music] [music] After World War II, you have African American veterans returning and feeling the shock of being targeted back into a subordinate role in the society.

They had fought a war against totalitarian racism, but they came home in large measure.

They were going to meet the same standard that existed before the war.

The South was not known for progressive leadership, let's say, but in 1959, Tampa would elect a new mayor who was ready to fight for everyone in the city, Mayor Julian Lane.

Wow.

That was at his campaign party right after he'd been elected.

I was I was, you know, 10 or 11.

Dad actually was going to run for city council.

And then so many people came up to him and said, we want you to run for mayor instead.

So he decided to run for mayor, and that's how he got elected.

[music] My grandfather was born in 1914, in Seminole Heights.

He went to high school and was a football player, was captain of the team, which transitioned him into being recruited by the University of Florida.

When he graduated, he joined the military.

He was stationed at Camp Livingston in Louisiana, which was an African American camp.

I think it really shaped him because he saw that they didn't have the same privileges within the military.

Area.

[music] He ended up coming back to Tampa after the war.

His father was a dairy farmer, so he had a dairy business going on for about 12 years until he started getting into politics.

[music] He was someone who was willing to listen.

He was willing to work with people in the black community, black community leaders for gradual change.

One of the early things he did was create a biracial committee that could deal with some of the problems detrimental to the African American community.

It had an equal number of African Americans as white Americans.

And all of these folks on the committee were well known in Tampa for their civic engagement, their business.

Right.

This looks like the biracial committee.

It does.

Oh, yeah.

Here's Reverend Lowery Right here.

[music] Reverend Lowery was a brilliant man who had been one of Martin Luther King Jr's teachers at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

[music] Helping others was not new to him.

Those were things that he was taught to do in Morehouse is to help mankind.

He was born to be a leader.

Yes, life has its light side, but there always comes a day of challenge and decision.

When you face the choice of which way you are going.

[music] Reverend came to Tampa because he was asked to be a pastor in 1956, the pastor of Beulah Baptist Church.

[music] We respected him.

We loved him.

And as president of the state NAACP, he was the man for the time.

[music] He was asked to be on the biracial committee by Mayor Lane, along with Cody Fowler and other community leaders.

[music] >> And here's Fowler.

[music] Cody Fowler was one of the most important white civic leaders in Tampa at that time.

He was a prominent attorney and he was a racial moderate to me.

>> He was Big Cody.

My grandfather was a southerner.

He was born in Tennessee, went to law school in Tennessee in 1950.

He was president of the American Bar Association.

And as a result of that, he traveled around the United States and around the world.

And he saw the world, and he saw how things were changing and where the world was going.

And he brought back that experience and that vision to Tampa.

And that led him to the 50s, when he saw what he thought was a grave injustice in terms of how people were treated differently on the basis of the color of their skin.

[music] Thank you all for coming this morning.

This is the historic West Tampa Black History walking tour.

The more we understand what has happened here in Tampa, the more we can look forward to what will happen, what could happen, and how we can be a part of it.

[music] The idea that we're all coming together to tell this particular story gives me hope.

I'm sure I can get 50 to 60 bodies downtown by tomorrow afternoon.

By tomorrow morning.

I'm watching for a lot of people who don't choose to settle down with books of statistics on black white relationships between 1961 and 1964.

They're willing to get it from the stage or from a movie.

[music] The play has been in rehearsal, and as I talk to you now, it's about a week from opening at the Straz.

I think they are heroes, every one of them.

Then send a group of us out to Franklin Street.

This play is about that, that prejudice that people of color have felt.

But because of the people before me, you know, like Mr.

Ford, because of them and what they did, those things were moved out of the way for, for me.

[music] 20 year old Clarence Ford was really energized by Greensboro and wanted to get involved.

[music] I just decided I wasn't better than anyone else if I had to take that chance, that's what I did.

And whatever happened, I was prepared for it.

[music] Clarence started thinking about, well, what are we going to do here in Tampa?

We should have sit ins.

Also, the NAACP Youth Council, led by Clarence, who was the new president, convinced the older leaders that This was something that they were going to go forward with.

And told them, say we we have the same problem here in Tampa, so why don't we do the same thing here in Tampa?

Since I was a barber, I had my own job, so I couldn't get fired.

If you were working in in an establishment back then, you would get laid off.

You would lose your job.

So we had to use high school students back there to do that.

[music] Clarence went to Middleton High School and talked to the president of the student government, the late George Edgecombe, and he went to Shafter Scott, who was the president of the student body at Blake High School.

And he said, I need 20 students from each school to go with me.

We're going to sit in at the F.W.

Woolworth lunch counters and demand to be served.

That was a time when we felt that we deserved to sit at the lunch counters.

It was just our time to step up.

We were 16 or 17 years old, and I just remember back to the song that James Brown sang that says, open the door and I'll get it myself.

Well, when they open the door, those students were ready.

♪ I don't want nobody to give me nothing.

Open up the door ♪ ♪ I'll get it myself ♪ It was like a like a buzz, you know.

You know, we're going to be meeting at the thing, and, you know, we're going to go downtown and just sit ins and what have you.

I am a Libra.

We are for justice and righteousness.

[music] Without my father's permission and my mother's permission.

Oh, Lord, help me.

I was one of the ones that George selected.

He told me, he said, you're the last one.

Because the world would know before we got there.

If we had told you first.

Oh, baby...she she.

See how we don't always.

Go?

Let's get it started.

Clarance Ford was our leader.

What I'm asking is for bodies to go to some lunch counters in downtown Tampa and simply sit there and order a soda or a coffee.

We just decided we're going to stop it.

We're going to cut it.

We're going to change it.

Now they're not going to serve you.

They're going to tell you to leave, and they're going to threaten to call the police.

We were given instructions.

We were not to be violent.

You've got to put up with Dr.

King calls nonviolent resistance.

If they say something to you, just get up and turn and walk away.

If they call you names, you don't call back.

If they hit you, you don't hit back.

And if that's too hard for you, don't come along.

We're not going to give him a reason to lock us up.

That's what they're hoping for, that we'll get violent.

His motivation was contagious.

We are going to be treated like human beings when we want to eat and drink.

We were fortunate in Tampa that at that time in 1960, we not only had the state president of NAACP, we had the state field secretary, Bob Saunders.

After Harry Timor, the head of the NAACP here in Florida, was murdered, they needed to find a new person to run the state chapter.

It took a man with guts to to take that position.

And that was Robert Saunders.

[music] The youth council consulted with Bob Saunders, Reverend Lowery and Francisco Rodriguez about the legalities and so forth.

Francisco Rodriguez was an extraordinary lawyer.

[music] My father started the first black law firm in Tampa.

He was the legal counsel for the NAACP.

He was always the guy that they were calling to help bail people out to, you know, go to court.

I don't know if there's anything you could name at that time that he wasn't involved in.

[music] My brothers and sisters was all afraid.

They didn't know what would happen to me if I would get shot or whatever, and tried to stop me from doing it, but I just told them that it's just something I had to do, and I had to take those chances, and that's what I did.

[applause] [music] I just woke up that day ready, ready to go.

I do remember going up our assembly point at St.

Paul Church.

[music] This is St.

Paul A.M.E.

Church, and this is where the 40 students from Middleton and Blake met prior to our marching to the Woolworth's.

[music] Civil rights meetings have been held there for decades.

Thurgood Marshall had been there before Rosa Parks.

[music] You know, this was the basis of all good things in the black community.

This is where we met.

This is where plans were made to come together.

Everything started in our churches.

[music] Well, the students met there, they prayed.

Most of us were concerned about someone perhaps spitting in our face, pushing us.

And Dr.

Lowery always said to us, this will be worth your while.

Now you do that job well, and 50 years from now you'll still be basking in his mighty blessing.

[music] That was a very difficult thing to do for young high school students.

[music] So the students walked into Woolworth's and sat down at the lunch counter.

[music] As we began to take the seats.

The other people that were there, they, you know, they removed themselves.

And then that's when the crowds came behind us.

[music] And of course, we were told, you know, we're not serving you.

You cannot eat here.

We don't serve Negroes.

[music] But we sat there.

[music] The young lady that was behind the counter, they said, we sorry, we just work here and we can't serve you.

And if we try to serve you, we gonna get fired.

[music] And I remember there was a little short white man.

He had, like, a black jack in his hand, and he was going like this.

[music] I said, oh my God.

[music] The mayor talked with Police Chief Neal Brown, and for the first time, the police actually go and stand around the interior of of Woolworths.

Sounds like you're defending him.

I'm defending my city.

My grandfather had a group of police officers to make sure that nothing was happening or no protesting was happening.

[music] They stood around us to make sure no one got close to us.

When other cities, they took it upon themselves to go against the demonstrators, but that was totally different here in Tampa.

[music] Although one of the men who didn't want to see these black students sitting at the lunch counter spat on Clarence Ford.

[music] Yeah, we expected it.

We looked we looked for it to happen.

And but what they would do was that they would turn the lights out and they would put the signs up.

The lunch counter is closed.

No more service for anybody.

We would leave.

We would leave and we would come back.

They put him up again, back and forth.

Yeah.

[music] [music] I was looking at them and my other friends were down there talking.

I was just looking out at the door.

[music] That's me right there.

[music] I've learned in life, you can only take one moment at a time and appreciate the moment for whatever it is at that moment.

So I'm glad for that space and time that it did happen, and I was a part of it there.

[music] My grandfather reached out to the editor of the Tampa Tribune, to the local radio, and told them not to write any stories.

The idea was to get this under the radar as much as possible.

If people read about it the next day in the newspaper, that's better than people reading about it the day before it happened.

So in order to avoid unseemly incidents and violence.

It really made a lot of sense, and it worked.

Everybody came together and the media side of things and said, yeah, we support this and we support you and we won't put a date and a time of when the citizens are going to happen.

Why are you causing all this ruckus?

Don't you know when you're not wanted?

[music] The students came back again and again and again, but our activities were cut short because of the movement among the political leaders to sit down at the table and work things out.

The biracial committee got together, and they decided that they would ask for a moratorium, assuring the students that they would work toward getting the lunch counters desegregated.

[music] They made sure that I was included.

I got calls all the time telling me what was happening, what was going on.

Most of these lunch counters were national, so you had to get the national executives on board.

But the national executives always deferred to local race practices, and they wanted to be assured that the white people in those communities would accept it.

There was some visible backlash here in Tampa that didn't happen so much at the sites of the sit ins as much as it did, you know, elsewhere.

Come hear my sermon this Sunday morning, and I will explain to them in no uncertain terms why this.

Two weeks after the sit in Reverend Lowry's house with his wife inside, it was shot at.

[music] It made him more determined.

I still have a job to do.

That was his response.

They had to threaten me and I had to continue my role with the sit ins.

[music] The national people were under great pressure.

There were boycotts and picketing of Woolworths throughout the North.

[music] They brought the Merchants Association to meet with the department store managers and the biracial committee, and they negotiated.

And they brought in every owner of every store that sold food to its patrons and negotiated a settlement of this matter so that they all would simultaneously open its counters to all of the people in the community.

And it was masterful because they brought in everybody, so nobody would be in an economic disadvantage.

[music] Trying to negotiate.

It still took weeks and weeks and weeks.

I know better than that.

You show these bigots we could just be easily bought by empty promises.

They'll never give us our justice.

[music] Some of the students were getting restless, but they said, look, we're working on it.

You got to have faith that we will do the right thing.

As these weeks have passed, I've been reminded of something a great philosopher said long ago.

[music] He said, you can't be a righteous person if you live in an unrighteous society.

I knew Cody Fowler was a fighter for righteousness.

He believed lawyers didn't just represent their clients.

They went out and saw problems and brought people together in the community.

To have them see our point of view.

Gave you a feeling of, oh, there there could be resolution coming about.

And they assured me that all we had to do was just give them a little more time and they would work it out.

Negotiations started in March and then September 18th.

It was actually the first day of integrated dining.

[music] They came up with a strategy of eating at the least busy times at these lunch counters, and send two people at a time so that people weren't going alone and could watch each other's back.

But the idea also was that all the managers of all these stores and the lunch counter managers all knew what was going to happen.

They were already clued in.

And so things went smoothly because everyone sort of knew the part that they that they were playing.

[music] When lunch got integrated.

Man, we was overjoyed, man, when we first got started.

A lot of them would get up and leave, and then more and more started sitting down around us, eating around us at the time.

But that really when it really hit that, you know, it really was happening.

My father then took me to we would have breakfast there sometimes, and we were pleased that now we are getting the same privileges that others had.

It was nice because all you want to do is get you a meal like a normal person.

You remember what you ordered for lunch that day?

Probably ordered a hamburger.

That's about it.

[music] What I've experienced as a person of color, it's just not something that I can quantify next to what these people went through.

But it's there and it's real and it's still happening.

And we have the obligation to get stories like this out.

Because that's what a righteous soul does.

[music] Hey there.

Long time no see.

I know you've been busy.

Yes, ma'am.

I made some coffee.

You want some.

Coffee?

I would love some.

Clay.

You remember when we first met?

Of course I do.

I called you, I got your information, and I said I would love to meet you and have some time with you.

And you said Barnes and Noble.

[laughter] [music] We walked around.

We sat down on the floor.

You brought your your cassette player, your old school cassette player, and you let me listen to a sermon of the Reverend's, and I recorded it on my phone.

Right.

And then we talked.

And then you started bringing out Reverend's clothes.

We did a whole.

And I was like, can you wear this?

Right.

I wear a lot of his actual clothes on stage.

But I will fight on through until this thing is accomplished.

I did give him quite a few of Reverend's blazers.

His ties.

It's really a blessing that I get to have those details to walk on stage with me.

[music] Back then, people were working together.

So Reverend would say, unite, we make a difference by doing the right thing and keep doing it and keep doing it.

It won't happen right away, but if you're consistent, there will be a change.

[music] You hear what's happening in Greensboro?

Well, that's what's coming, so y'all better get used to it.

Just going in and knowing that this character is not fearful.

I had took that inspiration for sure from Miss Arthenia Joyner.

[music] [music] I see you.

Dude you look so beautiful as always.

Thank you.

It's so good seeing you.

What are we have here?

Just some pictures from the past.

This was 1969, when I was legislative aide.

Good times in Tallahassee.

[music] I came home and started practicing law.

And here, here I am in the law office.

That's when I was secretary and lawyer.

[music] It was so important to me that I continued the fight for equality.

I went to my first meeting of the Florida black lawyers, and it was a fraternity, Lambda Epsilon Chi, and I was the first woman to come.

And I said, okay, boys, I'm here.

Now we have to change the name.

And that's when it became the Florida chapter of the National Bar Association.

Did you ever get discouraged at any point?

No, because you have to persevere.

You have to persist.

You can't just stop when things don't go your way.

You continue and continue and continue to fight.

If you want to make change, you can't give up.

[music] The reverend says, we gotta love'm.

In Montgomery.

that's how they did it, and in Little Rock too.

I feel very grateful that I was brought on to to play Clarence.

I have to ask you to please.

What an honor to to play him.

[music] Hello.

Hello.

Welcome.

Come on in.

Good to see you.

Hi.

How are you?

All right.

Hey.

How are you doing, sir?

All right good to see you.

Good to see you as well.

Welcome, welcome.

Oh, man.

Which one is you?

Right here at the front.

Yeah, right.

That's me right here.

Um.

There was, uh, some protesters.

I'm sure that's what we were looking at.

At that time.

The kids didn't know what to expect, and they were depending on me, and I didn't either.

[music] So you gonna come on and have a seat?

All right.

Awesome.

[music] [laughter] Yeah.

Back in the day, man.

We want it to be the best we could be every day.

But, uh, we had to sit in the back of the bus, everything.

There was no sitting near the front.

And our children say, we can't believe y'all did that.

Why did y'all do that?

Why did y'all let him do you like that?

You know, they didn't understand, you know, history.

[music] A lot of good changes flowed from the sit in campaign initially.

Mayor Lane did integrate the state fair and city pools, for example.

We were able to go to the restaurants on Dale Mabry, the white movie theaters.

When you've been told all your life you're not good enough to come here, you can't wait to see what it looks like on the inside of these theaters and restaurants, and what the food tastes like.

[music] My grandfather, He always wanted to do the right thing and not just the easy thing.

And this was the right thing to do was to integrate Tampa.

And it did cost him his next election.

[music] Mayor Julian Lane and Governor Leroy Collins, who was very supportive of Mayor Lane's efforts.

Both of those leaders were not successful in further office because of their decision to champion the rights of minorities.

I believe very deeply that I represent every man, woman and child in this state as their governor.

Whether that person is black or white, whether that person is rich or poor, a governor, if he's worth his salt, has a deep responsibility for all of the people.

[music] Really, America owes those sorts of political leaders a great deal of thanks.

[music] During the presidential administration of Dwight Eisenhower.

He came up with a plan for interstate highways.

Those highways were not built through affluent white areas.

It tore Central Avenue apart.

[music] It was the end of Central Avenue as the Harlem of the South and all the magical things that it was.

[music] And then there's what happened in 1967, after Martin Chambers was shot and killed by a Tampa police officer.

[music] This is just the straw that broke the camel's back.

A young man by the name of Martin Chambers was being chased by the police and was ultimately shot in the back.

There was a big riot that began in the Central Avenue area.

And it was terrifying because that had not happened in Tampa previously.

There was certainly a lot of riot police out at first, but what happened after was the idea of the white hats.

James Hammond was an important figure here.

Jim Hammond had the idea that if young black men in that community, if they could play a role in calming down the riots, that would be more effective than, you know, police coming into the community, because that wasn't that was just going to keep things stirred up.

[music] My dad, Bob Thomas, was part of that biracial committee.

He was going to go and meet with a bunch of those folks and give these hard hats.

They agreed to wear them, and they said, you're going to be the peacemakers.

And within a day, most of the violence came to an end.

That was a very different thing than that was happening elsewhere in the country at the time.

So it was known as the, "Tampa Technique."

The Tampa technique that became a useful expression was meant that black and white leaders would come together to promote a rational solution to the most difficult problems.

Retroactively, we call it the sit ins, the Tampa Technique.

[music] The 1960s sit ins, as successful as they may have been, was just the beginning.

[music] [applause] I have a dream today.

[applause] [music] Across the civil rights movement, you have the best stories of American style leadership that you're going to find.

[music] If you're driven by a desire to make a change, a fundamental change, then you you go for it.

Public history has come a long way in the city of Tampa.

The things that we decide to remember, things that we decide to honor are really important.

[music] [laughter] [music] Welcome to this wonderful historic occasion.

This is a signal honor for this community, for the mayor and the county to acknowledge that the work that was done by the courageous 40.

And that's what I've named us.

It's being recognized today because so many in our community are unaware of what took place in downtown Tampa, right at this very site at this point in history.

We had a group of young students armed only with courage and conviction and changed our city forever.

That is a story that we should never, ever forget.

[applause] As mayor of the greatest city in the world, do hereby proclaim March 1st, 2025 as Woolworth's sit in anniversary day.

God bless you all.

[applause] [music] It was a long time coming, but it was worth waiting for.

I guess I like that soda now.

Coming up.

And congratulations.

[music] What are the qualities of the story?

Is that it is regular people doing irregular things.

Regular people doing heroic things.

[music] Leaders need sacrifice.

Students made sacrifice, and there's no regret.

[music] I believe if we don't visit history, if we don't talk about the past, if we don't see how we progress, then we really do run the chance of repeating.

[music] There's a lack of that connection between young people and the next generation.

It's being aware of your history.

[music] This is the place to honor a moment in time, so that people who watch it can make their own decisions, and they can take this story and walk their own path with it.

[music] It's particularly important right now that our students and generations to come know this story, to remind them of the best of who we are.

[music] The more you get, I just think it's so much easier to forget where you came from to get there in the first place.

And if we aren't telling those stories like we are right now, our generation will lose that.

And if they lose that, they're lost.

[music] We're going to come back.

Day after day.

To tell this story to the young people is so important.

They need to know their history.

They need to know what happened 65 years ago to understand what we are moving into right now.

No justice, no peace.

We're having a larger discussion here about how we should talk about race in this country.

DEI has become a political lightning rod.

People in our contemporary world who want to silence all of that say that is divisive.

If we learn about the civil rights years, it's divisive, and we know that that's not the case.

[music] Black History is not just black history.

It's US history.

You have to preserve African American history as part of the essential history of the United States.

The good, the bad, the ugly, the pretty.

That's what history is.

[music] We've got a long way to go.

A lot of struggles ahead of us, but ultimately we cannot lose our faith.

[music] Education is the key now.

That's the only way.

[music] Students working across racial lines, building powerful coalitions and looking to their own future, they can take matters into their own hands.

[music] You got to keep learning.

Keep moving forward, not backwards.

That's our motto.

Backwards.

Never forward.

Ever.

[music] I want these young people to know and understand, and to be inspired to stand up and fight for what is right, good, and just.

[music] To know that I I had been involved to change things in Tampa.

[music] Yes, sir.

It's a good feeling.

Oh my gosh.

[music] The lunch counter was over there and that's where we sat.

Oh, boy.

[music] I work with not in vain.

That's right.

[music] You can sit back and do nothing, or you can stand up or sit in.

Speak up, speak out.

[music] The question is, what will remain if we sit back and do nothing?

[music] And the challenge is ours.

[music] ♪ I see blue skies and level planes ♪ ♪ Green meadows are wet from the rain ♪ ♪ I see winding from one place to another ♪ ♪ Mankind is helping his brother ♪ ♪ I see it, I see it, I see it, I see it, I see it, ♪ ♪ I see it today ♪ ♪ Places where men sit down to meet ♪ ♪ Instead of confronting a right torn streets ♪ ♪ People living side by side ♪ ♪ A nation repairing its damaged, damaged pride ♪ ♪ Damaged pride ♪ [music] ♪ I see bells ringing ♪ ♪ I'm sure to sure as soon as you with the rich ♪ ♪ And the poor can't spare ♪ ♪ That will cease to be a meaningless thing ♪ ♪ Called poverty ♪ ♪ A name together for common equality ♪ ♪ From pole to pole for the nation's poor ♪ ♪ The will is spreading from door to door ♪ ♪ I see it, I see it.

♪