Chiefs great Willie Lanier has seen decades of unrest. Here’s why he’s encouraged now
It’s been 155 years since the American Civil War ended with the Union vanquishing the Confederacy and the institution of slavery.
Yet while some say history is written by the winners, the glorification of the abominable persists in tangible forms, including statues deifying the unrighteous.
The unrelenting gaze of those symbols enshadowed the existence of Chiefs legend Willie Lanier as a child in Richmond, Virginia.
On his way to school every day, he crossed Monument Avenue — best historically known for its tributes to the likes of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Confederate Gens. Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart.
And, most imposingly, one of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee finished 25 years after the end of the war.
Peering down “astride their different horses” and “gigantic in their placement,” Lanier said this week, they all stood to him as identifiers of division and what might be called sentinels of separation.
“I would constantly think, ‘What if they had won? Where would people who look like me, where would we be?’” said Lanier, who still makes his home there. “ ‘What would our futures have been?’ ”
In the case of Lanier, the future became one of a scholar who molded football to his own considerable will and applied it to become a Pro Football Hall of Famer and infinitely accomplished businessman.
But that doesn’t make him any less cognizant of the force field those statues represented to him.
And the impediments they represented to others who “did not have that uniqueness of a particular skill” as he did in football.
And how they stood for an inherent absence of equality that he pushed through to an education at Morgan State.
His own success doesn’t make any less vivid his memory of the rebel flags emerging when a statue was erected nearby of tennis great and social-justice activist Arthur Ashe. And it doesn’t dim his recollection of how stunned visiting former teammate and fellow Hall of Famer Jan Stenerud was when he witnessed such exaltation of the Confederacy, a memory Stenerud confirmed in a phone call Tuesday.
“It was sad for me to see that and listen to what Willie went through,” said Stenerud, a Norwegian who came to the United States in the 1960s and saw his share of racism in action but nonetheless said he was shocked to see such imagery publicly endorsed.
So Lanier was moved to hear the news last week that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam plans to soon remove statues of Lee and four other Confederate figures.
A judge in Richmond on Tuesday issued an injunction preventing Northam’s administration from removing the Lee statue for 10 days, but a spokesman from the governor’s office said he remains committed to bringing down the divisive symbol.
Assuming it indeed ultimately comes down, Lanier said, he will observe it as a “signature moment” that he never thought would come to pass.
“It’s been 130 years — 130 years,” said Lanier, who as of August will have been alive for 75 of those.
It’s a perhaps cosmetic but nonetheless substantial step long overdue, precipitated at last by protests that have convulsed the nation in the wake of the public murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
When Lanier thinks of Floyd’s life being brazenly, casually choked out of him beneath the knee of former officer Derek Chauvin, he thinks about his own tears. And about how the Geneva Convention prescribed humane treatments even for those at war.
“At least (in the Geneva Convention) you had an attempt at humanity,” he said, adding that no such effort was made when it came to yet another gratuitous killing of a black man. “That was all taken away. With a hand in the pocket. …
“I think that’s what hit everybody: the lack of humanity. (And) if I perceive that you have a lack of humanity towards me, what am I supposed to do? How do I gauge you?”
So it is that Lanier and other black men and women are left to assume what they saw done to Floyd “could have been (done to) any one of us,” he said.
Never mind that Lanier is a famous citizen.
“I’ve never had any issues of any note from a police standpoint. Except I notice that as a (police) car comes into my rearview or side mirror, I will get a queasiness until it passes,” he said. “Now, that still happens. (Sometimes I say), ‘OK, God, is there going to be a time when I don’t feel this?’ Well, the answer as of today is no.”
To Lanier, today also comes with echoes of 1968 in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
(Speaking of whom, and speaking of symbolism, wouldn’t now be a fine time to rename the J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain as the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Fountain? As Star reader Zachary Jonas put it in a letter to the editor last fall, “Not only would honoring King this way remove the Nichols name associated with segregationist ideals, but it would symbolically and triumphantly conquer Nichols’ racist views with King’s sacred name. … It would unequivocally show the world Kansas Citians’ true values.”)
While Lanier remembers the armored personnel carriers around the streets of Kansas City, he thinks now that those days had nowhere near the sweeping feel of these.
He wonders if some of that is the emergence of 24/7 news but mostly figures the movement is now on an entirely different scale … around the world with hundreds of thousands of people passionately involved for weeks.
“This thing,” he said, “is more powerful than anything we’ve ever seen.”
While he laments that not much seemed to change between the reactions to Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists in 1968 and Colin Kaepernick starting to take a knee in 2016, his initial sense now is that there seems to be “an interest in listening longer before stating your opinion.”
So even as he’s not sure what a realistic hope is for further change ahead, he sees that point as imperative in anything to come.
After all, he knows the good that can come of listening and sharing and simply being able to respectfully occupy the same space.
Like he found in the business world and the melting pot of the Chiefs’ locker rooms he was in, which in turn became part of a broader integration into the community here through housing and other segregationist restrictions that still prevailed.
“If I’m not around someone,” he said, “how do you become more comfortable? How do you develop a relationship?”
Sports hardly were a perfect vehicle, but often they illuminated (and still do) what Lanier called “a way to identify hope for what could be better.”
And, he added, the NFL would be smart to not just acknowledge the perspectives of young and educated men from diverse cultures but to embrace further dialogue and actions accordingly.
So, upset as he is about the fringe opportunists who have been looting, he admires and appreciates the voices of this movement.
Both for what it has the potential to do … and is on the verge of eradicating in Richmond.
The monuments might seem mere symbols, yes.
But what they stand for, what Lanier calls “identifiers of slavery” and barriers to equality, should be stood for no more — something Lanier’s experience and perspective makes all the more clear for anyone in doubt.