Bullets rained down like fury in the hot summer air. It was just before 9 P.M. on July 7, and downtown Dallas was under attack.
The Reverend Dr. Jeff Hood, a slender young man in his early thirties with a long beard and wearing a white robe, looked north and saw two police officers crumple to the ground. He could hear the bullets whir past him. Instinctively, he grabbed his stomach and chest, feeling for blood.
Pow! Pow-pow-pow-pow-pow!
More gunfire; more panic. Dallas had become a war zone.
Hood turned around. Behind him stood hundreds of protesters who had gathered for the Black Lives Matter protest. It had been an otherwise peaceful night—they'd gathered only a couple hours before to walk the streets in protest of the use of excessive police violence against black men. There had been no fights, and the police remained a calming presence. But now their faces filled with horror as bullets ruled the air. A woman screamed. Some froze. Others ran.
Gun rights matter in Texas. Unless you're black.
In his right hand, Hood held an eight-foot cross made from lumber he had bought from a local hardware store. That night, it became more than just a symbol. He slung it to his side and used it to shepherd protesters to safety.
“Run! RUN!” he screamed, swatting the cross to shoo people away. “Active shooter! Active shooter!”
In the midst of the chaos, he looked, somewhat helplessly, for his wife, Emily. People all around him were running. At one point, he prayed with a woman in the middle of the street.
Later that night, Hood found himself in a bus station looking up at a television. Micah Johnson—an Army veteran apparently angered by recent police shootings—had used the rally as an opportunity to gun down five Texas police officers. Seven other cops and two civilians were injured as well. It was an unprecedented tragedy, and a bloody ending to what had been an otherwise peaceful protest. Hood's heart sank.
In the distance, he saw a radio tower for the local TV station. He decided to walk over, rooted by a sense of responsibility to go on camera and to discuss the night’s events. After all, he—a white southern Baptist pastor and anti-police-brutality activist—had co-organized the gathering that evening to protest the police shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota.
Hood spent the next 24 hours giving dozens of interviews to national outlets, including ABC’s Good Morning America, as well as local ones like the Dallas Morning News. In the interviews, he offered an eyewitness account of what happened and expressed grief for the families of the slain police officers. Over and over, he preached a Christian message: nonviolence, love, justice.
But it was his interview with Megyn Kelly of Fox News that catapulted him into infamy. Kelly played a clip of Hood, recorded just a few hours before the shooting began at the rally: “God damn white America!” he can be seen shouting. Within hours, another clip of Hood surfaced, this time yelling, “White America is a fucking lie!”
The videos went viral. Here was this eccentric man with a long beard, hipster glasses, and a slow drawl condemning “white America” just as tensions between the police and the black community had exploded. Conservative blogs like The Blaze and Breitbart blasted Hood, while Patheos called him a “queer Islamist.” Commenters accused him directly for the slayings; others criticized him as an opportunistic attention-seeker. In an instant, Reverend Hood became a national target for death threats over Twitter and Facebook.
“You should feel so proud. Because of you and your rally five people are dead. And now you’re on TV for your 5 minutes of fame. Crawl back in your hole scumbag.”
“I can only hope and pray that you are killed soon...”
“Just wait till you get dragged through the street. Racist loser.”
“My targets on you wigger cunt...you’re mine bitch boy.”
For days after the protest, Hood sat in his office chair, alone, wondering when the windows would crash in or a bullet would fly through the side of his home. He sent his wife and five small children to stay with his wife’s parents in West Texas. For more than a week, police officers patrolled Hood’s home and offered him protection. “I exist in a weird place,” Hood told me when I met with him in late July. “Many activists on the left hate my guts because I refuse to go along with the plan. Activists on the right side hate my guts because they think I’m a fucking traitor.”
Hood is a man out of sync with his surroundings: He's a white liberal activist in a staunchly conservative stretch of Texas. He fiercely opposes the death penalty and fights for LGBT rights, which he views as in step with modern Christianity. In short, the contradictions that Hood can’t help but inhabit raise complicated questions and scrutiny about the role of allies operating from positions of privilege.
On certain topics, for example, he often retreats into vague generalizations. On Colin Kaepernick's protest, for example, Hood says, “I’m glad that he’s standing up for his beliefs, but the question is, if our world is truly going to change, then it seems to me that we have to do more than sit or kneel. We have to give our lives.” When asked if he'll be supporting either candidate for president: “Trump can say whatever he wants to, and [Clinton] can say whatever she wants to. But it’s up to us to transform society.” And when asked to characterize his affiliation with Black Lives Matter, Hood says, “BLM is an institution. I’m not institutional, by any stretch of the imagination... I am an independent activist who was concerned about police brutality and involved in the movement of black lives.” The explanation comes off as evasive, even contradictory. Black Lives Matter is less an institution than a movement, and one without a hierarchy or codified rules; certainly BLM is less of an institution than Southern Baptism or Christianity.
Christian Parks is a former intern of Hood’s. Even though he is one of Hood’s biggest supporters, some of Parks's friends in the black community are consistently frustrated with the reverend's message, which they see as inflammatory and antithetical to their cause. “I have friends who would consider themselves very Afrocentric, very much part of the black nation, who are very frustrated with Jeff. Because to them, he was another white body who was taking up lots of energy and taking up lots of airtime to support something that, in their minds, ultimately added more confusion and more work for them.”
Chas Moore, the co-founder of the Austin Justice Coalition and an active member in the Texas BLM movement, disagrees with the notion that people like Jeff Hood shouldn’t be allowed to participate. “I’m not for that #AllLivesMatter bullshit, but I am saying that if my black life matters, it’s going to take all colors, all walks of life, getting into this fight and make this work, make the world better,” he says.
“I think there’s always a thin line when it comes to white activists or white allies, particularly within this movement,” Moore adds. “[As a white person,] you have to look at it like, ‘Is my privilege going to overpower people that are fighting for their liberation?’”
Around 11:10 P.M. on a recent summer evening, I met up with Hood in downtown Dallas to walk through the events of that night. Up until that evening, he had avoided the press.
He rolled up in a dusty beige SUV with a bumper sticker on the back that called for the abolition of the death penalty. He wore brown Jesus sandals (Chacos), jeans, a beaded bracelet, and a brown blazer with an untucked button-down shirt. His beard was rabbinical.
“Hey, brother.”
We shook hands.
In person, Hood was relaxed and spoke in a soft southern drone that hints at his Georgia roots. He is an activist in the most literal sense of the term: He prefers firm, direct action with little regard for the consequences. (Current arrest count: three.) On certain topics—say, white America—his opinions are clear as day. He believes that America, as a country, should confront its deep history of racism head on, and build bridges to “love and justice.” “I’m not saying that me and my family are a lie,” he says. “I’m not saying I’m a lie. I’m saying this whole idea of white America is a lie.”
Tonight is the first time he’s been in downtown Dallas since the shooting. I ask him how it feels.
“It feels like I’m returning to the scene of a crime,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s guilt that I’m dealing with now. I think it’s devastation. And just sadness. And feeling like this didn’t have to happen. It didn’t have to happen.”
We walk up to a small hill in the middle of a city park, and Hood tells me this is where he shouted his now-infamous refrain, the one that got him in trouble. “I said, ‘God damn white America,’ and I said white America is a fucking lie right after that,” Hood tells me. He never expected the clip to be broadcast to a national audience.
During our walk, several people stop and look at Hood, whose image has been plastered all over local media. As we’re passing a row of nightclubs and restaurants, a white man, smoking a cigarette and wearing what looks like a white kitchen smock, dashes across the street to meet us on the sidewalk. Hood freezes up, like an actor who's forgotten his lines. The man shifts his cigarette from one hand to the other and stretches out his arm for a handshake. The man thanks Hood for all that he’s doing and dashes back the other way.
I ask Hood if he gets recognized often. “Yeah,” he says with an exhale. “But I don’t know if they’re going to shake my hand or be the guy that fucking knocks me out.”
Hood lives in a small home in Denton, about 45 minutes north of Dallas. His home is hard to miss. In the living room window facing the street, a hand-written poster board reads, “The Confederate flag is racist!” When I meet him in his backyard, I find the reverend alone, cuddling a chicken. “I find the chickens very spiritual,” he says.
Afterward we head into his office, which is teeming with books, memorabilia from his travels, awards, pictures of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Cornel West, and a famous framed cover of Time magazine with the coverline “Is God Dead?”
It’s not every day you see a white kid from a conservative Christian fundamentalist family in Georgia grow up to become a racial-justice advocate. Hood pinpoints one early memory that might have triggered an early interest in black activism. It was around 1990. As a first-grader in Clayton County, Georgia, an area he describes as the “cradle of the civil rights movement,” he was assigned by his teacher, Mrs. Ellington, to recite “I Have a Dream” by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Hood remembers that when he recited the speech to the class, there was an uproar. Some of the black students’ parents were upset that a white child would be “appropriating black culture,” while white parents were upset that the recitation was “glorifying” Dr. King. It’s a position that would become familiar territory for Hood. “From very early on,” he says, “I realized these struggles were complicated, but the complication didn’t keep me from going in my desire to be a part of the change.”
Hood married his wife, Emily, in 2011. In 2012 they moved to Texas, where he began work on his doctorate. To make ends meet, he began working as a hospital chaplain in a local emergency room, where he saw firsthand the daily effects of violence in his community. He credits Texas, and the people he met there, as being his entry point into the world of racial-justice activism, including Dr. Michael Waters, the founder and senior pastor of Joy Tabernacle African Methodist Episcopal Church. Yet, when pressed repeatedly on who else, exactly, guided him into the world of activism, Hood frustratingly (stubbornly?) fails to divulge specifics. “It’s important for me to say that I feel like the message of Jesus, the witness of Jesus, is what guided this whole thing... There are other folks who have been helpful and who I’m thankful for, but it’s really the message of Jesus that has guided me.”
Hood holds four master’s degrees and a doctorate in theology, and he’s written more than a dozen books in the last five years. The titles include: The Sociopathic Jesus, The Year of the Queer, Jesus on Death Row, Last Words From Texas: Meditations From the Execution Chamber, The Rearing of an American Evangelical, The Courage to Be Queer, and a single work of fiction, The Basilica of the Swinging Dicks.
Hood’s theology no doubt veers far, far away from any traditional ideology—most mainstream religious leaders stay far away from him. Growing up, Hood says he wanted to be your typical conservative, fire-and-brimstone pastor—someone in the mold of his mentors. But it was an experience in late 2007, when he was still a student at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, that caused him to change course. Hood had one particular mentor in college who had become one of the most important men in his life. And this man was dying.
For the next two weeks, Hood says he sat by his mentor as he slowly—painfully—drifted away. A few days before his death, he surprised Hood with the revelation that he was gay.
“For the first time in my life, I was aware that I knew someone who was gay,” Hood wrote on his blog. “On multiple levels, my mentor had been an incarnation of Jesus for me. After the revelation, I had to deal with the fact that the closest representation of Jesus to me was gay. How could such knowledge not change a person? I believe that God saved me from my homophobia and hate. Now, I count myself an evangelist of the inclusive love of Jesus.”
Hood is very much a man characterized by his passions, and he confirms he has experienced manic episodes. On some level, it makes sense that when he wanted to become an author, he didn’t write one book; he wrote a dozen. And when it came to college, he didn’t get one degree; he got four masters' and a doctorate. And when it came time for him to speak at a Black Lives Matter protest, he didn’t choose the conventional language of racial justice. He belted out “God damn white America!”
He doesn’t do things with an eye for the middle ground. So his actions—condemning white America, writing books that infer Jesus was a sociopath—stand out. Whether or not he’ll be successful in converting others to his cause is a separate question entirely. And yet, for all his anxieties, Hood seems at peace with his unique place in the universe.
Later in the morning, he and I take his two eldest sons to a swim class, where Hood is again recognized by a parent in the bleachers, which causes him to tense up. “Were you on TV?” the man asks with a smile. Hood relaxes, and when the man leaves, he brings up the famous poem by St. John of the Cross titled “Dark Night of the Soul.”
It reads, in part:
In the happy night,
*In secret, when none saw me,*
Nor I beheld aught,
Without light or guide,
save that which burned in my
heart.
This light guided me
More surely than the light of noonday
*To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me–*
A place where none appeared.
The Cosmopolitan Congregation of Dallas meets every Sunday morning in a drab, low-slung building. Windows are scarce, and it looks more like an office than a church; I’m pretty sure it functions as one on weekdays. Outside, it’s a brutally hot summer day. Some women wear beautiful floral dresses; some of the men wear T-shirts and jeans.
Inside, I’m greeted with hugs by total strangers. As I pulled in, I thought of something Hood’s wife, Emily, told me the day before. “Jeff’s biggest message that he’s always trying to say is, like, Okay, Christians, act like Christians,” she said. “He wants mainstream Christian America to understand that Black Lives Matter is a Christian issue. This is something we should care about. When you don’t, you’re not acting like a Christian.”
Hood and I are seated in the front row next to a low stage, where a band is already out in full force. There is dancing and singing while various attendees come up to hug Hood and say hello. There must be a hundred people in the crowd, dancing, singing, praying. A large woman who smells like flowers wraps me in her arms and tells me she loves me. I pull away briefly and tell her, Yes, I love you, too!
Eventually, the crowd settles down and Pastor Will Horn takes the stage to welcome the group, announcing that there’s a special visitor today—the Reverend Jeff Hood. “He is one of our 21st-century drum-beaters for justice,” Horn says. “Give him a hand. This man has a wife and five children. And he puts his life on the line, literally, to make sure that our voices are heard and life is made better.”
He invites Hood up on stage and hands him the microphone. Hood begins by thanking Horn and the congregation for welcoming him to their ministry, and then begins a short but pointed sermon about the Black Lives Matter protest.
“We can’t forget about our law enforcement!” Hood announces to the crowd, his voice growing louder and fuller with fury.
“Amen,” someone shouts.
“But we also can’t forget the bodies of black and brown people that are being laid out in our streets! We’re seeing it every week! Every day, almost!”
“AMEN!”
“So again, what are the people of God to do? Stay awake. Stay awake! Keep those eyes open.”
Hood then tells the Biblical story of a woman caught in adultery. The woman, Hood preaches, is thrown at the feet of Jesus, who places his body between the woman and the mob of people who are about to stone her. “If the rocks had started flying, Jesus was going to die,” Hood yelled out. “So part of staying awake is giving our body to our community. Giving our body to the struggle!”
The crowd cheered, and Hood handed the microphone back to Pastor Will Horn, who summoned up the church elders.
“If you understand the cost of the prophetic voice, you’ll understand why we have to pray for the Reverend Jeff Hood,” Horn announced. Hood bowed his head as church elders formed a circle around him, reaching out to him and grabbing a bit of his clothing. Hood closed his eyes. The congregation lowered their heads.
The elders prayed. A few in the crowd chanted. When they finished, the elders released Hood, who looked up, thanked everyone, and made his way back to his seat.
