Rev. Ronnie Brooks - Reflections on Community Building

Written by Tim Buckley, January 2025

Racial integration of schools, despite the gains and lofty goals, has had negative consequences for many communities. Rev. Ronnie Brooks was a high school junior when integration came to Wichita Falls, Texas, in the late 1960s. He said it was traumatizing - to him, his family and the local Black community.

“My senior year at a new school was very challenging,” Brooks said. Until then, he had attended only Black schools. Booker T. Washington High School was a pillar of pride in the Black community, ranking up there with family and church. When integration was enforced, City leaders decided to close the school rather than bus white students to school in a Black neighborhood, even though Washington was the newest, best-equipped high school in the city, and the only one with air conditioning. His senior class was bused to three other, largely white high schools in other parts of the city.

“The impact on the Black community was devastating,” he said. “More than 50 years since the school closed, there are no new houses, no new churches or businesses in that part of Wichita Falls.”

Brooks, who moved to Salem in 2004, said that the move here was also challenging, and that his experience in Texas helped him to adjust and thrive here, helping to create Black community in civic and religious circles.

He will facilitate a conversation on Salem’s past and present efforts to eliminate various kinds of “isms” on Tuesday, January 28th from 1 – 2 p.m., as part of CBEL’s ongoing Racial Justice and Reconciliation practice.

The public is invited to attend, and you can click the button below to register.

Brooks graduated from East Texas A&M University with a degree in speech pathology. Asked why he chose that major, he said with a laugh, “There was a pretty young woman I met who was majoring in it. I thought this would be a good way to spend time with her.”

After working for four years in Paris, Texas, as a speech pathologist in elementary school, Brooks knew it wasn’t a good fit. He had wanted to become a minister from an early age but his mother discouraged it. “I recall times as a young boy when I would line up my sisters toy dolls as if they were in church, and I’d stand up in front of them and preach,” he said.

But in the middle of the night, shortly before he gave up speech pathology, he received a call from a recruiter at Texas A&M University, asking him to join the faculty at the Commerce, Texas, campus and establish a program of recruitment and services for students who might not otherwise be successful in college. Brooks started the TRIO program that still flourishes at Texas A&M, more than 40 years later. “Trio was, and is, comprised of about eight different programs to help high school students get ready for and then succeed in college,” he said. “The Upward Bound program was about skill building (behavior, how to study and conflict resolution, etc.) but also helping students navigate the mysteries of applications, exams, financial aid and scholarships. We helped all sorts of students find career paths and even to connect them to employment and experience, including AmeriCorps,” he added.

While working full time there, Brooks’ lingering desire for a deeper spiritual life led him to Southern Bible Institute (now Foster College), where he graduated in 1982, and was then given a part time ministry in Cooper, Texas, where they had a small church but no members. Commuting to Cooper weekly from the nearby university, he used his experience and skills to build the congregation. “It was a both a spiritually and civically oriented church,” Brooks said. The Cooper chapter of NAACP was started there during his tenure, for example. “Many young people came up from the college to worship,” he said. But he was later given the choice: become a fulltime preacher and give up the social and political part of the ministry or find another church. He chose the latter.

Recognized as a national expert because of his work at Texas A&M, Brooks was invited to be the keynote speaker at a conference in Portland in the early 2000s. “Driving through Portland on my way to the conference, I asked the person who picked me up at the airport, ‘How come I haven’t seen a Black person yet?’ ‘They’re pretty far and few between,’ my driver answered. “Well, I guess I don’t want to spend very much time here, then,’ I remember thinking.”

Ronnie Brooks and his wife LaNell Brooks at the MLK Day March in 2020

“But four years later, my wife was picking me up at the same airport and driving me to my new home in Salem,” Brooks said with a laugh. He had met LaNell (real estate agent and business owner) on his prior trip to Oregon. “She had moved with her family to Salem in 1974 and didn’t want to pull up roots, so I retired and took a pension from Texas A&M after 30 years,” Brooks continued. “When I asked my aunt in Texas, ‘What in the world am I going to do in Salem?’ she answered, ‘God put you there for a reason!’”

Within a short time, he was volunteering at McKay High School. “I had met the principal, Cynthia Richardson, who was also an active leader in the local NAACP,” he said. “Learning about my background working with students, she asked me to volunteer. Within a short time, it was part time employment and then full time,” he laughed. There are many similarities to the TRIO program he started in Texas.

In addition to Richardson, Brooks also mentioned restauranteur and activist Gregg Peterson, police chief Jerry Moore and social entrepreneur Sam Skillern as important early contacts and fast friends in Salem. Principal Richardson, Chief Moore, and Salem Leadership Foundation Executive Director Skillern have all since retired. Brooks has also retired from his work at McKay, but he is still actively engaged as founding pastor of To God Be the Glory church. He and LaNell have also continued to be active in the community while helping to raise and nurture her five grandchildren, who have lived with them for a period of time.

Whether working with students or with people in his community, Brooks said he puts a lot of emphasis on “empowering the young, restoring families, protecting the aged, and saving the lost.”

Pastor Brooks and guests at a 2023 CBEL Collaborative Gathering

Brooks said that CBEL’s efforts to focus conversation on difficult issues like racism and poverty is admirable. “These are hard conversations, but we have to have them.” In his role as pastor and student mentor, Brooks’ decades of experience give additional emphasis to his advice: “One just has to be willing to listen,” he said. “Beyond that, each of us can take ownership of some small part of the problem, and ask yourself, ‘How can I move the needle just a little bit?’”