Clarity Out of Tragedy : Fighting for racial justice--and remembering Amy Biehl

This week’s visit to South Africa by the Orange County family of a woman tragically slain while helping advance democracy in that strife-filled country was a hopeful, defining moment.

As the United States struggles to adapt its role in a vastly changed world, such singular events sometimes can offer clarity. We see who we are as a people, and what it is that we stand for in the community of nations.

Amy Biehl, 26, a Fulbright scholar, was caught up in South Africa’s terrible violence last summer while working to develop voter education programs and to foster equal opportunity and protection for South Africans during the delicate period of transition to democracy.

Her family’s visit should serve to reaffirm the applicability of America’s basic values and illustrate their inspirational linkage to the hopes of struggling peoples around the world.

Besides Biehl, a white, thousands of South Africans--most of them blacks--have paid the ultimate price. However, the Biehl family has sought to focus not on death but on the many in South Africa who share the strong belief that Amy held, a belief in a brighter future for their country.

In celebrating her vision with those who worked alongside her, Peter Biehl, her father, said it well: “What she was involved in is much bigger than her, and much bigger than all of us.”

The moving presence and public pain of one American family certainly cannot stop the violence. Indeed, the Biehl family’s visit has itself been framed in bloody events--the killing of five black youths, the stabbing Friday of a Brown University exchange student; and at a funeral Mass for Biehl a speaker delivered an ominous warning that violence is likely to continue until apartheid is brought to an end.

But if South Africa’s past and present are written in bloodshed, its future depends mightily on the efforts of those like the Biehls. Their contribution is made without guns or angry words, but it is powerful. It lies in the American notion that a better day for all is indeed possible.