Thursday, March 28, 2024 Mar 28, 2024
71° F Dallas, TX
Advertisement
Publications

POLITICS Baptism by Fire

Don Hicks says a "class war" cost southern Dallas 800 jobs.
By Ruth Miller Fitzgibbons |

BY THAT THURSDAY AFTER-noon, when it was time to leave for the City Council retreat at Lake Texoma, rookie City Councilman Don Hicks just couldn’t bring himself to go. Emotionally, he was wiped out from five weeks of intense debate over whether the city should bid for a state prison in South Dallas. After trying in vain to convince neighbors of the proposed sites that the prison would bring hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars in economic development, Hicks had conceded defeat the day before. In an emotional speech, the newly elected representative from Place 5-one of the city’s new minority districts-choked back tears as he recalled the angry insults that had been hurled at him. Acquiescing to the demonstrators who had gathered to protest the move, Hicks abruptly switched his support and, along with Mayor Steve Bartlett, the project’s original champion, voted with the council majority not to submit a bid.

Hicks, the lone council member to skip the retreat, didn’t do so because it was costing taxpayers $14,000, or because it was being held outside Dallas County-criticisms that had been leveled by some of Hicks’ colleagues. He just needed time, he says. Time to wind down. Time to attend to a big client in his law practice. Time with his wife, who for the first time in their 18-year marriage was insisting that he install a security system in their home. Time to watch his 13-year-old son’s basketball games. Even his son, Hicks says, had been hassled at school over the prison issue.

Sitting in his council office less than a week after the prison bid was voted down, reflecting on his tumultuous first month in office, Hicks says he was not prepared for the viciousness of the prison debate. His City Council campaign had promised two major thrusts: economic development in South Dallas and an aggressive assault on crime. He saw the prison issue as the perfect meld of those interests. Contrary to accusations that would be hurled at him later, Hicks says he was not asked by Mayor Bartlett to carry the prison issue-he volunteered. His voice still rises with frustration over the thought of the millions of dollars, “backed by the full faith and credit of the state of Texas,” that could have flowed to Dallas.

Hicks’ dream of an economic bonanza suffered a quick and violent death. Whether the fault lay with the messenger-Hicks-or the message is open to interpretation. Hicks believes that the city’s history of broken promises in South Dallas has left an un-breachable chasm of distrust. Others blame Hicks’ bulldog style. “What Don did right.” says political consultant Rufus Shaw, who commandeered Bartlett’s campaign in the black community, “was that he stood up to the radical community. What Don did wrong was just about everything else.”



LAST NOVEMBER, IN THE SAME ELECTION THAT PUT DON HICKS AND STEVE Bartlett in office, Texas voters approved a bond issue allocating $1.1 POLITICS billion for the building of new prisons. The opportunity to build brand-new facilities doesn’t come along all that often, and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice was eager to incorporate some of the newer thinking about incarceration and rehabilitation.

Chief among these new ideas is one that seems so obvious that it’s hard to believe it’s new. That is, that the process of rehabilitation might be enhanced if the prisoner were incarcerated in or near the environment that helped to create him. Rather than strand prisoners, a huge percentage of whom hail from urban areas, in isolated rural settings, away from family members, from educational programs and services, from large-scale substance-abuse programs, from job centers, from transportation, from health care-why not locate those criminals in a place that will give them access to the tools of rehabilitation?

To Mayor Bartlett, that translated easily into dollars and cents. Bartlett says that he was vaguely aware throughout the campaign that the state was targeting Texas’ urban areas as prison sites, but that “the issue had only come up once or twice.” After his election, in meeting with regional economic development groups, Bartlett decided that Dallas should bid for a prison. The economics were mind-boggling: $80 million in local construction costs and a $16.8 million annual payroll, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. And that doesn’t factor in the economic residuals of a major state facility in our midst.

The 800 jobs that the prison would add to the local economy were presented as the carrot. Don Hicks saw opportunities for a laundry list of professionals and business people-lawyers, accountants, computer programmers, educators, counselors, psychologists, food service people, chaplains, dentists, construction workers, office suppliers. “People asked why would Don Hicks get himself so involved in this prison deal,” Hicks says, “and the answer is that all those people are the people who live in my district.” Hicks had faith that the state would fill many of the available jobs with African-Americans, given the pool of talent in Dallas/Fort Worth. And that would have the added benefit of providing minority role models for the prisoners.

Alas, the people to whom Hicks would take his message-the folks who live near the prison sites-were not, by and large, doctors, lawyers or accountants. The issue of jobs became moot to those who, as they saw it, would bear the stigma of living near a prison without directly benefiting from it. As one caller to a radio talk show put it, “Most of the jobs in a prison take a bachelor’s degree. There aren’t many bachelor’s degrees out here.”

From the start, residents of neighborhoods nearest to the proposed sites were skeptical as to why the site selection process narrowed down to three locations-all south of downtown. That concern would later be echoed by political activists who gleefully joined the fight. “The answer is simple,” Mayor Bartlett explains. “The site had to have 300 acres, and it had to be free. That’s a fairly hard deal to come by in Dallas.”

In fact, massive distrust-of the idea of a prison, of Steve Bartlett, of the city of Dallas, of Don Hicks-ruled the prison discussion from the beginning. Hicks says that the very day he was sworn in, he rushed to a meeting at the Turnkey community center near Highland Hills to “leverage the negatives with a positive.” It didn’t go well. The antagonism that would later kill the deal was apparent at that first meeting. “I knew the concept of a prison would be a negative thing,” Hicks says. “But I thought with a clarified concept, and the obvious benefits, I could get my message out.”

If everyone involved agrees that Hicks couldn’t do that, they disagree on why. Hicks believes that the debate was co-opted by political “bullies’-people like former mayoral candidate Dallas Jackson, City Hall gadflies Roy Williams and Marvin Cren-shaw, West Dallas politico Mildred Pope, and County Commissioner John Wiley Price. “Most of the people who came out against it didn’t live anywhere near the place,” agrees Rufus Shaw. Hicks goes a step further: “All my opposition were people either running for office, or people who wanted to be in office, or people who had asked me for appointments [to city boards or commissions] and didn’t get them. What I learned was that the political egos of individuals are larger than the collective good.”

Hicks was especially incensed by Price’s opposition. The council member produced a newspaper clipping from 1987 and read it at a public hearing to show that Price himself had once advocated building a prison in southern Dallas. “The difference was, it was a private prison, and Price could get his grubby hands in the deal,” Hicks says bitterly. “But when I began to read from the paper, that shut him up.”

Hicks was stunned, he says, by the vi-ciousness of his opponents’ attacks-many of which were aimed at him personally. He was called a “handkerchief head,” a derogatory term for an African-American who does a white man’s bidding. A video he made to show that the site for the prison was an ugly garbage dump was derided as “silly.” He was accused of being arrogant, and he feels, discriminated against because he is a professional, a family man, part of the middle class. “We [in the African-American community] really are in a class war,” says the blunt-spoken lawyer. “People who were afraid of my education wanted me to wear it as a badge of dishonor.”

Hicks is convinced that the group of people who fought him on the prison issue never even heard the facts. “At one of these forums,” he says in disbelief, “I found myself debating a murderer! This was a guy that Dallas Jackson was holding up as an expert in criminal justice! It turns out he had killed a cop! And Jackson himself claims to be an expert in economic development? ] What economics? He doesn’t provide jobs for anyone. He doesn’t even have a job.” [Jackson hosts and produces a local cable TV show.]

Feisty and often combative, Hicks did often come off as arrogant. And he blundered into the abyss of untouchable subjects when, in attempting to justify the prison’s location, he stressed that most of the inmates at the maximum-security prison would be minorities. “These people have what I call an ostrich mentality,” Hicks says. “I don’t give a damn about being politically correct. They don’t need that. What they need is someone to bring them opportunity.”

Hicks’ critics charge that he didn’t even do a minimal amount of way-paving before he took the prison bid public. Says Rufus Shaw: “He tried to hog all the political glory, despite every person who backed him telling him not to do it that way. He was arrogant and stubborn. Don is trying to make himself a king, and there won’t be any more kings in the black community. There will never be another John Wiley Price.”

Hicks concedes that he didn’t touch the right bases before he went to the neighborhoods, but he says he believed that the residents had the first right to hear and be heard. At one point, when things were obviously going sour, Hicks says he offered to let the “bullies” take over the issue and claim the credit for themselves. “They said it was too late,” he says.

If the new councilman’s baptism by fire has been painful, it doesn’t seem to have dulled his spirit. But folks are already wondering aloud about the damage to his fledgling political career. Shaw claims that privately Bartlett was angry that Hicks bungled the deal and then backed down in the face of unexpected pressure. Bartlett denies that he was mad and takes pains not to assign blame. “We’re all trying and Don took a big political risk. I think he did a credible job,” says the mayor. “By the time Don pulled the plug, I believe the opposition was waning and the support was growing. In hindsight, there might be things that he or I would have done differently. But it’s not as if we’re the first city to decide not to build a prison.”

Looking back, Hicks puts an even more positive spin on the whole episode. On the day of reckoning, the day the council voted not to write a bid for the prison, the councilman’s sudden motion to cancel a public hearing and call a vote had the result of denying the assembled angry multitudes their microphone time. Indignant speeches went unmade.

“They had to go home, and the media went home, too,” Hicks says with some pleasure, “and I got to be the messenger for the people. I landed on my feet. I got a stand ing ovation. And I beat back the political bullies. They found out they’re gonna have to work with me.”

Related Articles

Image
Basketball

Kyrie and Luka: A Love Story

It didn't work last season, but the dynamic duo this year is showing us something special.
Image
Politics & Government

Q&A: Senate Hopeful Colin Allred Says November Election Is ‘Larger Than Our Own Problems’

The congressman has experience beating an entrenched and well-funded incumbent. Will that translate to a statewide win for the Democrats for the first time since 1994?
Advertisement