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Liz Walker made her mark in Boston as the first Black woman to co-anchor a TV newscast. But now, her impact is much deeper.
After leaving the TV host chair, Walker became the pastor of Roxbury Presbyterian Church, a historic church in Boston. There, she launched a group project called “Can We Talk” which mixes the community power of church with the power of talking. On this episode of Say More, Reverand Walker talks to host Anna Kusmer about how she ended up back at church, her childhood in Little Rock, and what music is inspiring her right now.
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the Feb. 12 episode.
Anna Kusmer: Welcome to Say More from Boston Globe Opinion. I’m Anna Kusmer.
If you lived around Boston in the 1980s or 1990s, you will probably recognize this voice.
Yes, that is the Liz Walker.
She was the first Black woman to co-anchor a TV newscast in Boston. In 2005, she left the news and went to church.
After TV, Reverend Liz Walker was the pastor of Roxbury Presbyterian Church. As a pastor, she found her higher calling, mixing faith with the power of talking. And between ICE raids, natural disasters and the mental health crisis, we need places to talk more than ever.
Her new project is called “Can We Talk.” Her book about the project, “No One Left Alone,” takes us into the church walls to sit beside grieving parishioners, healing together through conversation.
Welcome Liz, thanks for being here.
Liz Walker: It is an honor to be with you, Anna. Thanks for having me.
Kusmer: I want to talk about this new book and the project that inspired it. At the center of the book, as a young man named Cory Johnson. Can you tell me his story and why it became so important to your ministry?
Walker: Well, the first thing to tell you is that as a reporter, I covered this neighborhood often.
Roxbury, as we all know, is kind of the center of the — I hate to say Black, so I’ll say urban — community, and it’s a community that’s changing. When I went there in 2011, that neighborhood had been in the midst of what I’m going call gang violence, so that may not be accurate, but there was gun violence and lots of young people had died.
Seventy-five people had died between 2010 and 2011 in Boston. Many of them, most of them from Roxbury, and one of them was Cory Johnson. I had covered stories on shootings in that neighborhood, but I didn’t know the full story. You usually started on the news on a weekend.
Often, it was, “Another shooting in Roxbury, details at 11.”
So going back in as a minister and learning more about these young men who were dying, especially Cory because he was a member of the church and a promising young man. He had two children, two young girls, worked at the YMCA, worked in the community centers, and he was a typical youth, but he was really looking for a bright future. He and his brother went out to a party one night, and he didn’t come home. He was killed, and the murderer was never found. The circumstances have always been mysterious.
I wanted to know about Cory when I got to the church because I could see that his family was still grieving. I got there a year after he was killed.
Kusmer: One of your first events as pastor was like a one year anniversary of Cory’s death, and I think you were talking to his mother and that was that part of what inspired, sort of what came next?
Walker: Yeah. Because at this memorial service, a year after Cory was killed, and right after I got to the church, his mother asked me to pray at the memorial service. It was at the Boston Kroc Center in Dorchester, and the whole point of the memorial service was balloons and music. But underneath this, kind of party atmosphere and celebration, you could feel the pain.
There’s no way to go on when you — or at least there’s no way to go on in a healthy direction — when you haven’t dealt with some of the things that are holding you down. And this family was, and still is, trying to figure their way through this grief.
They’re a large family from Trinidad and Tobago. To see them try to put their best face on, in the wake of this violent death, broke my heart.
Kusmer: You say, and it really struck me in the book, that you didn’t know how to talk to someone whose loved one had been murdered when you were first talking to Debra at that event.
You were a journalist in Boston for decades, so obviously you literally knew how to talk to someone about hard things, but you felt like you were missing something in this new role.
Walker: Absolutely.
Kusmer: Can you talk about what you feel like you were missing?
Walker: Well, first of all, journalists, usually — now I’m old school and it may have changed in the last 5,000 years since I was on television — but you go to the scene of a horror show, or you go to the scene of a horrible situation and you usually say, “How did it feel?” which would make sense in a very kind of a superficial way.
But it’s really not quite the way to handle someone who just saw their love die.
So that’s what I mean about, what do you say?
And I think that in a culture that we have, we really don’t know how to address grief. What do we do? Do we come in and say, “He’s in a better place?” Do we come in and say, “You’re going to be all right?”
That’s not what you need to say. So that’s what I meant. I thought I knew what to say. I think we all think we know what to say, but in fact, talking in that way is not necessarily helpful. And so that was another part of this book: What do we say? How can we support our neighbors when they’re going through things?
And that’s what I learned, and that’s what I share.
Kusmer: So this project that came out of this realization is called “Can We Talk.” Can you describe what “Can We Talk” is, the sort of the form it took, and just what that actually looked like to be in the room there?
Walker: So we wanted to do something more than the usual fair, and I don’t say that with disrespect. When a person is killed or dies in our community, the church plans the funeral, the church works with the family, we talk to the police. We try to do everything we can to ease the burden of the family.
But what happens is after the funeral, maybe we bring covered dishes over, maybe we pray with the family, but at some point, life goes on for us. Life does not go on for the family. So this “Can We Talk” idea came from talking to mental health experts, funeral directors, and of course this family about, what would help you a little bit? After all of this is happening, how can we help you?
And talking really to psychologists because grief needs to be taken care of, it needs to be tended. Doesn’t mean it’ll go away, but it can be handled and managed so that you can cope, knowing that you are going through this.
So in talking to them, one of the ideas came up, “Well, why don’t we have something like Alcoholics Anonymous for people who are grieving?”
The similarity is only in the fact that this is a kind of a drop in group. It’s in the basement of the church. It’s not church, but it gives a safe — and we consider sacred — space for people to just release some of their pain.
These are gatherings we started monthly. We have food and we have a mental health worker on site who usually does it pro bono. We have companions — other people who have gone through trauma themselves, but have been trained in some basics of trauma education to identify what trauma is — identifying what you can do, as a neighbor, as a friend.
We tried it and the outpouring was amazing that first time. People just showed up. People heard we had a sign on the church wall outside, that was our only marketing plan.
People showed up and they talked about violence last week and about violence 20 years ago that they just were told to get over and move on, or they told themselves that.
But, it was always there because untreated trauma, any wound, needs at some point, light and air to heal. And if you don’t give it that, it can fester and it can get much worse.
Kusmer: The goal of this project, I think, maybe in a romantic sense we might think, “Oh, we want people to have these cathartic breakthroughs where they do relieve themselves of grief.”
But I think it’s not like that, you know? And I think of Debra, Cory’s mother, you kind of follow her throughout the book, her coming to these sessions.
What do you kind of define as progress for somebody who’s attending these events?
Walker: We had an event in New Bedford and Debra got up and spoke and so I listened to her very closely and I’ve watched her over the years, and she says that for her it is the ability to even talk about this incident that has given her a little space inside.
When Cory was first killed, she got a call in the middle of the night and she said she knew almost immediately something was wrong. When she got to the hospital, and this was back in 2010, and realized her son was gone, she said a part of her just shut down, just numb. There were no words for what she was going through.
Somehow over the years she kept working. She did what she had to do, but she never entered that space that was shut down. She said that went on for four years. So the idea of confronting your boogeyman, your darkness, your pain, your worst moment, it’s not about ending that moment, but it’s about finding a way through and then somehow integrating that into your life.
She will never be happy or get over Cory’s death. And she said that there are days now when she goes into a dark hole. She can’t help it, but she knows a way out.
The other thing she said that was very stunning to me, and it was nothing I even thought about, was that telling her story she sees now helps other people. And last night in New Bedford, it was extraordinary. People, probably about 30 or 40 people, were at this church and they listened to Debra talk, and then we tried a little, “Can We Talk” with them. And people started sharing things.
One man talked about being shot during busing and never having gone to the hospital. He was so ashamed. The things that we carry. So that’s what I think the healing is. A thing we talk about in Black religious tradition is God is a God of making a way out of no way. When you think there’s absolutely nothing, I’m going to be able to survive this.
Debra decided, “I’ll just have to live like this. I’ll have to live with this darkness. That’s just gonna be life.” And she says, a little of the darkness has lifted and she’s found a place to kind of deal with the death just a little easier.
So it’s not going to change. You’re right. It’s not big, but these are things.
I think one more thing you didn’t ask, but I’m going to tell you anyway, the idea of telling your story. We live in a culture, and this has always been the case, where other people define us, they define Cory: “at-risk young man, gang member.” That wasn’t who Cory was, so she gets to define who she is and who her son was.
Kusmer: And I imagine in a church setting where a lot of us might visualize a pastor speaking down to the congregation, this is maybe a new dynamic for a lot of people. They’re the ones speaking and they’re the lead, directing the conversation. I imagine that’s an interesting dynamic for you as well as a pastor.
Walker: I talk about these experiences in very dramatic terms, but it has been a life change for me because we are listening.
As a preacher, I love to preach. I could preach right now, but that’s not what you invited me for. But the goal here is to learn, to listen and to listen deeply because, part of the problem we’re in, the mess we’re in now is that so many people feel unheard. And that affects everything. And so this is a way for people to feel heard, to feel honored, to have dignity restored. And I’m not just talking about Black people or poor people or people of color. There are many people who just don’t feel heard. And this is a way to help kind of reach them and listen.
Kusmer: Liz, you grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas in the 1950s and 1960s, and you went to high school at Little Rock Central, which is famous for being the high school of the Little Rock Nine, where nine Black teenagers were sent to this all white school as part of integration after Brown v. the Board of Education. They were met with racist backlash. What was it like to be on the front lines of desegregation at such a young age?
Walker: I lived in the neighborhood around the school, at least within a mile of the school.
My brother and I have talked about this, “Are we just making this up or is this true?” But we remember the troops driving into — well, that’s a traumatic sight to see — government troops and guns and all these Jeeps and all that stuff.
So I think we do, I think that’s a real memory, not just imagination coming in when we were very young.
And then later my father, who was a part of the Civil Rights leadership in the city, wanted me to desegregate — be a part of the desegregation, the integration of these schools, because they did it in 1957 at Little Rock Central.
Then they shut down the schools and then they started it back up, grade by grade. And that’s how this was still going on all that time. So I was supposed to be in the seventh grade in 1963, and this was the year that they were desegregating the seventh grade. So they’d worked their way from the 12th grade down, and it was horrible.
Now, when the Little Rock Nine were in the news, the thing about them was, as horrible as their situation was, and it was certainly horrible, there were cameras, there was attention, there were interviews. They had Daisy Bates.
There was something to hold all of that chaos. By the time I got to the seventh grade, your father took you to the school or maybe you went with a group. I was not sent with a group. And you went and you were on your own. So there was no organized thing, at least not for me.
The reason I think I was not involved in that was right at the beginning of the school year, my father died.
So my family was thrown into its own personal chaos and the rules, whatever the rule, whatever he had in mind, who knows? But I felt very much on my own and so that was a traumatizing time for me. It was a time when puberty was coming, a time when most kids are thinking about dating.
It felt like the frontline of a war and there were only maybe in the whole school of 800 students, maybe 50 Blacks. I don’t think there were that many organized picnics or anything because I guess life just went on.
And, I really suffered from that, and other kids suffered from that, from being the only one in a class or being spit on. There were just all kinds of stories. I know that that has impacted me all my life, compounded by the trauma of losing my father.
And again, back in the day, there were no psychologists, there were no counseling services. You went to the funeral and my mother, my stepmother was grieving herself, she didn’t have time.
It was just shut down in my soul and has just begun to come up — of how I struggled with it since this program started. I tell people that and they look at me, but I think a lot of us hold our stuff to ourselves because we don’t know what to do with it, so we hold our pain inside.
Kusmer: What did the group, “Can We Talk,” unlock for you?
Walker: It unlocked the fact that I was not dealing with some issues. There was always this hole and it really came out in relationships, or the lack thereof, because I never went to a therapist. I never put a frame or a context around that time. I never even thought about the time I went through. You just got over it and moved on.
The year of 1963 was probably one of the worst years for this country. That was the year John F. Kennedy was killed. That was the year that the four girls were killed in Birmingham, Alabama. All hell had broken. We were in the Vietnam War. We look back on that time now as a defining moment in American history, and it affected all of us.
Kusmer: When I was a child growing up here in Boston, you were famous for being a local TV news anchor. What drew you to the calling of news?
Walker: Interesting. I have no idea. I wish I did. I think I always wanted to write, and I think one of the healing parts of my childhood was when I went to Central High School because by the time I got to Central, things had calmed down. One of the classes I took was journalism. I always liked to write little poems and things like that as a child, but I never thought that was going to amount to anything because I didn’t think it could. But I had a journalism teacher, Charles Lance. I was in his class and there was some project, and this was probably the 10th grade and he said, “You can write.”
Nobody had told me I could do anything, including my parents. When people say that to you, it can stick with you. That was kind of a way forward for me. I put everything into writing then.
Kusmer: What made you leave the anchor chair to go to Harvard Divinity School?
Walker: That’s another mystery in my life. I went to Sudan in 2001.
Kusmer: Is this a journalistic assignment?
Walker: I assigned myself this. Some people in Boston had been invited to go and observe and explore allegations of slavery in South Sudan. This was going on for decades, these allegations. And so a group went, and I was invited with them. I thought I’d do a documentary.
I went to my news director, and television news then, and now, was not looking at why we are gonna go all the way to South Sudan to do a story. “We cover local news.”
But I got mad and I decided, “You know what? I’m gonna do this myself.” So I took my own camera and it was on that journey that the people I went with Reverend Dr. Gloria White-Hammond and Pastor Ray Hammond, who are still two outstanding community leaders in Boston, medical doctors and ministers.
And I went with them and they kind of defined how I reacted to what I saw as a call. They said, “Oh no, this is God calling you. There’s something you should do.”
Kusmer: What in Sudan sort of created this shift for you?
Walker: I never had seen that kind of trauma, physical trauma. We went to villages where you could actually see the hollowed out piece where the bomb hit.
Kusmer: Wow.
Walker: Because this was the north against the south. I’d never been that close to that. I was never that close to a conflict, and so that kind of opened me up to the misery of the world.
Kusmer: Do you feel like you hit a wall with the tools of journalism? That then ministry felt like sort of an evolution of maybe what you had?
Walker: I do believe that I hit a wall of journalism because you sit there behind the camera and you’re watching this scene go on and this woman’s talking about gang rape and you’re thinking —
And telling the story is huge! This is important.
But remember, Hurricane Katrina hit, and when Katrina hit, people were waving white flags on rooftops that were covered with water and people were begging for help. And it seemed a little odd that TV cameras were just shooting that when I’m actually asking you to save my life. At some point there, the needs are beyond that idea of some objective and removed storyteller.
People are desperate for help, and your job is only to tell the story. I think storytelling is important, but sometimes you wanted —
Kusmer: — to do more.
Walker: I wanted to do more. That’s all.
Kusmer: Yeah, that makes sense. What do you think your dad would say if he knew you became a minister?
Walker: I wonder. I think he’d be going, “Girl…”
Kusmer: Why?
Walker: Well, I wonder if I became a minister because my dad was a minister and that’s all I remember.
I am not running around with some dramatic, “I’ve been called by God.” I kind of wonder was that just kind of trying to figure out what my dad was doing?
It has been the most satisfying role and it has been a role of kind of swimming in the deep end of the pool as opposed to on the side and taking the picture and really seeing the human condition, and seeing the commonality in it.
It crosses all kinds of barriers that you think. We have more in common. And you hear it and it sounds like a platitude, but it’s so true. That’s how I guess you get to platitudes. We have so much more in common as human beings than we think. And now when we are dividing the world into “us” and “them.” I think more than ever somebody’s got to say, “That’s not exactly what’s going on here, because we are all suffering.”
Kusmer: It’s funny because although you are technically a local celebrity, as a teenager, I was actually more in awe of your son because I went to Brookline High School with Nick. He was, and is, a phenomenal singer and actor. I still think about his performance in the musical “Ragtime,” which he was in as a senior.
Walker: Oh, that was huge.
Kusmer: Yeah. He was amazing in that. And I actually remember that he would walk down the streets next to Brookline High School, maybe he was walking home, and he would sing at the top of his lungs. I’m sure you remember that, too. And like an angel, the most gorgeous voice. First of all, you must be so proud of him.
Walker: I am very proud. I’m in awe of Nick. So many people remember him in Brookline walking down. I used to say, “Nick, be careful about that. People are gonna think you’re crazy singing at the top of [your] lungs.”
But that was his gift and he just did it.
Kusmer: Yeah. I mean, there’s so much in your book about humility, and I’m just curious about what you’ve learned from your son and your own parenting experiences.
Walker: Well, I’ve learned a lot from my son. I’ve learned that, you know, I wanted Nick to just be a regular kid that would just stay in the lines, because that’s what I wanted to do. And Nick had a sense of purpose early on. He wanted to sing and he only wanted to go to New York. And it wasn’t about, I look back now, I don’t think it was so much about fortune and fame. It was just about his gift.
Kusmer: Sharing his gift.
Walker: I really think so. That may be naïve.
So I learned that from him — the idea of purpose in our lives. And it is not an easy profession because there’s so many times of being down, so many times of being out. He was in “Hamilton” and that was huge, but he’s been struggling and hustling for a long time. And every victory is a big victory because he has been struggling and hustling. So, I talk a lot about purpose and trauma and grief can take us away from our sense of purpose.
And, “How do you restore that?” is important.
Kusmer: You have a whole chapter in your book about the power of music. I was wondering if you have a musical note to reflect on.
Walker: Oh, gosh. That’s a great, that’s such a great, great question. The song is “Golden.”
You know who I’m talking about — ”living my life like it’s golden.”
Kusmer: Jill Scott.
Walker: Jill Scott. I like Jill Scott, anything she does, because I love her voice. But that song is, you know, it’s just how we can take on a different kind of position and state of mind in life no matter what happens to you. It’s about just living your life, with swimming in the deep end, trying and taking risks, and not being afraid because there’s so much to make us afraid of everything.
And so “living my life like it’s golden” is a step out of that fear for me.
Kusmer: Liz Walker was the longtime pastor of Roxbury Presbyterian Church here in Boston. Her new book is called “No One Left Alone”, about the project “Can We Talk.” Thank you so much, Liz, for sharing with us. It’s been an honor to speak with you.
Walker: Anna, it’s been really delightful talking to you and I wish you the best.
Kara Mihm of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
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Anna Kusmer can be reached at anna.kusmer@globe.com.