Green Benches, Hidden Cruelty

In nineteen oh eight, a real estate agent named Noel Mitchell placed a few benches in front of his office on Central Avenue in St. Petersburg so that customers could rest after the long walk to his corner. The idea caught on. Other businesses placed their own benches. By nineteen seventeen, the city had passed an ordinance requiring that all of them be painted the same shade of hunter green.

The green benches became St. Petersburg's signature. They lined the sidewalks for blocks. They appeared on postcards, in national magazine advertisements, in promotional materials that sold the city as a warm, welcoming paradise where you could sit outside in January. For several decades St. Petersburg marketed itself as a destination for retirees, and the green bench was the image that defined it: a place to slow down, take the sun, watch the world pass.

What the postcards did not show was the rule.

Police in St. Petersburg enforced an unwritten custom: the green benches were for white residents and tourists. Black residents of the city were not permitted to sit on them. Not by posted sign. Not by formal ordinance that historians have located. By the presence of officers who removed anyone who tried, unless they were caring for a white child.

The bench sat there, painted green, an open invitation, and the invitation was not open to everyone.

The city removed the green benches in the nineteen sixties. The official reason was aesthetic: the benches had come to project an image of the elderly that the city's boosters found limiting. Civil rights pressure played a role that the historical record documents but does not fully credit.

A handful of green benches have been restored as decorative objects in modern St. Petersburg. They are pleasant to sit on now. They look exactly the same as they always did.