My Wall of Heroes

This week we celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Though he has become one of my honored heroes, I did not know much about him while he was alive. I was 14 when he gave his moving "I Have a Dream" speech in August 1963, and twenty when he was assassinated in April 1968. Much of what I had heard about him at that time was negative propaganda. There was no civil rights movement where I lived. I don't remember seeing an African American at any time in Huntington Beach, CA, in the 60s when I lived there. There were no African American students at my high school. I was insulated from racial problems by the society in which I lived. The "black" neighborhoods were in Los Angeles, thirty-five miles north. I had my first association with African Americans when I was a seventeen-year-old freshman at Long Beach State College in 1965, one month after the Watts Riots in Los Angeles. That association was one English professor and one fellow student in an anthropology class. My associations and friendships with people of races other than my own greatly expanded when I worked at Disneyland from 1966 to 1970. As I have progressed through my life, I have had numerous, close and satisfying associations with fine people of many ethnic backgrounds.
Over the last forty years, I have listened many times to recordings of the dream speech, and I am emotionally involved each time I hear it. I think of myself as being "color-blind" when it comes to race, that I truly judge men and women by the content of their characters and not the color of their skin. I long for the day when there are no hyphenated Americans, just Americans.
On the wall above the circulation desk in my school library, I have a collection of black-framed photographs and paintings of men and women whom I admire and reverence as my heroes. Also on the wall is a framed quotation from Elizabeth Brown Pryor, a biographer of Robert E. Lee, which I often ponder when I hear people trying to "clean up" characters of the past, or worse, condemn them by today's politically correct "standards." Ms Pryor says, "If we are going to embrace heroes, it is important that we accept their human frailty as well as admire their achievements. If we do not, we create empty icons, whose hollowness undermines any ability to inspire."
The twenty heroes on my wall of heroes are George and Martha Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Banneker, Phillis Wheatley, Abraham Lincoln, Fredrick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Marian Anderson, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nelson Mandela, and Ronald Reagan. They are on this wall because they inspire me with their courage and intellect and wisdom and the content of their characters. There are some other heroes of mine that are politically incorrect for the school venue: religious figures that are my spiritual anchor: Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, and Brigham Young among others.