LeBron James

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I’m not much of a professional sports fan. In eleven years in Akron, Ohio, I attended one professional baseball game and a couple of minor-league games of the Akron Aeros, a local farm team. I can’t remember ever attending a professional basketball game.

But I know who LeBron James is. I knew well before his fourth pick as the NBA’s Most Valuable Player.

As I drove from my home to my work at the University of Akron, I used to pass St. Vincent’s school on Market Street. That was the Catholic School that gave James his ticket out of the ghetto. His own brains and athletic talent did the rest.

As I drove by on my way to work, I watched James’ donations transform St. Vincent’s school into something bigger and grander. I read about his generosity to his community, which he gave without fanfare or publicity. He gave back for others, not for his own ego. My admiration only increased on hearing that he recently contributed millions to re-enfranchise ex-felons in Florida by paying off their modern versions of poll taxes.

Our nation is filled with wealthy celebrities. Our media resound with their enormous egos, their tasteless displays and waste of wealth, their drugs, their over-the-top parties, their infidelities, their often miserable “private” lives, and sometimes their untimely deaths from depression and overdose. Our president is one of these celebrities.

Over the years, I’ve paid even less attention to them than I have to professional basketball. I could never understand how such miserable excuses for human beings merit such fawning press coverage.

But not LeBron James. I read, I see and I admire. I watch him support the Black Lives Matter movement with admiration for his firmness, his modesty, his understatement, and his understanding of both the necessity and the difficulty of change.

James has taken on the corporate and media worlds that have funded his extraordinary success. He has more at stake than Colin Kaepernick, but he’s followed Kaepernick’s lead.

Some day, I hope to see a statue of both men in bronze on the National Mall. Kaepernick will be on one knee, praying and pleading for justice, with the quiet grace and dignity of a strong man facing daunting odds. James will be making a layup behind him, wearing a Black Lives Matter emblem. Others who aided the effort will fill out the montage.

These men—and similar women—are national heroes. They are patriots of the first order.

They did not choose politics or social reform. They just wanted to play ball, and they are good at it. But politics and injustice chose them. They rose to the challenge and risked what they had achieved to support something larger than themselves: the much-needed perfection of our society.

I’m a thinker and a writer, not an organizer. But if someone organizes such a tribute, I hereby pledge $1,000—or whatever more I can afford—to a monument to their civic courage and leadership. We must recognize, as a nation, the value and valor of these men, not after they are gone (like Rep. John Lewis or Dr. King), but while they are still able to serve as living examples to our youth.

Endnote: There are reports of private efforts to fund statues of James in Akron and Kaepernick in Reno. But they are not just hometown heroes. Their efforts and risk-taking for social justice are for us all. Their statues belong on the National Mall precisely because their simple pleas for social justice required so much courage and risk-taking.

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