I have been able to get my hands on the eulogy given by Rev Wight - this is where the RW and MSM are snipping from in regards to their latest Rev. Wright outrage...
Asa Hilliard A Child Of God
From:
Chicago Defender
Date:
November 9, 2007
Author:
Wright, Jeremiah A Jr
Eulogy lor Dr. Asa Grant Hilliard III
Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from Cod our Father and from Jesus Christ our Savior.
The Lord is my Shepherd I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death; I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; oh my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
To Queen Mother Honorable Mayor, Patsy Jo Hilliard, Baba Asa's partner in marriage and ministry, life, labor and love, the mother of Asa IV, Tricia, Robi and Hakim. (Hakim, Otis Moss III says you are a couple of years older than he, but you all were in Kemet here at Morehouse together and he asked me to greet you.) To Pastor Durley, our presiding "Poor Time Keeper"; to the president of Morehouse, Reverend Dr. Robert Michael Franklin; to Dean Carter and the members of the trustee board, faculty, alumni, students and staff at the Morehouse College; to the program participants in this service of celebration; to the guests of the Hilliard Family, ministers of the Gospel, members of Asa's family, the Morrisons and the Hilliards, and to the members of Trinity United Church of Christ who were in Kemet with me and Asa, and who have come to be here with you in this service of celebration; to the members of my own family who are here, my wife and my two oldest daughters; to the brothers and sisters of the Ashanti community, the Ghanaian chiefs, members of the Liberian community, brothers and sisters of the Kemetic community; to our brothers and sisters of the academic community, and to the members of the household of faith, I greet you.
She has been acknowledged by the children, but I want to thank, again publicly, Dr. Iva Carruthers, who came and got me from the dinner table in Cairo and said, "You need to come to Asa's room now," and who stayed with Patsy from that moment until the moment they came back home to Atlanta with Asa's body.
I want you to think with me for just a moment this afternoon on the subject "Asa Hilliard: A Child Of God." There are two different passages of Scripture and in both passages, in three different places, either John himself the Apostle, or one of John's disciples, uses language that for me best summarizes the life of Dr. Hilliard.
In John I verses 11, 12 and 13 the text says, "He came to what was his own, (This is the Revised Standard Translation.) and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood (That's your biology.), or of the will of the flesh (That's your sociology.), or of the will of man (That's your anthropology.), but who were born of God (That's your theology!).
Those who believed on His name, John says ... He gave power to become "children of God."
Then in the letters of John, in John's first letter to those in the first century community of faith, those whom biblical scholars call the Johannine communities, the small groups which gathered from Capernaum to Kemet, in John's first letter to those communities in Chapter 3, John says in verses 1 and 2, "see what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is."
To as many as received him, who believed on his name, he gave power to become children of God.
See what love the Father has given us that we should be called children of God and that is what we are." Those are the first two verses. Beloved, we are God's children. That is the third verse. In two different passages and in three different verses, John uses language that for me best summarizes the life of Asa Hilliard.
Asa Hilliard was a child of God. Asa G. Hilliard III was a child of God. Baba was a child of God. "Sub" was a child of God. Nana Baffour Amankwatia II was a child of God, and in the language of "he mama" (as the Gullah and Maroons in the low country would say), in the language of the Reverend Dr. Lois Otha Williams or her daddy Bishop Lowe, in the language of the saints of the Church of God in Christ, Asa's religion of origin, it is put this way: "If anybody asks you who I am, who I am, who I am... If anybody asks you who I am, tell 'em I'm a child of God."
Now what does a child of God look like? You can see it in the thirty-three year life of Jesus and you can see it in the seventy-three year life of Dr. Hilliard. First there is the issue of identity. A child of God gets his or her identity from God.
Jesus refused to be defined by others. He knew what other people said about Him. He knew how other people defined Him. Jesus lived His whole life under Roman oppression. The Italians ran everything in Jesus' day from the local government to the Roman Empire.
From Pontius Pilate to Caesar (pronounced "Kaiser") Augustus... from the circumstances surrounding his birth, a decree from the Roman government caused Joseph to have to leave Nazareth to go to his Bantustan in Bethlehem to get a passbook to legitimize his ethnicity... from the circumstances surrounding Jesus' birth (in a barn in a township that was under the Apartheid Roman government that said His daddy had to be in), up to and including the circumstances surrounding Jesus' death on a cross, a Roman cross, a public lynching Italian-style...
From birth to death, Jesus lived under Roman oppression, but Jesus refused to be defined by an oppressive government. Jesus got His identity from an omnipotent God. He refused to be defined by others and Dr. Asa Hilliard also refused to be defined by others.
In Bay City, Texas; in Marlon, Texas; in Houston, Texas; in Denver, Colorado; in San Francisco, California; in Monrovia, Liberia; in Abu Simbel, in Aswan or Cairo, in Kemet, in Accra, in Cape Coast, in Kumasi, in Ghana, Asa refused to be defined by others.
On August 22, 1933, in Galveston, he was born. From his birth to his death, like Jesus, Asa lived his whole life under the oppressive heel of white supremacy. From his birth in 1933 in the segregated South, in Galveston, Texas!
Texas! That's the state that did not want to be a state. The state that tried to pull out from the United States, tried to force Mexico to return the runaway Africans. The Battle of the Alamo was fought over the issue of African slaves.
Texas said yes to slavery and the Mexicans spoke in Whitney Houston "tongues" and said "Hell to the Naw" to slavery; and so the Battle of the Alamo had nothing to do with General Custer. It had to do with Kwame, Akosua, Kojo, Kofi and Yaa who refused to be slaves in a sick system of white supremacy.
Asa was born in Texas. Bay City, Texas is near Jasper, Texas. Jasper Texas of Rodney King and James Byrd infamy. Both Rodney King and James Byrd, distant cousins of Asa's, were from Jasper, Texas. Asa was born in a climate of white supremacy.
Jim Shankle! You heard Hakim (or "Kimi"). Jim Shankle left Mississippi to go to Texas because of white supremacy. With his wife sold to another slave holder in another state... he swam the Mississippi and walked four hundred miles to find his wife whom he valued even though the system of white supremacy devalued her.
Asa was born in a climate, a context and a country controlled by white supremacy. From its founding fathers some would say "fondling fathers" who defined Africans as non-persons, from its original government to its current government hell-bent on leaving every Black child behind. From his birth in the cradle of dehumanization to his death in the cradle of civilization, Asa lived under a government that like Rome in Jesus' day saw itself and sees itself as an empire.
The government runs everything from the White House to the schoolhouse, from the Capitol to the Klan, white supremacy is clearly in charge, but Asa, like Jesus, refused to be defined by an oppressive government because Asa got his identity from an omnipotent God.
Asa Hilliard was a child of God. A child of God, when it comes to identity, refuses to be defined by others.
Then a child of God refuses to be limited by what the world says about him or her, or thinks about him or her. Jesus refused to be limited by other folk's low expectations of him. Some of his own folk (Jesus' folks) thought he was a little "touched in the head."
Some of his own people tried to limit him to what they thought he ought to be doing in Nazareth. They asked, "Ain't this the carpenter's kid?" Some of his own colleagues tried to track him for failure.
His disciple, Nathaniel, just heard where Jesus came from: Nazareth? (The Red Light District in Houston? The projects in Denver? Manual Training High School for the Colored?) and Nathaniel said, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" That was Nathaniel's question. Trying to limit the Lord.
His enemies had their opinions about Him. The Italians for the most part looked down their garlic noses at the Galileans. His enemies had their opinions about Him. Pon-ti-us Pi-la-te. Y'all call him "Pontius Pilate." In Italiano, Pontius Pilate looked at the Palestinians as peasants. His enemies had their opinions about Him. His Jewish enemies! Yup, Jesus had enemies among His own people.
Why do people under oppression always seem to turn on each other rather than turning to each other? Could a part of it be the way they are taught to hate themselves and hate each other? What Reuben Fuerstein the Jew and Asa Hilliard the African call "socially mediated learning"
What Carter G. Woodson called the Miseducation of Africans in America, what Baffour Amankwatia called the making of a sheep dog? Not because of benign neglect but because of malignant intent. Does being fed a constant diet of self-hatred cause people under oppression to turn on each other? Jesus had folk who looked just like he looked. These were not Italians. These were Palestinians who were His enemies.
Those of us in the Christian church, when we read the sacred texts, we really get ticked, because we find out that one of the hardest pills to swallow is the fact that most of Jesus' staunchest enemies were "church folk." Not the "Bros" who hung out in the brothels and the bars, and the Jerusalem taverns, but the saints who hung out in the Synagogue and the sacred precincts of the Jerusalem temple!
Jesus' enemies tried to limit Him by what they said about Him and what they thought about Him, but Jesus' identity was intact because He knew He was a child of God and He refused to be limited by what the world said about Him or thought about Him.
And Asa? Asa was just like Jesus-"a sacred text," Wade Nobles says-"to be exegeted." Asa refused to be limited by what the world said about him or thought about him. Asa refused to be limited by other folks' low expectations of him.
One of his teachers thought he was too dumb to learn Algebra Some of his college classmates firmly believed in the ideology of "Old Black Joe." The city of Denver conspired to constrict him, consigned him to an education of the hand-Manual Training School-not an education of the head.
Like Jesus, Asa's enemies had their own low opinions about him. White Egyptologists recoiled at the very notion of everything that Asa taught, from Educational Psychology to Cultural Anthropology.
His white enemies in academia and in the media, they could not conceive of the fact that Cush or Nubia was the cradle of civilization, that Drusilla Dunjee Houston was right, that Iva Elaine Carruthers was right, that Peggy Brooks-Bertram was right, that John Henrik Clarke was right, that Charles Finch, Theophile Obenga and Runoko Rashidi were right, that Cheik Anta Diop was right, that Ivan Van Sertima was right, that Carlos Moore was right, that Anderson Thompson, William Leo Hansberry and Jacob Carruthers were right, that Molefi Asante, Nzinga and Na'im Akbar were right, or that Yosef benJochannan, Dr. Bobby Wright, Gerald Massey and Dr. Wade Nobles were right.
Asa's white enemies cringed at the creation of the Association for the Study of Classical African Societies and the Association of Black Psychologists. They had apoplexy over the fact that even the Greek historian whom Asa quoted, a guy called Herodotus, said that the ancient citizens of Kemet were Black and that Kemet (which was renamed Aegyptos by the Greeks) came out of the womb called Cush or Nubia, the country of Black people.
Asa's white enemies tried to limit his awesome expertise, his encyclopedic knowledge and his incredible intellect to the cubbyhole they had designed for him long before Schlesinger and Ravich who were and are, incidentally, Afro-phobic. Asa had white enemies in academia and white enemies in the corporate-controlled media who tried to limit his brilliance to the cesspools of mediocrity in which they live.
They would die and go to hell before admitting that Kemet was culturally, linguistically, sociologically, anthropologically and theologically cut from the same cloth as the Bantu, the Ashanti, the Akan, the Wolof, the Peul and the Yoruba. White Egyptologists even hated the word "Africanist." They took Egypt out of Africa and they created an eighth Continent called "the Middle East," an oxymoron which we still use today.
Asa's white enemies tried to limit Asa's expertise to what they thought he was capable of and like Jesus, all of Asa's enemies were not whites. Some of his enemies looked just like he looked.
I have told our congregation for thirty-five years, "Everybody your color ain't your kind and everybody not your color is not necessarily your enemy." Some of Asa's enemies are Africans.
We've got some Ghanaian chiefs here. We've got the Council of Ghanaian chiefs here, yeah! But we also got some Africans who can out-white, white folks. Make no mistake about it. They're British all down in their bones, born raised and living (as Ashanti) in Ghana not just Liverpool!
White supremacist brainwashing passing itself off as education, is not restricted to the United States of America or white European cultures. White supremacy is not restricted to any particular country or any particular color. We got some Africans who are whiter in their thinking than George Bush and Dick Cheney.
Some of Asa's enemies are African. Some of Asa's enemies are African Americans. Some teach at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Georgia State. Don't laugh too loud 'cause some teach at Morehouse and some teach at Spelman!!!
Some of Asa's enemies are negroes, colored or just confused, and some of Asa's enemies are church-folk. I know a whole bunch of saved and sanctified folk who never have understood Asa. "Why all that Black stuff?"
"Why can't he wear regular clothes like Bishop 'Whatcha-nama?' Regular means European. And, why he always talking about Hotep, Hotep, Hotep? Why can't he just say, 'Praise the Lord, Saints?' You know his mama didn't raise him that way!"
Like Jesus, Asa had enemies of another race and Asa had enemies of his own race, but Asa's identity was intact. Asa knew who he was. Asa knew Whose he was. Asa was a child of God and Asa refused to be limited by what the world said about him or what the world thought about him. Asa refused to be defined by others.
He refused to be limited by the world's expectations of him. But there is yet another aspect of identity that goes beyond refusal and that is acceptance or embracing Jesus personified it and Asa exemplified it.
Jesus embraced who He was and he used what God gave Him to bless others. Everything that Jesus did was a manifestation of how He took what God gave Him and used that to bless others. A child of God embraces who he or she is and uses what God gives him or her to bless others. Asa took the mind that God gave him. He embraced the life of the mind. He embraced the life of scholarship.
Asa took the mind that God gave him and used what God gave him to bless others. He embraced the life of a scholar and he embraced the life of a servant; a life of service to others, helping others, blessing others. Dr. Janice Hale, Dr. Crystal Kuykendall have both said to me over the past few days, had it not been for Asa Hilliard, their scholarship would not be where it is today. And how many other scholars, Black and white, have that same testimony?
Asa took what God gave him and used those gifts to bless others. I did not find out until the day Asa died just how far-reaching and personal that quality of his really was. We were sitting in Patsy's room in the hotel after Asa died. I knew about Donald Young one of my play sons in Chicago. He said after I turned him on to Asa, that he contacted Dr. Hilliard and Dr. Hilliard walked him through his master's program in education.
I knew about Donald, but I did not know until the day Asa died that my daughter, Janet, who got her master's in early childhood education administration, had also been blessed by Dr. Hilliard. Janet said (on the day he died) that Asa emailed her every day sending her something else to help her get her master's .
And, as we had family prayer in Patsy's room, my daughter, Nikol, my number three daughter, broke down in tears because she thanked God for the way that Asa, as a psychologist, had helped her when she was in crisis. I did not know that until the day he died
Asa's identity was intact. He knew he was a child of God. He refused to be defined by others. He refused to be limited by what the world said about him and thought about him, and he embraced who he was and used what God gave him to bless others.
What does a child of God look like? First there is the issue of identity and then there is the issue of integrity. Asa was a man of integrity.
He loved his family-a man of integrity. Last night we had representatives from all over the world at the celebration of Asa's life because of his love for the African community, but that love started with the love he had for Patsy Jo, for his children and his grandchildren. Asa was a man of integrity.
He loved his family. He loved his family and he lived his faith. A man of integrity-he now lives forever because of his faith. A man of integrity. Now, that "lived his faith" point and characteristic of this giant is very important. A lot of us like to talk our faith. A lot of church folk like to argue faith.
A lot of former church folk, some in the Kemetic community, some in the Ashanti community, some in the African American Yoruba community, they like to fuss about faith, fall out over faith and put other folk down because of their faith. But a child of God living a life of integrity is a person who lives their faith. Asa lived his faith.
Last night Runoko Rashidi said that Asa was a genuine human being That's because Asa lived his faith. He could be there for Runoko. He could be there for my two daughters. He could be there for Moses Hananiah. He could be there for me. He could be there for people of other faiths.
He could be there for people of no faith, because he lived his faith. He did not preach his faith or push his faith, pedal his faith or play with his faith. He lived his faith. There were times when some of us in the Christian family wished that he would have talked more about his faith publicly.
I never will forget when I stumbled up on just how deep his roots in our Christian faith were and are. It was in Chicago. I was on the Board for the Centers for New Horizons, an inner city child development program. Back then they had over five hundred students and Sokoni Karanja had Asa come in to lecture to the teachers and teach the teachers in an all-day workshop.
I had a funeral that morning, so I was late for the lecture. I didn't come in, therefore, in front of Asa (at Wendell Phillips High School). I sneaked in the back and came in, and sat up on the stage with the staff and the Board members behind Asa, and I heard Asa tell a story about living in Liberia.
One night he said he heard some drumming and he could not sleep. He tried to go to sleep. He tossed and he turned, but he kept hearing this music and he got up and went to find out where the music was, and just at the edge of the Bush he walked up on a religious ceremony.
And Asa said, "I understood for the first time in my life what I had grown up seeing in East Texas, in my sanctified Pentecostal grandfather's church and never understood 'cause I had not seen it in its natural setting."
I sat behind him on the stage that day in awe; and after questions and answers, and all the fellowship, I said to him, "Are you trying to tell me that you a Christian?" He said, "Absolutely! I am not trying to tell you. lam telling you!"
To do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God, that's how you live your life and live your faith. The forty-two confessions and the Book of Coming Forth are all about how you lived your life. The fortytwo generations of the prophets through which Jesus rode to get off in a barn in Bethlehem was God coming into the world to become flesh, to live a life to show you how to live your life!!!
Jesus said in one of His last conversations with His clergy colleagues, "When I was hungry you fed Me. When I was naked you clothed Me. When I was sick you visited Me. When I was in prison you ministered unto Me. In as much as you have done it unto the least of these, my little ones (in Surinam, my little ones in the favelas of Bahia, my little ones in the townships of South Africa, my little ones in the projects in Denver, my little ones in Ghana and Benin, my little ones in Sudan and in Aswan), you have done it unto Me."
Faith is about how you live your life. Asa is a man who lived his faith. He loved his family, he lived his faith and he now lives eternally - a man of integrity. Asa Hilliard was a child of God.
What does a child of God look like? To all who received Him, He gave power to become children of God. What does a child of God look like? Look at Asa. Beloved, we are now the children of God. A man of identity and a man of integrity.
But then, being a child of God is also a matter of constancy. Now for Jesus that meant he was the same every day. He wasn't one way, one day and then some other way the next day. That was constancy.
And for Asa that meant you pressed each day proceeding on the basis of the evidence you have before you. That was Asa's philosophy both as a scholar and as a child of God In one of his last lectures to the members of our church in Aswan last week (I think we were still in Cairo for that lecture.), he pointed out that there was no historical evidence of Hyksos, Habiru, Israeli or Palestinian slavery in the written records of the Kemites.
And, one of the Christian ministers traveling with our church said, "Areyou trying to tell us that what the Bible says is not true?" Asa said, "No, I'm trying to tell you that there is no historical evidence in the written records of Kemet about any such slavery as described in the Book of Exodus."
My oldest grandson, a senior at Howard University, was sitting in the class in Cairo and he said to Dr. Hilliard, "Dr. Hilliard, what are we as Christians supposed to believe? Are you telling us not to believe the Bible?" Asa cut him off.
Dr. Hilliard said, "I'm not telling anybody what to believe. I'm not telling anybody what not to believe. I am talking about historical evidence. You proceed in drawing your factual conclusions on the basis of factual evidence."
Only a child of God like Asa, a man sure of his identity, a man of integrity and a man of constancy could pull off that delicate balance of living continuously and confidently in the contradictions of life, in the disparate claims of facts and faith.
Asa proceeded each day as a scholar on the basis of the evidence of fact, but Asa also proceeded each day living a life of constancy. He proceeded each day as a saint on the basis of the evidence of his faith. Faith! The faith that he lived.
Faith! His sacred text, our sacred text says "is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen." Amon was not seen. Ra was not seen. Olodumare was not seen. Olurun was not seen. Unkulunkulu was not seen. Lesa was not seen. Modimo was not seen. Nyame was not seen. Yahweh was not seen. Jehovah Shalom was not seen. Allah was not seen. The orisha are not seen. The "I am that I am" was not seen and is not seen; but Asa had evidence of things not seen.
What evidence? Well, Asa knew that God was faithful. (The evidence of things not seen.) Every time that he looked at his own life, Asa knew that God was a God of mercy. Every morning when he could roll over and look at Patsy Jo, Asa knew that God was a God of grace. Asa knew God personally and because he believed in His name he now lives in a new house.
One of the things I used to talk with Asa about, one of the things I've never talked with Wade or with Na'im about, never got a chance to talk to Bobby Wright about, was why it is in Kemetic faith y'all don't sing nothing Almost like that brother who got discredited by Louis Farrakhan who broke away from the Nation of Islam, I think his name was Khalid Muhammad. He said that if the Nation had had some Gospel music (Laughter), y'all would have swept the Black community!
We look at all of the serious teachings of Ptah-hotep. We look at the fight between Tuthmosis and Hatshepsut, but them people sang y'all. They had some music.
Hakim when you were studying for the Bar, what was Daddy doing? He was driving and listening to some music. Wonder what those songs were like that we don't know.
We've got 150 songs right in the middle of our Bible. But we've never heard any of them sung. We call them the Psalms.
Life wasn't all about being serious and deep thought. Life means that they had babies just like when Asa and Patsy Jo went to Liberia. They did more than just sit around thinking deeply.
Brother Shankle didn't walk four hundred miles barefoot to engage in deep thought. What were those songs that they sang in Kemet like? I don't know what songs they sang when Ptah-hotep was alive.
I don't know what songs they sang when Hatshepsut was alive. I don't know what songs they sang when Nefertari was alive. But, I know early on Monday morning when Asa crossed over, not the Nile, but that other river, there was another song It wasn't the song they sang in the Valley of the Kings. It was the song Sister Otha was singing in the presence of the King of Kings. It was an old Pentecostal praise song sung for the victory God gave Asa "Yes, Lord! Yes, Lord! Yeah, Lord!"
Yesssssssssss, yessssssssss, yessssssssss. Yesssssssssss, yessssssssss, yesssssssssssss. Has he been good to you? Been so gooooooood, been soooooooo good. Been soooooooooo goooooodd...
Applause!
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