When Joe Waller left high school to join the Army in 1958, he had high hopes that by leaving St. Petersburg he could escape racism. Instead, he discovered the depth of discrimination. He wore the Army uniform, yet a white commissary clerk tried to have him reprimanded because his black hand touched hers when they exchanged money. He defended Florida during the Cuban missile crisis but was not trusted with ammunition. Only white soldiers got bullets. "I came back to St. Petersburg," he said, "filled with rage." In 1966, three years after he left the Army, the rage led Waller to charge the steps of City Hall, tear down a large painting despised by black residents and drag it through the streets before he was arrested. The rage led him to figure prominently in the civil-rights history of this city, leading demonstrations, forming militant protest groups, refusing to move toward the mainstream as many contemporaries did with age. Today, his rage remains unabated. Waller, who goes by Omali Yeshitela now, stepped forward after a white police officer shot and killed TyRon Lewis on Oct. 24, leading protests that attracted national attention. Yeshitela leads the group that held a tribunal, declared the officer a murderer and called on the state to put him to death in the electric chair. Some pointed to the rhetoric as proof Yeshitela is a throwback to the 1960s, someone whose actions are destructive and counterproductive. Others believe Yeshitela's willingness to act and speak against injustice brings needed attention to issues. "In 1996, as in 1966, Joe Waller focused attention on the oppression of blacks in St. Petersburg," said Marvin Davies, who will join others tonight to honor Yeshitela in a gala at Bethel Community Baptist Church. "Without the consciousness, compassion, dedication and leadership style of Joe Waller, conditions for blacks in St. Petersburg would have remained unchanged," he said. At 55, Yeshitela has mellowed somewhat from the post-Army days. He fights for the poor and dispossessed but goes home at night to a neatly landscaped three-bedroom house in the so-called Pink Streets of suburban St. Petersburg. For all his fiery words in public, he is described as being in private a quiet and unassuming man who is, as one neighbor said, "absolutely delightful." A young revolutionary Waller recalls sitting on the front porch of his St. Petersburg house as a toddler listening to his grandmother read him Bible stories about God calling Samson and Joseph to become leaders. His grandmother listened to his dreams of a big house and a big car. She would reply, "Wouldn't it be better for you to make those things happen for everybody?" Leonard Waller recalls being confused by his brother Joe, the oldest of seven siblings. The two would be in the car, and Leonard would mention a beautiful sunset or an interesting tree. "He'd say we're not allowed to enjoy that. They're not for us. "I was an artist ever since I was in first grade, and I think he was a revolutionary ever since he was in first grade." His grandmother's message blended with what Waller saw around him. He read newspapers and listened to his parents and neighbors talk about lynchings, unjust arrests, discrimination. As many African-American mothers did at the time, Waller's mother threatened him with the image of the Ku Klux Klan. Afraid insolence would get him in trouble, she would say, "I'm going to beat it out of you before the white man does." As for his father, a railroad worker, Waller said he was a very gentle man. "But I didn't understand my father. I thought he was too accommodating to white people." Second-class citizen By high school, Waller already was objecting to being treated differently because of his color. At the snack bar of a Central Avenue department store, black residents were allowed to order but not sit down. "I would just go on my own and I would sit and order and they would come out and threaten me and I would leave." He quit high school as a senior and joined the Army to "go out and seek this greater world in which I can make it and won't be held back." The civil-rights legislation banning discrimination based on race was still six years away. His hopes began to fade the first day. A fellow inductee on the train to Jacksonville turned to Waller and said, "I hate to see that." "What?" Waller asked. "A n----- sitting next to a white woman." The next five years convinced him he was considered a second-class citizen. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, Waller's unit was sent to Patrick Air Force Base near Melbourne. His convoy stopped in Palatka for a meal. "We walk into this restaurant in our G.I. outfits. We were going to save Florida from the dirty Russians and Cubans, right?" he recalls. "When we got in there, they said, "We don't serve n-----s.' " Back in Georgia, a superior questioned Waller about a complaint filed by a white clerk. The woman made it a point to avoid contact when she exchanged money with black soldiers; Waller made sure their hands touched. Waller said the conversation ended when he said he didn't like white women because they looked "like the underbellies of fish and frogs." About the same time, Waller's superiors sent him to a psychiatrist for writing political tracts and posting them around the base. The psychiatrist eventually told him, "There's nothing wrong with you. You're just a Garveyite!" "I didn't even know what a Garveyite was. The success of this country is such that they remove the history of our people." In the early 1920s, Marcus Garvey led a "back-to-Africa" movement that Waller later emulated, preaching that blacks had to leave mostly white countries because they would never find justice in them. Waller wrote a 12-page letter to President John F. Kennedy, demanding he be let out of the Army because he didn't want to defend an unjust country. The Army eventually gave him an honorable discharge in 1963; he returned to St. Petersburg, discouraged and disillusioned. Trying for normal life Leonard Waller said the military crystallized his brother's anger. When he came home, even family members had difficulty talking to Joe. "It made him realize it could be so much different in other countries than it was here," Leonard Waller said. Waller, trying to create a normal life for himself, got a job as a copy clerk at the St. Petersburg Times. Then, as Waller was walking home from the Times one morning at 2 a.m., police stopped him, took him to jail and charged him with vagrancy. The charge was dropped the next morning, and a judge later declared the arrest unlawful. The event had an impact. But, as Waller noted in a 1969 column he wrote for the Times, it was just one more incident in 22 years of learning the difference between black and white. "It's not just a matter of one big eye-opening experience, for blacks anyway," he wrote. In 1965, Waller went to Los Angeles, planning to attend college, when the Watts riots erupted. Though the violence horrified many, Waller was struck by the power and cooperation of the rioters. "I had never seen anything like that in my life," he said. "For just a brief moment, the African people had a real democratic situation going there." A year later, in 1966, Waller burst into St. Petersburg's consciousness. He wrote then-Mayor Herman Goldner, asking that an offensive painting be removed from City Hall. Goldner wrote back, saying minorities needed to become less sensitive about the painting, which depicted big-lipped black minstrels playing for white picnickers at Pass-a-Grille Beach. Waller and others had considered quietly removing the painting while disguised as city workers, but then, during a protest, an elderly woman began to speak. Her diction was poor, and she used poor grammar. White people, including journalists and police officers, laughed. "I lost my cool," Waller said. He marched up the steps of City Hall. Four others followed. He ripped the 8- by 12-foot canvas off the wall. The group dragged it through town, ignoring police demands to stop, before they were arrested. The mural incident elevated Waller to hero status in the black community. He earned the reputation he still has today for having courage others lack. The Rev. Don Gaskin recalls being disturbed by the painting even as a child when he accompanied his mother to City Hall to pay the water bill. "The thing was, Joe had the courage to do something about it," said Gaskin, pastor of the New Philadelphia Community Church. "It was a huge step for him to take during those times." Waller was given a six-month sentence in municipal court because of his actions and was sentenced again to three years in prison on additional charges brought by the state attorney. He appealed; the case dragged for seven years. The U.S. Supreme Court heard the case and issued a ruling that refined the Constitutional ban against trying someone twice for the same crime. By then, though, Waller had spent two years in prison. Pushing the envelope The civil-rights movement was in full swing and Waller dove in, leading protests, speaking and always pushing the envelope a little more than his fellow protesters. Sam Adams, a former Times reporter whose coverage later put him at odds with Waller, remembers Waller's role in the 116-day sanitation strike of 1968, the city's first major civil disorder. During daily marches to City Hall, other protesters seemed willing to march along the route suggested by police. Waller "would try to get supporters to deviate from that route in order to send a message that we were seeking empowerment," Adams said. Waller led students protesting the closing of all-black Gibbs Junior College, which came after Adams exposed mishandling of funds at the school. He was active in the Student Nonviolent Organizing Committee. Then in 1968, he formed the first of several organizations he would lead _ JOMO, the Junta for Militant Organizations, which figured prominently in numerous protests and confrontations through the late 1960s and early 1970s. His protests led to arrests, one in Gainesville in 1968 for "inciting to riot" during a protest after Martin Luther King's assassination, another in St. Petersburg for "verbal abuse of police" after he yelled, "Pig, pig, you pig" during a demonstration. "I was in and out of jail so often that sometimes I had to read the newspaper to find out where I was," he joked during a recent interview on WMNF radio. In 1969, he started the Burning Spear, a newspaper still publishing today, that espouses socialist ideals and keeps Waller's followers updated on protests and perceived injustices. By the late 1960s, Waller was developing a separatist philosophy that maintains that blacks cannot obtain justice without a separate economic and social order. An example of the thinking is turning black ghettos into "micro-nations" with their own government. Waller's work in the 1960s earned him a reputation, one that remains today. "I used to hear people on the street, when they felt they had been wronged in some way, say, "I'm going to go tell Joe Waller. I'll get Joe Waller,' " said Waller's brother Leonard. Problems at home Waller's private life has been nearly as tumultuous as his public life. His first wife, Ruth Ann Munnerlyn, divorced him in 1969 on grounds of extreme cruelty. They had three daughters. Waller explained the cruelty charge. His first family "suffered the most incredible kinds of poverty because of choices I made," he said. "Most of my life I have purposely and consciously never owned anything." Waller recalls picking up food and clothing for black residents and driving by his own house, where his children were hungry and without decent clothes. "I have had serious problems with my own children who grew up not understanding any of that, why their father was so poor and their father was always in jail," he said. In October 1969, a judge finalizing Waller's divorce ordered him to get a regular job so he could pay child support. He also chided Waller for applying to remarry before his divorce became final. Just two days earlier, the Times had carried the news that "St. Petersburg's most vocal black militant" had applied to marry Linda Leaks. Leaks and Waller soon opened the Ujamaa Restaurant to raise money for JOMO. It was the first of several businesses Waller helped start to help his socialist organizations become self-sufficient. Leaks and Waller, who had no children, divorced in 1989 but they had separated long before. Waller fathered two sons in 1980 and 1984 with his current wife, whom he married after he divorced Leaks. In part because of what happened with his first family, Waller for the first time tried to create a steady life for his current wife and two sons. He lives in a three-bedroom house in the city's Pink Streets that he bought in July 1994 for $90,000. His third wife was involved during the 1980s in his organizations. Then, she used the name Ironiff Ifoma. Now, she goes by Harriet Waller; she is a social-studies teacher at Pinellas Park Middle School. "My concern at my age . . .," he said, "is that should anything happen to me, my children should not be homeless." Omali is born As the civil-rights protests of the 1960s waned, many of Waller's contemporaries moved toward more mainstream methods of seeking change. At one point, Waller gave that a try, running for mayor of St. Petersburg in 1973, calling for improved health services for the black community, job development and mass transportation. He lost and quickly returned to familiar ways. That same year, he formed the African People's Socialist Party, an attempt to give his views a political voice. He spent eight years "living out of a red Samsonite bag," traveling the country to build the party nationally. In 1978, he moved to California, settling in Oakland, where he stayed until he returned to St. Petersburg about three years ago. In Oakland, the African People's Socialist Party protested at City Council meetings and staged public demonstrations. They called for neighborhood control of rent, protested interracial adoptions and clashed with police. There, and elsewhere, the group regularly protests police shootings. "We don't get along with them at all. They don't get along with us," Officer Ron Payne of the Oakland Police Department said recently. "Every time we have a questionable shooting, they're always having F--- the Pigs days in the parks." Waller gradually started using the name Omali Yeshitela, although he has never changed his name legally. He was given the name in the late 1960s by an African man. Omali means "son who returns." Yeshitela is "shelter for 1,000 people." In 1991, he formed the National People's Democratic Uhuru Movement that gained notoriety after the recent violence in St. Petersburg. Waller said he saw the need for a movement to fight for basic civil rights, which increasingly are violated by police in African-American communities. The recent protests over the TyRon Lewis shooting are typical of the group's actions in recent years, mainly in Philadelphia, Chicago and Oakland. Their rhetoric is radical and inflammatory. But not, Yeshitela insists, in the way most people think. His group doesn't directly call for violence but raises the consciousness of the community, he says, which then reacts to unjust actions, such as the tear-gassing of the Uhuru headquarters and gym on Nov. 13, which Yeshitela blames for the violence. "We accept blame in the sense that we have a community that is increasingly conscious and unwilling to accept that (TyRon's) death as if it were nothing," he said. But neither does he deplore the violence. The arson, looting, rock throwing and gunplay brought the city an onslaught of attention reaching as far as the White House. The attention, and the millions of dollars in aid it brought, never would have come without the disturbances, he said. "There was no legitimacy given to anything coming out of this community," Yeshitela said. "Now they have to deal with some of the issues out in the community. People are talking about the police department _ finally." A larger stage Yeshitela's office on the second floor of the Uhuru gym at 1245 18th Ave. S is lined with books _ on black history, socialism, revolution. One shelf contains a set of writings by Vladimir Lenin. On the wall hangs a framed, yellowing poster of Lenin in a dramatic pose with an exhortation in Slavic lettering below. On the right of his desk is a small, yellow square of paper imprinted with: "F--- the Pigs." Since he returned here, Yeshitela has been involved with the activities of the local Uhuru group. As in other cities, the group protests what it calls a police war on the African-American community. It runs cultural education classes for black residents, is developing a food cooperative and a school. Yeshitela, though, also plays his role on a larger stage. He travels frequently, both nationally and internationally, and sees himself embroiled in a long-term struggle to build an international revolution that will come only when worldwide conditions are right. "We're talking about making a revolution, not a war," he wrote in a recent issue of the Burning Spear. "A war is a contest between two armies. A revolution is a contest between two social systems." His ideology is separatist: Africa should become a free, socialist homeland for blacks. It is not anti-white as much as it is anti-wealth; an ideology that sees a world of rich oppressors who live off the labor of the poor oppressed. "We don't think that people are a certain way because of their race," he said. "Nobody ought to want a world in which just a handful of people have every g-- d--- thing and the vast majority of the people on this planet have nothing." The rage is still there. _ Times researchers Kitty Bennett, Carolyn Hardnett and John Martin contributed to this report, which used information from Times files.