All right all right ladies and gentlemen welcome back to another great episode of speak to the mic the unapologetic uncensored unfiltered podcast speak to the mike i am your host marlon joseph and uh before i get started i want to make sure i put this disclaimer out
That we are in no way representatives for our organizations we’re not spokesmen for our organization speaking on behalf of our organizations but we are merely black men who are representatives in in terms of being members of our organization speaking from our point of view and perspective on the
Very issues that plague our black community today and so uh without further ado i want to go into i want to go into order from when our organizations were founded and thank you gentlemen all for being on this show at this time because we got some um some
Issues that we need to unpack as it pertains to our relevancy in the black community and the very community service initiatives that we’ve been putting forth uh for almost now going on 100 years with the exception of iowa to phi theta being one of the the last of the divine nine organizations that
Will you know soon uh turn 100 years uh in a few decades from now but nonetheless we have been around for uh collectively over 100 years and so we’re here to talk about the very relevancy that we still hold in the black community as it pertains to our community service initiatives
So uh without further ado let me introduce my panel for today uh johnny johnson is a member of alpha phi alpha fraternity incorporated uh my brother my frat brother my big frat brother i have a lot of respect for here kevin barnes aka kb just
As well as i am so uh thank you too for being on the show my brother i’ve known for almost 20 years timothy stallworth member of 580 sigma fraternity incorporated um good people yes sir um oh at least i’m sorry i went in the wrong order let me make sure i get that
Correct so two 1911’s here so avoid terrell who’s omega 5 who was founded on the tail end of 1911. so i appreciate appreciate you for being on the show as well i’ve misspoke on that behalf so excuse that they getting back to timothy saw work fire baby sigma
My boy dante who is a member of iodify theta uh again uh gentlemen thank you all for being on the show taking the time to you know talk about these very issues that we need to unpack and unravel so without further ado let’s get to it man so
I want to start with uh johnny i want to start with you man uh how much impact has your organization had on youth in a professional sense when it comes to leadership skills uh in your profession that’s a that’s a great question leadership skills i mean our organization is about leadership um
But before i do let me just formally introduce myself my name is johnny johnson uh from chicago illinois i went to college at shaw university the oldest hbcu in the south most people have never even heard of shaw university unless you went to hbcu and um
Uh the chapter is beta rho chapter of alpha phi alpha i actually became a brother of alpha phi alpha through zylam the chapter uh which is here in chicago it’s actually one of the largest if not the largest chapters in alpha phi alpha fraternity incorporated and our organization was founded
On tuesday december 4th 1906 um on a cold day in ithaca new york at cornell university seven men uh who in their own right were leaders within the within their own own mind got together and formed an organization of what we now know is alpha phi alpha fraternity incorporated and so just to
Answer your question directly it’s all about leadership and it’s all about affecting our youth it doesn’t matter what organization that you’re a part of if you’re a black man living in the united states of america it’s all about helping the next generation that’s coming behind us do better and
Have more opportunities more resources and more ways to do things that they don’t know about just yet so this is how i live my life this is a motto that i live by and i’ve been doing this since i was a kid there’s three people that you should always have in your life
Number one it should be your mentor somebody that’s older than you somebody has been been through things that you may be going through at some point in your life and they can give you things to help you avoid you know pitfalls and landmines if you will
And be in a position to structure your life because you got somebody that’s that’s that you’re following by their example second person is somebody that’s your own age or somebody that you identify with that you can actually go through the battles of life with good bad and indifferent generally somebody that’s
The same age generally same demographic maybe you grew up with them or you came in contact with them in college and you’re all the best buds that type of scenario and then going into your question the third person or the third type of person that we should want to have around us is
Somebody that we are mentoring the same way our mentor mentored us talking about leadership and you talking about the young people my particular fraternity alpha fraternity incorporated we have something that we do every first first saturday in november called project alpha right it doesn’t matter where you are in
The country or in the world for that matter because we are our international organization but every first saturday in november even in the mr covet we take young men generally speaking between the ages of 12 and 18 and we get them in one location and we talk to thing talk to them about
Men things how to respect yourself as a man and others around you absolutely how to make sure you’re doing what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it as far as discipline is concerned in schools how to respect women right because we live in a world everything is social media driven
One wrong text message or one dm to the wrong person in the wrong way could turn chaotic so how do you conduct yourself as a young man in that capacity right sex education what’s an std right how to deal with law enforcement which is i know probably one of the questions that you
Have brother on this particular podcast how do you deal with law enforcement a lot of my direct brothers especially here in chicago they probably make up a good portion of the chicago police department so you have to conduct yourself when you come in contact with a with a law enforcement officer
Whether you’re in chicago anywhere else in the country there’s certain things that you do there’s certain things that you don’t do and us teaching these young men what to do and what not to do in certain situations can ultimately make or break their life so that’s some of the things that we do
From an organizational standpoint and i’m sure these other gentlemen have great things that they do within their community and with their within their organization that can help all of us become one because it doesn’t matter the letters that we’re wearing it’s all about what it is that we do
Regardless of the fact and that’s why i’m glad that you got it i’m proud to be here on this saturday afternoon yeah man absolutely you know what to to kind of circle back and piggyback off what you said about that right so i’ve always told people who are non-greek that we
Of the divine nine we are different branches on the same tree right so we obviously stand for brotherhood or sisterhood for the sororities and community service initiatives things like that so we’re all coming from different perspectives and objectives when in regards to the way we direct our attention to our black community right
But nonetheless the end result is for the betterment of our black community because our black regular organizations were founded on the principles that we if we don’t guide us nobody else is going to have us right so those those types of things resonate with me in such a way that i do
Appreciate whenever we get together and talk about these different issues that we are taking more initiatives and heed to when it comes to service in our black community so johnny again i appreciate you for for speaking on that uh kb so for for you what what in what way has kappa upside actually
You know influence you or impact your life in such a way professionally when it comes to the very leadership skills that you learn you know throughout this organization absolutely first of all thank you for having me brother and uh let me introduce myself as well uh my name is kevin barnes
Uh from a small town mississippi in the delta rovio mississippi uh plays at jackson state university which is a delta delta chapter fall 93 and uh so for me you know how i even got interested in the fraternity life you know i had an older uncle
At the time in the the 80s who was attending mississippi valley state university and you know he would take me and my brothers you know to visit the campus hang out with him and you know he would take us to greek shows and and when you’re little you know you
Don’t really know what what the greeks are but you know there was just something about the capitals that sparked me i don’t know what it was it was just kind of canes and you know what they were saying and then it’s a greek show it was
So much hype around with the smoke and all this and you’re talking like this is 8384 right so now that i see that these gentlemen are kappas right now you go back to your community and then i see my principal with the same tag on this car cause you know when
You’re in the fifth sixth grade i never paid attention to the cap attack until now i’ve seen these guys so now i found out okay my principal is a capper right one of my you know teachers is a kappa so now it’s like okay these guys i’ve kind of
Looked up to i find out they’re in this fraternity right but i’m still young so i don’t really know the whole picture right but you know uh there were some brothers in the area who came and were talking to us about kapolei and you know what it was about
And i just remember like okay you know i’ve heard of this cap of things so now they’re talking about you know bringing young men into catholics so that was my introduction into the fraternity right joining kappa league at a young age and those guys man who
Were talking to us man they were just such extreme gentlemen man and the way they carried themselves and what they talked about and the one thing that they impressed upon us was they didn’t care that we went to college to be captains they just wanted us to go to college
Absolutely we get better people right so they never stress we need you to be capitalists right that’s why you’re in this right they were like this is what we do as capital men and you’re in cavalie but they weren’t saying okay all bets are off if you never become a
Capital they never stressed that right so they were just teaching us about you know being respectful and young gentlemen and you know how to just even tie a tie and things like that and you know not sagging your pants you know yes sir no certain things like that right so
You know then you start to learn about the whole of what capital was about right you know training for leadership so that’s what these men were doing right and they were like you know you just don’t wake up one day and become a leader right someone has to
Train you someone has to guide you and like the brother from alpha phi alpha said he was like okay you know these are the first men that you seek to be your mentors now right because you know now they’re training us on what we should do how we should carry ourselves right now
Of course when i got to jackson state you know i wanted to be a kappa and i was able to feel my dream but you know i always remember that training for for leadership right and you know it’s as men you know when we get to college
You know the first thing we don’t really look for we’re not looking at like hey let’s see what these guys are doing community service wise they’re in colleges kind of you know the parties and you know how the gentleman oh absolutely right but you do look at what they’re doing
As well right so those you know when it all comes together right it was important that i did see that right because you do judge the college fraternity by what you’ve already seen by your teachers and your principals and you know members of your family right so you do
Judge being in college by these guys and luckily these men at jackson state you know look the same way represented the same mission talk the same way so uh so yeah man i was like you know me it was early you know learned about you know kappa league and that leadership early in
And able to um you know as soon as i graduated from jackson state and i moved you know to atlanta the first thing i seeked out man you know brothers used to say you know whatever city you land in after school man you definitely want to seek out
The alumni chat and a lot of times you know brothers don’t tell us that you know they don’t tell us hey soon you get somewhere you need to find an alumni chapter because these are how you connect with brothers these brothers could save your life for these brothers to help you in
In tough times right so if i moved to georgia you know that’s the first thing i i you know hooked up with was uh you know the stone mountain alumni chapter man and i’ve been with these guys 20 25 years plus now man you know just some of the things we do
Is you know the capitol league the meeting with young men you know the the college tours these things are important man because you know for a lot of these kids man if it wasn’t for us they would never visit a college campus in the seventh grade or in eighth grade
But you know one thing we instilled in it is like you gotta have grades right we don’t just accept anybody right so we’re letting them know at an early age you need that 3.0 right and then you might have a kid one year he has a 2.7
And the next year he gets up to that 3.0 because he now sees that these guys are walking around within the kappa league jackets on they’re carrying themselves differently you know that they got the haircuts you know they you know their swag is different so we are showing them early
That it’s important to carry yourself in a certain way but again that’s training for leadership right we don’t just want them walking around with the khakis on and thinking they’re cool right gotta keep these grades together you know we’re checking in with them what are we asking their parents how
They’re doing at home you know and you know even when when things are tough man you know we putting you know a couple dollars in their pocket right so we want to show them that hey man we got you back you know this is what we do not only as
Fraternity men just as black men period right like we’re you know you’re part of a community right so yeah all of that that i learned in the 80s man from training the leadership you know i still apply that now man so you know it’s very important that we keep that going
And again the reality is you can have a hundred thousand members right it’s always gonna be the 80 20 rule right so we know and that’s one you know issue we may discuss later like how can we get more members to be involved right and we can all speak to this from college
Now you know if you want a college campus and it was 30 brothers in your chapter it’s probably 10 that’s really going to do the majority of the heavy lifting right well that’s the same way on the alumni level man it’s you know we 70 brothers deep but 25 are gonna do the
Heavy lifting right so that’s definitely something you know we need to work on as a community as attorney members um you know just to you know get brothers more in line with you know just being you know more uh you know volunteering and giving back to the community so
Yeah absolutely and you know what and representation matters right so absolutely to even speak on briefly about how these young men obviously see us as examples right also what what fraternity that you’re in we obviously are black men in a certain class or the certain representational
You know stance that we’re looked at as examples for them and so because we had those examples set for us before we got to this place it’s only right that we exemplify the very things in the very premise that our organizations stand for and then we become that very example to them to
Help inspire them and to possibly aspire to be a part of the organizations or even just aspire them to want to go to college in general because the more education that you have as a black man or a woman the more dangerous you are in in the most positive way and so absolutely
That influence does definitely matter um terrell so i mean obviously this particular question it was primarily in regards to how we basically convey our leadership skills that we learn in our fraternities as it pertains to our own profession so terrell for you what in what way would you say your organization helped
Impact your life personally when it comes to the leadership skills that you’ve learned from your organization and how were you able to convey that to your profession your professional life well um for me it was just uh like as soon as i joined the fraternity like we didn’t have that many people in
Our chapter so everybody pretty much got a role instantly you know what i mean like so you went from being pledging and then now you’re uh vice bossless or whatever you know what i mean so it instantly puts you in a place where you have to work or have to
Learn how to get stuff done and as i um like i crossed my sophomore year so by the time i got to my last year at russ i was the boss list you know what i mean um president mphc so basically they put me in the position to be
Uh the president of nphc and then after i graduated um like all of my jobs were through the connections of my fraternity so where i’m working now i’m in management and i basically use those same skills uh that i learned like being a sophomore having to call different people having to email up
To different district reps uh basically just uh i feel like for me it was just more uh leadership through communication you know i um learned how to communicate effectively through different uh tiers of management learn how to um be assertive with what i needed learn how to delegate tasks to people
Um and i feel like that was the most important part the delegating of tasks because if you don’t do that you just essentially working harder than everybody that’s working for you you know what i mean so uh that’s basically for me that’s what i got out of it um
Uh basically lead by example always like uh like johnny said keep a mentor and uh somebody that you’re mentoring um it was a young man and my job uh was a sigma i got him promoted within like six months of being there i just told him that
Like i just told him what he did and he did exactly what i told him and look he got promoted after that so pretty much like i just try to lead by example build bridges and just keep it moving yeah and those very things and those very characteristics is what makes a
True leader you know it separates a good leader from a great one right so in order to lead you have to first follow and and following you’re you’re you become a student the of the life or of that organization or of that person who’s in that organization that’s teaching you so
And in life you can never stop learning right so change is something that i talked about before in one of my other episodes about how inevitable it is and how it’s necessary in most cases so if you’re not if you’re not growing as a person as a follower as a leader
Then just like a plant if you don’t grow you’re dead that’s basically what that means right so we we can never get to a place where we’re content with what we already are as far as what we already know versus the amount of information addition to that that we need to be learning
So that we can pass it along and become that very leader that you know by us become leaders in that in our own right so yeah i appreciate it from that perspective uh tim um for you i wanna in fact this uh in that way as well so what ways would
You say your organization has impacted your life from a leadership standpoint when it comes to your profession uh well it kind of gave me a set foundation when i first you know hit the ground running i was like terrell you know once as soon as
I i crossed over it was hey we got to hit the ground and we got a roll uh there’s a motto that i live by i live my entire life but it’s everything that i do i stand on it uh my grandfather made sense to me a long time ago man he said
Son you can either work or you can whine but you can’t do both absolutely you know and then when i you know i first heard it it didn’t make sense to me i said what you mean man i’m working but i can we’re definitely whine about
What’s going on right now he said no you can’t because if you’re whining you’re not working on changing what you’re whining about yeah so uh i mean i i definitely live every day like that moving forward and so once i hit the ground running and i crossed man it was okay look you
Have a job this is your position this is what you need to do and uh moving from that i was like terrell you know i went from that to being the president of the band atlanta council while i was there i was the president of the choir
Uh sergeant-at-arms for the end of naacp but uh me stepping into that role once i first hit the ground running it was like look man you have to know how to run things and you have to understand that see everybody else with the school and their first you know their their
First insight or anything on the group was on the fraternity was hey man we’re gonna throw this party everything was gonna be live no no no no no no for me it was hey look 587 fraternity incorporated is a business that’s the reason why you have incorporated on it it’s a
Business so you need to understand that you need to take care of the business before you can understand that you could get time to play so uh it definitely impacted me like that man uh everybody knows i mean you you’ve been with me for long enough to know that hey
Look we’re gonna take care of this business first and then you know i’m saying we’re going to shoot the breeze we can do whatever it is that we want to do so it definitely uh taught me man you you can’t do anything without doing the work first
For sure for sure and um i just i take that man with me every day you know when i come to work you know it’s light what i do i’m a trainer i’m a trainer out there at amazon i train people how to drive the hospital
Trucks on the yard i train them how to run the entire yard hey look man i don’t mind making it fun but you have to remember this is your job absolutely you know so uh it’s definitely that’s what it that’s what i got out of it man that’s what it gave me
For sure for sure yeah and i appreciate that too man because especially the points you made about change and how either you’re going either you’re going to adapt to change or you’re going to get left and left behind man because these are constantly evolving and you have to be able to adapt to
To the times right so you think about it from a holistic standpoint each and every one of our founders during that time in their lives when these organizations were founded and just started right they they had to adapt to that very moment in that very time that they actually
Started these organizations the very premise of what we’ve been doing all this time in terms of fighting for social justice fighting during the civil rights movement these are some of the very pivotal fights that we’re still fighting today but in in certain different instances right so
To be a leader you have to fully understand what what you’re leading and who you’re leading because if the people around you that you are leading don’t trust you to do the right thing and to be the leader then you’re not leading you’re not a true leader when it comes
To the very characteristics or fabric that it takes to be a great leader and so and being a great leader consists of you having to listen to those that you are leading because you can’t just be a person that’s always dictating what someone does and don’t do
But you’re not willing to listen and then embrace the very idea of what needs to happen in order for that leadership to take place so yeah i do appreciate that uh dante from your perspective man what um what would you say that you have uh you
Have taken in terms of uh the leadership skills that you have obviously have learned um while being a part of your organization and how have you been able to apply that leadership skills to your professional life first i want to say uh good afternoon fellas nice chatting with y’all today sorry for
My tidiness but i thought it was five o’clock chicago town forgot marley actually georgia yeah eastern central time because i know that we are our you know different so yeah yeah but you know growing up in chicago you know growing up it’s a it’s kind of like a
Bubble known from the south side of chicago so i never really expected to even go to college let alone pledge a fraternity you know they didn’t come to cvs you know what i’m saying showing love and stuff like that so i never knew that it was even a fraternity thing out
There so i actually got to college so all this is kind of new to me but you know my fraternity you know we the last the last or the last to get in the divine now so we have to work that much harder you know than everybody else
To get it out the mud so you know i was pledged by older cats you know on their way out so when i cross i hit the ground and running i’m doing everything step shows business meeting comedy shows paperwork all that stuff so they actually prepared
Me for all that plus they actually was preparing me for life absolutely so i kind of took what they gave me the game and trying to transfer over into you know life after college so i work in the commercial real estate industry and i’m like probably one of the only black people
There so they they kind of managed me of how to transition over that to child you know fit in you know with that side over there and try to bring it back and tell other people like you look you go to college college really ain’t for everybody
No it’s like it’s it’s a good learning curve even though if you don’t graduate from college like it is actually a good learning curve to transfer into the other life because i didn’t know anything coming out of high school going to college like i didn’t know how to file
Taxes yep same thing you know how to fill out wrong paperwork correctly like these brothers taught me like everything how to do everything correctly like and they and i love them brothers for that they they set me up for life after college so it definitely was a big
Big impact in my life and how i turned out right now yeah and you know what to that point i think we can all share that very sentiment in regards to what we’ve been able to take from our organizations and apply it to our own professions right so
Some of us may be in leadership roles in our own uh everyday jobs and we took the very things that we learned in our organizations and applied it to that very uh profession and so and it’s gotten us you know this far and possibly get us even further than that
The more consistent we stay on on top of it so again i do appreciate it you know that you guys would you know share that some of that insight from your standpoints in regards to that um i want to circle to i want to get to
The next question that i have because i think this is a very important one especially given the times we’re living in right now where my in my previous episode when i talked to the sororities i talked about the very three fights that we as african americans in general have been fighting for
Hundreds of years now we’ve been fighting for the ability to be free fighting for the ability to be human and fighting for the ability to be black and these same three fights we’re still fighting today and so to transition to the next question johnny i want to start with you
Uh based on the level of impact that most of that all of our fraternities have had in the past when it came to the civil rights movement you know fighting against jim crow and just the the huge advocacy that we put that role that we play
In those times convey that to today with black lives matter with uh to a certain degree with the metoo movement obviously we men are becoming much more vocal about setting up for our black women protecting our black women with the understanding that black women have been the most disregarded and disrespected
Of them all and so us standing up for them in in their position and let them know hey we’re fighting this fight with you all help me understand how different or similar are we today versus 50 60 years ago when it came to the civil rights movement
Great question um i think this is a question that if anybody’s having real conversations whether it be on social media whether it be in person just on the phone et cetera obviously when this cover 19 corona buyers pandemic still but people are kind of moving kind of however they move
But this is the type of question that people need to talk more about if they’re not talking about it already which is obviously one of the reasons why you just brought it up because a lot of times and i’m just being direct a lot of times we talk about everything
Else under the sun but the main issues at hand that can help us get from where we are to where we’re trying to go as a collective unit organism community etc so when we talk in civil rights movement when we talk in you know a lot of older times if you will the
The guy the gentleman that come to my mind obviously martin luther king uh was very very famous alpha man we’re talking third good marshall you know he was an alpha man as well and i mean i could name a whole bunch of and i’m sure you all can too in your respective organizations
But it’s kind of mirroring the the main difference is now as opposed to 50 60 70 years ago we’re in the the what i call the microwave age quick fast in a hurry we can we can think about some hey man what should i eat for dinner
And then we do it we go right to this device or we got an iphone or we go right on our tablet so our computer is our laptop we type in a recipe instant youtube video pop up yep so to wrap up what i’m basically saying and then continuing on with the
Actual question itself now any information that we want we can we can get it if we know what type of information that we’re looking for so when you talk in you know the 40s 50s 60s you know when the baby boomers were born and you know these 70 million new
Babies was born you know back and our parents and grandparents aged depending on how old we are they didn’t have any they didn’t have access to direct information the way we do now absolutely but yet to your question some of the things that were going on then you know
I held my son out a couple of weeks ago and he had an assignment and he chose the greensboro sit-ins which happened in greensboro north carolina you know they were sitting in because of you know everything that was going on with the government and the segregation and you had you know
People that looked like us on this podcast sitting in at war wars all they just wanted was fair service it doesn’t matter if i’m black and you white or if i’m asian and you hispanic if i’m coming into your establishment i just want to be serviced
Regardless of christ you know my race my creed my ethnicity et cetera so nowadays you’re talking black lives matter and all of these other things that’s going on with the you know with the george george floyd case you know they just settled 27 million dollars a day or two ago
I’m really this is in my opinion but i hope that they don’t think that just because they settled out of court for 27 million that we don’t want convictions eric that derek shoving is not going to get convicted of one or more you know crimes if you will absolutely i don’t
Want that to be we don’t we should never intertwine those two because money doesn’t doesn’t buy you know the things that we’re ultimately trying to do which is justice yep brianna taylor if not today or yesterday was the day she got killed last year yup sure was it was yesterday
Like you know how do you just go into somebody’s house with a no knock warrant and just kill somebody and then you know you kind of sweep it under the road like oh we sorry we didn’t mean to do that but you took somebody’s life though
So just to wrap it up and just be out of respect of the time a lot of stuff that’s going on now is a mirror of what went on 30 40 50 60 years ago but now we have the opportunity with the information that we have at our fingertips and our collective unity
To just improve and evolve as a people because we got it at the end of the day we got to get out of our own way right so gentlemen like martin luther king and thurgood marshall and a whole bunch of other alpha men that came before me
You know i’m standing on their shoulders obviously they may not be physically here in our presence yeah but at the end of the day if it wasn’t for them there’s no johnny johnson alpha phi elf attorney incorporated yep hey you know and johnny even to that point right so
We’re standing on the backs of all these black men who sacrificed their livelihood lives overall when it came down to fighting for our rights and fighting for what was right right so each and every one of us have you know just profound figures in our organizations who who were out there
On the front lines out there marching and protesting with dr king with ralph david abernathy with uh jesse jackson uh al sharpton um uh john lewis uh to say the least right so we each have those members and representation matter during that time just like it does now but to your point
We do have more access to information so the the whole idea of being ignorant is no longer is a damn excuse you you can’t afford to be ignorant in a time like this where there’s so much accessibility to information that you can it’s right there within your fingertips
You have no excuse now to not know and so for me personally even thinking about the george floyd case and uh and many of these other cases that have come out now with this pen this pandemic has been so kind of a double-edged sword if you think about it because now everyone has
Been forced to be at home and now they have to see this [ __ ] in real time so white people who have been pretty much dismissing the very issues that we’ve been crying about and hollering about saying that we’ve been going through now it’s oh my god i didn’t know you
Were going through this what the [ __ ] took you so long even seeing this we’ve been telling you this for years you thought we were just exaggerating this like you thought we were making this up so now you have no choice but to sit in this and see this for your own two
Eyes and say no this is this is just wrong and it’s not enough to say that you’re anti-racist now if you’re not putting your white privileged power and position in jeopardy to make it an equal playing field for us all we don’t want your damn sympathy we
Don’t we don’t need it we don’t appreciate it we don’t welcome it you’re not willing to put forth the effort to make it so that we all equal don’t tell me uh you know i’m just i’m so heartbroken over what’s going on you ain’t more damn heartbroken over than we
Are so guess what if you’re gonna put your privilege your white privilege on the line to make so that we have an equal playing field and guess what we’ll we’ll appreciate your support and effort to fighting against the uh discrimination and social injustice in in this world and in this country and
And now i mean obviously with the recent events that happened to meghan markle and prince uh prince harry out there in the uk listen racism is not just conditioned to the u.s we know that the the whole idea of the british colony okay they originated colonization they colonized the entire damn continent
Of africa with the exception of one country which i found very fascinating to know this a few years ago i read ethiopia was the only damn country in africa that wasn’t colonized um that that that alone just blew my mind and knowing that i am wishing that all the other
Surrounding countries had took on that same idea and premise saying well listen you own odd turf but uh yeah we appreciate you being here but y’all must need to go let me go right now because um we’re not having this versus the other ones we were too receptive
To having these european colonists come on our turf come on our land and say hey man listen we’re on the same page here we’re friends here we we can work together all the while you’re plotting and we’re plotting to steal from us take take our people from us you didn’t take slaves
You took black doctors lawyers uh judges uh dentists business owners you took them and made them slaves we wanted slaves to begin with so you took us you basically bribed us you basically sweet talk to us you were basically doing what a used car salesman does right so
He tells you that this car he ain’t too bad it got he got some miles on it but you ain’t gonna need no tuning up no time soon and as soon as you drive off the damn lot it breaks down it basically sold you a damn limit and from that standpoint that’s
That’s exactly what happened with them coming over to our land doing the very things they’ve done but i say that to say this racism hasn’t been conditioned to just our country it’s been worldwide racist experiences have happened everywhere and so to think about how our organizations were started on the premise that again
Because you didn’t accept us we got our own but then even starting our own was a damn problem for you too almost to almost to a point where they felt like it was for segregation on our end no you forced us to have to segregate on
Our end and have our own and the older i get the more i realized integration was probably the worst mistake we could have made because we were better off having our own [ __ ] then when we didn’t when we had our own [ __ ] you didn’t like it when we didn’t
And we asked to be a part of yours you didn’t like that either so which one is it because you can’t have both okay so from this marlin let me let me just interject real quick at the very end of the day what you just said is very very important integration versus segregation
At the end of the day it’s all about money right however you want to slice it right and i don’t mean money like the paper dollar because we know it ain’t really worth much anyway but the the utilization of money and a collective effort amongst all the
People that look like us on this podcast obviously hundreds of millions of other people that look like us if we can get out of our own way and think with our minds and not our pride situation and know that it’s a life bigger than just us in a physical form
We could we could literally change the way a lot of people do things because in our communities this 1400 stimulus check is coming at some point right depending on if you filed your taxes right the money is spent already before they deposit it into your account or give you a debit card
Or cut you a check but guess what that money is probably not going to be spent with people that look like us on this webinar this podcast is going to be spent with other people so that’s our problem and one of my business mentors taught me about six years ago
Knowledge of the problem is the key to the solution so if we know that we have a problem we know that we have an issue that’s the first level of it now okay we know we get identified the problem how do we move forward to be in a position to solve it
Right it’s all about controlling the money and controlling what we do with our money like why is it that we live in a neighborhood was all of us generally speaking of course because everybody lives in different territories across the country but i’m speaking for me i live in chicago i live
You know on the south side of chicago like like the gentleman stated but arabs own the convenience store right and they talk to not me but they talk to other people any type of way yep but what i tell people when they kind of laugh at me when i say it
I’m literally in the same physical location as them i said look do you know if we boycott this location for two months they will be out of business and then we can pool our resources and open this joint right back up and it’ll be people that look like us working in here
Absolutely man they look like me they laugh like now you’re playing yeah yeah that’s saying man being monotonic man we we have to understand that collectively if we’re we’re together we’re much more dangerous in the most positive way together than we are separate right so staying consistently unified is something that
We have to do much more of than what we have done we can’t do it in just in spurs right we got to do this consistently this can’t be when it’s just convenient for one or two of us every last one of us has a part to
Play in this and part of the premise of me even starting this podcast is to provide information that people can take from these episodes and say okay let me apply this to the to the inner circle of my friends and family that i have and let’s understand that we each have a
Part to play in this and if every last one of us is not doing our part then guess what we’re doing a disservice to ourselves into our own communities so we can’t afford to do that it’s funny johnny that you bring it up because i’m obviously i dedicate each month to a specific
Topic so i actually have a money talks uh month uh coming up in a couple of months where i’m going to be discussing you know uh financial uh empowerment and economic just economic uh stability and things of that nature talking about real estate talking about um uh different things that we can uh
Investment and stocks and things like that too so i’ll be talking to experts in these areas throughout every every month for every episode in regards to these very things because i’m of the mindset that i don’t have all the answers but i’m willing to talk to everyone who were in these professions
In these organizations who can come together collect collectively to make a difference and making sure that we all understand what our parts and roles are moving forward so we can better help assist our black community so i got a question for john i know you live in chicago but i got a question
Why do you think that black people don’t trust other black people to pour their resources together to bob back into the community honestly speaking it’s it has a lot to do with the way we’ve been programmed right yeah so programming is everything right so think about it now like i got a
12 year old son if it’s not video games if it’s not social media unless he going outside to play and interact with other kids his age he has he has really no interest in it and that’s him he’s his own young man obviously i’m trying to instill in him
Certain values and things that i know that he should have but why am i saying that those are programming mechanisms yeah so television is programming that’s why they call it television programming so why am i why am i saying that will you just ask that question
It has a lot to do with the way we’ve been programmed so a lot of times what i do i’m in the financial industry so hopefully brother i would like to come back and have that conversation at another absolutely absolutely from a financial standpoint
What i do on a day in and day out base like prime example right before i got on this this podcast i was in another webinar because i help students across the country whether they’re high school students college students or adult students looking to get post-secondary education
I showed them how to get endowment funds right money that doesn’t have to be paid back but that come directly from the college of university that’s financial education right so when it comes to being programmed we have to be deprogrammed and i’m speaking in general but to the masses we have to be
Deprogrammed for how we was taught and then we have to be reprogrammed a certain type of way so we can start thinking about what you just said why can’t we live in a neighborhood and pool our resources and have convenience stores in that neighborhood beauty supply shops in that neighborhood
Restaurants in that neighborhood you know anything park districts the whole nine yards right banks do you think that’s a household sorry do you think that’s a household issue or like a a educational issue like do for schools and stuff like that the schools we go to well i think it’s actually the
Combination of both yeah yeah it is a combination of i wanted to say that real quick so obviously it starts at home everything starts at home first right so the the lack of education and in in the enlightenment of financial stability right not to go too far into
This conversation because this is a different topic that we are obviously deviating from the the topic that’s at hand but i want to just touch slightly on this subject while we’re on here so obviously being able to like he said the program the very things that we have already learned
We need to unlearn those things and now we need to relearn the very things that’s more beneficial to our uh to the betterment of our community versus the very things that’s been put in our minds with this whole misconception about the american dream and all those other also the crap that’s been
Fed to us for far too long right so now we’ve been feeding into that very propaganda that this is what works for us when in our actuality this was never designed for us to begin with so the idea that black people oftentimes go broke trying to look rich that’s problematic right so
We’re spending money that we don’t have on [ __ ] we don’t need right so we and we need to stop doing that so that is something that’s taught early on at home and then even when you leave home now you gotta even as an adult because now we can’t
Get to a point and say now well i never knew this okay you never knew that in the past there is no room for error now there is no excuse for not knowing today because there’s so many different avenues and bits of information that’s out there and people who are in
These professions who can talk to you specifically about the very things that you need to be doing more of again that speaks to the very unification tactic that we need to be more more conscious of when it comes to doing things together versus saying well i’ma learn it and then you know
I applied to my inner circle of people but you’re not willing to share that information and now and one thing i used to talk to my uncle about and i always always tell him well he even told him this in the very last conversation i had with him before he passed away was
Knowledge is not power applied knowledge is though so if you know something and you don’t apply it how in the hell can you say you know it all right you have to apply it and so that’s wonderful yeah very much so and here’s the thing about ignoring right so
Ignorance there’s two meanings for the word ignorant it means to not know something at all and it means to know and not give a damn we choose the latter entirely too many damn times now and i’m holding us accountable for that because of the fact that we have so much potential to unveil
And unpack that it’s going to take all of us to do that no one person or no 10 people or no one organization can do that it’s going to take all of us to do that and if we don’t understand what our obligations are and our part is
As black people we’re going to always be on this [ __ ] treadmill running and walking but ain’t getting no damn where so we have to stop that at its core and it starts at home so before we go even even delving into that conversation even further
I want to i want to get back to what we were talking about as it pertains to this conversation so with this topic kb only i want to follow follow this up with you um so given the impact that our organizations have have influenced and had during the civil rights movement what
Impact would you say that our organizations hold our fraternities in particular whole today with black lives matter and just all the different causes that’s similar to the civil rights movement and fighting against jim crow what would you say that because you’re the older guy you’re the oldest person on the call so
I want to not just in the fraternity but just in life in general so much more of a perspective to talk about but from that generation of uh uh of fighters who have fought the good fight all these years right right so i’ll say you know one of the biggest differences was
I think back then no one cared that someone was greek right because the community just was sticking together right so for example like the small town i grew up in i grew down i grew up down the street from fannie lou hamer which you know we all probably heard of but
You know great civil rights activists you know created the saying i’m sick and tired of being sick and tired right but growing up down the street from fannie lou hamer and seeing her working with my grandmother and you know she started the first head start program in our town
And you know we were just glad to go to this this little head start and you know then you know years later after she passed in 1977 we found out she was honorary member of delta signal data right i didn’t think anybody knew that or cared right
They just respected her for what she did the crime you know the time she put in right so when jesse jackson another example when he ran from president the first time in 1984 it was of course the second time in 1988 he came through the mississippi delta right so i remember him
You know giving like me and another buddy like 50 to pass out flyers right and we were just so happy and we was like oh you know this guy’s running for president we didn’t really know what that meant yeah but then years later when you’re older you found out
He’s a member of a mega sci-fi we didn’t know that and i don’t even think the community cared they just were behind him because he was right so my point was you know if you if you look at that famous photo that’s out there you know right before
Martin gets killed in the lorraine hotel you know where you got jesse and and you know brother ralph albernathy and my one of my favorite people to wear a jose williams man i met him i love hosea man nobody cared that those guys were kappa alphas omegas and sigmas right
Because the work they did was probably for a lot of people who probably had second grade education nothing about college or canada back then people just just united together because of what they were going through and and the fight for justice right now you can pick up a phone man and just text
You know somebody in groups because there’s so many groups now and and you know sorority fraternity groups and especially here in atlanta man you can have 5 000 greeks meet at on martin luther king boulevard monday morning and you know if you know i get in trouble i know that keisha
Lance bottoms is a delta my wife doesn’t know she can make a call to her and be like hey you know i need this or that or you know it’s the access down is just easier right i mean you know um speaking of the george floyd man those two gentlemen who uh
Represented you know the family those are my chapter brothers in stone mountain i made one of those guys chris stewart is my guy justin you know miller i pledged him man so if something happened to me man these are my chapter brother we’ll see them in
A few days when they get back right so you know there’s people out in the world just by looking at these guys that just were glad that they represented family in yeah you know the 27 million isn’t gonna bring them back but now man you know i know these people
Back then man you know you couldn’t just reach martin luther king like that it’s just you know some people just heard of this guy they would see some of you know his sermons and but they were so moved by what he was doing in the community
Yeah most people didn’t know he was an alpha you know most people still to this day people think he plays their morehouse i don’t know he became an alpha at austin so it’s like you know now the information is there and we can do more and you know we can
Team up with black lives matter and we can you know team up with anybody else that’s doing the same work as us right but back then i think it was more of just unification of justice man for voting rights right so i remember one of the craziest scenes man i had
Ever seen in my small town right so as i said you got fannie lou hamer who lived down the street the guy who killed emmett till lived on across town right yep so i remember us being told don’t go to this man’s store you know but our family member never told us
Why they was like don’t ever patronize this guy right but when you were a kid we would still go on this story and i remember this guy calling us to know he would tell us hurry up and get your candy get out of here little [ __ ] we was like
What is [ __ ] like you know why he’s talking to us like this right yeah then later found out when we older man you know like 14 15 you know they started telling you a story of emmett till right and emmett till was killed like five minutes five miles from where i lived
Right so we would go visit where he was found as a school project right and this stuff was eerie man you know and my wife was from chicago right so you know being that it was from chicago people from chicago only heard about what happened to him
Right so my wife when we started dating i actually showed her where emmitt was killed she was like damn you grew up you know and of course i didn’t grow up with him in 1955 but i could show her where he was was murdered in
And you know like i knew the man who killed him him and his brother and you know at 14 15 man you know we tried to burn this man’s store down it was like this is our our justice for him right but this was this was heavy man that i was in this
Small town but you know they have dynamics you know fannie lou hamer and you know this guy roy bryant killed in the teal man but back then man nobody cared about all this greek stuff like that right it would be cool that you find out somebody was greek right but back then
Man it was just unifying for justice man getting our people together and the sad part is man so many of us now we have so many more brothers and sisters that are free that are educated they have more knowledge man you know we do a lot you know but
There’s so much more we could do uh in terms of unifying right uh we still have some some hurdles to get over when it comes to how we review ourselves of fraternities and sororities and you know people still got issues with certain certain people or whatever so
I just think you know the difference now and then was just really the access right how we felt about each other now it’s just it’s everybody’s greek and it’s cool and you can meet somewhere we marched and everybody got on the cool paraphernalia but i just think back then man it was
Just really ground roots you know fighting for justice and marching man for a cause because most of the people who were marching back then man probably weren’t even in college you know what i’m telling you there were margins i was bigger than them right so it was just bigger than them absolutely
Right so i don’t even think people cared about you know where you were from and you know what what level of education you had back then you know when you were called to lead you led right you know and it’s sort of like now that’s what i tell my young brothers in
Jackson state whether you want to be a role model or not once you become a member of a fraternity that’s any organization man you you’re a role model you’re a leader yeah you’re not here to a different standard whatever you do you represent us they’re not gonna say
Mike johnson slap the girl on campus they’re gonna be like yo the loops flaps just chick you heard the news with the chick over there like wait it’s the whole organization and young boys don’t really get that i tell them like hey whatever you do man you know
You represent us as a whole now you are a role model or you want to be in a nightmare you you have to be a leader right so um so yeah that’s kind of where i look at it from man it’s just um now it’s just more access to knowledge and
We have way more leaders now back then you know i think you know and again a lot of people back there as my grandmother would say it was just afraid man because you could die like now we we we’re more afraid of the police right like you know as black men
But we don’t worry about every day of just dying in general right like we’re not worried about someone coming to burn our home there right back then man you could just get your home burned or killed for trying to vote you know somebody found out you were trying to
Vote you know you could get fired from your job right so there was still some some hesitancy to do i really want to roll with freddie luther because you know fanny had to fight the good fight she didn’t have everybody rolling with her right they were still afraid you know i mean they
Burned her home down they beat her in jail it was a lot she told my grandmother they did to her man like back then you know if you were a strong powerful woman if you ever went to the hospital man you know that you know they would secretly put
You to sleep and give you a hysterectomy they gave her a hysterectomy so she would never have kids man so these are storage in here but these people kept going man you know they they were like you know uh you know we are marching for something bigger
Than us and i think now we don’t feel like we need to die for this stuff we like hey if i got time to do it or now it’s like let me just cash up a few dollars right you know back then people were willing to put their lives on the line right
So i think that’s the biggest difference man it’s just really like you know the the cause is bigger than yourself right so absolutely man yeah i do appreciate you even point that out because of the fact that we we’re we’re at a different time but some of the same things are still happening
Right so if we’re not willing to have those leaders to stand out there and really be vigilant and be vocal about what it is that we’ve been crying about for many decades now uh then then we’re really missing the point of how unified we could ultimately be to
Get a lot of these things done and we are at a point where right now we have so much so much momentum even with this whole with the george floyd situation with the brianna attendant situation with the um uh the elijah uh mclean uh uh uh situation as well that took place
Uh with the uh the cops uh they they obviously arrested uh him for leaving the uh store and he ultimately died from i think an injection that was uh pumping his heart because they it was cold outside i think it was in colorado i can’t remember exactly
Where but uh he ultimately uh died in the hands of in custody of the police so those type of things they are still occurring you know at a rapid pace right so we we each have an obligation to fight those those same fights i think now those organizations our organizations back
Then they they were vocal they they were out you saw them with their paraphernalia you saw them represent organizations but now we’re more vocal in the sense of okay we’re doing this this community service initiative is on behalf of this organization and things like that too so we’re much more present in the
Term in in sense of trying to broadcast our organization and what we do more but not enough is being done collectively and and that’s something i’ll ask later in the show but terrell i want to get to you so in comparison to the civil rights movement um
How effective or impactful would you say our organizations are today when it comes to black lives matter um to how effective they are today yeah compared to civil rights the civil rights movement well today i feel like um it’s definitely um a lot different than like uh kevin was saying
Um but i played um today we have more um people complaining about it than actually actually stepping forward and trying to make a change i feel like right now it’s just so many different sub groups of sub entities other black lives movements that no one is on the same page
So it’s kind of hard to actually push a certain agenda if everybody has their own hidden agendas absolutely um so if if we’re trying to fight for uh the ability just to be black i feel like that should just be the first uh movement you know instead of all these other
Entities and all these other sub groups and everything like that that just keeps us distracted from it’s it’s kind of hard to fight 200 battles at once it is we’re fighting too many battles and they winning none of we won one yet yeah you know so i feel like the
The main thing what we have to do i mean like we can start off on the greek level and just be on the same page you know that’s something that the npsc was for putting everybody in the same direction you know but as if we don’t get everybody unified
On the same level then i don’t think anything will ever be done yeah absolutely man and again to talk about that that ability to be monolithic we have to understand that we’re fighting for a cause greater than ours right and i’m sick of tired of having to deal with the past
Issues of the previous generation on top of dealing with the current issues today too we’re not going to pass off any more of these damn issues to the next generation the next generation needs to have their own issues that they have to fix and deal with
For that time right we are at a place where generation now this is us today in this time in this moment we have a a huge opportunity to make real change happen so that our kids are not affected by the very things that we’ve been affected by
Growing up into adulthood and so yeah i do appreciate your stance on that man because that’s that’s very important that we do stand together in unification so uh marlon let me let me let me just interject real quick because of what you just said okay we’re creatures of habit
Right it’s all about habits right we are our habits so the things that we’re going through today is what we was exposed to when we was kids and to your point of what you just said we didn’t want to continue the past generation problems going into the generation after us
Well we that’s all going back to what i talked about with the deep programming and the reprogramming yep i may know how to cook or be on the grill now because i learned it when i was a kid right but if i don’t know money if i
Don’t know how to deal with people from a communication standpoint if i don’t know how to talk to the cops when they pull me over if i don’t know how to conduct myself in a professional atmosphere if i don’t know how to conduct myself in a social atmosphere these are all the
Problems that we’re dealing with today and obviously we got to do we got to do for ourselves especially if we’re parents because now our children are looking at us specifically dads because we’re all men on this call hey what what should i do dad now they’re looking for us advice i’m thinking like
Man this year makes 20 years i’ve been out of high school that means 20 years ago i was asking my mom about advice on this and my dad and my aunties and uncles about et cetera now i got a 12 year old son who’s asking me about xyz going through
Puberty that type of stuff so long story short it’s all about the deprogramming of what we already know that’s negative and then reprogramming us on a positive level and then improving our overall habits because when we approve that then we can instill those habits in our children and our next generation behind us
So they become better than what we are at the ages that they’re going to become yeah absolutely and you know what uh before i get to asking tim this question and dante too tim i want to point something out too so uh in my episode with the sororities
Right so a friend of mine ashley who was an aka she mentioned the fact that we oftentimes is greek try to take credit for an individual’s accolades and success right when it comes to them being a member of that particular organization now granted um so kamala harris has been on record
Accrediting a lot of her leadership skills to alpha kappa alpha which is a sorority and that she went to achieve players that uh howard university and so rightfully so to accredit that leadership skills the very leadership skills that she has applied to her profession in her life
Which is the very reason why i asked that question earlier so for me thinking about it from a perspective of john lewis being a member of 580 sigma right so the many things that he stood for and the many things that he obviously accomplished in his life before his passing last year
Spoke to the very things that we were talking about in regards to the individual success versus the success of the organization right so many times our organizations can grab the coattails of this one particular person who represents our organization in a positive way versus us saying oh we as a holistic you know
Organization did this right we we contributed to this right so thinking about it from the civil rights movement on to conveying it to black lives matter john lewis was a pivotal piece for both fights and that that’s a that’s an amazing accomplishment to have lived this long
And i think he was 82 83 i wanted to he was in his 80s on a misquoted age but the fact that he saw from from bloody sunday a couple like last weekend was the anniversary of bloody sunday on the uh on the edmond penis bridge
Out there in alabama right so the fact that he has now it’s been it talks about naming that bridge after him because of what he endured along with many others on that bridge during that time right versus today where black lives matter obviously marched with him on that same bridge in the
Anniversary of bloody sunday just past couple years before his uh before his death so i do think that that’s a very pivotal and very important piece to stay to to state because of how how influential he was in today’s time versus how influential he was in yesteryear with that with that generation of
People who was fighting that good fight during civil rights fighting against jim crow and things like that so i want to know from you tim how how effective or impactful has our greek organizations been versus how they were or any similarities that they have today versus
The civil rights fight that we all all of our organizations took part in in helping you know advocating for i think uh today it is a huge difference and i say that because it goes back to what you just said uh too often we want to take credit for the individuals
Actions so uh i think today the problem is there is a lot of clout chasing when it comes to it so a lot of people want to piggyback off what that one person did and says hey look phi beta sigma did this or an alpha man did this all right kappa
Did this when true enough you did absolutely nothing to go along with it um and it confuses the masses when you do that because the call to action isn’t clear there’s not one clear call to action because hey just because someone from five eighty sigma steps up
And they say hey we’re gonna support this initiative so now we’re gonna run out there because you want your 15 minutes of fame and say hey look i participated in this movement and you stray away from the actual initial movement that was supposed to take place in the first place
So i think that that’s that’s the larger confusion uh confusion when i group there’s there’s way way too many people that want to be chiefs and not enough indians uh so that that that’s that’s a big problem uh with today’s society you know uh they say media moves the masses man and them
You know i was a mascot major so like i said that that 15 minutes of fame is definitely ruining us right now like it’s killing us right now so uh that that’s the major difference for me man until we can all come together like you said half of those men you’d even know
Were greek back in the day you knew that work before you knew them you know and uh that that’s the big difference with today versus you know back in that time uh perfect prime example someone from my family man abraham henry you know you met my cousin pete
Aaron that was his grandfather you know he was right there with martin luther king you know megan evans you know he was right there in the fight with those guys you knew him you know what i’m saying before you knew anything else about him all you knew
That he was a civil rights leader right you know so uh i think we should in our sense um once we get back to that and let the word speak for ourselves versus trying to jump out there with a pen or something that we can make that’s that’s notable about it uh
Then we can we can make a larger impact man but it’s becoming too personal for us because we want this to be out there yeah yeah absolutely you know what and to that point man we we do oftentimes get in our own way in regards to the bigger picture right it’s okay that
You want recognition for what what what your organization have done i know for me seeing the act the the voting registration happen here in the state of georgia the state of georgia alone turning blue set precedence for many years to come because no one saw this happening in any southern state
Let alone it be in georgia of all states right so this has opened the door of possibility that other southern states like maybe louisiana probably not mississippi not to be funny but i mean that i don’t think that’s ever going to happen right but maybe texas maybe florida florida oftentimes
Fluctuates so i mean that’s neither here nor there but the point is the fact that georgia has turned blue it speaks to the very the very fight and the very efforts that was put forth with keisha lance bottoms and and and her being the mayor of atlanta
And uh having delta sigma theta be behind her advocating for voter uh advocating against voter suppression here in the state of georgia um keith uh stacey abrams who’s not greek but came from hbcu this woman is on record for being responsible for over 800 000 people being registered to vote
In the state of georgia alone right so cap off aside we actually had members of different uh chapters here locally in atlanta advocating for voter registration here too so we we accredit a lot of these different organizations and entities for the very result that we got today which is having
Joe biden as the president having kamala harris as the first woman first black first black first indian woman madam vice president of the united states of america so that alone sent so many presidents for future generations to see this and even for me being a father of a daughter i’m letting my daughter
Know there is nothing that you can’t do and that this is a man’s world but a woman’s universe and granted women have been disregarded and disrespected entirely too long so from that standpoint raising my daughter to believe that you can do anything you want don’t ever let
A man tell you differently right so i do appreciate it i do appreciate the stance that we have taken as fraternity members in regards to the very efforts that we have been portraying and perpetuating out here in society helping our communities the best way we can especially with what
The recent events have have been with us being in this pandemic and knowing that the last regime the last administration did a shitload of of of things in the most negative way to hurt us and we have been disproportionately affected by it more than anybody else has
So it showed me that we were fed up with the [ __ ] and was like you know what we’re going to fix this ourselves and what what turned out was we had the largest turnout of people voting in the history of this country that said something to me
The fact that we as black people preferably got up there and said listen we’re going to get is out here and we’re going to make sure everybody’s registered to vote hell now they’re advocating for the voting age in the state of georgia to be 16 now
Now it’s going to be 16 years and up you’re going to be eligible to vote so that that’s that’s the precedence that i feel like our organizations among other organizations just not greek have played a huge part in when it comes to the outcome of this presidential election
And even the local level elections too when it comes to the senators congress governors mayors things of that nature too so i do appreciate it from that standpoint so i want to turn to dante real quick uh in regards to his very question because i think the one thing that i do
Appreciate about io to fight data is that you guys were founded at the peak of the civil rights movement right so 1963 you guys were founded and during that time that was a in lack of a better work a very critical and important time in in human history especially in regards to black
Humans yeah he definitely wasn’t yeah well yeah it definitely was a political war zone back in 63. yeah and so i want to understand that time to now what what what differences do you see or similarities do you see in regards to where we are fraternity wise when it comes to our
Influence and impactful uh just overall support when it comes to the black lives matter movement as it pertains to how it correlates with the civil rights movement then well i got i get you guys kind of touched on kind of everything i was going to speak on with this question but
You know back then in the 60s they really didn’t care who he was because it was just one common goal like we were trying to fight property racism education and that was just the main agenda like the agenda now everybody is just clout chasing trying to step up and be the leader
Whether it’s financial game political game it’s like no one agenda it’s like everybody’s trying to tackle 200 different subjects and know we had leaders back then like fred hampton mlk you know we’re tackling poverty if that’s what we’re going with we’re going with that 100 percent harder no
Matter what’s going on and you know then the cash that they willing to die for it and as soon as they tackle that subject okay we’re attacking education you know we’re going 10 12 years whatever the case may be with education it’s like nowadays it’s like
It’s like as black people we are so divided like this is just like they attached to the now what so what’s the next killer okay then that’s killing somebody else get killed okay we’re gonna that protest we’re going to do this to that okay now that’s done
The next thing happened oh okay now that’s done right they don’t tackle like no we’re going to be on this person’s ass this police officer about killing this particular person until his ass is put in jail we’re not we’re not we’re not letting him off the
Hook you know what i’m saying like that we’re not settling for anything too many people like do settlements and stuff like that like it’s like agreements and settlements that okay we won’t admit guilt but we will give you this certain amount of money and stuff like that like little stuff
Like that it’s like i think the tricks that black people like fall for and like we can never get past it because we keep falling for the love the money tricks or whatever the case may be yeah yeah yeah and and congested you know my uh uh chris rock has a joke
You know that says you know america’s only country where people go hunting on a full stomach right so like now you know we have so much access to capital and money and we can really do a lot of stuff that people couldn’t do back then right like my grandfather
Didn’t go hunting for the hell of it back in the day right he went hunting they was gonna eat whatever he killed that day right if he killed rabbits and deer they’re gonna eat it that day now you know you can kill a deer and just take it and get it you know
It’s sliced up and just tell a guy get it back to me two weeks or whatever it’s no big deal right so the metaphor for that is you know we’re just not as hungry now the issues are not as as as big right to some of us you know as a whole right
So you know for example like you say you know the brother tim was saying cloud changing yeah it was cool that kaepernick was a new and he was kneeling he was like that side guy yeah yeah it was like you know how many people willing to forgo watching
Football people say wait wait we did it man like you know yeah buy your nike shoes but you know to say don’t you know you know have my nfl package and watch football okay you asked him a lot now man but again it was like
Bro it ain’t that serious i know a lot of people said dude ain’t that serious man you know people would justify it like okay he’s still a millionaire he’s fine but he was saying no man this issue is bigger than my money yeah and you know so again it was like
You know we tend to justify a lot of stuff now we’re like you know what ain’t that serious man you know even when lebron talks you know you still got people saying man shut up and dribble you know you rich what are you talking about and again society looks at
Us as black people saying as one person way more money now what are you complaining about yeah but it’s like it’s bigger than the money it’s just so much [ __ ] you guys are you know get you you know think about it get your foot off monday you know get
Your d off from the net you know we’re still asking white america to stop choking us man stop harassing us like we’re still begging for simple things right just leave me alone man i’m good i don’t you know no i don’t i shouldn’t have to
Show you my id like you know you know why are you asking me where i’m going you know so um i don’t know when you when you think about things like that man it’s it’s crazy that we have to deal with that in society but you still got to deal with your brothers
And sisters right you still gotta we’re still dealing with you know you got to be careful when you’re going on certain parts of town right you know i grew up not even i grew up in miss you know mississippi i lived in l.a well i knew christian blood neighborhoods not to go
In but why is that why is it like i got to be scared of my own people i don’t know how chicago you know my wife’s from chicago and i got lb’s in chicago my dad lives in chicago you know you got to know what a folks
And vice lord said it’s crazy like oh you know why was you in inglewood anyway if you can rob the eagle when they was like why was you over there anyway that’s not you know it’s crazy how we we have so much on us as black people man we do man society
It’s almost like you just get on work man if you just like let me just make it home to my family right and i remember my dad used to tell me that in mississippi you just want to make it home right and now i’m telling my daughter
You know we’re just trying to make it home it’s like wow all these years later we still talking to our kids that you just want to get home at the end of the day right man you know what i want to repent something you just said about that kb so for me
And we can all agree on this too especially given that being black we love it we wouldn’t trade it for the world right absolutely right within itself though on the face of it it is very [ __ ] exhausting because we’re we’re walking ptsd every day is something that we have to be
Concerned with right on top of that everything that’s going on in the world that affects all of us because again society looks at all of us as one person regardless of what shade of black we are it doesn’t matter it’s not to them it don’t because it’s unfair to think that we’re
All the same people and we’re gonna all react or or or act the same way based on our color and guess what they do they have this preconceived notion that all black people are thugs gangbangers and they’re they’re this and that all these negative stereotypes and stigmas that are associated with us
The very things that we are about you don’t want to hear though but even at the same token on our everyday jobs we have to be concerned with what’s going on out there and then still maintain a certain professionalism to where we’re not showing that we are emotionally trauma
Uh traumatically affected by what’s going on in the world at that very moment right so we’re told that you know expressing ourselves now we’re angry with black dude or women with angry black women why do we have to have these negative stereotypes associated with us with ourselves when it comes to us
Expressing how we [ __ ] feel we’re just expressing how we feel we’re not going to flip tables over here going through the damn chair at you if we do get to that point then trust me it probably some things happen for it to have gotten to that point
But i mean the point is though to have so much that we have to unpack and unravel and deal with on an everyday basis it is exhausting on the face of it every single day for all of us and so the idea that we have to have these
Conversations today with our own kids just make it home safe listen whatever they ask you to do if they get poor if you get pulled over just listen just say yes yes sir no sir yes ma’am no ma’am get your ass home because and even having to tell ourselves that too
As black men especially for me being six four 230 pounds on average the average black the average cop that i may run into about 5 10. the fact that he has to look up at me he’s already inferior of me and i haven’t done anything wrong i
Haven’t even given him a reason to fear me but the fact that my pigmentation scares him alone with whatever stereotype that he’s that has been perpetuated on tv for him he’s automatically assuming that every black person is like that and it’s unfair to put us all in one bucket but guess what
We do that to ourselves to a certain degree too because even point about how we look at ourselves now again we’re fighting ourselves we’re fighting each other and we’re fighting the damn system to to what dante said earlier and what uh what toriel said earlier about all these different fights
That we’re in have we have yet to win one of them and that’s a problem and the biggest problem in fighting all these fights is we’ll fight these fights as individuals we’re not fighting these fights together we have no issue with each other there’s no quorum between you and i regardless of what
Organization we’re part of but even from a community service standpoint the community that we service needs to see us as representations of our organization as well as representatives of us of our culture too as black men and women and if they can’t see that consistently guess what they do
They they disassociate themselves with us saying that we’re black elites we think we’re better than everybody else and granted some of those things may indeed be true by by certain standards of the individual but that that’s not the grant it’s not the whole umbrella of the organization right everybody in this
Organization don’t feel that way and so those types of things we have to be associated with just because of one bad apple here and there but my thing is if we’re servicing the community we need the community feedback on on how best how the best ways we can service the community
And in the full capacity of what our organizations have been exemplifying and standing for so you know let me let me let me just interject real quick because you just you just you just loaded us you gave us the loaded potatoes my bad so i i got two words for y’all
And i know y’all will resonate with this american skin right now you’ve seen that movie i haven’t watched it yet but i listen i’ve seen birth of a nation it’s just you shouldn’t hate parker why am i saying that though he just talked about making it home
Having conversations with our son all of this stuff is personified in that movie and then at the end he still come out and i’m spoiling it for you on the end you’re still gonna watch it so you’re still gonna see it he come out with his hands up and they still
Kill him so it’s like he did all this stuff in the movie to make a point like man you can’t just judge just because i’m a black man with my son in a white neighborhood that you know you have no justification and no no justifiable means of pulling me over
Nope and then to shoot my son and then to get acquitted or not even charged for that matter you just mentioned ptsd we walk in ptsd well in the movie you know he was ex-military yeah him and one of my brothers you know from alfalfa mari harwick played his right-hand man
In in the movie so it’s like man it’s a lot of parallels but movies like that are lit that stuff can literally happen in any one of our cities like as soon as we get off this podcast if it hasn’t already happened already exactly and it happens too much it does but the
Real question at the end of the day is what what what can be done about it because at the end of the day going back to what we initially talked about we was brought over here in chains as slaves we didn’t ask to be here no right think about it like this we
Built america we sure the hell did didn’t give you didn’t get anything for it so think about it like this imagine you was in mark zuckerberg’s dorm room several years ago he invited you there hey marlon hey kevin hey terrell hey tim hey whoever the person is
I got a new idea it’s called facebook and you like okay i’ma embrace the idea and then we do all this work and we get no we get no satisfaction the work that we did that’s us as slaves four five hundred years ago that’s exactly what that is indentured
Service i know you all remember world civilization we was in high school in grammar school that’s what it is yep it’s all one big ball right and we got to learn how to decompartmentalize our lives right yeah because we’re we’re men and black men at that first and foremost yeah some of
Us are husbands some of us are fathers we’re all educators on some level whether we work inside of the schooling system or not and we’re all mentors to people that are younger than us and to people that are around us that may not have the information
That we have so it’s all about pooling our resources you mentioned that earlier you said i don’t know i don’t have all of the answers but i surround myself around others who don’t that’s everybody but it’s all about what michael jackson said man in the mirror we identify that we don’t know
Everything and that we need resources and to be able to collectively come together and do it alpha kappa sigma q iota anything right groove five grooves i don’t know if y’all know about that but whatever but at the end of the day we’re black men right so from an
Organizational standpoint i want young men specifically to see me as a as a proud black man trying to give them some insight into the world in which i’ve seen it and help them try to understand it as they get older and then on the back end found out that
I’m part of an organization all right like whatever i want to interact with you i don’t want to be sensitive on time here so to get to the next question um obviously you unraveled a lot there uh johnny on that part so i want to get to this question so for you guys
K.b i’ll start with you on this one um for you what what what particular community service initiative resonates with you the most about your organization well i i think the the the one that kind of yeah see that’s really tough right because yeah you know when you do several different things
Right you get you get you know you’re able to impact different people right so for example right um when we do and a lot of you know a lot of our our organizations you know we do the the turkey drives right i mean you’d be amazed right
You know because you know the first year you started doing it right you might give out 200 turkeys right years later man you might have like a thousand people then you thinking to yourself man did that many people really need turkeys and you’re like wow people are hurting out here man so
You know just things like really just feeding people man and you know giving baskets in and and then you turn around and you know with the kappa league man you have 20 children in your program and you know you find out from the parents man that
The kid has never been out of you know atlanta or you know like my son is is never even talked about you know how men have impacted his life right so it’s a lot of things man you know and you know me i’m a part of the camp county panhellenic council
So we try to tackle a lot of things as well right you know uh going into you know the elderly health care centers man and just sitting with you know the old people managers you know because we can’t forget about our elderly people right you know these
Are the people that laid the foundation for us right so you know when we go to see them man and just sit down with them and play bingo or cards man and then you might find out it’s a guy man who’s in a mega man that plays in 1950 somewhere
And he’s like man i’m just glad to see y’all man because he might you know he said he might say i haven’t even seen greeks in 30 years right because his life has just been like you know in a wheelchair and i’ve been in this facility for so long
You know he’s happy just to see some greeks coming and sit with him man so so there’s a lot of stuff we do man with me man i think impacting the community man you know with you know the turkey drives and the baskets man i mean you know you’re
Seeing people pull up with you know in many fans you know with kids man you know they need old family yeah you know it’s you know you got food over here we got clothing over here man you know we having coke drives man and people are just
Saying you know i just need a cold and i need socks so to me man it’s just impacting the community man that’s absolutely and you know if you think if you think about it too right so um most of the time we all we oftentimes get too
Fixated on just us being out there presenting ourselves in the organizational weight rather than the very need that that our community actually needs from us so from that standpoint thinking about it as crazy as it sounds there are still a lot of people who don’t know all the greek letter organizations that
Are out here who are doing things in the communities you know i’m saying so we’ve been around roughly on average 100 years because we assume we assume everybody has that information and we do exactly right so it was funny right like i knew i wanted to be a cap in the sixth grade
So when i would get to college and i ran into dudes who said they had never even they didn’t even know what a fraternity was i used to say how’s that possible yeah i mean like man i didn’t grow up in a community yeah but you have to think about it demographically so
Coming to my high school yeah most of us on average on this call right now from chicago so we weren’t exposed to a lot of that up north versus down in in the south where it’s much more you know vigilant and you can see it there in real life so it looks different
Demographically so uh but even still that is something that we have to still unpack and be able to do more of when it comes to service in the community and having them get to know us from that standpoint so johnny you i want to make this quick
Because i know we’re kind of pressed for time so i want to want you i want every last one of you guys to get your kind of your takes on this conversation on this question in particular um for you johnny what what um community service initiative stands out or resonates with you the
Most about your organization well um for my chapter specifically here in chicago um two of them kind of come to mind one is alpha walk and the other one is is a national program is go to high school go to college okay so go to high school
Go to college primarily just a mentoring program where we encourage young men that are in grammar school to go to high school and we instill in them what they need to do as they get older and understand themselves and then the young men that are in high school
We promote going to college whether it’s hbcu pwi whatever if college is for you and it’s an alignment what your career is going to be go to college do what you need to do become that doctor that engineer that lawyer etc and then with the alpha walk is really about
Being in tune with our physical bodies obviously covert is obviously unlocked a couple of doors that we didn’t even know were you know we’re locked if you will but physical activity is very important so just getting out and going for a walk around your block you’ll be surprised how much stuff you
Can learn by just walking around in your community so alpha walk we have it every summer with the exception of last year because of the pandemic yeah and we walk about five miles around a radius of of where my chapter house is in chicago and we’re having conversations with people
Whether we know them or not we you know we learn about the area in which we’re walking in and we raise money for certain causes like like wounded warriors or you know kevin mentioned about you know elderly people we give a thousand dollars here two thousand dollars there whatever money we raised
As proceeds by just going for a walk in our community so the two that kind of resonate with me the most and why i love doing them and obviously the other ones as well yeah and i appreciate that initiative that you guys have been putting forth and effort in
And um definitely speaks volumes especially with the you know the alpha walk and just overall understanding the overall fitness that we have to be in better shape as black men and women because on average black people live don’t live past 65 because we don’t take better care of ourselves and we
Don’t exercise we don’t eat right and things like that so that’s type those are type of things that we have to do more of in terms of being very much so vocal about when it comes to our health uh terrell for you what would you say um is the one initiative uh
Community service initiative that stands out and resonates with you about your organization well for me in my uh chapter that i joined uh robbie mueller here in chicago uh they do this toy drive for the kids doing like christmas and the holidays um you know like wrap all the presents up then just
Uh deliver them to multiple um shelters across chicago um that’s just my favorite because you know like just for the kids they they deserve to have a christmas too like they didn’t ask to be born poor or whatever it is or they didn’t ask for to be born into a struggle
Um so if we can just deliver like a small moment of joy for them kids and that just you know it means a lot to me yeah it goes a long way with them too man because again they’ve been they’re being put in adult situations too often
And entirely too much when it comes to the struggles of their adult parents right uh having to be adults early on in their lives when they haven’t really enjoyed their childhoods and so part of that is taken away from them when that struggle is ongoing or is constantly increasing in their lives so
I appreciate you guys for doing that and i i definitely know that they appreciate that as well um tim for you what what resonates with you regards to your organization when it comes to community service initiatives what what’s the one thing that that resonates with you about that uh
For me man it’s the signature club just because of the fact that i get to touch a lot of different aspects with them you know i get to teach them business i get to teach them a lot of the things that i’m interested in and uh mostly men’s because they’re raw clay
You know so i get to leave my stampton show and watch how their you know their lives are molded and watch them grow from there so uh man kevin catching a kid at the early age like that man you get to learn so many different aspects about them you
Get to see things that you were blessed with that most kids might be missing out on so uh it’s definitely the sigma better club for me man like i said it’s raw clay you get to help mold somebody and fashion somebody’s life that’s the dopest thing in this world to
Me it is man you got to get them early man because in life you got to get carried before you crawl you got to crawl before you walk and if we don’t get them early enough then guess what we we lose them later in life and then we
Wonder what what went wrong with them well in our actuality we as adults preferably adult men we dropped the ball with not taking ownership of our community and and being much more vocal and vigilant in our kids lives so whether they are personal kids or not but the fact that
We’re still being very much so active in the community when it comes to being role models and leaders in that aspect it’s still something very important to a young man especially growing up in today’s time uh dante for you what what stands out what resonates with you about your organization when it
Comes to we have this community of service things called ifit it’s crazy how every organization has the same agenda doing the same thing everybody’s actually on the same page but call it something different but yeah basically helping people be aware of their like personal health man personal fitness as you know
I take pride in that i started lifting weights and get my personal life together like over like four years ago like people don’t know how important it is like adequate sleep the right type of vitamins the right type of food to put in your system
What not to eat what to eat what to watch out for a lot of people don’t have knowledge of things like that so it’s just great that we get to teach you know teach that to people of of color really of color of how to correctly eat right how to survive
And live longer than the average of 65 or whatever the case may be then the average of retirement because after retirement you know i’m saying usually people of our race you know that stuff like that so it’s just teach people how to live longer i mean certain stuff you can avoid like cancer
And all that other stuff stuff like that yeah but even still right so we we have we are our bodies are our temples right if we don’t take care of our body our body won’t take care of us right so we we we can’t get mad at later on in life
If our bodies tend to start to dwindle in terms of you know different ailments things like that because we didn’t take care of our bodies early on our bodies are light automobiles if you if you if you’re tuning it up get getting an oil change on it
Eventually you can keep it long enough to where it’ll last a long time right so we have to be very much so active when it comes to our physical health as well as our mental health because sometimes the very weight that you need to lose ain’t necessarily physical weight
So from a mental standpoint we have a lot of things to unpack and unravel when it comes to the very things that we have to resolve within our own personal lives and so that initiative alone man like you said there are different names for it but
Same with the same agenda for the most part but yeah physical health physical health definitely helps the mental health it does and vice versa and vice versa right so it starts with the mind your mind tells your body what to do and right and rightfully so so if we’re
Putting the right things in our bodies eventually our minds are gonna stay sharp enough to where we’re not losing it necessarily but um to uh to get to get to the last question i want to ask you guys and this is something that’s very important personal and direct so i’m gonna start
With you johnny on this what more can all five of our fraternities do together we know all the individual things that we do we we just talked about that right we just pretty much unpack the very initiatives that each and every each and every one of our organizations have been
About and stood for and advocated for right so but what what more can we do collectively together as as the the males of the divine nine i mean at the end of the day just to simply put it it’s all about identifying the main problems that we need to
To address and and and tackle and collectively go go and tackle it until the job is done and then work on something else too often times people get overloaded now when i say people i’m just talking about people in general but obviously us as fraternity guys we can understand it
Because we’ve all been on lines whether it was you by yourself or like with me it was 13 of us on our line like you know there’s no one man above the crew if you will right so we all are one unit we are one organism and we
Going forward toward a goal so if you’re talking about you know collectively as as organizations coming together from a fraternity standpoint identify a problem that we can tackle right away right because the stuff that’s going to take us years to do it’s going to take us years to do it but
If there’s something that we can nip in the bud two weeks to a month tops hey everybody come together like like you all just mentioned i think it was kevin you said you can make a phone call and 5 000 people would be at one location on on a monday morning or whatever
Where if we get that type of power and we obviously live in the information age we can do that we got to identify the problem that we’re going to come together and solve first we we tackle the low hanging fruit as we move forward toward the big stuff
Like you know the government which at the end of the day they ain’t gonna never budge off that and whatnot that may be something that we’re going to die trying from a 50 cent quota if you will but the low-hanging fruit we can you know communicate with each other come together
Solve and it has a lot to do with our own communities and working within our communities and then we take care of home and then go from more abroad from there absolutely k.b funding works for you um but what more can we do together so believe it or not man you know
We are already doing a lot of that right and and i’m speaking from my own personal view right because like i said as a part of the dekalb county panel of council i know that this already works right because i’m with you know other fraternities and sororities every month and every other
Month regardless of what we’re doing so i know that when we all come together and we have these initiatives like you we know that we’re already working together right so for us the thing is trying to go back to our prospective organizations and make sure those brothers and sisters are joining
Us at the pan right so when i tell them hey this month japan we’re gonna be at a local high school giving out coats well i expect at least 10 of my fraternity brothers to show up so think about it 10 alphas are showing up and 10 omegas and 10 iotas and
10 sigmas okay that’s the work right there right but i think sometimes people just assume well you know my god got it right there or my brother he’s gonna be there i don’t really need to go well no we need as many people as possible right and i think his own day
All hands don’t get right and i think you know that kind of that may start in on the undergraduate level because even in college i was a part of japan so i knew then it worked right we weren’t always beefing and arguing over stuff you know
In these pan means we were trying to decide all right we’re going to do this and we’re going to do that also another important perspective is let’s use the expertise that we have right so if we’re gonna go into the school then let’s tap the teachers who are in our
Pan right what do you guys think right if if we’re gonna do something regarding a financial capacity all right who are the bankers in the group right so we need to really start using the guys or the ladies who you know this is their expertise right we don’t really need
A thousand people trying to lead all the time right it’s like who’s good at this right okay like you said once we tackle something okay who is good at things you know this is what you do on a daily basis right so if it’s something political let’s reach out to our you know
Brothers and sisters who are you know uh aldermen and councilman let’s let’s get their perspective on right so i see that it works already it’s just we need more hands-on debt and that’s easier said than done right i mean it’s hard to get everybody out right because it’s always gonna be
You know i know i can depend on like my brothers know they can depend on me right so it might be like if nobody’s gonna be there kb is gonna beat me yeah i’m cool with that but sometimes you know and i know you brothers feel
The same way it’s like man i don’t know you don’t always be the person to represent right i’m like you know and then you know what i tell my meals i’m like you know i’m not gonna ask you to do that and i’m not willing right so hey
I’m telling you to be there i’m gonna be there brother you know now i might expect you to be there a little early and stay a little late you need all right but um but you ain’t doing nothing i haven’t done brother so this ain’t brand new right you ain’t the
First meal to stay late this is we’ve all done this right those neos still need to see us show up as old as right so i think sometimes we feel like we’ve already put in our work right i’m like man look man back in the day brother
I don’t put in my work but they still do that guidance and they still need that right at that point we start to complain about wait things don’t look right or man we didn’t do that back in the day yeah because you took your you know you fell asleep at the wheel
And you know you stop training right you just assume i’m gonna put it in the hands of the next guy see i don’t really like to put everything in the hands of the next guy i’m like okay let me just go see if it’s running like it should be
Running right or if i think it i want it done this way well let me let me go and tell a guy hey maybe you need to do it this way and yeah you can put your own spin on it right but you know i think for the most part man
You know the greeks are united man we just need to show more of it and i’m speaking from because in atlanta it’s so many greeks right really it’s probably 20 000 greeks right so if five of a thousand of us show up that’s still a good number but we know
Like man it’s 15 000 of us didn’t do nothing right so we’re still saying what if all the greeks in atlanta came out right and not just 25 right i mean that would be marvelous but at the same time you know that’s a huge task right because
You know you you’ve got so many chapters in atlanta and you have a large representation right we have 10 alumni chapters in atlanta right so you know even if five chapters should go up you know we feel like we’re doing our part right but then you know
The other five they can slack off a little because we know we got five that are gonna be there so you know it’s it’s hard to have all hands on deck but we still gotta keep pushing it right yeah yeah it’s all about maintaining consistency with representation right representation
Matters but we have to also make sure everyone is like i said doing their part regardless of where the organization is to you know better assist the black community because again this is the same community that we all come from absolutely so terrell real quick um you
What what um what can we be doing more together you’re mute i’m sorry about that uh for me i just feel like on uh we could start on a smaller level just like even just supporting other people’s uh community service different organizations community service initiatives like i would love to see
Like different organizations showing up to the alpha walk or the ifit you know like um like why don’t we just instead of just um so like sometimes you only see all the greeks get together when it’s a picnic you know what i mean like you got you got the communities and
Community service before the picnic is 20 people there and at the picnic is 2 000 greece like i feel like you just start small just start supporting other bodies um support everybody’s community service efforts and uh that would just be a good moving in the right direction because you can’t get
The big picture done if we’re not even supporting each other on a little smaller scales you know absolutely man that that’s a very valid point to make um tim for you what would you say what would you say we can be doing more of together
Uh man what we could be doing more of is i kind of want to use one of uh fair con quotes man he said in one of his speeches he had he uh talked about the younger generation he said man this is the greatest generation i’ve ever seen
We said that they fools we say that they’re knuckleheads but they are the greatest generation of soldiers that i’ve ever seen they will go to war over anything they just don’t know what to be aimed at or what to fight for absolutely i believe that’s true about
Us we have the soldiers we have the numbers we have the amount of people but we don’t have the direct call to action um like we said i i think we need one decisive thing to work towards and uh you know like i said that’s main part of the panhandling council uh
One of the main things to work towards but mobilizing our soldiers together like y’all said that is very true many times often times you’ll see that if they have a community service event before a picnic or before a party or anything like that it’s five to ten people there
You know i’m saying you may get two people out from each organization but like you said it’s clear and decisive that that party’s gonna be afterwards how that picnic’s gonna be afterwards it’s gonna be lit it’s gonna be turned up it’s gonna be off yeah we know everybody’s everybody’s going to
Get the memo and everybody’s going to get the flyer to that but everybody’s not going to drive the community service driver you know i’m saying i put that information out there first so i think man uh we have the numbers we have the movement the thing about it is it’s
Uh making everything concise about what we’re trying to do yeah and moving towards that so yeah uh dante for you what would you say we can be doing more of together it’s kind of a long shot but maybe helping the community build businesses man we have too many lawyers doctors basketball players
Whatever you want to call it like in between each fraternity sorority or whatever that it shouldn’t be no way we shouldn’t have our own bank we shouldn’t go to uh nphc bank and ask for a loan to study going for man the the white man is banking axa for
A loan get denied and stuff like that you know starting stores in our community why can’t we start no stores in our community and stuff like that why we have to go to an outsource to get money to get denied and stuff like that i just don’t understand i don’t understand why
Why we’re so divided on that as a whole we want the same thing yeah but it’s just like we’re not click it’s like it’s individual stuff right we want our name on the d we don’t want to have it the llc we want our name on the d
So it’s kind of confusing to me that that we as a people are like this you don’t see the chinese people doing that they they keep they money inside the community very much they live they live in the hospital yes just that they money it’s about their own business
So it’s just kind of weird to me that we as black people don’t see this we have other people moving in in our community like the chinese they build in a chinese restaurant and that we go there all the time but we don’t we won’t support
The black grocery store you know in the neighborhood but we’re gonna buy some chinese food we get our nails and and hair done by the koreans what the case may be like everybody is profiting off us except us yeah but that that that kind of goes back to what johnny was
Saying earlier about the program indeed program right right think about it yeah think of think about it in this sense when you went to school they didn’t teach you anything about finance when you were growing up your parents didn’t teach you anything about finances right so it’s set up it’s set up this
You systematically set up from the beginning to be learned to learn you actually go to school what do they teach you you come to school to get a job to get a better job you’re taught to be an employee versus being an entrepreneur so everything that you learn everything
That you learn so far as finance you’re taught by people that don’t fully understand it and what they told you is look you have to be able to take care of you so that’s where the sense of selfishness comes from and we don’t realize it take care of you
Make sure your family’s straight make sure you’re stable so when someone else comes along and even if they’re trying to help you in your mind they’re threatening my sense of stability so how can i fully how can i fully depend on you when you may know
Just as little as i know so i’m not going to trust that guy but hey this guy right here has this bank and it’s a proven establishment so i’m going to go over here and go fund with that person i see that that person has the store so it’s just
It’s the deprogramming that johnny was talking about earlier you know uh until you meet someone that that can deprogram you and change that sense of your sense and understanding the finances then man you’ll forever be doomed to repeat the cycle yeah absolutely man let me just interject real quick very
Briefly because i know we we’re coming up on time to tim’s point going back even further every person that’s not a european that comes to this country comes here to start a business exactly think about that we came here unvoluntarily in chains and we helped start the country if you will
Yup asian people you know no disrespect to any nationality asian people they come here they immediately build the china it’s a chinatown probably in every every major stage at least major city in the country same thing with people that are hispanic whether they mexican puerto rican there’s some demographic in one pocket
Of whatever major city in any city in the in the country for for that matter with us it’s more people that look like us on this planet than any other race or ethnicity yet we’re the most divided yep has a lot to do with the way we was brought over here
But even more than that it has a lot to do with the non-use of resources within our graphs which is going back to what i talked about earlier that’s really what it is and when we can hey i know that i don’t know let me go ahead and
You know exhaust this resource with this brother he may be a single he may be a capital he may be an alpha iota whatever i’m just speaking from a fraternity standpoint yeah but but bringing all those resources together is going to be key and very vital to us advancing in our in
Society as a black community right and so if we’re not doing the very part that is is for service in our black community because at the end of the day if we ain’t got us ain’t nobody got us and like this these other ethnicities they have theirs and you know what we can’t
Really fault them for only for to a certain extent on having just stairs right because at one point in time we used to be much more unified right so now we’re at a point where we’re the xeroxers xerox in the xero we’re copying the very people who copy
From us initially when it came to unification so that those type of things have to be talked about more in a much broader perspective when it comes to us being unified on a consistent basis so but again again i want to thank each and every one of you guys for being on the
Show i really appreciate you all taking the time to be on here to voice your opinion and perspective on a lot of different issues that we’re trying to unfold and this is a ongoing conversation right i want people to take from this episode that the very information that we need to be
Applying to our everyday lives and into our communities and our inner circles of friends and family is that the idea of knowing that we each have a part to play in this and if we don’t all do our parts then we’re doing a disservice to ourselves into our community so
Uh before we go i want to leave you all with this quote that i actually read from an author named gregory s parks who was interviewed on his book about black greek letter organizations in the 21st century our fight has just begun so he says the identity
Is largely born out of racial isolation and discrimination on predominantly white college campuses and in society in general as such their goals their goals have always been the development of personal excellence usually high scholasticism um development of kinship ties which basically brotherhood sisterhood and racial and gender for sororities
Uplift throughout civic action community service and philanthropy so these these are types of things here that stood out to me when reading that quote about that and i’m definitely gonna check that book out when it comes to um this young this man speaking on black organizations and i’m curious to know what
Organization he’s a part of too because that alone would speak to the very truth that we’ve been talking about all day about how we need to be doing more things together and being consistent with our efforts to service our community so um on that note fellas uh again man
Salute to all you black men who are doing excellent jobs in your professions in your fields and in your in your cities and states uh keep doing the work man because we again we have a long way to go we still got much work to do until we get to that
Point where we’re on an equal playing field we got much [ __ ] to do and so it’s gonna take out every last one of us to do that and to quote uh w.e.b the boys who talked about the talent in 10th i want to expand that right so
13 and a half percent of the the african-american population in the united states if you take 10 out of 13 that that number don’t look too well so what we need to do is since it’s not that many of us to begin with in the united states
Every last one of us need to be doing our damn jobs every last one of us has a job to do whether it’s great or small or you scaling it as it being a great job or a big job or a small job listen all of the intricate pieces have
To be in play in order for us to really get ahead in life and have the rest of society respect us in regards to making sure that we are treated fairly and equal on all facets in all professions of life so again man thank you all for being a part of this
Uh this podcast episode man and talk about this and unfold the very things that we need to be discussing more of when it comes to our black community service uh our black organizations as it pertains to our community service initiatives and so again greatly appreciate all you guys you know
The time you’ve taken to be on this uh this episode hope you guys are staying safe and staying sanitized until we are truly able to get out of this damn pandemic and get to some new normalcy where we’re traveling again because um fellas we we got some damn traveling and
Some damn plans to make in terms of uh traveling out of the country for at least a week or two to to basically decompress from all of the [ __ ] that we’ve been subjected to in the last year this last year felt like 10 years at least at least for me so
What quick brother yeah i was telling my wife it was like if you guys remember last year this time remember they were saying you know black people couldn’t get coleman because at the time it was only like white people were getting seemed like right it was like coco said i hold my beer
Right it was like if you think like you think about all the [ __ ] we go through as black people man even now we’re still dying at higher rates with cobras almost like [ __ ] we just can’t win man and you know my mother you know was just hit with covet and you
Know she was in the hospital a week ago and the crazy thing is you can’t really even go visit your loved ones man because you can’t you know you don’t want to contract it so it’s literally like you just pray for them that they’re going to make it through and then when
They go home they still have the quality but you can’t even be around people man so it’s almost like even like we’re losing this battle it’s almost like you know like we just can’t [ __ ] win man you know it’s like it it’s crazy how you know again you know we’re still struggling
To find out how we can get the shot or where we’re supposed to go and we’re still dealing with health care and insurance issues so again we still caught up in it man and you know um then people were skeptical you know it’s easy for people to like oh you know
You remember the tuskegee experiment so i think people you know easy to throw that out just to say i’m not getting the shot right so it’s so much to deal with even with covered man it’s you know you’re like are you getting a shot now bruh i don’t trust them and
They came up with this this uh covet vaccine too quick and you know they can’t even kill cancer how they come up with so it’s like you know we just deal with stuff off i mean the conversation is a while depending on what you’re talking to man
You know even with that man like i say salute to all your brothers man stay healthy man and you know like i said coco is just one more damn thing you gotta gotta deal with man and overcome so yeah and you know what and and better days are on on the horizon so
I’m i’m very optimistic and hopeful for the future hopefully sometime this year absolutely we can get to that place where we can get back to patronize and establishments fellowshipping and just being around socially uh with our friends and family and loved ones things like that too so
That way we can create a new normalcy for ourselves and so we’re not gonna we’re we’re done with being subjected to the standards of the quote unquote american dream we’re setting our own damn standards as black people and and it starts with understanding what the initiative is with this
Which is the foundational thing the the the common denominator in all of our organizations is community service so that’s going to be the one thing that brings us all together in unification and so again guys thank you for your taking this time being on this show give your expertise
And your your perspectives on these different issues that we’ve touched on obviously it’s going to be ongoing conversation so i’ll be looking forward to having a conversation with you guys in the future again about this and hopefully we’ll get a place where we can talk about some progress we’ve made
In between that time um thereafter so again man um again appreciate all that you guys have said on this show and uh just taking the time being here and i hope you guys are staying safe and we’ll definitely circle back again man i’ll be checking in on each and every
One of you all um uh pretty soon so again y’all definitely take it easy and um yeah we’ll be talking again if you like what you’ve heard from this week’s episode and like to hear more from previous episodes be sure to like share comment and subscribe to my youtube channel below
You can also find me on social media platforms that speak to the mic underscore podcast show on instagram and speak to the mike podcast show on facebook be sure to also like share subscribe to my spotify page at speak to the mic podcast show you
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