The Courage to Dream and to Enable Dreams

Kentucky State University, 2002 Honors Convocation
April 11, 2002

Good Morning. Thank you for inviting me to come and speak to you today at the 2002 Honors Convocation. I am honored.

These days I have been more reflective than usual, and I would like to tell you something about those reflections. I ask your patience as I first tell you a story, then talk about the lessons learned from my reflections on that story, and then tell you why I believe it is important to share this with you today.

First, the story: Two weeks ago, Peter Biehl died. His untimely death sent expressions of surprise and sympathy for his family from around the world. Who was Peter Biehl? Peter was the father of Amy Biehl, who on August 25, 1993, was killed by a mob in the South African township of Guguletu near Cape Town. Perhaps some of you may recall the news coverage in 1997, when Peter and Linda Biehl traveled to South Africa to testify before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on behalf of the requests for amnesty by the four young men who had killed their daughter, Amy. If ever you have the opportunity, I recommend that you see A Long Night’s Journey Into Day, the Oscar nominated documentary that tells the story of 4 of the cases to come before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Peter and Linda said at the time that their daughter, Amy, had taught them to do what they were doing. From the time that she was quite young, Amy had always pushed herself to "right" things that she perceived to be wrong…to take the actions that enabled others…and to push herself to be better than she had been the day before. This was always her dream. And her parents said she had always pursued her dream. When she graduated from Stanford, she took a job with the National Democratic Institute and worked in a few countries in Africa. At the time of her death at 26 years old, she was a Fulbrighter working in South Africa. Peter and Linda said that every Sunday morning Amy called them from Cape Town and described to them in some detail what she was doing and why it was important to do it. She and some of her black South African friends were preparing people to vote and to be contributing citizens to the new government about to be born. Amy dreamed dreams of enabling others and thereby enabling herself more. Her efforts were tireless. She was driving her friends home into the township on that August night just as a political meeting was breaking up, discharging onto the streets angry young men, encouraged to make the township ungovernable and to kill whites. Amy just happened to be the first white person they saw as they were coming out of the meeting. Over the protests of her friends in the car who were shouting that Amy was really one of them, the mob surrounded the car, pulled Amy from it, stoned, kicked, and stabbed her. By the time the attackers could hear the protestations of Amy’s friends, she lay bleeding to death in the street. Ambulances came slowly and reluctantly into the townships.

But Amy’s work goes on. Her parents established the Amy Biehl Foundation Trust in Cape Town to carry out community-based and youth-oriented programs in the areas of education; health and safety; employment skills; microenterprise development; environment; arts and music; and recreation. These youth-focused programs have expanded recently to become adult and family-centered under the principle that healthy youth involves healthy families and communities.

On April 1st of last year, I met Peter and Linda Biehl in Cape Town. I had asked Ahmed Kathrada, a dear friend and former prisoner on Robben Island with Mr. Mandela, if he would introduce me to them. I view them as people who live the values of the sort I wanted our students to have learned by the time they graduate from our university, and I wanted to ask them if they would come to UMass. They agreed. Last November 6-8 on the UMass campus, we had the privilege of experiencing listening to and learning from people whose living values touch all they do and all with whom they come in contact. All of those activities and events are captured and archived at my website, http://www.umass.edu/chancellor

On March 1, about 6 weeks ago, Peter and Linda came back to UMass en route to California, where their oldest daughter had given birth to their third grandchild. They stopped at UMass coming from Cape Town to follow up on some of the initiatives and internship opportunities discussed when they were here in November. Peter complained of having eaten something that must not have agreed with him. The following day he entered Eisenhower Medical Center in southern California, where he died at noon on Easter. What a shock! At just 59 years old, Peter was gone…no longer available to us in ways that his visible example and vibrant engagement of the world was itself enabling to all who witnessed. I spoke almost daily with Linda during those days. She said that hours before he died he said to her, "Now you know you must go on with this work, don’t you?" Linda said she said of course she knew it and that they would go on with the work together. His last words to her were, "Yes, we will." Peter Biehl died on Easter Sunday. Since then I have been more intentionally reflective, thinking about the dream that Amy pursued and that Peter and Linda had taken up as a way of respecting and honoring the values she lived…and about the affirmation that Peter made as his last words.

I said I would also talk with you about the lessons learned from this story. One of those lessons has to do with dreams—and the importance of having the courage to dream and to act in the fulfillment of a dream. This reflective time has prompted recollections from the past…something my father said to me…something that explained a scene from my early childhood that had always been confusing for me.

When I was a child, I was fortunate enough to have my great-grandmother living with us. Daily I crawled up onto her ample lap to have her read to me. She spent lots of time reading to me and to my brothers long before we started school. Those were special moments...moments in which books played a significant role. Books were to be handled reverently and were regarded as a gateway to knowledge. I recall even now a series called the How and Why Library of Knowledge. If I could find those volumes now, I'm sure I would find much of the information dated, inaccurate, misleading, and incomplete. But then, in my great-grandmother's nurturing lap, that series of books was part of the enchantment, exploration, and veneration for learning.

That is why I was so confused when once, as a toddler, I saw my father tearing the pages out of a large, leather-bound book. How could he be doing that? Why was he doing it? I couldn't have been more puzzled or confused. That image remains as intense now as it seemed then. Though I have no recollection of asking why or of learning the reason then, I must have asked someone; or perhaps I expected to learn the reason somewhere in the pages of the How and Why Library of Knowledge series.

Some years later I learned his reason for defacing those books. He worked the midnight shift in the Ford Motor Company River Rouge Plant factory and went to law school by day. He and my mother had married while still in college and had a rapidly growing family to support through hiscompletion of university and three years in law school (I am the oldest of six). In order to study at work, he needed to conceal "the book" to the extent he could. So, he tore the pages out of his books--"very carefully," he said--and placed them as carefully between the soft cotton of double undershirts worn to protect the torn pages. With torn out pages, he could manage more surreptitiously to read a page at a time. It could not have been easy--not to mention safe--studying the Rules of Evidence and contract and constitutional law while putting in a full effort on an assembly line. But, he told me later, a law degree had been his dream. "You have to have a dream, honey." were his exact words to me. The image remains vivid because the example has likely been a more powerfully guiding principle in my life than I had ever realized.

In the poem, A Dream Deferred, Langston Hughes posed the following provocative questions:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun, or
Fester like a sore, and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat, or
Crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Over sixty years later in On the Pulse of Morning (written and delivered by the author at the first Clinton inauguration), Maya Angelou played and varied the theme of dream. I will not read the entire poem but from the section that begins:

You, the Turk, the Arab, the Swede, the German, the Eskimo, the Scot, the Italian, the Hungarian, the Pole,
You, the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru bought, sold, stolen,
Arriving on a nightmare, praying for a dream.
Here root yourselves beside me.
I am that tree planted by the river;
I, the rock.
I, the river.
I, the tree.
I am yours - your passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces;
You have a piercing need for this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but
If faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon this day breaking for you.
Give birth again to the dream.

(Each time I read these words, I am moved yet again by their power--their imperative.)

And, over the years, in my journal I have often written the line from Yeats: "In dreams begins responsibility."
My great-grandmother? She died when I was in the third grade. And my father died almost 20 years ago. I like to think that they both live on in the books I have read and the stories I have told to our son. Among my most treasured possessions are the sweat-stained pages of the Rules of Evidence. Whenever I feel myself lacking the courage to risk, to learn, to dream, I touch those pages and reconnect with the power of human purpose, conviction, and a passion for living.

My father was right, of course. We must have dreams...and we must have the courage to do what is necessary to pursue them...to enable them. The song, "Happy Talk" from the musical South Pacific has a wonderful refrain that goes: "... you gotta have a dream, if you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true."

I also said that I would tell you why I thought it was important to share this with you today. I want to remind us all that time has a way of eroding dreams. We must pay attention so that the moments of action do not slip away. We must not miss the opportunity to act on our dreams, to enable them...as Amy Biehl did and taught her parents to do…as Peter Biehl did until the moment he breathed his last.

And let me not forget to speak about the courage to dream, for it does take courage, and it is worth the risk. Dreams really call us into action…lead us into action. Whenever you need courage, think of the story of Philip of Macedonia and how it happened that he gave his son, Alexander, the horse called Bucephalus. Remember? A merchant from a neighboring town offered to sell a horse to Philip of Macedonia, but Philip didn’t want to buy an untested horse, so he called for his grooms to come and put the horse through its paces. But one after another the groomsmen were thrown from the horse. Alexander, Philip’s young son who had been watching from the corner, asked his father it he could try to ride the steed. His father was sure he couldn’t. Besides, how could a young boy ride the spirited steed when none of the groomsmen had been able to. Philip finally relented, saying that he would give the horse to Alexander if he were actually able to ride it.

Alexander approached the horse from the front—head to head—and grasping the horse’s head, he turned it into the sunlight, for Alexander had noticed that the horse was so difficult to mount and ride because it was too afraid of its own shadow.

So, as I said, I would tell you a story (actually three of them: one about Peter Biehl, one about my father, and one about Alexander, son of Philip of Macedonia); I also said I would tell you about the lessons learned from these stories (having the courage to dream and to pursue the dream); and then I said I would tell you why it is important for me to share these stories with you: These are important matters because they have to do with life and its living…with enabling rather than disabling, with learning and growth…and with renewal.
Well, we must have the courage to turn toward the light and not be frightened by our own shadows…to have the courage to dream…and to pursue the dream…and to enable other and others’ dreams.

Thank you for your attention.

Dr. Marcellette G. Williams
Chancellor
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003