These are excerpts from the opening lines of Chapter 19 in the new book by Vincent Lewis Hall, “A Warrior on My Side,” my 40-year ride with Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price.
By: Vincent L. Hall
Over a span of about 10 years, it was my privilege to conduct in-depth interviews from people who know Dallas at its underpinnings. These conversations helped me to craft my new book, “A Warrior on My Side.” In the midst of that I gleaned much from one of my local heroes.
Dallas historian and community sage, Donald Payton, is a Griot of a different sort. He never tells the story to please or entertain; the epithets and education that emanate from his mouth are raw. You can take him or leave him.
His assessment of Commissioner John Wiley Price is built on his vast knowledge of race politics in the city. Price’s brilliance, in his words, was that he organized Black politics outside of the established class of Negroes in charge.
Price was young enough to relate to a new generation, smart enough to relate to the “smart” people and always did his homework. John Wiley Price is a product of integration.”
Before the 1970s, Black leaders in Dallas generally emerged from the pulpit at church or from the halls of segregated colleges. The national environment was uncertain in the urban areas, and Dallas’ White leadership wanted to maintain its Negro communities’ reins and the hand-picked leaders they ordained.
“Cleveland burned, Chicago burned, L.A. burned, and Kansas City burned. They had to do something to get us out of the streets. My dad had been a soldier, but I just couldn’t do it. I had to stay here.”
Payton recalls how shallow the coverage of Dr. King’s civil rights movement was in the local Dallas Morning News. “The paper had a little two-inch story in the back about the civil rights movement. All over the country, they were “siccing dogs on us and killing us.”
Even though the times were turbulent, the story of Black activism was rarely placed on the same level as that of whites. “They talk about Kent State, but not the Orangeburg Massacre in South Carolina.
Payton visibly muses and reflects on the killed students while protesting a segregated bowling alley in 1968. Three of the 200 South Carolina State students were killed, and 27 were injured.
Musical giants Crosby, Stills, and Nash wrote a song about Kent State. The deaths at Kent State became the folklore of modern social resistance against the establishment and the government. Orangeburg, South Carolina, became a little-known factoid. Those lives were forgotten within days of their loss.
Dallas’s history of police misconduct was vast and vicious. Nobody gleaned more from activists like J.B. Jackson and Al Lipscomb than John Price. Either of the two men could recite the chronicle of injustices in Dallas, as effectively as a street-corner preacher could save souls.
The passion and pain they conveyed in every story were never lost. John lived it in his heart and in his psyche. He had been misused by the “system” in rural Forney, Texas, where he grew up watching black subservience from his row in the cotton fields. Price had enough of white cotton and white cops.
John Price was a young voice that could deliver that kind of analogy to young Blacks in Dallas. They loved the national perspective of injustices that found common ground with their own experiences. Price could connect the rampant police abuse in South Central L.A. to the police brutality in South Dallas.
John became a Warrior in deference to the oppression he lived through and not by alliance or birth. Donald Payton is a Griot, and I always trust his word!(A Warrior on My Side is now available on Amazon!)
A long-time Texas Metro News columnist, Dallas native Vincent L. Hall is an author, writer, award-winning writer, and a lifelong Drapetomaniac.
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