Bold Gold Star father tells his story in Marin
Khizr Khan loves to remind young people — or, as he calls them, “our future leaders and heroes” — that children have played an important role in his unexpected 18-month journey from being a reticent and apolitical father of a fallen U.S. soldier to a household name.
Ever since he fixed his gaze at the camera at the Democratic National Convention in July 2016, speaking directly to candidate Donald Trump and electrifying the nation, Khan — whose middle son, Capt. Humayun Khan, died in 2004 protecting his men from a suicide bomber in Baquba, Iraq — has been a global symbol of speaking up to denounce bigotry.
Interviewed last week at Dominican College, Khan recalled that when he was invited by Hillary Clinton’s campaign team to speak as a representative Gold Star father on the last night of the convention, he and his wife, Ghazala, spent days mulling over the offer at home in
Charlottesville, Va.
“We are humble, modest people. This felt too big for us,” said Khan, a Pakistani-born, Harvardeducated lawyer who became an American citizen in 1986.
“Our sons Shaharyar and Omer advised us, ‘Please don’t go, you’ll regret this,’ ” said Khan, 67. He was in the Bay Area to promote his two newly published books: a captivating and very personal memoir, “An American Family: A Memoir of Hope and Sacrifice,” and “This Is Our Constitution,” an accessible, nonpartisan primer on America’s founding documents written for middle school readers.
“We had decided not to accept,” Khan said. He walked to his mailbox that same afternoon and found a hand-delivered envelope with no stamp, addressed in a child’s writing. “It read: ‘You are a lawyer. Can you please not let them deport Maria? She is in the fifth grade. She is our friend.’ ”
Khan had been fielding similarly fearful questions from his Muslim and Hispanic neighbors (“anyone with different skin,” he said), whose children worried about deportation ever since Trump’s incendiary statement in December 2015 vowing to ban all Muslims from the United States.
“I would hearten them by reading the 14th Amendment, Section I, about equal protection and due process,” said Khan, who fell in love with the U.S. Constitution as a young law student in Lahore in 1972. “But the children were still scared, asking, ‘Are we going to be thrown out?’ ”
“We were thinking of them when we called the Clinton people back to accept.” And the rest is history. With Ghazala by his side, Khan pulled his $1 pocket Constitution from his blazer and said these now-famous words: “Donald Trump, you’re asking Americans to trust you with their future. Let me ask you, have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy.”
Kahn says the dramatic flourish was ad-libbed after he felt his beloved Constitution in his pocket while in a cab headed to Philadelphia’s Wells Fargo Center. He’d carried it for years, heavily underlined with quotes from Thomas Jefferson and Justice Antonin Scalia tucked inside. (His original copy now resides in the Virginia Historical Society.) “We practiced how I should pull it out of my pocket, with the cabbie watching,” he said with a laugh.
“So, you see, I stand here because of you,” Khan told an all-school assembly at Hall Middle School in Larkspur on a recent morning. “It was your peers who sent us to speak on your behalf. See the power your words can have.”
Khan describes himself as a naturally private person who misses being home with his grandchildren, but believes “a time comes in everyone’s life to speak out” when democratic virtues are being trampled. Khan’s Marin school visit was his 176th appearance since the convention. Book Passage in Corte Madera (which hosted Khan’s Dominican event) has seen a substantial increase in their sale of pocket-size Constitutions ever since Khan held up his own at the convention.
Wearing a dark suit and his gold star lapel pin, Khan kept the packed gym, including numerous Marin County parents eager to see him in person, rapt as he made his plea for civic engagement as an antidote to today’s rancorous political climate.
The oldest of 10 children raised on a small farm without electricity in Punjab Province, Khan told the Hall students that “I remain in awe of the Bill of Rights, which I call the Bill of Human Dignities, because I have lived twice under martial law. Please remember that some parts of the world do not have these rights — of equality and fairness, even the right to assemble and to speak freely.
“Always remember this word: civility. It must be our motto,” he said. “We may disagree, and in democracy there are always two sides to an issue, but the sides must talk to each other with dignity.”
The adults in attendance caught Khan’s unspoken reference to the backlash he and Ghazala experienced when Trump fired back at them on Twitter after the convention.
“We were saddened, but not surprised,” he told The Chronicle. “We knew his mentality, and his lack of empathy was well known.”
In person, as well as in “An American Family” — which is both a personal history of the Khan family and an emblematic story of immigrant struggle and ambition — Khan stresses the importance of his outsider’s perspective. As someone who first learned of America’s democratic virtues as faraway abstract ideals, he only discovered later, as a U.S. citizen himself, that the durability of these freedoms is perennially tested.
“I can perhaps see more clearly the blessings of America because they were once new to me,” he writes near the end of his memoir. “I am an American patriot not because I was born here but because I was not.”
As a new immigrant, Khan was in awe of the many small indicators of what he calls “the 14th Amendment’s equal protections put into practice”: city buses running on time, house numbers at every address, even the slow, egalitarian crawl at the DMV (“where we all take a number and wait,” regardless of status).
Khan reminds every audience that as a student at the University of Virginia, his son Humayun “wrote an essay entitled ‘Democracy Requires Vigilance and Sacrifice.’ The vigilance part is my mission now.”
As students filed out of the gym and back to class, a few hung back hoping to shake hands with Khan.
“It was so inspirational hearing him,” said seventh-grader Kourosh Vafaie, 12. “He made us all feel that we’re connected, no matter how different we are. He’s kind of the opposite of Trump.”
“I can’t believe we got the opportunity to meet him,” said Trent Carrade, 12, of Larkspur, who had watched Khan’s convention speech in his history class. “He has a simple message, but it’s really inspiring. Everyone, all of us, have equal rights, and we shouldn’t take that for granted.”
“I am often asked what I would add if I could write a new constitutional amendment,” Khan said at the end of his remarks.
“I would add Amendment No. 28, stating that every American must read the country’s founding documents. We can only protect these liberties after we become aware of what they truly mean.”