Over the past few months, Dallas residents have filled the streets to protest police brutality. Civil rights icon John Lewis passed away. All the while, I kept thinking of Rev. Peter Johnson. Johnson is Dallas’ preeminent veteran of the Civil Rights Movement. He began his work when he was 18 as a student organizer with the Congress of Racial Equality, and, later on, for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He helped organize civil rights campaigns throughout the South.

In 1969, he arrived in Dallas ostensibly to show a documentary about Martin Luther King. Jr. that had been made to help raise money for the cause. Johnson’s bosses back in Atlanta told him to tread lightly in Dallas. In those days, Dallas had a fierce reputation, and the city could be dangerous for a young Black civil rights agitator. But Johnson didn’t like what he saw in Dallas, so he stuck around and started causing trouble. Good trouble.

If you’ve read Jim Schutze’s The Accommodation then you will be familiar with Johnson’s role in organizing residents around Fair Park, whose homes were being stolen by the city, and his work launching Operation Breadbasket, which campaigned against structural inequality and urban hunger. Now 75, Johnson has spent his entire life fighting racism, inequality, and all their symptoms—from homelessness and housing to workplace discrimination and voting rights—often at the risk of his body and well-being.

Especially after reading the Dallas Morning News’ recent report of the abject brutality exhibited by some Dallas police officers during the recent protests, I wanted to hear what Johnson thought of it all. I found that—in addition to being disheartened by the cancellation of the college football season—Johnson is equal parts enraged and hopeful about the state of our city and the nation. Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

The founding mother of Dallas was one of the city's first millionaires.

Dallas—and the country—is experiencing the most widespread movement of direct action we have seen in more than 60 years. People are taking to the streets to demand that this city wakes up, listens, and sees the systemic and endemic racism that has defined the lives of people of color in America for what it is. If real progress is going to be made, however, that direct action must advance an agenda of change.

Based on the many conversations going on right now, there is a hunger for change. When Love Field swiftly moves to take down a statue of a racist cop, when the hosts of sports talk station The Ticket spend a week soul searching, you know we have entered a new kind of moment. Reforms that weren’t imaginable a month ago now seem possible.

Change is already happening. Los Angeles may redeploy public funds from its police budget to fund community development. The Minneapolis City Council voted to disband its police department. Even during the disastrous Dallas City Council meeting Friday, the city manager presented a list of possible reforms, and promising ideas were put forth by council members, like reimagining the police academy and banning elected officials from taking campaign donations from police unions.

This next step, however, concerns me. A knee-jerk response to the crisis will likely miss the monumental scale of the problem. Racism runs through every aspect and every institution of American society. It is baked into the structures of power that hold our city, state, and country together. Racism is so much a part of American life that we are blind to most of the insidious ways it defines our culture. Confronting that is going to take courage, not only from our neighbors who have taken to the streets but from all of us.

Over the past week, I have seen a lot of well-meaning efforts to confront the problem. There have been the numerous corporate statements backing Black Lives Matter; public symbols of support, like the blackout of Reunion Tower; and the sharing of articles and ideas on social media about how to support businesses owned by people of color, contribute to organizations that work in disadvantaged communities, and raise money to help repair the damage to properties that took the punch of the anger that manifested in Dallas’ streets. These are not meaningless gestures. They represent people in positions of power and privilege saying, “We hear you.”

But ultimately these are only gestures. They are the kinds of gestures that have been made before, and they are gestures that have proven hollow when it comes to making meaningful change. Real change is going to need to strike more deeply, and it is going to require more than giving our attention, time, and money. But to understand what real change looks like, we must first confront assumptions about how our society works.

After the killing of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, I was struck by the Rev. Al Sharpton’s interview with Floyd’s brother, Philonese Floyd, in Houston. Philonese described a brief condolence phone call from President Trump.

“It was so fast,” Floyd said. “He didn’t give me an opportunity to even speak. It was hard. I was trying to talk to him, but he just kept, like, pushing me off, like ‘I don’t want to hear what you’re talking about.’… I said that I couldn’t believe they committed a modern-day lynching in broad daylight.”

George Floyd grew up in Houston. I am a native. Perhaps we danced down some of the same streets and enjoyed some of the same delights of that city. Hanging at Hermann Park, celebrating the Houston Rockets’ NBA championship, or just chilling to the No. 1 radio station, KMJQ, Majik 102 FM, a broadcast outlet I was privileged to work for.

Right now, though, the bond that connects my sadness to the Floyd family’s most is something Philonese Floyd said. Ahmaud Arbery’s father used the same phrase — a modern-day lynching — to describe what happened when white men chased his son in their trucks as Ahmaud jogged down a Georgia street. It’s an honest phrase. Most folks, it seems, would rather not confront it or how lynching has evolved. Before June 7, 1998, I was in no great hurry to dive into the topic either.

A new book about the Texas Rangers tells the truth about that famous bronze at Love Field and a 1930 lynch mob in Sherman. An excerpt from Cult of Glory.

In 1855, Victor Considérant, a renowned disciple of the French socialist philosopher Charles Fourier, led French, Swiss, and Belgian settlers into North Texas to establish a socialist utopian colony on the banks of the Trinity River. Before coming to Texas, Considérant had been driven into exile in Belgium after a failed insurrection against Napoleon III in 1849. While in exile, he wrote a book called Au Texas, which laid out a vision for an egalitarian society in an untouched corner of the state that Considérant depicted as a new Eden. He raised about $16 million (accounting for inflation) and arranged for the Atlantic passage of hundreds of followers. We know how the story ends. Considérant’s utopian experiment, called La Réunion, failed after 18 months.

La Réunion’s crash is often attributed to the intellectual French settlers’ inability to farm, their ill-preparedness for North Texas’ harsh climate, and financial insolvency. But James Pratt’s new book, Sabotaged: Dreams of Utopia in Texas, challenges these assumptions. Pratt describes a settlement that, despite internal divisions and difficult conditions, managed to establish a beachhead on the west bank of the Trinity that supported about 150 settlers. He also paints a portrait of Considérant as impetuous and underhanded, determined to undermine the success of La Réunion before he even arrived. Pratt’s book raises an intriguing historical “What if?” But for poor leadership, La Réunion could have survived.