My son Jackson participated in the Black Lives Matter protest today as leader of the College of Charleston Students for a Democratic Society. It is his 23rd. Birthday. I wrote this Newspaper column on his 18th. Birthday, when he became a citizen.
To my Son:
Dear Jackson, 18 years ago, on the pages of this newspaper, in a column entitled “Love Covered With Sweat” Your mother and I announced your birth to the world. You were born after a night of storms, on a day when the streets of Los Angeles erupted in riots and flames. It was law day and May Day, 1992. Deciding to remain innocent of who you would be until the moment you joined us, you should always know, that my learning I had been blessed with a son was the greatest thrill of my life. You are the greatest gift of your mother’s love for me.
I have burdened you, willingly and unwillingly, with the baggage our family has carried through its generations. You know our story through the centuries of farming, the elections, protests and the bloody contests of the Revolution, Civil War and WWII.
In memory, you have charged with Washington and Golden Head Edwards with the Continental Cavalry at Yorktown. You have taken a stand on the bloody clay of Missionary Ridge with the 10th. SC and William E. Finklea. You have measured the sacred ground of our ancestral lands with your own legs on a hot summer afternoon in Zion, SC. You have said farewell to my parents and my surviving grandparents at Magnolia Cemetery. While I cherish the love of my surviving inlaws, the long bloodline behind us has fallen into the dust. Those departed, however, remember you. In every breath you pull from the sky you are their living memory. They are proud of you today.
It was our unconsidered hope that you would blend in, be happy and make no trouble. However, everything we were and everything we did made that unlikely. The casual acceptance of injustice is not dinner table conversation at our home. You have peeked into dangerous books. It never occurred to us that raw authority should be the basis for family life. You have attended political meetings since you went to the Democratic Breakfast club in a basket at two weeks old. You delighted Big John, who marched with Dr. King. You are more comfortable with a protest sign in your hands than a Game boy. You love Paris.
For some time now, you have had a hand in making yourself. This is the most radical decision an individual can make. It provokes the widest resentment. In a nation where “freedom” is the cheapest word, you know its actual value. I have been startled to discover your view of justice and the facts can put you on a different road from your mother and me.
Yesterday, you scanned your hand signed petition into the computer and posted it on Facebook. Then you tagged the names of the signers in the photo gallery, which surfaced the paper petition in the electronic sphere and stimulated awareness. That’s a lot of work to get organic juice at the Wando High School food court. It was an original concept in hybrid community organizing and electronic activism. In 18 years of bringing computers and politics together, I’ve never seen anything that worked like that done. I’ve also met few people who would spend four tedious hours doing it.
I’m also startled to discover the scanner on the home printer works. It has never worked for me.
This week you will register to vote. Last weekend you were one of the youngest delegates to the state Democratic Convention. Many aging fighters smiled to see you in your shirt and buttons. Many of them, in small and different ways, are your parents as well. They loved your infantile enthusiasm. They marveled at your confidence addressing Charleston City Council at the age of 8. They valued your first adolescent efforts at being a citizen activist. As their bodies aged, yours grew tall and strong. As defeats beat them down, you grew up. Welcome to the tough, thin line which stands for justice and fairness in South Carolina and holds back the excesses of power and greed. You are one of us now, equal and arriving just at the time of the most important fight imaginable, for the survival of the species and the future of the planet.
You are free to make your own decisions now. You live in our home by choice. From here on we are a family because we want to be.
Help us to learn to love the adult our son has become, to accept your strength and to value who you make yourself. Forgive us if we still see the tiny, precious five pound baby we once held in our hands in your blue eyes. We cannot forget the love we felt for that infant. Understand that we still remember sending you to school on your first day, your toddling steps across Moultrie Playground downtown and the first time you shot away from the Hobcaw Yacht Club dock in a little sailboat.
Few children have more press clippings than baby pictures. Thanks for tolerating a published childhood. You will always be my favorite subject and the only thing I write about which I can count on your mother to read.
There is a bright, new I-phone coming to you on your birthday. The corrupt, decaying and dishonest society around you is about to get a wake up call. Many of your peers are asleep in a cocoon of seamless distraction. They will not leave Plato’s cave. You are headed into the harsh light of a new age. Others will follow you.
Welcome to the hard job of 21st Century Citizenship in America. Happy 18th. Birthday William Jackson Hamilton IV.
William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I’On Village.