Former Dallas Mayor Pro Tem Don Hill Speaks Out

Letter to the Editor

I am not an apologist for America! I am writing this letter on the 6th anniversary of my incarceration, while hospitalized in a federal medical center in Butner, North Carolina, with Stage 4 prostate cancer, serving an 18 year sentence for public corruption. I may never see freedom again. Therefore, I have reason to be fatalistic about my daughters’ and grandchildren are, including my 18 year- old grandson’s, future in America. Nevertheless, my life experiences tell me of a power in expectant optimism and that power works toward righteousness – even righteousness in America.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ bestselling book, “Between the World and Me”, took my hope for America to task in a way that was unexpected. In writing a letter to his beautiful teenage son, his counsel concerning his son’s future in America is devoid, in large measure, of the 3 pillars of my spiritual life: faith, hope and love. Despite Coates’ love for family and the African American community, this writer’s authentic affections falter in the face of America’s history of hatred and oppression of our ebony brothers and sisters.

Three major premises emerge in Coates’ book: first, the assault on ” black bodies” by America’s law enforcement, educational and economic institutions, have given birth to a fear born of Coates’ life experiences, that is beyond hopeful end.

Secondly, racism is the “father of race” and its implications of white supremacy and black inferiority. Finally, the “love power “of African American people profoundly displayed in the aftermath of the murder of the Charleston Nine is not from God or divinely inspired. As exquisitely explained in a recent “Letter to the Editor,” love requires a risk of loss, of rejection, of rebuke. Nevertheless, love requires me and all who desire the best for America to “cast out bread upon the waters” as King Solomon advised over 3,000 years ago. In loving our enemies and America with its legacy of failed promises, we embrace the possibility that America’s vituperative progeny will ultimately see us as authentic Americans. The transformation has begun already. We have given birth to educational, economic and cultural institutions and icons that impact America on a daily basis.

Our struggle to achieve full citizenship embodies this Nation’s highest principles. The humility and courage displayed by so many African Americans, young and old, rich and poor, skilled and unskilled, over our history in this country point undeniably to an endowment from God. The fact that the book remained on so many bestseller lists throughout 2015 and beyond is a testimony to the powerful writing of Coates and, most important, the disillusionment in America.

The killing of black and brown men across America, including Dallas, grieves my heart, as well as the increasing rate of poverty throughout our Nation. We are frustrated! From the segregated neighborhoods of America’s class – stratified urban areas, including Dallas, and the attendant dangers to Coates’ son, as well as my grandson, I am ever prayerful.

Coates’ cry for the sanctity of his son’s body echoes the paternal prayers of every faithful father. Deaths in the black lives of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, La Quan McDonald, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice and too many others are anecdotal evidence of police oppression often repeated and devoid of real accountability. An innate response of parents, family members and the larger community resembles the fear of family separation during slavery: sudden, final, without remorse or justification. Even the legacy of indiscriminate lynching provided rules of conduct for the oppressed to follow though without any guarantee of safety.

Coates’ cautionary calculations to his son are heartfelt and real. The antidote, however, to this parental terror is the provocative trinity of faith, hope and love. May I explain? The foundation of a righteous nation is justice. As the sacred scripture from the book of the prophet Amos proclaims, justice and righteousness are infinitely intertwined and interrelated. Justice rolling down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream are progressive. What was the common thread in all of Jesus’ miracles on which the sufferer experienced healing – the quality of faith demonstrated or a lack thereof.

My faith in a righteous America is based on the progressive reinvention of itself. Nations do reinvent themselves. America has and continues to reinvent itself through historic social movements. I do not believe we are captive to our past, nor condemned by our present predicament, but faithful to the principles of America’s founding documents and its reinvented iterations of freedom from stigma or oppression, due process of law, equal protection and full citizenship. We are not pitiful victims; we are pitiless victors!

An early 20th century writer best captured, in words, the danger of fear in a short essay entitled “The Realization of Perfect Peace” when he proclaimed:  Fear is everywhere. Fear has become with millions a fixed habit. To live in continual dread, continuing cringing, continual fear of everything be it loss of love, loss of money or situation, is to take the readiest means to lose what we fear we shall. Consider this; hope that is seen is no hope at all!

A hopeless, struggle-filled future that Coates casts before his son is the antithesis of a legacy born of our historic heritage. Throughout the historical journey of African American people, we possessed an eternal hope as well as a daily expectation that our lives will be better, we will survive, no matter the circumstances. This courage to believe in better days would prevent some of our ancestors from committing suicide during the Middle Passage, others from revolts doomed for failure and others to survive in the face of incomprehensible cruelty. Yet in our hopeless situation, we gained strength; the more hopeless the circumstance, the more we persevered. We got married, we had families, we developed skills, intellect, and trades; we displayed industry to create our own! No greater story has ever been told!

Love of country demands a just rebuke when confronted with injustice. To love those who reject our existence, even to the point of murder and oppression, is America’s redemptive opportunity to reciprocate and create, in the words of President Barack Obama, “a more perfect union.”