Farid Alan Schintzius didn’t just fight the good fight, he won the good fight over and over and over.

The 76-year-old Richmond activist, carpenter and entrepreneur died shortly after midnight on Dec. 5, leaving a legacy of good karma, persistent resistance and what he playfully called “Kabuki theater for change.”

“Alan dedicated his life to leaving this world better [than] he found it by relentlessly pursuing love, beauty, and justice,” his family said in a public statement on social media following his death. “He is survived by his seven children, countless loved ones, dreamers, schemers, fellow travelers, and co-conspirators.”

Schintzius passed away in the home of his daughter, Noelle Forest, as he was apparently practicing zikr [a Sufi form of worship]. “A mighty wind blew through, shaking the doors of the house at the time of his departure,” the statement noted.

The man himself was a mighty gust of wind, shaking Richmond’s doors for decades. A carpenter and home renovator by trade, the Buffalo, New York native moved here from Richmond, Maine in August, 1985. Throughout his early life – as a conscientious objector doing alternate service or as one of “a band of gypsies” traveling the country painting barns and installing lightning rods – he had also enjoyed meaningful experiences in Richmond, Kentucky, Richmond, Indiana and Richmond, Ohio.

When he was seeking to get a degree in chiropractic medicine, he looked at attending MCV (today’s VCU Medical Center), and decided to give another Richmond a whirl. “We got here and one of my kids was supposed to go to Robert E. Lee Elementary,” he revealed in a 2023 interview for WRIR’s “Open Source RVA.” “I was ashamed, embarrassed, compromised. I had been blinded by all of my [previous, happy] Richmond experiences.”

He never got that degree. But he found a lasting home, although at that time of his arrival, he found the River City was extremely closed off and segmented, and that the input of ordinary citizens didn’t seem to matter. He said that Richmond had “dungeon energy. You were not wanted. The good news for me was that there was nothing they could do to me, there wasn’t anything they could offer me that would keep my mouth shut.”

Schintzius first got involved in local politics by being a local point man for Democratic nominee Jerry Brown during the 1996 presidential election. He had the idea of using the then-vibrant public access channel on Comcast to host a regular program [called “If I Had a Hammer”] advocating and canvassing for Brown, the former governor of California. “Jerry Brown ended up taking 66% of Richmond’s caucus,” he would later recall proudly.

“We thought we were done [with the show] and one of the last people to call in said, ‘How can you go off the air? I’ve been here for years and I was told when I got here to keep your mouth shut and your head down, and now I know I don’t have to do that. You have to stay on the air.’ And we did, for eight years.”

“His love for his neighbors will live on through everyone he inspired to get involved in community advocacy,” said longtime friend, U.S. Senator Tim Kaine

It was the beginning of a life of activism, speaking out and advocating for specific causes. From saving a 19th century Quaker home, the Jacob House, from being demolished by Virginia Commonwealth University, to being a leader in Occupy Richmond (the local equivalent to Occupy Wall Street), to protesting such controversial city initiatives as Dominion Energy’s Navy Hill development, a baseball stadium next to a historic slave burial ground in Shockoe Bottom, and a proposed casino (twice), his determined opposition and ability to find allies won attention and almost always prevailed.

“I realized that there were few places on the planet better suited than Richmond, Virginia, the Capital of the Confederacy, for my skill set and my passion to shake, rattle and roll,” he said. “To pick up the hammer and smash the dungeon energy.”

“His love for his neighbors will live on through everyone he inspired to get involved in community advocacy,” said longtime friend, Senator Tim Kaine, in a statement [you can read the full version after the story]. “Alan took on countless causes throughout his life, whether it be a community radio station or lobbying against the closure of a hospital. That’s the Alan whom Richmond has known and loved for decades: indefatigable, insistent, and relentlessly effective when it comes to making people’s lives better in his community.”

Schintzius was a cut above, echoes Viola Baskerville, a former member of the Virginia House of Delegates. She first met the activist when she sat on Richmond City Council in the 1990s. “Richmond could not have been blessed with a better activist than Alan. He believed that ordinary people could do extraordinary things.”

Earlier this year, Baskerville teamed up with Schintzius to organize a citizen’s group to help stop Virginia Union University from demolishing the historic Richmond Community Hospital, an important African-American landmark that stood on its grounds. The effort was a success. In October, VUU announced that it would preserve rather than demolish the hospital. “Alan referred to the two of us as the odd couple,” she remembers with a smile. “A white male Quaker and a Black female Episcopalian, but we wanted to make sure that Richmond understood the significance of that building.”

“Richmond could not have been blessed with a better activist than Alan. He believed that ordinary people could do extraordinary things.” – Former Delegate Viola Baskerville

The two had joined forces earlier, along with other community leaders, to oppose a casino development in Richmond. “We were like David up against Goliath,” she recalls. “The movement did not have that much funding, but Alan was consistently doing what he called ‘Kabuki theater,’ which was his term for public and community activism which brought attention to an issue to keep it in the press and keep it at a level of community engagement.”

One example of his out-of-the-box thinking was hiring an airplane to fly a huge banner protesting the 2023 casino referendum over the large crowds at the Richmond Folk Festival. “We defeated the casino once and then they came back and we had to defeat it again,” she says. “The second time being an even more resounding defeat for them. And all we had was Alan’s Kabuki theater.” In the early days of the Community Hospital protest, the activist proposed that he and Baskerville hold a church service on the grounds of the building every first Sunday of the month. “I told him that this would be trespassing. He said, ‘You know, let’s just go ahead and do it and let them throw us out.'”

The Camel and WRIR Independent Radio

But Schintzius wasn’t just about saying no. He also built lasting projects in Richmond – like the still-thriving Camel restaurant and venue, which he envisioned as “a social oasis” – and was instrumental in launching the career of Kaine, who served as Richmond city councilman and mayor before rising to become Virginia’s governor and senator (and the eventual vice-presidential running mate of Hillary Clinton). “When I was running my first Richmond City Council race,” says Kaine, who shares a Quaker background with his friend. “Alan made hundreds of calls for my campaign. I ended up winning by fewer than a hundred votes.”

“Later, when I was mayor of Richmond and working with the Clinton White House on Federal Communications Commission licensure for low-power local independent radio stations, Alan was one of the community leaders who advocated for Richmond to have an independent radio station. That station, WRIR, started broadcasting in 2005 when I was lieutenant governor of Virginia, and is now one of the largest of its kind.”

“He had a most excellent habit of finding that fulcrum point that could move the entire world with a tiny applied lever at just the right spot,” says Christoper Maxwell, the founder of WRIR, in a Facebook post. “It was Alan that gave the nascent WRIR, then called ‘Radio Free Richmond,’ a home in the basement of his nascent effort at building The Camel restaurant.” In later years, the activist would join forces with Maxwell to establish and nurture another low-power station, WRWK (The Work) in Midlothian.

How far would Schintzius go when he believed in something? “I remember Alan chaining himself to the bulldozer to save the Jacob House,” Maxwell recalls. “[This was] not just any old lovely antique building. This one had some ghosts! Turns out that that it wasn’t just an 1880 vintage [house] most common to that area, it dated back to the 1830s as a training house used to teach real construction skills to Black tradesmen, which became vitally important both before and after the Civil War.”

“Alan felt that the Jacob House was an incredibly important place,” remembers Chris Dovi, co-founder of nonprofit CodeVA, and a former Style Weekly reporter, as well as a frequent collaborator who would co-write and edit Schintzius’ social media posts and assisted him in an ambitious plan to replace the Confederate statues on Monument with alternate, more historically accurate signage. “The spirits moved him to act on their behalf.”

“You have to worry a little bit now that some of the dumb projects that City Hall has tried to do over the years will have less of an obstacle when they’re wasting taxpayer money or bulldozing history” – Chris Dovi

Dovi continues: “VCU dismissed all of his claims that the Jacob House was anything more than just an old house. And when they moved it – they moved it rather than bulldoze it because of his efforts – they found, lo and behold, that there was a cellar that was hidden. So he was right. Nobody knows the history of that cellar but it was hidden and it belonged to someone who was a Quaker, and it would have been a very early stop on the Underground Railroad because of the period of time. That house belonged to people who would have been a part of it.”

Bill Martin, director of the Valentine, says that, earlier this year, Schintzius gifted a cache of items to the museum, including 115 videotapes of his cable access show, the anti-casino banner that was flown over the Richmond Folk Festival, and the text for the alternate signage of the monuments. “What an amazing influence on the city,” Martin marvels. “He was always pushing … and he was consistently underestimated in how much he could actually get done and the kind of influence he actually had. It was about his persistence and passion about these things … even if you didn’t always agree with him, this was a strong independent voice. There was integrity and honesty in what he said.”

Former 1st District Councilman Jon Baliles got to know the gaunt, Sufi-garbed advocate when they both ran for mayor in 2016. Schintzius would eventually drop out and endorse Baliles – “he brought a small army with him” – but not before legally challenging the Richmond registrar’s casting out of some of his collected signatures. For that crusade, he enlisted the legal help of former State Senator Joe Morrissey, another mayoral candidate that year, and someone the activist had long been at odds with.

“What an amazing influence on the city,” Bill Martin marvels. “He was always pushing … this was a strong independent voice.”

Baliles says this was typical, that Schintzius the activist understood the power of bringing together broad coalitions to solve a problem. “He would align with anybody if they were on the right side. If you’ll recall, the casino people were heard laughing on the radio, making fun of the fact that Alan had thought of flying that anti-casino banner and that [conservative business leader] Jim Ukrop had paid for it. They didn’t recognize the power of that [pairing] and it just exploded on social media. People started to think, yeah, this [casino] sucks.”

That was part of what Dovi calls the activist’s “asymmetrical warfare.”

“He wasn’t afraid to ask people things, people who were not him, like the Ukrops. Here comes this bearded zen figure, how is he going to appeal to them? He was able to appeal to their conscience and sense of what was right. And he did that kind of thing again and again and was successful. You can’t bottle that.”

Dovi is concerned that he’s irreplaceable. “You have to worry a little bit now that some of the dumb projects that City Hall has tried to do over the years will have less of an obstacle when they’re wasting taxpayer money or bulldozing history.”

A public memorial to Farid Alan Schintzius will take place near his birth date in April, his family says. Details are forthcoming. “If you would like to honor his memory,” they write, “please carry a small spark of his embers into the world and let it grow into a mighty flame.”

Last year, Schintzius told an WRIR radio audience that he was thankful that this was the Richmond he landed in. “Whatever it is that’s out there that arranges things, well played. You got me here.”

When asked for thoughts on his long list of achievements, he said, “I have two gifts. One is that I have a big mouth and I’m willing to open it, and the other is that I don’t know when to stop. I don’t know how to stop. If it’s mine to do, it’s do it all the way.”

Full statement from Sen. Tim Kaine:

“Anne and I first became friends with Alan back in the mid-‘80s – he and Anne were attendees of the same Quaker meeting, and we’d hired him to do some carpentry work on our house. Back then and throughout his life, he was the kind of person who would always show up for his community and never hesitate to advocate for the underserved, downtrodden, or voiceless.

When I was running my first Richmond City Council race, Alan made hundreds of calls for my campaign. I ended up winning by fewer than a hundred votes. Later, when I was Mayor of Richmond and working with the Clinton White House on Federal Communications Commission licensure for low-power local independent radio stations, Alan was one of the community leaders who advocated for Richmond to have an independent radio station. That station, WRIR, started broadcasting in 2005 when I was Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, and is now one of the largest of its kind.

Alan took on countless causes throughout his life, whether it be a community radio station or lobbying against the closure of a hospital. That’s the Alan whom Richmond has known and loved for decades: indefatigable, insistent, and relentlessly effective when it comes to making people’s lives better in his community.

Anne and I are so sad to hear of his passing, and our hearts go out to his family and to the many people who knew and loved him. His love for his neighbors will live on through everyone he inspired to get involved in community advocacy.”

Corrections: An earlier version of this story had wrong title for Viola Baskerville and the wrong district for Jon Baliles. Style regrets the errors.