Get to Know
Henry B. Thomas (Photo by Joao Bicalho)
Name: Henry B. Thomas
Department: Political Science and Public Administration
Job: Associate professor, executive director of the Florida Center for Public and International Policy and president of the United Faculty of Florida
Years at UNF: 18. My good friend (Adam Herbert) became president in 1989. He had been my dean at FIU. I arrived in 1990.
Tell us about your family:
I met my wife, Kay, at a race riot! I was working as a community organizer at the FIGHT Organization in Rochester, N.Y. Kids in our youth group were being bussed to an outer-city school, where she was a teacher. One day FIGHT got a phone call from one of the kids in our youth group that blacks and whites were at war at the school. Kay was one of the few teachers of either race that played a constructive role in defusing the situation.
The principal of the school was quite literally hiding under the desk in his office in hopes that the violence would all go away. Kay and perhaps three other teachers began to pull the students into groups, what we would call today discussion circles, to frankly discuss the tensions in the school. FIGHT also got the school board involved and over time tensions began to recede.
During the course of all this, a series of meeting took place, and Kay and I became better acquainted. In addition to the issues at Kay's school, the school district was going through a number of issues regarding bussing to desegregate schools. Kay joined me in several marches against school board policy.
I was chief of staff at FIGHT so I was in the mist of a number of battles with local governments and firms in the region. Kay likes to remind me that I did not dress to impress - I did not look as though I had stepped from the pages of GQ. My standard attire was a pair of plaid (yellow and brown or black) pants and a very loud velour shirt. In one of my classes several years ago, one of my students found pictures of my FIGHT colleagues at Attica Prison at the time of the state assault on the prison.
I was very lucky to find someone willing to understand all the community control issues that vied for my attention. Kay was also the driving force that persuaded me to return to graduate school and get the doctorate. The day I met her was a very good day.
We have two children – Elizabeth and Brock. Elizabeth is a senior health policy advisor to Steny Hoyer, majority leader in the House of Representatives. Brock is a senior staff accountant at McBride Shopa & Company, P.A., located in Wilmington, Del.
If you could choose any other career, what would it be and why?
Well I am not at all sure. The fact is that only other career I considered was the ministry. While in seminary, I preached a sermon, in which I said that "today Jesus would be a black panther." It was a Jeremiah Wright moment, and the seminary transferred me to a suburban white church where, presumably, I would not corrupt inner-city youth.
What is your favorite thing about working at UNF?
Our greatest asset is smart and interesting people – faculty, students and staff. Getting to know them has been a gift. I have many, many friends here, but perhaps the person that best illustrated this was my friendship with Terry Bowen (a UNF associate professor of political science and public administration who was killed in a traffic accident in August of 2003).
What is the proudest/happiest moment of your life?
I am happiest when my children and my students make me proud. Graduations are a fine time. It is ironic that I never attended any of my own graduations. I always finished in summer term, and the graduation was in fall. By then I was always on the other side of the country, and it was too expensive to attend.
Tell us something about you that even your friends don't know:
When I worked with the FIGHT Organization, we defeated the hand- picked leadership of Saul Alinsky, virtually the father of community organizing in America. Although Alinsky's official policy was to stay out of the local politics, he decided to enter the fray on the side of his friend. The result was that I learned most from Alinsky by fighting and defeating him at the game he invented.
What do you hope to accomplish that you have not done yet?
I have been working with a group of our faculty focused on conflict transformation. So very much of our future is dependent on our ability of solve problems without violence. We like to blame inner-city black communities for failure here, but the reality is that we face global failure. I hope that many more of my colleagues will join this effort.
Last book read:
"Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcends Tragedy" by Donald Kraybill, Steven Nolt and David Weaver-Zercher