Houston’s journalism career spanned more than four decades, including a 20-year stint as a local news reporter for Washington, D.C.’s WTTG-TV Fox 5. She covered the Reagan White House and Capitol Hill as a correspondent for NBC News and worked as an anchor for the ABC Radio Network. Houston also could be heard over the years on WTOP news radio in Washington and as a reporter and anchor on WHDH-AM in Boston.
In her book, she used her reporter’s skills to tell the story of her father, Thomas Gray, who was outraged in 1950 by the death of Hilliard Brooks, boyhood friend who was shot and killed by a white police officer after he tried to board a city bus. Gray led protests in Montgomery, including helping to organize the Montgomery bus boycott.
Her uncle, attorney Fred D. Gray, worked alongside his brother as they braved death threats to fight segregation. Fred Gray was lead counsel in Browder v. Gayle, which eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal. The court in 1956 upheld a lower federal court ruling that an Alabama law and a city ordinance requiring racial segregation on interstate buses were unconstitutional.
Kirkus Reviews calls the book a daughter’s fond memoir of an extraordinary father and a chronicling of pivotal civil rights figures overlooked by history books. Houston chronicles not just her remarkable family, but also other freedom fighters such as Claudette Colvin, a plaintiff in Browder v. Gayle. Colvin was removed from a Montgomery bus for refusing to relinquish her seat to a white passenger months before Rosa Parks famously did the same thing
Kirkus Reviews calls the book “a welcome reminder that profound social changes can also result from the quiet heroism of people with unshakable commitment to nonviolence.”
The June issue of O, The Oprah Magazine included the memoir among its "10 Titles to Pick Up Now," commending it as “a stirring tribute to the pastors and maids who stood alongside Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.—and an ode to rebellions both public and private.“