UNITED NATIONS  - 26 August 2004 /  www.MaximsNews.com /   “He was the kind of person I’d like to have known better.”

Those were the words a colleague spoke last week after returning from a sad duty:  the funeral of one of our National Urban League staff members.

Eric Bryant Rhodes, a program manager in our housing and economic development department, hadn’t been with us long, having joined our headquarters team in early 2002. 

But it doesn’t take long for a person of quality to make an impact in the work he or she does, or have an impact on his or her colleagues.

Eric Rhodes was such a person; and so his death earlier this month has stunned us and forced us into measuring his loss and realizing, as Marvin Owens, our vice president for housing and economic development said, we’re the poorer because he’s not coming back.

Eric’s job was to insure that our national programs in financial literacy, in homeownership education, and in housing counseling -- all carried out by our affiliates throughout the country -- did what they were supposed to do: help individuals and families, and the communities of which they were a part, become economically knowledgeable and self-sufficient.

He was, you might say, our quality-control officer on this critical front, and his skill at evaluating whether the actual program was the best way to achieve the goals of the policy soon became apparent.

Eric much preferred to do his evaluating out in the neighborhoods and among the people who are supposed to benefit in tangible ways from policies designed to build the economic strength of African Americans and other Americans.

 He could have lived his life differently. 

 Having been educated at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago, he could have established a more distant analytical relationship between himself and communities that need society’s help. 

But Cy Richardson, for whom Eric directly worked, says that he “wanted to come to the Urban League to work closely with the people who most needed help." 

"He wanted to be directly involved in building family stability and security.”   

My colleagues who attended Eric’s funeral in Cleveland, Ohio, where he had grown up, reported that, while it had begun with a profound sense of sadness, it soon became infused with a lightness of spirit that sprang from a shared thankfulness for having known someone who had lived life well and made the world better for it.

My colleagues were cheered at hearing the recollections of Eric from his younger sister, Samone, and best friend, Kevin Walker, and others -- words which proved that our own work-driven impressions of Eric were on target, and which, at least for the moment, chased away the sorrow. 

In this way, Eric’s funeral became a tribute to him and to that powerful urge that Eric’s parents, Jerry and Deborah Rhodes, instilled in their children and which so powerfully resonates throughout Black America. 

The writer Albert Murray defined this passion in The Spyglass Tree, his semi-autobiographical novel of growing up in Alabama, as the indelible “ancestral imperative to do something and become something and be somebody.”

That’s what drove Eric Rhodes through college and graduate school. 

That’s what motivated him to join us at the Urban League. 

And that’s what prompted his pursuit of knowledge and accomplishment in photography and music, and a steadfast commitment to intellectual debate beyond his work at the office.

In fact, Eric Rhodes was a stellar model of an engaged individual. 

He was not apathetic; nor was he driven to inaction by the profusion of choices of how and where to get involved. 

He understood that civic engagement was civic empowerment; and he had found a way to pursue his own interests and also fulfill the obligation all of us have to improve the quality of life in our communities and in the country at large. 

His life underscores that there are many ways to meet one’s “civic-engagement duty.”

What Eric Rhodes was working for at the Urban League -- putting structural mechanisms in place to help others improve their lives -- and what he himself embodied is, now more than ever, worth striving for.

His family buried Eric last week. 

But we refuse, as they do, to think that he is gone. 

As one colleague said, “I didn’t say my goodbyes to Eric—and I don’t intend to.  Our friendship continues.  It’s just been transformed.”

I agree.  That’s the way to look upon a wonderful life.