City, CT leaders pay tribute to Charles Tisdale

BRIDGEPORT — Charles Berkley Tisdale fell short in historic runs for Congress and mayor, but his decades of work heading the city’s anti-poverty agency may have touched more people than if he had succeeded in the short-term realm of elected political office.

About 250 people gathered in the auditorium of an East Side school named after his late wife on Thursday and celebrated Tisdale as a community leader with a lasting legacy for tens of thousands over generations, and as an African American who, if he was a couple decades younger, could have been a U.S. senator or whatever else he wanted to be.

But being born in the Jim Crow South, in the depths of the Great Depression, made it much tougher for a smart young man and football star whose physical hunger later focused on social and economic justice.

Edolphus Towns, a former congressman from New York City who was Tisdale’s roommate at North Carolina A and T State University, credited Tisdale with creating the so-called training table for athletes. “How can I play football if I’m hungry,” Towns, himself a college basketball player, recalled Tisdale’s complaint to the football coach, who promptly ran with the idea.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said Tisdale, who died Sunday at 86, brought a different kind of appetite into public life as the state’s first African American congressional candidate in 1976 and Bridgeport mayoral candidate in 1983.

“Charlie Tisdale may have been hungry in college, but he was hungry through his whole life,” Blumenthal said. “He was hungry for justice through his whole life. He was an advocate and a fighter. He was fearless and he was fierce. He was not just street smart and book smart. He was street wise and he saw ahead of his time, which is...

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