Judah Rising: A Story of Becoming

A young man born into the crack-era projects of Dallas battles poverty, violence, the prison pipeline, and his own inner demons to rise as Judah — a filmmaker, healer, and frontline truth-teller for his community. He wasn’t supposed to make it. Not out of the projects. Not past the gangs. Not beyond the police. Not through the darkness that almost took his life. But he did. In Judah Rising, LeJoseph Johnson recounts a life shaped by the crack era, generational poverty, and systems built to swallow Black boys whole. When his cousin’s face appears on America’s Most Wanted and a judge offers him six months to escape prison through the military, he’s thrust into a journey marked by discipline, despair, homelessness, and a near-suicide that becomes the turning point of his becoming. Acting saved him. Yoga healed him. Activism transformed him. And a simple cell phone became his weapon — capturing truth during the Dallas protests, giving voice to the unheard, and igniting the movement known as Word On Da Street W/ Judah. Gritty, poetic, and painfully honest, Judah Rising is the story of a man who burned, broke, and rebuilt himself — and how rising for himself became rising for his people View Less