OurCalling - Our podcast about homelessness

In this episode, Pastor Wayne Walker, CEO of OurCalling, interviews Rodney Lara, Ed Johnson, and Tori Thompson on crucial social issues. They delve into the complexities of homelessness and race in community settings, examining the disproportionate impact on black, particularly older men, and discussing the role of systemic issues, personal choices, and educational disparities. The speakers also explore historical and cultural dynamics, including the effects of segregation, the influence of family structures, and systemic challenges faced by individuals reintegrating from prison. Throughout, they emphasize the necessity of addressing both personal responsibility and systemic injustices to foster equitable opportunities and strengthen community support.

https://www.ourcalling.org/

***************
- **Rodney Lara and ED Johnson on Homelessness and Race in the Community (00:00-23:23, 36:26-44:02)**
- Observed a disproportionate number of black homeless individuals, particularly older men, which is shocking and pulls at the heartstrings.
- Noticed the impact of systemic issues and personal choices on homelessness, emphasizing the need for accountability and better life decisions.
- Disparities in education and job opportunities between northern and southern Dallas, affecting exposure and prospects for youth in these communities.
- Talked about generational changes and the decay of community and familial structures that once provided support and guidance.

- **Tori Thompson on Economic and Social Disparities (06:04-07:22, 08:01-09:36)**
- Highlighted the lack of educational and economic opportunities in South Dallas compared to the North, influencing the futures of younger generations.
- Discussed the role of family and upbringing in shaping life choices and opportunities, highlighting the differences in available resources and community support.
- **Discussion on Family Influence and Systemic Challenges (14:49-21:45)**
- Explored how family structures, or the lack thereof, influence individuals’ paths towards or away from homelessness.
- Discussed systemic racism and injustices, including challenges faced by individuals returning from prison who are unable to reintegrate successfully due to ongoing discrimination.
- **Cultural and Historical Insights on Race and Community (31:07-39:43)**
- Examined the historical context of racial segregation and the role of the church in both supporting and undermining racial equality.
- Analyzed the ongoing effects of policies like redlining and educational disparities on African American communities.
The speakers underscored the interconnectedness of personal responsibility, systemic injustice, and community support in addressing homelessness and fostering equitable opportunities.


★ Support this podcast ★

Creators & Guests

Host
Wayne Walker
CEO and Pastor Wayne Walker serves as the CEO and Pastor to the homeless at OurCalling. In 2001, Wayne, along with his wife Carolyn, started serving the homeless community in Dallas. They founded OurCalling in 2009. During his youth, Wayne’s family actively pursued the scriptural commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” by modeling the life of Jesus to scores of foster children whose own origins represented generations of human brokenness, dysfunction, sexual exploitation, and abuse. Early exposure to these destructive forces set him on a path to recognize the long-term effects of trauma, which often lead to homelessness. While completing his Master’s Degree in Cross-Cultural Ministry from Dallas Theological Seminary, Wayne befriended and ministered to men and women in the homeless community. During that time he began to establish personal, discipleship-oriented relationships with homeless individuals, many in the same urban setting where he and his family continue to work today.
Editor
Orange and Teal Productions
caroline@orangeandteal.org
Designer
Sarah Katherine

What is OurCalling - Our podcast about homelessness?

A Podcast by OurCalling—the goal is to be a learner. What can we learn about serving those experiencing homelessness? Even though we have years of experience, can we step back, take a fresh look, and rethink everything we know? OurCalling is a Christian nonprofit (501 c3) serving the homeless community throughout Dallas County in Texas. Our team helps people get to know Jesus and get off the streets every day. Last year, we helped individuals exit homelessness over 1,300 times. We have a facility in downtown Dallas, and our street outreach teams visit over 4,000 locations throughout the county. We serve about 10,000 individuals experiencing homelessness each year. We partner with the most amazing organizations and recognize that we are stronger when we work together.

Wayne Walker:

Hi. I'm pastor Wayne with Our Calling, and this is our podcast about homelessness. And today, we are talking about race, how it makes us, more equipped to serve our our brothers and sisters because of our understanding and our appreciation for the differences and the challenges we we face with that every single day.

Tori Thompson:

Who is our calling? What does our calling do to help the homeless?

Wayne Walker:

The nonprofit. We care with dignity. Our calling. Can't help but think about the definition of Christian

Tori Thompson:

We connect with intentionality. Called our calling To our calling.

Rodney Lara:

We build community with integrity.

Tori Thompson:

Calling our calling.

Wayne Walker:

This is our calling and our podcast. A word on the streets about homelessness. So I'm pastor Wayne with our calling, and these are some of my team members, coworkers. And today, we're talking about race relations, right, and connectivity between the implications of race on the homeless community, not only on the staff that serve, but also the people that we serve. You know, our kids have been around our calling all of our lives.

Wayne Walker:

And one of the questions that each one of them at different stages have always asked me is, dad, why are most of the homeless community black? And that is a question we wanna talk about today. But first, let's go around the table and kind of introduce ourselves. Start here with miss Tori.

Tori Thompson:

Hi. My name is Tori Thompson. I am the chief financial officer here at Our Collin. I am a mother, wife, and a proud grandmother.

ED Johnson:

My name is Ed Johnson the third. I serve as the director of programs here at I Collin. I am a husband, a father, also a local church pastor. So I'm grateful to be here to talk about this topic.

Wayne Walker:

Not only that, Ed, you're doctor Ed Johnson.

ED Johnson:

Yes, sir.

Wayne Walker:

You went to Truett and then DTS. Yes. And that has some implications as well on how you serve and what you do.

ED Johnson:

Yeah. Mhmm.

Wayne Walker:

Alright. Mister Rodney?

Rodney Lara:

I'm Rodney Lara, and I am the director of operations, here at Our Calling. I too am a father, and a husband, and I'm glad to be with you today.

Wayne Walker:

Rodney, you've worked for local church as a senior pastor and other pastoral roles. You also went to DTS. You also were a captain in the army. That has a lot of connection to your culture and your community.

Rodney Lara:

True. And I'm a proud man from San Antonio, Texas and, pastor the church, in a tough area to pastor. That's the west side of Chicago.

Wayne Walker:

Yeah. That's a tough area. I I went up there and visited you. It's a little crazy. And Tori didn't talk about you.

Wayne Walker:

You worked at Concord Church for years.

Tori Thompson:

Yes. 12 years at Concord Church, which is south of downtown, in the heart of Oak Cliff. I also attended SMU, to get my bachelor's, and then I got my master's at Amberton University.

Wayne Walker:

Wow. A lot of brilliant people, plus Wayne. So thank you. Don't use big words because I'll get confused. So the first question is, what are your observations?

Wayne Walker:

We'll start with Rodney and Ed. What are the things you guys see here?

Rodney Lara:

You go first.

ED Johnson:

The things we see

Wayne Walker:

In relation to race. Yeah.

ED Johnson:

Just in general in terms of our society. Okay.

Wayne Walker:

And specifically here in our calling.

ED Johnson:

Yeah. I mean, it's like you said earlier in intro on the topic that, you know, we see a disproportionate number of our people, black people who are homeless. And, a lot of them are men. A majority of them are a good portion of them are men. And, it's heartbreaking to be honest with you, just to see it.

ED Johnson:

It's kinda like Paul said, you know, he had a zeal for his own people. It's not that we discount anybody else, but, you know, you, you appreciate how God has created you, how he's created us, the culture that he's allowed us to be born into, the parents that he allowed us to have, the ancestry, all that all that wonderful stuff, which is beautiful and rich. But when your people are are suffering to some extent, and we'll talk about why they are suffering and why they are homeless, which is not a simple answer, obviously, then it that pulls at your heartstrings. And so that's my just initial response in terms of working here and encountering, the homeless community and just seeing day in and day out, seeing men and women walk in here who look like us. They use our front doors as we say, more than our back doors.

Rodney Lara:

Yeah. Some of the observations that I see, I see men, and I'm I'm surprised that they're older men. So, I'm talking 55 and up. Surprised to see one of my classmates here from San Antonio one day walk through the door. So that is always shocking to see an older man, a man in a wheelchair, a man on a walker who is homeless.

Rodney Lara:

So that is always shocking to me.

ED Johnson:

Yeah. I would say too, it's shocking to me that I ran into a guy on the street, not just even in here in the building, but then I I search and rescue teams out in the field. You know, I've run into a guy last week. Name was O. I'm 45.

ED Johnson:

I think or or 46. 46. You know, you forget your age. Sometimes I hear Yeah.

Wayne Walker:

You're lying, man.

ED Johnson:

Older. And so, but he was right around the same age. And so that's just always shocking to see that too.

Wayne Walker:

Yeah. There's such a disparity in the community, even in the north and south difference in in Dallas? Tory, what what do you see in the disparity between north and south Dallas?

Tori Thompson:

Definitely, like, with education. When I was growing up, there were a lot of free programs that were around to kinda help you, get into dance, or if you wanted to do baseball or any other field. And, like, right now, when you look at the educational disparity, there are not a lot of programs on the south side of town like it is on the north side of town. So our children are not getting the exposure, and they're not, being taught, you know, financial wealth and all the other stuff. Like, when I was in school, they taught you how to write a checkbook, you know, they taught you all of those things, and that doesn't happen anymore.

Tori Thompson:

And so, you know, at the end of the day, when you look at South Dallas, there are some people who have never even been out of South Dallas. They don't even know what the other world is, or they they've they've never went north. And so when you talk about education, also jobs, South of Dallas, there are a lot of warehouses. That's it. And so what that means is if you live South of Dallas and you get a job South of Dallas where you live, you're gonna be working in a warehouse, which is hard labor, on the body and everything else.

Tori Thompson:

There, there isn't anything that's saying, hey. You can do this, or you can go to school for this, or you can go get a trade for this. I just remember growing up, they had trades. You could do all kind of different trades and make money, but it's not like that anymore. And so when you look north, you have all the corporations, you know, with the office buildings and all of that and the schools and everything else, and you just don't have that south.

Wayne Walker:

Now, Tori, you don't come here as a visitor to South Dallas. You grew up there. Yeah. Yeah. Where'd you go to high school?

Tori Thompson:

South Oak Cliff High School, back to back champions.

Wayne Walker:

Back to back state champions. That's right. Yeah. You're so proud of that.

Tori Thompson:

I am. Wow. And

ED Johnson:

I live

Tori Thompson:

over there still. So I live in a area which is called Wynwood Hills, which, when Oak Cliff first started, that was the rich area of Dallas. You have Dallas cowboy, football players staying over there, all type of things. And so, you know, like, as the migration hit, you know, we still, it's still a nice area, but we're surrounded by everything else. And so I still live south of Dallas.

Tori Thompson:

You know, I just never wanted to move north. I like where I live. I know the culture around there, but I I do see that we need a lot of change.

Wayne Walker:

You know, it sounds to me when you talk about the disparity of those that I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but it sounds almost impossible to dig your way out of that.

Tori Thompson:

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. You think about it, you know, I don't know if y'all ever saw the movie Claudine, but that's, like one of my favorite movies, and it's about a single black mother.

ED Johnson:

Mhmm.

Tori Thompson:

And it's Diahann Carroll, and it's Jane Earl Jones. And so she was on welfare, but she worked. And so she just needed the welfare to kinda help, you know, get along with the kids because she had had different babies. Now, when you look at the welfare system, what it has done to our society has made you know, some of us just wanna live on welfare, And so, we don't see any other way out, or we're not trying to get any other way out. All we want to do is get that monthly food stamp, get that check to pay that rent, and then just let our kids run wild with no home training.

Rodney Lara:

Yeah.

Wayne Walker:

So if we focus back on the impact of that on homelessness, we've got some questions here we talked about earlier. How much of a black person's homelessness is due to the systematic, sis the system, right? All the systematic racism and injustices in the community. And how much of it is based on personal choices from your opinion?

Tori Thompson:

Well, that's a hard question because I think it's both and. I I just know, like, I think Lara and Ed, when we grew up, we had that grandmother saying, don't go and embarrass me. Yeah. Your name is important.

ED Johnson:

Yep.

Rodney Lara:

Yeah. Grow growing up in San Antonio, we didn't have a lot. We we grew up on I grew up on the east side of San Antonio, which, when you said that people knew what was on the east side of of the city. But we we had a family structure, so I felt fortunate that I was born into the right family. So we didn't have a lot of money, but we had a lot of drive, discipline, and I had a family structure.

Rodney Lara:

So I live with my grandmother, and my mother lived with us as well. But just pride in what you did, hardworking people lived in my neighborhood. And so I feel that that structure has diminished. So you don't have a grandmother. You don't have many men around because they're in prison.

Rodney Lara:

And so even those those soft skills that you need to function as an adult, you just don't get that anymore. And and I just had people around me, particularly in school, who just exposed me to books. So books was my way out. And so getting exposed to that just opened up a whole different world for me, which is another thing that I don't see us focusing on a great deal in our education system is you can go pro in being an accountant. You can go pro in so many other things besides being a rapper or a ball player.

Rodney Lara:

And so I don't see that emphasis as much as I used to.

Tori Thompson:

And I grew up, you know, I came through the crack epidemic. So when I was getting ready to hit graduate high school, crack just came out of nowhere, pretty much. And so I had, you know, people that I had been in school with in the kindergarten, now they are the biggest dope dealer in the area. And how do you distinguish between that? So you have these 16 and 17 year old kids with all this money.

Tori Thompson:

Mhmm. And then it's 2 things happening. They're getting killed or they're going to jail. Yep. That's the only 2 things.

Tori Thompson:

And what I noticed most back then was a lot of the parent structures that we had was broken because one of the parents were on crack cocaine. And so here you have your friend selling to his best friend's mom or his best friend's dad crack cocaine. And so it just it just tore the family system up, from what we knew. Because what I always grew up with was 2 parent home, and then, you know, everybody had 2 parent homes. Not everybody, but most people.

Tori Thompson:

And then when crack came on the scene, it just it it it ripped a hole through it, that whole parenting structure. Now that we have these men in jail that have kids that are without them, because every child needs their mother and father. I don't care what anybody says. You know, they can say, yeah. I can rate.

Tori Thompson:

No. You can't. Every child needs a mother and father or at least a mother, father figure in their life to help them. And it just split it down the middle. And I think we're still trying to play catch up on that.

Rodney Lara:

So so we've talked about, Wayne, we've talked about the education system. We've talked a little bit about the family structure. And so when those have eroded and you have these men who are in prison and they come out of prison, they've paid their debt to society, they are still paying that debt. Because now all of a sudden, I'm I'm pretty much relegated to only certain types of jobs. I'm a felon.

Rodney Lara:

I can't get an apartment in a nice area. I can't get a decent job. I don't have any education, so I don't have a skill. So now all of a sudden, I'm back into the world of crime. And so now I have a revolving door of in and out of prison.

Rodney Lara:

I've torn every door with my family apart, so I can't go back there. And so that's why we see some of our guests with us here.

ED Johnson:

And I think the family piece is huge. Like like what you said, Tori and Rodney, the family piece is huge. I grew up in a 2 parent home. Right? A traditional 2 parent home, a father and a mother.

ED Johnson:

And, Rodney, one of the things that benefited me was having a father who told me looked me in the face, Wayne, and said, don't if if there's anything I can tell you, there's a lot I could tell you. But one of the things I wanna tell you as your father to a young man is don't get caught up in the prison system. Don't do 1, like you said, Tory, don't do don't do anything that's gonna bespert, mismatch, or put a blot on our name. That's gonna be disrespectful towards the family name. You are Johnson, so you need to act like 1.

ED Johnson:

So he was my accountability. Right? But there was also a sense where he said, son, the system is not geared to make you successful if you get caught up in it. If you get caught up in the system, you get a record, it's gonna be hard for you to make it Mhmm. In this life.

ED Johnson:

And so because I had the family structure, I had my father present, not just in the home, but engaged and active. Because you can be in the home and still be absent.

Rodney Lara:

Right. That's right.

ED Johnson:

You'll be absent minded. Right? So you have fathers that can be there, but they're not really there. They're not fully present, not engaged. But my dad, thanks be the guy, you know, he was a Christian, which had a lot to do with it, but he was engaged.

ED Johnson:

And that was one of the things that he taught me. And so I knew I I can make mistakes, and I'm gonna make mistakes, but there are certain mistakes I won't make in terms of crime because I know what my dad taught me.

Tori Thompson:

Exactly. So my mom, I call her Quiet Storm. I would never ever do anything that I had to call her where she gonna come get me from anything.

Wayne Walker:

She gonna kill you.

Tori Thompson:

She's gonna kill me. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I lived with that. I mean, you know, I was like, oh, no.

Tori Thompson:

I can't. So that made me make different choices

Wayne Walker:

growing up,

Tori Thompson:

because I was like, yeah. Okay. What what will my parents say? But I I think also too, along with, you know, the absent parents and everything else, I just think now, this new generation, they don't understand. Like, if you don't work now, when you get ready and you get 55, like, we see some of our guests walking in the door, you don't have anything.

ED Johnson:

Mhmm.

Tori Thompson:

So if you don't work, the most social security is gonna give you is $500, 600 at the most. Where can you live in Dallas with that?

Wayne Walker:

Yeah. I I we've met so many people that that when they try to apply for, you know, SSI or SSTI, especially SSI, Social Security Income, that the they get just this penance little check because they never put anything in. Exactly. All their jobs are under the table. Exactly.

Wayne Walker:

Kinda shade tree kind of stuff, and so it was never connected. Yeah. But what what you guys are referring to is is just this phenomenon. When we meet thousands of people that we work with that are experiencing homelessness

ED Johnson:

Yeah.

Wayne Walker:

We see this commonality that many of them are homeless because of what happened to them before the age of 10. Right? They were on this trajectory at an early age. It is not always because they had, only one parent at home because there's a lot of people that are great raised in single parent families that turn out great. But often it's it's this horrible lifestyle that's promoted to them.

Wayne Walker:

I remember when I was a kid, my dad would, you know, would teach me how to use a bait caster for fishing and he would tell me if I can cast across the street, he would take me out on the boat. Right? I'm a little kid. He's teaching me how to fish, teaching me how to do different things. My brother as well.

Wayne Walker:

But we have homeless friends that have told me that when they were kids, they were taught how to cook crack in a microwave.

ED Johnson:

Mhmm.

Wayne Walker:

Right? Mama's boyfriend made them sell drugs on the school

Tori Thompson:

Exactly.

Wayne Walker:

You know, parking lot, or they couldn't come home if they didn't make so much. And so what is being instilled to to children is not even a lack of values, but it's the wrong values. It's the wrong value. Yeah.

Rodney Lara:

That's right.

Wayne Walker:

It's not that we're teaching them the wrong the the it's not it's not that we're not teaching them the good things. It's that we're actually teaching them and training them to do the

Tori Thompson:

bad things. They're they're becoming the parent at a early age.

Rodney Lara:

Yeah.

Tori Thompson:

And that's hard on the child that doesn't have a childhood, you know, that they have to live through somebody abusing them, somebody calling them outside their names, them having to go out and hustle just so they can eat. Yeah. Because they don't have food in the house. And so you now have put a child in an adult place that it was never meant to be. And so how do you expect them to recover from that?

Tori Thompson:

Yes, sir. It's hard.

Wayne Walker:

One of our staff members, and I won't we won't mention his name. It'll be his story to tell one day. But he was raised in a single parent home, and he had to help his mom pay rent. Mhmm. So he goes out and looks for a job when he's 14.

Wayne Walker:

And what's the only job a young black man in South Dallas can do at 14? You quickly get money. Parts. Yeah. Yeah.

Wayne Walker:

And so he gets caught up in this lifestyle, not really out of choice. It's my mom and I need to eat, and we wanna stay in a safe place. And so it's just treacherous to watch down this this Yeah. Depravity from the disparity in the community.

Rodney Lara:

And so, you know, which begs the the question, why does that happen in primarily African American and brown individual neighborhoods? Alright. So, you know, you've got bad education. You have, poor parenting. I've got crime.

Rodney Lara:

And now you put on that, I've got a neighborhood that is not attractive to businesses that would bring the kind of money in tax dollars where services could be provided that would that would put me on a different trajectory. Yeah. You know, you talked about South Dallas. And what's interesting, I'm not a Dallas site, but the first thing I did when I moved to Dallas was I wanted to learn about the city that I was going to make my home. I've lived here in Dallas more than I've ever lived in San Antonio.

Rodney Lara:

And so I picked up the book, The Accommodation. And when I picked up that book and it told me about this city, it helped me understand why why 60% of the land mass is south of the trinity, but all of the growth is up north. It helped me understand, oh, I understand what is happening here. And so it's it's it's also by design Mhmm. And we're starting to see that change through gentrification.

Rodney Lara:

Mhmm. But the people who have put residency in these neighborhoods are now having to be booted out because they even can't afford to pay the taxes on on a neighborhood that 50 years ago, they would say that they were relegated to. So it's it's it's a hard deal.

Wayne Walker:

Mhmm. Yeah. So let me just ask a question. This is one that we talked about earlier, and the question is, what's the difference between you and them? Right?

Wayne Walker:

So what's the difference between someone your age, like the person you saw, oh, who's homeless. Right? Her people that you know or even family members, what is the difference between you and them?

Tori Thompson:

Go ahead. I think for me, my parents just kinda instilled, you know, these are the steps that you take, and they also showed it to me. And I think, like, for me, my brother me and my brother grew up in the same household, but my brother got in trouble, and he went to prison. And my mom, it it it literally tore apart because we grew up in the same household. But I think what helped my brother to come back to where he is now, a family man with his own business, and he has grandkids, and you would never know he had been to prison, is that initial thing that God already says.

Tori Thompson:

You train up a child in a way they should go, and they won't stray from it. They'll come back to it. Mhmm. And I think, like, when you look at, our society, they're not taking their kids to learn about Christ. You know, when we grew up, I don't care what time you went to bed, when Sunday morning came I was

Rodney Lara:

going to church.

Tori Thompson:

You was going to church, and you better hold those eyes open with toothpicks or whatever the whatever you gotta do.

Rodney Lara:

And there was no children's church back then.

ED Johnson:

And there

Tori Thompson:

was no children's church, so you're sitting in adult church about to die.

Wayne Walker:

I'm a snatching you up. Yeah. Honestly,

Tori Thompson:

Yes. My grandmother is saying, I see all of y'all. But I think, like, we have taken Christ out of the school. Mhmm. We have taken Christ out of society.

Tori Thompson:

And so that that was a moral compass that we grew up with that we no longer have. And so we're, you know, again, we're doing our children a disservice by not, teaching them those moral values of please and thank you, and just nobody has to do anything for you. And when they do, just say thank you. Just a simple thank you. So

ED Johnson:

I think for me I mean, obviously, none of us position ourselves as better than anybody. And that's not the question you asked, obviously, is what what makes us different, which I think is a valid question. And so what we mentioned is not a it doesn't come from a self righteous standpoint at all. Right? We're just trying to look at the practicalities of, you know, what what what were the differences.

ED Johnson:

And I think it goes back for me, like, what Tory said. In our homes, you had a father and a mother. Or if you had a single parent, you had the single mom or dad, it was primary single mom usually, who had enough sense to to bring or have their kids around father figures. Right? So that was, you know, uncles, you know, older cousins, or whatever whatever it was, you know, grandfathers and all that.

ED Johnson:

They they had them around their children to where they could influence them and shape them. And I had that as so if you compare me to O, I don't know O's full story. But, man, what what kept me on the right road was, again, I had a father and I had brothers who I looked up to. And they not only told me the right way to go, they showed me. And I learned from my brother's bad choices.

ED Johnson:

So it wasn't just me, you know, and I know people come up, you know, they may be the only child and say don't have that benefit. But, again, I think that role, that parental role, that father figure, that whatever the case may be, a healthy parental figure is just absolutely it was absolutely life changing for me. Yeah. I I would have went I have had so many friends, man, that in high school, one went to gangs, went off to the military, got kicked out of the military because he was wouldn't follow rules, didn't have a father in his life, went to Houston. Once he got kicked out of the out of the army and and got to a stop sign and start set tripping.

ED Johnson:

That's like gang affiliated stuff where they start doing their signs and different things like that. A car pulled up on the side of him, and those guys didn't know him from Adam. But because he saw the color that they had on was different than the, you know, the gang that he represented, He decided he wanted to set trip with these guys, and they ended up pulling up guns and killing them on the spot. And so I I think about I mean, yes. There's there's systemic things.

ED Johnson:

Yes. There's educational things. Like like Tory said and Rodney mentioned, it's not a either or, it's a both end. But, man, sometimes sometimes it comes down to personal decisions that we're making. True.

ED Johnson:

That either, in our context, either places a man or woman into homelessness or perpetuates their homelessness. Right? So maybe you didn't cause yourself to get into homelessness. Right? So maybe somebody else made a choice and did something very traumatic to you that set you on a bad trajectory and mental health issues and the whole nine, which which are legitimate cases.

ED Johnson:

Yeah. But there are others where it's like, man, if you would have made this this this one decision here or these these two decisions or these few decisions, your life would have taken a different a different path.

Rodney Lara:

Yeah. Yeah. I think for me, I think really three things. I think it was the messages that I heard from people who, I looked up to, and they were positive messages.

ED Johnson:

Absolutely.

Rodney Lara:

You're good. You're smart. You going somewhere. I think if you hear that enough, you actually start believing it. Right?

Rodney Lara:

And then I think to I think I think making good choices. Right? And I think the thing that I think is missing now is I think my grandmother and my mother created an environment for me to fail, but it didn't have dire consequences. So you're able that's the proving ground. That's why you train, you make mistakes, you're able to correct those mistakes, and you're able to do better.

Rodney Lara:

Right? And then number 3, I would say, just the exposure. So, again, we didn't have a lot of money, but my mother was taking me to the opera. She was taking me to the symphony. She took, I still remember at 3 years old going to the World Fair in San Antonio, Texas.

Rodney Lara:

It was the hemisphere, came to the state the great state of Texas. It was just exposure. Right? And so I think being exposed and thinking, wait a minute. So that's out there?

Rodney Lara:

I I I could do that? I think those are the things that creates an atmosphere choices and here's the thing, I don't think you have hope.

ED Johnson:

Yeah. Excuse me. Yeah. I would add to that. I know we have to probably move on, Wayne, but I to it's it's kind of dovetails again into your question of earlier about systemic versus personal choices.

ED Johnson:

Man, and to be honest, Tony and I and Rodney Rodney, we were talking the other day about that particular question in various conversations that we've had at various times. And we brought the fact that our our parents and grandparents grew up in an era where the system was absolutely against black people. Mhmm. Jim Crow laws.

Rodney Lara:

That's right.

ED Johnson:

I mean, you you name it. They had it. If you talk about the man being against that, they had the man that was against them for real. Like in like, it was outright. There was no subtlety to it.

ED Johnson:

It was not covert. It was out in the open. Go from government to police to real real real estate to the whole thing. You you stay on this side of the tracks. You cannot come on this side of the tracks.

ED Johnson:

Like, that's your neighborhood. That's if you want to my redlining, that was that was absolute redlining in its rawest form. Right? You can't do it. And yet and yet, our grandparents and parents survived that.

ED Johnson:

And not just survived it, they thrived in it. They

Tori Thompson:

did it with dignity.

ED Johnson:

Did it with dignity. You had them deprived of so much. Right, that you couldn't do certain things. You didn't have access to certain things, but they say, you know what? Fine.

ED Johnson:

We're gonna build our own banks. We're gonna build our own we're gonna establish our own schools, and they did that. And so there is a part, I think, of us where there's a there's a pride, a a good pride that we wanna look at our people and say, man, they fought hard. We can do better. Yeah.

ED Johnson:

And we can do better.

Rodney Lara:

We can do better.

ED Johnson:

Like, us cry I don't mean I don't wanna say crying, but us always pointing back to the the system as being the culprit of everything. It's like, y'all, come on. We're not saying that there's not vestiges of remnants of certain things, of racist stuff that's going on. But, man, if our parents could make it in Jim Crow And

Rodney Lara:

so, Wayne, you've been to my house, and you know right in right in the foyer area of my house, I have a I have a framed picture of 2, poll tax receipts. 1 of them is from 1937, and 1 is from 1938. It's from the house that I grew up in that my grandmother and grandfather built. They built that house for $26100, y'all. That was a lot of money Yep.

Rodney Lara:

Back then. They built this house, and they received a poll tax res, from Bexar County every year. The receipt they had to pay the tax y'all to vote.

Tori Thompson:

Right.

Rodney Lara:

Dollar 25 to vote. Now I went back and looked, Wayne. A dollar 25 in 1937 would have been $25. So they they they they felt so hard and so dogged about voting that they went and scraped that dollar 25 together and paid the poll tax. And every time I look at it, it reminds me that I come from some folk, and I come from some good stock.

Rodney Lara:

They no excuses. You get to it. We we don't wanna hear no sniveling and crying. No excuses. You can do it.

Tori Thompson:

There's a picture of me in the Dallas Morning News. So Dallas Morning News, if you ever see this podcast, I'd like to have that picture. But my grandmother was voting, and so I peeked up under the cover, and the photographer took a picture. And I don't know what it was, but it must have been some big event that my grandmother was voting at. And so they did a news article, you know, in the paper on that.

Tori Thompson:

But that's just how much voting is important, or was important in our family. And what discourages me is that our people won't even go vote. Like, they won't even register for the those that who can register. They won't register. They won't go vote.

Tori Thompson:

They don't even wanna talk about voting. And I just know how hard it was fought for and what it means. The laws that are made at the city level, you have a chance to vote for it. You have a chance to vote for who you put in office, and they don't even care about it. So some of the choices are ours because we have these privileges, but yet we don't take advantage of it.

Tori Thompson:

You can go to school online now. I I couldn't do that. I had to go in the classroom. But now, you can enroll in school. They're not even making you take the gamut and all those other things to get into school, but yet we don't take advantage of those things that are now.

Tori Thompson:

And so sometimes, you know, for me, like Ed and Lara said, we if and and because we're like, now wait a minute. Now we do have some stuff that needs to be corrected, But then there are other opportunities that you guys don't even try to go for. Mhmm.

Rodney Lara:

Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you said that, Tory, because we Ed and I were talking about this last week. I was I was talking in JAD. We talk I was I was sharing with them how, you know, the the the Pell grant, which is probably some of y'all probably never heard of before, but the only way I could go to school was on a Pell Grant.

Rodney Lara:

Right? That was money that the government gave you and said, you don't have to pay this back. We just need you to

Tori Thompson:

Go to school.

Rodney Lara:

Go to school. Right? So I get this I get this Pell grant, and I show up on the campus of Lamar University. I go do well, and then I do so well that I'm able to get an army ROTC full ride. But without that money, my life is changed.

Rodney Lara:

So my trajectory changed all because of of an opportunity.

ED Johnson:

Mhmm.

Rodney Lara:

Right? And so I and and a lot of those opportunities in that arena have dried up because a lot of people can't they've gotta get a loan. So our folks can't get a loan. Mm-mm. But like you said, there are other opportunities that they could take advantage advantage of that we don't.

Rodney Lara:

Right? And last thing, she talked about voting, but the thing with voting is deeper. It's deeper than voting. It's about these are the things that you do to be a decent American.

Tori Thompson:

Yes.

Rodney Lara:

You vote. You pay your taxes. You do the right thing. You I don't care if people are looking or not. You do the right thing because that's what you're supposed to do.

Rodney Lara:

If you are a decent person and you say you love the Lord, That's the I think those are that's kind of places that we've been growing up. And we we've just seen a change and a shift in that. Absolutely.

Wayne Walker:

So one of the questions here that, you know, we discussed earlier is and this is kind of a tough question is is who's to blame? Who's to blame for where we are? Right? And and we when we discussed it, we broke it up into 2 different areas. So what's the church's blame in this and what's the school's blame in this?

Wayne Walker:

And maybe you can think of another. But how who do we I don't know that it's even helpful to figure out who we blame. Right? Because that's just a point. It's somebody else and not pointing back at what we can do about it.

Wayne Walker:

But who's to blame for where we are?

Rodney Lara:

You want do you wanna go first?

ED Johnson:

No. Go ahead. I'll jump in.

Rodney Lara:

Alright. So I think I think the church does have some blame. And and and and I again, this is not my city, but I learned about my city, the city that I love now. But there was a time, Wayne, that black people could not go to First Baptist Church.

Tori Thompson:

Oh.

Rodney Lara:

You better not go up in there. No. And so what was being taught in the church about people that look like me to the to the congregants. And so what was being taught on Sunday, and then what was being lived out on Monday through the rest of the week. Right?

Rodney Lara:

And so now I've got that piece I've got to deal with, And then I've got to deal with okay. So what theology are we are we getting that's off in our churches and and and and and learning? And so I I think there's I think there's some blame and fault on both sides, right, from the from a from a church standpoint.

Tori Thompson:

I think the churches play a huge part in it as well, because when you look at slavery, the whole reason why the African American church separated, you know, like it is, it existed to talk about things that they could not talk about outside. And so when you say what's the most segregated day in America, it's Sunday morning. It is very segregated. It's still, to this day. And I think, you know, part of it is is that both sides use the church, for their own cultures, and it's hard for us to try to mend that and get, you know, where we're doing the same thing or worshiping together.

Tori Thompson:

I think you're starting to see it more. But I think, you know, initially, like me growing up, it was very segregated. You did not go to a church that was not African American. It was it was all African American. And, you know, and I think the same way with white America.

Tori Thompson:

You're not gonna go to a church that's not all white. And so I think now we're starting to see some changes with that, but that's hard to to do because it's so segregated. Yeah. And kudos to the big churches for trying to do

Rodney Lara:

that. Absolutely.

Tori Thompson:

Because they are trying. Like Park Cities, I know he does a lot. Mhmm. And so, yeah. But it it's hard to do because, like I said, that's the most segregated day in America, Sunday morning at church.

ED Johnson:

Yeah. I, so I I as I mentioned before, you know, I pastor a local church, planted the church, and, we have a fairly diverse congregation. You know, whites in our church. We have Hispanics, you know, in our church. And, and so I, you know, I do feel like to some degree, maybe historic obviously, historically, the church does bear some responsibility, you know, for, like, the way that things are, in our society.

ED Johnson:

They specific specifically here in Dallas. And I think that a lot of the blame comes in, at the point at which churches probably were silent when they should not have been. Right? So if your silence is complicity, right, is is is complicit. Like, you if you're silent, it's saying that you agree with what's going on.

ED Johnson:

And I think there are historical cases in which I think the church in some regard, some segment of the church failed to speak up. Right? Not only just speak up in terms of, like, words, but also in terms of, like, right when you said in terms of example. Like, my dad used to teach us he used to tell us, Tory, like, you people probably catch more. You they they you catch more than you're taught more.

ED Johnson:

Right? Like, you you'll catch it more than you, you know, than somebody teaching you. You you catch you're taught it by watching somebody. Right? And I think there was a lot that happened in that day.

ED Johnson:

The church in terms of, you know, not making friends with the opposite, you know, race or ethnicity, You know? Not, you know or the the sidebar conversations and the water cooler conversations. And, you know, you may project one way on Sunday morning, but then Monday through Saturday or Friday, you know, when you, you know, your your life doesn't resemble diversity. Right? You're not at the table eating with people.

ED Johnson:

You're not befriending people on both sides. It's just not on one side. And so I think the church, can do a better job, or that has done a better job at that. But I do think we have some responsibility to bear. In that, we are the light of the world.

ED Johnson:

That is, Christ is the light of the world. We reflect Christ to the world. And so, yeah. I think we do have something to, some some of that responsibility to shoulder.

Wayne Walker:

Yeah. We have a phrase we use here in leadership at our calling, and we say, you know, what you tolerate, you endorse.

ED Johnson:

Yep. Mhmm.

Wayne Walker:

And so for churches back then to tolerate all this injustice, they actually endorsed it whether they said that in or not. And you see that. So if you have this segregation on Sunday mornings, let's say 40 years ago, not only you're not worshiping together, but we're not gonna do business together. I'm not gonna shop at your store. I'm not gonna sell you that piece of property.

Wayne Walker:

I'm not gonna hire you to work in my place. You're not gonna hire me to work in your place. And so, unfortunately, the church started looking like the culture. Mhmm. Instead of what

ED Johnson:

the body of Christ is

Tori Thompson:

supposed to be where our culture

Wayne Walker:

we we we want we don't want the culture the church to look like the culture. We want the culture to look like what the church is supposed to be, which is the body of Christ, which is unit unity, which is where we come beside each other and love each other. Well, we are a little long winded, so we're gonna break this in half and I won't point to who was long winded here. So we're gonna have a second episode of this. We'll come back and continue this discussion on another day.

Wayne Walker:

So thanks for coming today.