The Most American Story You’ve Never Heard

I’m not famous. I’m not rich. I never rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous either. But I grew up with real American heroes. My Papaw had a shoebox full of medals from flying a B-17 over Europe in World War II. Some of his buddies had the same medals from D-Day, from the Battle of the Bulge. These were the kind of men who came home quietly, worked their farms or their shifts in the mines, and never bragged about what they did to save the world.

In my life I’ve crossed paths with a few names folks you may know. Tim Kaine, our Virginia Senator who ran for Vice President in 2016. A little over a decade earlier I went to his inauguration ball when he became Governor of Virginia. And once I even shook hands with Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, right in a local diner in Big Stone Gap. He was on one of his store visits, driving that old Ford pickup of his. No security detail, no big fuss…just Sam Walton, a cup of coffee, and a conversation about business with the locals.

But the most American man I’ve ever met isn’t a politician (yet) or a billionaire. His name is Dr. Biko Agozino. He isn’t rich or famous. He’s a professor who has lived in Virginia for sixteen years, and he is running for the House of Delegates in District 42, which covers the Virginia counties of Giles, Montgomery, Pulaski, and the city of Radford.  Mostly rural, very MAGA-Red.

If I was hired as a consultant for his opponent’s campaign, I already know the attack lines. “He’s not from here.” “Biko came to America and now he wants to change it.” Same boilerplate we hear every election.

Here’s the truth. Biko is the most American man I have ever met because he survived and escaped a country where the government worked only for the rich. Where there were three kinds of people: the rich, the working poor, and the starving poor.

He’s running because he is living proof of the American Dream. He’s running to PROTECT IT. To keep it alive for everybody, not just the billionaires. He believes in an America where the poor get a fair shot, where working families have the same rights as the wealthy, where democracy belongs to the people.

Biko was born in a small village in Eastern Nigeria. His family farmed to survive. When he was a boy, the Nigeria-Biafra war broke out. Folks around the world saw the pictures of starving children, you know the ones with the very bloated bellies, “Biafra Babies.” Biko was one of them.

He lived through starvation and disease. His family lost everything. He remembers bombers overhead, neighbors too weak to stand, and his mother digging crabs out of the mud to keep them alive. His father sold land just to pay school fees. More than three million people died in that war. Biko lived, and he carried one lesson that never left him: when democracy fails, war takes its place. And war destroys everything.

After the war, Biko went back to school. He studied by candlelight and worked in the fields. He kept climbing when others quit. He earned a scholarship to the University of Calabar, then to Cambridge, then to Edinburgh, where he finished his doctorate on Black women and the criminal justice system.

He never forgot his roots. He taught summer classes for poor kids. He fought the juvenile death penalty in Pennsylvania and saw the Supreme Court ban it. He helped reopen an SAT test center in Nigeria so more students had a chance. For more than thirty years he’s been teaching and mentoring, sixteen of those years right here in Virginia.

Biko doesn’t need to run for office. He already has a career and a beautiful family. But he knows the American Dream is not guaranteed. It has to be defended.

He has lived in a place where the rich controlled everything and the poor had nothing. He has seen what happens when the government forgets its people. And he knows America is at its best when everybody gets a fair shot and power stays in the hands of voters.

That is why Dr. Biko Agozino is running for the House of Delegates in District 42. He is a farm boy who survived war and built a life through education. He is a professor who calls Virginia home. He is a husband, a father, and a neighbor. And he is living proof of the American Dream.

Final words for voters:
Biko is running against an opponent backed by hundreds of thousands of dollars in corporate campaign funds from outfits like Dominion Energy. If you want to support an underdog, but a fighter, someone who doesn’t have to dream the American Dream because he is the American Dream, then please donate to Biko. I promise it will make you feel good. Click, support, and donate here: Friends of Biko

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John W. Peace II is a fifth-generation farmer from Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where he grew up on his family’s dairy, Clinch Haven Farms, and still lives today farming hay and beef cattle. He’s a proud father to Trey and Shelby Peace, and partner in life to Cathy Swinney. A Virginia Tech graduate with graduate studies at Penn State, he served as the youngest Chair of the Wise County Board of Supervisors (2004–2008). John co-owns SafeHavenServices.co and urTOPIX LLC (urTopixLLC.com), a Democratic campaign consulting firm focused on reaching rural voters that is sponsored by www.RuralAmericaRising.com PAC. He’s also a two-time Amazon bestselling author. Learn more at www.JohnWPeace.com.