Inspiring Voices {Ora Houston}
Former City Council Member of District 1
Words by Jessi Devenyns Photos by Eric Morales
First impressions are only skin deep. “You can’t tell by looking at people, what kinds of experiences they’ve had that led them to be the authentic self that they are today,” declares Ora Houston.
Ms. Houston explains that if someone could be judged based upon a cursory glance, image would be a one-dimensional view of a persona, of her persona, as a former City Council member. However, after living a life that began with Jim Crow and, most recently, ended with passing city-wide legislation on the dais, Ms. Houston as a District 1 Representative is only part of the story.
The story begins in 1961 when Ms. Houston left Austin at the precocious age of 15 to attend college in Iowa. She soon discovered that neither snow nor nursing were her calling. “The bed pans just didn’t cut it for me,” she explains. Dillard University in NOLA was her next move which eventually led her back home to graduate from Huston-Tillotson University with a degree in psychology and sociology.
After marrying, she moved to the West Coast. While living in the Pacific time zone, she remembers meeting a rainbow of figures, both through interactions on the street and roles she served within the community. “These experiences around the country have helped me become who I am. Because if I had stayed in Austin, I’d have just been like any other body in Austin,” she shares.
Although an outsider’s perspective would imagine that she was breaking her own stereotypes and laying foundation for understanding humanity from a deeper level, Ms. Houston was also living another life just below the surface. “I had never experienced that kind of abuse,” she recalls narrating the memory. “I’ve gotten spankings and timeouts [and] punishment, but I never had that from someone who said they loved me. So I didn’t have the words to explain to my mom and dad what was going on.” Thus silence.
Until one day, she was finally able to connect her spouse’s behavior with the proper terminology and recognize the toll his actions were taking on her and her son. “I called a friend [because] I couldn’t drive across the Golden Gate Bridge to get to the airport.”
Though that flight shelved a chapter of her life, the experience left Ms. Houston with an acute perception of the importance in understanding others beyond a surface level. Uncovering the layers of stories that create a human and helping tell them became her mission. By telling one’s story, it gives others insight into the complexities of life and the relationships that members of the same community maintain with one another. It also helps erase the narratives that society gives individuals based on superficial aesthetics.
“Sometimes, as people get older, they see themselves as being unwanted. And so there’s a stigma attached to aging, and I’m not gonna have that stigma attached to me.”
Ms. Houston insists that she cannot be the one to tell all the stories. Therefore, she leads by telling her own and demonstrating how being vocal allowed her to generate a support network and receive the help that she needed. “I understand if you need your voice to be heard, you’ve got to stand up and say it because nobody’s going to say it for you. And I also know that people who have been pushed to the edges of our society don’t have their voice or don’t know how to find their voice. So one of the things you have to do is help people understand that they have a voice, and this is how to use it.”
By empowering others with their own voice, Ms. Houston found her role in Austin which, decades later, landed her on the City Council dais to speak for those in her community who struggle to be heard. Now as a citizen again, not much has changed. Today, Ms. Houston is focusing on the elderly community and shedding light on an
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