In recent months, we have lost several members of our Case Western Reserve University community. As we who work for peace with justice, know we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.   

I would like to remember Bennie Khoapa, Nahida Gordon, Douglas Kerr and Don Freeman, each of whom was single-minded in their life-long quest for truth, justice and peace.                                                                                It is no accident that we often chant in the streets the old Biblically-rooted adage, “No Truth, No Justice, No Peace.” On the other side are those who worship at the temple of Mammon where “It is all about the Benjamins,” in the classic words of the U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar. I offer below four brief sketches of four remarkable lives. I cannot possibly credit all of their accomplishments, but I hope to keep each of them alive in our memory.

Bennie Khoapa earned a PhD at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at CWRU in the area of social welfare. He, himself, was a political refugee from South Africa, where his colleague, Steve Biko was murdered by the South African apartheid police. Biko is the subject of the film, “Cry Freedom,” about resistance to apartheid after Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. Leaders of the African National Congress (ANC), Mandela’s congress, were all in prison, in exile or killed when Biko led a new youth movement for “black consciousness.” Like Biko, Bennie was confined for five years under house arrest.  Bennie escaped to the U.S., got his degree and went on to teach sociology in Michigan. When the apartheid government fell, he returned home to teach at Durban University of Technology, where he directed the annual celebration honoring Biko.

Nahida Halaby Gordon taught bio-statistics at CWRU’s Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing. She was one of the Palestinians driven from their homes by Jewish militias in the 1948 Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe in Arabic). 750,000 Palestinians, with their descendants, became permanent refugees in their own homeland, up until today. Nahida co-founded the Interfaith Committee for Peace in the Middle East along with other ’48 Palestinians. It brings together Muslims, Jews, Christians and others in prayer and service to the cause of peace. Nahida shared a Cleveland Peace Action event with Abbas Hamideh of Al-Awda, standing for Palestinian Right of Return Coalition. Later in life she traveled to Jaffa in Israel to visit her father’s house (a polite Jewish owner allowed her to come inside to rekindle childhood memories). She published her book, “Palestine Is Our Home” in 2016.

Douglas Kerr was a physician and researcher at CWRU and University Hospitals in pediatrics. He was born in Beirut, Lebanon in World War II and lived in several countries in the region before moving to the U.S. His brother, Malcolm Kerr, was a scholar of the Arab world and was chosen to become president of the American University of Beirut in the tumultuous 1980s, where he was assassinated in 1984. Doug dedicated himself to peace, and was on the national board of Churches for Middle East Peace, which sends delegations of Americans to visit and learn about the Israel/Palestine (I/P) conflict. He teamed up with his wife, Mary Ann Kerr, in Cleveland to sponsor such trips. Theologians who witnessed Israeli apartheid firsthand often returned home to support boycott, divestment and sanctions in their own churches.                 

Doug was a leader in Cleveland Peace Action where he helped sponsor programs on Middle East peace-making. One guest was Iyad Burnat on the film “5 Broken Cameras.” Doug co-authored an important op-ed with CWRU professor Ted Steinberg in 2016 analyzing the I/P peace process.

Don Freeman attended Cleveland Public Schools in the 1950s and then CWRU as a scholarship student. He returned to teach at the secondary level in Cleveland. He was fired by Superintendent Paul Briggs, in collaboration with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for working with and hosting Malcolm X in Cleveland. For years Don and his wife, Norma Freeman, attended and monitored meetings of the Cleveland Board of Education, documenting the failures that led the federal judge Frank Batista to order desegregation and busing to overcome deliberate patterns by the board to keep the schools segregated. Don and Norma regularly published their magazine, “Vibration,” to document this and other freedom struggles. The magazine was dedicated to “the resurrection of the mentally and spiritually dead.”  Norma was proud of actually having met W.E.B. Du Bois at her historically black college in the South. Don spoke at vigils for Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, killed by Cleveland police in East Cleveland, which he termed the 137 shots “Atrocity.” His book is entitled “Reflections of a Resolute Radical.” 

It will be a tall order to fill the shoes of those who came before us at CWRU. But we can and must. Their marvelous leadership and work require us to carry on. We can keep on by supporting the students unfairly punished by CWRU’s administration for their strong stand against what is now almost universally condemned as genocide in Gaza.