Challenge authority, like Steve Uhlfelder did

TALLAHASSEE — Hundreds gathered at Florida’s Capitol Wednesday to protest the Republican plot to politicize the teaching of Black history in school. Thousands should have been there — but it’s a start.

The next night near St. Petersburg, a relative handful marched on a street in Dunedin against Gov. Ron DeSantis. It’s unheard of for demonstrators to show up at the annual Governor’s Baseball Dinner, a feel-good event to celebrate the state’s history as a spring training venue. But it’s a sign of a civic pulse as people in Florida express frustration over the state’s downward spiral.

The Legislature won’t challenge DeSantis. Courts rarely question him. All that’s left is the people.

It’s more important than ever that people let the world know, loudly, that where this state is headed is all wrong.

Next Tuesday marks five years since one of the biggest mass demonstrations ever seen in Tallahassee as tens of thousands converged on the Capitol to demand action after the Parkland massacre. Protests matter. They demand public and media attention. The bigger the better.

Steve Uhlfelder believed in challenging authority.

As a University of Florida student body leader in 1970, he demanded the resignation of UF President Stephen O’Connell for ordering the arrests of Black students who presented demands and occupied a building on the Gainesville campus. As a result, one-third of the 350 Black UF students withdrew from school, despite Uhlfelder’s pleas that they remain on campus.

That’s Uhlfelder. Work within the system, and keep pushing for change.

A lawyer, higher education leader and advisor to governors, he died last weekend in Santa Rosa Beach from what his family said was Parkinson’s disease “and some other health issues.” He was 76.

A native of West Palm Beach, Uhlfelder used his UF experience as a springboard to a long public career in which he became a pillar of the state’s political establishment, a Democrat who survived, and thrived, after Republicans took charge. He chose his political role models well: LeRoy Collins. Reubin Askew. Talbot (Sandy) D’Alemberte, a former FSU and American Bar Association president.

Uhlfelder served on the Board of Regents, overseeing state universities. He was executive director of the Constitution Revision Commission, chief of Gov. Jeb Bush’s mentoring initiative and a presidential appointee to the Fulbright scholarship board.

“He was in the system but fighting the system,” his son Daniel told me Friday.

He was a successful lobbyist, but he had the soul of an outsider. His connections didn’t stop him from publicly antagonizing a future Senate president, Tom Lee, who thought it was an inherent conflict of interest for lobbyists to be on boards overseeing universities (Lee was right.)

By the suck-up-to-leadership code of Tallahassee, Uhlfelder went at it completely wrong. But he fought for what he believed.

He was tormented. He relished confrontation, but wanted everyone to like him.

In a profile I wrote about him in the St. Petersburg Times in 2002, he said: “I like to be provocative, but I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.”

He backed Bush’s re-election, and that cost him friends. The 2002 Democratic nominee for governor, Bill McBride, had hired and mentored Uhlfelder at the Holland & Knight law firm.

As his health slowly deteriorated, Uhlfelder spent the last six years of his life in a frustrating fight with the state bureaucracy to move ahead on a Holocaust memorial on the Capitol grounds in Tallahassee. The Legislature approved it years ago.

He lost his own grandparents in the Holocaust and desperately wanted to see the project come to life, but died before he could see it.

“Six years is a damn long time to build a $400,000 structure to recognize six million killed, many with relatives who live here in Florida,” Uhlfelder told the Tallahassee Democrat days before he died. “They spent four times as much money sending immigrants to Massachusetts than they will to build this.”

Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the

Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsenti nel.com or 850-567-2240 and follow him on Twitter @stevebousquet.