My friend Kindell
Stephens died January 2, 2008.
Hundreds – maybe
thousands -- of others in Middle Tennessee, and elsewhere, can say this very
thing. Kindell had more friends than anyone I’ve ever met. Not acquaintances –
friends.
Establishing a
friendship typically calls for one party to take the initiative. Kindell was
determined to be my friend. We met while playing on-on-one basketball at the Y.
Kindell was a great player – he had a
cup of coffee with the Lakers – and he was surprised – and pleased – that I
wasn’t intimidated by him. Whenever he saw the glimmer of pride, the spark of
competitive fire, he embraced it.
Kindell cultivated
the seeds of self-reliance in dozens of kids down through the years. A young man who spoke at his funeral thanked
Kindell for “seeing something in me when nobody else saw anything.”
Kindell saw
something in me, as well. Maybe it was a curiosity about him and his culture. I’d
been to college and played basketball, but my education hadn’t included
becoming real friends with any African Americans. The ones I’d known were as
wary of me as I was of them.
Kindell came to
Nashville in the mid-‘60s, when segregation was yet in full flower. He went to
Fisk, starred in basketball, had that stint in the pros, and came back to
Nashville. He counseled young athletes, first at Fisk, later at Tennessee
State, where he was sports information director and the “Voice of the Tigers”
on radio broadcasts.
After Kindell and I
met, he asked me to play on a basketball team with him. I was the only white on
a team of blacks – I got an inkling of what it was like to be a minority.
Kindell helped me feel at ease.
The more I got to
know Kindell, the more I learned about empathy – not the refined and ethereal
kind of empathy the philosophers recommend, but empathy in action. I seldom saw
Kindell without several charges in tow – the kids whose causes he took up and
made his own. As Howard Gentry, a longtime friend and broadcast associate of
Kindell’s, said at a memorial tribute attended by hundreds: “If you knew
Kindell, chances are that he helped you in some way.” Gentry also said,
“Kindell brought me out of myself.”
As pastor Darrell
Drumright said in his splendid and stirring eulogy, and as the dozen or more
illustrious speakers echoed at the memorial celebration: Kindell Stephens was a
facilitator, an ambassador, an encourager. He brought people together…
Why did he do it?
Kindell’s brother Leonard, speaking at the tribute, recounted Kindell’s happy childhood.
He wasn’t a former waif himself, on a mission to return good for evil. He was
simply a good man.
We are all strangers
to one another. Our hearts are restless, St. Augustine said, because earth is
not our true home.
Kindell has gone
home.
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