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One balmy summer evening two years ago, Sherialyn Byrdsong's husband, Ricky, a former basketball coach for Northwestern University, took their two youngest children, Ricky Jr., then 8, and Kelley, then 10, for a walk through their quiet suburban neighborhood outside Chicago, Illinois. As Ricky and the kids were walking a block from their house, Benjamin Smith, a white supremacist, cruised up from behind Ricky, leaned out his car window, and savagely shot a rapid round of gunfire. Bullets flew everywhere, burrowing into the siding of a nearby house and into Ricky's back, but miraculously missing the children. Then Benjamin Smith drove on, looking for his next random victims. (He eventually killed two people and wounded nine others—all either African- American, Jewish, or Asian-American—in two states before he took his own life.) Ricky and his children ran toward their house, but Ricky only made it across the street before falling in a neighbor's yard.
When Sherialyn returned home from an errand a short time later, her kids led her to Ricky, who was barely conscious on the corner one block from their house. She rushed to get him medical attention, but several hours later, after emergency surgery, Ricky died—simply because he was black, and had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sherialyn Byrdsong was left a widow and single mother of three young children. Ironically, his death came one week after Ricky had signed a book contract on a topic about which he was passionate: adapting what he'd learned on the basketball court as a coach, and applying it to building stronger families. Now Sherialyn was left to coach their children alone, three months shy of their 20th wedding anniversary.
Sherialyn could have become embittered toward whites or even toward God. Yet she chose to cling fervently to her faith in Christ and to pour her anger into something good. At Ricky's funeral, she wrote a message for the program that summed up her newfound role as a "voice in the wilderness": "It's time to wake up, America. It's time to turn back to God, to read and obey his Word, to put prayer and the Bible back into our schools and daily family living. This is not a gun problem, it's a heart problem, and only God and reading his Word can change our hearts. There can be no greater memorial and tribute to [Ricky's] life than to dedicate ourselves to the same pureness of heart and clean conscience in the sight of our God." Within days, she began work on Ricky's book, Coaching Your Kids in the Game of Life (Bethany House), along with coauthors Dave and Neta Jackson, and began forming The Ricky Byrdsong Foundation, whose mission is to eradicate the fear and ignorance that lead to hate. Some of its work includes running basketball camps and hosting an anti-hate program that brings teens of different races—including supremacists—together in a year-long work/play/discussion group. Sherialyn represents the foundation as she travels throughout the country speaking on the need for racial reconciliation and a return to godly values. She's taken a front seat in the movement for hate crimes legislation, and has spoken at the White House and for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, as well as at schools, church groups, and civic organizations.
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