Colin Allred
What was it like transitioning out of football and then into your kind of life of public service?
I think any football player always has a hard time coming out of it. The longer you’re in, the harder it is. Even people who play high school football, I think, have a hard time when they get to college and they can’t play anymore. Especially if you go to college and especially NFL because your life is so structured around it. Football required 100 percent of my attention, my energy to play at that level. It took everything I had. Once you pull out of that, it’s like you’re suddenly pulling the plug on something.
All of a sudden there’s no 6 a.m. workouts anymore. There’s no daily ritual that you’ve got to do every day to get ready for the next game. The biggest change for me was, number one, losing that sense of structure. Number two, in football you’re all on the same side. You’re all working towards a common goal. Then you get out in the rest of the world, and everybody is pulling in different directions. In a lot of ways it can feel very isolating and lonely because you’re not surrounded by this brotherhood of people who are all working for the same thing. The transition for all of us it was difficult. It was difficult for me, too.
I got interested in public service because I really felt like “there but for the grace of God go I” in a lot of different cases, whether it was somebody getting in trouble with the law or not being able to become whatever they wanted to become. I knew that I had been lucky to have a lot of help at each step of the way to let me roll with the pitfalls. I felt like I’d been given so much by public institutions, by public schools, by community institutions like the YMCA that I really wanted to strengthen those and make sure they were strong. Not all of us have ideal home lives or have the resources to move forward and give access to exclusive places. We rely on public and community-based things throughout our lives to help us become what we want to become.
In law school and then during your time as an attorney, was it always the plan to run for public office at some point? Was that something you were always interested in, or was running for congress a more recent decision.
Yeah, it’s more recent. I got into civil rights law because I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to impact obviously the law and the ways that it was being applied. I wanted to make sure it applied equally. I really felt like going into politics was the extension of that.
I guess it’s basically the same thing: trying to make sure that everybody gets an equal shot. It became clear to me that, like Robert Kennedy said, “If we’re gonna change our politics, we’re gonna have to change our politicians.” It was voting rights actively being gutted, for example. Some of our best efforts in the legal system end up being stymied or take years and years to get results. They’re important and we gotta keep going on them, but we really need to have legislators first. And, like a lot of folks, I was shocked by the election. I was shocked by the outcome.
I thought a lot about the kids I grew up with here going to Dallas schools here, thought a lot about things that I felt like Trump was targeting them and talking about them and their families, and I really felt like that wasn’t who we are. It’s not who we are as people. I feel like it’s a very dangerous time for the country. I feel like in 20 or 30 years our kids and our grandkids will ask us, “Well, what did you do when all this stuff was going on? When the constitution was being questioned. When people were being pitted against each other. How did you get involved?” I want to be able to have a good answer.
Why take on Pete Sessions? You could have run another race. You could have run for the state House or something locally. Why jump in in 32?
Well, like I said, it’s where I was born and raised, so it’s important to me that I have a deep connection to this area. It’s a really personal race for me. Obviously it’s political, but it’s also personal because I have such deep roots here, and I felt like, particularly in the Congress, the direction that it’s been going in is one that we need to change and we need to be challenging at every single one of these levels. My experience is at the federal level. I’ve worked in the Obama administration for three different stints. My experience is federal, and so I think I should try to apply myself there.
There’s a lot more, so read the whole thing. Allred and Ed Meier are the two main contenders against Sessions in CD32, with both of them posting strong Q2 fundraising numbers. He’s one of many Obama administration alumni running for office this year. I didn’t see that the Dallas Observer had done a similar Q&A with Meier, but if they do I’ll make note of it.