Standing in the light, even near the end

MELONE E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published February 19, 2002

The old man looks small in his wheelchair, certainly too small for an icon. A tiny plastic tube rises out of a black bag beside him and runs into his arm, through his chest and sends medicine, drop by drop, to his heart.

His voice is soft and hoarse. When he talks, he often looks somewhere else, as if at a dot in distant space only he can see.

Bob Gilder's body is betraying him not by inches but by yards. Gilder, 72, has been in the hospital four times in the last five months. He has suffered two heart attacks and one stroke, and has had a pacemaker implanted in his chest.

He pulls open his shirt to reveal the big dark scar where the surgeons cut. He reminds me of a fighter who has finally taken too many hits in the ring.

Gilder certainly knows about fighting, a particular breed of it. He was at the lunch counters and in the schools in the '60s and early '70s, demanding Tampa desegregate. For years he was the president of Tampa's NAACP, and the man most associated with civil rights issues in the bay area.

For the last 10 years Gilder worked in St. Petersburg city government. In public, he ran a housing improvement program for the mostly black neighborhoods south of Central Avenue. In private, he advised mayors Dave Fischer and Rick Baker on the racial conflicts that simmer beneath the city's surface.

Now Gilder is at home in Tampa and it doesn't look as though he'll ever be back to work.

I asked him what I had to ask him. I asked him about dying.

He'd had his romantic notions. "I wanted to die for the (civil rights) movement. I thought if I died in a certain way it would help the cause for which I lived."

But he was in his 20s and 30s then. Except for those moments of melodramatic thinking, dying never occurred to him.

Now at 72, Gilder can see death coming. He prays to God to hold off. "I've got too much to do."

The latest project is an old-fashioned voter registration drive. Old-fashioned, I say, because registering black people to vote was one of the first things young civil rights workers did in the '60s. Gilder boasted that he's gotten 36,000 people registered to vote in the last decade alone.

You cannot find his likes easily among the ranks of those in Tampa Bay who call themselves civil rights leaders. He has too much a sense of proportion, of fairness. He knows how to take the long view. "Not everything black is right," he said, "and not everything white is wrong."

I asked him what he would do if he had 20 good years left in him. He talked about the need for better health care for the poor.

He talked about getting to the bottom of the Glazers' ousting Tony Dungy, one of the NFL's few black coaches.

And, given the chance, Gilder would fight Tampa General Hospital all over again for its decision to go from public to private.

If I were to visit him again today, I'm sure another project would be on his list. This is a man who has always wanted to be useful, to be an agent for change. Idleness does not suit him.

When it was time for me to leave, it was impossible for Gilder to shake hands. He had both hands tight on the arms of his wheelchair and he was rising up slowly, relying on the strength of his arms, to stand. He wanted a hug, and I gave him one.

I didn't think of the poem until I was out the door, nor how much it applies to this icon, Bob Gilder. "Do not go gentle into that good night," the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote. "Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

-- You can reach Mary Jo Melone at mjmelone@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3402.

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