Robert Boddie, a 'master teacher' in Kitsap community, fought for kids and against racism

BREMERTON — Robert Sylvester Boddie Jr., a fearless advocate for the underprivileged and people of color who spent more than three decades of mentoring at-risk youth on the Kitsap Peninsula, died Sept. 9 from multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer. He was 63.

Friends and family said Boddie became an inexhaustible advocate when alerted to injustice — whether it was an unfair school suspension or disproportionate jail sentence. He was not afraid to call out people in power for racism.

"He had no fear of approaching anyone at any time," said TC Curry, who began volunteering with Boddie to help at-risk youth in 1990. "It could be the governor, the mayor, the superintendent. He would not take no for an answer."

Curry watched Boddie's decades of mentorship from the beginning. After retiring from the Navy, Curry began a "Scared Straight" program in local schools that took at-risk youth on visits to Washington prisons to keep them from going there in the future. He and Boddie went inside the barbed wire with kids for 15 years. For even longer, they went into area schools.

Through it all, Boddie fought a status quo in which Black students and other students of color were routinely suspended from school or received discipline disproportionate to their white counterparts. 

"He just said, 'Hey, I'm here, and if y'all treat these people bad, I'm gonna tell the world,'" said Mike Nkosi, an attorney who partnered with Boddie on several of his initiatives. "If Robert had not been there, their lives would've been ruined."

Boddie's devotion to volunteering in schools led to a new generation of mentors. Harriette Bryant, who co-founded OurGEMS — Girls Empowered through Mentoring and Service — and OurGENTS in Kitsap County's schools, said Boddie was the example she followed. "He was the catalyst," she said.

"He took me under his wing," said Akeuyea Karen Vargas, another longtime volunteer and advocate for racial justice in Kitsap. "Much of the work I do now is because he immersed me in the system. He was my role model."

'Rough and tumble'

Boddie, who grew up in Chico and played Pee Wee football, "was rough and tumble," his father, Robert Boddie Sr., said. He was always one to speak his mind, no matter how uncomfortable it might make people.

After graduating from West High School, he became a Marine — "he wanted something with action," his father said. Upon discharge two years later, he got a job at the U.S Postal Service. It was there that he suffered life-threatening injuries at the hands of robbers, who stole his car.

Stabbed multiple times, the robbery left him partially paralyzed on his left side, his father said. But the incident sent his life into a tailspin. And before Boddie would emerge as the mentor he'd become, he needed one himself.

Finding his life's calling of helping local youth was fostered by the Rev. Sam Rachal Jr., formerly of Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Bremerton. Thereafter, he never wavered far from that mission. He convened advocacy groups, organized pickets and, above all, mentored countless children in Kitsap County schools over decades.

His work didn't end at school. Boddie saw injustice in the adult world in Kitsap County's court system. Unafraid to approach judges, prosecutors and lawyers, Boddie put those in power on the spot, creating a one-man check-and-balance on the justice system.

Nkosi recalled a young Black woman who got into a fight at Bremerton High School and spat on another student. She was expelled and prosecuted. Boddie and Nkosi met with school leaders and county prosecutors for what they say was a disproportionate punishment from her white peers would have received — with an impact that could affect the rest of her life.

Thanks to their efforts, they got the student out of juvenile detention and back in school.

"It ended up being discipline, and not a permanent record," he said.

'Without self-interest'

Boddie was integral in starting a Juneteenth festival in Bremerton, long before it became a national holiday celebrating when the last enslaved Americans learned of their freedom in Galveston, Texas. The Bremerton festival started as a meeting in Nkosi's office and grew to a gathering of thousands of people each year at Evergreen-Rotary Park.

With a memory like a steel trap and unwillingness to sugarcoat conversation, Boddie put leaders around Kitsap County on edge. But he made sure to hold accountable those he was helping, pushing kids to ensure they were on a path to a diploma. Part of his effectiveness, friends said, was that his advocacy was often unpaid and without regard to himself.

"He had a unique ability to work within the power structure without self-interest," said longtime educator and Central Kitsap School District teacher JD Sweet. But he wasn’t afraid to get on students and parents. He called them out too."

Boddie was co-founder of the CLCA, or Community Leadership Coalition and Alliance, which began after an incident at the Kitsap Mall, Sweet said. Two Black teens were accused of dealing drugs in the mall. It struck a familiar nerve in Kitsap County, and Boddie and several others set out to do something about it.

"Our whole focus then, was to do something when there seemed to be injustices occurring," Sweet said.

They picketed schools, and, when an editorial supported a state anti-affirmative action initiative in 1998, they protested outside the Kitsap Sun.

"If there is disproportionate discipline in the schools, or unfair treatment of citizens on the job and we are contacted, we will investigate and attempt to bring the parties together to arrive at an equitable solution," Boddie wrote in a 2010 Kitsap Sun column.

Sweet said Boddie reminded him of Malcom X, someone who "didn't teach a class" but was in every respect an educator on a wider level.

"Robert was a master teacher in our community," Sweet said.

Boddie had moved to Tacoma in recent years, but that didn't keep him off the peninsula where he spent so much time working with area youth.

“That’s my passion, for these kids,” Boddie told reporter Christina Henry in 2016. “I come from Tacoma because I believe in these kids. I could be doing this in Tacoma, but I have a passion for Kitsap County.”

In 1998, he received the Kitsap County Bar Association's prestigious Liberty Bell Award for an estimated 4,000 hours of volunteer work with juveniles and at-risk youth. Many more thousands of hours would come through the nonprofit he founded, POWER, or People Organized Working for Ethnic Reality.

Boddie was preceded in death by his mother, Dorothy Boddie. He is survived by his father, siblings Michelle Bussey and Tony Boddie, daughters Candice Ervin and Shakera Boddie, sons Robert Boddie III and Armand Boddie, 9 grandchildren and 7 nieces and nephews. Services are private.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Robert Boddie, a 'master teacher in our community,' dies at 63