Edward David White, an eighteen-year-old black boy not very likely to get into trouble, was murdered in Philadelphia in 1965. It was a night in early fall. He would go after work to meet his girlfriend, a precocious mother of an eight-month-old boy and pregnant with his second daughter. A 16-year-old drunk, accompanied by three other young men and armed with a 38 caliber revolver, fatally crossed his path.
He shot him in the chest. He was looking to avenge a member of his youth gang, stabbed to death a few days earlier. White, with no police record, had nothing to do with that death. The murderer, who was drunk, was arrested that same night and, since he was a minor, he spent four and a half years in a correctional facility for adolescents.
When he came out, he walked for a few more years on the wrong side of life. He spent another season in jail. And in his thirties he settled down, took a master’s degree in business administration, left the neighborhood, and became Larry Miller, a top executive at Nike. He became president of the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team and in charge of the exploitation in the multinational of the Michael Jordan brand, of whom he was a right-hand man in business. He is 72 years old.
It could be an exemplary American moral tale, if it weren’t for the fact that on his long road to success, he always hid that corpse in his locker.
56 years later he has decided to settle accounts with his past and tell his story in a memoir, Jump: My Secret Journey From the Streets to the Boardroom (Skip: My Secret Trip from the Streets to the Boardroom), scheduled for release in January. Earlier, in October he gave an interview to Sports Illustrated, And this weekend, The New York Times has reconstructed history from the point of view of the family of the murdered, for whom the latest news has meant a bitter return to the past.
They would have liked, at least, as they have expressed to the New York newspaper, to have known in advance of the publication of the book and about what it revealed about the absurd end of their loved one. They found out thanks to the fact that the son, today a 56-year-old man, accidentally read the interview on the internet a couple of weeks ago. Sports Illustrated. Until then, he only knew that his father had been murdered at the corner of 53rd Street and Locust. Nothing more.
Join now EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits
Subscribe here
Miller does not cite in the memoirs the name of the one whose life he took ahead, although he writes that “he will always mourn his loss.” He also says that he did not know the victim and that his death was due to nothing but chance. Telling it 56 years later, he adds, has freed him from the nightmares and migraines that have haunted him for more than half a century. In all this time he kept that episode a secret, especially after being rejected in a job interview with an important consulting firm when they learned of his background. Since then, he chose to dedicate his life to that form of lying that consists of not telling the whole truth.
That night in 1965, White, seeing himself at gunpoint, raised his hands and tried to convince his assailants that he did not belong to any gang. Miller paid for his crime, but the family now demands an apology or that at least in the book, which has not yet seen the light, White’s name appears.
The episode has resonated with force in the United States, a country on which the suspicion is still projected that at the time of death, race determines, as this case that happened half a century ago shows, how much you matter to the system.
Follow all the international information at Facebook and Twitter, o en our weekly newsletter.