Photo by Marcin Czerniawski
The story told by the Secretary of State designate Anthony Blinkin says it all about how we will now want to be perceived by the world. His late step father, Samuel Pisar, after surviving four years in a concentration camp, made a break from a death march to encounter an American tank. The hatch of the tank opened and an African American man looked down on him. Pisar said the only words in English that he knew, taught to him by his mother before the war, “God bless America.” “That is who we are”, said Blinken. “That is what America represents to the world, however imperfectly.”
There is more to this anecdote than meets the eye. The first group to liberate concentration camps was a segregated Engineers Combat Battalion. Dr. Leon Bass who was a friend of mine was part of that troop that Blinken is referring to in his remark. Dr. Bass was an educator and a first-hand witness to the liberation of Buchenwald. He came to speak at the Episcopal Academy at the Chapel services. He continued to honor my request to come and address the community long after he retired from public speaking about his life experiences. He died on March 31, 2015. When I heard of his death, I stopped, thought about our friendship, his experiences, and was silent in prayer to honor his Quaker tradition.
He describes his “not being good enough” from the time that he volunteered for service in the United States Army in 1943 through his days following the war. He fought racism and all the “isms” his entire life.
His words are powerful. It puts Blinken’s comment in a bigger context. There once was a statement in our culture, “Be like Mike”, meaning to be like Michael Jordan as a standard of excellence. We need as well to “Be like Leon” as he is faith in action. After that horrible event at Charlottesville, Leon’s words make an even bigger impact. White supremacy couldn’t happen here in this country, could it? Leon would say,”Yes, if you don’t keep being vigilant.” He, like President Obama, thought that America was the promised land.
After college Leon was chosen to be the Principle of one of the most challenging, violent high schools in Philadelphia. He told others that he was going to turn that school around with love. People just laughed. Leon was present for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech in Washington and was influenced greatly by it. His experience at that speech and his liberation of Buchenwald were moments that changed his life forever. He was a practicing Quaker, not a Quaker in name only. He made the school into one of the very best in the city. He filled those students with a sense of promise of what their lives could be like.
He had some hard truths to tell our school community that I thought should be heard in the many times he came to speak. At the end of his address, he would say: (I paraphrase) “You think that what happened in Germany could never occur again. It can and it does. Injustice occurs in our nation. It occurs in this school as well. It happens when you bully someone, when you know what is right and don’t stand up for that right or another person being treated badly, and when groups are targeted because of their race, religion, or sexual orientation. It happens when you keep silent with the noise of wrong doing sounding in your ears. It happens when you choose the easy wrong rather than the harder right."
The students and faculty always gave him a standing ovation after hearing some very challenging words of what our nation and school should be, a place of liberty and justice. They did it because they always chose authenticity over hard truths to hear. After all the school motto is “Esse Quam Videri”, to be rather than to seem to be. There was always “being” not “seeming” in the life of Dr. Bass. I like that Anthony Blinkin set the tone for his leadership with that story. Leon lived exactly what Anthony Blinkin was urging us to consider as our future together.
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