Dule Hill joined “The West Wing” in 1999, not long after it debuted. He played Charlie Young, a personal aide who soon begins a relationship with the president’s youngest daughter, Zoey Bartlet (Elisabeth Moss). Charlie is Black; Zoey is white. The hate mail arrived almost immediately.

“It was shocking to me,” Hill, 46, said. “I said, ‘Wow. It runs deep in this country. It runs deep.’ ”

Hill requested those letters and taped them up in his trailer as a peculiar kind of inspiration. If he played the part to the best of his abilities, he hoped, he could make it easier for the next actor of color to be hired — and harder for the next slur to be mailed.

“We’re all on this journey, trying to move the ball forward,” he said.

Sometimes moving forward can mean looking back. This fall, Hill, an actor of agility, elegance and goofball charm, appears in a re-imagined “The Wonder Years,” now airing Wednesdays on ABC. Set in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1968, it stars Hill as Bill Williams, a music professor by day and funk musician by night. A devoted parent and an ambitious artist, Bill tries to equip his children for a world that won’t always recognize their full humanity. Playing Bill encourages Hill, who recently became a father, to display his rangy gifts — comedic, dramatic, rhythmic.

Although this new “Wonder Years” remains a nostalgia-driven, half-hour comedy, it also pushes Hill to confront themes that his previous TV parts — callow young men, cheerful neurotics, tack-sharp professionals — rarely allowed. Because Hill knows how blessed he is, professionally and personally. But he also knows what it means to be a Black man in America.

“You appreciate this country and you love this country,” he said. “But you also realize that this country doesn’t always love you back.”

Hill signed on to “The Wonder Years” a few months after the killing of George Floyd because it seemed more important than ever to show that loving Black families have always existed and will always exist, even in the midst of struggle.

“As I go along in life, I see that out of bad and challenging times, there’s also a beauty and a brilliance and a light that comes,” he said. This show, he thought, could be part of that light.

Hill has been an entertainer pretty much since he could walk. His mother, a dance teacher in central New Jersey, started him on tap, ballet and jazz dance when he was 3. At 9, he was cast as an understudy in the Broadway musical “The Tap Dance Kid.”

After high school, he studied business administration at Seton Hall University. Then in 1995, during his junior year, he booked a role in the off-Broadway production of the dance musical “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk.” When a performance conflicted with a midterm exam, he asked the professor if he could take the exam early. The professor refused, saying that Hill should think about where he wanted to be, at college or in show business. He chose show business.

In 1999, he landed “The West Wing.” Aaron Sorkin, the show’s creator, recalled his audition. “There are a few things that even a good actor can’t fake, and two of them are ‘smart’ and ‘funny,’ ” Sorkin wrote in an email.

As the rare actor of color on “The West Wing,” Hill felt a responsibility to excel. He wanted to be “one of the steps along the way to making change,” he said. His ambition, his nerves, his inherent goodness, he poured it all into Charlie.

When “The West Wing” ended, he asked his reps to find him a comedy. They found “Psych,” a zany procedural on USA. James Roday Rodriguez, his co-star, drove to Hill’s house for a chemistry read to see if Hill should play Gus, the anxious sidekick to Roday Rodriguez’s antic detective, Shawn. Hill had cut his television teeth on Sorkin’s precision-tooled dialogue; Roday Rodriguez had an improv background. The read was weird.

“This dude is all over the place,” Hill remembered thinking. “He’s on the ceiling, underneath the couch. I’m like, ‘What is up, my man? Are you trying to sabotage my read?’ ”

But as the show continued, Hill grew looser and more spontaneous. “Psych” wrapped in 2014. Hill did a stint on “Ballers” and another on “Suits.” He married his “Ballers” co-star Jazmyn Simon in 2018, adopting her teenage daughter. The next year they welcomed a son.

Amid that happiness, Hill was exploring a Black entertainer’s pain. In 2019, he starred in a bio- musical, “Lights Out: Nat ‘King’ Cole,” showing what respectability politics had cost Cole. Colman Domingo, who co-wrote that show, felt the resonance between Hill and Cole, men of color navigating a majority-white industry with sweetness and grace.

“There is dynamite underneath that sugar; I wanted to explore that dynamite,” he said. “Dule was not afraid of that at all.”

Hill has never been afraid of that. But on a career path smoothed by personal charm, opportunities for exploration have been few.

He knew that “The Wonder Years” could be one more. When he read about the pilot order, he turned to his wife and told her that if he were going to do a network comedy, this would be the one. After Floyd’s murder by police and the protests that followed, the struggles of the civil rights era felt very near.

“I wanted to tell the deepest story that hopefully could relate to where we are today,” he said.

The original “Wonder Years” premiered on ABC in 1988. It starred Fred Savage as Kevin Arnold, a middle-class 12-year-old in 1968, navigating adolescence as America came of age too. Amanda Ann Klein, a professor at East Carolina University, has written admiringly of the show. But she noted a problem with it: “A big hole was its ability to deal with race,” she said. So she was excited to see its premise applied to a Black family.

“I don’t think you often see Black Americans getting the opportunity to be nostalgic,” she said.

Saladin K. Patterson, the showrunner of this new version, wanted to show how these same years might affect a loving middle-class Black family. “We felt like that was going to be a story of strength and resilience and perseverance,” he said. He drew on his own family’s history, modeling Bill on his father, Bill Patterson, a musician and music manager.

Hill hopes that this leg of his race will teach viewers something about the political upheavals of the 1960s — how they birthed the world we know today, how Black love has persisted. And he expects it will help him to understand something about himself and the life he wants to make for his children.

“When you’re playing a Black father and you are a Black father, the story is going to hold up a mirror to yourself,” he said. “It’s going to make you ask questions about things: ‘Who am I in this? And who do I want to be?’ ”