Ken Welch sat front and center, holding up his cell phone, recording Melrose Elementary School’s Black History Month celebration.
He took in every performance: 60 students singing, stepping, acting, rapping, dancing, telling the story of African-Americans from pre-colonial times to slavery, through the Civil Rights movement to the present day.
Welch represented the present. St. Petersburg’s first Black mayor returned to the same cafeteria he once sat in as a Kindergartner and member of Melrose’s last segregated class. Next to him sat an icon of the past: Leon Jackson, last surviving member of the Courageous 12, the group of Black police officers who sued to end racial discrimination in the St. Petersburg Police Department in 1965.
