Over Coffee
Summerfield Woman Holds Government Accountable
By Penny Fletcher penny@observernews.net
May 22, 2008 - 6:06:13 PM

I was supposed to meet Michelle Williams for lunch (and coffee, of course!) at Doc’s Grill in Summerfield last week but when we set the day and time I didn’t know the restaurant  had been reserved for the monthly meeting of the Apollo Beach Woman’s Club and would be closed to the public. Next time I’ll check.

Since neither of us lives more than two miles from the restaurant, we quickly adjourned to Michelle’s home. We both knew our meeting was about much more than coffee or lunch.

When I first got the e-mail from Michelle, I didn’t realize we were neighbors. But I immediately respected her for her community involvement; something with which I have a long history myself.

Her first mail to news media was sent a few days before she was due to read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Tampa as a response to recent acts the activist- and many others- considered acts of racism.

“I am prepared to go to jail over what I believe,” Michelle had told me in her first e-mail.

As it turned out, the 400-plus people (of all races) who showed up to listen to her speak May 11 were calmed, not incited, by the speech- much as the group in Washington D.C. was when it was first delivered in 1968.

I remembered first hearing that speech in its entirety on television news- sitting on my couch in a small apartment near Fort Campbell, Kentucky, while pregnant with my third child. Nowadays, an entire speech usually only gets a sound-bite, but I remember hearing Dr. King’s from start to finish while my first husband was fighting in the jungles of Vietnam.

Michelle’s reading of the speech – and her subsequent meetings with various organizations and officials in both Tampa city government and unincorporated Hillsborough County – came about because of the recent ousting of a group of women playing kickball in Tampa’s city parks.

Anywhere from 50 to 100 women, mostly mothers and their teenage daughters, from housing projects all over Tampa, play kickball together in different parks, Michelle told me. They’re not an organized league, and none of them ever really know how many will show up. Some of them wear T-shirts with the name of their housing project on the front and their last name on the back, she said.

City official’s first reaction was to ask the women to pay a $1,500 permit fee to play, like they would an organized league. Since they weren’t organized, just some women who decided they wanted to use a city park, they didn’t think they should have to pay.

“City parks are for just this type of thing,” Michelle said. “If everyone is charged, it’s different. But it was only this one group of women (being asked to pay).”  

Now when they met, Tampa police began making the women leave the various parks. Five different parks: all the same reaction.

One day, the women were even asked to turn their shirts inside out, so their names couldn’t be read.

Michelle, a Riverview resident, was not personally involved, but having grown up in Clair Mel and been involved in community causes all her life, the professional woman began taking time out of her busy days to call and e-mail officials and find out what was going on.

Michelle Williams

Some television news channels showed a fight breaking out while the reporter was talking about the women’s games but the women playing had nothing to do with the fight, Michelle said. “They can’t help who else is in the park. They’re there to play a game with their daughters.”

The more vocal Michelle got, the more officials she met with earning the respect of the Mayor’s African American Advisory Council and a local NAACP attorney, Curtis Stokes.

She’s also earned mine. You see, this isn’t just a “Black Race” problem, although the women involved happen to be black.

This is a problem of selective discrimination. And as of press time, several Tampa Police Department and mayoral appointees seemed ready to try and help Michelle resolve it.

I call it selective discrimination because I could not find any rules and regulations for groups under 199 people either online on the Tampa City Parks Department Web site, or on the telephone with officials. And by midweek, officials had agreed to allow the women to play.

I even called the Hillsborough County Parks, Recreation and Conservation Department and asked if there was a county rule about this type of thing. Could groups bring equipment and set up games, such as kickball and volleyball, in a public park? I named some, including E.G. Simmons Park in Ruskin and was told by a parks department manager, Kevin Church, that they could.

Michelle intends to keep following the women’s’ games.

“I won’t give up,” Michelle said the other day in her living room. “I had to stay after the county to mow grass near where my grandmother lives, but finally, it got done.” Her grandmother, you see, is blind, and high grass on the roadway near her house almost resulted in her being snake bit. What would have happened if Michelle had not seen the snakes (not once, but twice!) we can only guess.

In the past she also worked to get seniors’ programs and lunches in recreation centers near her grandmother’s home. “Other rec centers had them,” she said. “I found out they were budgeted for so I wanted to know why some centers got them and others didn’t.”

It’s usually the poorer communities where people are too busy scraping together a living to attend meetings that don’t get services, she said.

But with activists like Michelle, things will get done. I only hope there are enough people who can take time out of their day to write letters, send e-mails or gather signatures on petitions to hold officials accountable to the people who elected them.

Meanwhile, my hat’s off to Michelle for standing up for what she believes is right.

**Perhaps you have something you’d like to share. Or maybe you’d rather tell the community about your favorite charity or cause: or sound off about something you think needs change. That’s what “Over Coffee” is about. It really doesn’t matter whether we actually drink any coffee or not (although I probably will). It’s what you have to say that’s important. E-mail me any time and suggest a spot. No matter what’s going on, I’m usually available to share just one more cup.      



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