Jon Mark Beilue: 'How well do you bounce?'

'How well do you bounce?'

From the projects of south Dallas, Leon Jackson beat the odds

Leon Jackson didn’t know what tomorrow would look like, he said, much less a week later. He was in a college classroom for the first time, and really, any kind of traditional classroom for the first time in eight years.

The academic pace was accelerated. He felt disconnected from people he did not know. He was on a strange campus in a strange part of Texas. He felt the pull of friends through his cell phone from the projects of south Dallas. He knew this would be hard, but did it have to be this hard?

It was the fall of 2015, and Jackson, then 26, was a transplanted older freshman at West Texas A&M University. It was the first extended stay outside of Dallas and the weight of this different world constantly pressed on his shoulders and played with his stomach.

“You could say I had separation anxiety. I dealt with that a lot,” Jackson said. “But I didn’t want to quit. ‘Quitting’ has never been something I wanted in my vocabulary. There was something bigger here for me, something bigger than even graduation. I wasn’t going to quit.”

Jackson’s rocky road to Canyon should have never got this far. He should have lost his way in the margins along the way. A child of the poverty growing up near the State Fair and the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, his mother struggled with drugs and was often on the streets.

He had three sisters that he hardly lived with. A younger brother lived in Galveston. He did look up to an older brother, Nathan, who helped when he could. Jackson lived with his grandmother, Marian Johnson. She then died when he was 9.

There was a gap when he didn’t even go to school after his grandmother’s death. There was no one to make him. As a 19-year-old high school sophomore, he dropped out of school again. Drugs and crime were a constant temptation, and Jackson could have been – maybe should have been – just another statistic in an urban cycle of woe.

But then there was last week, the first full week of May 2020, and a virtual graduation for the 31-year-old Jackson at the home of WT athletic director Michael McBroom. There were congratulatory videos for him. Some talked via Zoom, but some couldn’t talk because all they could do was cry. And it felt so good. So good.

“I don’t have the words,” Jackson said. “I wish I did, but I don’t. I’m just blown away. If I had one word, I guess it would just be, ‘Wow.’”

It’s a story of unusual perseverance and what can happen when an adult man fully invests in a young boy, what happens when he sees not color but hidden promise.

Navigating through the ‘negative chaos’

Brad Reeves had overcome his own issues, namely an addiction, when he first met Jackson 19 years ago. Leon was 12 and hung out at the Turner Courts Rec Center in south Dallas.

Some boys and girls clubs in Dallas had lost their funding after 9-11. Drive Financial Services, where Reeves worked, adopted Turner Courts to keep it open. The company bought equipment, uniforms, helped with sports leagues, tutoring, a Bible study. It was a hands-on operation.

Reeves saw Jackson there every night he was there, and there was something different about him. There was a light, a spark, a good nature, a bright smile.

“He had a quiet confidence to rise above the negative around him,” Reeves said. “We had a Bible study in the gym, and he was at my table. There were seven or eight other guys his age cutting up, but Leon picked up one of the Bibles and asked me to show him the Lord’s Prayer and then asked if he could keep the Bible.

“That was the moment that I wanted to lean into this kid a little bit. I had learned a hard lesson about being a selfish jerk and to be selfless and start serving other people. Leon entered my life, too, at the perfect time.”

Jackson’s grandmother, his only real stable influence, had died three years earlier. There was no consistent roof over his head. He bounced around from family member to friend to family member.

Jackson didn’t even go to school his fourth-grade year. It was a continual mishmash of schools and idle time and no supervision. “A free for all,” Jackson called it. It was an educational nightmare.

He pinballed his way from one school to another. By the time he reached high school age, he lived with a cousin near Skyline High School in far east Dallas. Jackson wasn’t allowed to attend there, but instead had to get on a DART bus at 6 a.m. to go to A. Maceo Smith High School in Oak Cliff. It was challenging, to say the least.

Reeves intervened. He talked with the principal at Bryan Adams High School, told her Jackson’s story. She would take him, but warned it would be tough for a now  20-year-old sophomore with a checkered background.

Not surprisingly, he struggled with grades. Being four years older than his classmates, he struggled with friends. He felt like a misfit. His home life, he described as “negative chaos.” As a sophomore, he either dropped out or was kicked out, take your pick.

A dejected Jackson knew he’d let Reeves down. And Reeves was down and frustrated. Plus, he had his own family – wife Holly, daughter Payton, and son Cole – and a full life. He put things with Jackson on pause.

“Then one day he called me and asked if I’d be willing to help him again,” Reeves said. “I said that if you’re willing to work, I’ll always be there to help you, but you got to work. It was a tough love moment – are you willing to work?”

Jackson was ready to work. The first plan of action was to get his GED. Reeves set him up in an apartment in Deep Ellum that was easy access to the DART station to get to his GED classes, but with one stipulation – Jackson had to give of himself.

He worked with a church youth group, but also with some non-profits. He fed the homeless at Soup Man, a soup kitchen in Dallas. All the while, he was navigating his way to his GED. It took two years, but he completed the work in 2013.

Jackson and Reeves were in that gray area of what to do next. In March 2015, McBroom, Reeves’ fraternity brother at SMU, called and asked if he would like to bring his son to the Lone Star Conference basketball tournament in Allen. Reeves asked if he could bring Leon too.

As the Buffs played, Reeves told McBroom about Leon with the Reader’s Digest version of his story. That led to an inevitable question – what about college? Yes, what about college?

‘You can’t inspire anybody by quitting’

Reeves believed, and Jackson agreed, attending college needed to be outside the D-FW metroplex. There were too many temptations. Jackson needed a fresh start somewhere.

West Texas A&M University seemed like a promising landing place. It was six hours away. It was small, but not too small. The McBrooms could be a safety net. He wanted to study communications and one day work in marketing or advertising for the Dallas Mavericks. WT had a good program for that.

But Jackson needed to establish himself first. He took and passed nine hours of college level work at El Centro Community College in Dallas that summer. That got Jackson to WT by the fall of 2015 – but initially it was just another fork in the road. Which way would he go?

Reeves and Jackson spent a lot of time on the phone that first semester with again those “tough love conversations” as Reeves calls them. The finish line is just four laps away, he told him, and it’s OK to feel out of sorts.

“I told him to block out the noise, work hard and never be afraid to ask for help,” Reeves said. “I was going (through) that some with my own daughter. I asked my family, and I asked Leon, ‘If you stumble, how well do you bounce?’”

Leon bounced. His life was a series of bounces, and this was one more. Even at the insistence of Reeves that Jackson go to summer school and not come back to Dallas, it got better.

Maybe it’s a class or a professor, a friend or an encouraging word at the right time, but like with many students, it began to click of confidence for Jackson.

“Just the help and support of a lot of people — I knew people were behind me and praying for me and wishing me well,” he said. “That helped me. Even though it was hard at first, I was at a place I needed to be to give myself an opportunity in life.”

In the summers, Jackson went to class, and worked at various places like Lowe’s, a sporting goods store, a grocery store. He became more active on campus, especially with intramurals. The last two years, he worked for Tyson Jex, WT’s director of athletic communications, and helped with game and event management at Buff athletic contests which fit what he one day wanted to do. Classes weren’t as intimidating as they once were.

“I’d go into a professor’s office or an academic dean’s office and see those degrees on the wall,” Jackson said, “and that was constant motivation to stay in the books, to keep reading and writing and keep studying to make my life different.

“I know there’s plenty of kids in situations later on for me that I can give back to in a sense and pass it on, and you can’t inspire anybody by quitting and not working hard.”

He’s already inspired the Reeves family and he’s inspired his mother, Kim Bonner, to be in a much better place today.

And 4 ½ years later, he graduated a week ago with an overall 2.50 GPA in communications with plans to pursue a master’s degree at Dallas Baptist University.

If Leon Jackson, a lost child from the projects of south Dallas, is one of WT’s most unlikely graduates, then he’s one of WT’s most proud too.

Do you know of a student, faculty member, project, an alumnus or any other story idea for “WT: The Heart and Soul of the Texas Panhandle?” If so, email Jon Mark Beilue at jbeilue@wtamu.edu.