His recent offering in the Sunday edition, “Rallying my brothers in arms in the prostate cancer battle,” is another example of his excellence—this time while sharing his very personal battle with the disease. The column begins:

“A year ago, at age 71, I joined the army.
Well, ‘joined’ is not the right word. I was drafted… The ‘army’ into which I had been conscripted was not the United States Army, but the 3.5‑million‑member platoon of American men diagnosed with prostate cancer.”

It struck me because I was a member of that army, as were my father, my maternal grandfather, and my brother. My father and grandfather are no longer with us. My father died sixteen years ago from complications of prostate cancer. His treatment whittled a proud, tall, charismatic figure into a mass of pain I barely recognized from the smart, funny man I once knew.

McCaa’s article resonated with me because his course of treatment—“entire prostate [removed] and some surrounding lymph nodes during a procedure called a prostatectomy”—was the same treatment my brother and I received.

My cancer was discovered much like John’s. During a routine exam, I was referred to a urologist who found my Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) level was 11. A subsequent biopsy confirmed the diagnosis.

That’s what is devastating about prostate cancer. I told my doctor, “But I don’t feel sick.” That’s the pernicious part of the disease—you don’t feel anything. No pain. No bulge or tumor to see. No nausea. You carry on normally, as I certainly did, until you get tested.

And then there’s the “man” thing—the tendency to avoid doctors, ignore testing, or assume something will “go away.” In my case, I told myself I was protecting my family from bad news.

You see, my diagnosis came at the worst possible time.

I had my biopsy sometime before September 10. On September 12, our oldest child, Jason—33 years old—was murdered. As you can imagine, that week is remembered only as a blur, a haze of activity and must‑do’s. I preached Jason’s funeral, which was on September 19. And although we handled things better than we did when our youngest son, Payton, died at age 11 some thirty years earlier, we were going through the motions more than we admitted to ourselves.

Then came the phone call.

I was back at work at CitySquare when the urologist’s office called and told me the biopsy confirmed cancer. I hardly ever told my wife about anything medical I was going through. That is, until a doctor admonished me gently: “You need to learn to lean on and depend on her. That’s why you have a wife.” So I asked her to come with me for the biopsy, but I went to this follow‑up appointment alone.

The doctor explained everything and discussed treatment options. I told him, “Look, I can’t go home and tell my family this. We just buried our son last week. I don’t think they can handle this now.” More to the point, I didn’t think I could handle it.

The doctor expressed sympathy, asked a few questions, and said we could delay—but not for long. We agreed to wait until November to resume discussions about a course of treatment, but pretty much knew it would be a prostatectomy.

I told my wife a week or two later. She was concerned, of course, but she didn’t fall apart. She was a champ. We couldn’t do much before January, so we decided to wait until after Thanksgiving to tell our daughters and, later, the rest of the family.

I learned firsthand what John McCaa says about his journey: prostate cancer is a “family disease.” The diagnosis brings emotional stress, shifts in roles, more caregiving, and more communication. It would have been impossible for me to carry the weight of this diagnosis without their love and support. In fact, I wish we had communicated even more.

If I may speak directly to the women whose husbands, fathers, or brothers are diagnosed with this disease: no matter how impassive we may seem, we need you. Sometimes it’s to talk, sometimes not. Sometimes it’s to hold our hand, or to ask the question we’re too distracted to think of. You help us remember what we forget. But never believe we want to face this alone. We need you, the children, and everyone we count as family to help us through what can be an uncertain—and yes, frightening—time. We may act as if you’re bothering us, and sometimes we do need space. But bother us anyway, and let us tell you when we need quiet. It’s important for you to know: we need you.

I also learned something I found almost incomprehensible: I met men—and discovered I already knew men—who had prostate cancer and never mentioned it. They were at the gym. They worked on my house. They worked with my wife. No one said a word. Not that I expected them to discuss it casually, but we talk openly about colds, flu, throat cancer, even lung cancer. I eventually realized—and had confirmed—that prostate cancer touches our sense of manhood, and for many men, that becomes a source of shame.

That brought back my own embarrassment. Even though my father and grandfather had prostate cancer, I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t even know what a prostate was. I did the research I should have done years earlier: the prostate is a small gland below the bladder that produces the fluid carrying sperm. Prostate cancer occurs when its cells grow abnormally and uncontrollably. Most cases grow slowly, but some grow faster and can spread.

The numbers McCaa cites are sobering:

• 1 in 8 men will get prostate cancer.

• Among Black men, it’s 1 in 4.

• In 2025, the American Cancer Society estimated 315,000 new cases, with 330,000 more expected in 2026.

• In Texas, 24,090 new cases will be identified this year, and 2,500 men will die from the disease.

Talking about this disease isn’t about “bleeding all over one another.” It’s about making sure men include prostate health in their overall health journey—and that those diagnosed have other men to talk to, to share fears and apprehensions with. It’s not about what we can do about “it.” It’s about the support we need and the support we can give.

September is Prostate Awareness Month. In our churches, fraternities, sports events, and everywhere men gather, we should make men aware of this disease—especially Black men. According to the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network, prostate cancer remains the most commonly diagnosed cancer among Black men, with an estimated 57,300 cases expected in 2025, accounting for 44% of all cancer diagnoses in Black men. Black men have the highest prostate cancer death rate of any racial or ethnic group and are more than twice as likely to die from it as White men. Much of this disparity stems from unequal access to high‑quality treatment.

Still, there is good news: prostate cancer death rates are improving because of advances in treatment, better management of recurrent disease, and earlier detection.

Thanks to John McCaa for sharing such important information. We can all do better. I apologize for not having done better. It has been almost twenty years since my diagnosis and treatment, and I’m fine. I, admittedly, don’t live as healthy a lifestyle as I should. I think that’s probably why I’ve not been as vocal as I should have been. But I’m still here and past worrying about the disease that many others are facing or have yet to face, but will.

Still, it’s never too late to receive a good word. Especially a life-saving word!

Remembering is holy work. Throughout Scripture, God calls His people to remember—not to live in the past, but to recognize how His hand has shaped our journey. Memory becomes a spiritual discipline: it anchors us, humbles us, and reminds us that grace has been present even when we were unaware.

When we remember our history—personal, family, communal—we reclaim the truth of who we are and how far God has brought us. Forgetting leads to drifting; remembering leads to worship. In Deuteronomy, the Lord repeatedly says, “Remember…” because memory keeps us faithful, grounded, and grateful.

Your story is not random. It is threaded with divine fingerprints. To remember is to honor God’s movement through your life.

Illustration

A historian once described archives as “the sacred vault of a people’s identity.” He said that when communities lose their records, they lose their sense of direction.

Think of an old family photo album—creases in the pages, fading colors, handwritten notes in the margins. When you open it, you don’t just see pictures; you see evidence of God’s sustaining power. You see ancestors who endured, parents who sacrificed, moments of joy that carried you, and seasons of struggle that shaped you.

The album doesn’t change the present, but it deepens your understanding of it. It reminds you that you stand on foundations laid long before you arrived. Remembering becomes a way of saying, “Lord, I see Your faithfulness across generations.”

Action Steps

• Pause intentionally this week and recall three moments in your life where God’s presence carried you—whether through provision, protection, or quiet strength.

• Write down one part of your personal or family history that you’ve never reflected on spiritually. Ask: What did God teach me through this?

• Share a story with someone younger—a testimony, a lesson, a memory that can strengthen their walk. Passing on memory is part of holy stewardship.

• Pray over your history, including the painful chapters. Invite God to show you how even the difficult pages were not wasted.

Prayer

Father, thank You for the gift of memory. Thank You for the ways You have guided, protected, corrected, and sustained me through every season. Help me to honor my history—not with nostalgia, but with gratitude and wisdom. Reveal Your presence in the chapters I overlooked, and give me courage to share my story so others may see Your faithfulness. Make my remembering holy, and let it deepen my trust in You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

1933 - 2025

Old Testament Scholar, Theologian, Professor

“Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption, and the endless pursuit of private well-being.”

Suffice it to say that I was embarrassed and angry.

My family had never used food stamps, and here I was allowing my wife to use them as if we were on ‘government assistance’. So I confronted her when we got home, and we went back and forth about what that meant to me. For her, it was the way she had to make it until we were married. And of course, she could do a little better now that we were married. But she said this was her approved allotment for the month, and it would help us at least for this time… so could we continue to use them, please? I relented.

My wife and I will be married for 47 years this coming October. Nearly 50 years ago, we were young, starting our new life with three children, still hopeful, ambitious, and determined to make it on our own.

We both had menial jobs; I worked in a department store's toy warehouse. My bride worked in the food service department of a hospital. We lived in public housing — the projects, we called them then (ironic, since I was balking at being viewed as if I were on ‘public assistance’!) — and our goal was to get out. We had no idea about budgeting, so we didn’t know what that meant or how much it would take, but we were going to make it.

As a young couple, that food assistance and the $63 a month we paid in rent helped more than you can imagine. Because we both worked, we were able to make the aid from those stamps last for more than three months as we established our young household.

Now that is our story. We weren’t special, and our circumstances weren’t either. As a matter of fact, we had much in common with the modern-day ‘SNAP’ recipient. The majority of SNAP households with a working-age adult already have at least one working member. But under the rules that took effect in February, that isn’t enough — a recipient has to document 80 hours per month. The difference is, now, if you miss a recertification notice or work irregular shifts you can’t neatly prove, you’re off the SNAP roll. And it’s one of the reasons that Texas has lost about 600,000 SNAP recipients — the largest drop of any state — with participation down roughly 17% since July 2025. Statewide enrollment is around 3.1 million. Nationally, enrollment fell from 42.4 million to about 37 million between September 2025 and April 2026.

For 15 years, I worked as a Vice President at one of the largest local nonprofits fighting the effects of poverty in our city. We became known for our work with the homeless population. But our first poverty-fighting program was our food pantry. I saw long lines of families in queue for the staples, fruits, and vegetables that we provided. We took the documentation necessary to prove our case to our funders, but we didn’t require it to receive food. The need for that kind of service hasn’t relented in the six years since I retired from that organization. There were 1.4 million people in North Texas classified as food insecure in 2024, including 506,050 children — one in four — up 64,190 from the year before. DFW ranks among the worst-performing large metros in the country.

Of those categorized as food insecure in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, 54% already earn too much to qualify for SNAP. A program that was never catching everyone who needed it is now catching even fewer. And the North Texas Food Bank (from which we got much of the food we provided) has seen its federally supplied inventory fall from 50% of its stock to 25% — so the safety net beneath the safety net is thinning at the same moment.

We were young. We were healthy. There were two of us, and both of us could work. That subsistence bridged us across a few months, it wasn’t the ground we stood on.

That isn’t most people’s situation. There’s the woman living on an SSI check that runs out before the month does. The mother who can’t take a second shift because there’s nobody else to care for her disabled son. The man who worked thirty years and can’t lift what the job requires anymore. For them, a SNAP card isn’t a bridge to something better — it’s literally how they get food. The rule that says document eighty hours a month or lose it was written as if everybody has what my wife and I had.

In Dallas County, two of every five people on SNAP were children under 18. Across the North Texas Food Bank’s 12-county area, SNAP was delivering about $81 million a month — $56 million of it into Dallas County alone.

Nationwide, almost 9% of individuals — more than 3.5 million — who were beneficiaries of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program lost those benefits between July, when President Donald Trump signed his “big beautiful bill” into law, and February.

So the question is, why, in the wealthiest nation in the civilized world, are so many people going hungry? Notice that in the barrage of statistics I unleashed, not one of them describes a problem of food ‘unavailability’. We have food. Affordability is a problem — but that’s another post, entirely. Food safety is an issue — but that, too, is another post.

The problem is that a program, ostensibly designed to remove barriers to accessing nutritious food and help poor people afford it, has created additional barriers, leaving that same food just out of reach. And the reason is, in part, so that those who are affluent can enjoy ‘more’.

The OBBB, or ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’, signed into law on July 4, 2025, has consigned those who are hungry and food insecure to ‘pay’ for its implementation.

The Tax Policy Center looked at where the tax cuts land in 2026. Households in the bottom fifth of earners earn an average of $150 per year. Households in the top fifth get $12,540. And the same law made permanent an estate tax exemption of $15 million per person — $30 million for a married couple.

There’s something wrong with making those most vulnerable pay for the comfort of those whose lives are the least precarious. And to make the price point of that payment the cost of life essentials, to say the least, is heinous.

This is the point at which it has become almost cliché to say, ‘We’re better than this.’ But the fact is, this is happening. It’s happening because we are not better than this. This is us. The real question is, how long are we going to keep proving it?

Somewhere, there’s another young couple in their early 20s just starting their lives together, in line at a grocery store, with a basket of groceries they’ll be unable to pay for at the register. I wonder where they will be in 50 years?

I’ve learned the background: the meetings with the Kennedy administration. The president’s concerns about violence, the final concession, and how a King associate learned that Kennedy had OK’ed the march. “What am I going to tell our people?” King’s aide asked. “Tell them not to put any mayonnaise on those sandwiches.” Mayonnaise and a hot August day is not a good mix.

I’ve read that King’s speech was respectfully received, but that there wasn’t the raucous Baptist church response he was used to until Mahalia Jackson spoke up loud enough for him to hear: “Tell ‘em ‘bout the dream, Martin; tell ‘em ‘bout the dream!”

I learned about a young John Lewis, one of the early speakers on the program, who was refusing to speak unless he could be more radical in his demands. And I learned how James Forman and another member of SNCC prevailed upon him to soften the rhetoric, so that A. Philip Randolph’s dream of this March could take place without controversy.

I’ve learned all of that. But I never heard about the 10 Point Plan, which was the whole objective of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Without those points – demands to be presented to Congress as proposed legislation – this March was just a parade, with the flourish of a flowery speech at the end.

The demands were on a pamphlet given to all march attendees. The pamphlet was called “Organizing Manual No. 2.” Inside, under a heading that read “WHAT WE DEMAND,” were ten numbered items. Not aspirations. Not slogans. Ten specific things they wanted Congress and the President to do, written the way you write when you expect someone to actually pick it up and move it.

This wasn’t simply a march saying “End Racism Now.” This was a ten point policy proposal.

And there’s a reason it read that way. A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, first threatened to march on Washington back in 1941. Bayard Rustin, who pulled the 1963 march together in about eight weeks, was a labor man too. Neither of them believed you could separate the caste problem from the poverty problem. The manual said so in language nobody puts on a T-shirt:

“That crisis is born of the twin evils of racism and economic deprivation.”

“[We] know that as long as black workers are voteless, exploited, and underpaid, the fight of the white workers for decent wages and working conditions will fail. [We] know that semi-slavery for one means semi-slavery for all.”

That’s not a slogan calling for empathy. That’s a theory of politics and economics, and a pretty good one at that.

The Plan was endorsed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Urban League, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the AFL-CIO, and it was eventually presented to Congress.

I want to share what each point meant in 1963, how many were successfully enacted, and what they mean for us now.

POINT ONE

Comprehensive civil rights legislation, “without compromise or filibuster”

They wanted a real bill guaranteeing four things: public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, and the vote.

Then, in 1963, there was no strong federal civil rights law prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations, housing, education, or voting. The marchers demanded legislation “without compromise or filibuster” because they knew the Senate filibuster was the usual weapon used to kill civil rights bills.

Did it work? Yes. The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 after the Senate defeated a civil rights filibuster for the first time. The Voting Rights Act followed in 1965, and the Fair Housing Act in 1968.

Now: The Civil Rights Act did pass, and the filibuster against it was defeated. That mattered. It put federal law on the side of equal access in public accommodations, employment, education, and federally supported programs. But the culture did not catch up all at once. Compliance had to be enforced, resistance had to be litigated, and habits built under Jim Crow did not disappear just because Congress finally acted.

POINT TWO

Withhold federal funds from any program where discrimination exists

Then: In 1963, the federal government was still helping finance Jim Crow — from federally funded hospitals to segregated school districts receiving federal aid. The marchers were not asking for a new right so much as a basic rule: Washington should stop paying for discrimination.

Did it work? Yes. It became Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, one of the strongest civil rights tools ever created. After Congress tied federal school money to compliance, desegregation moved quickly: roughly 1.2% of Black students in the South attended school with white children before enforcement, but by 1970 the figure was over 90%.

Litigation moved little by itself. Federal money moved the system.

Now: Title VI became the model for later protections, from Title IX to disability rights under Section 504. But enforcement is weaker now: Alexander v. Sandoval limited private lawsuits over disparate-impact rules, and recent federal action has further reduced agency enforcement.

This still bears watching. It’s being dismantled, gradually, even as we speak.

POINT THREE

Desegregate all school districts in 1963

Then: By 1963, Brown was nine years old, but many Southern districts were still delaying integration. Prince Edward County, Virginia, even closed its public schools for five years rather than integrate.

The demand named school districts, not just individual schools. That distinction would matter later.

Did it work? For a while, yes. By the late 1980s, about 43% of Black students in the South attended majority-white schools, making the South the nation’s most integrated region.

But Milliken v. Bradley made it much harder to desegregate across district lines. Segregation did not disappear. It shifted from within districts to between them.

Now: That 43% has fallen to about 16%. One in five public schools is now 90–100% nonwhite, and about 130 districts remain under federal desegregation orders.

The loss matters. Rucker Johnson’s research found that five years in desegregated schools raised adult wages for Black children and reduced adult poverty, with no measurable harm to white students.

POINT FOUR

Enforce the Fourteenth Amendment — reduce the representation of states that disenfranchise

Then: Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment includes a penalty that almost nobody talks about. If a state denies people the vote, its representation in Congress is supposed to be reduced. It was meant to prevent a strange bargain: Southern states could count Black residents for representation while still keeping many of them from voting.

By 1963, that had produced real political power. Mississippi was 42% Black, but Black registration was under 7%. Those denied voters still counted toward seats. The result was larger Southern delegations, safer incumbents, and committee chairs with the power to block civil rights bills for decades.

Did it work? No. Congress never used that penalty. Instead, it chose the more direct route: protect the right to vote through the Voting Rights Act.

Now: For a long time, the Voting Rights Act was the stronger and more practical tool. But it depends on federal enforcement, a willing Justice Department, and courts willing to back it up. Since 2013 (Shelby v. Holder), all three have become less reliable.

The unused Fourteenth Amendment penalty would have worked differently. It would have tied representation to access to the ballot. A state that suppressed votes would not just risk a lawsuit; it could lose seats.

I do not know whether that would have worked. It has never been tested, and it would have been fought hard. But it is worth noticing that the demand nobody tried was aimed at incentives, not just rules — and the rules we did win have proved easier to weaken than anyone could have hoped.

POINT FIVE

An executive order banning discrimination in federally supported housing

Then: Kennedy had promised to end housing discrimination “with the stroke of a pen.” It took two years, an “Ink for Jack” campaign, and finally Executive Order 11063. But the order was narrow. It applied only going forward, and only to housing the government directly financed or insured.

That mattered because the federal government had spent decades helping build segregated housing. The FHA’s own rules warned against letting “incompatible racial groups” live in the same communities.

Did it work? More than they asked for, at least on paper. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 covered far more of the housing market than Kennedy’s executive order ever did.

Now: Open refusals are mostly gone, and that matters. But the results have barely moved. Black homeownership is about 45%, compared with about 75% for white households. In 1970, it was about 42%. More than fifty years later, the gap is still nearly the same.

That gap is also the racial wealth gap. Homeownership was the main way many families built wealth. For decades, federal policy helped many white families buy homes while keeping many Black families from doing the same.

POINT SIX

Let the Attorney General sue when constitutional rights are violated

Then: In 1963, enforcement often depended on private plaintiffs. That meant a Black family in Mississippi had to put its name on a federal lawsuit and risk a job, a mortgage, a home, or worse.

This was not a new idea. The original 1957 civil rights bill had included this power for the Attorney General, but the Senate stripped it out to pass a weaker bill. Point six was asking to put it back.

Did it work? Partly. The 1964 Act gave the Attorney General power in specific areas — public facilities, schools, and pattern-or-practice employment cases — but not the broad authority they asked for.

Now: This is the recurring problem: discretionary power only works when officials choose to use it. Police pattern-or-practice cases have risen and fallen sharply from one administration to the next. And when the EEOC refers cases against state or local employers to the Justice Department, a change in DOJ priorities can make enforcement stop.

POINT SEVEN

A massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers, “Negro and white”

Then: This was the “Jobs” in Jobs and Freedom. Randolph saw it as central: a large federal program to train and place all unemployed workers, Black and white. Rustin’s point was practical. A jobs program only for Black workers could be isolated and defeated; a universal one might survive.

At the time, Black unemployment was 10.9%, compared with 5.0% for white workers. Anti-discrimination law could divide too few jobs more fairly, but it could not create enough jobs.

Did it work? No. Nothing at that scale was ever enacted. The closest was the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) in the 1970s, whose public jobs program peaked above 700,000 positions before Congress ended job creation in 1981 and replaced it with training and placement alone.

Randolph and Rustin later made the full case in the 1966 “Freedom Budget for All Americans,” a ten-year plan to abolish poverty. King endorsed it. More than 200 economists endorsed it. It went nowhere.

Now: The basic unemployment gap has barely moved. The marchers cited a roughly 2-to-1 Black-white unemployment ratio, and it is still close to that: as of July, Black unemployment was 6.3%, compared with 3.6% for white workers.

That is the point. Anti-discrimination enforcement matters, but it has not solved a jobs gap that a public employment program was designed to reach. We built that capacity once, in the 1930s, and a smaller version in the 1970s. Then we chose not to keep it.

POINT EIGHT

A national minimum wage high enough to support a decent life

The pamphlet was specific: “Government surveys show that anything less than $2.00 an hour fails to do this.”

Then: The federal minimum wage was $1.15 an hour, scheduled to rise to $1.25 just days after the march. The marchers wanted $2.00 because they were asking for a wage floor a person could actually live on.

The number matters, but the bigger point is who it was for.

This was not a separate Black minimum wage or a special program. It was a higher minimum wage for every worker — Black and white, North and South, farm and factory, hotel and household.

That was the argument. Raise the floor, then make sure everybody stood on it. The workers furthest below that floor in 1963 included farm workers and domestic workers, many of whom were Black. Those jobs had been left out of the Fair Labor Standards Act from the beginning, so a real national minimum wage would have reached people who had no wage floor at all.

Did it work? Eventually, but too late. Congress did not raise the minimum wage to $2.00 until May 1974, eleven years after the march.

That delay was its own kind of defeat. Congress did not have to reject the demand outright. Moving slowly did the same work.

What was actually refused: A raise for everybody. In raw numbers, most workers who would have benefited from a $2.00 minimum wage were white, because Black workers were a smaller share of the labor force. So this was not Congress refusing a special benefit for Black workers. It was refusing a higher floor for all workers.

Why refuse it? One reason is that much of the Southern economy depended on cheap labor. A strong national wage floor would have disrupted that arrangement. That is also why farm and domestic workers had been excluded from the minimum wage law in 1938, and why five Southern states still have no state minimum wage of their own.

So the country was offered higher pay for working people and chose not to take it. The point was to keep Black wages down, but poor white workers paid for that choice too. That is part of what Randolph meant when he said, “semi-slavery for one means semi-slavery for all.”

If you build an economy with a basement under one group of workers, the basement does not stay under them alone. It pulls down the floor for everyone above it.

Now: The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since July 2009, the longest freeze in the law’s history. The tipped minimum wage has been $2.13 since 1991.

Thirty states have raised their own minimum wages. Five states have no minimum wage law of their own: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

That list is hard to ignore. It overlaps with the states at the center of earlier fights over voting rights, school desegregation, and cheap labor. The pattern is the point: the fight over wages was never separate from the fight over civil rights.

POINT NINE

Broaden the Fair Labor Standards Act to cover everyone it currently excludes

Then: The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 created the minimum wage, the forty-hour week, and overtime pay. But it left out farm workers and domestic workers. That was how Southern votes were won for the New Deal: the law protected many workers, but not the jobs where many Black workers were concentrated.

Did it work? Yes. This is one of the quieter victories. The 1966 amendments extended federal wage-and-hour protections to about 9.1 million more workers. The 1974 amendments went further, bringing in domestic workers and public employees.

Now: This is why the demand matters. Economists Ellora Derenoncourt and Claire Montialoux found that extending minimum-wage coverage in 1967 explains more than 20% of the narrowing of the racial earnings gap during the civil rights era. And that was the period when the gap narrowed more than at any other time in modern American history.

Just as important, they found no evidence that the newly covered industries lost jobs as a result. The policy raised wages and narrowed the racial wage gap without producing the job losses opponents warned about.

That is the larger point. A demand in a march pamphlet became law three years later, and economists can still measure its effect decades later. When someone says this kind of policy does not work, this is one of the clearest cases that it did.

POINT TEN

A federal Fair Employment Practices Act

Then: This demand closed a twenty-two-year circle. In 1941, Randolph threatened a march over exclusion from defense jobs. Roosevelt responded with an executive order creating the Fair Employment Practice Committee, and Randolph called off the march. Congress killed the committee in 1946.

So in 1963, Randolph came back differently. This time he held the march and demanded a statute. And the wording mattered: the demand named federal, state, and municipal governments before private employers. He was not asking for another temporary order.

Did it work? Yes, but under a different name and in stages. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act covered employers, employment agencies, and unions, and it created the EEOC. But the first version was weaker than what the marchers asked for: the EEOC could not sue, and government employers were exempt. Both gaps were closed in 1972.

Now: The law is still in place, but enforcement around it has changed quickly. Executive Order 11246 — LBJ’s 1965 order covering federal contractors — was revoked in January 2025, and the regulations carrying it out were formally rescinded in August 2026. The EEOC’s new enforcement plan also says the agency will not bring disparate-impact cases, which were central to Title VII after Griggs.

So the statute remains. But part of the machinery that made it work is being taken apart.

What the pattern tells us

Put the ten demands side by side, and a pattern quickly shows up.

The demands that told someone to stop doing something were enacted quickly and produced measurable results. That includes points one, two, six, and ten. Within nine years, each was substantially written into law.

The demands that required the country to build something were not. That includes jobs, wages, and political representation — points seven, eight, and four. They were never enacted, enacted too late, or left unused.

In other words, prohibition was politically easier than provision. The one major exception proves the point: point nine required no new program or new spending. Congress only had to remove exclusions from a law already on the books, and that change worked well enough that economists can still find its effects in the data.

That is why Randolph and Rustin’s less-remembered argument matters. They understood that formal equality without economic provision could remove barriers while still leaving gaps in place. And that is close to what happened: Black unemployment is still roughly twice white unemployment, as it was in 1963. Black median household income is 60.5% of white median household income, and that gap worsened between 2023 and 2024. The homeownership gap is wider than it was in 1968. Schools are again much closer to the early 1970s than to the high point of desegregation.

We won many of the demands aimed at removing barriers. We skipped most of the demands designed to close gaps. Then we spent sixty years wondering why the gaps did not close.

The costs did not stay where people thought they would.

The $2.00 wage floor Congress refused would have helped more white workers than Black workers. School resegregation now costs nonwhite districts about $23 billion a year, while integration never showed measurable harm to white students. And the Urban Institute found that if Chicago reduced segregation to the median level of large American metros, the region would gain $4.4 billion in annual income, 83,000 more bachelor’s degrees, and a 30% lower homicide rate.

That is what Randolph meant. “Semi-slavery for one means semi-slavery for all” was not just a moral claim. It was a warning about how the economy works.

I’ve always thought of the March on Washington as a moral event. It was. But it was also a legislative strategy, written by people who understood Congress, the courts, the labor market, and federal money. They were not only asking the country to feel differently. They handed the country a to-do list.

We finished about half of it. We are now weakening parts of the half we finished. And the one demand nobody ever tried — the one aimed at political incentives, not just legal rules — looks, from here, like it might have helped the rest of it stick.

There is another march on Washington scheduled for this Friday, August 28 — the sixty-third anniversary. Its three demands are voting rights, equal opportunity, and economic dignity.

Essentially the same list, compressed.

^{Dr. Feltus’ comments start at 1:57:27}

In a previous post, I pretty well castigated some Collin County residents — and more specifically, right-wing, conservative, Christian nationalist–leaning McKinney residents — over their public displays of religious bigotry and hatred. In some cases, guised in concern over a land use proposal submitted to the city council over the construction of a mosque, and tissue-papered over with expressed concerns of traffic and uncontrolled development, these citizens showed the worst of what North Texas has to offer to people who do not look, worship, or even dress like them. They actually claim the right to declare who can and cannot live among them.

They were also egged on by outside agitators, in some cases people from other states, using this unsightly episode for clickbait, who came up to push the situation to further extremes (it reminded me of a guy and his wife who came from Henderson County to speak up in a Dallas City Council meeting about the evil of removing Confederate statues in Dallas! But that’s another story for another day).

The McKinney City Council decided to follow the law and approve the mosque’s application because the applicants themselves had complied with it in their submission. One would think that this would be enough — that there would be a cessation of hostilities, and some effort to deal with their loss. Perhaps even a “We’ll deal with this on election day,” followed by work to find candidates who would run against the incumbents on the issue.

But no … they’ve decided on another tactic: a “recall petition” to remove four of the seven council members. Three of the seven are up for reelection next year. Those who support the recall say this is evidence of a tendency not to listen to voters. Issues regarding approval of a regional airport and an amphitheater are used as examples. I can understand a type of civic saltiness when it comes to these clearly fiscal issues. But the mosque is a horse of a different color. This is about people who are their neighbors and who also pay taxes, and who want a place to worship in the community. When it came to the airport and the amphitheater, no one called project owners names or made actual threats of harm to those who felt differently.

And as for the city council members, they simply, in light of all that was presented to them, did what elected officials are bound to do — they followed the law…

As The Dallas Morning News reported:

City Council members say the site plan for the mosque met all the requirements for things like traffic, parking and height, and they cannot deny the plan based on the religious group occupying the proposed buildings.

McKinney Islamic Association president Yasser Wardany wrote in a statement that McKinney council members followed the law.

“We appreciate the members of the city council who were willing to take the more difficult path and make a decision based on the law, the facts and the established process, even when that decision was not the easiest or most popular one,” he said. “That kind of principled leadership safeguards our Constitution.”

City officials said they did their job. Mayor Bill Cox, who is named in the recall efforts, said in a statement the council “honored their legal obligation” and approved the site plan as compliant. Council members Justin Beller, Dr. Geré Feltus and Ernest Lynch are also named.

Speaking of Councilmember Dr. Geré Feltus — that’s her picture at the head of this post. Click the link below the video below the photo to watch and hear one of the most eloquent, passionate, and principled arguments for the council’s action ever made, and the most pointed challenge to its critics.

If you are a North Texan — seriously, if you are an American still on this side of the lunatic fringe — she will make you proud. Very proud indeed.

1899 - 1974

American Jazz Pianist, Composer, Band Leader

“There are 2 rules in life: Number 1- Never quit. Number 2- Never forget rule number 1.”

Public response was a couple of columns, a mention on a talk show, and then…nothing happened.

In April, Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen said on CNN that Ann Romney “has actually never worked a day in her life.” The country came apart. It ran wall-to-wall for most of the week. Republicans and Democrats lined up to defend her. Ann Romney said her career choice was to be a mother and that it was hard work, and she was right. Mitt said his wife’s job was more important than his, and he was right too. Within 24 hours, Hilary Rosen apologized.

The country had virtually the same proposition put to it within a couple of months, with two different reactions: ‘caring for your own small children is not real work.’ Aimed at a wealthy woman, it was an outrage that required a public apology. Aimed at a poor one, it was a policy proposal meant to inspire personal responsibility.

This isn’t a criticism of Ann Romney. She raised five sons through multiple sclerosis and breast cancer. The people who admired her for it were not wrong. That’s exactly the point. We are entirely capable of believing that raising children is hard work. But why do we attach the belief to some mothers and not others?

It’s that word “work” that moves between those two moments.

For those who defended Ann Romney, “work” meant labor. Effort. Getting up, doing the thing, being responsible for other human beings. The hardest job in the world, as everyone kept saying.

When Romney told a mother with a two-year-old she needed to go to work, “work” meant wage employment. A job. A W-2.

The four same letters, carrying different weight, value and meaning. If raising five children is the hardest job in the world, then raising one is not “not working.”

Notice, too, that the dignity is only ever prescribed downward. Nobody has ever suggested that a wealthy stay-at-home mother needs ‘character’. Nobody worries that she isn’t learning responsibility. If “the dignity of work” were really a claim about work, it would apply to her. It doesn’t. So it isn’t. It’s a claim only made about the poor.

In America, just under ten million children are poor. Two and a half million of them are in deep poverty, below half the line. Twenty-five million — more than a third of all the children in this country — live below twice the poverty threshold, which is the zone where you are not officially poor but a transmission going out ends you.

This administration’s answer is Trump Accounts. Every child born from 2025 through 2028 gets $1,000 from the federal government, placed in an investment account that families and billionaires can add to. Michael Dell pledged $6.25 billion. Ray Dalio put in $75 million. The accounts went live on the Fourth of July, 6.5 million children signed up, and the White House has staged press events for every donation.

The money cannot be touched until the child turns eighteen, and only for school, a house, or a business.

But there’s nothing for a hungry four-year-old. Nothing arrives for a family that’s short on rent in November. The first dollar becomes available in 2044.

And the law that created those accounts cut the programs those same children actually live on. Since the 2025 bill took effect, at least 776,000 children have lost SNAP. In Arizona alone, 205,000 children came off food assistance — a 55 percent drop. Nobody set out to take food from children. They came off because their parents failed work requirements and paperwork. That’s what conditioning a family’s benefits on adult behavior looks like in practice: the sanction lands on the adult, and the hunger lands on the kid.

That’s not a plan to end child poverty. It’s a plan to be seen having one.

In 2021, child poverty in this country fell from 12.6 percent to 5.2 percent. In one year. It is the lowest rate ever recorded, and it is not a mystery why: the Child Tax Credit was expanded and made fully refundable, which meant that, for the first time, it reached families too poor to owe income tax — the families the credit had always skipped.

You have to measure it with the right measuring stick to see it. The official poverty measure counts only pre-tax cash, so it can’t account for a tax credit at all; by that measure, child poverty in 2021 was 15.3 percent, and almost nothing happened. The Supplemental Poverty Measure counts the credit and food assistance, and it shows the floor dropping out. Same children, same year, two numbers, and which one you quote decides whether 2021 was the most successful year in the history of American anti-poverty policy or nothing.

The objection to sending families money without conditions was that parents would stop working. Researchers went and checked. The employment effects were, in their words, very small, inconsistently signed, and statistically insignificant. The fear did not materialize. It just remained in place, without reason and with evidence to the contrary.

Then the expansion expired, and by 2024 child poverty was back to 13.4 percent — higher than before the pandemic.

Biden’s people proved the mechanism worked and then let it lapse. They treated the most effective anti-poverty policy in modern American history as pandemic relief — a temporary measure, filed with the eviction moratorium and the stimulus checks — rather than as permanent architecture. Seventeen million children are still shut out of full credit today because their parents earn too little, which is the same flaw the 2021 expansion fixed and then un-fixed.

A temporary safety net may be worse than none at all. You show a family that the floor can hold, you pull it out from under them, and then you’re baffled when they don’t share your enthusiasm about the economy. That is a fair description of 2021 to 2024, and of what it produced in November.

Dealing with child poverty means ensuring a family is fiscally healthy throughout the child's entire childhood. Not a check. Not a gesture. Not a locked box that opens in eighteen years. The whole eighteen years.

And “the whole time” has to mean steady, not just long. The Federal Reserve’s own survey of American households found that 43 percent of Black adults and 46 percent of Hispanic adults can’t cover their bills in a given month because their income swings — against 31 percent of white adults. Fewer than half have enough saved to survive a 3-month job loss. For most families, poverty isn’t a place. It’s something you keep falling through. A raise, when you can get one, doesn’t fix that; hours still get cut, shifts still vanish. A payment that arrives on the same day every month, regardless of your schedule, does something a wage cannot.

That’s the argument for a permanent, fully refundable child allowance, and it’s also the answer to the “get a job” reflex. Most poor children in this country already live with a working adult. What’s missing isn’t a job. It’s that the poverty line rises with every child in the house and wages don’t — workers don’t get paid by the child. That gap is arithmetic. Every comparable country besides the U.S., pays a child benefit. It’s why we have the child poverty rate we have.

Wages, and a child benefit, and food and health coverage that don’t disappear when a parent’s hours get cut. That’s the prescription. We have the numbers that show the prescription works.

We say we care about all children. But ‘All children’ is an abstraction — the nation’s future, our kids, a category you can profess devotion to at a press conference for free. Every politician alive will affirm it.

‘Every child’ is distributive. It means this one, and that one, and the one in Arizona whose mother missed a work-verification deadline in August. It means the child whose mother is home with him, and gets no credit for it, because we’ve decided she’s the kind of mother who needs to learn about dignity.

We already know that raising children is hard work. We knew it in 2012, and we affirmed it loudly.

We just need to believe it about every parent and their children.

But the March on Washington did not occur in isolation. It was supported by—and sought to give voice to—the longings of millions of Black Americans across the country. And while hundreds of supporters sat by the reflecting pool and stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the work of freedom continued in towns, neighborhoods, villages, and hamlets nationwide. This is a story about that work—work that was unfolding even as marchers made their way to that shrine of liberation.

Two different jails in Sumter County in the summer of 1963, are the bedrock of this whole story.

Four organizers — Don Harris, John Perdew, and Ralph Allen of SNCC, later joined by CORE’s Zev Aelony — were in one. All were under indictment for attempting to incite insurrection, a capital offense under a Georgia statute written in 1871 to break Black resistance to white rule. This was a capital offense, and because of that, there was no bail. On August 28, while John Lewis stood at the Lincoln Memorial and asked what would happen to the young SNCC field secretaries in Americus who faced the death penalty for peaceful protest, those men were in a cell. They were there for eighty-five days. On October 31, a three-judge federal panel led by Elbert Tuttle threw the statute out as unconstitutional, and they walked.

In the other, in a Civil War–era stockade twenty miles away in Leesburg, sat a group of Black girls from Americus. The youngest was twelve. They were arrested for walking up to the front ticket window of the Martin Theater instead of climbing the back stairs to the colored balcony. They slept on bare concrete, drank from a dripping shower head, and used hamburger wrappers for toilet paper for somewhere between forty-five and sixty days. Their parents were not told where they were. They were never charged with any crime.

That is not a lesser version of what happened to the men. It is a different technique and, in some ways, a better one. An indictment is a legal event. It generates a docket number, a defense attorney, a hearing, a ruling, an appeal, a citation, a paragraph in a history. An indictment can be fought, and in this case it was fought and beaten inside three months. A child held with no charge generates none of that. There is nothing to appeal because no charges had been filed. No court ever looked at those girls because the state was careful enough never to present anything to a court to look at.

Sixty-three years on, look at what that carefulness bought. We do not know exactly how many girls were in that stockade. Georgia’s own historical marker says thirty-three. The Smithsonian says fifteen. Accounts differ about what day they were arrested and what day they got out. The uncharged leave no trace, which is exactly why the practice works and exactly why we barely teach it.

Americus in 1963

SNCC organizers moved into Americus in February 1963, expanding the Southwest Georgia project from Albany into the rural plantation counties around it. Americus was the county seat of Sumter County, a place where Black residents outnumbered whites but where political and economic power remained firmly in white hands. The town had segregated schools, restrooms, cafes, water fountains, buses, libraries, and theaters. Its physical geography mirrored its racial order: white neighborhoods of shade and property, Black neighborhoods of tin-roof houses and red-dirt alleys.

The Americus Movement grew from local leadership. Economically independent leaders, such as ministers J.R. Campbell and R.L. Freeman, businesswoman Mabel “Mom” Barnum, and SNCC field workers, helped sustain a campaign of voter registration, marches, sit-ins, and challenges to public segregation. Don Harris later emphasized that one reason the movement proved so difficult to stop was that it was rooted in the community itself. There was no outside source of power that authorities could simply cut off. The movement depended on the people of Americus and Sumter County.

What that movement was asking for is worth reading in its own words. The Sumter County Movement’s fundraising appeal of August 14, 1963 — two weeks before the March on Washington — lists what it meant to break down, in this order: unequal job opportunities, unequal police protection, segregated public facilities, lunch counters, theaters, and taxi-cabs. Jobs first. Theaters fifth.

That local strength made the repression more severe. In July, roughly one hundred protesters were arrested at the segregated library, movie theater, and Trailways bus station. Younger demonstrators became central to the campaign. Some marched against their parents’ wishes. Some were very young. At the Martin Theater, children and teenagers confronted the physical architecture of segregation: Black patrons entered separately and climbed to the balcony while white patrons entered through the front.

The Girls in the Stockade

The girls arrested at the Martin Theater that July were taken from the Americus jail to the Leesburg Stockade in Lee County, and they were still there in August. Their detention was meant to frighten them and to frighten the community that had produced them.

What finally moved was not a court. A twenty-one-year-old SNCC photographer named Danny Lyon found the stockade, walked up to a barred window lined with broken glass, and took their picture. SNCC ran the photographs in The Student Voice. Jet picked them up. Senator Harrison Williams of New Jersey read the story into the Congressional Record. Within weeks, the girls were home. Lyon later said that in Americus his pictures had actually accomplished something: they had gotten people out of jail. A practice that leaves no record has exactly one vulnerability, and it is not the Constitution. It is publicity.

What happened to those girls was not an aberration from the movement’s economic story. It was part of it. Children were punished because holding children works: it terrifies parents, disciplines families, and warns a community about the cost of defiance. The stockade exposed the cruelty required to preserve a racial and economic order that depended on fear.

It also did not work. The marches continued through the summer with the children still in Leesburg.

August 8

After a mass meeting at Friendship Baptist Church, roughly 150 young people walked out singing. Sheriff Fred Chappell met them with clubs and a cattle prod. Seventy-seven were arrested. Protesters were beaten badly enough to require medical care. A Black man walking through a white neighborhood was shot in the back and killed by a police officer, and his name is difficult to find in the public record of the Americus story. That absence is part of the story too.

No officer was charged. Instead, the county solicitor answered with the insurrection statute, and the four organizers went into the cell they would occupy for the next eighty-five days.

Nobody needed to hang them for the prosecution to work. The point was not necessarily conviction. The point was removal. A Reconstruction-era law, already constitutionally suspect, became a crowbar for taking organizers off the streets during the most consequential weeks of the summer, including the day of the March on Washington. In Americus, the charge was the punishment. The verdict was beside the point.

The March’s Economic Demand

Three weeks later, the March on Washington carried the same struggle into a national forum. It demanded more than an end to legal segregation. It demanded jobs, wages, voting power, public investment, and enforceable rights at work. It understood that citizenship without economic security would remain partial citizenship.

Seen from Americus, the economic meaning of the march becomes harder to miss. The demand for a minimum wage that could support a decent life spoke directly to workers trapped in poverty wages. The demand to extend federal labor protections to excluded workers named a racialized structure of labor law. Many of the workers left outside those protections were Black, female, agricultural, or domestic workers — precisely the workers whose vulnerability made local white supremacy enforceable.

The civil rights story is often divided into two parts: first equality before the law, then later the harder question of economic justice. Americus resists that division. There, the fight for a library card, a theater seat, a ballot, and a decent wage belonged to the same world. Public humiliation and private poverty reinforced each other. Segregation made exploitation easier, and exploitation made segregation harder to challenge.

What Was Won, and What Was Not

Every method Sumter County used that produced a legal record, Sumter County eventually lost. The insurrection statute was struck down in eighty-five days. The theater, the fountains, and the waiting rooms were desegregated. The voter rolls were opened. The county’s at-large school board elections, which diluted the Black vote in a Black-majority county, were finally struck down under the Voting Rights Act, with the Eleventh Circuit affirming in 2020. Sumter County is now majority Black. Sanford Bishop has represented it in Congress since 1993. Shirley Green-Reese, one of the girls in the stockade, went on to earn a doctorate and serve on the Americus city council.

It is most of what those children were beaten for, and it was won.

But in 1966, as the public schools desegregated, Southland Academy opened in Americus. It is still there. It is about ninety-five percent white, in a county that is half Black, whose public schools are seventy-two percent Black. Nobody was arrested for that. No sheriff was required, no cattle prod, no 1871 statute, no midnight transfer to another county’s jail. It broke no law, generated no docket, and produced nothing for a federal panel to strike down — which is why, of everything Sumter County built to keep the races apart, it is the piece still standing.

That is the part we consistently miss. We tell this history as a story about violence and its defeat, and the violence really was defeated. What we do not tell, as well, is that the most durable instruments were never the loudest or the most obviously illegal ones. They were the quiet, lawful, private, unlitigable ones: a school you can pay to attend, a neighborhood you can afford or cannot, a hiring decision nobody writes down.

The Technique That Survives

The relevance sixty-three years later is not that we still live in 1963. We don’t. The sheriff is not the same, the statutes are not the same, and the political terrain has changed. What has survived is the technique: the discovery that the state does not always have to win a case to win the fight. It only needs a serious enough charge, a broad enough statute, and enough time.

The loud prosecutions of our own moment — sweeping indictments, resurrected conspiracy statutes, charges that take years and dozens of lives to resolve — are the easy parallel. But the easy parallel may be the distraction. The technique with the real future is the other one: the practice that leaves nothing behind to argue with. You cannot litigate a number that was never collected any more than you can appeal a charge that was never filed.

That is why gaps in public data matter. The federal civil rights data collection that tracks school suspensions, expulsions, and arrests has not kept pace with the crisis it is meant to illuminate. National juvenile confinement data still show Black youth locked up at many times the rate of white youth, and Georgia sets no minimum age for juvenile court jurisdiction. There was no legal floor under how young a child could be brought before a judge in 1963. Nobody has installed one since.

And the wager of the movement was that political access would convert into material change. In Sumter County, the access arrived. Nearly half the county’s children now live below the poverty line, even as the county has attracted major new capital investment in solar manufacturing, vertical farming, poultry processing, and call-center work. In fairness, that money is recent and poverty data lag. But it did not arrive in time for those children, and no story about sheriffs explains why.

Coda

The whole apparatus in Sumter County ran on one assumption: that nobody outside Sumter County would ever find out. Not that it was legal; much of it was not, and that mostly did not matter. Just that it would go unrecorded. That assumption was the load-bearing wall. Danny Lyon put a camera through a broken window, and the wall came down in about six weeks.

Americus still matters because it forces a harder accounting than the usual triumphal civil rights story allows. The legal victories were real. The statutes fell, the doors opened, the vote expanded, and people who had been jailed as children lived to hold public office. But the deepest lesson of Americus is that the most durable forms of racial control are often the ones no one can sue over: the unfiled charge, the missing record, the private school, the absent data, the poverty that persists after representation arrives. To return to Americus is not simply to revisit the past. It is to ask what kinds of power remain standing precisely because they never had to stand trial.

It’s hard to say whether Graham was wise or prophetic — likely a bit of both. What he feared is now playing out in our political and cultural climate. And the unholy offspring of that marriage are white conservative Christian nationalists. Some know full well they are perverting authentic Christianity; others are simply too dull to realize they’ve been duped.

The manipulation to which they’ve surrendered makes them unashamed to display their intolerance, their loveless character, and their senseless, sick bigotry — especially when the objects of their hostility get too close. Like in their neighborhoods…or their city.

Unfortunately, this is not unique. It’s everywhere. But we have a vivid example right here in Collin County, just north of Dallas. And let me place this disclaimer early: there are wonderful people in Collin County. But Collin County is just small enough — and just politically combustible enough — to give many of its residents a very bad name.

None of this is logical. None of it is justified. But bigotry often looks for a local address, and in Collin County it has found one.

Here’s how ordinary land‑use meetings became stages for a national politics of white grievance. In 2000, the county had 491,675 residents. Today it has 1,297,179 — up 21.7 percent since 2020 alone — and in the year ending July 2025 it recorded the second‑largest numeric population gain of any county in the United States, behind only Harris County.

Four of the five fastest‑growing cities in America sit inside the county: Celina, Princeton, Melissa, and Anna. And the growth hasn’t just added rooftops; it has transformed the county’s social composition. Since 2020, the non‑Hispanic white share has fallen to 45.1 percent, while the Asian share has risen to 22.8 percent, the Black share to 12 percent, and the Hispanic share to 16.6 percent. Nearly a quarter of residents are foreign‑born, and almost a third speak a language other than English at home. Roughly 100,000 Indian Americans now live in Collin County — about 9 percent of the population.

The religious landscape has shifted as well. The 2020 U.S. Religion Census counted 12 Muslim congregations with 37,413 adherents and 12 Hindu congregations in Collin County. Across Texas, mosques grew from 166 in 2010 to 224 in 2020. This is not gradual change. Collin County is being transformed in real time — faster than its civic culture can absorb.

Rapid change creates dislocation. Traffic worsens. Schools overflow. Pastures become four hundred townhomes. People attached to the way things used to be feel a genuine sense of loss. But when that loss starts looking for someone to blame, resentment can turn ordinary civic anxiety into something much uglier.

You cannot file a zoning objection against the twenty‑first century. You can only object to the item in front of you. Land use is the last lever ordinary people can still reach: a microphone, an agenda item, and a governing body legally obligated to listen for three minutes. So grievances about cost, congestion, density, schools, and unfamiliarity get poured into whatever permit happens to be on the docket. What goes unexplained is why a mosque’s site plan becomes the place where people warn about “Sharia,” foreign invasion, or the loss of America itself. Growth may supply the pressure. But pressure is not prejudice.

And that distinction matters. Grievance‑displacement can explain why a routine municipal hearing becomes crowded and raw. It cannot explain the xenophobic statements, the religious suspicion, or the anger directed at Muslims and immigrants as such. Something has to aim it.

The distinguishing feature of the current backlash is not just anxiety — it is manipulation. State and federal officials have weaponized the worst instincts of those expressing their grievances. This is where Billy Graham’s warning becomes prophetic. They are helping write the script for municipal meetings about routine permits.

U.S. Rep. Keith Self posted that Texas “must STOP the spread of Sharia,” then testified at a McKinney site‑plan hearing. State Rep. Keresa Richardson urged rejection from the same podium. Gov. Greg Abbott announced a dozen state‑agency investigations into EPIC City — a proposed Muslim‑led residential development later renamed The Meadow — before trimming them to six; he also directed the Texas Rangers to open a criminal investigation and signed HB 4211. Attorney General Ken Paxton brought two lawsuits and demanded records from a Dallas Islamic mediation group.

The infrastructure around the message has grown more formal. A “Sharia Free Texas” caucus now exists in the Texas House. At an August 2026 True Texas Project conference, legislators floated proposals to ban hijabs in public schools, prohibit halal food sales, close Islamic charter schools, deny professional licenses, and reclassify Islam as a political ideology rather than a religion.

In January 2026, GOP consultant Vinny Minchillo told Politico, “The Muslim community is the boogeyman for this cycle.” It was the bluntest line in the article.

The political context explains the choice. Collin County’s presidential margin moved from Republican +31 in 2012 to +17 in 2016, then to +4.6 in 2020 before snapping back to +11 in 2024. A county that nearly flipped and then partially reverted is a county where mobilization is the whole game. In that environment, the primary electorate becomes the real audience.

And the agitators are not always local. Much of the loudest testimony in Frisco came from people who didn’t live there — including out‑of‑state activists and content creators looking for footage. A council meeting is a free film set with guaranteed conflict, and a public‑comment card is the price of admission. The incentives run in one direction: the more extreme the three minutes, the better the clip performs.

Frisco’s brief removal of general public comment from its agendas in June 2026 showed how badly civic forums had been distorted. Collin County’s deeper vulnerability is its lack of social ballast. In a place where so many residents arrived recently, there are fewer long‑standing ties — the church league, the twenty‑year neighbor, the family rooted for generations — that make it socially costly to demonize the people two streets over.

The thinning of local opinion journalism compounds the problem. The Dallas Morning News columnists who once interpreted stories like this for a regional audience have largely left the paper. McKinney and Frisco coverage appears mostly as straight news, while broader interpretation comes from Texas Monthly, the Dallas Observer, and KERA. A county that outgrew its civic infrastructure — newsroom included — now gets narrated to itself by out‑of‑state YouTubers.

The public response has been uneven. Some voices have spoken clearly. Faith Commons, Rabbi Nancy Kasten, Rev. George Mason, and CLEAR DFW organized an April 2026 interfaith letter signed by more than 100 North Texas clergy. “In accusing American Muslim organizations, communities and individuals of anti‑American activity or intent,” the letter said, “an increasing number of our elected officials have abdicated their authority as representatives of the American people.”

CAIR‑Texas and CAIR‑DFW have spoken repeatedly. Hindus for Human Rights issued a warning on June 4, 2026. State Rep. Salman Bhojani put it plainly: “Texas Muslims are not a threat to this state. We are part of it. We built it. We serve in its military.” State Rep. Wes Virdell added: “My first priority is that we do not violate the First Amendment.” McKinney council member Justin Beller called the controversy “election year fearmongering” and now faces recall. Former McKinney mayor George Fuller was booed and escorted from city hall.

Newness is what makes Collin County dynamic. It is also what makes it combustible. The law matters here because cities cannot use zoning rules to make it unreasonably hard for a religious group to build or worship. Under RLUIPA, they cannot treat a mosque, church, synagogue, temple, or other house of worship worse than a similar nonreligious use.

That law has consequences. Religious groups can sue, and the Justice Department can step in. Since 2000, DOJ has opened more than 155 land‑use investigations and filed nearly 30 lawsuits. So when cities spend hours debating a permit that otherwise follows the rules, the legal risk is carried by local taxpayers. Collin County has already seen this: in 2019, the federal government settled a case with Farmersville over the Islamic Association of Collin County’s cemetery.

Fairview provides the control group. In 2024, the town unanimously denied a permit for an LDS temple, citing height, lighting, traffic, and a 173‑foot steeple. The fight followed a familiar path: mediation, redesign, approval, litigation, and continued objection. Even a year after approval, the mayor asked the church to voluntarily cut the approved 120‑foot spire to 68 feet.

Fairview proves two things at once: North Texas suburbanites will fight a large religious building of any faith, keep fighting after they lose, and still be writing letters a year later. That impulse is not, by itself, bigotry. But nobody in Fairview said Mormonism was a political ideology. No congressman called the temple a beachhead. Nobody moved to recall the council. The fight was conducted in the vocabulary of spires because it was about a spire.

The McKinney Islamic Association followed the same pattern. Its 2024 rezoning request for a single larger building faced organized opposition and was withdrawn. It returned in 2026 with three smaller buildings. “We listened carefully to the city council and the concerns of the community and completely redesigned the project,” president Yasser Wardany said. They changed the building. It changed nothing.

The EPIC City story must be told carefully because it is often distorted. Many of the loudest claims have gone nowhere or remain unproven. The Justice Department closed its religious‑discrimination review in June 2025 with no charges. The Texas Rangers opened a criminal investigation in March 2025, but no charges have been publicly reported sixteen months later. The Texas Workforce Commission complaint ended in a settlement with no admission of wrongdoing. Paxton’s lawsuits remain allegations, not proven facts. One caveat: HUD’s fair‑housing investigation remains open. And the project, now called The Meadow, has never been built.

This whole sad episode is not just about who gets to live in McKinney, Frisco, or Celina. It is about how we welcome people who don’t look, live, or pray like white evangelical Christians or Christian nationalists. It reveals how government and the principles of American democracy can be weaponized by those who bully, intimidate, and simply yell louder than the people they seek to force into civic compliance.

I have seen no statements from the mayors of Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, or Denton; the county judges of Dallas, Tarrant, or Denton counties; the Dallas Regional Chamber; the North Texas Commission; major employers; large congregations; or area university presidents. The silence is disturbing. If a statement exists, it should be added. But if the silence holds, it matters. In a county where growth has outpaced civic trust, and local anxiety can be repackaged for state campaigns and national feeds, institutional quiet leaves the microphone to whoever can make the loudest three minutes go viral.

The psalmist cries out from a world where arrogance seems loud, and the vulnerable seem overlooked. Yet he anchors his hope in a God who does not forget the humble. Humility in Scripture is not self‑deprecation; it is the courageous posture of dependence. It is choosing God’s strength over our own, God’s timing over our urgency, God’s vindication over our self‑promotion. The humble are not forgotten because humility places us where God’s hand is already moving. When we walk humbly, we make room for God to arise on our behalf.

Illustration

A violinist once visited a master craftsman known for building extraordinary instruments. On a shelf sat two violins: one polished and gleaming, the other plain and unfinished. Naturally, the violinist reached for the beautiful one.

The craftsman gently stopped him.
“That one looks impressive,” he said, “but it refuses to bend to the hand. It resists tuning. It wants to sing its own way.”

He then lifted the plain, unfinished violin.
“This one,” he continued, “responds. It yields. It allows itself to be shaped. And because it yields, it will carry the richest sound.”

Humility is the soul’s willingness to be tuned by God. Pride makes us rigid; humility makes us responsive. And the music of a responsive life carries farther than the noise of a self‑directed one.

Action Steps

• Begin with surrender. Start each day acknowledging your dependence on God’s wisdom and strength.

• Practice quiet listening. Slow down enough to hear others—and to hear God.

• Serve without spotlight. Do one act of kindness this week that no one but God sees.

• Repent quickly. When you miss the mark, confess without excuses.

• Give God the glory. Name Him as the source of every blessing and every victory.

Prayer

Lord, lift up Your hand over my life. Teach me to walk humbly before You, trusting Your strength more than my own. Shape my heart the way a craftsman shapes an instrument—making me responsive, willing, and tuned to Your will. Remove pride from me and anchor me in Your grace. Remember the humble, O God, and let Your presence be my confidence. Amen.

1942 - 2016

World Heavyweight Boxing Champion, Humanitarian

“You don’t lose if you get knocked down. You lose if you stay down.”

I’ve recently branched out and begun baking desserts. Pies, in particular. Lemon and Buttermilk Chess, Bourbon Pecan, and Sweet Potato are specialties I have developed. Some people who cook say they find it relaxing. For me, cooking is like writing. I enjoy having written more than the writing; when it comes to cooking, I enjoy having cooked more than I enjoy the actual process of cooking.

I bring all of this up because there is a portion of the process that I actually have come to enjoy: shopping for the ingredients. Picking just the right ones. Looking for the ingredients recommended and referred to by the cooks and chefs on the cooking shows. At first, when I started, I just started grabbing things. The chicken thighs, the short ribs, the potatoes and broccoli, the spices — all the spices — the pie crust shells (I’m not eager to make homemade crust yet. I’ll experiment with that later). Then I started paying attention to how much food actually costs.

Even though my wife and I have remarked how much we were saving by not going out to eat nearly as much, I began to notice that food is expensive. And even more so, as time went on and the economy worsened. It’s a little easier for us now that the children are gone. But it’s also easy to empathize the challenge it must be to raise 3 or 4 children for the average parent or parents. And isn’t that where we all begin to notice changes in our economy? For some of us it is clothes. For some it’s utilities. For others it’s the interest rate on our credit card debt. But what slowly creeps up on all of us and makes us realize the challenge of the unaffordability of our lives is the thing we do every day because we all must eat.

If you’re blessed enough to persevere in this economy, you may be patting yourself on the back because you’re still employed. Maybe you’re more blessed because you have remained on a job and you’re paid a living wage. Or you’ve retired, and you think you’ve saved enough.

Several years ago, I wrote a blog on which “10,000 Cups…” is modeled. Its focus was wide-ranging and dealt with politics, race, history, entertainment, sports, and public policy. When it came to policy, I wrote about the need for living wage employment, educational issues, affordable healthcare and hunger — and all of this during George W. Bush’s administration (as much as things change, they stay the same). During that time, I entertained responses to the blog and received, along with people who agreed with me, some of the most caustic, unkind, unsympathetic, uncharitable replies you could imagine. It was par for the course with the burgeoning days of social media.

But still many of those expressing uncharitable views were those who found healthcare affordable, had been “responsible” and saved their money, and blamed single-parent families on men — primarily Black men — for having no sense of family values (never mind the fact that there are legitimate reasons some men may be unavailable to their families). Now the children and grandchildren who wrote those caustic viewpoints express the same sentiments today. And like their parents and grandparents, they do not know how much worse this economy is at the kitchen table than it looks from a comfortable distance. They do not know that being careful with money is not the protection they think it is. Perhaps the cars in their garages have been paid off. Or their 401(k)s are well funded. But they don’t understand that food insecurity is not an animal caged in another community or state. It just may be around the corner a live danger for them as well.

Food Insecurity Isn’t Somewhere Else

In the 25‑county DFW region, 54% of the people facing food insecurity earn too much to qualify for SNAP. Last year it was 49%. That’s roughly 755,000 people out of nearly 1.4 million who are food insecure. Texas sets its SNAP limit at 165% of the federal poverty level — about $53,000 a year for a family of four. The median household income in Dallas is higher than that.

What that means is simple: the food insecure aren’t just the people panhandling outside the store. They’re just as likely to be the person ringing you up inside it.

The Cost of Keeping Up

The Congressional Joint Economic Committee found that the average Texas household spent $1,040 more per month in 2024 just to maintain the standard of living it had in January 2021. Food alone accounted for $141 of that.

For low‑income families in North Texas, housing and transportation already take up to 40% of monthly income. Groceries take another 30%. When prices rise, there’s nothing left to absorb the increase.

“Good News” That Doesn’t Feel Good

We hear that grocery inflation was up 2.7% over the past year, and it gets reported as if that’s good news. But prices rose on top of everything that came before. Groceries cost 25–30% more than they did in 2020, and this year’s 2.7% sits on top of that.

And 2.7% is an average. Fruits and vegetables went up 5.3%. The healthiest food on the shelf rose at nearly twice the rate of everything else.

The Other Costs That Close In

Utility‑related costs in DFW jumped nearly 19% over the past year. Gas in Texas may be the cheapest in the country, but it was still 87 cents higher than a year ago — about a third more. The national average climbed 30%. Every single state saw prices rise.

Housing affordability keeps eroding. More than half of Texas renters are cost‑burdened, spending over 30% of their income just to keep a roof overhead. And remember: that gas number includes the cost of driving back and forth to the grocery store.

Gas prices have fallen about 8.5% since May, but cheaper than three months ago is not the same as affordable.

When Groceries Go on Credit

I was taught never to use a credit card for groceries. I’ve done it once — left my debit card at home. But for many people, that “never” has become normal.

More than one in three working‑age adults used a credit card to buy groceries last year. About one in five couldn’t pay the balance in full. Nearly 9% didn’t always make the minimum payment. Almost one in ten used buy‑now‑pay‑later plans. Another 5.2% took out payday loans.

The average household spent $6,224 on groceries at home in 2024. Put half of that on a card at 22% interest and pay only the minimum — it takes about 20 years to clear and costs roughly $5,000 in interest.

Nearly 20% of working‑age adults pulled money out of long‑term savings to buy groceries. These are people who did the responsible thing — and the responsible thing is what they’re spending. And repayment trouble showed up even among high‑income adults who used credit cards for groceries.

This is not confined to low‑ and middle‑income households.

The Larger Truth

All of these numbers point to one thing: almost no household in Texas — or anywhere else — is beyond the reach of the structural weakness in our economy. We may not understand how corporations or wealthy investors benefit from tax policy. We may not follow the contradictions of the market. But we do understand that the purchasing power of our dollars is shrinking.

And we need to know this isn’t our imagination. We need to know we are not alone. We need to know what is happening and how, so that we don’t blame one another, and so that we demand something more than someone telling us that they will bring down the price of eggs on day one.

We need to know that our money is not saving us. That our responsibility is not saving us. We need to know that what has befallen our brothers and sisters can befall us, and will reach more of us than we know. Whether more humble options include food banks, food pantries, food give‑aways, we need to know that we are in this together.

More on this is coming.

“Here in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs,

flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.

Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it.

They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out.

No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it.

And O my people they do not love your hands.

Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty.

Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them.

Touch others with them, pat them together,

stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either.

You got to love it, you!

And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth.

Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again.

What you say out of it they will not heed.

What you scream from it they do not hear.

What you put into it to nourish your body they will

snatch away and give you leavins instead.

No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it.

This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved.

Feet that need to rest and to dance;

backs that need support;

shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you.

And O my people, out yonder, hear me,

they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight.

So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up.

And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs,

you got to love them. The dark, dark liver—love it, love it,

and the beat and beating heart, love that too.

More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air.

More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts,

hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.

Saying no more, she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave her the music. Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh.”

John 6 introduces us to one of Jesus’ most public miracles—the feeding of the five thousand. Yet at the center of this massive moment stands a quiet, nameless figure: “a lad here.” No name. No background. No credentials. Just a boy with a small lunch and a willing heart.

His anonymity is intentional. It teaches us that Jesus often works through people whose names Scripture never records. The Kingdom is advanced not only by the well‑known disciples, but by unseen helpers whose obedience becomes the platform for divine power.

The boy with the lunch is one example, but he is not alone. The Gospels are filled with anonymous servants whom Jesus used to reveal His glory:

• The men who carried the paralyzed friend to Jesus (Mark 2:1–5). We don’t know their names, but their determination opened the roof and opened the way for healing.

• The servants who filled the waterpots at Cana (John 2:7). We don’t know who poured the water, but their obedience became the foundation of Jesus’ first miracle.

• The owner of the donkey Jesus rode into Jerusalem (Luke 19:30–35). His name is unknown, but his willingness helped fulfill prophecy and usher in the Triumphal Entry.

These unnamed individuals remind us that God sees what others overlook. Their names are unknown, but their faithfulness is unforgettable. Jesus builds miracles on the quiet obedience of people who never stand in the spotlight.

Illustration

In 2018, during a massive California wildfire, a church opened its doors as an evacuation shelter. Families poured in—exhausted, frightened, carrying only what they could grab before fleeing the flames. Volunteers rushed to help, but one elderly man quietly slipped into the kitchen without saying a word.

For hours he cooked—pots of soup, trays of cornbread, pans of scrambled eggs. No one knew his name. He refused interviews. He didn’t want recognition. He simply said, “People are hungry. I can cook.”

Late that night, a firefighter stumbled into the shelter, covered in ash, dehydrated, and barely able to stand. Someone handed him a bowl of the man’s soup. After eating, the firefighter said, “I can go back out there now.”

That nameless cook never stood on the front lines. He never held a hose. He never appeared on the news. But his quiet service strengthened the ones who did. His anonymous obedience helped save lives.

Just like the boy with the lunch, he offered what he had—and God multiplied it into strength for others.

Action Steps

• Offer what you have. Don’t wait until your gift feels significant—God multiplies what is surrendered.

• Serve quietly. Look for opportunities to bless others without needing recognition or applause.

• Honor the unseen. Thank the people in your life who serve faithfully behind the scenes.

• Trust God with your smallness. The boy’s lunch teaches us that God does not need much—He just needs you.

Prayer

Lord, thank You for the nameless servants who have shaped my life and strengthened my faith. Teach me to serve with humility, to give without seeking recognition, and to trust You with whatever I have. Use my small offering to bless others and bring glory to Your name. Amen.

(1927 - 2022)

American Actor

“We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.”

Robert Wilonsky’s August 6 Dallas Morning News column reported that the North Texas Irish Festival will move to Denton in March 2027 after 42 years at Fair Park. The news apparently surprised both Visit Dallas President and CEO Craig Davis, whose organization is now responsible for filling Fair Park’s buildings, and State Fair of Texas President Mitchell Glieber. For 42 years that on a good year brought as many as 30,000. It’s the longest-tenured event at Fair Park apart from the State Fair itself. And the two men whose jobs most directly involve keeping events at Fair Park found out from a columnist making phone calls. It’s one thing that I didn’t know that there was a North Texas Irish Festival, or how many people it brought to Fair Park (I didn’t). It's also another thing: there are two people whose job it is to know; I had no idea.

Meanwhile, the City of Dallas was hosting national journalists at Klyde Warren Park to introduce them to the city ahead of the Republican Party’s September gathering at the American Airlines Center. There were mariachis outside. There were cowboy hats. There were quesadillas and margaritas and ceviche. There was a host committee of philanthropists and Republican fundraisers, a Trump aide overseeing convention operations, and the mayor of Dallas, telling the room that big moments don’t intimidate this city.

What’s happening here in September? A two-day gathering. It will nominate no one. Party officials have described it as a combination fundraiser and political showcase ahead of the November elections. The president himself promised, in his own inimitable style, ‘a rally like none other’.

Now is it a ‘rally’ or a ‘convention’? The president at whose behest this whole thing is being staged calls it a rally, so I’ll take him at his word.

Just look at what Dallas is capable of when it decides something matters.

In a matter of weeks, the city produced a host committee, secured a venue, organized a press tour, and put its mayor on a stage to sell Dallas to a national audience. That is real institutional muscle, and it moved fast.

There is nothing wrong with hosting a rally. Dallas hosts things. But Craig Davis was candid about the reason for the enthusiasm: the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center is being demolished for expansion, large conventions have dried up, and by his own account the city is in the doldrums and seriously needs the business.

Set that beside a 42-year tenant that could not get a contract from the city until January for an event held in March. That operated year to year, in perpetuity, on that basis. They were never contacted about next year at all.

This is a city that doesn’t lack the capacity. It has capacity. It speaks volumes about priorities…and choosing.

Which raises the obvious question. If Dallas is short on convention business, why was it not fighting for the recurring three-day event with tens of thousands of attendees that it already had?

It’s worth pointing out that the festival lost money. Its most recent filings show roughly $660,000 in production costs against about $500,000 in revenue. John Jenkins, the park director, says the city offered a 50 percent discount on rental rates and that Dallas cannot go broke failing to cover its fixed costs.

I get arithmetic. I reject the premise.

Cities subsidize things that lose money at the gate. That is most of what a city does. Klyde Warren Park does not turn a profit. The Arts District does not turn a profit. The convention center we are currently demolishing and rebuilding is not being financed on the theory that it will pay for itself in ticket sales. We spend public money on those things because we have decided they make Dallas a place people want to be.

So the question was never whether the North Texas Irish Festival covered its costs. The question is why, in four decades, no one in this city ever picked up a phone to help it try. Where was economic development? Where was the tourism bureau, funded by hotel tax dollars collected from the visitors that the festival brought here? A $160,000 gap is not a structural crisis. It is a sponsorship package. It is a promotional campaign. It is one staffer with a portfolio and a mandate.

It seems nobody was assigned to care. That is not a budget problem.

Jenkins says the city offered the festival a discount. John Hebley, the festival’s managing director for 25 years, says he never heard about a discount because he never heard from the city at all. But if the city says it called, that should be easy to verify: a missed-call log, an email, a message, something.

That is what makes this dispute so basic. Somebody, somewhere in the Park and Recreation Department, either made that call or did not. There is a record, or there is not. Note the asymmetry. On one side is an all-volunteer nonprofit run by people with day jobs. On the other is a municipal department with staff, files, email servers, and a legal obligation to document its dealings with tenants. If the city cannot demonstrate that the conversation happened, the city’s account fails.

And understand what is being disputed here. Not the terms of a lease. Not a rate schedule. Whether anyone talked to anyone. After 42 years.

One thing is clear: Denton called. Plano called. Dallas issued a statement.

This is where the festival stops being an isolated story.

A board member spent years trying to get the festival’s leadership to sit down with Denton. They finally went in May. One drive up I-35E, one afternoon at the fairgrounds, and the decision was made. Denton’s mayor says his city is honored to have them.

Meanwhile: AT&T is moving its global headquarters to a 54-acre campus in Plano, taking thousands of workers out of downtown after nearly twenty years. The Dallas Stars have signed a letter of intent for a new arena at Willow Bend — in Plano, which formally pitched them, created a taxing district for the project, and put up roughly $15 million toward clearing the site. Bank of America is walking out of the tallest building in Dallas. Downtown office vacancy sits north of 27 percent, and Ray Washburne — co-chair of the very host committee selling Dallas to the national press in September — has called most of those towers zombie buildings.

Plano recruits. Denton recruits. Dallas fumbles its hold on major businesses and small people-focused, community celebrations and holds a press conference afterward to explain that the future is bright.

Our Republican governor blamed crime and homelessness for AT&T’s departure; our own police chief disputed it. The company said it wanted horizontal space. I don’t fully believe either explanation, and I’d note that southern Dallas has land — acres of it, sitting empty, in a part of this city that has been asking for exactly this kind of investment for fifty years.

As far as we know, no one offered it.

None of this is to say the North Texas Irish Festival is a South Dallas event. Its audience is largely white and increasingly suburban, and Hebley says many longtime attendees have moved to Collin County. Dallas cannot be blamed for changing demographics.

But a city that can watch AT&T move its global headquarters to Plano, the Dallas Stars pursue a new arena at Willow Bend, Bank of America leave its namesake tower, and downtown retailers close without a clear replacement strategy should not be surprised when a reporter has to tell City Hall that one of Fair Park’s longest-running tenants is leaving.

The festival’s complaints fit that larger pattern: deteriorating buildings, unreliable parking when the Music Hall had a show, rising security costs, fights over concession revenue, and communication with the city that Sheri Bush described as nonexistent. All of that played out against the backdrop of Fair Park’s roughly $600 million in deferred maintenance across 277 acres of aging public buildings.

This becomes the perfect example of earlier references to market city development and people-centered development. One is left to question whether or not Dallas is competent at either.

There are a couple of lines from the movie ‘A Few Good Things’. One line comes from the prosecution of two Marines being court-martialed: ‘These are the facts, and they are not in dispute’.

The other is the oft-quoted line, shouted by Col. Jessup (Jack Nicholson), that makes me wonder about some of those at work at City Hall: “You can’t handle the truth!”

Because if they could, I don’t think we would be seeing this charade of operations and spectacle.

When I was a college freshman/student preacher (our religion professor insisted on referring to us as ‘Mr.’ or ‘Ms.’ instead of ‘Rev.,’ so that we wouldn’t make the mistake of thinking we had ‘arrived’!), my most consistent wardrobe was jeans, some type of pullover shirt, my high school letter jacket when the weather was cold enough, and sneakers.

Every Wednesday, the Baptist Ministers’ Union of Dallas met. It was our chance to get away and see how the ‘big boys’ played. I would go because my Dad and Granddad were almost always there, and it gave me a chance to see them, as well. All of these men, our role models and mentors, would be dressed in business suits and ties (some more splendidly than others), but all pretty formal for a Wednesday. My outfit? Jeans, some type of pullover shirt, my high school letter jacket when the weather was cold enough, and sneakers. That type of casual dress might seem disrespectful, if not willfully inappropriate. But we were — for the most part — literally teenagers. We dressed much more appropriately on Sundays, and our more mature counterparts were gracious, so nobody ever said anything.

I did have a classmate, a preacher, a little older than me. He was a tall, good-looking young man who wore a suit and tie every day — literally — EVERY DAY! And we rarely, if ever, saw him in the same suit twice. I kid you not, his suits were on at least a six-week rotation.

Eventually I had to ask him, “’Jim’ (not his real name), I see you every day, wearing a suit and tie. How can you afford to dress like that, every DAY?!” “Britt,” he said, “I don’t eat!” Now clearly that wasn’t true (although we never did find out his source of income). But we just assumed it meant he made sacrifices the rest of us weren’t willing to make. And he would have been right.

This was the mid-seventies, and this class of freshmen was mildly rebellious. I guess we were, in our own way, protesting the stuffiness of the age and making the point that God wasn’t concerned about our outward appearance; He was concerned about the heart. Or probably more to the point, some of us either weren’t fashion-conscious or were just too lazy.

I’m bringing all of this up because 50 years later, I understand both the rebellious nature of kids and the expectations of the real world. “Jim,” the young man who always wore suits and ties, was kind of a role model for us, although we would tease him sometimes. Now, it’s acceptable for a preacher to go to the pulpit in jeans and sneakers. Back then, it was wholly inappropriate. “Jim” was in a perpetual state of ‘readiness.’ He ‘looked’ like what we all wanted to become. He wasn’t stuffy. He was always friendly. But he was always what a professional looked like, and he was always comfortable with the look.

I read of Tuskegee University’s dress code and the rationale behind it: the University wants its students prepared for their future. I hear that they want them perpetually ready. Ready in case a donor walks across campus and wants to increase the scholarship he’s funding. Ready in case a business leader comes by the cafeteria, stops, wants to eat lunch with a student, and has an internship to offer. It’s not about ‘respectability politics.’ In Jim’s case, the respect wasn’t for the corporate world; it was for himself, and for the calling he would be fulfilling with and for Black people. For us, how the preacher dresses was, and still is to a great extent, a source of pride.

The fact that Tuskegee is getting pushback from people supporting these students, and justifying these kids’ ‘right’ to wear ‘do-rags,’ ‘bonnets,’ and sleepwear to class, is, to me, unfortunate. Here’s what I learned: after dressing so ‘comfortably,’ it took a while before I began to wonder whether the rest of the world was taking me seriously.

I was still dressing that way, mostly during the week, when I became pastor of New Mount Moriah: a pullover shirt, sometimes a football jersey, blue jeans, and tennis shoes. It would be perfectly fine now. In fact, I’ve seen preachers preach in the same get-up. Back then, it was more than a little out of place. A deacon came by and took me to meet a friend of his. She was a banking official. We walked into her office and had a fine meeting. She didn’t think anything of the way I was dressed. She and I became great friends. She always said that if she died before me, she wanted me to preach her funeral — given the preachers she knew, that was a high honor. My concern wasn’t so much how she felt about how I was dressed; I understood at some fundamental level that although my deacon wasn’t much more formally dressed than I was, I was representing him.

I come from a different era. I grew up for a time in my Granddad’s home. He was a preacher and a pastor. He would literally put on a coat and tie to go to the grocery store to pick up a loaf of bread.

Now my insecurities and feeling uncomfortable in my comfortable dress were something I eventually got over. I learned to take more pride in my appearance. But I’m older now — and I feel I’ve earned the right to be a little more comfortable. Still, even now, when I go to most meetings, I’m mindful of how I look.

We live much more casually now, and we have to accommodate a lot of what we used to consider inappropriate. At the same time, there has to be a line drawn somewhere.

Students have the ‘right’ to wear whatever they want to wear, wherever they can wear it. But at some point, isn’t how we dress about how we feel about ourselves? If you have to assert your right, I wonder if you really feel that way. I wonder if it’s not a matter of what you wear. Is there a point where it makes a difference what you’re exposing of yourself, and to whom? And I wonder who’s being the more childish: the students who should know you don’t wear pajamas to class, or the adults who would NEVER do that, saying these children have every right.

Tuskegee has a rich and storied past. It’s Booker T. Washington and the former slave woman who gave him eggs to sell so he could build a college; it’s George Washington Carver, showing farmers the value of rotating crops and extracting every product he could from peanuts, soybeans, and sweet potatoes. It’s countless other students who have passed through those halls and become men and women they would never have dreamed they could become. And for some of them, maybe many, it began with dressing respectably. Not fancy. But it certainly didn’t include walking across campus without a shirt. It may have included sleeping in a bonnet, but it also included taking that bonnet off when you left the dorm to eat in the cafeteria. Maybe wearing slacks when you went to chapel (well, ok, I was guilty of wearing jeans to chapel — but there wasn’t a rule for us!).

What if Tuskegee didn’t have a dress code and you could wear whatever you like? What if professors invited surprise professionals from area companies that are hiring to be guest lecturers in their classes? And what if those professors gave their students no warning, but let them present themselves to these professionals in the attire they had ‘the right’ to wear?

I wonder if these young men and women would learn something about the right to respect themselves.