On December 29, 1966, Joe Waller — the young St. Petersburg organizer who would become Omali Yeshitela — led marchers into City Hall and tore down a mural that had hung there for decades depicting Black musicians with grotesque minstrel faces entertaining white beachgoers. Charged with grand larceny and riot for removing the city's official racism from its wall, he was sentenced to five years, served over two and a half, and emerged stripped of civil rights he would not recover for years.
The mural action — commemorated today in the very city that jailed him — is the Uhuru Movement's founding legend: the lesson, as Yeshitela taught it, that even the mildest assault on the symbols of white power would be answered with prison, and that the movement must therefore build its own institutions.