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Speaker 1: I'm Tamika D. Mallory and it's.
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Speaker 2: Your boy my son It generally we are your host of TMI Tamika and my Son's Information, truth, motivation and inspiration.
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Speaker 3: New name, New Energy, what's up?
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Speaker 1: My song learning? How you doing today?
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Speaker 2: I am blessed a hoghly favored Tamika D.
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Speaker 1: How you feel I'm doing good?
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Speaker 3: Some are still in progress, get into August. Other kids going back to school around the country, but the northern States, particularly in New York, we don't start until September. So this is kind of a midway point for us for summer, thank god, because the traffic in the city is much less during the time while the school buses and the teachers and the families picking up and taking their kids to school are at home. So that's good. I'm not rushing it, and you know, it goes fast. That's all I can say is that summer goes fast. I feel like as soon as we go to mark this vineyard, it's the end of the summer.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, some of those fast. I think it's only pretty much like one month, like July is really the whole summer, because by August everybody is worried about okay, we got to get ready for school, this and that. So the whole month of July and probably that last week of June is really summer, Like summer really kind of ends.
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Speaker 1: I wouldn't say it ends August. I mean, I think about it.
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Speaker 2: I don't really say that it ends. I'm just saying that that's when it winds down.
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Speaker 3: To me, it's around the fifteenth. And it's definitely when it starts getting cool at night. As soon as at night it starts that you need a jacket and all of that. That's when you know summers over. Start getting the school clothes ready, it's time to go back. I'm like, you know, my granddaughter obviously she's in daycare. She's in school all year round, so they don't really have like summer. So it's not like so I'm not in that mode with her yet, but soon and very soon she'll be gone in the kindergarten where she'll be you know, at school during it from what is it September to June. Shoot, they go to school till damn near the.
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Speaker 1: End of June. I don't feel like your kids go to school to the Indies, they do.
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Speaker 2: They did get out like the last twenty third, twenty fourth or something in June.
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Speaker 3: You see, I think I'm like one of the parents. Yeah, I'm like the third parent.
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Speaker 2: Nah, it's twenty third, twenty fourth, So it's it's the end of June. So I'm telling you July is pretty much the only one. But they go back in September, they go back to first That's what I'm saying.
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Speaker 3: It's the halfway point. I guess first of August is the halfway point. So that's a good thing. We're hanging out, We're living up summertime in New York City.
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Speaker 1: Still, people are enjoying it.
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Speaker 4: You know.
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Speaker 3: I would say that the night life in New York really picked up this summer to me, like, you know, the not just night life, but just social social climate. It really did pick up. And the older people came back outside. And when I say old, I mean in our age people thirty five, forty forty five and up really came back outside, reclaimed some of the spots that used to have, you know, good events because all of that stuff has started closing down.
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Speaker 1: It was actually pretty like damn.
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Speaker 3: I feel like like Eric Adams ushered back in the night so the night life yeaside.
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Speaker 1: He was getting his indy and his cigar.
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Speaker 3: But but I mean, I do feel like that because people started opening spots again.
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Speaker 1: Everything was closed. When people would come to.
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Speaker 3: Visit, they would say, where are we going, and I'd be like, I have no idea the whole. But also we were out of the city so much during these last however many years in this state with Breonna Taylor's family all of you know, back and forth just wherever we had to be. That maybe we didn't have the like we didn't know exactly the spots, but now I know, like ten spots.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, because you know, I know a lot of the promoters, you know what I'm saying, so shut out to sleep losing Isaiah, you know, fish people started really promoting parties again, and they was like yo, I would get an email or I'll get a text, so I'll get a DM like yo, despite is open, you know, especially in Halem Hall, them had a lot of stuff going on. This shit.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, it was in Brooklyn too, because I somehow or another I got into Brooklyn algorithm. I think if from the Kwanza crawl, the you know, the they go to the bars and restaurants and whatnot. During I think they had started it, Yeah, Kwanza and then now they also have a summer date and I am in their little algorithm.
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Speaker 4: In Brooklyn was popping too.
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Speaker 3: I don't know what was going on in Queens, but I will say and people probably be like, why do y'all care about that? Well, we do because people deserve to have some social experiences. And they became places that you would see people from all different walks of life. They'd be like elected officials, there would be people who are like us that are in activism, there'd be people who do parties. They'd be people who just you know, coming out the street, like I appreciate that.
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Speaker 4: And the.
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Speaker 3: Violence was limited in those areas, which is a problem because younger kids who would never go to the parties, like you know, they would never be in Sangria, right, They're not in the Bronx.
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Speaker 1: They're never going to be in Sangria. They are somewhere though, and.
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Speaker 3: Where they are is where the shootings are happening.
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Speaker 1: That's where now.
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Speaker 3: And we talking about twelve, thirteen, fourteen year old kids. So that's a lot of where you see the separation. Because when we were out and we were thirty something hanging out, I don't know if I was ever thirty something out with y'all. Y'all was always forty and I was thirty something. But when we were out and we were mixed in with the twenties and whatever, that's where it just didn't go right. But the twenties are not so bad right now. It's the thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year old kids.
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Speaker 2: The twenties is stunt because a lot of the twenties is going to the clubs with us.
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Speaker 1: You know, they're trying to get it.
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Speaker 2: I see a couple of them inside this spouts that we in now, So they're trying to be with the grown folks. They're hanging out with the aunties and the unks.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, but the thirteens and the fourteens, they need a lot of attention. Because we had a big meeting with the city and the deputy mayor when she Deputy Mayor Rinita Francois, when she first did her meeting with the violence prevention groups, Angelo and I were there. For those who don't know, when we say Angelo, we're talking about one of the four co founders of our organization until Freedom, Attorney Angelo Pento, and we went to the meeting with all the heads of the Crisis Management System, which is the Violence Prevention Group. And you know, of course they whipped out the data because you know, the city's going to say, we're we're funding these organizations almost one hundred million dollars needs to be much more. In fact, I think the mayor did put some more money back into CMS because under Adams administration it got cut from one hundred to eighty six or something, so he puts some money into build it back up. And you know, their thing is, we're gonna always, we're gonna, of course celebrate the winds and the success. That's safe. The city is safer than it has been. I don't It depends on where you live, so that's always. We're not going to go down that rabbit hole today. But whatever, anyway, the city is safer. It is less violence, less rates, less, you know, all the things, because they don't just look at gun violence the way that some of us kind of have that narrow focus. They're looking at violence in general, hate crimes, domestic violence, all of that, and so there they've seen it's a steady decline in those things. However, the one thing that they did bring up is that the data suggests that young kids thirteen, fourteen, fifteen are probably one of the.
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Speaker 1: Most vulnerable populations.
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Speaker 3: So for people who are like, what do we do and how do we support and how do we get involved and you care about our youth, that is one of the most important things that we could be doing right now is trying to strengthen our youth organizations, making sure that there's more outreach. Looking under your children's mattresses, in their book bags, they're not adults in your house at thirteen and fourteen years old, turning their shit inside out, knowing this password to their cell phones. Because good kids get guns in their hands as well. And as we know with the fourteen year old out in Queens, it was kids just having a regular fight and somehow a gun went off and this boy ended up dead.
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Speaker 1: So you know, that's one of the things that we should be focused on.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty much. I think as we talk about the violence in the community, it's been a lot, it's been scattered, you know, just looking I've seen a young twelve year old killed a couple of weeks ago, you know, and I feel like there has to be a more succinct approach. I think we got to get back outside again. I think you know this, We started doing a lot of work, but I think we got to get right back into the communities. You know, I was thinking about strategies, right. I see a lot of these kids live stream I was talking to you about it a couple of weeks ago about live streaming, like really going to the communities, live streaming, doing intervention. We're talking to some of these kids because I've realized that that's what they're into, the streaming things. So I think, like some of us violence interrupted and incredible messages need to start streaming those that type of content, going to the communities and grabbing up these kids, having conversations, like going to the vulnerable communities and really letting them see what's going on. And I think that'll be, you know, very instrumental in a lot of the change.
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Speaker 3: You know, you are you look very young, right, you look very young, but you're not that young, right, Like you're half what you have what they call it half a century. Then they say something like a court nicol something nah, something they got to do with coins, but whatever. So I think that also we have to make sure that we're training the next generation, the Nissans being your son, and Tarique's my son, and.
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Speaker 1: Kylie which is Jamila T.
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Speaker 3: Davis's son, and you know, and and all of these younger people, we've got to really train them to be because they are very good technically, Like these kids know how to run all kinds of like software and you know, and design and they're into the AI space.
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Speaker 1: They're doing all of that.
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Speaker 3: And they have stories, right, like which is Jamila's son, can talk about being a child whose mother went to prison and left and behind. And that is a sensitive issue for young kids out here right now, that there is a missing parent who's in prison. How do you overcome that?
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Speaker 2: Right?
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Speaker 3: Tarique has his own story his father was killed when he was young, never had his dad gun violence took his life, and then the story goes on and on and so on and so forth. Nasan has a story of you being away in prison for seven years of his life. They need to be empowered and trained within these organizations and spaces. And I know the crisis management system does it, but I'm saying that there has to be even more resources pouring in that you don't get rid of the elders, because even we are advised by our elders. We actually have an elder coming up on the show today, but even we are being advised by somebody an elder. So you always have to have the elders in the space. But people who are your age, age, my age and older also have to recognize that we cannot stand in the way of the next generation taking their rightful place to do the work with the generation behind them. And sometimes that doesn't happen. Sometimes we have people who are older who stick their foot in the door and are unwilling to move for anybody else to come in, and that I think stunts our growth as a community.
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Speaker 2: That's what I want to do streaming because I know that would attract the young kids and they will want to be involved in the work and see it as something that they can cool. You know, cool. It will be trendy if we go streaming and we are here and we grabbing up and we saying, hey, we were raising kings, so we want to grab the next young kings. That's gonna stop the violence in the communities and we're gonna empower them and they and next thing you know, they got a million followers. We got a million followers, and now people want to be a part of it always. That's what I've always said about this work. You know, when we make it sexy, when we make it trendy, when we saw giving it the same platforms and the same you know, level of advertisement that we give everything else, then you'll see these kids want to be a part of it. Because there's a lot of people that when they they don't realize the work we do because they don't see it. So if it's highlighted and it's amplified the same way that you know, people doing negative not even just negative, just stupid stuff, and they got millions of followers and this and that. If you can get millions of followers for doing the right thing, for stopping violence in your communities, if you start transforming the minds of these kids who are naturally leaders, but they just leading in their wrong direction and they don't understand that you can actually lead in a positive direction and get positive results and be successful. And these are conversations that I have with people all the time because they don't know it, you know, And a lot of times when you when you don't see that, you know, you have to see it to be it. You don't see someone successful in a way like I always tell people when I was young, I didn't want to be a lawyer or doctor, any of that I want. I actually did want to be a lawyer because I used to watch Perry Mason. If Perry Mason made me want to be a lawyer when I was young, But the average.
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Speaker 4: The kids don't know nothing.
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Speaker 2: Sam and Matt Locke and all these I used to watch those shows.
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Speaker 1: Perry Mason was good, what it was.
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Speaker 2: That was one of my favorite shows. But I wanted That's why I wanted to be a lawyer. But I didn't see that in my community. Right. The only level of success that I've seen with somebody who was either a drug dealer. I seen basketball players have success. You know. Those are the things that were celebrated. They had the money you wanted, they had the girls you wanted. So I say all the times, if we really want our kids to transform and we want them to do positive things, then we got to amplify and show them positive people who are successful and respect it.
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Speaker 4: You know. So that's that's just the It's important, it's very it's important.
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Speaker 3: I appreciate that we have to elevate the positivity and put the same amount of resources behind advertised and all of that because a doctor or a lawyer or somebody, unless they are saying something that you know they're talking about, I don't know, Saint Kuchie or something, they don't get as much attention, right, Like you can't just go and be smart online and receive the type of attention that you deserve without having to add some types of tricks and gimmicks and this and that to you know, make it pop. And that is I believe that that is by design right, that the algorithm is pushing stupid ship to our kids, just like they pushed crack to us to our families, which was the major destroying factor co Intel pro in the movement. There has all they you know, you you what do they do in this era not this erab a little bit earlier it was you know, you stole money from and they're still doing that, still embezzlement, like they have found ways to break down all the positive things in our society and you know, pills then the tourken wars. I mean, it always is something that distracts us. So I appreciate what you're saying, and I think that that's when people say, what are the solutions? There are many and the solutions begin with things like us taking the time to click a thing like a thing, share a thing, and not always be like the one that everything you post, everything you share is drama, battles, gender wars. Take the time to make sure that even if it's only got two comments on it, that you're part of a community of people who are pushing positive things. We could do so much just for our phones, just for our houses. Sending five dollars to a local grassroots organization.
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Speaker 1: We can do that.
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Speaker 3: And so don't look for this big solution. Bring your solution very, very local and on a micro macro level, which means that it may be small in focus because it's just your area, but it's macro because those people and those ideas need help and need support. So exactly, speaking of young people, Tuskegee University says, no bonnets, no do rags, No you know, slippers and pajamas and all of that going to class. Keep that stuff in your dorms, keep it to your privacy. And you know, there are two very distinct arguments out in the universe that I understand.
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Speaker 4: On both sides.
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Speaker 3: I completely understand the people who say we're policing how people dress. That is not that shouldn't be a major focus for us, that we're out here policing people's attire. You don't know their situation sometimes not for nothing, especially to Skia University. You talking about black kids, black girls get up in the morning time and your head just ain't right, like it just ain't right, It just ain't right.
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Speaker 1: You just all over the place.
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Speaker 3: You might have your menstrel you're going through stuff, You got issues at home, and you might not have the ability, the time, or even the desire to fix yourself up. And so your head scarf might just be where you at on that day, right, And well, let me just finish the point. You might just be that might just be where you are. And I'll tell you that there's some hypocrisy in this because I personally will say that I could see a bonnet and feel completely disgusted by it, but a do rag I don't feel that way because do rags have been made, so you know that's really accept it, like it's a do rag.
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Speaker 1: You see men in drags all the time.
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Speaker 3: Although in my household and in my family, everybody knows and my son knows, you ain't going nowhere with me with no dow rag on your head. Take that off. That's because I know better. But I'm just saying it doesn't make me feel as cringey as when I see somebody with a bonnet on walking through the airport. So, but I understand people who feel that we shouldn't be policing people's attire when you're trying to actually get people to graduate, and if they doing well in school, perhaps just getting them there is a part of the process. Then there are people like me, So I'm putting that up front, like me who were raised that everything don't go everywhere, that you wear certain clothes in certain environments, you don't bring your bed clothes because I'm gonna tell you it's nasty. Number one, because if you wear a bonnet outside, you are not You don't have two different bondings. You ain't got a bonnet for the outside and a bondt for your bed. You wear in that same funky ass bonnet on your head outside to wherever you're going and then bringing it back and bringing the germs and putting it back in your bed. Same thing with pajamas that you wear into the airport where people don't travel from China Mexico, wherever else all over the United States. They get on the plane, whatever they got boog is this that whatever nastiness that they put it in their seat and then you sit your ass down on top of it with them pajamas on. And you're not gonna tell me that you have pajamas that's just for traveling. I don't believe that it's nasty.
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Speaker 2: No, I completely agree. I think that there has to be some level of the coorum right, and especially when you go to higher learning. When you go to college's higher learning, it's preparing you for society. It's comparing you for real life. And in real life, when you go somewhere profession you know, you're not wearing a bondt, You're not wearing pajamas, you're not wearing slippers, you know. So I think it has to you have to be able to separate the times from where you wear those kind of clothes in the times when you do things that's professional. You know, if when my kids go to college, you know, I want that level of structure. I'm especially my son is fifteen nine. I'm giving him structure. Certain things that you don't do. It's certain things about hygiene, and certain things about the way you dress and things of that nature that you're supposed to understand as a young man. I think when you go to higher learning that those things should be implemented. So I wouldn't want to be in class and I'm coming and you you. I mean, I think even to learn right, you should you should want to put on clothes that make you look a certain way, because it's about I tell people all the time, it's not all about what you know. Sometimes about how you look, your perception. You can get a job just based off your appearance. If your appearance is not right, then everything else is become secondary.
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Speaker 3: Right, And I'm not suggesting that you need to be dressed up in the highest fashions and wait and spending money trying to keep up with the Joneses, but pajamas, bedclothes. I'm gonna have to put do rags in there, because even though, like I said, the hypocrisy is that I don't see it the same way, but I am going to put it in there because I know better. Do rags and and hair bonnets and head scarfs and all of that. Those things, by the way, inside of your home need to be clean, right, and put, it's sort of sacred you taking that into your living space. When you go out, you need to be at least preparing yourself to be out in the world. Right to your point, to prepare yourself to be out in the world. I want to go to church. I saw my cousin Kim Abney. He wrote this whole post about going to church was a place where you learned how to wear a suit and tie. You may not have had anywhere else to go for the entire year that called you to wear a suit and tie unless somebody got married or there was some type of very very special function. A lot of people don't have families that have weddings or family reunions where the Saturday night is the banquet.
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Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying. A lot of people don't have that. They're not in organization.
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Speaker 3: So guess what if they go to church with Grandma or Mama and family, they put they Sundays best on. This is how you learn how to actually be able to have duality. That you don't just look one way all the time. You might you're dressing up right, you're dressing up or your change up might not be the tie and suit. The look exactly as some of the you know, the older images of what it looks like to dress up. That may not be the case okay nowadays, and you have to credit people are you know, Russell.
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Speaker 1: Simmons and Kevin Kevin Lows.
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Speaker 3: And people you know at that time, you know, they changed it to where you can at least wear a piece a pair of sneakers with your suit, and then we kind of lost having to have a tie on all the time. I think that's okay, create your own style, right, you don't have to live in a box, But wearing your night clothes, your house clothes out into the world, to me is completely unacceptable. And I don't really you know, people, everybody has their opinion. So I'm not going to sit here and say that someone else who feels like people should be liberated to show up as they are, that they are wrong. I'm saying that as for me and my house and me and my family, and what I will teach my granddaughter is that when we go places, we clean up, we get ourselves together, and yes, we go and we learned and we try to excel and we understand that they we should be calling ourselves to a higher standard and if you want to tie this back to what we were speaking on around these thirteen fourteen, fifteen year olds who are out here with guns, they out here killing the people killing themselves. There has to be a correlation here where we're dealing with this idea that being an intellectual person who actually thinks and tries to gain knowledge about topics and also has a level of understanding and grace for other people.
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Speaker 1: We're dealing with a serious.
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Speaker 3: Decrease in that, like you could just say anything, be you know, not even necessarily knowledgeable about topics, and then you somehow become an expert just because you was able to say the hot thing that got you know, everybody watching right that became trendy. Then over here you're dealing with people telling us that we shouldn't be trying to be politically correct. So now just be as you want to be where you're buying it. On the airplane, where when I was growing up, you got dressed up in a real nice I mean, it was Sunday's best in order to travel on a plane. Now just wear your stinky pajamas and go to the airport. You know, everything has just starting to diminish, and by the way. Even our movements are suffering with some of that, where people either don't take it as serious as they should, or folks are unable to keep the spark and engagement in the movement. And so yeah, there's enough finger pointing and accountability to go around as to what people should be doing to keep that elevation of the spirit, elevation of the fight, elevation of excellence and all of that. Yes, we absolutely have enough fingers to point, but we've got to be able to start somewhere, and it's got to be some kind of standard.
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Speaker 1: And I think that our young people have.
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Speaker 3: To be taught that you don't take everything about you in every space that you go in. You compartmentalize. It doesn't mean you fake, it doesn't mean your phony. It just means that when I show up at church, I don't sit in there people put my foot up and start cussing and eating fried chicken.
00:27:19
Speaker 1: That's not what I do while the sermon is going on.
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Speaker 2: I mean, you just have to have versatility, and you have to understand that there's just a time and place for everything. And I think no better places than college, because college is supposed to teach you about the next level of life. You know, you graduated from high school. The child is the you know, the teenage, the mid teenage. We able to just navigate and teach you. But at that point when you go to college, you know, it's about making real life changes. It's about growing into the man and woman that you'll be. And you need to understand the society that you can't show up with pajamas in professional places and people take you serious.
00:27:57
Speaker 3: Absolutely, absolutely, So last week we weren't in studio, but still we talked about a couple things that I want to circle back to while I'm on this here camera because I need to talk back again about the Black organization's closing down. Here's part two of my thought of the day from last week about black organization's closing.
00:28:20
Speaker 1: So, number one, there.
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Speaker 3: Were people who thought that the organization that we posted because we posted an example of the topic and it's an organization called Black Visions, and they were making an announcement that their organization was shutting down. And when I posted it, the caption did not say that this is not until freedom, which is our organization. And so there were people who reached out to me to say, like, you know, keep your head up supportive conversations while you know what can be done you people, which.
00:29:01
Speaker 1: Sparks some other dialogue.
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Speaker 3: But I want to put a pin in that and say that Black Visions is not our organization. Our organization is called Until Freedom and we do not know the reason why Black Visions close. We were just using it as an example to show that there are so many Black Visions is not the only organization. There are many that I have. Some of them have closed without discussing it. Some of them have closed and made big announcements. But there are many organizations that have closed down and or they have conjoined with other organizations because they don't have the resources to keep going on their own. And so but let's just be clear, Until Freedom, like most organizations, is struggling as well. We are not at the point of making an announcement of closing our doors, but we could be right if we are not able to get the type of investments that we need need from various places. We have many different funding sources, whether it be from individuals, it's individual giving, it's individuals who have you know, resources at the level that they can actually help us to sustain ourselves. Most of us work another job two, three jobs. We've got all types of other things going on which sustains us personally, so that we're not putting so much of a burden on the organization to care for our personal needs.
00:30:27
Speaker 1: Which, by the way, the work that we.
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Speaker 3: Put into an until Freedom every day, we should not be having to work seventeen other places because I can tell you that what that does, it diminishes people's ability or limits people's ability to be able to work the way that we want to, the passion that we have for the community, the effort that we want to be able to give. It's hard to do when you got to get up and do three other things so that you can survive. But most Americans are doing it, and especially Black people and definitely Black women, because they say, we've got to have seven different forms of income in order to sustain ourselves and our families. So we're all hustling and whatever. And so therefore, when I see an organization closing, it's just it's knocking on the doors of most of us. And even the big organizations are experiencing a cutback in resources that they were receiving. But those conversations that started because people thought Black Visions was us really led to some important conversations that gave me a part two to my thought of the day. One of them, or a few of them were people who have lots of money, right, And sometimes you can say people have lots of money and you don't really know what they have, so we shouldn't say that, but on paper they look pretty good. Just put it that way, and you know when they were reaching out and they're like, you know, we're working on things, We're trying to figure out ways to be more helpful.
00:31:59
Speaker 1: There's so many different groups reaching out.
00:32:02
Speaker 3: I have not been one who is asking people to send five thousand and ten thousand dollars. Yes, that is great, that is important. And if you have five thousand or ten thousand dollars and you want to send it to until Freedom right now, we appreciate it. You can go to until freedom dot com and make a donation through act blue, or you can get in touch with us and get us that. But we've been focused on trying to make sure that we secure real investments, not that those are not real, let's be very mindful, but more investments so that we can sustain for a longer period of time. And so these people are not calling to say I got five bands to help you out. They're calling to say, listen, we're looking at ways that we can structurally support many organizations because we see the bottom falling out. But there were two people who contacted me and said, damn, like, what's going on? And I said, we told y'all when y'all was on your shows and going on interviews and going around doing radio shows, saying that diversity, equity and inclusion wasn't the main thing. It wasn't that important, It wasn't working for black folks. We were only getting a small piece of the pie. We told y'all that the narrative was dangerous, not that we don't understand the data and what the data shows. The data clearly says that white women and other groups benefited from DEI more than black folks, which is what it was intended to. It was pretty much like the child of affirmative action, one of those things that people Reverend Jackson and other people came up with, this idea of really going into or organizations and institutions and corporations and putting departments that focus on equity. Right, and so that is obviously important, but as with everything that black folks have somebody gonna come do corn rolls Kardashians and now they.
00:34:18
Speaker 1: To cornroll people.
00:34:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, and now they're the best corn roll people that ever cornroll. Meanwhile, our people created that so that we could put rice and other things in our heads all the way back in Africa, right, so they always do that. There's always appropriation, is always people taking advantage of us. Nevertheless, the idea that people did not understand that the end of DEI, the attack on DEI, the criminalization of DEI, ultimately.
00:34:48
Speaker 1: Meant black people get rid of black people.
00:34:53
Speaker 3: And the problem is that people who do not understand the framework of Project twenty twenty five, and they really did not sit and and read and digest what that document is. They don't get the connection with the diversity, equity and inclusion attacks.
00:35:12
Speaker 1: Because when those folks say that they want.
00:35:15
Speaker 3: To restore America to the white male, or they didn't say that, they said the American family, which to them, they're talking about the nuclear family.
00:35:26
Speaker 1: They're talking about a man woman.
00:35:29
Speaker 3: And notice that I'm taking my hand down a notch when I get to woman and children and they are speaking about white men, white women, and white children. Just go look at the websites for all the different departments in the federal government. They have whited out the photos that showed diversity that you know, had all different types of communities Indians and African Americans and whatnot, and they have basically pictures of white folks, white children in schools, white people working, white people.
00:36:02
Speaker 1: That is what they're speaking about.
00:36:04
Speaker 3: So diversity, the end of diversity, equity, and inclusion was not just some one off idea that it wasn't important. It was a part of a plan to destabilize black communities.
00:36:16
Speaker 1: And now when you see these.
00:36:18
Speaker 3: Organizations closing it is it was a part their plan is actually working. And so in the individual one or two of the individuals said back to me, you know what I hear you.
00:36:29
Speaker 1: I didn't get it. I didn't see it.
00:36:31
Speaker 3: Now I see more of what you're speaking about, but I didn't get it, and I can tell you one of the fundamental problems that I'll be done.
00:36:40
Speaker 1: Both individuals continue to.
00:36:43
Speaker 3: Take me back to George Floyd and the commitments that were made under the George Floyd uprisings, when everybody saw racism for the first time and said we've got to poor money funnel money.
00:37:00
Speaker 1: Into the black community.
00:37:01
Speaker 3: We're going to do better, right, And so they keep saying, well, I did a report or we have reports that shows that even though they committed X amount of millions or three hundred and forty billion dollars or something like that, that we never received and if we did, we just got a slither and And this is where I just want to say, for the record, if your understanding or your conversation around diversity, equity and inclusion starts with George Floyd commitments in twenty twenty, you do not know what you're talking about. And it's not disrespectful.
00:37:38
Speaker 2: You just don't know.
00:37:38
Speaker 1: You just don't know.
00:37:39
Speaker 3: You don't have the proper analysis of where diversity and equity and inclusion started and understanding that they were not They're not talking about a twenty twenty commitment.
00:37:52
Speaker 1: This is going back.
00:37:54
Speaker 3: This is this is not only just traveling back many years, it's also covering so many different aspects of things that you don't think about. You don't realize that a part of DEI was looking at people who are handicapped and how when they show up at work, in school, and other places, there were resources to be able to ensure that those people had accessed the same as a person who was not other able. Right, you're not looking at what it meant for women, what it meant for our young people. Institutions that had to build in dei and colleges and other places, because when people were applying to get into these institutions, they couldn't get in, not because they weren't qualified, but because these different departments of admissions departments were overlooking people who look like us, and therefore they had to build in things that would allow them to measure that and to stop it from happening. So you're speaking about George Floyd.
00:38:55
Speaker 1: That tells me. And these are people who have major platforms.
00:38:59
Speaker 3: So when they go out and they go to these big meetings and they're sitting down with all of these corporate giants, or they're sitting in places and they're sharing their perspective. People trust you because you are black, and they think and you're successful and they see you tapped into the culture, so they think, you know, meanwhile, you really are not that well knowledgeable. You're not that knowledgeable about the implications of what this attack on diversity, equity and inclusion has done, what it is going to continue to do and what Project twenty twenty five really is and how DEI plays into making black folks back subservient. We never got out of it, but we are going backwards in a way that is very very dangerous.
00:39:45
Speaker 2: Everything you said is spot on and for me, is just common sense because if everything was merit based, right, then they wouldn't have never had to implement DYA. Right if you were just being able to get hired on your own meritive because you were qualified and you were educated, if you did the right work, why would they have ever had to create a di in the first place. So how did somebody trick you to believe that a policy that was put in to help you is no longer need it? And when they took the policy out, they took the people out, right. So if you if you, if you look and see now that all hundreds of thousands of black women and men have been erased from the workforce, and you telling us that we didn't need it because they knew what they was doing. Even though white women and other people were benefiting more from d I, we were the one that was gonna get harmed because they took it away. So they can eliminate your jobs. They wasn't eliminated Susan from her job. They wasn't going to eliminate Pablo because he was he was gonna take the less, you know, the less pay for his job. They was gonna eliminate you because you were highly educated and you were moving and creating generational wealth for yourself. We were taking over. They literally, we literally have over one hundred people in Congress insteade of elected officials. We created Black Caucus that they want to eliminate. Now, all of these things. If you're not paying attention, and if you're not really civically engaged and you don't have civic knowledge, then you shouldn't be talking.
00:41:10
Speaker 3: But some people have civic you know, it's not and I'm glad that we have our guests coming up now to kind of not so much talk about this, but at least I know it from listening and learning history. And I think that that's part of the problem. You could be civically engaged in not know history, so it doesn't connect to anything. You just kind of living in the wilderness and you're trying to do the right thing. It's not I'm not taking away from people who know that they need to cast their vote. They know that they need to show up and be a part of their community. But when you understand, to your point, why was diversity, equity and inclusion ever needed in the first place, then it all starts to make sense why they will want to get rid of it. And what you have to also be very mindful of is that there are multiple things happening at one they are today. I was on a long conference call listening to two things. One was a report from doctor Wes Bellamy, who we have to have back on the show because they have Obviously there's been so much focused on black women who've lost their jobs or who have been pushed out of the workforce in many different ways, and let's just always have to remind people that once you're pushed out of the workforce, that's only one issue, right that now, Also sponsorships have been cut, departments have been closed down, you know, where people have been able to tap in as a lifeline for community, for scholarships for their young people to go to college, for businesses to get resources that they can't get from the banks. So this is a trickle down effect that has happened with black women. The report that doctor West Bellamy has done with his students and his department at Virginia State University is to look at where black men are. We'd black men have lost about six hundred and fifty thousand jobs. Black men are the slowest, I mean the fastest declining. They're saying that black women is kind of flattened out a little bit at this point.
00:43:13
Speaker 1: Like they did the damage. They got rid of a bunch of people.
00:43:16
Speaker 3: They pushed people out, made people feel like, let me take the package and go home.
00:43:19
Speaker 2: They're just simple. It's easy to do. See, this is what they always do. They said that we're going to get the women out, and then some of these men say, yeah, they don't deserve to be anywhere. Get them all, get them out of there. And then next once they got rid of them, they got rid of your black ass.
00:43:32
Speaker 3: First they come for you and then they come for me. So you're not exempt. And so now black men are the second group. But by the way, the economy is falling, like there are people, there are economists speaking about this every day.
00:43:47
Speaker 1: Whenever you attack people who pour.
00:43:50
Speaker 3: One point four trillion dollars into an economy and you take our resources away, you are going to suffer but you know, that's another day's topic. We should have an economists on to talk about that. And so that is one report that we heard and it's very startling. But the other report was on ice raids. You've got Haitians now who have lost their TPS status and they are putting ankle monitors on Haitians. They are putting ankle monitors where you can still live in the US, but they are tracking you so if they want to pick you up and throw you out, they can do so. They are creating in home prisons with tracking devices on Haitians, shackles exactly, shackles on Haitians. This stuff is literally in front of your eyeballs.
00:44:46
Speaker 1: It is happening.
00:44:48
Speaker 3: Why do you think that a society under a Project twenty twenty five framework would want to deport immigrants who haven't done any people making so not People won't care.
00:45:00
Speaker 1: People are making pizza at the pizza shop. We don't care.
00:45:04
Speaker 3: Nobody cares if the person who cooks who makes the pizza at the pizza shop, or does or whatever, even if they have a different job, a fancier title.
00:45:16
Speaker 1: We do not care.
00:45:17
Speaker 3: If their child goes to school and we got paid for free lunch, we want to pay.
00:45:22
Speaker 1: Like the guy on the internet.
00:45:23
Speaker 3: What do you say if free lunch I want to do, I take my mind, but a free lunch.
00:45:29
Speaker 4: I don't.
00:45:30
Speaker 3: I don't care about that. But why would a society decide that those people need to be deported, criminalized, some of them even killed, and then all of a sudden they want black people not to be working.
00:45:46
Speaker 4: What do you.
00:45:47
Speaker 1: Think that these people are trying to do.
00:45:50
Speaker 2: It's not what they're trying to do with it. What they're doing, they're definitely disenfranchising us and they're taking away all of our resources. Because I always say, when I look at the matrix, right, we remind me of the virus. Like anything that we touch, we control. And they know that immediately. Once we learn, we've learned their systems. So that's why I say every one hundred years they have to disenfranchise us, because once we learn the system, we master it. And once we start mastering it, we just like a virus and we start taking over the ship. So they say, no, we got to stop them, We got to cut them off, and we got to start them from scratch again. And it's what they keep doing all the time.
00:46:28
Speaker 3: And the internet has become one of the biggest threats.
00:46:32
Speaker 2: Media has always been the biggest stress one.
00:46:34
Speaker 3: Of the biggest biggest threats, not the Internet. Not the Internet, because there's very good resources on the Internet where you can become more knowledgeable, you can share, you can connect, you can meet with people.
00:46:44
Speaker 2: But the social media.
00:46:45
Speaker 3: Social media has become one of the biggest threats to our empowerment and our unity.
00:46:53
Speaker 2: Because they know how to want.
00:46:54
Speaker 4: A good job.
00:46:55
Speaker 2: They put they put the loudest, dumbest voices with our colors in front, and they amplify that and they make that make those people seem like they know what they talking about, and they don't know nothing, and they just be talking heads. And immediately when you put them in front of somebody that actually know something, you see they don't know nothing. And then what happens is they don't care because you got people like Trump that what you just followed, They follow this cult mentality and they keep lying to themselves. They don't even admit that they don't know what they talking about. They just keep on running with the lie. And most people don't care because they want to believe the bullshit anyway. So to do something exactly so if you just keep on to let somebody say dumb shit and they just live with the lie and just keep on saying it over. Trump can just keep saying the same thing over and over and over about we see it we at war or the country for absolutely no reason, and now we negotiating to get back where we was before the war started, and they saying the same shit over and over and people believe it. It doesn't even make sense. But if you keep on saying something over and over, it becomes the truth. So that's what's happening right now.
00:48:01
Speaker 1: It's a trick bag, but it's not funny.
00:48:05
Speaker 3: So we barely really really ever probably never talk about the topics for an episode during the episode, but this time I think it is fitting of our guests, who is one of our friends. Y'all know, it's a big thing that we have to have our friends on that are doing amazing things. And today, for this particular episode, what came to me was the woman behind the Power, Core Masses Berry on love, leadership and legacy, because that's all we're going to talk about.
00:48:42
Speaker 4: Come on now, okay.
00:48:47
Speaker 1: The power.
00:48:47
Speaker 4: I mean, that's you. You are the power, all right, right, that's but I'm glad you finally told me what we were gonna talk about.
00:48:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, what I told you because no, you know why, because you are the type of person that if I would have told you, then you would tell me that's not good, take that out.
00:49:08
Speaker 4: Put that over there.
00:49:10
Speaker 3: So I just avoided all of that by not.
00:49:14
Speaker 4: Telling you at all.
00:49:15
Speaker 3: But I'm so glad that you took the time to come up and visit us on our show. It's one thing to be virtual, it's a whole different vibe. Come into the studio and spend some time with your mentees.
00:49:26
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well we've been talking about it for a long time. Yes, I'll watch you all the time, and of course I cheer you on and correct you. Yes from afar, but you know, it's a great show and you guys get important information out.
00:49:40
Speaker 1: So yeah, so thank you for coming. Let me tell y'all who core mass experience.
00:49:44
Speaker 3: Another thing we don't do is read bios, but we're going to do all that today because when you have greatness in your myths, you need to get it right. And I want to just read a couple of things, not the whole bio, but just some things that helped to bring you up to speed as to who this woman is. So TMI is so proud to welcome Cora masters Barry, the former First Lady of Washington, d C. Some people would argue that she's still the first Lady of Washington trac a political strategist and educator, a trailblazer, and once boxing commissioner, which a lot of people do not know that this woman was the boxing commissioner. Oh and wrestling. We got to figure, you know, we got to talk about all of that. A staunch youth advocate, like too much of a youth advocate probably for some.
00:50:42
Speaker 4: People, because she becomes the children's.
00:50:44
Speaker 3: Parents and the parents' parents to make a community come together to ensure that our children get what they need and deserve. And she's the founder of the Southeast Tennyson Learning Center, which you and I have celebrated in that space. The work that is happening with our young people from Blacks and Wax, which I think we should be bringing back. We'll talk about that off camera, and just other programs and things I mean, I've been at We've been at Southeast Learning and Tennis Center with Venus and Serena Williams. We've been there with other celebrities we've been at fancy, fabulous engagements, but we also have done community work out of that space.
00:51:27
Speaker 1: And so you'll have to tell us why you invested.
00:51:32
Speaker 3: You could have done anything with your life once Marion Barry was no longer with us, the great honorable former mayor of Washington, d C. But you decided to pour into young people. And I want to hear more about that. He was a four term man. Yeah, four I thought it was like two terms. No, I don't know why I'm meant four term mayor?
00:51:54
Speaker 1: Wow?
00:51:55
Speaker 3: How many were you involved in helping him Ryan in nineteen seventy one?
00:52:03
Speaker 4: Okay, So I was involved with his very first campaign when he ran for Skoboard when he was at Pride. So we've been friends, colleagues, political allies, comrades for many, many many years before we got married. So I would arguably say I was probably very much involved in everything that he ever did.
00:52:21
Speaker 1: Wow, four terms. I mean that.
00:52:24
Speaker 3: Deserves its own conversation, what it's like to four turns through adversity, racism and everything.
00:52:33
Speaker 1: And I think the thing about.
00:52:35
Speaker 3: You that is most it gives me, it makes me slightly emotional, is that you are the wind beneath so many people's wings. And so it makes perfect sense that you were there with him from the very beginning, because I'm sure if he was sitting here now he was saying I couldn't have done four terms without the machine of the core, Masteresbury and others who helped him to get where he was.
00:53:06
Speaker 4: But I think that the drama of Marion Berry is well known across the country, so we don't need to realiterate that everybody knows it. But it was because of that that he did four terms. That when Maryon was set up to be taken down by the government simply really because he was too many black people were making too much money, and they had tried to set him up with money. But mary never cared about money, so they could never get him taking money. They could never bribe him. But they knew he loved the streets, so they called him in the streets.
00:53:42
Speaker 2: The street.
00:53:42
Speaker 4: He loved the street. Oh yeah, no, he was a great man, but he loved the streets, and they called him in the streets. But when it was all done, and said just in context, when they had the child, I think fourteen or fifteen counts, most of them were felonies. He was convicted on a simple charge of simple possession, a misdemeanor. That was it. And the judge was so angry was he that I've never seen His name was Penfield Jackson and that sounds like somebody sitting on a plantation, doesn't it. Christ He was so mad. He was so mad that he sentenced him to six months in jail, first term, first offender, misdemeanor, simple possession. Six months. Man made him great, Old.
00:54:35
Speaker 3: We got to talk about how you tell us that our knocks are boost so sometimes.
00:54:41
Speaker 4: But that's how he got that fourth term.
00:54:42
Speaker 1: Though, because he had been knocked down.
00:54:45
Speaker 4: Well, if they had just given him his fair thing, given him what do you call it, publics? I mean community service. He did have loved him, but jail right made him a king. Really, that's what y'all gonna do. So we're gonna bring them all the way back. That's what our people can do when they really really understand their power.
00:55:07
Speaker 2: Absolutely so for me, right, So I'm doing a little history and I see that they say your mother ran for president four times.
00:55:15
Speaker 4: Yeah, doctor Isabel Masters.
00:55:17
Speaker 2: Wow, that's amazing.
00:55:20
Speaker 4: Yeah, she was way ahead of her time.
00:55:22
Speaker 2: That's why I see you have all of that in you. You could have been the president. Easy.
00:55:27
Speaker 4: Who wants to do that? I know who wants that job? Oh my god. But she was something else. She got her PhD at sixty eight years old. My mother was a single mother. She raised six kids in college, educated every single one of us, and then went back and got her master's degree. And they were there, the big spread of that and evident you can look it up. And then went back and got her PhD at sixty eight years old, and you know, was politically active, didn't care much about the Democrats or the Republicans. But she ran the Looking Back Party. She was She was the nominee of a couple of the the the Alternative Party.
00:56:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep, yeah, how was that? Were you involved? How old were you when?
00:56:11
Speaker 4: Oh?
00:56:11
Speaker 1: Well, time the.
00:56:13
Speaker 4: First time my mother decided she was running for president, I was a grown woman and she was running. The last couple of times she was running at the same time Jesse Jackson was running, and she was mad at me. She was like, you supporting Jesse? I said, Mom, I'm supporting you too. Yeah, but she was serious. She was way ahead at her time.
00:56:33
Speaker 3: Wad what were you doing for Reverend Jackson at that time when he was running for president and not And whether or not you were close to him is not important, But what were you?
00:56:42
Speaker 1: What was life?
00:56:43
Speaker 4: My support of Jesse Jackson was through Maryon, because Marion is the reason that Jesse ran for president the first time. Well, when he we did a street naming of Maryon. I don't know if you were there a couple of years ago, and we wanted Jesse to speak, but he couldn't, so he but he did a video. It was a lot of effort. But when you did the closed caption, he talked about the fact that when he wanted to run for president, he went to all the big city mayors. He named Tamina Jackson, he named Carl Stokes, he named Hatcher, he said, and they all kept saying this, now it's not the time. Now, it's not the time. Then he said, well, I went to see Marion Barry, my brother. He said, we'll make the time. And so that's why he ran. And that when he ran, he announced his candidacy from the city from it's I mean, we can tell it now, from the city call I mean a convention center at Washington, d C. Where Marion had given all the DC government workers four hours of liberal leave. So when you saw the cameras, you thought all these people were there for Jesse and they were government workers. That's what they did.
00:57:51
Speaker 1: They had leave so they could choose.
00:57:54
Speaker 4: They wanted to guy be at the convention center when he's announcer. Yeah, I love that when you could use the power for empower in your own Yeah. Yeah.
00:58:03
Speaker 1: And your father was a marine, one of the first black Yeah.
00:58:06
Speaker 4: He was the first black marine. Wow, the first black very first. Wow.
00:58:10
Speaker 1: How do he pass? I don't remember.
00:58:12
Speaker 4: He passed natural death, but he they you know, as a political scientist and the historian, I have something that I called the Jackie Robinson syndrome. There are no accidental firsts when it comes to our people. And so everybody who has been the first from floor rock everybody down. Some white people were sitting somewhere saying, this is what the first has to look like and be like. So with my father, it would you would think that he was just the first one that showed up. That's not what they did. They were recruiting. He was on a bus. There's a college in Oklahoma called Langston University. We're all out of Oklahoma, and he and my mother were on the bus going between Oklahoma City and Langston, and they saw him. He was nice looking and was well spoken, you know, whatever they was looking for for the Negroes then, and they talked to him and asked him would he be interested in it being the first one and listed as first Black marine, and they set up a meeting. They came my mother had My mother had to sign an approval to do it because they didn't want to be I think what they told me accused of breaking up a family and by sending somebody off the war without the approval of the spouse. Now I don't know what that wow wow, but yeah.
00:59:31
Speaker 3: That so they recruited him, they did, okay, cool, so then okay, but your mom still raised your you all asked them when it.
00:59:39
Speaker 4: Came back from the war and realized that he almost lost his life over there for a country. Then when he came back, he was living in the front in the back of the bus, and the the prisoner of wars, the Germans and the Japanese are sitting in the front of the bus.
00:59:55
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:59:56
Speaker 4: Oh no, that was the history of World War Two. They came back black, the Black soldiers came back to Jim Crow Wow, and all of that. You came back and my mother just summed it up and just said he was shell shocks. So she took us all and went to California.
01:00:11
Speaker 3: And that's right, So you were in So where was that at the time before California?
01:00:17
Speaker 1: Where was your mom and your dad?
01:00:18
Speaker 4: Oklahoma?
01:00:19
Speaker 3: C They was in Oklahoma City, then they went to California. Raised y'all there, How in the world.
01:00:23
Speaker 4: The mother did it? My mother left my father in Oklahoma.
01:00:26
Speaker 3: And Oklahoma went to California. How did you get to Washington, d C. Help me, help us understand?
01:00:34
Speaker 4: We would just say that's that that would be in the book. Okay, Okay, I mean I went off to college and eventually ended up in Washington, DC to work on my master's degree. Okay, there's a plenty in between.
01:00:46
Speaker 1: That little.
01:00:49
Speaker 2: You know.
01:00:49
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, we talked about that offline because I really don't know the answer to it is, so I need to I need to know. Then, how did you meet Marion Barry? Where were you actively engaged?
01:01:01
Speaker 4: When the way I met Marion really actually was I was working on my master's degree at Howard University, and it was in the evening I was working on public administration. Met a guy and we were at a place called Billy Simpson's meeting three or four other people in between. I guess we might have whatever we're doing given a break, and said he was on his way to Walter Palmrooy's house too because he was going to run for a non voting delegate, and then we want to go, so we said yeah, so we went. And that's why I started sort of doing politics, because I think that was just where I was. But I didn't meet Mary. And then I'm a Delta and I was at a Delta meeting at the y w C A and in Washington, d C. I was sitting in the back. I didn't know most of the people Bufferton, California, and he came in with a Dashiki super black and I said, who is that and they said that's man A Barry. I said, ugh, oh, he was so arrogant. Oh Lloyd, Yeah, that's wag and getting there campaigning for Walter Farboy for he was reporting him as none voting delegate. He wasn't running for anything. He was still he had a snick and uh and uh pride. But that's the first time I saw him. He was very arrogant, and you lights him anyway, because that's what we like of always liked those kind of means. But at that moment he was just.
01:02:28
Speaker 3: Arrogant and he felt you was the first love. Not first love, but he fell in love with you.
01:02:35
Speaker 2: So we know that you were the first lady, you know, but you are a brilliant, phenomenal woman of your orange. What are some of the accomplishments that you've done that you're proud?
01:02:48
Speaker 4: Well, I always say I never had a plan for my life. So my life really has been a life of basic, organically following something that's inside of me, and it almost always is for the greater good up to a point. Now, there was a point that my leadership took everybody where they weren't supposed to go. When I first went off to college, the dean of students called me in and looked at me and said, miss Masters, the only reason you're not on the train on the way home is because you're only one person and you can't be doing all of this. So I have always had a leadership, you know, just depended on how I was going to use it. And at some point, you know, God said, okay, you know, get over here and make some sense. So I just went from one thing to another. I've always been very interested in young people always. I just think it's important earlier you can get them. So almost everything that was in my life, no matter what it was, it was rooted in young people. I didn't go I didn't go to college for that. I didn't grad. I didn't graduate and do education or anything. I was in a public administration. But everything that I've ever done, even if it was the Boxing Commission, the most out of accomplished in the Boxing Commission changed how they did the rules to protect the health and the safety of boxers, especially young people. I started a program where they competed among the Washington d C. New Jersey in Pennsylvania. We called it the Mayor's Stuff. It was always always went to young people. And then I Marian became the aor historic sports term and I really, really, and that'll be in my book. Did I want to do that? And I didn't really know. I did not want to do any of it. But that's a whole nother story. That's the whole another book. But at some point I was there and we had broken a lot of records, we had made history and I read a magazine article the other day that I did back in nineteen ninety six, and the Marying one, and he took office in nineteen ninety five, and I talked about it. Whatever I did, it would be to empower young people. I started an organization called the Recreation Wish List Committee because Marion asked me to head up his inaugural. People were giving hundreds of thousands of dollars for a party, and I was like, I'm not doing that. So I just took some of that money and put it to the side and started an organization to help with recreation. I didn't want to kiss babies, I didn't want to go to teas. I wasn't going to make new friends just for all purposes. So I just empowered my community and we started an organization, and then we would go around the city and put in back boxing gyms and computer labs, baseball diamonds, and then tennis courts. One day, and then Guy gave me another vision to build on top of the tennis courts a building. So here we are now, you, I mean, it's twenty five years later.
01:06:00
Speaker 3: You and you know the connections there are make me. It's so interesting because sometimes we think if we started out here, we have to follow exactly this line in order to be successful to get where we're traveling.
01:06:18
Speaker 1: But you show that you can move.
01:06:21
Speaker 3: Around and apply your skill set in many different ways. So you're a professor of political science, professor at what college?
01:06:31
Speaker 4: Was it? University of the District of Columbia, right.
01:06:33
Speaker 3: So the University of DC for twenty six years, and also boxing commissioner. Like these are two different things, completely different things that most people would never say that you can do one and the other because they would say, well, what do those two things have to do with each other? And I'm sure being the boxing commission that took you to night life and had you out. I mean, we have that picture which I intend to put in the show of Muhammad Ali and you sitting at the banquet or something that you are at. So you know, you're working with Muhammad Ali. And while the struggle is real, we know the movement was strong and all of that, there's still funny stories of things that was going on, personal lives and issues, you know, and.
01:07:20
Speaker 1: All of that.
01:07:21
Speaker 3: To talk about that diversity of self as a woman, that you're not stuck to one thing, well.
01:07:27
Speaker 4: Go back to my mother. We never got anything defined for us based on gender. You just never got discussed. She modeled that a woman could do and be anything. So it took me a very long time to realize that there was such a thing as misogyny.
01:07:46
Speaker 1: Because you, being a woman, been a woman.
01:07:48
Speaker 4: I didn't think that was an issue until I was put on the boxing commission. I asked Mary. He asked me what I wanted to do to put me on the boxing commission because we had tried to do a fundraiser and there were big fat men sitting around not doing their white men, the big old fat black men, but the whole all of them were just trifling, talking cigars and get the ring wasn't up. And I was like, I want to be on the boxing commission.
01:08:16
Speaker 3: So you hadn't You weren't in the boxing No, So you just having him try to work with them on something.
01:08:22
Speaker 4: It's going to do a boxing match, yes, for as a fundraiser for again the recreation department, and you in order to do that. A boxing commissioner is a regulator. A boxing commissioner is the one who gives a license to a boxer, a manager, a trainer, a promoter, all of that has to come through the commission. You have to have certain criteria to be a licensed that is for the boxing Commissioner does so in order to do any of those things, we had to go through those those incompetence.
01:08:55
Speaker 1: So what did they do when you showed up?
01:08:58
Speaker 4: Well, when, oh, well, that's a whole other story. When it was announced, it's a long story. But when it was announced that Marion was appointing me to the boxing Commission, I was the first woman in the country. Uh mmm, all hell broke. It was all across the country and I didn't understand it. He did, Oh man. He asked me what commission do you want to be And he kept trying to put me on the real estate Commission. The ABC boyd said I'm gonna do that stuff. And then one day I said, I know I want to do. I want to go on the boxing commission. He said, he the boxing committte And I said yeah, and he said are you sure? I said yeah, And this is what he said to me. He said, well I can have it if you can. Oh. And he went on by this business and I saw that. I and then a couple of months later to give me a call and said, I've been nominated to go on the boxing COMMI I totally had forgotten about it. And then about two weeks later, after the word broke and all this is, you know, on the internet, pull it up, the lady called me to tell me that there had been a letter submitted to the city about me. It was a letter that had been submitted with no signats if they accused me of everything from drug dealing the problem you lie. It was an amazing I mean, from prostitution to drug dealer. And I was like, she said, you out, that was before emails.
01:10:19
Speaker 1: So you have a copy of this letter.
01:10:21
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm sure I do. So I ran over there to look at it. I'm at city Hall and I'm like, oh my god, this is horrible. I mean, I'm a professor of political science. I can't have people say these things about me. I have a more interpret two clause from my job. Although I started calling the mayor, calling the mayor, and he was bus he said, being the damn mayor. So finally as secretary and he was fat Selden. I called about the tenth oft time. She said, missus Corar, the mayor will call you when he gets a chance. I said, I'm not getting off this phone till he gets on there. I don't care what you say. I'm gonna come up there. And I was in city Hall. So he got on the phone. He said, what's up. What's up? I said, they got a letter out blah blah blah blah blah. He said, I told you I can hell it if you can. Wow. So that was him letting me know that you didn't understand where you where you was doing. I know this is gonna be a big deal.
01:11:20
Speaker 2: But you.
01:11:22
Speaker 4: Cause you don't because you think you all have Why did'all you know?
01:11:26
Speaker 1: Because you're gonna fight me over Okay, you.
01:11:29
Speaker 4: Want to do that, I'm gonna put you on there and the rest. That's what. That's the whole book by itself. Wow.
01:11:37
Speaker 3: That is wow. They lost their their minds.
01:11:42
Speaker 4: They were going they were coming from me and the way I corrected that because once I once I realized to your pointed by it, once I realized I wasn't gonna get no support from the mayor. That's your look. You said, now you gonna hand your business. I was separated from my husband. I called him, I said, will you come to my hearing? Because I had to be.
01:12:02
Speaker 1: Confirmed, meaning that y'all were not in the same house.
01:12:04
Speaker 4: Separated. Yeah, a friendly Yeah, my mother, that's my camera. Okay. I called him and he said, I said, you come when you come to my hearing. He said, yeah, my girlfriend owned the sprintal home. She gave us one of her one of her funeral cars. We picked him off. This is so good, and picked up my two daughters from school and they showed up at the funeral car. And we're supposed to be in limbousines right this paneral My god. So we go in there and I'm sitting there at the hearing and everybody's the place is full because you know, I'm being nominated to be on a boxing commission. And the woman who was chearing, whose name I won't call, didn't like me that much. And I could tell she kept looking at this letter, and she kept looking over there at my husband and she said, ms Masters, is I understand your separated? That? Yeah? I said, yeah, that's my husband and my two children right there. So y'all was separated. Yeah, but you had to go. I told you, I said, we have a modern marriage. Oh in other words, now read this in public with my children. Sitting there reading and it hadn't been signed. So she said, well, we have some here, but I'm not going to enter into the record since it hadn't been signed. But I promise you if I had not done that, she would have done strategy. Strategy was the strategy. And I was like, and you were confired. Oh yeah, I was confiredbent. I was commissioner for ten years. At first I was just a commissioner and then I became Chair of the commission.
01:13:30
Speaker 1: Was Muhammad Ali boxing at the time?
01:13:32
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
01:13:33
Speaker 4: Yes. I came into boxing when Muhammad Ali had just lost to Leon Speins and I met the people with Leon Speins and Hilton Head and he was They were training for the rematch in New Orleans, so yeah, he was boxing.
01:13:48
Speaker 1: Wow, what was that like?
01:13:50
Speaker 3: Just please give us a little Muhammad Ali, honey, because you know, Muhammad Ali was the man, but.
01:13:56
Speaker 4: He was he was the man, but he was you know, he was just really the same. No, uh, he was very he was. Okay, I'll give you I you're not familiar with watching in DC, but there's a hotel called the Hyatt right there on Eighth Street, and I don't remember why, but we were all sitting one of those hotels, says, everything is open, the restaurants outside. We're just sitting out there. He's on his way off the Iraq or somewhere to do something. And I said to him, I said, mohammap, it's called Muhammad. I said, you better not do that, because I'm telling you now you're gonna get in trouble. You're not Jesse, because you know, Jesse was y' all young. Yeah, Jesse was going and getting prison like that. I said, you're gonna go there and mess up and then they gonna then you're gonna get in trouble. And he said, dang, do nothing by me. If I mess up, they gonna say, oh, Muhammad Ali. They took advantage of it. He said, if I do good, they say I'm the grating. And I was I thought that. I said, you know, he's right, Yeah, I can't lose. They'll just say it's their fault. Who like that? Now?
01:15:05
Speaker 1: Sure, oh yeah, oh yeah, but it's different.
01:15:08
Speaker 4: But he was a great guy. He was. He was a great guy. Yeah. He liked a lot of women.
01:15:14
Speaker 2: Though.
01:15:14
Speaker 3: Oh listen, his ex wife is telling her story right now. She's saying a lot of things I've been watching the clips of her talking about the things that happen.
01:15:25
Speaker 1: Anyway, let's go. Let me say that.
01:15:30
Speaker 3: You and other women, including my own mama, will tell the story of how the men love the ladies love the ladies, probably a little bit too much, but somehow y'all still navigated. See, we we are at the age or we are in a time where cheating is like the worst thing that could ever happen.
01:15:52
Speaker 4: That's a thing.
01:15:54
Speaker 3: Oh man, Oh it's it's big problems crazy.
01:15:58
Speaker 2: They'll let you buck.
01:16:01
Speaker 1: They were mentioned back then too.
01:16:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, hm, but y'all kind of what was the thing? Was it that they were taking very good care of you all as women, because that's nothing like I'm not going to work myself down to the bone and then have a man that's out here being whatever.
01:16:19
Speaker 4: First of all, cheating is different now than it was then, you know, prior as was I was getting off her in age. You know, that's when all this age and all that stuff started coming. Cheating took on a whole different dynamic then than it used to be. And I just think different generations of women did different ways of dealing with man. I wasn't very tolerant of it. I never have been. Neither was my mother. That's why she raised us in California. But you know, my relationship with Mary and was withstood all of that as friends, but our marriage didn't withstand it.
01:16:51
Speaker 3: Wow, that was that's a quote. As friends, we were able to get through it all, but marriage for me.
01:17:04
Speaker 4: No, whoo, this is so good. We're stopping right now.
01:17:14
Speaker 3: We got a little bit more because we want to go to Venus and Serena.
01:17:18
Speaker 2: So you know the center that you have, this amazing space. We met Venus and Serenity. What was the inspiration to open.
01:17:29
Speaker 4: Well, again, back to the conversation about the Recreation wish List committee, the inspiration to open the center was always to utilize anything that we have in our community to empower and change the trajectory of our children. So tennis is one of the best mechanisms. It's one of the best sports any kid can get involved in, but it wasn't available to us, not on any equality level. So Venus and serena appearance on the national stage helped with the vision I had to build the top East Tennis and Learning Center. I think that if they were not there, I don't think it would have been that easy to do it.
01:18:10
Speaker 1: But how did you meet them?
01:18:13
Speaker 4: I met them because of my husband and I and people that were very much into tennis. Went to the US Open. I'm trying to think the very first time. I was watching tennis one day and Venus was playing at Wimbledon and she had they still had the beads, and so there was something going on about that, and she had melted down, and I remember being very emotion I'd never met them day in my life. I remember being very emotional about this black girl with these beads, you know, like being in the world all these I mean, I just I just felt so and I was like, just come on, come on, come on, talking to the TV. So she came home. That was before they built the art As Stadium. This was theis Lewis Armstrong which is still there. And so she came to play against a white girl named Mary Pierce, who you got, big old braid, she known for it, big old braid down her back. This girl was fifteen years old and she's playing against this journeyman, this girl Mary Peers. And I'm sitting in the box along with some other people and the people are cheering for Mary Piers. Now you gotta understand, this is a US Open, and I'm on TV, so I'm not gonna say the US f and Open, but this is what this was. So I started saying whatever. I don't know whatever I was saying. So White Lady looked up at me and said, well, you know, it's really just about the underdog. I look at her, I said, turn around. I know what you're trying to do, and thank you for that. But I know what I'm looking at. So when sa Venus won, we were sitting catacorne across the court to and I saw or seen jump up to leave, and I jumped up.
01:20:06
Speaker 1: That's her mother, their mother, their mother.
01:20:08
Speaker 4: Where the lobby is out there where all the people come in, and I jumped up and I cut her off. She was leaving, Yeah, she was living and she had won. That's what they always did, to get up and leave. But I cut her off. So I introduced myself and I'm standing there and Richard come up. That's a whole lot of conversation. But I was very, very upset about about it, and she was very calm. She's got a calm personality until she doesn't. And she said her answer to me, I think is when I fell in love with them. She said, we're used to it. That was right here for me. Why why are you used to it? This is United States of America. That's a black girl. They should be cheering for her. We're not gonna be used to this. And that just changed everything. And and you and her became bestie and all to this day, yes, right, and.
01:21:08
Speaker 3: The children and you And so to your point, you were asking about the center.
01:21:15
Speaker 4: What you were saying, Yeah, well, I was, you know, building the center. She went, she went her way. I went my way. She left, her husband, moved to Washington for a while, and I had a hip replacement while this thing was being built. I'm just skipping a whole bunch of stuff. So we had just put the ceiling on. We had did the cutting of the uh you know, you signed a beam and when you're getting ready to put the cover on the building, we had done that. I had my surgery, so I was Bedriddensha called me and told me that her Easha is their daughter, the oldest one. The oldest one was killed johndy Way in California. So Easha was the next oldest. To tell me that she was gonna take her mom to look if I could let her in. So they let her in so she could see us. No windows or anything. So they came to visit me. Marion went had the security go by some spaghetti, some my gianos because they like the Italian food. I entertained them in my bedroom. It was Esha and Orsine and Marion and myself. I'm in the bed and Orsine said to me, she stood over me, I remember it like yesterday. We talked about the other day. And she said, so, when you're gonna open it? And I looked at her. This was in January, and I said, when Venus and Serena it can be there and another day before if they can be there tomorrow and open it tomorrow. If they can't be there till this time next year, we'll open it this time next year. I'm not opening it until they can be there, because this seller represents who they are, if the community represents the community they came out of, so all of that has to be you know, menience. And she took out her and back in the day she had a BlackBerry and she was at that time still controlling the girls. And she looked and she said, we're available. April twenty second. Can you do it? Then I said, we're opening it up in April twenty second. And that's how they came. Wow, she came. The whole family came.
01:23:24
Speaker 2: So rich with history, so much history. Wow, such a historian, like we call you and you tell us so many things, like I remember you introduced me to Hugh P. Newton's wife, and I'm like, she just knows everybody like you, the madam.
01:23:44
Speaker 4: I'm just glad that I'm alive so that I can keep bugging y'all about the history. That's but you made a really good statement. I was so proud to hear you say it that if you don't know the history, you're just operating in a moment. You're in a bubble. And it's.
01:24:01
Speaker 2: One more question, one more question, because I know you got a lot to do. But we were talking about DL early and then you gave us the history of DR. Could you give that history of DR for us real quick?
01:24:13
Speaker 4: Well, first of all, I want to say one thing before we even talk about that they're talking about in this country about what they call democratic socialists. I want to announce to everybody, please, this country has been socialistic since the nineteen thirties. Please go back and look at the New Deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After the capitalistic society develop art and people were in breadlines and there were no safety nets. He did the same thing Trump did. He packed the Supreme Court and got those programs under him, became New Deal. That's what social security, public housing, welfare, food stamps, all of that came in the forties. In the thirties, so we've always had a socialistic country. Where do you think supplementing the FOS departments are all of that socialism? There was all safety nets, So I'm saying all that to say, and that went fine, but that didn't solve the problem of Jim Crow. So by the time we got through all of that and got through Jim Crow. Although those social nets did help black people too, they did trickle down because we all I remember we had I don't know, look things you punched we had for eating you know, food that worn't Yeah, there was things like that. And we lived in public housing at the Jordan Down Projects for nine months before we moved out. So we benefited from from parader Franklin Delanor Roosevelt. But when the nineteen sixty four and the nineteen sixty five Voting Rights and Civil Rights Act passed. Red Johnson said we got to do something.
01:25:45
Speaker 2: Called though, what did you do?
01:25:48
Speaker 4: No, you said, Johnson, Yeah, that's WORL poverty. Yeah, oh okay, worrel poverty. And and that's when he came up with the permative action. And he said, okay, you can tell everybody that they can now the the discrimination is going. There's no more rules that say you can't do it. But they're not there. They You've had the superior education, you've had the opportunities you have to give people on what a head starts. And that's where a firmative action came from. That was the origin of the d and at all, and it had its backs under Reagan. He's the first one to start dismantling some of the programs coming out from under on the Johnson Carter held him for a minute and then he got caught up in Iran and that was the end of that. The Trump learned from that, But yeah, that's where it started.
01:26:42
Speaker 3: And then the EI becomes then the sort of like the child, which is which I said of affirmative action. It was kind of like the tactic. Yeah, right, yeah, so you because initially it was about black people, right. Initially, firmative action was it's really about leveling the field because we had such a they had such a head start. But then it became women and you know, just to be And it's very similar to the voting rights right that it started out being black folks fight, but then that we actually opened the doors for other communities, for women and other people to receive their voting rights. There's so much this, You're right, This is a part one because we need to come back and talk about what you see happening today. I do want you to just mention some of the people who you have mentored that folks see today.
01:27:38
Speaker 1: And I'm one, so I claim I am.
01:27:40
Speaker 3: I am mentored by fire, by fire, oh my lord, by core mass weary.
01:27:53
Speaker 1: But I needed it. I needed in.
01:27:55
Speaker 3: I always tell the story of how I called Core masters Bury one day and I was destroyed. And we had gone through many phases of this really really difficult time that I was in. I was you know, being you know, I wanted to say attacked, and you know, maybe there's a better word for it, but I was under the white supremacist I was under their eye they were paying attention to me and putting throwing the sink at me, and you know, it was a real hard time and we had had some emotional moments. We had to do a lot of strategy. When you talk about bringing the children and having them and your husband or your what was your strange husband at the hearing, those are some of the kinds of ideas that we had to employ during the time that I was going through the attacks against me, just you know, different things. But this particular day, you know, it felt like the worst of it all, and that probably was towards the very end of it. It's funny because that's how it goes when the attacks are raging and you just think, this is it.
01:29:03
Speaker 4: I'm done, as dark as hours right before, don.
01:29:05
Speaker 3: It's right there, and I called you to tell you, listen, this is it. It's four hundred news articles they saying all these things about me. I'm plastic everywhere. I'm in every newspaper. It's terrible. And you said, oh my lord, this is amazing, this is great.
01:29:23
Speaker 1: And I was like, I will never talk to this lady.
01:29:27
Speaker 3: Is my last conversation with Coral masses Berry because they are trying to kill me, and you're sitting here telling me, what did you say?
01:29:36
Speaker 4: They don't ways that kind of aco somebody who doesn't matter. You making air dance difference. You are making a difference. You are threatening them. Who's gonna write about somebody who's doing nothing?
01:29:48
Speaker 3: And you also told me you said you don't know what God can do. You said, because you could be doing all the good in the world and never get one story told about you. But he he's taken what you think is your worst moment and using it to elevate you. And look at me, now, how But you know, I don't know. Elevation comes with a.
01:30:10
Speaker 4: Lot, it does. It all comes with responsibilities. I tell everybody, if you want to be an advocate, you got to be ready to sacrifice because there are sacrifices involved in it.
01:30:19
Speaker 1: So tell us who you've mentored that we know.
01:30:23
Speaker 4: I don't really like that word. Of people that have been in my life, I think probably of the ones that goes the fartherest back that you would know where to start with. Melanie mm HM.
01:30:31
Speaker 3: Melanie Campbell, who is the President and CEO of the National Coalition of Black Civic Participation. In her organization is considered to be one of the big eight civil rights groups.
01:30:43
Speaker 2: Across the country at the conference now.
01:30:47
Speaker 3: And she's the convener of the Black Women's round Table, which has been at the Really, I mean, the Black Women's round Table has one saved a lot of women from the types of issues that we spoke about. Has been the foundation of women who are running for office, women who need training resources. I mean, just and you have definitely been her mentor give somebody else, you know, Bell.
01:31:13
Speaker 4: Benis and Serena and Angela and Angela.
01:31:17
Speaker 3: You gotta tell these people who these folks are. Angela could be anybody.
01:31:21
Speaker 4: What if these are all my friends?
01:31:23
Speaker 3: Angela Also Brooks is a senator, not a state senator.
01:31:29
Speaker 1: But this is important.
01:31:30
Speaker 4: She's not.
01:31:32
Speaker 2: You always want to be modest.
01:31:33
Speaker 1: By the way, State senators are very important.
01:31:35
Speaker 3: So don't take this wrong because state senators helped move things in your local community. I'm just saying she is a United State senator and you I watched you help take her from county executive county executive to becoming a senator and it was not easy.
01:31:54
Speaker 1: That was hard.
01:31:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I remember you saying, I mean, you've done the hard things. I think I was I was up there in that group of hard things, hard things, but you know, we are grateful for you. And I have to say, while I'm much younger, and I know what you mean when you say you're in relationship with people, because there's things I help to put you on too and hip you to it. And we've had some back and forth about issues that I hope that I helped to enhance or you know, what you're understanding of different issues and sort of change your opinion, which I don't know if I did, but I tried. But I'm proud of you, right like I am proud of you because I know the struggles, the struggles of keeping the center open through all the different administrations and people trying to cut the funding and not getting the support you deserve. You know the convictions that you have that we have shared that we decided we ain't gonna go turn against our people no matter who tells us. We got to denounce and call out and whatever, and we said no, we will handling on the inside.
01:33:03
Speaker 4: I really, really really do want to deal with that for a second. That's one of the things I would love, if I had one wish that somebody would say, if you could just have one thing that you could change since you you know, we on the other side of everything. I would want my people to stop being afred to love the people who love us. I want our people to love a minister Lewis Farakon or Jesse Jackson or Maryon. There are anybody that the larger community says is no good because they got another agenda. And we're walking around whispering like it breaks my heart. And when you when you when you turn on the television and you turn on social media and you see these maga people.
01:33:49
Speaker 3: They don't care and they're dying by the way the healthcares cut that the.
01:33:56
Speaker 1: Food benefits, food security is catch everything?
01:34:00
Speaker 4: Is it? He does? He has one thing that that they he hates who they hate God.
01:34:08
Speaker 1: They stay together.
01:34:10
Speaker 2: That's and we can't even bond in love.
01:34:13
Speaker 3: And that's the difference is that they come together under hate and we not always right. There's things we've had to correct self correct sometimes you can't correct it. But we are bound bound by love and that's a very different thing. But thank you, Corel masters Berry. I hope you enjoyed this conversation.
01:34:33
Speaker 4: It wasn't as bad as I thought.
01:34:36
Speaker 2: All that stuff jewels.
01:34:37
Speaker 3: You dropped me that you put some jewels on it. Love you, Thank you for joining us on the TMO show. Is Barry, Thank you.
01:34:49
Speaker 2: Shut up to Mama core Man. She always she always tells me something I didn't know. I'm always amazed by her knowledge, her wisdom, just understanding the the history of our people in the way she's just so articulate.
01:35:05
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, she's very intelligent.
01:35:07
Speaker 2: Very very shocked. And what's crazy, I didn't know that her mother ran for president four times and got her kids. Said, wow, she comes so she comes from a family of you know, education and just black excellence in black power.
01:35:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, she and you know, she always takes me back to that. Like when we're talking. I spend hours, as you know, in a day talking to her several times a week.
01:35:32
Speaker 1: It used to be every day.
01:35:33
Speaker 3: It's funny because you always go to the well when you're in trouble all the time. Then when things are kind of coasting, then you don't speak as much then. So we've gone through several iterations of that, and at the most intense times in my life and her life, by the.
01:35:48
Speaker 1: Way, because she's been through some things.
01:35:50
Speaker 3: We're on the phone, you know, five hours from six o'clock in the morning, back and forth. I'll call you right back, you know, going back and forth through different things and strategizing, and one of the things that she always does in the middle of a com it doesn't matter what we're talking about. I could be telling her about cell phones and how they work and whatever a problem is with a cell phone tower, and she'll be like, well, you know, in nineteen seventy so and so, when they started the blah blah blah and they started building the polls, we had an incident where, you know, she always takes you back to the history, and I could be honest in saying that there's a lot of things that I don't know or didn't know until she started, you know, encouraging me to go back and pull certain books or look certain things up, and then things made more sense, you know. And that's why she said that she heard us talking while we were filming before she came on about this idea that you could be engaged, you could be civically engaged, you can be smart, you can have money, you can do all of that. But if you don't really know history, then things become kind of disjointed and they feel like one offs when they're actually a part of a process.
01:37:11
Speaker 2: That's a fact. So so shout out to her for always, you know, enlightening us. And she brought some beautiful energy to this.
01:37:18
Speaker 4: Absolutely, she does.
01:37:20
Speaker 1: She does.
01:37:21
Speaker 3: And she's more than eighty. I think she's eighty one, right, it has to be eighty one. So we were at eightieth birthday party last year, so she's eighty one years old.
01:37:30
Speaker 1: She's moving around.
01:37:31
Speaker 3: She just came here from the Hamptons from an event for the Apollo and some other event. One of her good friends, Reggie Van Lee, is a major, major philanthropist, and you know, he still keeps up with Corls.
01:37:47
Speaker 4: That's his girl, that's right, you know.
01:37:49
Speaker 3: And and he's younger than her, older than us, but younger than her, but nevertheless, he still he keeps up with her. He keeps up with Susan Taylor, who used to be editor in chief at Essence magazine, and she's also older, but you know, nevertheless, or more seasoned, as they would say, you know, he's there with them. And that's what it's all about. Like we don't get to forget, we don't get to forget, we don't get to leave our people behind.
01:38:16
Speaker 1: Shout out to Cora masses Berry.
01:38:19
Speaker 2: That's my girl, that's mama Core. That brings me to my I don't get it this week. Last week, doctor Fauci testified before Congress. You know, he was a questioned about COVID nineteen and did he vaccination what he was asked to testify and he pled the fifth over one hundred times. There was a lot of back and forth. A lot of people felt like he was justified in tweeting the fifth because they felt this was a witch hunt and they were just trying to trip him up in anything that he said, they were trying to use to lock him up. Other people felt like he was admitting guilt, you know. And for my I don't get it this week is I've never been the biggest fan of Fauci, you know, I questioned a lot of his methods and tactics, a lot of things that he were saying I didn't really agree with. I always thought that COVID was something that we could build our natural immuniicism, but that was just my theory. I always felt that people talked about the vaccine more than they actually talked about being healthy, talked about you know, a lot of methods that we could have used, like Elderberry's and all the herbs and things, the natural herbs that we could have used exercise in which I did during the pandemic, and a lot of people was critical of me because I was like, I don't want to put some vaccine into my body. So, you know, I've never been the biggest fan of Fauti, But when I look at this whole situation, you know the criticism he's receiving. Over a million people lost their lives in the US, and you know, it was a serious thing, like they literally had morgues outside of hospitals.
01:40:04
Speaker 1: Well not per RFK, because RFK said, oh, we're gonna.
01:40:08
Speaker 4: Get no reason.
01:40:09
Speaker 2: We're gonna get to RK.
01:40:10
Speaker 3: He eould say he said there was no reason to separate people because the the what you call it, the intensive key and all of that stuff was open.
01:40:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I know a lot of people worked in hospitals who said that is one hundred percent a lot, right. You know, I know a lot of people who were inside hospitals while they loved ones. But when it first started, she said that the emergency rooms was so packed to the to the rim. So you know, he's another part of this. I don't get it. But what I really don't get is why people are mad at Fauci for saying to social distance and to stay away because the possibility is something might have happened, like we don't know there's a new virus, and he was trying to figure it out. I didn't agree with a lot of things that he said. I wasn't, you know, one of the main people saying anything about the vaccine. I just didn't agree with the vaccine. But why aren't people critical that Donald Trump was telling people to drink bleach?
01:41:07
Speaker 4: Right?
01:41:08
Speaker 2: They said Fauci had to be guilty because he pled the fifth over one hundred times. But Donald Trump is on record of pleading the fifth over four hundred.
01:41:19
Speaker 1: Times about sexual assault.
01:41:21
Speaker 4: Yes, but nobody it was his case, right.
01:41:24
Speaker 2: Yes, and he played he played guilty. I mean, he played the fifth over four hundred times, and nobody's critical about that.
01:41:32
Speaker 1: But you won't say nobody.
01:41:33
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't, But I.
01:41:36
Speaker 3: Give you have to assign the people you're talking about beause there's a lot of people who are critical.
01:41:41
Speaker 2: Okay, I just don't. I just didn't you talk.
01:41:43
Speaker 1: About those people who you know, are.
01:41:47
Speaker 3: Mag black maga and or not just black Maga Maga or people who.
01:41:52
Speaker 2: People that I hear that I hear coming out that are so angry with fauci like people that I normally hear being silent about everything of coming out saying, oh, why would you have to, you know, plead the fifth if you wasn't guilty? But I never heard none of these people say anything about Trump pleading the fifth over four hundred times. So I'm not saying nobody, but I just don't understand why these people are so loud about these things but so silent about other things. RFK has literally told people to stop taking vaccinats and we watch people have a measle outbreak that hasn't happened in years. Right, So no, and there's nobody having these conversations, right.
01:42:31
Speaker 3: So I hate when you say there's nobody having these conversations. And what I'm trying to say to figure out what we call those people who are not having it?
01:42:41
Speaker 1: Is it Donald Trump lovers?
01:42:44
Speaker 2: But it's not even just I don't know if it's Donald Trump lovers because I haven't seen them speak up for Donald Trump. Oh right, So I bet I haven't heard them say anything. That's what I'm trying to say. So if I haven't heard you say anything about anybody and you've just been quiet, all of a sudden you come out you said, I told y'all about Fauci. But we have a president that's in the White House that has done way more that people actually can see, and y'all not critical of that. And this is the person who is literally controlling the US right, and nobody says nothing with Donald Trump awarded Fauci, like he literally gave Fauci awards, but nobody is saying anything about that now. Fauci, Now, Fauci is the scapegoal for everything right. And we literally have someone that's in charge of the MAHA movement that is literally telling people shit that don't even make sense.
01:43:41
Speaker 3: RFK also said he was asked by Congresswoman Summer Lead on camera at a hearing he was testifying before Congress, and she said to him, she gave him the data on black maternal health and how many black women have died during child birth and the challenges that black women are facing while having children, and you know, she said, did you.
01:44:09
Speaker 1: Know these numbers?
01:44:10
Speaker 3: Some of it he acknowledged, and she said, so what is the plan for addressing black maternal health. And RFK said, well, you know, we're going to address all maternal issues.
01:44:25
Speaker 1: We're going to work with it.
01:44:25
Speaker 3: And she said, no, I know, but black people, black women are experiencing specific issues and there is a rising concern around black women not being able to take children either to full term or even in labor. These things are happening death basically, either the baby or the mother. And he said, well, you know again, we have to address all communities. And she said, well, what about the problem is with black women, not with these other communitians And he said, that's DEI that's what he said on camera.
01:45:06
Speaker 1: I've said the state of this on the show before.
01:45:08
Speaker 3: Maybe this time, if somebody clips it, people will actually care.
01:45:12
Speaker 2: The fact that we have such levels incompetency in charge of health like health is the most seriously. I don't care much money you got, don't care much thing you got. If you don't have health, you don't have nothing, you know, And we have levels in competency in our health department.
01:45:30
Speaker 1: And let me say.
01:45:33
Speaker 3: To give my opinion. Do you want my opinion on the Fauci thing. Yes, my opinion is that I was having a conversation with an elected official in New York City who is trying to do and it was not mayor Mom, Donnie. It was another person who's really trying to do incredible work, transformative work. And I told you about this conversation, and they were bringing some frustrations to me about some of the challenges around breaking through the red tape and trying to get resources to the communities that really really needed. And you know, they were giving me a whole thing, and I said, we think sometimes because it's new people a new day, new time, knew whatever, or we like the way a person looks, and like a Mamdannie, we're all into oh, Mamdannie, go go. We're cheering him on that it has changed inherently racist systems. Now, you have to fight every day if that's what you're going to be. That's why you can't just be against racism. You have to be anti racist, meaning that you are working every single day to fight racism.
01:46:53
Speaker 4: Right.
01:46:54
Speaker 1: That takes boots on the ground, fee to the pavement.
01:46:59
Speaker 3: But we are inherently racist, inherently corrupt systems.
01:47:05
Speaker 1: And Fauci was.
01:47:06
Speaker 3: Operating in that we can't sit up here and act like you know, something because I know people who are like, I love Fauci. I love yeah, because he was cute and cool and funny on TV, and he you know, he was Fauci.
01:47:19
Speaker 4: He's a Fauci man.
01:47:20
Speaker 1: But that does not mean that he's.
01:47:22
Speaker 3: Not operating with a system that has historically disenfranchised Americans, not just black but all people.
01:47:34
Speaker 1: So I would not doubt you.
01:47:37
Speaker 3: I would put my life savings on the fact that if he stated all the clarity around everything, and he didn't plead the fifth and we had all the documents and everything, like we could be there like a bubble or like a little the glass ball where we could see it exactly as it happened and no human can change it, that there would be plenty of things that we would disagree with and we would say, not only is this wrong, but like, you know it's wrong, and still y'all are telling us this.
01:48:09
Speaker 1: That's what we're.
01:48:10
Speaker 3: That's the facts that And I would say that about Obama, I would say that about whatever, because that the system is inherently, inherently corrupt and problematic and challenged in all the things. But I do not believe that Fauci went to work every day and said let me go help kill people and just lie and lie like these people do.
01:48:33
Speaker 4: That's in their administration right now.
01:48:35
Speaker 2: I mean, I wouldn't say I believe that. I believe that, you know, there was a play involved. I think when you look at the pharmaceutical companies, you know, and you talk about vaccinations, you know, people made billions of dollars and off ski tactics, right, And I think that there were a lot of different methods that could have been used other than that. I don't know about the social distancing, because I'm not really.
01:49:01
Speaker 3: Mad about to that. Yeah, because your mother was back from me, you didn't want nobody around, you know.
01:49:12
Speaker 2: So I don't know if I'm mad that they took precautions, you know, to separate, you know, especially when you you had a new virus that nobody knew exactly what was happening.
01:49:23
Speaker 3: So I used to wear his mask across his nose and the top of his lip.
01:49:28
Speaker 1: That was where your mask used to be on your nose.
01:49:31
Speaker 2: And because I was I wasn't with it. I wasn't really with it, you know. I did what I had to do throughout the time, but I was never with it. And I worked out, you know, we had our own little workout on Instagram. Shout out to the whole teenager to come out every day. I was every day, you know what I'm saying. And we had our workout and we made sure that we ate properly. We made sure that we had the right you know, nutrients in our bodies, and we did things that was going to make a healthy so that our immune system could fight against anybody. You know. But I just think when I'm looking at it, even though, like I said, I'm not the biggest Fauci fan, but I'm just looking like, how does he become the skategoat for everything, right, especially when we got administration right now that's literally telling us shit that doesn't make sense. And even in that time when when Trump was the president, because Trump was the president, when when it first happened and he was telling people literally to drink bleach.
01:50:27
Speaker 1: The bleach thing is bad. That's bad.
01:50:30
Speaker 3: He was thrown when he was throwing and people, and.
01:50:36
Speaker 1: That's terrible.
01:50:37
Speaker 3: But hopefully hopefully more people, I'm sure more people had did good sense than to listen to him. With some people, what is actually criminal and what we should be talking about, which has nothing to do with Fauci or Biden or anybody else. It is squarely on the Trump administration is the fact that they knew there was a virus and didn't tell anybody, Right, That's the real crime is in them having months in advance knowledge that a serious virus was moving around. Because if you remember, you just go back and check the record. It was like December. I'm sure it was December we found out about this virus. At least we were starting to hear about it in February, and then in March everything shuts down. But in December, I believe the first person in California look that up janis I believe it was a woman in California was the first person in the United States who tested positive, and then it was somebody else. I think it was two people in December, maybe one in December, one in January, and they knew it and didn't.
01:51:53
Speaker 1: Do anything to try to address it.
01:51:55
Speaker 3: And by the way, I am convinced that they know about stuff that's going on right now. I haven't told us, and I'm not saying that other administrations have not done the same, but I am saying that with a million people dead and December, I believe I remember hearing something, but let's just go with January. This was going on from then that they knew something was happening and that it was an outbreak.
01:52:20
Speaker 1: They knew it, and.
01:52:21
Speaker 3: They did not tell us anything until March, okay, or they didn't shut anything down until March, which I do believe that the shutdown was necessary. And the reason why I think it was necessary is because I know of entire families that died. See your position and where you and I had many knockdown, drag out fights and arguments around this whole being healthy, eating your vitamins and vegetables, or taking your vitamins and eating your vegetables and doing all of that.
01:52:50
Speaker 1: Is that the.
01:52:52
Speaker 3: Problem with that concept is if you were already pretty much healthy, you were already into vitamin and all of that.
01:53:00
Speaker 1: The way that we were.
01:53:03
Speaker 3: We're even healthier now than we were back then, but the way that we were at that time, and you already had the head start of being that way.
01:53:14
Speaker 1: It's easy to.
01:53:15
Speaker 3: Say, just shore up your immune system, make sure that you're taking your vitamins. But the virus was traveling rapidly with people who had never had vitamins, don't even.
01:53:26
Speaker 2: Have That's what I'm saying, and that's what I'm saying.
01:53:29
Speaker 1: There was obesity.
01:53:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say. And what I kept telling people, if you are in good health, if you do not have.
01:53:37
Speaker 1: Preexistence, you shouldn't have to take them.
01:53:38
Speaker 4: You shouldn't.
01:53:39
Speaker 2: You should be building up your immune system because our immune system is built to fight all viruses, and as long as it's inside the universe and it's moving around, you getting a little piece and your body is creating anybody's and that's what happens, and that's how we survived, you know. And I just didn't believe that we should be telling perfectly healthy people to put vaccines anybody that didn't know how their body was going to react to them.
01:54:03
Speaker 3: I never agreed with forcing people to take a vaccine.
01:54:06
Speaker 1: I never agree that. I never agree with it.
01:54:09
Speaker 3: But it also was the type of situation you have to pick your battles in this country. A lot of people I remember one young lady having a Holy town damn fit because she wanted us to take on the fight against the government and the COVID nineteen stuff and the vaccines, and she was pissed with us that we were not on that issue. Meanwhile, were dealing with police accountability.
01:54:38
Speaker 1: We're fighting for Breonna Taylor.
01:54:39
Speaker 3: Joe, we got all these other things going on, and she was pissed off that we would not get into that. And the thing is that there are people who have scientific knowledge and understanding who are better suited to become engaged over here when you got all this other stuff like we would ever have bought. Even though Breonna Taylor's family still has not received full justice, we still made it all the way to where people had to go before courts and take immunity and everything.
01:55:12
Speaker 1: And the truth is out there. We know the truth, and it was it was work.
01:55:17
Speaker 3: That wasn't just you know, And if we had been out there talking about were fighting against the vaccine, we would have never been able to complete that process, which is still not complete. But to get through that, because they would have they would have marginalized us, like they would have silenced our voices.
01:55:37
Speaker 1: We're already in enough fights as it damn.
01:55:40
Speaker 2: Is, and we were and we weren't knowledgeable enough to tell somebody that we just fighting.
01:55:44
Speaker 4: Against it, and we didn't even know if that wasn't.
01:55:47
Speaker 2: Exactly I just I was just going off common sense that I had and I wasn't. I wasn't advised to anybody what to do. I'm saying what I was doing for me, And if you believed in what I was doing, then come on, I'm not telling you. If you felt like you need to take a vaccine for you and that made you feel comfortable, fine, I'm just saying I wasn't doing it because I didn't believe that my body wasn't strong enough to fight off any virus that they put into the universe.
01:56:11
Speaker 4: Exactly.
01:56:12
Speaker 1: Well, there's that.
01:56:14
Speaker 2: That brings us to the end of another episode. Thank you for tuning in to the TMI podcast. We love you. Continue to support us, make us the number one podcasts in the world. Let us know what you like, what you don't like. Tell us about some topics you might want us to talk about. Tell us about guests you might want to see. We're gonna have some good guests coming up, so make sure that you tune in. I'm not gonna always be right. Tamik It de marries and I can always be wrong. We will both always and I mean always be authentic peaks.
01:56:42
Speaker 3: Listen to the TMI podcast on the Black Effect Network on iHeartRadio or anywhere podcasts are available, or catch
01:56:51
Speaker 2: The video version on YouTube at TMI show PC
Speaker 1: I'm Tamika D. Mallory and it's.
00:00:01
Speaker 2: Your boy my son It generally we are your host of TMI Tamika and my Son's Information, truth, motivation and inspiration.
00:00:09
Speaker 3: New name, New Energy, what's up?
00:00:14
Speaker 1: My song learning? How you doing today?
00:00:16
Speaker 2: I am blessed a hoghly favored Tamika D.
00:00:19
Speaker 1: How you feel I'm doing good?
00:00:21
Speaker 3: Some are still in progress, get into August. Other kids going back to school around the country, but the northern States, particularly in New York, we don't start until September. So this is kind of a midway point for us for summer, thank god, because the traffic in the city is much less during the time while the school buses and the teachers and the families picking up and taking their kids to school are at home. So that's good. I'm not rushing it, and you know, it goes fast. That's all I can say is that summer goes fast. I feel like as soon as we go to mark this vineyard, it's the end of the summer.
00:01:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, some of those fast. I think it's only pretty much like one month, like July is really the whole summer, because by August everybody is worried about okay, we got to get ready for school, this and that. So the whole month of July and probably that last week of June is really summer, Like summer really kind of ends.
00:01:20
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say it ends August. I mean, I think about it.
00:01:22
Speaker 2: I don't really say that it ends. I'm just saying that that's when it winds down.
00:01:27
Speaker 3: To me, it's around the fifteenth. And it's definitely when it starts getting cool at night. As soon as at night it starts that you need a jacket and all of that. That's when you know summers over. Start getting the school clothes ready, it's time to go back. I'm like, you know, my granddaughter obviously she's in daycare. She's in school all year round, so they don't really have like summer. So it's not like so I'm not in that mode with her yet, but soon and very soon she'll be gone in the kindergarten where she'll be you know, at school during it from what is it September to June. Shoot, they go to school till damn near the.
00:02:09
Speaker 1: End of June. I don't feel like your kids go to school to the Indies, they do.
00:02:12
Speaker 2: They did get out like the last twenty third, twenty fourth or something in June.
00:02:17
Speaker 3: You see, I think I'm like one of the parents. Yeah, I'm like the third parent.
00:02:21
Speaker 2: Nah, it's twenty third, twenty fourth, So it's it's the end of June. So I'm telling you July is pretty much the only one. But they go back in September, they go back to first That's what I'm saying.
00:02:30
Speaker 3: It's the halfway point. I guess first of August is the halfway point. So that's a good thing. We're hanging out, We're living up summertime in New York City.
00:02:38
Speaker 1: Still, people are enjoying it.
00:02:39
Speaker 4: You know.
00:02:40
Speaker 3: I would say that the night life in New York really picked up this summer to me, like, you know, the not just night life, but just social social climate. It really did pick up. And the older people came back outside. And when I say old, I mean in our age people thirty five, forty forty five and up really came back outside, reclaimed some of the spots that used to have, you know, good events because all of that stuff has started closing down.
00:03:12
Speaker 1: It was actually pretty like damn.
00:03:14
Speaker 3: I feel like like Eric Adams ushered back in the night so the night life yeaside.
00:03:22
Speaker 1: He was getting his indy and his cigar.
00:03:25
Speaker 3: But but I mean, I do feel like that because people started opening spots again.
00:03:29
Speaker 1: Everything was closed. When people would come to.
00:03:31
Speaker 3: Visit, they would say, where are we going, and I'd be like, I have no idea the whole. But also we were out of the city so much during these last however many years in this state with Breonna Taylor's family all of you know, back and forth just wherever we had to be. That maybe we didn't have the like we didn't know exactly the spots, but now I know, like ten spots.
00:03:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, because you know, I know a lot of the promoters, you know what I'm saying, so shut out to sleep losing Isaiah, you know, fish people started really promoting parties again, and they was like yo, I would get an email or I'll get a text, so I'll get a DM like yo, despite is open, you know, especially in Halem Hall, them had a lot of stuff going on. This shit.
00:04:17
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was in Brooklyn too, because I somehow or another I got into Brooklyn algorithm. I think if from the Kwanza crawl, the you know, the they go to the bars and restaurants and whatnot. During I think they had started it, Yeah, Kwanza and then now they also have a summer date and I am in their little algorithm.
00:04:37
Speaker 4: In Brooklyn was popping too.
00:04:38
Speaker 3: I don't know what was going on in Queens, but I will say and people probably be like, why do y'all care about that? Well, we do because people deserve to have some social experiences. And they became places that you would see people from all different walks of life. They'd be like elected officials, there would be people who are like us that are in activism, there'd be people who do parties. They'd be people who just you know, coming out the street, like I appreciate that.
00:05:03
Speaker 4: And the.
00:05:06
Speaker 3: Violence was limited in those areas, which is a problem because younger kids who would never go to the parties, like you know, they would never be in Sangria, right, They're not in the Bronx.
00:05:22
Speaker 1: They're never going to be in Sangria. They are somewhere though, and.
00:05:26
Speaker 3: Where they are is where the shootings are happening.
00:05:30
Speaker 1: That's where now.
00:05:30
Speaker 3: And we talking about twelve, thirteen, fourteen year old kids. So that's a lot of where you see the separation. Because when we were out and we were thirty something hanging out, I don't know if I was ever thirty something out with y'all. Y'all was always forty and I was thirty something. But when we were out and we were mixed in with the twenties and whatever, that's where it just didn't go right. But the twenties are not so bad right now. It's the thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year old kids.
00:06:04
Speaker 2: The twenties is stunt because a lot of the twenties is going to the clubs with us.
00:06:08
Speaker 1: You know, they're trying to get it.
00:06:09
Speaker 2: I see a couple of them inside this spouts that we in now, So they're trying to be with the grown folks. They're hanging out with the aunties and the unks.
00:06:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, but the thirteens and the fourteens, they need a lot of attention. Because we had a big meeting with the city and the deputy mayor when she Deputy Mayor Rinita Francois, when she first did her meeting with the violence prevention groups, Angelo and I were there. For those who don't know, when we say Angelo, we're talking about one of the four co founders of our organization until Freedom, Attorney Angelo Pento, and we went to the meeting with all the heads of the Crisis Management System, which is the Violence Prevention Group. And you know, of course they whipped out the data because you know, the city's going to say, we're we're funding these organizations almost one hundred million dollars needs to be much more. In fact, I think the mayor did put some more money back into CMS because under Adams administration it got cut from one hundred to eighty six or something, so he puts some money into build it back up. And you know, their thing is, we're gonna always, we're gonna, of course celebrate the winds and the success. That's safe. The city is safer than it has been. I don't It depends on where you live, so that's always. We're not going to go down that rabbit hole today. But whatever, anyway, the city is safer. It is less violence, less rates, less, you know, all the things, because they don't just look at gun violence the way that some of us kind of have that narrow focus. They're looking at violence in general, hate crimes, domestic violence, all of that, and so there they've seen it's a steady decline in those things. However, the one thing that they did bring up is that the data suggests that young kids thirteen, fourteen, fifteen are probably one of the.
00:08:01
Speaker 1: Most vulnerable populations.
00:08:03
Speaker 3: So for people who are like, what do we do and how do we support and how do we get involved and you care about our youth, that is one of the most important things that we could be doing right now is trying to strengthen our youth organizations, making sure that there's more outreach. Looking under your children's mattresses, in their book bags, they're not adults in your house at thirteen and fourteen years old, turning their shit inside out, knowing this password to their cell phones. Because good kids get guns in their hands as well. And as we know with the fourteen year old out in Queens, it was kids just having a regular fight and somehow a gun went off and this boy ended up dead.
00:08:43
Speaker 1: So you know, that's one of the things that we should be focused on.
00:08:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty much. I think as we talk about the violence in the community, it's been a lot, it's been scattered, you know, just looking I've seen a young twelve year old killed a couple of weeks ago, you know, and I feel like there has to be a more succinct approach. I think we got to get back outside again. I think you know this, We started doing a lot of work, but I think we got to get right back into the communities. You know, I was thinking about strategies, right. I see a lot of these kids live stream I was talking to you about it a couple of weeks ago about live streaming, like really going to the communities, live streaming, doing intervention. We're talking to some of these kids because I've realized that that's what they're into, the streaming things. So I think, like some of us violence interrupted and incredible messages need to start streaming those that type of content, going to the communities and grabbing up these kids, having conversations, like going to the vulnerable communities and really letting them see what's going on. And I think that'll be, you know, very instrumental in a lot of the change.
00:09:52
Speaker 3: You know, you are you look very young, right, you look very young, but you're not that young, right, Like you're half what you have what they call it half a century. Then they say something like a court nicol something nah, something they got to do with coins, but whatever. So I think that also we have to make sure that we're training the next generation, the Nissans being your son, and Tarique's my son, and.
00:10:26
Speaker 1: Kylie which is Jamila T.
00:10:28
Speaker 3: Davis's son, and you know, and and all of these younger people, we've got to really train them to be because they are very good technically, Like these kids know how to run all kinds of like software and you know, and design and they're into the AI space.
00:10:49
Speaker 1: They're doing all of that.
00:10:51
Speaker 3: And they have stories, right, like which is Jamila's son, can talk about being a child whose mother went to prison and left and behind. And that is a sensitive issue for young kids out here right now, that there is a missing parent who's in prison. How do you overcome that?
00:11:11
Speaker 2: Right?
00:11:12
Speaker 3: Tarique has his own story his father was killed when he was young, never had his dad gun violence took his life, and then the story goes on and on and so on and so forth. Nasan has a story of you being away in prison for seven years of his life. They need to be empowered and trained within these organizations and spaces. And I know the crisis management system does it, but I'm saying that there has to be even more resources pouring in that you don't get rid of the elders, because even we are advised by our elders. We actually have an elder coming up on the show today, but even we are being advised by somebody an elder. So you always have to have the elders in the space. But people who are your age, age, my age and older also have to recognize that we cannot stand in the way of the next generation taking their rightful place to do the work with the generation behind them. And sometimes that doesn't happen. Sometimes we have people who are older who stick their foot in the door and are unwilling to move for anybody else to come in, and that I think stunts our growth as a community.
00:12:26
Speaker 2: That's what I want to do streaming because I know that would attract the young kids and they will want to be involved in the work and see it as something that they can cool. You know, cool. It will be trendy if we go streaming and we are here and we grabbing up and we saying, hey, we were raising kings, so we want to grab the next young kings. That's gonna stop the violence in the communities and we're gonna empower them and they and next thing you know, they got a million followers. We got a million followers, and now people want to be a part of it always. That's what I've always said about this work. You know, when we make it sexy, when we make it trendy, when we saw giving it the same platforms and the same you know, level of advertisement that we give everything else, then you'll see these kids want to be a part of it. Because there's a lot of people that when they they don't realize the work we do because they don't see it. So if it's highlighted and it's amplified the same way that you know, people doing negative not even just negative, just stupid stuff, and they got millions of followers and this and that. If you can get millions of followers for doing the right thing, for stopping violence in your communities, if you start transforming the minds of these kids who are naturally leaders, but they just leading in their wrong direction and they don't understand that you can actually lead in a positive direction and get positive results and be successful. And these are conversations that I have with people all the time because they don't know it, you know, And a lot of times when you when you don't see that, you know, you have to see it to be it. You don't see someone successful in a way like I always tell people when I was young, I didn't want to be a lawyer or doctor, any of that I want. I actually did want to be a lawyer because I used to watch Perry Mason. If Perry Mason made me want to be a lawyer when I was young, But the average.
00:14:08
Speaker 4: The kids don't know nothing.
00:14:11
Speaker 2: Sam and Matt Locke and all these I used to watch those shows.
00:14:14
Speaker 1: Perry Mason was good, what it was.
00:14:16
Speaker 2: That was one of my favorite shows. But I wanted That's why I wanted to be a lawyer. But I didn't see that in my community. Right. The only level of success that I've seen with somebody who was either a drug dealer. I seen basketball players have success. You know. Those are the things that were celebrated. They had the money you wanted, they had the girls you wanted. So I say all the times, if we really want our kids to transform and we want them to do positive things, then we got to amplify and show them positive people who are successful and respect it.
00:14:47
Speaker 4: You know. So that's that's just the It's important, it's very it's important.
00:14:51
Speaker 3: I appreciate that we have to elevate the positivity and put the same amount of resources behind advertised and all of that because a doctor or a lawyer or somebody, unless they are saying something that you know they're talking about, I don't know, Saint Kuchie or something, they don't get as much attention, right, Like you can't just go and be smart online and receive the type of attention that you deserve without having to add some types of tricks and gimmicks and this and that to you know, make it pop. And that is I believe that that is by design right, that the algorithm is pushing stupid ship to our kids, just like they pushed crack to us to our families, which was the major destroying factor co Intel pro in the movement. There has all they you know, you you what do they do in this era not this erab a little bit earlier it was you know, you stole money from and they're still doing that, still embezzlement, like they have found ways to break down all the positive things in our society and you know, pills then the tourken wars. I mean, it always is something that distracts us. So I appreciate what you're saying, and I think that that's when people say, what are the solutions? There are many and the solutions begin with things like us taking the time to click a thing like a thing, share a thing, and not always be like the one that everything you post, everything you share is drama, battles, gender wars. Take the time to make sure that even if it's only got two comments on it, that you're part of a community of people who are pushing positive things. We could do so much just for our phones, just for our houses. Sending five dollars to a local grassroots organization.
00:16:51
Speaker 1: We can do that.
00:16:52
Speaker 3: And so don't look for this big solution. Bring your solution very, very local and on a micro macro level, which means that it may be small in focus because it's just your area, but it's macro because those people and those ideas need help and need support. So exactly, speaking of young people, Tuskegee University says, no bonnets, no do rags, No you know, slippers and pajamas and all of that going to class. Keep that stuff in your dorms, keep it to your privacy. And you know, there are two very distinct arguments out in the universe that I understand.
00:17:44
Speaker 4: On both sides.
00:17:45
Speaker 3: I completely understand the people who say we're policing how people dress. That is not that shouldn't be a major focus for us, that we're out here policing people's attire. You don't know their situation sometimes not for nothing, especially to Skia University. You talking about black kids, black girls get up in the morning time and your head just ain't right, like it just ain't right, It just ain't right.
00:18:17
Speaker 1: You just all over the place.
00:18:19
Speaker 3: You might have your menstrel you're going through stuff, You got issues at home, and you might not have the ability, the time, or even the desire to fix yourself up. And so your head scarf might just be where you at on that day, right, And well, let me just finish the point. You might just be that might just be where you are. And I'll tell you that there's some hypocrisy in this because I personally will say that I could see a bonnet and feel completely disgusted by it, but a do rag I don't feel that way because do rags have been made, so you know that's really accept it, like it's a do rag.
00:19:02
Speaker 1: You see men in drags all the time.
00:19:04
Speaker 3: Although in my household and in my family, everybody knows and my son knows, you ain't going nowhere with me with no dow rag on your head. Take that off. That's because I know better. But I'm just saying it doesn't make me feel as cringey as when I see somebody with a bonnet on walking through the airport. So, but I understand people who feel that we shouldn't be policing people's attire when you're trying to actually get people to graduate, and if they doing well in school, perhaps just getting them there is a part of the process. Then there are people like me, So I'm putting that up front, like me who were raised that everything don't go everywhere, that you wear certain clothes in certain environments, you don't bring your bed clothes because I'm gonna tell you it's nasty. Number one, because if you wear a bonnet outside, you are not You don't have two different bondings. You ain't got a bonnet for the outside and a bondt for your bed. You wear in that same funky ass bonnet on your head outside to wherever you're going and then bringing it back and bringing the germs and putting it back in your bed. Same thing with pajamas that you wear into the airport where people don't travel from China Mexico, wherever else all over the United States. They get on the plane, whatever they got boog is this that whatever nastiness that they put it in their seat and then you sit your ass down on top of it with them pajamas on. And you're not gonna tell me that you have pajamas that's just for traveling. I don't believe that it's nasty.
00:20:44
Speaker 2: No, I completely agree. I think that there has to be some level of the coorum right, and especially when you go to higher learning. When you go to college's higher learning, it's preparing you for society. It's comparing you for real life. And in real life, when you go somewhere profession you know, you're not wearing a bondt, You're not wearing pajamas, you're not wearing slippers, you know. So I think it has to you have to be able to separate the times from where you wear those kind of clothes in the times when you do things that's professional. You know, if when my kids go to college, you know, I want that level of structure. I'm especially my son is fifteen nine. I'm giving him structure. Certain things that you don't do. It's certain things about hygiene, and certain things about the way you dress and things of that nature that you're supposed to understand as a young man. I think when you go to higher learning that those things should be implemented. So I wouldn't want to be in class and I'm coming and you you. I mean, I think even to learn right, you should you should want to put on clothes that make you look a certain way, because it's about I tell people all the time, it's not all about what you know. Sometimes about how you look, your perception. You can get a job just based off your appearance. If your appearance is not right, then everything else is become secondary.
00:22:00
Speaker 3: Right, And I'm not suggesting that you need to be dressed up in the highest fashions and wait and spending money trying to keep up with the Joneses, but pajamas, bedclothes. I'm gonna have to put do rags in there, because even though, like I said, the hypocrisy is that I don't see it the same way, but I am going to put it in there because I know better. Do rags and and hair bonnets and head scarfs and all of that. Those things, by the way, inside of your home need to be clean, right, and put, it's sort of sacred you taking that into your living space. When you go out, you need to be at least preparing yourself to be out in the world. Right to your point, to prepare yourself to be out in the world. I want to go to church. I saw my cousin Kim Abney. He wrote this whole post about going to church was a place where you learned how to wear a suit and tie. You may not have had anywhere else to go for the entire year that called you to wear a suit and tie unless somebody got married or there was some type of very very special function. A lot of people don't have families that have weddings or family reunions where the Saturday night is the banquet.
00:23:19
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying. A lot of people don't have that. They're not in organization.
00:23:23
Speaker 3: So guess what if they go to church with Grandma or Mama and family, they put they Sundays best on. This is how you learn how to actually be able to have duality. That you don't just look one way all the time. You might you're dressing up right, you're dressing up or your change up might not be the tie and suit. The look exactly as some of the you know, the older images of what it looks like to dress up. That may not be the case okay nowadays, and you have to credit people are you know, Russell.
00:24:01
Speaker 1: Simmons and Kevin Kevin Lows.
00:24:03
Speaker 3: And people you know at that time, you know, they changed it to where you can at least wear a piece a pair of sneakers with your suit, and then we kind of lost having to have a tie on all the time. I think that's okay, create your own style, right, you don't have to live in a box, But wearing your night clothes, your house clothes out into the world, to me is completely unacceptable. And I don't really you know, people, everybody has their opinion. So I'm not going to sit here and say that someone else who feels like people should be liberated to show up as they are, that they are wrong. I'm saying that as for me and my house and me and my family, and what I will teach my granddaughter is that when we go places, we clean up, we get ourselves together, and yes, we go and we learned and we try to excel and we understand that they we should be calling ourselves to a higher standard and if you want to tie this back to what we were speaking on around these thirteen fourteen, fifteen year olds who are out here with guns, they out here killing the people killing themselves. There has to be a correlation here where we're dealing with this idea that being an intellectual person who actually thinks and tries to gain knowledge about topics and also has a level of understanding and grace for other people.
00:25:34
Speaker 1: We're dealing with a serious.
00:25:36
Speaker 3: Decrease in that, like you could just say anything, be you know, not even necessarily knowledgeable about topics, and then you somehow become an expert just because you was able to say the hot thing that got you know, everybody watching right that became trendy. Then over here you're dealing with people telling us that we shouldn't be trying to be politically correct. So now just be as you want to be where you're buying it. On the airplane, where when I was growing up, you got dressed up in a real nice I mean, it was Sunday's best in order to travel on a plane. Now just wear your stinky pajamas and go to the airport. You know, everything has just starting to diminish, and by the way. Even our movements are suffering with some of that, where people either don't take it as serious as they should, or folks are unable to keep the spark and engagement in the movement. And so yeah, there's enough finger pointing and accountability to go around as to what people should be doing to keep that elevation of the spirit, elevation of the fight, elevation of excellence and all of that. Yes, we absolutely have enough fingers to point, but we've got to be able to start somewhere, and it's got to be some kind of standard.
00:26:59
Speaker 1: And I think that our young people have.
00:27:02
Speaker 3: To be taught that you don't take everything about you in every space that you go in. You compartmentalize. It doesn't mean you fake, it doesn't mean your phony. It just means that when I show up at church, I don't sit in there people put my foot up and start cussing and eating fried chicken.
00:27:19
Speaker 1: That's not what I do while the sermon is going on.
00:27:22
Speaker 2: I mean, you just have to have versatility, and you have to understand that there's just a time and place for everything. And I think no better places than college, because college is supposed to teach you about the next level of life. You know, you graduated from high school. The child is the you know, the teenage, the mid teenage. We able to just navigate and teach you. But at that point when you go to college, you know, it's about making real life changes. It's about growing into the man and woman that you'll be. And you need to understand the society that you can't show up with pajamas in professional places and people take you serious.
00:27:57
Speaker 3: Absolutely, absolutely, So last week we weren't in studio, but still we talked about a couple things that I want to circle back to while I'm on this here camera because I need to talk back again about the Black organization's closing down. Here's part two of my thought of the day from last week about black organization's closing.
00:28:20
Speaker 1: So, number one, there.
00:28:22
Speaker 3: Were people who thought that the organization that we posted because we posted an example of the topic and it's an organization called Black Visions, and they were making an announcement that their organization was shutting down. And when I posted it, the caption did not say that this is not until freedom, which is our organization. And so there were people who reached out to me to say, like, you know, keep your head up supportive conversations while you know what can be done you people, which.
00:29:01
Speaker 1: Sparks some other dialogue.
00:29:03
Speaker 3: But I want to put a pin in that and say that Black Visions is not our organization. Our organization is called Until Freedom and we do not know the reason why Black Visions close. We were just using it as an example to show that there are so many Black Visions is not the only organization. There are many that I have. Some of them have closed without discussing it. Some of them have closed and made big announcements. But there are many organizations that have closed down and or they have conjoined with other organizations because they don't have the resources to keep going on their own. And so but let's just be clear, Until Freedom, like most organizations, is struggling as well. We are not at the point of making an announcement of closing our doors, but we could be right if we are not able to get the type of investments that we need need from various places. We have many different funding sources, whether it be from individuals, it's individual giving, it's individuals who have you know, resources at the level that they can actually help us to sustain ourselves. Most of us work another job two, three jobs. We've got all types of other things going on which sustains us personally, so that we're not putting so much of a burden on the organization to care for our personal needs.
00:30:27
Speaker 1: Which, by the way, the work that we.
00:30:29
Speaker 3: Put into an until Freedom every day, we should not be having to work seventeen other places because I can tell you that what that does, it diminishes people's ability or limits people's ability to be able to work the way that we want to, the passion that we have for the community, the effort that we want to be able to give. It's hard to do when you got to get up and do three other things so that you can survive. But most Americans are doing it, and especially Black people and definitely Black women, because they say, we've got to have seven different forms of income in order to sustain ourselves and our families. So we're all hustling and whatever. And so therefore, when I see an organization closing, it's just it's knocking on the doors of most of us. And even the big organizations are experiencing a cutback in resources that they were receiving. But those conversations that started because people thought Black Visions was us really led to some important conversations that gave me a part two to my thought of the day. One of them, or a few of them were people who have lots of money, right, And sometimes you can say people have lots of money and you don't really know what they have, so we shouldn't say that, but on paper they look pretty good. Just put it that way, and you know when they were reaching out and they're like, you know, we're working on things, We're trying to figure out ways to be more helpful.
00:31:59
Speaker 1: There's so many different groups reaching out.
00:32:02
Speaker 3: I have not been one who is asking people to send five thousand and ten thousand dollars. Yes, that is great, that is important. And if you have five thousand or ten thousand dollars and you want to send it to until Freedom right now, we appreciate it. You can go to until freedom dot com and make a donation through act blue, or you can get in touch with us and get us that. But we've been focused on trying to make sure that we secure real investments, not that those are not real, let's be very mindful, but more investments so that we can sustain for a longer period of time. And so these people are not calling to say I got five bands to help you out. They're calling to say, listen, we're looking at ways that we can structurally support many organizations because we see the bottom falling out. But there were two people who contacted me and said, damn, like, what's going on? And I said, we told y'all when y'all was on your shows and going on interviews and going around doing radio shows, saying that diversity, equity and inclusion wasn't the main thing. It wasn't that important, It wasn't working for black folks. We were only getting a small piece of the pie. We told y'all that the narrative was dangerous, not that we don't understand the data and what the data shows. The data clearly says that white women and other groups benefited from DEI more than black folks, which is what it was intended to. It was pretty much like the child of affirmative action, one of those things that people Reverend Jackson and other people came up with, this idea of really going into or organizations and institutions and corporations and putting departments that focus on equity. Right, and so that is obviously important, but as with everything that black folks have somebody gonna come do corn rolls Kardashians and now they.
00:34:18
Speaker 1: To cornroll people.
00:34:19
Speaker 3: Yeah, and now they're the best corn roll people that ever cornroll. Meanwhile, our people created that so that we could put rice and other things in our heads all the way back in Africa, right, so they always do that. There's always appropriation, is always people taking advantage of us. Nevertheless, the idea that people did not understand that the end of DEI, the attack on DEI, the criminalization of DEI, ultimately.
00:34:48
Speaker 1: Meant black people get rid of black people.
00:34:53
Speaker 3: And the problem is that people who do not understand the framework of Project twenty twenty five, and they really did not sit and and read and digest what that document is. They don't get the connection with the diversity, equity and inclusion attacks.
00:35:12
Speaker 1: Because when those folks say that they want.
00:35:15
Speaker 3: To restore America to the white male, or they didn't say that, they said the American family, which to them, they're talking about the nuclear family.
00:35:26
Speaker 1: They're talking about a man woman.
00:35:29
Speaker 3: And notice that I'm taking my hand down a notch when I get to woman and children and they are speaking about white men, white women, and white children. Just go look at the websites for all the different departments in the federal government. They have whited out the photos that showed diversity that you know, had all different types of communities Indians and African Americans and whatnot, and they have basically pictures of white folks, white children in schools, white people working, white people.
00:36:02
Speaker 1: That is what they're speaking about.
00:36:04
Speaker 3: So diversity, the end of diversity, equity, and inclusion was not just some one off idea that it wasn't important. It was a part of a plan to destabilize black communities.
00:36:16
Speaker 1: And now when you see these.
00:36:18
Speaker 3: Organizations closing it is it was a part their plan is actually working. And so in the individual one or two of the individuals said back to me, you know what I hear you.
00:36:29
Speaker 1: I didn't get it. I didn't see it.
00:36:31
Speaker 3: Now I see more of what you're speaking about, but I didn't get it, and I can tell you one of the fundamental problems that I'll be done.
00:36:40
Speaker 1: Both individuals continue to.
00:36:43
Speaker 3: Take me back to George Floyd and the commitments that were made under the George Floyd uprisings, when everybody saw racism for the first time and said we've got to poor money funnel money.
00:37:00
Speaker 1: Into the black community.
00:37:01
Speaker 3: We're going to do better, right, And so they keep saying, well, I did a report or we have reports that shows that even though they committed X amount of millions or three hundred and forty billion dollars or something like that, that we never received and if we did, we just got a slither and And this is where I just want to say, for the record, if your understanding or your conversation around diversity, equity and inclusion starts with George Floyd commitments in twenty twenty, you do not know what you're talking about. And it's not disrespectful.
00:37:38
Speaker 2: You just don't know.
00:37:38
Speaker 1: You just don't know.
00:37:39
Speaker 3: You don't have the proper analysis of where diversity and equity and inclusion started and understanding that they were not They're not talking about a twenty twenty commitment.
00:37:52
Speaker 1: This is going back.
00:37:54
Speaker 3: This is this is not only just traveling back many years, it's also covering so many different aspects of things that you don't think about. You don't realize that a part of DEI was looking at people who are handicapped and how when they show up at work, in school, and other places, there were resources to be able to ensure that those people had accessed the same as a person who was not other able. Right, you're not looking at what it meant for women, what it meant for our young people. Institutions that had to build in dei and colleges and other places, because when people were applying to get into these institutions, they couldn't get in, not because they weren't qualified, but because these different departments of admissions departments were overlooking people who look like us, and therefore they had to build in things that would allow them to measure that and to stop it from happening. So you're speaking about George Floyd.
00:38:55
Speaker 1: That tells me. And these are people who have major platforms.
00:38:59
Speaker 3: So when they go out and they go to these big meetings and they're sitting down with all of these corporate giants, or they're sitting in places and they're sharing their perspective. People trust you because you are black, and they think and you're successful and they see you tapped into the culture, so they think, you know, meanwhile, you really are not that well knowledgeable. You're not that knowledgeable about the implications of what this attack on diversity, equity and inclusion has done, what it is going to continue to do and what Project twenty twenty five really is and how DEI plays into making black folks back subservient. We never got out of it, but we are going backwards in a way that is very very dangerous.
00:39:45
Speaker 2: Everything you said is spot on and for me, is just common sense because if everything was merit based, right, then they wouldn't have never had to implement DYA. Right if you were just being able to get hired on your own meritive because you were qualified and you were educated, if you did the right work, why would they have ever had to create a di in the first place. So how did somebody trick you to believe that a policy that was put in to help you is no longer need it? And when they took the policy out, they took the people out, right. So if you if you, if you look and see now that all hundreds of thousands of black women and men have been erased from the workforce, and you telling us that we didn't need it because they knew what they was doing. Even though white women and other people were benefiting more from d I, we were the one that was gonna get harmed because they took it away. So they can eliminate your jobs. They wasn't eliminated Susan from her job. They wasn't going to eliminate Pablo because he was he was gonna take the less, you know, the less pay for his job. They was gonna eliminate you because you were highly educated and you were moving and creating generational wealth for yourself. We were taking over. They literally, we literally have over one hundred people in Congress insteade of elected officials. We created Black Caucus that they want to eliminate. Now, all of these things. If you're not paying attention, and if you're not really civically engaged and you don't have civic knowledge, then you shouldn't be talking.
00:41:10
Speaker 3: But some people have civic you know, it's not and I'm glad that we have our guests coming up now to kind of not so much talk about this, but at least I know it from listening and learning history. And I think that that's part of the problem. You could be civically engaged in not know history, so it doesn't connect to anything. You just kind of living in the wilderness and you're trying to do the right thing. It's not I'm not taking away from people who know that they need to cast their vote. They know that they need to show up and be a part of their community. But when you understand, to your point, why was diversity, equity and inclusion ever needed in the first place, then it all starts to make sense why they will want to get rid of it. And what you have to also be very mindful of is that there are multiple things happening at one they are today. I was on a long conference call listening to two things. One was a report from doctor Wes Bellamy, who we have to have back on the show because they have Obviously there's been so much focused on black women who've lost their jobs or who have been pushed out of the workforce in many different ways, and let's just always have to remind people that once you're pushed out of the workforce, that's only one issue, right that now, Also sponsorships have been cut, departments have been closed down, you know, where people have been able to tap in as a lifeline for community, for scholarships for their young people to go to college, for businesses to get resources that they can't get from the banks. So this is a trickle down effect that has happened with black women. The report that doctor West Bellamy has done with his students and his department at Virginia State University is to look at where black men are. We'd black men have lost about six hundred and fifty thousand jobs. Black men are the slowest, I mean the fastest declining. They're saying that black women is kind of flattened out a little bit at this point.
00:43:13
Speaker 1: Like they did the damage. They got rid of a bunch of people.
00:43:16
Speaker 3: They pushed people out, made people feel like, let me take the package and go home.
00:43:19
Speaker 2: They're just simple. It's easy to do. See, this is what they always do. They said that we're going to get the women out, and then some of these men say, yeah, they don't deserve to be anywhere. Get them all, get them out of there. And then next once they got rid of them, they got rid of your black ass.
00:43:32
Speaker 3: First they come for you and then they come for me. So you're not exempt. And so now black men are the second group. But by the way, the economy is falling, like there are people, there are economists speaking about this every day.
00:43:47
Speaker 1: Whenever you attack people who pour.
00:43:50
Speaker 3: One point four trillion dollars into an economy and you take our resources away, you are going to suffer but you know, that's another day's topic. We should have an economists on to talk about that. And so that is one report that we heard and it's very startling. But the other report was on ice raids. You've got Haitians now who have lost their TPS status and they are putting ankle monitors on Haitians. They are putting ankle monitors where you can still live in the US, but they are tracking you so if they want to pick you up and throw you out, they can do so. They are creating in home prisons with tracking devices on Haitians, shackles exactly, shackles on Haitians. This stuff is literally in front of your eyeballs.
00:44:46
Speaker 1: It is happening.
00:44:48
Speaker 3: Why do you think that a society under a Project twenty twenty five framework would want to deport immigrants who haven't done any people making so not People won't care.
00:45:00
Speaker 1: People are making pizza at the pizza shop. We don't care.
00:45:04
Speaker 3: Nobody cares if the person who cooks who makes the pizza at the pizza shop, or does or whatever, even if they have a different job, a fancier title.
00:45:16
Speaker 1: We do not care.
00:45:17
Speaker 3: If their child goes to school and we got paid for free lunch, we want to pay.
00:45:22
Speaker 1: Like the guy on the internet.
00:45:23
Speaker 3: What do you say if free lunch I want to do, I take my mind, but a free lunch.
00:45:29
Speaker 4: I don't.
00:45:30
Speaker 3: I don't care about that. But why would a society decide that those people need to be deported, criminalized, some of them even killed, and then all of a sudden they want black people not to be working.
00:45:46
Speaker 4: What do you.
00:45:47
Speaker 1: Think that these people are trying to do.
00:45:50
Speaker 2: It's not what they're trying to do with it. What they're doing, they're definitely disenfranchising us and they're taking away all of our resources. Because I always say, when I look at the matrix, right, we remind me of the virus. Like anything that we touch, we control. And they know that immediately. Once we learn, we've learned their systems. So that's why I say every one hundred years they have to disenfranchise us, because once we learn the system, we master it. And once we start mastering it, we just like a virus and we start taking over the ship. So they say, no, we got to stop them, We got to cut them off, and we got to start them from scratch again. And it's what they keep doing all the time.
00:46:28
Speaker 3: And the internet has become one of the biggest threats.
00:46:32
Speaker 2: Media has always been the biggest stress one.
00:46:34
Speaker 3: Of the biggest biggest threats, not the Internet. Not the Internet, because there's very good resources on the Internet where you can become more knowledgeable, you can share, you can connect, you can meet with people.
00:46:44
Speaker 2: But the social media.
00:46:45
Speaker 3: Social media has become one of the biggest threats to our empowerment and our unity.
00:46:53
Speaker 2: Because they know how to want.
00:46:54
Speaker 4: A good job.
00:46:55
Speaker 2: They put they put the loudest, dumbest voices with our colors in front, and they amplify that and they make that make those people seem like they know what they talking about, and they don't know nothing, and they just be talking heads. And immediately when you put them in front of somebody that actually know something, you see they don't know nothing. And then what happens is they don't care because you got people like Trump that what you just followed, They follow this cult mentality and they keep lying to themselves. They don't even admit that they don't know what they talking about. They just keep on running with the lie. And most people don't care because they want to believe the bullshit anyway. So to do something exactly so if you just keep on to let somebody say dumb shit and they just live with the lie and just keep on saying it over. Trump can just keep saying the same thing over and over and over about we see it we at war or the country for absolutely no reason, and now we negotiating to get back where we was before the war started, and they saying the same shit over and over and people believe it. It doesn't even make sense. But if you keep on saying something over and over, it becomes the truth. So that's what's happening right now.
00:48:01
Speaker 1: It's a trick bag, but it's not funny.
00:48:05
Speaker 3: So we barely really really ever probably never talk about the topics for an episode during the episode, but this time I think it is fitting of our guests, who is one of our friends. Y'all know, it's a big thing that we have to have our friends on that are doing amazing things. And today, for this particular episode, what came to me was the woman behind the Power, Core Masses Berry on love, leadership and legacy, because that's all we're going to talk about.
00:48:42
Speaker 4: Come on now, okay.
00:48:47
Speaker 1: The power.
00:48:47
Speaker 4: I mean, that's you. You are the power, all right, right, that's but I'm glad you finally told me what we were gonna talk about.
00:48:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, what I told you because no, you know why, because you are the type of person that if I would have told you, then you would tell me that's not good, take that out.
00:49:08
Speaker 4: Put that over there.
00:49:10
Speaker 3: So I just avoided all of that by not.
00:49:14
Speaker 4: Telling you at all.
00:49:15
Speaker 3: But I'm so glad that you took the time to come up and visit us on our show. It's one thing to be virtual, it's a whole different vibe. Come into the studio and spend some time with your mentees.
00:49:26
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well we've been talking about it for a long time. Yes, I'll watch you all the time, and of course I cheer you on and correct you. Yes from afar, but you know, it's a great show and you guys get important information out.
00:49:40
Speaker 1: So yeah, so thank you for coming. Let me tell y'all who core mass experience.
00:49:44
Speaker 3: Another thing we don't do is read bios, but we're going to do all that today because when you have greatness in your myths, you need to get it right. And I want to just read a couple of things, not the whole bio, but just some things that helped to bring you up to speed as to who this woman is. So TMI is so proud to welcome Cora masters Barry, the former First Lady of Washington, d C. Some people would argue that she's still the first Lady of Washington trac a political strategist and educator, a trailblazer, and once boxing commissioner, which a lot of people do not know that this woman was the boxing commissioner. Oh and wrestling. We got to figure, you know, we got to talk about all of that. A staunch youth advocate, like too much of a youth advocate probably for some.
00:50:42
Speaker 4: People, because she becomes the children's.
00:50:44
Speaker 3: Parents and the parents' parents to make a community come together to ensure that our children get what they need and deserve. And she's the founder of the Southeast Tennyson Learning Center, which you and I have celebrated in that space. The work that is happening with our young people from Blacks and Wax, which I think we should be bringing back. We'll talk about that off camera, and just other programs and things I mean, I've been at We've been at Southeast Learning and Tennis Center with Venus and Serena Williams. We've been there with other celebrities we've been at fancy, fabulous engagements, but we also have done community work out of that space.
00:51:27
Speaker 1: And so you'll have to tell us why you invested.
00:51:32
Speaker 3: You could have done anything with your life once Marion Barry was no longer with us, the great honorable former mayor of Washington, d C. But you decided to pour into young people. And I want to hear more about that. He was a four term man. Yeah, four I thought it was like two terms. No, I don't know why I'm meant four term mayor?
00:51:54
Speaker 1: Wow?
00:51:55
Speaker 3: How many were you involved in helping him Ryan in nineteen seventy one?
00:52:03
Speaker 4: Okay, So I was involved with his very first campaign when he ran for Skoboard when he was at Pride. So we've been friends, colleagues, political allies, comrades for many, many many years before we got married. So I would arguably say I was probably very much involved in everything that he ever did.
00:52:21
Speaker 1: Wow, four terms. I mean that.
00:52:24
Speaker 3: Deserves its own conversation, what it's like to four turns through adversity, racism and everything.
00:52:33
Speaker 1: And I think the thing about.
00:52:35
Speaker 3: You that is most it gives me, it makes me slightly emotional, is that you are the wind beneath so many people's wings. And so it makes perfect sense that you were there with him from the very beginning, because I'm sure if he was sitting here now he was saying I couldn't have done four terms without the machine of the core, Masteresbury and others who helped him to get where he was.
00:53:06
Speaker 4: But I think that the drama of Marion Berry is well known across the country, so we don't need to realiterate that everybody knows it. But it was because of that that he did four terms. That when Maryon was set up to be taken down by the government simply really because he was too many black people were making too much money, and they had tried to set him up with money. But mary never cared about money, so they could never get him taking money. They could never bribe him. But they knew he loved the streets, so they called him in the streets.
00:53:42
Speaker 2: The street.
00:53:42
Speaker 4: He loved the street. Oh yeah, no, he was a great man, but he loved the streets, and they called him in the streets. But when it was all done, and said just in context, when they had the child, I think fourteen or fifteen counts, most of them were felonies. He was convicted on a simple charge of simple possession, a misdemeanor. That was it. And the judge was so angry was he that I've never seen His name was Penfield Jackson and that sounds like somebody sitting on a plantation, doesn't it. Christ He was so mad. He was so mad that he sentenced him to six months in jail, first term, first offender, misdemeanor, simple possession. Six months. Man made him great, Old.
00:54:35
Speaker 3: We got to talk about how you tell us that our knocks are boost so sometimes.
00:54:41
Speaker 4: But that's how he got that fourth term.
00:54:42
Speaker 1: Though, because he had been knocked down.
00:54:45
Speaker 4: Well, if they had just given him his fair thing, given him what do you call it, publics? I mean community service. He did have loved him, but jail right made him a king. Really, that's what y'all gonna do. So we're gonna bring them all the way back. That's what our people can do when they really really understand their power.
00:55:07
Speaker 2: Absolutely so for me, right, So I'm doing a little history and I see that they say your mother ran for president four times.
00:55:15
Speaker 4: Yeah, doctor Isabel Masters.
00:55:17
Speaker 2: Wow, that's amazing.
00:55:20
Speaker 4: Yeah, she was way ahead of her time.
00:55:22
Speaker 2: That's why I see you have all of that in you. You could have been the president. Easy.
00:55:27
Speaker 4: Who wants to do that? I know who wants that job? Oh my god. But she was something else. She got her PhD at sixty eight years old. My mother was a single mother. She raised six kids in college, educated every single one of us, and then went back and got her master's degree. And they were there, the big spread of that and evident you can look it up. And then went back and got her PhD at sixty eight years old, and you know, was politically active, didn't care much about the Democrats or the Republicans. But she ran the Looking Back Party. She was She was the nominee of a couple of the the the Alternative Party.
00:56:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, yep, yeah, how was that? Were you involved? How old were you when?
00:56:11
Speaker 4: Oh?
00:56:11
Speaker 1: Well, time the.
00:56:13
Speaker 4: First time my mother decided she was running for president, I was a grown woman and she was running. The last couple of times she was running at the same time Jesse Jackson was running, and she was mad at me. She was like, you supporting Jesse? I said, Mom, I'm supporting you too. Yeah, but she was serious. She was way ahead at her time.
00:56:33
Speaker 3: Wad what were you doing for Reverend Jackson at that time when he was running for president and not And whether or not you were close to him is not important, But what were you?
00:56:42
Speaker 1: What was life?
00:56:43
Speaker 4: My support of Jesse Jackson was through Maryon, because Marion is the reason that Jesse ran for president the first time. Well, when he we did a street naming of Maryon. I don't know if you were there a couple of years ago, and we wanted Jesse to speak, but he couldn't, so he but he did a video. It was a lot of effort. But when you did the closed caption, he talked about the fact that when he wanted to run for president, he went to all the big city mayors. He named Tamina Jackson, he named Carl Stokes, he named Hatcher, he said, and they all kept saying this, now it's not the time. Now, it's not the time. Then he said, well, I went to see Marion Barry, my brother. He said, we'll make the time. And so that's why he ran. And that when he ran, he announced his candidacy from the city from it's I mean, we can tell it now, from the city call I mean a convention center at Washington, d C. Where Marion had given all the DC government workers four hours of liberal leave. So when you saw the cameras, you thought all these people were there for Jesse and they were government workers. That's what they did.
00:57:51
Speaker 1: They had leave so they could choose.
00:57:54
Speaker 4: They wanted to guy be at the convention center when he's announcer. Yeah, I love that when you could use the power for empower in your own Yeah. Yeah.
00:58:03
Speaker 1: And your father was a marine, one of the first black Yeah.
00:58:06
Speaker 4: He was the first black marine. Wow, the first black very first. Wow.
00:58:10
Speaker 1: How do he pass? I don't remember.
00:58:12
Speaker 4: He passed natural death, but he they you know, as a political scientist and the historian, I have something that I called the Jackie Robinson syndrome. There are no accidental firsts when it comes to our people. And so everybody who has been the first from floor rock everybody down. Some white people were sitting somewhere saying, this is what the first has to look like and be like. So with my father, it would you would think that he was just the first one that showed up. That's not what they did. They were recruiting. He was on a bus. There's a college in Oklahoma called Langston University. We're all out of Oklahoma, and he and my mother were on the bus going between Oklahoma City and Langston, and they saw him. He was nice looking and was well spoken, you know, whatever they was looking for for the Negroes then, and they talked to him and asked him would he be interested in it being the first one and listed as first Black marine, and they set up a meeting. They came my mother had My mother had to sign an approval to do it because they didn't want to be I think what they told me accused of breaking up a family and by sending somebody off the war without the approval of the spouse. Now I don't know what that wow wow, but yeah.
00:59:31
Speaker 3: That so they recruited him, they did, okay, cool, so then okay, but your mom still raised your you all asked them when it.
00:59:39
Speaker 4: Came back from the war and realized that he almost lost his life over there for a country. Then when he came back, he was living in the front in the back of the bus, and the the prisoner of wars, the Germans and the Japanese are sitting in the front of the bus.
00:59:55
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:59:56
Speaker 4: Oh no, that was the history of World War Two. They came back black, the Black soldiers came back to Jim Crow Wow, and all of that. You came back and my mother just summed it up and just said he was shell shocks. So she took us all and went to California.
01:00:11
Speaker 3: And that's right, So you were in So where was that at the time before California?
01:00:17
Speaker 1: Where was your mom and your dad?
01:00:18
Speaker 4: Oklahoma?
01:00:19
Speaker 3: C They was in Oklahoma City, then they went to California. Raised y'all there, How in the world.
01:00:23
Speaker 4: The mother did it? My mother left my father in Oklahoma.
01:00:26
Speaker 3: And Oklahoma went to California. How did you get to Washington, d C. Help me, help us understand?
01:00:34
Speaker 4: We would just say that's that that would be in the book. Okay, Okay, I mean I went off to college and eventually ended up in Washington, DC to work on my master's degree. Okay, there's a plenty in between.
01:00:46
Speaker 1: That little.
01:00:49
Speaker 2: You know.
01:00:49
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, we talked about that offline because I really don't know the answer to it is, so I need to I need to know. Then, how did you meet Marion Barry? Where were you actively engaged?
01:01:01
Speaker 4: When the way I met Marion really actually was I was working on my master's degree at Howard University, and it was in the evening I was working on public administration. Met a guy and we were at a place called Billy Simpson's meeting three or four other people in between. I guess we might have whatever we're doing given a break, and said he was on his way to Walter Palmrooy's house too because he was going to run for a non voting delegate, and then we want to go, so we said yeah, so we went. And that's why I started sort of doing politics, because I think that was just where I was. But I didn't meet Mary. And then I'm a Delta and I was at a Delta meeting at the y w C A and in Washington, d C. I was sitting in the back. I didn't know most of the people Bufferton, California, and he came in with a Dashiki super black and I said, who is that and they said that's man A Barry. I said, ugh, oh, he was so arrogant. Oh Lloyd, Yeah, that's wag and getting there campaigning for Walter Farboy for he was reporting him as none voting delegate. He wasn't running for anything. He was still he had a snick and uh and uh pride. But that's the first time I saw him. He was very arrogant, and you lights him anyway, because that's what we like of always liked those kind of means. But at that moment he was just.
01:02:28
Speaker 3: Arrogant and he felt you was the first love. Not first love, but he fell in love with you.
01:02:35
Speaker 2: So we know that you were the first lady, you know, but you are a brilliant, phenomenal woman of your orange. What are some of the accomplishments that you've done that you're proud?
01:02:48
Speaker 4: Well, I always say I never had a plan for my life. So my life really has been a life of basic, organically following something that's inside of me, and it almost always is for the greater good up to a point. Now, there was a point that my leadership took everybody where they weren't supposed to go. When I first went off to college, the dean of students called me in and looked at me and said, miss Masters, the only reason you're not on the train on the way home is because you're only one person and you can't be doing all of this. So I have always had a leadership, you know, just depended on how I was going to use it. And at some point, you know, God said, okay, you know, get over here and make some sense. So I just went from one thing to another. I've always been very interested in young people always. I just think it's important earlier you can get them. So almost everything that was in my life, no matter what it was, it was rooted in young people. I didn't go I didn't go to college for that. I didn't grad. I didn't graduate and do education or anything. I was in a public administration. But everything that I've ever done, even if it was the Boxing Commission, the most out of accomplished in the Boxing Commission changed how they did the rules to protect the health and the safety of boxers, especially young people. I started a program where they competed among the Washington d C. New Jersey in Pennsylvania. We called it the Mayor's Stuff. It was always always went to young people. And then I Marian became the aor historic sports term and I really, really, and that'll be in my book. Did I want to do that? And I didn't really know. I did not want to do any of it. But that's a whole nother story. That's the whole another book. But at some point I was there and we had broken a lot of records, we had made history and I read a magazine article the other day that I did back in nineteen ninety six, and the Marying one, and he took office in nineteen ninety five, and I talked about it. Whatever I did, it would be to empower young people. I started an organization called the Recreation Wish List Committee because Marion asked me to head up his inaugural. People were giving hundreds of thousands of dollars for a party, and I was like, I'm not doing that. So I just took some of that money and put it to the side and started an organization to help with recreation. I didn't want to kiss babies, I didn't want to go to teas. I wasn't going to make new friends just for all purposes. So I just empowered my community and we started an organization, and then we would go around the city and put in back boxing gyms and computer labs, baseball diamonds, and then tennis courts. One day, and then Guy gave me another vision to build on top of the tennis courts a building. So here we are now, you, I mean, it's twenty five years later.
01:06:00
Speaker 3: You and you know the connections there are make me. It's so interesting because sometimes we think if we started out here, we have to follow exactly this line in order to be successful to get where we're traveling.
01:06:18
Speaker 1: But you show that you can move.
01:06:21
Speaker 3: Around and apply your skill set in many different ways. So you're a professor of political science, professor at what college?
01:06:31
Speaker 4: Was it? University of the District of Columbia, right.
01:06:33
Speaker 3: So the University of DC for twenty six years, and also boxing commissioner. Like these are two different things, completely different things that most people would never say that you can do one and the other because they would say, well, what do those two things have to do with each other? And I'm sure being the boxing commission that took you to night life and had you out. I mean, we have that picture which I intend to put in the show of Muhammad Ali and you sitting at the banquet or something that you are at. So you know, you're working with Muhammad Ali. And while the struggle is real, we know the movement was strong and all of that, there's still funny stories of things that was going on, personal lives and issues, you know, and.
01:07:20
Speaker 1: All of that.
01:07:21
Speaker 3: To talk about that diversity of self as a woman, that you're not stuck to one thing, well.
01:07:27
Speaker 4: Go back to my mother. We never got anything defined for us based on gender. You just never got discussed. She modeled that a woman could do and be anything. So it took me a very long time to realize that there was such a thing as misogyny.
01:07:46
Speaker 1: Because you, being a woman, been a woman.
01:07:48
Speaker 4: I didn't think that was an issue until I was put on the boxing commission. I asked Mary. He asked me what I wanted to do to put me on the boxing commission because we had tried to do a fundraiser and there were big fat men sitting around not doing their white men, the big old fat black men, but the whole all of them were just trifling, talking cigars and get the ring wasn't up. And I was like, I want to be on the boxing commission.
01:08:16
Speaker 3: So you hadn't You weren't in the boxing No, So you just having him try to work with them on something.
01:08:22
Speaker 4: It's going to do a boxing match, yes, for as a fundraiser for again the recreation department, and you in order to do that. A boxing commissioner is a regulator. A boxing commissioner is the one who gives a license to a boxer, a manager, a trainer, a promoter, all of that has to come through the commission. You have to have certain criteria to be a licensed that is for the boxing Commissioner does so in order to do any of those things, we had to go through those those incompetence.
01:08:55
Speaker 1: So what did they do when you showed up?
01:08:58
Speaker 4: Well, when, oh, well, that's a whole other story. When it was announced, it's a long story. But when it was announced that Marion was appointing me to the boxing Commission, I was the first woman in the country. Uh mmm, all hell broke. It was all across the country and I didn't understand it. He did, Oh man. He asked me what commission do you want to be And he kept trying to put me on the real estate Commission. The ABC boyd said I'm gonna do that stuff. And then one day I said, I know I want to do. I want to go on the boxing commission. He said, he the boxing committte And I said yeah, and he said are you sure? I said yeah, And this is what he said to me. He said, well I can have it if you can. Oh. And he went on by this business and I saw that. I and then a couple of months later to give me a call and said, I've been nominated to go on the boxing COMMI I totally had forgotten about it. And then about two weeks later, after the word broke and all this is, you know, on the internet, pull it up, the lady called me to tell me that there had been a letter submitted to the city about me. It was a letter that had been submitted with no signats if they accused me of everything from drug dealing the problem you lie. It was an amazing I mean, from prostitution to drug dealer. And I was like, she said, you out, that was before emails.
01:10:19
Speaker 1: So you have a copy of this letter.
01:10:21
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm sure I do. So I ran over there to look at it. I'm at city Hall and I'm like, oh my god, this is horrible. I mean, I'm a professor of political science. I can't have people say these things about me. I have a more interpret two clause from my job. Although I started calling the mayor, calling the mayor, and he was bus he said, being the damn mayor. So finally as secretary and he was fat Selden. I called about the tenth oft time. She said, missus Corar, the mayor will call you when he gets a chance. I said, I'm not getting off this phone till he gets on there. I don't care what you say. I'm gonna come up there. And I was in city Hall. So he got on the phone. He said, what's up. What's up? I said, they got a letter out blah blah blah blah blah. He said, I told you I can hell it if you can. Wow. So that was him letting me know that you didn't understand where you where you was doing. I know this is gonna be a big deal.
01:11:20
Speaker 2: But you.
01:11:22
Speaker 4: Cause you don't because you think you all have Why did'all you know?
01:11:26
Speaker 1: Because you're gonna fight me over Okay, you.
01:11:29
Speaker 4: Want to do that, I'm gonna put you on there and the rest. That's what. That's the whole book by itself. Wow.
01:11:37
Speaker 3: That is wow. They lost their their minds.
01:11:42
Speaker 4: They were going they were coming from me and the way I corrected that because once I once I realized to your pointed by it, once I realized I wasn't gonna get no support from the mayor. That's your look. You said, now you gonna hand your business. I was separated from my husband. I called him, I said, will you come to my hearing? Because I had to be.
01:12:02
Speaker 1: Confirmed, meaning that y'all were not in the same house.
01:12:04
Speaker 4: Separated. Yeah, a friendly Yeah, my mother, that's my camera. Okay. I called him and he said, I said, you come when you come to my hearing. He said, yeah, my girlfriend owned the sprintal home. She gave us one of her one of her funeral cars. We picked him off. This is so good, and picked up my two daughters from school and they showed up at the funeral car. And we're supposed to be in limbousines right this paneral My god. So we go in there and I'm sitting there at the hearing and everybody's the place is full because you know, I'm being nominated to be on a boxing commission. And the woman who was chearing, whose name I won't call, didn't like me that much. And I could tell she kept looking at this letter, and she kept looking over there at my husband and she said, ms Masters, is I understand your separated? That? Yeah? I said, yeah, that's my husband and my two children right there. So y'all was separated. Yeah, but you had to go. I told you, I said, we have a modern marriage. Oh in other words, now read this in public with my children. Sitting there reading and it hadn't been signed. So she said, well, we have some here, but I'm not going to enter into the record since it hadn't been signed. But I promise you if I had not done that, she would have done strategy. Strategy was the strategy. And I was like, and you were confired. Oh yeah, I was confiredbent. I was commissioner for ten years. At first I was just a commissioner and then I became Chair of the commission.
01:13:30
Speaker 1: Was Muhammad Ali boxing at the time?
01:13:32
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
01:13:33
Speaker 4: Yes. I came into boxing when Muhammad Ali had just lost to Leon Speins and I met the people with Leon Speins and Hilton Head and he was They were training for the rematch in New Orleans, so yeah, he was boxing.
01:13:48
Speaker 1: Wow, what was that like?
01:13:50
Speaker 3: Just please give us a little Muhammad Ali, honey, because you know, Muhammad Ali was the man, but.
01:13:56
Speaker 4: He was he was the man, but he was you know, he was just really the same. No, uh, he was very he was. Okay, I'll give you I you're not familiar with watching in DC, but there's a hotel called the Hyatt right there on Eighth Street, and I don't remember why, but we were all sitting one of those hotels, says, everything is open, the restaurants outside. We're just sitting out there. He's on his way off the Iraq or somewhere to do something. And I said to him, I said, mohammap, it's called Muhammad. I said, you better not do that, because I'm telling you now you're gonna get in trouble. You're not Jesse, because you know, Jesse was y' all young. Yeah, Jesse was going and getting prison like that. I said, you're gonna go there and mess up and then they gonna then you're gonna get in trouble. And he said, dang, do nothing by me. If I mess up, they gonna say, oh, Muhammad Ali. They took advantage of it. He said, if I do good, they say I'm the grating. And I was I thought that. I said, you know, he's right, Yeah, I can't lose. They'll just say it's their fault. Who like that? Now?
01:15:05
Speaker 1: Sure, oh yeah, oh yeah, but it's different.
01:15:08
Speaker 4: But he was a great guy. He was. He was a great guy. Yeah. He liked a lot of women.
01:15:14
Speaker 2: Though.
01:15:14
Speaker 3: Oh listen, his ex wife is telling her story right now. She's saying a lot of things I've been watching the clips of her talking about the things that happen.
01:15:25
Speaker 1: Anyway, let's go. Let me say that.
01:15:30
Speaker 3: You and other women, including my own mama, will tell the story of how the men love the ladies love the ladies, probably a little bit too much, but somehow y'all still navigated. See, we we are at the age or we are in a time where cheating is like the worst thing that could ever happen.
01:15:52
Speaker 4: That's a thing.
01:15:54
Speaker 3: Oh man, Oh it's it's big problems crazy.
01:15:58
Speaker 2: They'll let you buck.
01:16:01
Speaker 1: They were mentioned back then too.
01:16:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, hm, but y'all kind of what was the thing? Was it that they were taking very good care of you all as women, because that's nothing like I'm not going to work myself down to the bone and then have a man that's out here being whatever.
01:16:19
Speaker 4: First of all, cheating is different now than it was then, you know, prior as was I was getting off her in age. You know, that's when all this age and all that stuff started coming. Cheating took on a whole different dynamic then than it used to be. And I just think different generations of women did different ways of dealing with man. I wasn't very tolerant of it. I never have been. Neither was my mother. That's why she raised us in California. But you know, my relationship with Mary and was withstood all of that as friends, but our marriage didn't withstand it.
01:16:51
Speaker 3: Wow, that was that's a quote. As friends, we were able to get through it all, but marriage for me.
01:17:04
Speaker 4: No, whoo, this is so good. We're stopping right now.
01:17:14
Speaker 3: We got a little bit more because we want to go to Venus and Serena.
01:17:18
Speaker 2: So you know the center that you have, this amazing space. We met Venus and Serenity. What was the inspiration to open.
01:17:29
Speaker 4: Well, again, back to the conversation about the Recreation wish List committee, the inspiration to open the center was always to utilize anything that we have in our community to empower and change the trajectory of our children. So tennis is one of the best mechanisms. It's one of the best sports any kid can get involved in, but it wasn't available to us, not on any equality level. So Venus and serena appearance on the national stage helped with the vision I had to build the top East Tennis and Learning Center. I think that if they were not there, I don't think it would have been that easy to do it.
01:18:10
Speaker 1: But how did you meet them?
01:18:13
Speaker 4: I met them because of my husband and I and people that were very much into tennis. Went to the US Open. I'm trying to think the very first time. I was watching tennis one day and Venus was playing at Wimbledon and she had they still had the beads, and so there was something going on about that, and she had melted down, and I remember being very emotion I'd never met them day in my life. I remember being very emotional about this black girl with these beads, you know, like being in the world all these I mean, I just I just felt so and I was like, just come on, come on, come on, talking to the TV. So she came home. That was before they built the art As Stadium. This was theis Lewis Armstrong which is still there. And so she came to play against a white girl named Mary Pierce, who you got, big old braid, she known for it, big old braid down her back. This girl was fifteen years old and she's playing against this journeyman, this girl Mary Peers. And I'm sitting in the box along with some other people and the people are cheering for Mary Piers. Now you gotta understand, this is a US Open, and I'm on TV, so I'm not gonna say the US f and Open, but this is what this was. So I started saying whatever. I don't know whatever I was saying. So White Lady looked up at me and said, well, you know, it's really just about the underdog. I look at her, I said, turn around. I know what you're trying to do, and thank you for that. But I know what I'm looking at. So when sa Venus won, we were sitting catacorne across the court to and I saw or seen jump up to leave, and I jumped up.
01:20:06
Speaker 1: That's her mother, their mother, their mother.
01:20:08
Speaker 4: Where the lobby is out there where all the people come in, and I jumped up and I cut her off. She was leaving, Yeah, she was living and she had won. That's what they always did, to get up and leave. But I cut her off. So I introduced myself and I'm standing there and Richard come up. That's a whole lot of conversation. But I was very, very upset about about it, and she was very calm. She's got a calm personality until she doesn't. And she said her answer to me, I think is when I fell in love with them. She said, we're used to it. That was right here for me. Why why are you used to it? This is United States of America. That's a black girl. They should be cheering for her. We're not gonna be used to this. And that just changed everything. And and you and her became bestie and all to this day, yes, right, and.
01:21:08
Speaker 3: The children and you And so to your point, you were asking about the center.
01:21:15
Speaker 4: What you were saying, Yeah, well, I was, you know, building the center. She went, she went her way. I went my way. She left, her husband, moved to Washington for a while, and I had a hip replacement while this thing was being built. I'm just skipping a whole bunch of stuff. So we had just put the ceiling on. We had did the cutting of the uh you know, you signed a beam and when you're getting ready to put the cover on the building, we had done that. I had my surgery, so I was Bedriddensha called me and told me that her Easha is their daughter, the oldest one. The oldest one was killed johndy Way in California. So Easha was the next oldest. To tell me that she was gonna take her mom to look if I could let her in. So they let her in so she could see us. No windows or anything. So they came to visit me. Marion went had the security go by some spaghetti, some my gianos because they like the Italian food. I entertained them in my bedroom. It was Esha and Orsine and Marion and myself. I'm in the bed and Orsine said to me, she stood over me, I remember it like yesterday. We talked about the other day. And she said, so, when you're gonna open it? And I looked at her. This was in January, and I said, when Venus and Serena it can be there and another day before if they can be there tomorrow and open it tomorrow. If they can't be there till this time next year, we'll open it this time next year. I'm not opening it until they can be there, because this seller represents who they are, if the community represents the community they came out of, so all of that has to be you know, menience. And she took out her and back in the day she had a BlackBerry and she was at that time still controlling the girls. And she looked and she said, we're available. April twenty second. Can you do it? Then I said, we're opening it up in April twenty second. And that's how they came. Wow, she came. The whole family came.
01:23:24
Speaker 2: So rich with history, so much history. Wow, such a historian, like we call you and you tell us so many things, like I remember you introduced me to Hugh P. Newton's wife, and I'm like, she just knows everybody like you, the madam.
01:23:44
Speaker 4: I'm just glad that I'm alive so that I can keep bugging y'all about the history. That's but you made a really good statement. I was so proud to hear you say it that if you don't know the history, you're just operating in a moment. You're in a bubble. And it's.
01:24:01
Speaker 2: One more question, one more question, because I know you got a lot to do. But we were talking about DL early and then you gave us the history of DR. Could you give that history of DR for us real quick?
01:24:13
Speaker 4: Well, first of all, I want to say one thing before we even talk about that they're talking about in this country about what they call democratic socialists. I want to announce to everybody, please, this country has been socialistic since the nineteen thirties. Please go back and look at the New Deal under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After the capitalistic society develop art and people were in breadlines and there were no safety nets. He did the same thing Trump did. He packed the Supreme Court and got those programs under him, became New Deal. That's what social security, public housing, welfare, food stamps, all of that came in the forties. In the thirties, so we've always had a socialistic country. Where do you think supplementing the FOS departments are all of that socialism? There was all safety nets, So I'm saying all that to say, and that went fine, but that didn't solve the problem of Jim Crow. So by the time we got through all of that and got through Jim Crow. Although those social nets did help black people too, they did trickle down because we all I remember we had I don't know, look things you punched we had for eating you know, food that worn't Yeah, there was things like that. And we lived in public housing at the Jordan Down Projects for nine months before we moved out. So we benefited from from parader Franklin Delanor Roosevelt. But when the nineteen sixty four and the nineteen sixty five Voting Rights and Civil Rights Act passed. Red Johnson said we got to do something.
01:25:45
Speaker 2: Called though, what did you do?
01:25:48
Speaker 4: No, you said, Johnson, Yeah, that's WORL poverty. Yeah, oh okay, worrel poverty. And and that's when he came up with the permative action. And he said, okay, you can tell everybody that they can now the the discrimination is going. There's no more rules that say you can't do it. But they're not there. They You've had the superior education, you've had the opportunities you have to give people on what a head starts. And that's where a firmative action came from. That was the origin of the d and at all, and it had its backs under Reagan. He's the first one to start dismantling some of the programs coming out from under on the Johnson Carter held him for a minute and then he got caught up in Iran and that was the end of that. The Trump learned from that, But yeah, that's where it started.
01:26:42
Speaker 3: And then the EI becomes then the sort of like the child, which is which I said of affirmative action. It was kind of like the tactic. Yeah, right, yeah, so you because initially it was about black people, right. Initially, firmative action was it's really about leveling the field because we had such a they had such a head start. But then it became women and you know, just to be And it's very similar to the voting rights right that it started out being black folks fight, but then that we actually opened the doors for other communities, for women and other people to receive their voting rights. There's so much this, You're right, This is a part one because we need to come back and talk about what you see happening today. I do want you to just mention some of the people who you have mentored that folks see today.
01:27:38
Speaker 1: And I'm one, so I claim I am.
01:27:40
Speaker 3: I am mentored by fire, by fire, oh my lord, by core mass weary.
01:27:53
Speaker 1: But I needed it. I needed in.
01:27:55
Speaker 3: I always tell the story of how I called Core masters Bury one day and I was destroyed. And we had gone through many phases of this really really difficult time that I was in. I was you know, being you know, I wanted to say attacked, and you know, maybe there's a better word for it, but I was under the white supremacist I was under their eye they were paying attention to me and putting throwing the sink at me, and you know, it was a real hard time and we had had some emotional moments. We had to do a lot of strategy. When you talk about bringing the children and having them and your husband or your what was your strange husband at the hearing, those are some of the kinds of ideas that we had to employ during the time that I was going through the attacks against me, just you know, different things. But this particular day, you know, it felt like the worst of it all, and that probably was towards the very end of it. It's funny because that's how it goes when the attacks are raging and you just think, this is it.
01:29:03
Speaker 4: I'm done, as dark as hours right before, don.
01:29:05
Speaker 3: It's right there, and I called you to tell you, listen, this is it. It's four hundred news articles they saying all these things about me. I'm plastic everywhere. I'm in every newspaper. It's terrible. And you said, oh my lord, this is amazing, this is great.
01:29:23
Speaker 1: And I was like, I will never talk to this lady.
01:29:27
Speaker 3: Is my last conversation with Coral masses Berry because they are trying to kill me, and you're sitting here telling me, what did you say?
01:29:36
Speaker 4: They don't ways that kind of aco somebody who doesn't matter. You making air dance difference. You are making a difference. You are threatening them. Who's gonna write about somebody who's doing nothing?
01:29:48
Speaker 3: And you also told me you said you don't know what God can do. You said, because you could be doing all the good in the world and never get one story told about you. But he he's taken what you think is your worst moment and using it to elevate you. And look at me, now, how But you know, I don't know. Elevation comes with a.
01:30:10
Speaker 4: Lot, it does. It all comes with responsibilities. I tell everybody, if you want to be an advocate, you got to be ready to sacrifice because there are sacrifices involved in it.
01:30:19
Speaker 1: So tell us who you've mentored that we know.
01:30:23
Speaker 4: I don't really like that word. Of people that have been in my life, I think probably of the ones that goes the fartherest back that you would know where to start with. Melanie mm HM.
01:30:31
Speaker 3: Melanie Campbell, who is the President and CEO of the National Coalition of Black Civic Participation. In her organization is considered to be one of the big eight civil rights groups.
01:30:43
Speaker 2: Across the country at the conference now.
01:30:47
Speaker 3: And she's the convener of the Black Women's round Table, which has been at the Really, I mean, the Black Women's round Table has one saved a lot of women from the types of issues that we spoke about. Has been the foundation of women who are running for office, women who need training resources. I mean, just and you have definitely been her mentor give somebody else, you know, Bell.
01:31:13
Speaker 4: Benis and Serena and Angela and Angela.
01:31:17
Speaker 3: You gotta tell these people who these folks are. Angela could be anybody.
01:31:21
Speaker 4: What if these are all my friends?
01:31:23
Speaker 3: Angela Also Brooks is a senator, not a state senator.
01:31:29
Speaker 1: But this is important.
01:31:30
Speaker 4: She's not.
01:31:32
Speaker 2: You always want to be modest.
01:31:33
Speaker 1: By the way, State senators are very important.
01:31:35
Speaker 3: So don't take this wrong because state senators helped move things in your local community. I'm just saying she is a United State senator and you I watched you help take her from county executive county executive to becoming a senator and it was not easy.
01:31:54
Speaker 1: That was hard.
01:31:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I remember you saying, I mean, you've done the hard things. I think I was I was up there in that group of hard things, hard things, but you know, we are grateful for you. And I have to say, while I'm much younger, and I know what you mean when you say you're in relationship with people, because there's things I help to put you on too and hip you to it. And we've had some back and forth about issues that I hope that I helped to enhance or you know, what you're understanding of different issues and sort of change your opinion, which I don't know if I did, but I tried. But I'm proud of you, right like I am proud of you because I know the struggles, the struggles of keeping the center open through all the different administrations and people trying to cut the funding and not getting the support you deserve. You know the convictions that you have that we have shared that we decided we ain't gonna go turn against our people no matter who tells us. We got to denounce and call out and whatever, and we said no, we will handling on the inside.
01:33:03
Speaker 4: I really, really really do want to deal with that for a second. That's one of the things I would love, if I had one wish that somebody would say, if you could just have one thing that you could change since you you know, we on the other side of everything. I would want my people to stop being afred to love the people who love us. I want our people to love a minister Lewis Farakon or Jesse Jackson or Maryon. There are anybody that the larger community says is no good because they got another agenda. And we're walking around whispering like it breaks my heart. And when you when you when you turn on the television and you turn on social media and you see these maga people.
01:33:49
Speaker 3: They don't care and they're dying by the way the healthcares cut that the.
01:33:56
Speaker 1: Food benefits, food security is catch everything?
01:34:00
Speaker 4: Is it? He does? He has one thing that that they he hates who they hate God.
01:34:08
Speaker 1: They stay together.
01:34:10
Speaker 2: That's and we can't even bond in love.
01:34:13
Speaker 3: And that's the difference is that they come together under hate and we not always right. There's things we've had to correct self correct sometimes you can't correct it. But we are bound bound by love and that's a very different thing. But thank you, Corel masters Berry. I hope you enjoyed this conversation.
01:34:33
Speaker 4: It wasn't as bad as I thought.
01:34:36
Speaker 2: All that stuff jewels.
01:34:37
Speaker 3: You dropped me that you put some jewels on it. Love you, Thank you for joining us on the TMO show. Is Barry, Thank you.
01:34:49
Speaker 2: Shut up to Mama core Man. She always she always tells me something I didn't know. I'm always amazed by her knowledge, her wisdom, just understanding the the history of our people in the way she's just so articulate.
01:35:05
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, she's very intelligent.
01:35:07
Speaker 2: Very very shocked. And what's crazy, I didn't know that her mother ran for president four times and got her kids. Said, wow, she comes so she comes from a family of you know, education and just black excellence in black power.
01:35:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, she and you know, she always takes me back to that. Like when we're talking. I spend hours, as you know, in a day talking to her several times a week.
01:35:32
Speaker 1: It used to be every day.
01:35:33
Speaker 3: It's funny because you always go to the well when you're in trouble all the time. Then when things are kind of coasting, then you don't speak as much then. So we've gone through several iterations of that, and at the most intense times in my life and her life, by the.
01:35:48
Speaker 1: Way, because she's been through some things.
01:35:50
Speaker 3: We're on the phone, you know, five hours from six o'clock in the morning, back and forth. I'll call you right back, you know, going back and forth through different things and strategizing, and one of the things that she always does in the middle of a com it doesn't matter what we're talking about. I could be telling her about cell phones and how they work and whatever a problem is with a cell phone tower, and she'll be like, well, you know, in nineteen seventy so and so, when they started the blah blah blah and they started building the polls, we had an incident where, you know, she always takes you back to the history, and I could be honest in saying that there's a lot of things that I don't know or didn't know until she started, you know, encouraging me to go back and pull certain books or look certain things up, and then things made more sense, you know. And that's why she said that she heard us talking while we were filming before she came on about this idea that you could be engaged, you could be civically engaged, you can be smart, you can have money, you can do all of that. But if you don't really know history, then things become kind of disjointed and they feel like one offs when they're actually a part of a process.
01:37:11
Speaker 2: That's a fact. So so shout out to her for always, you know, enlightening us. And she brought some beautiful energy to this.
01:37:18
Speaker 4: Absolutely, she does.
01:37:20
Speaker 1: She does.
01:37:21
Speaker 3: And she's more than eighty. I think she's eighty one, right, it has to be eighty one. So we were at eightieth birthday party last year, so she's eighty one years old.
01:37:30
Speaker 1: She's moving around.
01:37:31
Speaker 3: She just came here from the Hamptons from an event for the Apollo and some other event. One of her good friends, Reggie Van Lee, is a major, major philanthropist, and you know, he still keeps up with Corls.
01:37:47
Speaker 4: That's his girl, that's right, you know.
01:37:49
Speaker 3: And and he's younger than her, older than us, but younger than her, but nevertheless, he still he keeps up with her. He keeps up with Susan Taylor, who used to be editor in chief at Essence magazine, and she's also older, but you know, nevertheless, or more seasoned, as they would say, you know, he's there with them. And that's what it's all about. Like we don't get to forget, we don't get to forget, we don't get to leave our people behind.
01:38:16
Speaker 1: Shout out to Cora masses Berry.
01:38:19
Speaker 2: That's my girl, that's mama Core. That brings me to my I don't get it this week. Last week, doctor Fauci testified before Congress. You know, he was a questioned about COVID nineteen and did he vaccination what he was asked to testify and he pled the fifth over one hundred times. There was a lot of back and forth. A lot of people felt like he was justified in tweeting the fifth because they felt this was a witch hunt and they were just trying to trip him up in anything that he said, they were trying to use to lock him up. Other people felt like he was admitting guilt, you know. And for my I don't get it this week is I've never been the biggest fan of Fauci, you know, I questioned a lot of his methods and tactics, a lot of things that he were saying I didn't really agree with. I always thought that COVID was something that we could build our natural immuniicism, but that was just my theory. I always felt that people talked about the vaccine more than they actually talked about being healthy, talked about you know, a lot of methods that we could have used, like Elderberry's and all the herbs and things, the natural herbs that we could have used exercise in which I did during the pandemic, and a lot of people was critical of me because I was like, I don't want to put some vaccine into my body. So, you know, I've never been the biggest fan of Fauti, But when I look at this whole situation, you know the criticism he's receiving. Over a million people lost their lives in the US, and you know, it was a serious thing, like they literally had morgues outside of hospitals.
01:40:04
Speaker 1: Well not per RFK, because RFK said, oh, we're gonna.
01:40:08
Speaker 4: Get no reason.
01:40:09
Speaker 2: We're gonna get to RK.
01:40:10
Speaker 3: He eould say he said there was no reason to separate people because the the what you call it, the intensive key and all of that stuff was open.
01:40:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I know a lot of people worked in hospitals who said that is one hundred percent a lot, right. You know, I know a lot of people who were inside hospitals while they loved ones. But when it first started, she said that the emergency rooms was so packed to the to the rim. So you know, he's another part of this. I don't get it. But what I really don't get is why people are mad at Fauci for saying to social distance and to stay away because the possibility is something might have happened, like we don't know there's a new virus, and he was trying to figure it out. I didn't agree with a lot of things that he said. I wasn't, you know, one of the main people saying anything about the vaccine. I just didn't agree with the vaccine. But why aren't people critical that Donald Trump was telling people to drink bleach?
01:41:07
Speaker 4: Right?
01:41:08
Speaker 2: They said Fauci had to be guilty because he pled the fifth over one hundred times. But Donald Trump is on record of pleading the fifth over four hundred.
01:41:19
Speaker 1: Times about sexual assault.
01:41:21
Speaker 4: Yes, but nobody it was his case, right.
01:41:24
Speaker 2: Yes, and he played he played guilty. I mean, he played the fifth over four hundred times, and nobody's critical about that.
01:41:32
Speaker 1: But you won't say nobody.
01:41:33
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't, But I.
01:41:36
Speaker 3: Give you have to assign the people you're talking about beause there's a lot of people who are critical.
01:41:41
Speaker 2: Okay, I just don't. I just didn't you talk.
01:41:43
Speaker 1: About those people who you know, are.
01:41:47
Speaker 3: Mag black maga and or not just black Maga Maga or people who.
01:41:52
Speaker 2: People that I hear that I hear coming out that are so angry with fauci like people that I normally hear being silent about everything of coming out saying, oh, why would you have to, you know, plead the fifth if you wasn't guilty? But I never heard none of these people say anything about Trump pleading the fifth over four hundred times. So I'm not saying nobody, but I just don't understand why these people are so loud about these things but so silent about other things. RFK has literally told people to stop taking vaccinats and we watch people have a measle outbreak that hasn't happened in years. Right, So no, and there's nobody having these conversations, right.
01:42:31
Speaker 3: So I hate when you say there's nobody having these conversations. And what I'm trying to say to figure out what we call those people who are not having it?
01:42:41
Speaker 1: Is it Donald Trump lovers?
01:42:44
Speaker 2: But it's not even just I don't know if it's Donald Trump lovers because I haven't seen them speak up for Donald Trump. Oh right, So I bet I haven't heard them say anything. That's what I'm trying to say. So if I haven't heard you say anything about anybody and you've just been quiet, all of a sudden you come out you said, I told y'all about Fauci. But we have a president that's in the White House that has done way more that people actually can see, and y'all not critical of that. And this is the person who is literally controlling the US right, and nobody says nothing with Donald Trump awarded Fauci, like he literally gave Fauci awards, but nobody is saying anything about that now. Fauci, Now, Fauci is the scapegoal for everything right. And we literally have someone that's in charge of the MAHA movement that is literally telling people shit that don't even make sense.
01:43:41
Speaker 3: RFK also said he was asked by Congresswoman Summer Lead on camera at a hearing he was testifying before Congress, and she said to him, she gave him the data on black maternal health and how many black women have died during child birth and the challenges that black women are facing while having children, and you know, she said, did you.
01:44:09
Speaker 1: Know these numbers?
01:44:10
Speaker 3: Some of it he acknowledged, and she said, so what is the plan for addressing black maternal health. And RFK said, well, you know, we're going to address all maternal issues.
01:44:25
Speaker 1: We're going to work with it.
01:44:25
Speaker 3: And she said, no, I know, but black people, black women are experiencing specific issues and there is a rising concern around black women not being able to take children either to full term or even in labor. These things are happening death basically, either the baby or the mother. And he said, well, you know again, we have to address all communities. And she said, well, what about the problem is with black women, not with these other communitians And he said, that's DEI that's what he said on camera.
01:45:06
Speaker 1: I've said the state of this on the show before.
01:45:08
Speaker 3: Maybe this time, if somebody clips it, people will actually care.
01:45:12
Speaker 2: The fact that we have such levels incompetency in charge of health like health is the most seriously. I don't care much money you got, don't care much thing you got. If you don't have health, you don't have nothing, you know, And we have levels in competency in our health department.
01:45:30
Speaker 1: And let me say.
01:45:33
Speaker 3: To give my opinion. Do you want my opinion on the Fauci thing. Yes, my opinion is that I was having a conversation with an elected official in New York City who is trying to do and it was not mayor Mom, Donnie. It was another person who's really trying to do incredible work, transformative work. And I told you about this conversation, and they were bringing some frustrations to me about some of the challenges around breaking through the red tape and trying to get resources to the communities that really really needed. And you know, they were giving me a whole thing, and I said, we think sometimes because it's new people a new day, new time, knew whatever, or we like the way a person looks, and like a Mamdannie, we're all into oh, Mamdannie, go go. We're cheering him on that it has changed inherently racist systems. Now, you have to fight every day if that's what you're going to be. That's why you can't just be against racism. You have to be anti racist, meaning that you are working every single day to fight racism.
01:46:53
Speaker 4: Right.
01:46:54
Speaker 1: That takes boots on the ground, fee to the pavement.
01:46:59
Speaker 3: But we are inherently racist, inherently corrupt systems.
01:47:05
Speaker 1: And Fauci was.
01:47:06
Speaker 3: Operating in that we can't sit up here and act like you know, something because I know people who are like, I love Fauci. I love yeah, because he was cute and cool and funny on TV, and he you know, he was Fauci.
01:47:19
Speaker 4: He's a Fauci man.
01:47:20
Speaker 1: But that does not mean that he's.
01:47:22
Speaker 3: Not operating with a system that has historically disenfranchised Americans, not just black but all people.
01:47:34
Speaker 1: So I would not doubt you.
01:47:37
Speaker 3: I would put my life savings on the fact that if he stated all the clarity around everything, and he didn't plead the fifth and we had all the documents and everything, like we could be there like a bubble or like a little the glass ball where we could see it exactly as it happened and no human can change it, that there would be plenty of things that we would disagree with and we would say, not only is this wrong, but like, you know it's wrong, and still y'all are telling us this.
01:48:09
Speaker 1: That's what we're.
01:48:10
Speaker 3: That's the facts that And I would say that about Obama, I would say that about whatever, because that the system is inherently, inherently corrupt and problematic and challenged in all the things. But I do not believe that Fauci went to work every day and said let me go help kill people and just lie and lie like these people do.
01:48:33
Speaker 4: That's in their administration right now.
01:48:35
Speaker 2: I mean, I wouldn't say I believe that. I believe that, you know, there was a play involved. I think when you look at the pharmaceutical companies, you know, and you talk about vaccinations, you know, people made billions of dollars and off ski tactics, right, And I think that there were a lot of different methods that could have been used other than that. I don't know about the social distancing, because I'm not really.
01:49:01
Speaker 3: Mad about to that. Yeah, because your mother was back from me, you didn't want nobody around, you know.
01:49:12
Speaker 2: So I don't know if I'm mad that they took precautions, you know, to separate, you know, especially when you you had a new virus that nobody knew exactly what was happening.
01:49:23
Speaker 3: So I used to wear his mask across his nose and the top of his lip.
01:49:28
Speaker 1: That was where your mask used to be on your nose.
01:49:31
Speaker 2: And because I was I wasn't with it. I wasn't really with it, you know. I did what I had to do throughout the time, but I was never with it. And I worked out, you know, we had our own little workout on Instagram. Shout out to the whole teenager to come out every day. I was every day, you know what I'm saying. And we had our workout and we made sure that we ate properly. We made sure that we had the right you know, nutrients in our bodies, and we did things that was going to make a healthy so that our immune system could fight against anybody. You know. But I just think when I'm looking at it, even though, like I said, I'm not the biggest Fauci fan, but I'm just looking like, how does he become the skategoat for everything, right, especially when we got administration right now that's literally telling us shit that doesn't make sense. And even in that time when when Trump was the president, because Trump was the president, when when it first happened and he was telling people literally to drink bleach.
01:50:27
Speaker 1: The bleach thing is bad. That's bad.
01:50:30
Speaker 3: He was thrown when he was throwing and people, and.
01:50:36
Speaker 1: That's terrible.
01:50:37
Speaker 3: But hopefully hopefully more people, I'm sure more people had did good sense than to listen to him. With some people, what is actually criminal and what we should be talking about, which has nothing to do with Fauci or Biden or anybody else. It is squarely on the Trump administration is the fact that they knew there was a virus and didn't tell anybody, Right, That's the real crime is in them having months in advance knowledge that a serious virus was moving around. Because if you remember, you just go back and check the record. It was like December. I'm sure it was December we found out about this virus. At least we were starting to hear about it in February, and then in March everything shuts down. But in December, I believe the first person in California look that up janis I believe it was a woman in California was the first person in the United States who tested positive, and then it was somebody else. I think it was two people in December, maybe one in December, one in January, and they knew it and didn't.
01:51:53
Speaker 1: Do anything to try to address it.
01:51:55
Speaker 3: And by the way, I am convinced that they know about stuff that's going on right now. I haven't told us, and I'm not saying that other administrations have not done the same, but I am saying that with a million people dead and December, I believe I remember hearing something, but let's just go with January. This was going on from then that they knew something was happening and that it was an outbreak.
01:52:20
Speaker 1: They knew it, and.
01:52:21
Speaker 3: They did not tell us anything until March, okay, or they didn't shut anything down until March, which I do believe that the shutdown was necessary. And the reason why I think it was necessary is because I know of entire families that died. See your position and where you and I had many knockdown, drag out fights and arguments around this whole being healthy, eating your vitamins and vegetables, or taking your vitamins and eating your vegetables and doing all of that.
01:52:50
Speaker 1: Is that the.
01:52:52
Speaker 3: Problem with that concept is if you were already pretty much healthy, you were already into vitamin and all of that.
01:53:00
Speaker 1: The way that we were.
01:53:03
Speaker 3: We're even healthier now than we were back then, but the way that we were at that time, and you already had the head start of being that way.
01:53:14
Speaker 1: It's easy to.
01:53:15
Speaker 3: Say, just shore up your immune system, make sure that you're taking your vitamins. But the virus was traveling rapidly with people who had never had vitamins, don't even.
01:53:26
Speaker 2: Have That's what I'm saying, and that's what I'm saying.
01:53:29
Speaker 1: There was obesity.
01:53:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I'm trying to say. And what I kept telling people, if you are in good health, if you do not have.
01:53:37
Speaker 1: Preexistence, you shouldn't have to take them.
01:53:38
Speaker 4: You shouldn't.
01:53:39
Speaker 2: You should be building up your immune system because our immune system is built to fight all viruses, and as long as it's inside the universe and it's moving around, you getting a little piece and your body is creating anybody's and that's what happens, and that's how we survived, you know. And I just didn't believe that we should be telling perfectly healthy people to put vaccines anybody that didn't know how their body was going to react to them.
01:54:03
Speaker 3: I never agreed with forcing people to take a vaccine.
01:54:06
Speaker 1: I never agree that. I never agree with it.
01:54:09
Speaker 3: But it also was the type of situation you have to pick your battles in this country. A lot of people I remember one young lady having a Holy town damn fit because she wanted us to take on the fight against the government and the COVID nineteen stuff and the vaccines, and she was pissed with us that we were not on that issue. Meanwhile, were dealing with police accountability.
01:54:38
Speaker 1: We're fighting for Breonna Taylor.
01:54:39
Speaker 3: Joe, we got all these other things going on, and she was pissed off that we would not get into that. And the thing is that there are people who have scientific knowledge and understanding who are better suited to become engaged over here when you got all this other stuff like we would ever have bought. Even though Breonna Taylor's family still has not received full justice, we still made it all the way to where people had to go before courts and take immunity and everything.
01:55:12
Speaker 1: And the truth is out there. We know the truth, and it was it was work.
01:55:17
Speaker 3: That wasn't just you know, And if we had been out there talking about were fighting against the vaccine, we would have never been able to complete that process, which is still not complete. But to get through that, because they would have they would have marginalized us, like they would have silenced our voices.
01:55:37
Speaker 1: We're already in enough fights as it damn.
01:55:40
Speaker 2: Is, and we were and we weren't knowledgeable enough to tell somebody that we just fighting.
01:55:44
Speaker 4: Against it, and we didn't even know if that wasn't.
01:55:47
Speaker 2: Exactly I just I was just going off common sense that I had and I wasn't. I wasn't advised to anybody what to do. I'm saying what I was doing for me, And if you believed in what I was doing, then come on, I'm not telling you. If you felt like you need to take a vaccine for you and that made you feel comfortable, fine, I'm just saying I wasn't doing it because I didn't believe that my body wasn't strong enough to fight off any virus that they put into the universe.
01:56:11
Speaker 4: Exactly.
01:56:12
Speaker 1: Well, there's that.
01:56:14
Speaker 2: That brings us to the end of another episode. Thank you for tuning in to the TMI podcast. We love you. Continue to support us, make us the number one podcasts in the world. Let us know what you like, what you don't like. Tell us about some topics you might want us to talk about. Tell us about guests you might want to see. We're gonna have some good guests coming up, so make sure that you tune in. I'm not gonna always be right. Tamik It de marries and I can always be wrong. We will both always and I mean always be authentic peaks.
01:56:42
Speaker 3: Listen to the TMI podcast on the Black Effect Network on iHeartRadio or anywhere podcasts are available, or catch
01:56:51
Speaker 2: The video version on YouTube at TMI show PC
