If you are lucky enough to know Amber Sims, you can’t imagine this Dallas woman as anything short of fearless.
But this time last year, the 34-year-old Sims — whose racial-justice work includes ensuring that our young people have safe spaces for difficult conversations — was very afraid.
Despite her worries about the mysterious deadly virus sweeping the country, Sims had forced herself to fly to Washington to help a close friend move. As the women prepared in late May to hit the road for New Orleans, details of another tragedy — the murder of George Floyd — eclipsed even the pandemic.
“We are two Black women driving cross-country just as the uprising began,” Sims recalled.
They despaired over Floyd’s death and even feared for their own safety. They made sure to be off the road before nighttime and avoided stops in places that felt ominously like “sundown towns,” where people of color still aren’t welcome. Their stop in Atlanta coincided with that city being placed under curfew.
Finally in New Orleans, the two watched from an apartment rooftop as protesters took over a nearby freeway.
In this “most surreal moment of a very surreal journey,” Sims realized that Floyd’s killing — and the growing response — meant teens back in North Texas would now, more than ever, need the safe space to talk about race and identity.
That’s what the Young Leaders, Strong City initiative, which Sims co-founded in 2014, provides. Just a few days after the first big protests in North Texas, she had organized a virtual conversation for more than 250 high school students.
Sims recalled that a new rawness crept into those first early June conversations as young people reflected not just on police brutality but on their treatment by their own peers.
In video highlights from the group’s summits and monthly meetings, students talk about how these gatherings give them the confidence to speak their minds about who they are and where they come from. They talk about their fears of being stereotyped on campus for their honesty and about how to take what they learn into their less-safe worlds.
Even in this pandemic year, Sims estimated, Young Leaders, Strong City has been able to work with more than 800 North Texas high school students, teachers and administrators.
As the group’s only full-time staffer, Sims does a big chunk of everything, including outreach to local school districts. But she said the engine that keeps the community-based effort running is its diverse co-founders and volunteer team.
Richardson ISD has made racial diversity and equity work a priority under Superintendent Jeannie Stone, and she credits Young Leaders, Strong City as key to that effort.
Last June, as the national reckoning with racism grew, a group of former and current Richardson students delivered a list of demands they wanted to see enacted in the district. That list remains on Stone’s door as a reminder of the work still to be done.
Sims told me that some of the young people in that meeting with the Richardson superintendent had regularly attended the Young Leaders, Strong City summits. “I felt inspired by that, just as I’m inspired that a year later, that fire has not died among local students everywhere,” she said.
But the year has been a draining one for Sims, a struggle summed up in an exchange she had with a middle-age white man on that New Orleans rooftop last spring.
Sims recalled that he pointed out that a lot of change had happened “since back when he was growing up. He said, ‘Isn’t that great? Isn’t that enough?’”
“My answer to him and to anyone is, ‘No, it’s not.’”
Out of this “year of discomfort,” Sims told me, has grown an even greater desire to do anti-racism work and “to think harder about what do I want my impact in the world to be?”
It’s a question Sims has considered since she was quite young — before she could even put words around what was on her heart.
Although she was born in Dallas and educated mostly in Mesquite public schools, Sims lived in Birmingham, Ala., as a young child and spent summers there after moving back to Texas. That meant trips to many iconic Birmingham civil rights landmarks, including the 16th Street Baptist Church, where a Ku Klux Klan bombing killed four young Black girls in 1963.
Her aunt also made sure Amber, from a young age, had plenty of “books about myself” — for instance, a biography of the early Black aviator Bessie Coleman and the A-to-Z of African American History.
“Thanks to my aunt, I had a sense of identity from an early age that has impacted me tremendously,” Sims told me.
After graduating from Agnes Scott College, a small liberal-arts college for women in Atlanta, Sims considered sports journalism as a living. A voracious baseball fan since fourth grade, she eventually landed a “dream-come-true job” in the Texas Rangers’ communications department.
But those early Birmingham memories and her school experiences both there and in North Texas tugged her away from sports and into racial-equity nonprofit work.
Sims spent most of her public school years in majority-white classrooms; the two she spent at predominantly Black campuses revealed disparities that she initially thought would make learning impossible.
Yet that was also the first time she was in a Black teacher’s class and had a Black principal. “I won the math derby — and I haven’t been good at math since,” Sims said, laughing. “I was told I was smart and I performed like I was smart.”
Personal experiences like those underpin why she believes it’s so important that Young Leaders, Strong City focuses on work that validates for students who they are and what their worth is.
It’s also part of why Sims — like so many of us — is profoundly troubled by today’s controversy about critical race theory. “What is so wrong with facing the reality that we have evolved in a system that creates hierarchies that benefit some and do harm to others?” she asked.
“What would the country be without those things and how do we undo them?” Sims said.
She also worries that this debate is no more than a convenient way to push back against all the work that has taken hold around racial equity. Sims has seen a growing commitment by people everywhere to ask more questions and be more inclusive, to create space to apologize and show changed behavior.
“A lot of this has happened in the last year,” she said. “Why would we let people erase our work?”
Her response is not only to be more protective of the gains, but to be “more boisterous about my work in a way I haven’t always wanted to be,” she said.
Byron Sanders, president and CEO of Big Thought, which creates opportunities for local youth in marginalized communities, has known Sims for almost a decade. He told me he is continually awed that — whatever the race, ethnicity, ages or genders of people in the room — Sims knows how to connect with each one and how to bring them into honest discussions.
Sanders, a local social-justice warrior in his own right, credits Sims with teaching him a lot about “how to show up in work, conversation and spaces around equity and race.”
He described, for example, how Sims has challenged him and other Black men to think hard about the intersection of race and patriarchy. “How women, particularly Black women, have had to show up, had to endure, have had to be more strategic than I think an equitable world would require,” he said.
Being in Sims’ circle can be hard work, Sanders said with a laugh, “but it’s that good kind of work that does push you to be a more truthful and honest version” of yourself.
My good fortune in getting to know Amber Sims this year is the kind of experience that makes me want to believe that the rest of us can prevail over the red-meat controversies that consume our politicians. That we can work to understand one another, to be in authentic relationships with one another despite our differences.
Sims is the kind of emerging leader that our city desperately needs right now. She trades in the currency of truth — imbued with compassion and hope — that helps us see ourselves and see what change looks like.
