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Rousing Rabble, Seeking Justice, Blazing A Trail

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By TOM JACKSON

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 10, 2008

Community organizing is much on America's mind these days. One major party candidate for president cites the experience as a proper springboard to the White House. The other side suggests the nation would be better served by the elevation of candidates who have dealt in "actual responsibility."

Well. Voters have another 55 days in which to resolve that dispute, allowing us to sacrifice at least one reflecting on a life spent in the service of community organizing back before it became a profession. Back, indeed, when attempting to get communities organized could get you called rabble-rouser, communist, subversive, traitor and worse.

In Alabama, it could get you fire-hosed. In Mississippi, it could get you killed.

In Florida, where Charles Wolfgang Arnade spent most of the last two-thirds of his life pursuing intellectual honesty and even-handed justice, rousing on behalf of the suppressed rabble resulted in death threats from bigots and scorn from neighbors, but also gratitude and admiration.

His death in northern Virginia on Sunday at 81, barely 11 months after east Pasco County bade him and his civic-minded wife, Marjorie, an hors d'oeuvres-and-cake-fueled farewell, diminishes us all. (A November memorial service in San Antonio remains in the planning stages.) His passing emphasizes what was accomplished in, and by, his lifetime.

At the moment America became ripe for hauling from the cruel complacency of its Jim Crow apartheid, Charles Arnade grabbed the rope and heaved.

Shaped By Lessons Of Youth

Almost certainly, the horrors he witnessed as a boy at the dawn of World War II - the Rape of Nankingand Kristallnacht and the subsequent rounding up of Jews in Nazi Germany - informed his thoughts as an adult about the relationship between the recklessly powerful and the oppressed.

Seeing injustice and standing against it required a particular brand of courage, no less so because his heritage made him a member of the privileged class. Even as upheaval at home and Soviet expansionism made being a John Bircher a respectable political alternative, Arnade battled business as usual.

Having hopped with his father and family from country to country, one step ahead of war's nightmares, Arnade made it to the United States, from Germany and Switzerland via Bolivia, in time to earn, and lose, a scholarship to the University of Texas by welcoming Progressive Party presidential nominee Henry Wallace to his campus residence.

An Illuminating Irritant

As a professor at Florida State University, University of Florida and University of South Florida, Arnade left a trail of wincing administrators, giving comfort to a student arrested as part of a Montgomery, Ala.-style bus boycott; decrying an early 1960s state Senate hunt for communists in higher education; hosting the meetings of the Pasco chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and leading faculty opposition to USF's intercollegiate football start-up.

OK, so not all of his causes were noble. But they were heartfelt and consistent, each - even the misguided gridiron episode - energized by a pure desire to reward integrity, intellect and dignity.

He bequeaths a legacy that, although unique in its construction, summons all of us to bold mimicry.

Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.

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