TAMPA - Bob Gilder spent a lifetime laying the bricks of democracy through countless voter education and registration drives.
Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Buddy Johnson will ask county commissioners to honor Gilder's legacy by naming the county's Elections Service Center after him.
"I have admired Bob Gilder's energy in the voting-rights arena for all of my adult life, albeit from a distance," Johnson said.
"I don't know of a person who was more energized about getting people registered to vote."
Gilder died Feb. 28 of heart failure after battling two heart attacks and a stroke. He was 72.
A former president of the Tampa NAACP, he was active in civil rights causes and was among those who participated in lunch counter sit-ins and pushed for school desegregation. In the years since those early 1960s protests, he helped build bridges between black and white, rich and poor, in St. Petersburg and in Tampa.
He served on an advisory committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and the Florida Commission on Human Rights.
As director and founder of the Tampa Bay Voter Coalition, Gilder was responsible for helping register thousands of people to vote, particularly African-Americans.
Although ailing, he assisted former Supervisor of Elections and current Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio in a voter education campaign when she installed new machines after the 2000 election debacle.
The Elections Service Center, a roughly 25,000-square-foot building, is located at 2514 N Falkenburg Road in eastern Hillsborough. It houses the county's elections equipment, including the 3,100 touch-screen voting machines purchased in 2002, and is where poll workers are recruited and trained.
"I think it's very nice of the community to feel like they want to do something like that," said Ellie Gilder, Gilder's widow. "And I think it's an appropriate building to be named after Bob, since he spent so much of his life working on voter registration and voter education."
