Recently, I spent a week with my wife’s family. My father-in-law, Hivens Gill, wasn’t there. He died more than two decades ago.
Yet, I thought about him the whole week.
Hivens, a Black man whose roots were in Georgia, served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War years.
Neither Georgia in the 1930s and 1940s, nor the U.S. Army in the early 1950s, were known for treating Blacks fairly or well in the pre-segregation days ahead of the Civil Rights movement.
After the Army, Hivens — a good pianist and bassist — tried his hand at Motown. But after finding all the slots occupied when attempting to break into the ranks of legendary players, a frustrated Hivens went to work for Ford Motor Co. in Detroit.
He married my delightful mother-in-law, started a family and worked hard.
He pursued further education at every opportunity and began a series of promotions at Ford.
Eventually he was an executive with the New Plant Development team, opening a plant in Ohio, then being promoted to Ford’s headquarters in Dearborn, Mich.
I thought about him because I know what he invested in his family, and being around them shows the fruit of it.
“Get educated and work hard,” he’d say. “No one can ever take education away from you, and hard work opens doors.”
Like Martin Luther King Jr.’s famed “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Hivens emphasized that character matters way more than race when reading people — and, hopefully, when being read by people.
He wasn’t blind to racism, nor initially none-too-pleased when his daughter Teressa brought home this white musician from Pittsburgh and told him she was in love.
He later told me, after we’d become friends, that he’d simply never anticipated one of his kids dating someone who wasn’t Black. It just wasn’t a thing when he came up.
He also said it bothered him more that I was a musician trying to break into that industry, because he knew how daunting it was, and he didn’t want his daughter tied up with a struggling dreamer with no money to pay the bills.
Despite the doors that were harder to push open due to racial divides, he was convinced that his children could put in the time and effort, and the right doors would open.
Because of that, he built them up. He told them they had it in them to get there.
All four of his children went to university, got educated and became professionals.
As we recently spent time together as a family, Hivens Gill’s legacy was staring me in the face the whole time.
He’s in the sturdy walls of the homes his widow and children own. He’s in the businesses they’ve built, in the paychecks they sign, in the best principles they’ve spoken into their families’ lives.
He’s in the beautiful notion expressed to his grandkids that they’re capable of a good life and should be willing to chase it.
Hivens Gill, like all of us, had his flaws and moments he regretted.
But they don’t make up his legacy.
His higher principles have shown through. Instilled and reinforced with intention, they manifest over and again even decades after he left us.
I’m grateful for that and inspired by it.
Words matter. We should speak hope and life into our kids… it’s the antidote to the depressing nihilism that so many young folks are immersed in today.
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