Reading the Book "The Sun Does Shine": What Educational Leaders and Educators Can Learn from a Former Death Row Inmate

"You don't have to be locked up to occupy your mind and your days trying to rewrite a painful past or undo a terrible tragedy or make right a horrible wrong. But pain and tragedy and injustice happen--they happen to us all. I'd like to believe it's what you choose to do after such an experience that matters the most--that truly changes your life forever." Anthony Ray Hinton, The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row

Anthony Ray Hinton's book The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row is a emotionally riveting and reader-disturbing tale that every educator should read this summer. In it, Hinton tells the story of his life on death row in Alabama for the crime of murder that he did not commit. He was clearly convicted due to a racist justice system in which both law enforcement, district attorneys, and judges found him guilty of murder because of his skin color and because he was a convenient suspect. What's more, this wasn't something that occurred in the 1950s or 1960s. Hinton was convicted and sentenced to death row in the 1980s.

The real value of this book besides its portrait of a racism that is very much part of our country's fabric lies in the wisdom that Hinton shares throughout. It is clear that through the injustice he experienced, he has a lot to say that we should give attention to. For example, nowhere does Hinton capture both the injustice of his experience and what he learned than when he writes:

"My only crime was being born black, or being born black in Alabama. Everywhere I looked in this courtroom, I saw white faces--a sea of white faces. Wood walls, wood furniture, and white faces. The courtroom was impressive and intimidating. I felt like an uninvited guest in a rich man's library, It's hard to explain exactly what it feels like to be judged. There's a shame to it. Even when you know you're innocent. It still feels like you are coated in something dirty and evil. It made me feel guilty. It made me feel like my very soul was put on trial and found lacking. When it seems like the whole world thinks you're bad, it's hard to hang on to your goodness."

Elsewhere, Hinton shares additional wisdom about the experience of being Black in America:

"Innocent men don't run. Except sometimes innocent men need to run. This is true in Alabama and everywhere. If you're poor and black, sometimes your best and only chance is to run."

And:

"There was no good end to the running in my mind, but there were nights when it seemed like dying on the pavement would have been a whole lot easier than proving my innocence in a courtroom. I shouldn't have had to prove I was innocent--they were supposed to prove I was guilty--but not in this courtroom." 

Hinton's book offers readers one man's experience of what happens when the very institutions that are supposed to ensure justice and fairness align to carry out an injustice. It is this story that reminds us that the institutions we lead can be capable of the same.

Statements like this rightfully disturb our beliefs in what we often see as an infallible system of justice and government. It convicts us of often having a blind faith in our institutions and how it deals with citizens. Hinton's story loudly proclaims that the fight for making sure our institutions are just and fair is far from over. After all, Hinton was released in 2015, just about 3 years ago. In the story he tells, it took him 30 years to avoid execution and prove his innocence, when it was clear from the beginning to the system that convicted him that he was innocent.

Why should educators and school leaders read this one? We should read this book because much of the literature sold to us is about methodologies, technologies, and leadership strategies. If we simply only read that stuff, we forget that our institutions are still engaged in effectively providing opportunities for people, and that our institutions of education, like our justice system, can and does still act in ways that are unjust and unfair. By reading Hinton's story, not only do you learn from a very wise individual who shares what he learned from personal injustice, you also find your own personal faith in our institutions disturbed enough to realize they still get things wrong. Leadership is recognizing that both we and the institutions we lead still exist in contexts culturally and historically constituted, and that means, no matter our intentions, they still act in unjust ways.

As a side not, I am firmly convinced that being an effective leader is more than reading John Maxwell books, applying the tenets of leadership gurus like Stephen R. Cover, and the many other ideas and programs peddled in the leadership industry these days. Being an effective leader means encountering the uncomfortable---the disturbing---so that we find ourselves off-balance. In this state of being off-balance we discover that the world we thought we had figured out isn't really what we thought it was and that perhaps we can't really see things with the level of certainty our leadership gurus tell us we can. Therein lies the value in Hinton's book The Sun Does Shine. It effectively disturbs our world---especially the world of this white male who often sees things through that lens of privilege and culture. Anthony Ray Hinton's story of spending 30 years on death row for a crime he did not commit is one every educational leader should read.

Facebook, Bogus Timeline Posts, & Authentically Helping Others

If your Facebook timeline is like mine, rarely does a day go when you don’t see a post that asks you to share it because your act of sharing will somehow benefit the subject of the post. For example, today I found a post from a well-meaning friend asking me to repost a photo with a description that stated, “If this boy gets 100 shares he gets his heart transplant for free!” Most of us would immediately repost without question, after all, it’s the least we could do in situations like this.

If this boy gets 100 shares he gets his heart transplant for free!

But here’s the real problems with these posts: they are bogus just about every time. Or so it seems. Lately, when I’ve seen these posts, I’ve gotten into the habit of googling the bylines, and just about every single time an article from Snopes.com comes up telling me the post is bogus. Snopes usually provides a bit of additional background as well, such as who is really in the photos, when the post began circulating, and other variations of the post. Web sites like Snopes are excellent tools for helping sort out fact and fiction from the web.

Part of us wants to believe that we can help someone so easily with the click of a button. We may even justify our reposting of things like this because we say, “What can it possibly hurt.” But in some ways we are perpetuating a lie and just maybe giving people a false sense of having done something good for another human being when we’ve really done nothing.

But sometimes the real issue we have with the web is our own personal approach to it. We turn to the web sometimes to only verify the world as we wish it could be or want to it be. For example, we want to believe that there are people like this little child who need a heart transplant, and there are people like us who can help. Better yet, just maybe, these opportunities to repost these requests for help exist to give us an opportunity feel better about all the time we waste thumbing through these social media sites.

Perhaps the truth is simply this: you can’t really believe much of anything that comes through your social media feed, and if you want to really make a difference in someone else’s life, turn off Facebook and help someone face-to-face this holiday season. In the real world, need can be a bit more obvious and you don’t need Snopes to fact check. If you take a hard look at the real world around, I bet there’s someone whose needs are apparent, and we might have to do a bit more than simply repost.