Amy Biehl’s Life Was Short but Her Legacy Is Immortal

Sometimes, death has a poetic quality to it, almost as if a master lyricist had penned the verses that captured the end of a person’s life.

If you’re inclined to think along such lines, you couldn’t help but reflect on the death in South Africa last week of Amy Elizabeth Biehl of Newport Beach.

Death that came half a world away from her Orange County soil.

Death at the hands of total strangers who stoned and then stabbed her.

Death then mourned by hundreds of others who also were strangers.

It would all seem so crass, so inhuman, so pointless.

And yet, it was a death rich in poetry and historical symmetry. It was a death so rich in humanity, in fact, that it will keep Amy Biehl’s memory alive as surely as if she had lived to be 100.

At 26, Amy Biehl was too young to remember the March on Washington in 1963. It was perhaps the seminal moment in the modern history of the American civil rights movement, an event that converted millions of people to the cause. It left history with the indelible visual image of throngs converging at the Lincoln Memorial and with the indelible aural image of Martin Luther King crying out, “I have a dream!”

It was a day and a speech that sent thousands of foot soldiers out across the country, working anonymously or publicly to advance civil rights.

A generation later, Amy Biehl had become one of those soldiers.

In noble battles fostered by noble causes, all deaths are heroic. So it is with hers.

She died in the week marking the 30th anniversary of the march. How perfectly poignant, how historically eerie that her death now serves to remind everyone that the war goes on, the soldiers keep fighting.

Biehl was what this country used to call the “best and the brightest.” Scholastic, athletic, vivacious, driven by a social conscience, she, like all the best and brightest, saw life not as a desultory stroll, but as a purposeful march.

As a student at Stanford, she became interested in the burgeoning civil rights and democratization movement in Africa, an interest that would inexorably draw her to South Africa. Despite her youth, State Department officials already had hailed more than one of her research papers on African politics as breakthrough documents. When she became a Fulbright fellow in 1992, she continued her research at the University of the Western Cape.

Friends said after her death that Amy sometimes spoke ominously about her safety. That kind of talk is not uncommon among soldiers or freedom fighters. They’re conscious of death’s lurking shadow but combat its presence by striving to outpace it.

That’s why it misses the point to call Biehl’s death “senseless.”

It won’t help the Biehl family to think of their daughter and sister’s death as devoid of meaning. Nor should they.

It was not senseless at all. Sad, to be sure, but not senseless.

She died for a cause that has burned for centuries. Far from being a senseless death, it was a glorious one.

Should there be any doubt, what happened after her murder supplied all the meaning a family could possibly hope for while contemplating a loved one’s death.

Consider that Amy had been in South Africa only 10 months but that 1,000 people attended her funeral service. Consider that hundreds of them then formed a five-mile processional to where she was attacked by the mob. At that point, an estimated 300 staged a peaceful protest. Consider that hundreds of mourners have laid flowers along a picket fence next to where she was killed.

No, not a senseless death. No more senseless than that of the millions who have preceded her in the centuries-old fight for human rights.

In that sense, Amy Biehl now belongs to the ages. Not because of who she was or how old she was, but for the cause she fought for. She becomes another fallen soldier, some who died bearing arms and some who died bearing books.

My guess is that Amy Biehl wouldn’t be one of those calling her death senseless. As a scholar, she knew the roots of racism and repression. She understood the anger and hatred it creates. She knew that whites killed blacks, and that blacks killed whites. She knew the stakes of the war she was waging and probably knew instinctively the war would still be burning long after her lifetime.

Her father, Peter Biehl, seemed to sound just the right note when he said Amy would be embarrassed by all the attention her death is getting.

I’m sure he’s right. It wasn’t surprising to read that one of Amy’s friends telephoned the Biehls and said Amy showed no fear as the stoning began that led to her death.

Of course not. That’s what defines the best and brightest--noble soldiers to the end, drawing sustenance not from attention but from the worthiness of their cause. Wanting to live, to be sure, to carry on that cause but knowing that, should they fall in battle, their death was far from senseless.