Little boys running in the streets of West Tampa in the 1940s were supposed to be stopped by the first grown-up who could grab them. It didn't matter whether the grown-up was related. Every adult was a neighborhood parent - and every youngster was a neighborhood child.

During segregation, it was the same in the other black enclaves across town - east Tampa and the Central Avenue area east of downtown.

``Our community was indeed a village,'' Smith says. Children shared the streets with doctors, lawyers, teachers and tradesmen.

Latinos had their own tightly knit communities in Ybor City and West Tampa. Although not separated from whites by law, as blacks were, they were not welcomed into white society. So they created their own worlds, including theaters and dance clubs, cooperative markets and health clinics.

Smith left town as a boy to live with relatives in Georgia. But his parents remained, in the home Smith's stepfather bought with money he earned as a longshoreman. It was the home Smith, now 70, chose to come back to when he retired recently from a career in education.

Gone were the laws that once barred him merely from walking across the lawn of the University of Tampa.

But gone, too, was the family feeling of his old neighborhood.

The returning Smith found a community struggling. Many were working to pull it back together, but still it was perforated with the despair of people blind to their choices.

It was part of an urban core slashed by an interstate highway, its neighborhoods weakened by destructive ``urban renewal`` projects, and by desegregation, which encouraged many of the best educated of the minorities to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Looking past Tampa to the suburbs, Smith sees that the area offers blacks more than in the past. But he also senses a bitterness - a nagging feeling that progress cost minorities their enclaves while failing to close the gaps left by decades of discrimination.

It's the police officer eyeing the black man driving a Lexus and the security guard following black and Latino teens through the department store. It's the assumption that affirmative action, not ability, gets the minority the top job.

It's the slur, the slight, the subtle insult.

And it's the way we still separate ourselves in Tampa.

We may share office space and sit side-by-side at softball games. But most of us still live in different worlds, worship in different churches, dance in different clubs.

Numbers give the chasm form and dimension. Black and Latino people are twice as likely as whites to be denied a home mortgage. A handful of minority professionals lunch daily with the executives who decide the city's future.

Blacks and Latinos, however, face different obstacles. Blacks are twice as likely as Latinos to live in poverty.

Blacks here were treated differently from the start, when Tampa's leaders reinforced laws segregating dark-skinned from light-skinned Cubans. Decades later, in 1967, a federal commission reported that Tampa's blacks had ``no one of their own race to represent them in positions of policy or power.''

It took 16 more years for a black to be elected to the city council; 18 for a black to be elected to the county commission; 26 before the city hired a black police chief.

Tensions continued through the years, including the evidence of racism in the women's basketball program at the University of South Florida in 1999.

``Our leaders say we could become a community known for its diversity and culture,'' says James Ransom, a prominent black who has helped negotiate solutions to several racial conflicts in Tampa. ``We're making progress, but we have a long way to go.''

Consider the recent evidence of a gap in test scores between black and white students and research tying it to teachers' attitudes. A sample of those attitudes appeared in a letter a Hillsborough County teacher wrote in June to the Tribune.

Although people worry about the gap, the teacher wrote, they don't acknowledge the ``well-known genetic and environmental factors'' behind it.

Tampa's Latinos also have heard the insults and faced the closed doors of discrimination. In the early 1900s, they were the most frequent targets of lynching parties bent on stopping the cigarworkers from unionizing.

But as Tampa grew, the descendants of the immigrants blended into the life of the expanding city.

Today, Latinos pour into Tampa from across South and Central America. And new problems are emerging.

In the classrooms, children who speak no English struggle to grasp the ideas of Thomas Jefferson from English-language texts and teachers who speak no Spanish.

Their parents, many of whom were professionals in their native countries, often end up in menial jobs with long hours and low pay.

``The Latinos don't band together to help each other like the Cubans did 100 years ago,'' says Christian Leon, born in Tampa to Colombian parents. He's working to organize a festival celebrating Caribbean and Latin American arts. He hopes that over time, it will create a focal point for these people from different cultures, different economic classes.

As previous stories in this series have shown, we are disconnected here in many ways, separated by geography and constant change. In our division, we have failed to see the strength of our diversity.

The loser, Leon says, is Tampa.

The new immigrants and their children bring hope and energy, and they could help build a thriving, multicultural city, he says.

So could the blacks, so many of whom dream of closing the white-black student gap or owning a home or rising to the top of their professions.

Many are fighting battles along these divides - including Walter Smith, who became president of Florida A&M University and will never forget being toted back to the Italian produce man 60 years ago to return that apple.

Here are their stories.