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Hey, it’s Jen Vellenga. In this episode, make sure you put on your seatbelt because we do talk about the mass shooting in Kansas City during a right at the end of the Chiefs Super Bowl celebration. Beyond that, you’ll hear from our guest, Ebony Reed, who’s the chief strategy officer at the Marshall Project and the co-author of the book, Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap, a book that she has co-written with Louise Story that is ready for pre-order and releases on June 4th. So go ahead and get your pre-order. You will hear so many other incredible stories. This is Episode 86 on the Speak With Presence podcast. Thanks for joining us.

It has taken us almost three years to co-report and co-write this book. We think this is one of the more contemporary looks at the black-white wealth gap and its impact on people under 50. It is a mixture of federal data, academic research, our own data, interviews that were turned into narrative style of writing that tells the stories of seven families. They all are connected in a way that they don’t even know how they are connected. They’ll know when they read it.  

This is the Speak with Presence podcast, where perfection is overrated, leaders listen, and we all speak up to influence change. I’m Jen Vellenga. And I’m Jennifer Rettele-Thomas. And if you’re new here, welcome to our community. To our regular listeners, we appreciate you. We love hearing from you. And when you reach out to share your takeaways and suggest guests for our podcast, we’re just thrilled.

And a special shout out to our quiet, regulars. You know who you are. You listen in your car, while you walk, while you work, our voices in your headphones. We know you’re listening in and we appreciate you. We’re thinking of you and we’re lifting you up.  And I have to say, when we talk about lifting up others, we need to mention the tragedy in Kansas City this week.

Our hearts go out to the whole Kansas City community. We are praying for the victims. And the families who grieve.  We will talk more about this in a moment. So if you’re triggered by this kind of conversation, you might want to skip this episode. We are recording on location today. It’s February 16th. And we are, in reality, just a few blocks away from the Union Station.

When we originally planned to have this particular conversation, we didn’t know a mass shooting would occur down the street during the Chiefs Super Bowl victory celebration.  But we’re here. And we are at the United WE Headquarters. And today, our guest is Ebony Reed, who is a board member at United WE.  United WE advances women’s economic and civic leadership. In fact, we interviewed Wendy Doyle, the CEO, just last year.  Ebony is also the chief strategy officer at the Marshall Project and the co-author of the book, Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap. This is a book written with her co-author, Louise Story. It will be released on June 4th, and you’ll hear more about all of that.

But it’s Interesting to know in this moment that Ebony was the assistant chief over the AP’s Boston Bureau when the Boston Marathon bombing happened just a decade ago.  Ebony, we are honored to have you on this podcast.

Thank you. I’m honored to be here today. Thank you. We’re thrilled to have you. Like I said, when we first, actually, we’ve been trying to get you on the podcast for a while. Almost a year.  So we did not know that this all would be happening right now, but you must have some really unique insights into what’s happening in the city and this very public tragedy. So could you share some of those insights?

Sure. You know, this morning I was with the Plaza Rotary Club and we were, you know, I was talking with them about the book and people began to share their feelings about what had happened. And I’ll just say that my experience from a decade ago in Boston is that when something like this happens in a community, the fabric is forever changed.

So, one of the things I did notice, because I’m not a member of the local media core here, the local news core, but I do work for a national organization, and I thought about how scary it was ten years ago in Boston, because the police weren’t able to immediately apprehend any suspects. And our city had to get shut down, and the only people that can move around for a while were the media and the authorities. And so I just thought about how fortunate we are to live in a community where you never know when something like this will happen if the people will be apprehended immediately.

But you know, Kansas City didn’t have to experience a shutdown and having experienced shutdowns and COVID, I can say, you know, like people know now what those are, but a decade ago, it was really hard to wrap your head around that. And, you know, at the same time people go to these large gatherings and companies are there and the media is there and it’s an exciting time for communities.

But when something goes wrong, everybody has to go into emergency protocols, and that’s really stressful for everyone who’s there. But also everyone who isn’t there, who has to also go into that mode. And so, when I was in Boston my boss, who was the chief of the Bureau, Bill Cole, he’s retired now, he ran in the marathon. He’s a marathon runner. And so he was at the race and we had talked a lot leading up to the Boston Marathon. He was like, you’re gonna be here with our news editor or photo editor. He was like, but you got it, Ebony. You’re the deputy chief of this Bureau.

And when it was clear that the bombing had happened, the phone lines went down. We couldn’t call out to New York.  We couldn’t call anyone in Boston. Like you just couldn’t use your phone. And it wasn’t long after that, within like maybe a minute or so, the photo editor, his name is Bill Sykes, he’s now retired from the Associated Press, but he is a proud Mizzou alum. So I want to mention that since we are here in Missouri doing this. He said, Ebony, we have a photographer missing and her name is Elise. She passed away last year, but he said to me, you know, we got to decide what we’re gonna do here. This is serious. And I took a moment and I was thinking. I mentioned this to the Rotary Club this morning because this may not seem like an innovative thing today, but 10 years ago, I was trying, in the crisis, to think outside the box, which is what you have to do sometimes.

And I said to him, you know, the phone lines are jammed.  Let’s give it a couple of minutes. If she does not make contact with us, she might actually see a tweet because the internet might not be jammed. And he was like, oh, and I was like, yes, let’s just see. But I was very nervous and he was like, are you sure? And I know with that extra, are you sure about, because he was asking me, without actually spelling it out, like, are you sure you want to tell the world that the Associated Press may have a missing photographer. Like this is gonna make the organization part of the story and in journalism we try not to be part of the story and we try to cover other people’s stories. And I was like yes, because we can’t send anyone to look for her. We can’t ask for any guidance outside, it’s us and we want to do everything we can to find her.

She did get in touch moments before we were ready to try to push that tweet out and I was grateful that she did. I was grateful that she was safe. But I certainly thought about that this week and thought about other crisis that I’ve had to cover and I just, you know, my thoughts and my prayers go out to certainly the people who were impacted. I didn’t know that Lisa Lopez, who passed away, that I would be friends with someone that’s a cousin, you know, of hers. And so my deepest condolences to her family and to her friends, and then just thoughts for all the people that have had to work around the clock since this happened. This has just impacted a lot of people in our community in a very, very deep way.

Absolutely, yes. Your work with the Associated Press makes you uniquely positioned to understand it in a way that others maybe don’t. I do want to say that in case you aren’t aware of this, Lisa Lopez Galvin is the person that they’ve identified as being deceased. She was a DJ for Kansas City, Missouri radio station KKFI 90.1 and she leaves behind a spouse and children. And at the last time I looked, there were at least 22 other people injured with gunshot wounds. And three people were detained. So, some information is still coming out on that because this was just a couple of days ago, right down the street.

It’s really horrible. I mean, as I was leaving the Rotary Club, my neighbor across the street texted me to say that one of her friends knows one of the people who was shot and the bullet hit this person in the face. And like, that’s the other thing I remember after the marathon bombing, it was then it was the coverage of the injuries and how people’s lives were forever changed. We don’t even know yet because these people are still getting medical assistance. You know, and children, what the road is ahead of them. I wasn’t down in Connecticut when the Sandy Hook  shooting happened, but the same control Bureau for the AP out of Boston, which had six new England States, you know, those same journalists were many of them went from Boston to support the team in Connecticut and covered that. Those reporters, they were changed from that. So it’s tough. 

All of these tragedies, the thing that just keeps going through my mind is what a great city to let all the school districts out so that families can be a part of this. And for myself, and I know Jen, we watched it from the television. Right. We weren’t there. Yeah. We weren’t there, but we were watching it. And the joy that it brings all of us to see these families and these young children enjoying and celebrating and creating memories.  And then within a few seconds to think of these children now that are going to have very different views of these types of events. They may need therapy. They may need a lot of support because of what they witnessed, what they saw. And my heart just goes out to all of them. And thinking about what all of our roles are to help support our city.

Absolutely. You know, I wasn’t there either. I was actually at home working, and it would be my former neighbor from Boston, from Quincy, Massachusetts, her brother-in-law, her partner’s brother, is a coach for the Chiefs. And they immediately checked on his whereabouts, and then they were like, oh, where is Ebony? And so the frantic phone call that I got from them and I didn’t even know what was happening because I was like writing at my computer and I hadn’t seen any news alerts.

And so people, all over the country, are sending their condolences and were impacted, right? Because they’re worried about their friends and their family, right? It’s traumatizing. It’s just traumatizing. I found myself thinking about, well, first the high and the low. The extremes of emotion that happened on that day. I mean, just awful. But as much as we try to protect everyone, I think of the games, the college games that I’ve gone to where everybody went to plastic, see-through things, and you have security, you have to go through the schools, you go through security, there. We know how to practice lockdowns, but I found myself thinking about how do you do that? A million people showed up for that, a million people outdoors.

Let’s transition into something. Let’s talk about her book. Well, yes, let’s do that. I do want to say that even though the book people can physically hold it on June 4^th.  It is available for pre-order right now. Yes. So my co- author Louise Story and I hope people will buy it like today when they hear this podcast. It’s available on Amazon, Target, Barnes & Noble. Rainy Day Books here in the Kansas City area has a special pre-order page for us. We’ve been picked up by many book retailers and hope that people will want to invest the time to read the book, but also it will be on audible for those who want to listen to it.

It has taken us almost three years to co-report and co-write this book. It is a mixture of federal data, academic research, our own data, because we commissioned our own Harris Poll. Interviews that were turned into narrative style of writing that tells the stories of seven families, although we had to complete about 400 interviews to actually be able to put it together. And we think this is one of the more contemporary looks at the black-white wealth gap and its impact on people under 50. Louise and I also co-design and co-teach a course, an MBA class at the Yale School of Management in Connecticut. And we were able to trial out some of the material in our class with the MBA students over the past couple of years.

All of the people that we interviewed are all trying to raise their families up economically.  And as we chronicle their stories over the past two and a half years. You see them intersect with job issues, the labor market, becoming entrepreneurs, the student loan crisis, the criminal justice system, banking, technology. They’re just living their lives just as any other American, but you see them interacting and hitting some systemic systems and having to work through those.

I should also say two of the seven families, three are prominent and have a level of celebrity. Four are people that most people may not know about until they read our book. Louise and I spent a significant amount of time in the South. So, all of the families at some point crossed through a southern state, but it is a national book. And so, all of them, we trace their family trees back five or six generations. And that took us all over the country by doing that because people moved or had relatives that lived in other places before they got to where they are. And so yes, the book does take a stop or two through Kansas City and also through St. Louis.

We used, in terms of records, we used court records, we used probate records, we used Freedman Bank records, we used census records, we used family documents. I mean, there are so many records plus data to really round out these really rich and deep stories of these families.

What were the eligibility requirements or the determining factors for choosing those specific families? Because if you interviewed that many, why did you pick those specific? And I know you can’t tell me who they are yet. I can’t tell you who they are, but that’s why people should get the book and read the book. But what I can tell you is that they all are connected in a way that they don’t even know how they are connected. Will they know? Do they know now? Or they’ll know when they read it? They’ll know when they read it.

What a great story. Was there a biggest takeaway or biggest aha moment through this journey? There was, there were several. One of the things we also looked at was like government policies and things that have happened in the workplace and things that have also helped establish the middle class in our country. And one of the things that helped with that is the G.I. Bill. A lot of families were able to buy homes or go to school or start a business because of loans through that program. And in our reporting of this book, we were looking at that and looking at its impact or lack of impact on families.

And I happen to mention it to one of my aunts on my father’s side. And she was like, oh, well, don’t you know, like your granddad was a veteran and he used the G.I. Bill. I knew he was a veteran, but I didn’t know that he had used the G.I. Bill to purchase a home with my grandmother. And so then that began to shape my thinking about, like, how my family had early role models for home ownership, which, by the way, for black Americans, you know, it’s right around or under 45 percent, closer to or around 75 percent for white Americans.

And home ownership is one of the major ways, and also stock ownership, that people can grow wealth. The other way is what you earn, right? Your income is the input in wealth. And also, if you have inheritance, which many black families don’t. So that was an aha moment where it was like, oh, my family benefited from this government program, like many families did. And there were some white families that didn’t benefit from the G.I. Bill. But more white families benefited than black families. And it was a national federal program, but it was administered at the local level. So for some families, if they lived in communities that had more discrimination, they could try to seek out to use the program and they may not have been successful or welcomed.  And so that was an aha moment.

I think Louise and I certainly covered the complexity of the black-white wealth gap. As we began to think about and uncover in our reporting and looking at a lot of data, black students are more likely to have student loans. We looked at unemployment numbers that impact black and Latino Americans. We looked at a lot of data and looked at it crossing so many different disciplines and industries that one of my takeaways was that without some type of significant government intervention, whatever that is, this isn’t something that’s just going to like magically go away.

It won’t just self-correct itself, and it didn’t magically appear on its own. Like, people made decisions and created systems that contributed to getting us where we are. I think on a human level, one of the things that we talked about when we finished our reporting was just this sense of working with someone who’s different from you and partnership, you know, and Louise and I have been partners in this project, and that’s different from hiring someone to work for you or being someone’s boss.

Now, this is also interesting too, because it speaks to an evolution in our relationship as friends, because I was working at the University of Missouri, which will speak to how I came to Missouri and why I was working there in 2019 when she started reaching out to me to join her at the Wall Street Journal when she was creating a new team there.

And that’s how we first got together and worked together there. And then in the summer of 2020, through a lot of conversations, like many people were having, about what’s happened in this country and like why things are a certain way and why there are certain inequities and before we knew it, we were moving down a path of wanting to document and report on this area as journalists.

What’s the origin story of coming up with the idea for the book? I mean, was there something that triggered that, that made you go, we need to write about this and put this in a book. There were a lot of different conversations that we were having. I mean, we were talking about how we both have master’s degrees and we had both owned homes during the Great Recession and I had a modified, short sale, something that most people probably have never heard of and the bank involved set up. I don’t even know if this was legal because the agreement that I have with them says this is enforceable, even if it’s found to be illegal someday. And it’s in there.

So I paid on a home, a difference, for almost 13 years after I didn’t even own the home. And you know, to pay off the loan and later, especially after my partner died, I had lawyers and better counsel and people around me and they were like, what is this thing? And like, why were you paying on it and why didn’t you just say no? And I was just kind of like, I was young and I was proud to be a homeowner and I didn’t realize that I could have said no. You know, back then.

So, I do want to tell you though where the title comes from, Fifteen Cents on the Dollar, because, my hope, our hope is that people will learn from the book, even if they don’t read it. But we do want people to read all 450 pages. It is a thick book, but we think it’s worth the read. So where does the title Fifteen Cents on the Dollar come from? Yeah. So, the Federal Reserve has a consumer survey that it releases every three years on economic data. And the last release was last fall and it takes us through October of 2022.  The next release will be in three years and that data will take us through October of 2025. So, in this release of last fall, that’s where you see the wealth by race and that data shows us that for every $1 in wealth that white Americans have, black Americans have 15 cents.

We, as people, when I say we, I just want to be clear who I’m speaking of in this sense, cannot see wealth by gender. So I want to mention that because there are other gaps and certainly I’m interested in gaps that also women face. Sitting on the board of United WE and in our class that we teach at Yale, Louise and I definitely know it covers women and also other groups too, but with women, the Federal Reserve does not separate the wealth of a woman and a man often they’re in the same household.  So with women we look at income gaps and we can look at pay gaps, but it is with race that we’re looking at wealth gaps.  

How does the Fifteen Cents on the Dollar relate to your work at the Marshall Project and could you share a little bit about the Marshall Project with us?  Yes, I’m happy to. So the Marshall Project is a news nonprofit. They cover the criminal justice system by shining a light on the system. Those of us who work there, we are not advocates. We are journalists. This is a news organization. Our editor-in-chief, Susan Chira, comes from the New York Times. My boss, the president, spent many years at Human Rights Watch and also Newsweek before she led The Marshall Project as the president.  We are nationally distributed. The organization began 10 years ago based out of New York, but we now have roughly 73 employees across the country. We have a local operation in Cleveland, Ohio. We also opened a local operation in Jackson, Mississippi last year.  And I’m working real, real hard with my colleagues to bring an operation to Missouri.  So we’re working on that, fingers crossed.

The Marshall Project is the youngest, news non-profit to have ever won two Pulitzer Prizes. So we are talking high-level, quality journalism investigative. I joined the Marshall Project in January of 2022.  I had already been working on the book project for more than a year with Louise when I decided to join the Marshall Project. And I think one of the ways that it connects, when we were reporting, I mean, of course, you know, like I know the data and the stats around black and brown communities being impacted by the criminal justice system. But when we started reporting this book, we were really looking for upward mobile, career advancing, creative, young black Americans doing things to lift up their families.

And time after time, as we sat through interviews, we kept running into people that, for no fault of their own necessarily, they had relatives, sometimes close, immediate family relatives that had interactions with the criminal justice system. And at one point, Louise and I even had a conversation and it was like, we aren’t trying to produce a book, that I can just say for me as a black person, and I know Louise shares very deep commitment to inclusion.  I wasn’t trying to produce a book that would make people look bad, but be fair and accurate. And I began to wonder, we’re running into so many people that have had this interaction with the criminal justice system. You know, what does this mean?

And really where we landed on it was, it just is that we’re reflecting what’s happening in society. These people, many of them, we met them, some of them randomly as we began to build out our list and then see connections between them as we began to report out and decide who would be in the book.

Tell us, how did you get to Missouri? Well, you know, because you were in Boston, I was in Boston. Is that where you grew up? No, I moved there from my job with the Associated Press. I have been to Missouri once before this most recent return for me, but I had never been to Kansas City.  So in the late 90s, I’m a student at the University of Missouri.  I had gone to a summer journalism camp at UNC Chapel Hill. Okay, wait, you have to clarify though, University of Missouri in Columbia, Mizzou. Yes, Mizzou. That’s where I was going to college. But before that and remember, Ebony, that we are Kansas City, Kansas side. Oh, that’s right. And then we met together at Kansas State University.

So yes, we love Missouri as well, but we think Kansas City, Kansas, don’t we? We do.  Well, just like earlier when you said you were coming from Manhattan. Oh, you were coming from Manhattan. I came back from Manhattan, Kansas. And I thought you meant New York. And I was like, oh, you made good time. I made good time. Yes, yes. I have lived in the Big Apple and the Little Apple, but I currently live in the Little Apple. 

So Kansas, so Mizzou. So, but the reason I got to Mizzou was that I had been in a summer journalism program at UNC Chapel Hill in North Carolina and a professor from Mizzou came there and spoke about this fabulous place. I mean, she made it sound mystical. Kansas City? No, Columbia. That’s fascinating. She talked about the newspaper and the NBC affiliate and all you could be. I mean, I was so excited. I was like, I have to go to school here. And after I heard her speak, I went back home to Detroit. I grew up in a Northwest suburb, Lathrop Village.  Shout out to my friends there.  And I told my parents, I said, this is where I need, I have to go here. And my dad was like, well, how are you going to pay for that? That’s out of school, out of state tuition, you know. So I went to the library. This is before scholarships were like online as easily accessible.

Petersons. Do you remember the Petersons catalog? Yes. Yes. Yes. And so I made my own little file of 75 scholarships.  I had a little system. I applied. I got like 11 of them. You know, what’s funny is, it was like $80,000. So I got most of my undergrad and my parents were able to pay the rest. But you know, I spent all that time crying about the 50 some or 60 I didn’t get.  Isn’t that ridiculous? No, that’s how it goes. And you got it all paid for almost. For my undergrad, not for graduate school, but for my undergrad. So that’s how I ended up coming here because I’d had that interaction at another university where someone had come from Mizzou and spoke.

So I went to school there, graduated, and went on to get my master’s online from Mizzou while I was working as a reporter in Cleveland. But the whole entire time that I was on campus, I had literally never met a person from Kansas City. No? Never. How is that possible in Columbia? I’m telling you, I had only met people from St. Louis. I had only, well, UMKC? I mean, I don’t, I had only flown in and out of the St. Louis airport. I’m telling you guys, I hate to say it. I didn’t even really know Kansas City existed. Oh my. And I mean it’s Kansas City.  Kansas City. Come on. I didn’t even know. I didn’t even know. So, that was my first time here.

Then I would go on and I would say …. What year was that?  I don’t want to say what year I graduated. Okay, okay. No, no, no. Don’t tell us. It was early 2000s when I graduated. But then I would say I came back and forth because I joined a board at the university. So I was still coming from flying into St. Louis and making my way.

So now we get to like 2013ish. And my friend, Bill Ryder, who is a journalist, also Mizzou alum, who was in that high school program with me at UNC Chapel Hill when we were 17 years old, calls me up in Boston, and he’s talking about some guy named Terez Paylor that works at the Kansas City Star that he’s friends with that he wants to introduce me to.  I was so rude.  I was so rude. I said absolutely not. I said, how old is he? I said, oh no. I said, do not set me up. I said he was like a newborn when I was in first grade. I said I know for a fact I have more life experience. I mean, looking back on it, that was ridiculous.

Also Kansas City Star. Come on. I don’t even know that city exists.  So anyway, that was three years of conversations back and forth about I needed to meet Terez. So 2016 happens. Things changed in my life. I was more open to it. He made the introduction.  Terez and I have our first date.  Well, let me just say this. We spent months talking on the phone. He was a phenomenal listener.  And one day I mentioned that I had gone to the beach and that I had met a guy that wanted to take me on a date and I thought that he was going to leap through the telephone. He said to me, he said, Ebony, why do you think I am investing my time to listen to all of your stories if you want to go on a date with someone else?  So what was your response, Ebony? I was like, oh, okay. I get it now. I do get it.  I hear you.

It wasn’t long after that, that we made our plans for our very first date that was in Houston, Texas. Why Houston? Because Terez was covering the Chiefs and they were playing the Texans. And it was like Septemberish of 2016 and I said to him, I’ve always wondered how you can take a religious experience and turn it into a TV show. And I said I used to watch Joel Osteen when I was in Detroit and I always wondered like how do you do that? And he says well, I’ll take you and we’ll figure it out.  So I flew to Houston. I met him there. He was a complete gentleman. I have my own room. He picked me up from the airport. He drove me around. He took me for a bite to eat. We went to Joel Osteen’s church. We had a lovely time.

And then after that he came to Boston. I came to Kansas City. I began to take a little time off from my work to join him on the road.  I met some of his colleagues from the Star down in Atlanta on a trip down there. And so by the time it was like Christmas of 2016, we knew we were getting married. And so we were in San Diego because I wanna say there was a Chief’s game at some point, like around that timeframe. And then we went to L.A., so that was January of 2017. Terez had always wanted to cover the Rose Bowl. And so he covered the Rose Bowl, and I said, oh, well, while we’re out here, I’d like to introduce you to the NFL editor of Yahoo Sports. And he was like, you know, you the editor? Because, by the way, I know people. Stay in your lane. Listen, listen. And I do try to stay in my lane even to this day, because I don’t know a lot about sports.

And one of the things I was very nervous about when Terez passed, because so many people were wanting to interact with me, I thought, I’m going to disappoint all these people. They’re going to find out real quick that I don’t know a lot about sports. I don’t even know all the players names. I try my best. But like I am in her camp.  I’m a money journalist. I’m a generalist like and so, you know, yes. So he was shocked. But I said, hey, those are my friends from Detroit. I said, we worked in the Detroit media market together.

And so I took him to the home of my friends, Al and Makisha. And Al is now the managing editor of Yahoo Sports and hit it off. And as we were leaving his home, I will never forget he asked me if everything was cool with Terez because he didn’t want any drama and I don’t blame him. He didn’t want his wife, one of my closest friends, you know saying you hired this guy and he did, you know. He’s a tool. Exactly. We don’t have time for that. He’s a tool. We don’t have time for that and Terez was it. So it was all good.  He was a good listener. He was a good listener and a very sweet man and a year later, Yahoo offered him a position and he had been working his whole life for a role like that.  And I know a lot of people miss his coverage and I just miss him as a person. We’re so sorry. Yeah.

So after we visited with Al and Makisha, I said, oh, by the way, my former boss from the AP is now at the University of Missouri and he’s reached out to me and there’s an opportunity for me to go teach at the university and run an innovation lab.  What do we think about this? And I said, oh, and they’ll also pay for my move. And Terez was like, are you serious? And I’m like, yes. And so we were like, that’s an early wedding gift for us. Let’s do it. So I accepted the job. And I told my friends in Boston, I was sorry, but I had to go. They were all very confused. They said, we don’t even understand what’s going on with Ebony. She’s leaving to go to a place called Columbia, Missouri. It’s mystical.  I tried to tell them. I said, I’ve been there before. It’s going to be great. And they were like, Hmm.

And so for the first two years we were commuting between Columbia and Kansas City in the NFL off season.  Terez would be in Columbia. One thing I do appreciate about Louise is she is very persistent and so I ultimately ended up joining her at the Wall Street Journal, which I was hired as a remote senior manager well before the pandemic. Which is really rare.  And that allowed me to leave Columbia. And tell my friends there, I’ll have to see you later. And then I came on to Kansas City.

So Terez and I bought our home. We were living our lives six weeks after we bought our home in the Northland, which is where he always liked to live because of the close proximity to the airport. Sure. Yep. Then had a medical emergency and he passed away. We’re so sorry. Yeah.  We’re so sorry that you lost him, but we’re also thrilled that you stayed. Thank you. Thank you. I tell people that I feel like on a very regular basis that all of the good deeds that Terez did in Kansas City come back to me.  That’s so amazing. He lived here 15 years. He knew a lot of people and on a very regular basis, like somebody is coming up to me to see if they can help me, to ask me a question. I mean I had a roof leak last year. It was super tiny, like this storm came and the shingle, like one shingle turned around and caused a leak.

The guy comes out and we’re chatting and he says was this Terez Paylor’s house? And I said, it was, it was. And he said no charge for today, Ebony. Oh, not that I was looking for a discount on that one shingle, but I’m just saying like, you know, even today he is still revered and respected in the community and the love and compassion that our neighbor showed me, who didn’t even really get to know me quite honestly until after he passed because we had just moved in. And the pandemic hit and, you know, Terez was very, very concerned and worried about the pandemic because it was really hitting black and brown communities. And I remember talking to a neighbor and just trying to chat it up and he came outside and said, you know, I need Ebony to come in the house because the pandemic is killing black and brown people. We need to be in the house.

So like, people really didn’t get to know me in my neighborhood deeply until after he had tragically passed away. But I’ve tried to, well, one, I’m a very big proponent for grief counseling and I’m very public about that because I didn’t even know how valuable and necessary it was until I went through this experience in my life. And you know, I tell my friends now, I’m not even really sure when I’m going to get out of it. Like, I recently graduated to six-week check ins, which my counselor says I’m doing a great job and I’m so happy. Thank you. And she underscored the fact that in three years, I have never missed a session. I may have had to reschedule for work, but I have never missed a session. And I just want to mention that because so many people, especially this week, saw lots of tragic things. And that is a resource and an outlet that people should, if they need someone to talk to should consider that. But I will tell you with Fifteen Cents on the Dollar, Terez did read an early proposal.  He was an advocate for this book.  He encouraged me to do it with Louise. And so I think it is quite remarkable the amount of work that we’ve done in this book that, here we are, and it’s available for purchase now.

He’s very proud of all that you’ve accomplished. Thank you. He’s very proud. His spirit is still alive and well. Yes. Through you. Thank you. And the many people that he’s touched. I think that you’ve shared so much today and I think it feels like this conversation was a little bit more somber at the beginning than what we’re used to and we’ve talked about some hard things during this conversation and I appreciate you being so open to share it with our listeners.

But I think I just want to acknowledge that we are so fortunate as Kansas City to have you here now. Oh, that’s really sweet. Thank you. I feel fortunate to be here. We’re fortunate to have you. I believe that through this book, it’s going to open so many opportunities through the awareness of this research and we get to have you here in Kansas City and we hope that through your voice, through your passion, that we want it to be a global effect.

But we can say for now that you are here in Kansas City impacting us. Thank you. So thank you for that. Thank you. And Kansas City is definitely impacting me. Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure to chat with you both.

We’re thrilled to know you and we can’t wait to see you around. Sometimes we bump into you and we go, it’s Ebony! It’s Ebony! It’s Ebony! It’s two crazy women calling from the distance. Ebony! Go find her! Oh God, turn the other direction. Walk away, walk away. Just pretend I don’t know them.  Sometimes we’re a lot, but we like it that way. We have posters that say that.  Alright. Ebony, thank you so much for sharing your many stories. We are just honored to know you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Ebony. 

I’m Jen V with JRT. Thanks for listening to the Speak with Presence podcast.  If you or your team need to gain speaking presence or build communication skills without being perfect, I can get you there. I use actor training tools, but revamped for the professional. So don’t be nervous. Go to voicefirstworld.com/chat to book a free call.  Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week.

I don’t think of myself as a criminal justice journalist.  You may not be an expert, but the fact that you’ve been reporting so deeply on it, you’ve become one whether you wanted to or not. That’s a good point. That’s a good point. Thanks. Bye.