After Ted Williams, Mohammed Ali and Bobby Orr, since I was a boy, I have been looking for heroes. There have been painfully few. The next generations have not, for me, been fertile ground.
I have just returned from a nine-day trip with a group of 15 friends through Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, and Tennessee. When I came home, I was shocked to learn of Alexie Navalny’s murder in a Russian prison.
I remembered that after Putin tried to kill him once before, he returned to Russia, only to be imprisoned yet again and ultimately murdered. He risked everything for the love of his country, its people and an integrity that is larger than his life. That is this old man’s kind of hero.
It wasn’t my objective but on the trip, I accidentally found the heroes like Navalny that I have been looking for.
For years, I have wanted to follow the “nonviolent” civil rights movement from the death of Emmett Till in 1955 up to when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in Memphis on Aril 4th, 1968.
Yes, I had seen all the pictures, read the books and knew the dates and places as we all have. This movement started when I was in lower school and compounded until it arguably ended with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. when I graduated from high school in 1968.
It was all familiar to me.
But all the histories and research I had done became like reading the script of a play until I walked onto the stage where it had happened. Then I had no escape. It is different when you are surrounded by it. It is different when you become immersed in it.
The Delta blues surrounded us as we passed the crossroads where Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil, then parked down the road near Baptist town to walk near where he had been laid to rest.
Much of the Mississippi Delta, our guide at the front of the bus informed us, is owned by eight families.
For hour after hour, the low flat land passes by, with row after row of cotton plants as far as the eye can see on both sides of the road.
Finally, we left the two-lane road from Jackson, Mississippi and traveled down a dirt road to a big house with five or six little cottages next door to it. These are the houses for the families of the tenant farmers who live there surrounded by their work, earning an annual income of around $8,000 a year — that is, before they paid their rent.
On the bus days later, I tried to better understand the famous 1957 picture of young Elizabeth Eckford as she tried to integrate Little Rock Central High School while screaming white people threatening her 67 years ago. Days later, I met her — now in her 80s — as she sat quietly in front of us and answered questions across from where it had all happened.
She said her parents were determined not to back down and they would not talk about it. She said it had taken her almost 40 years to come to grips with what had happened to her in that one day, and for the remainder of the school year, day after day, as she withstood catcalls and being shoved into lockers as she walked the halls.
That little girl in the picture with the sunglasses on, holding her books alone and determined, gives no evidence of the damage that was done to her, which had stayed with her for so long.
It was much the same with the picture I had seen of the cluster of black men in Memphis as they were all turning and pointing in unison as Martin Luther King, Jr. lay at their feet on the balcony of room 306 of the Lorraine Hotel. The hotel has been turned into a much bigger museum, with a plate glass wall preserving the hotel room that these men had left to talk to friends three stories below. It is now forever frozen with the shades all drawn.
I was not ready for 14-year-old Emmett Till’s final journey down from Chicago to visit family in Mississippi to the candy store where he whistled at a white girl. His two assassins had tracked him down three days later and extracted him at gunpoint from his relative’s house to be beaten beyond recognition and dumped in the river. Days later, he was fished out to be buried back home in Chicago in an open casket.
It all rushed at me hours later, when I found myself in the courtroom where the two men were exonerated in 67 minutes by an all-white jury who said they had a ten-minute Coke break to extend the deliberations. I was sitting in the seat of juror number six, right across from the witness stand where Emmett’s mother had testified in tears.
After I opened the news when I got home, Navalny’s murder drove me back to that trip.
I found heroes in many of the locations we visited. In the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, those heroes were in the records of the hundreds of lynchings, including many who could not be identified.
There are names we all remember, of course. They were committed to their country and to peaceful change despite the daily risk they might be killed. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, said he could see the promised land, but perhaps he would not be there with them when they entered it. Soon thereafter, he was killed.
Medgar Evers, who was shot from across the street at midnight, had trained his children to run to the bathtub and hide whenever they heard gunshots, because it was the only place they might be safe from a high-powered rifle.
Medgar Evers was killed by a high-powered rifle bullet that went through him, through the front window of his living room, through the wall of his kitchen, and then lodged in the refrigerator.
These people died to advance the cause of freedom. Let’s remember them as we move toward an election that could determine how free we really are.
The night I returned, after I unpacked and turned out the light and set the alarm for an early breakfast, I thought about the people who I had met and the surroundings that had given old history a new life. I went to sleep thinking of those people as little candles where I could warm my hands, little flickering lights burning in the dark.
