I started to title this article about my son Justin Hurst’s magnificent recent second place victory in his triumphant return to the Springfield City Council as some version of the mythical story of the Phoenix rising up from the ashes.
But such an artificial description of how my son rose from defeat in the last mayor’s race two years ago to a resounding victory that brought him back to the Springfield City Council and positioned him to launch a future mayoral challenge seemed too trite to me primarily because I never viewed incumbent Mayor Domenic Sarno’s relatively narrow victory as a loss for Justin.
I was extremely proud of how Justin conducted himself in the mayor’s race. He was fearless. He raised issues that no other Black candidate for any office dared to raise (or for that matter, any White candidate). He went straight at the status quo that some of us had been fighting against for years, a status quo so rigid and self-entitled that as a body, it still doesn’t understand that its time is gradually, but recently more rapidly, coming to an end with the transition of Springfield to a significant minority majority and the emergence of fearless leaders like Justin, who, by the way, I think stands out among them all.
I think I’m uniquely qualified to make that judgment as one who has been in the fight from the time I returned to Springfield from college in 1968 and ran for mayor in 1969. And to the frustration of some of my detractors, I never quit the fight because I have always believed that quitting is the only certain way to lose. Which is why I was hopeful but uncertain that Justin had recovered from some of the more stressful aspects of his run for mayor enough to stay in the fight for the future of Springfield.
It’s not easy to learn the hard way that many of your own are so psychologically enslaved by a corrupt White system that even as they cheer you on, they go into hiding when the real fight starts. And to learn that some of your own have actually crossed over and sold out and have become more dangerous to the progress you’ve struggled for than the worst members of the White status quo. An ever-present reality to me but a shock, I’m sure, to a relative political newcomer like Justin who had never felt such a betrayal by his own so up close.
And to top it off, I was very much aware that to have to contend with the people closest to him expressing a need to see him defend himself against a last minute cheap shot by the mayor and his minions that was blown out of proportion by the mainstream media (as though he needed a defense, which he didn’t) could easily have been enough to take the fight out of Justin, although I hoped he wouldn’t overreact, which he wisely didn’t seem to.
But Justin went strangely silent for a year and a half. And I worried that his detractors and his confused allies had taken the fight out of him until I woke up one morning to see his city council signs on my lawn. And I didn’t react well for many reasons that are not worth a lengthy explanation here. But suffice it to say that before I committed to Justin’s sudden re-emergence, I wanted assurance that Justin was back in the fight for the bigger cause rather than for himself. Because, if he was in it for himself, that was his business but I wanted no part of it and I told him so in no uncertain much-more-than-timid terms. This was after I had removed his city council signs from my yard.
I reminded Justin that after the mayoral election, I was the only person who came to his immediate defense in the form of a controversial article I wrote titled “The Worst Article I Ever Wrote.” I knew that his detractors would be planning to do a ceremonial victory dance over what they believed to be his political grave and, being the warrior that I am, I deliberately preempted their celebration with what was actually one of the best articles I ever wrote. It was not written as the publisher of a news magazine or as a journalist but purely as a father in defense of his son in a time of his need for a bit of room to recover. I needed Justin’s reassurance that he wasn’t now just looking for a place to park his ego but that he was truly back in the bigger fight for something bigger than himself. And I pressed him hard on it, mainly because I was puzzled by his year and a half of silence.
To my surprise, Justin never raised his voice to me that day. All he kept saying was something like “I get it.” I thought for sure that I had lost my son with my reaction but, in fact, I instead learned that my youngest son, who had never hesitated in the past to fire back at me, had matured. He didn’t tell me his entire strategy but he assured me that it would make me proud. And I was proud as I watched the old Justin emerge much more polished and strategic and courageous and unafraid to confront power as he ever had been. And I soon replaced his signs in my front yard.
I was most impressed by how he handled the mainstream media (especially print media). For the most part, he ignored them and relied mainly on an excellent social media campaign. And it worked! I was never so pleased at the genius of it all and at the obvious frustration of media folks who have always exercised their freedom to be unfair while Justin demonstrated their irrelevance by running an excellent modern campaign that spoke to the bigger story of why the print media is dying.
Some say that I run Justin which could not be further from the truth. Nobody controls Justin and that’s how it should be. I will say one thing about Justin. He is a lot like me in his willingness to fight and speak straight truth to power and to take the kind of risk that most people run from.
But Justin is a much better politician than I could ever be and that few could ever be. People love him. He’s a natural. And he has emerged in Springfield politics at a time of major transition when a flawed mayor is in a lame duck mode and has lost his dictatorial grip on the school committee entirely and can no longer rely on his bully control of the city council. Change is in the air and Justin Hurst is squarely at the center of it where he belongs and where we all need him.
Justin’s group of supporters is like Jessie Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Visit his house at any time for any event formal or informal and whoever you may be, you will feel at home. He and his lovely multi-cultural family are genuine folks who are all—young and older alike—contributing to the future of Springfield which they represent well.
And all I can say is that I hope to be around when Justin walks into the mayor’s office as Springfield’s first Black mayor. ■