My Choice of Heroes
Mark Gerzon wrote A Choice of Heroes (1984) several decades ago. The thesis of that book was that we, as the generation of baby boomers and those who were born later, could choose whomever we wanted as heroes. The strange part of all of this is that the society had moved so far to the right with far right-wing Republicans, along with their religious fundamentalist base and neoliberal conservative Democrats, that there is now a dearth of heroes from which to choose. The word neoliberal is the opposite of what once passed for liberalism and has not existed since the presidency of Lyndon Johnson in 1968. Johnson let the liberal Great Society burn to the ground under the weight of the Vietnam War.
In this epoch of reactionary politics it might be good to reflect on my particular heroes. As if in some race to baseball’s All-Star Game, and Martin Luther King, Jr. may have had a laugh from this sports’ analogy, he stands as a great hero of the civil rights and antiwar movement.
King stood up for justice, and had the intellectual background to bolster his positions and actions against segregation, hate, and war. He lived in fear, but that did not stop him. He was tormented by segregationists and the FBI, then led by the bizarre reactionary and Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who saw dirt (literally) and conspiracies under every rock and in every nook and cranny. Hoover led the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) that resulted in the deaths of civil rights leaders such as Fred Hampton and their supporters such as actress Jean Seberg. Hoover’s dirty tricks against King were endless. King took the next step and stood up against the Vietnam War as is memorialized in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered in April 1967 at Riverside Church in Manhattan.
King wasn’t accepted by the general public until his legacy was whitewashed decades later. Some radical activists/protesters saw him as a lesser figure in the civil rights movement and called him the derogatory “Da lawd.”
King’s nonviolent civil disobedience, with its roots in Gandhi’s campaign to free India from British rule, was seen by some, including my next hero, as weak and accommodating. Weak and accommodating leaders are not marked for assassination. King’s Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community (1967) is a favorite.
Malcolm X, my next hero, was equal to Martin Luther King, Jr. and my third hero, war resister and writer David Harris, in stature and fearlessness. Malcolm, a brilliant practitioner of Black liberation in a segregated society, championed direct resistance through self-defense, cut his teeth from his experiences with poverty and segregation, and rose to the heights of leadership. His philosophy of resistance and Black identity across the globe provided the underpinning of the Black Panther Movement. That he formed two organizations, one Islamic based in the US , and the other international, is a testament to his ability to evolve as a human being and theorist. Like King, Malcolm X was the target of both the national police (FBI) and local New York City police. The active role of these two police organizations’ probable involvement in his assassination is an evolving story. Malcolm became the enemy of the Nation of Islam when he unmasked its leader Elijah Muhammad’s hypocrisy. Muhammad gave a wink and nod to the Nation’s plan to assassinate Malcolm. Malcolm has risen to heights that Elijah Muhammad could not begin to imagine as both a leader and an intellectual.
In both King and Malcolm X can be seen their tireless fight against segregation, the socio-economic status of Black people, and the forces of reaction and violence in the US. The Autobiography of Malcolm X ( 1965), with the collaboration of Alex Haley, is one of the best autobiographies ever written.
These heroes, whose ideals affect me all of these decades later, ends with my third hero, David Harris, the war resister and writer. Harris lived long past the other heroes written about here, into relative older age. He stood up to the government during the Vietnam War, was imprisoned for over two years, and went on to be a successful journalist and writer. Goliath (1970) and Our War (1996), two of his books stand out for consideration, though I liked his retrospective on his career in journalism in My Country ‘Tis of Thee (2020). No activist/protester can remain unscathed from his/her confrontation with power. In a final interview, David Harris lamented that we as a generation, and I paraphrase here, could not see the force of the political reaction in response to the inroads for freedom and equality we made during the decade of the 1960s and early 1970s. The acceptance of war, the pushback against women’s rights, the destruction of the environment, and racism all stand in direct opposition to the gains of the 1960s.
Both Trump and Biden, significantly and radically to the right of center to different degrees typify that reaction. A radical bookstore owner in Harlem said that the wind is in the sails of the far right. This is a tragic assessment compared to the years of great hope for a better world.
My Choice of Heroes