The boys from Iran

I remember the first time I ate a home-cooked Persian meal. Fragrant rice on a large platter surrounded by seasoned vegetables. My best friend, Ed, his brother Bill, and I sat cross-legged around the platter on the floor of a rented home in a trailer park. The air was redolent with the scents of cardamom and cumin as our new friends, Mohammed and Hussein, showed us how to use flatbread to scoop up our dinner.

The flatbread, too, was fresh-baked. Ed, Bill, and I raved about the meal the brothers had served us. As was their way, they bowed their heads shyly to acknowledge our praise—trying hard to be good hosts, living alone in a strange country when they were still just boys.

Though they were only teenagers, Mohammed and Hussein lived on their own in the trailer park—7,000 miles from home. Their parents had sent them to America, out of the killing path of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the radical Shia cleric, and his followers, who called their uprising Enghelab-e Eslami—the Islamic Revolution.

Under the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran had been rapidly modernizing, though his rule remained authoritarian. When Khomeini toppled Pahlavi, he promised justice, peace, and dignity amid the restoration of the true worship of Allah. Many believed and supported him. Instead, Khomeini institutionalized repression.

The Islamic Republic fused religion with politics and purged dissenters. Women lost legal rights, were forced to wear the hijab, and were beaten if they refused. Protesters were shot in the streets.

And that’s how two young Iranian teens wound up in Scottsboro, Ala. Both were brilliant, and their parents feared for their lives. I never learned why Mohammed and Hussein wound up in a Southern burg with a checkered past and not some more cosmopolitan place where their brown faces might blend in. In 1931, two white women falsely accused nine black teenagers—later known as the Scottsboro Boys—of raping them on a freight train. Rushed trials sent several of the boys to death row in one of the most notorious mis­carriages of justice in American history.

By 1979, while natural and civil rights were collapsing in Iran, they were expanding in America. When we shared supper with the Iranian brothers, the Civil Rights Act was only 15 years old. I later realized my black classmates were among the first generation born after the right to vote had been secured in law.

But some of my white classmates showed it would take more than an act of Congress to drive a stake into racist hearts. Growing up in the “melting pot” of Hawaii, I had never heard anyone use the N-word. The first time I heard it in Scottsboro, I felt physically ill. Then, when Mohammed and Hussein enrolled at my high school, those same classmates improvised the slur, adding the word sand and hurling it at teenage refugees.

Thus, I found myself standing at a three-way crossroads: an American racial reconciliation still painfully incomplete, a calcifying Iranian theocracy that would one day menace the world, and a friendship with immigrant teenagers trying to navigate both.

All this makes the current U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran very personal to me. Since the war began, I’ve heard many testimonies from adults whose parents, like Mohammed and Hussein’s, sent them to America while they stayed behind under the bootheels of the ayatollahs.

What kind of country makes parents gamble their children’s futures this way? What American parent can imagine sending their children 7,000 miles from home—deciding life alone in a trailer park amid simmering racism was the better option for their kids?

Mohammed and Hussein quickly learned their freedom came at a price. The people who stayed behind in Iran are still paying it. Decades later, the people of their homeland still cry, “Azadi! Azadi! Azadi!”—Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!

For me, that cry isn’t theoretical but embodied in two Iranian boys who became my friends. Mohammed and Hussein are men now—maybe grandparents like me, blessed with self-determination secured by the sacrifice of their parents all those years ago.

But their countrymen still suffer imprisonment, rape, and public executions under a dictatorship desperate to hold onto power.

Forty-seven years is enough. For the sake of my friends, their families, and all families like them, I cry with them:

Azadi!