Robert Brookins Gore

Day before yesterday I got a call that my friend Bob Gore had died. According to his friend Vernell Lillie of Pittsburgh, Bob probably died of malaria in The Gambia, a little republic inside the elbow of Africa. He told me once that he wanted to go home.

Bob Gore lit up the horizon of the civil rights movement, he was part preacher, part pistol, part organizer….. all brave and all eloquent. When it was over I lost track of him….it was the middle 70s…we were both broken refugees from the action….floundering, drinking too much. He married, unmarried and finally settled in Pittsburgh where he told stories to buses full of black children on their way to school.

I don’t believe there is enough English to properly compose a toast to this wonderful man.

On his way to Africa in 2002 he came through western Massachusetts and we had dinner.
During dinner, I gave him an old button I’d saved…the one that is half black and half white and said “Freedom Now, CORE.” He cried.