Unlearning Politics Pt. 3 with Robert Hill: Navigating Power Structures, Addressing Economic Disparity, Seeking Change in the Black Community, and Understanding Local Political Transformations
Ever pondered the complex world of local politics? This riveting episode offers a rare opportunity to engage with our esteemed guest, Robert Hill. Memphis' political landscape has undergone significant transformations, particularly with a demographic shift following the white flight of the 1950s and 1960s. Hill and I dissect this seismic shift, its effect on the quality of elected officials, and its implications on the city's intellectual capacity. We also critically analyze the economic disparities in Memphis, their historical context, and their deep-seated impact on race and politics.
In the final part of our discussion, we scrutinize the intricate connection between education, poverty, and family structure. With a spotlight on the significance of higher education and job training in shaping a metropolitan city, we broach the subject of self-imposed poverty and its roots in lack of opportunity access. Wrapping up the episode, we delve into the urgent need for change in the black community, touching on disparities in food options, the black church's role in economic inequality, and the pressing need for investment in generational wealth. This conversation with Robert Hill is not just a podcast episode, but a deep exploration of local politics and a call to action for change.
Hello everybody and welcome once again to the Unlearned Podcast. I am your host, ruth Abigail aka RA, and you have entered into the podcast that is helping people gain the courage to change their mind so that they can experience more freedom, and this is our Unlearned Politics series, and I'm really excited about our guests today. I have in a building with me Mr Robert Hill. How you doing, mr Hill?
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me, abigail, it's a pleasure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm glad you're here. So Mr Hill is what I'm going to call one of those people who you wouldn't know unless you knew him because he ain't out here in the spotlight, but he's out behind the scenes. He is the former state director for the Tennessee Department of Corrections as well as the former executive director for Shelby County government, so he knows where all the bodies are buried. Is that right?
Speaker 2:There's a lot of them down there now, but I left and retired from the county. Ain't gonna tell them how many bodies is there now. We left the county in excellent shape. The mayor of Luttrell really left the county in excellent shape. That is not the case now.
Speaker 1:Why is that not the case now?
Speaker 2:Well, we left. We had roughly a $45 million surplus. We fully funded the county's OPEC, which is the retirement, and roughly about a year into the term of the current county mayor. Audit dissipated, of course, when he gave employees hyperinflated raises and then COVID sitting in and then tax dollars shrunk and then he had to turn around and then lay the employees off. So it's the classic physical oxymoron that just didn't balance.
Speaker 1:So when talking about politics I can already probably feel the tension in the air with some listeners who really love our current county mayor and really you know he's a great guy personally. Absolutely right and even love him as a mayor, right? And then you were under Mayor Mark Luttrell and then you had some people that loved him and some people that didn't care for him. You know how do you? What are some of the things from behind the scenes, if you will? What are some of the similarities actually in the functioning of that kind of an office that a lot of people may not even realize? And really then at some point, the job is just the job and you just have to. You have to do it. What are some of those things that both of those mayors would likely have had to do just because they have that office?
Speaker 2:Well, it's really really not necessarily a function that Shelby County must have.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:The County Mayor's office was created with the first County Mayor being Roy Nixon, around 1974, 75, but it is a duplication of governmental services. It really in my mind I'm looking forward to the day that we can become a Metro Memphis similar to what we saw what we see in Nashville and some of those other cities. The County Mayor does not have contractual authority to do anything without the scope and approval of the County Commission. The City Mayor does, and so you still see this attitude in Shelby County, especially among the seven municipalities. They want to break away from Shelby County. That's a hot button item. Now to where they're trying to amend the charter at the state level to have separate functions outside of Shelby County, like Germantown wants to be separated from Shelby County. Millington is such a line and I think the only way we really can get around that is to become a Metro government, have one mayor and then do a way of duplication of services and then cut the tax. Right now we'll be in double tax for services that can be merged into one service.
Speaker 1:And why was the County Mayor's office created in the first place?
Speaker 2:Really was an administrative office. Okay, it really became an administrative office when the municipalities started to grow. Now, mind you, back in the 50s, 60s, even before then, shelby County was on rule. So you didn't have roads, you didn't have paved roads, you didn't have sewage services, water services, services like that, you had no gas services. You had propane tanks for individual homeowners and then, of course, you had wells for water for most of the homes out there. And then, once those roads and city services started to go to try to make it more amenable, more cosmopolitan, to match the city, then that's when we popped up with this administrative mayor to help with the services, since the city was not used to a rural community.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But that's no longer the case now.
Speaker 1:So now, what can you help people who may not understand the real difference? You said that the County Mayor has no contractual authority. The County Commission has to essentially approve everything. I learned this a few years ago when I kind of got into the political space as a regular kind of mythian through an organization called MICA, where I learned a lot of this stuff and how powerful the County Commission was. I didn't realize that in some aspects and then but you know the difference between the City Mayor and the County Mayor, the County Commission and the City Council, if I think. I used to think that it essentially functioned the same way. It was just the city was the city and the county was the county, and it was like the mayors did the same thing, the City Council and the County Commission did the same thing. But I have learned since that that's not the case. Can you explain the? difference and significance of each one.
Speaker 2:It would make sense if you had a County Mayor who was actually the Mayor truly over a county. But the municipalities are separated individuals, the individual municipalities within the county. So each municipality have its own mayor and then it also has its own Board of Auditmen. So now you've tried, you have tripled the duplication of services. The most practical thing would be is to become a Metro government, have a mayor and then let a mayor appoint a county supervisor. Do away with the County Commission, because it's not. I think the state at some point should do away with any and all non-constitutional seats. If it's not a constitutional seat, it is a redundancy that the laborers attacks base that is dwindling.
Speaker 1:So can you give me other examples of non-constitutional seats?
Speaker 2:Non-constitutional seats would be. Probate court would be eliminated, ones that are constitutional. The sheriff is a constitutional seat, chief Law Enforcement Officer of the county. So you have to ask yourself then, why do we need a police department? It's chartered, it's a chartered agency, so it's not necessarily needed. But you've got to do is expand the Sheriff's Department for all of it. So that's the duplication of services. The trustee's office is a constitutional seat to make sure that tax revenues are collected and the state revenues are reported. The city court clerk's office is not a constitutional seat. It is a function that can be absorbed as a regular supervisor under the appointment of a mayor, which is what they're trying to put on the ballot recently and have enough votes to put it on this particular ballot this time. Criminal court clerk is not a constitutional seat. General Sessions, however, is. So you have General Sessions, civil and criminal. So why would you need another separate criminal court clerk's office? The county registrar's office is a constitutional seat to ensure that everything is denergified with a legal record and plat for every piece of property is sold and bought within the state and within the county. So you know there's so many services that we don't necessarily need. We don't need a juvenile court clerk's office. It's not a constitutional seat, it is a ministerial duty. Juvenile court itself is not a constitutional office. It was something that was established to really help Kenneth Turner maintain his own territory, so to speak. It's ineffective and it don't work. It needs to be demolished. It really needs to go back to his original setting, which is on the premise that I'd be absorbed into General Sessions, and for family matters to be absorbed into the constitutional seat, which is circuit court.
Speaker 1:So, ok, you just named a lot of different things that are duplication of services but they are being active, are they not as active offices? What happens if you do it Like how do you practically do what needs to be done without those? What does that look like? What kind of Memphis is it?
Speaker 2:Well, we have more effective Memphis and more efficient Memphis, because you shouldn't have to go back and forth to three different offices to get one result. So why would you have to go to the trustees office to pay taxes for the county and then go across to the city hall to pay city taxes? That needs to be merged into one entity.
Speaker 1:You ever think that'll happen?
Speaker 2:I think at some point we're getting ready to burst economic loop because the tax base has dwindled within the city limits of Memphis sales tax revenues and such. Because when you have a large, we used to have interstitial pockets of poverty in Memphis. Now it is a large pocket within the 240 loop, so sales tax revenues play a huge role in it. Well, if you have people who are on welfare and food stamps, they don't pay taxes on that, so there's no revenue to collect on that. Then the others that do live don't feel that it's safe to be able to shop in the community, so they go outside, down to Goodman Road, mississippi, and by the stuff and by the gas. So now those sales tax that would have been collectible in state revenue now is going to a different state. And then you have property taxes. But then when property values fall, the Advalorium of math says that when property taxes, when property values go down, the property tax is supposed to go up, but at some point in time the property taxes now are equal to that and greater than most house notes, and so eventually that bubble will burst. It cannot sustain itself. You cannot spend more than you have coming in and then think it's going to be sustainable.
Speaker 1:Why is that not? Why do we not hear more about that? Do you think I mean in Memphis? But just in general, why do we not hear more about?
Speaker 2:Memphis is a different city. It's a different mantra of a mindset. We keep falling for the shiny penny trick and we're pretty much have traveled this country, have traveled around the world, but there's no city like Memphis with the mindset of efficiency and being productive and then being a really a metropolitan city that know how to operate. We lack in the sense of urban transportation is ineffective, highly ineffective. You should be able to get on the A-L on the middle of interstate 240 and be able to get from one side of the town to the next, like you would see on Dan Ryan in Chicago Felling schools. That needs to really follow a qualified mayor to appoint a superintendent of schools or supervisor of schools, and do away with a school board. Let it follow the city council. We have too much of these duplications of services. To where intellectual conflicts come into play, to where nothing gets done.
Speaker 1:So what? So follow me and show this I want to kind of dig into, because you have a wealth of knowledge that we aren't even going to dip half of a toe in today.
Speaker 2:But we're going to finish pulsing the nails.
Speaker 1:We got to do that because I want to know why. I mean, I want to know what got you into this. How did you even get into politics?
Speaker 2:Well, I've drafted, I was drafted. What drafted you? For years I was a teamster and I was a business owner. I was a day care operator for years and I had businesses that were very successful. I used to own Tennessee and Mississippi large black owned mortgage companies. I was a mortgage banker for years, you know, when the mortgage industry fell out because of the economy and subprime lending, I got recruited by a dear friend of mine, late John Ryder, attorney John Ryder. He was a master of political activities and then my younger days, I was Bishop Gray's driver. So I was exposed to politics. I worked a lot of different campaigns because he was very political and I got out of politics because most of us who are African American, we do it butt backwards. So when the politics can be broke, which then makes you susceptible to behavior that can get you indicted and locked up, you really should go into private industry, make a living for yourself and have some sense of financial capacity and then go back to have the willingness to serve To where then your heart is totally for the service, instead of trying to look the part of what a politician and some people's mind or what an enormous city to be, to be glamorous for their reason, and then you're trying to live this lifestyle off of a government check or a government salary and find yourself caught up in a caught up and we see that in Memphis and we've seen it before with others, and people have, of course, been indicted and I just think a lot of the politicians that we see now are going in it because the median income is so low here in this city. If you're elected official making $125,000, they think that's a good job. Well, that's not really a good job. I mean, you would be living on welfare if you're making that and living in Nashville.
Speaker 1:You make a really good. I don't know that. I've heard it put that way. You really ought to go into it, having already had enough financial capacity so that you got to have a heart to serve. You're a track record.
Speaker 2:You should not be in politics trying to run governmental money when you don't have a track record to have been a producer in private industry, to know how to balance a payroll.
Speaker 1:I don't think that, I don't think most people and I don't know, maybe not say that I certainly don't think about politicians as servants nowadays. I think of them as leaders, I think of them as as quacks, you know as quacks no, I don't say that, not all of them but I will say I don't think of them as servants, but I do believe that that is the heart and spirit that a politician should have. That's what you're doing, is you're serving.
Speaker 2:Well, ask yourself the question why do we have 200 people running for city mayor?
Speaker 1:That's a great question, Mr Hill.
Speaker 2:It is an embarrassment. It is an indictment on the intellectual capacity of the citizens of Memphis to even accept it.
Speaker 1:It really is unbelievable.
Speaker 2:It is an embarrassment. This has become about a me myself and I. It's not about us and we. It's a me myself and I, and that's an embarrassment.
Speaker 1:When, in your opinion and I don't know if this is, I don't know when do you think the shift happened, whether it's locally, nationally, when did we stop caring about us and really start turning it on ourselves?
Speaker 2:The great white migration here in Memphis and when that occurred, that shift, that paradigm shift, the city was pretty much abandoned to a black community that had not had the exposure to practice and wherewithal to run government. Not to say the whites are smarter or blacks are any less smarter, but they needed to have a relationship, black and white relationship and in the training we have people who holding an office, who've never held a, got judgments down in General Sessions Court where they can't pay their own bills. Yet we've put them over the resources of a city and a county to pay the bills on a daily basis and it's an embarrassment.
Speaker 1:The great white migration. For those that may not know what that is, can you kind of explain it?
Speaker 2:Well, you look at the 50s, 60s and all the way up through the 70s, the city was almost 60, 40. In some cases, 60% white, 40% black. The shift started when Dick Hackett lost the race against Willie Harrington in 1991, and then you saw white flight. And when white flight leaves, then so does white mining. So then you have black mining. There's a difference between Don't ever fall for this misconception and believe this lighted money is green, it's not, it's black and white. And there's a difference in products for whites and blacks in this city, in this county, in this nation. And so when you take the resources out of a Memphis, or you take a Memphis Egypt and take all the gold out of it a Memphis, Tennessee that sits on the banks of a mighty Mississippi, like a now, and you take all of his resources out of the city, then all you have then left is empty shells and blight and disruptive government that can't find a way to have effective education and policing, and then other companies are not attracted to coming in and bringing those type of jobs to create upper solid black middle class and white middle class jobs and lifestyles. So you become a Detroit, a Gary, Indiana, South Bend, a Cleveland, Ohio.
Speaker 1:Money is not green, it's black or white.
Speaker 2:It's black or white.
Speaker 1:All right, so can you, Because there are people out there that's like nah, that's not true. Money is money. Like you know, whether you're black or white, you got money. You can do what you need to do, Prove it.
Speaker 2:Well, prime example is when you go in the inner city of Memphis, most people don't even notice there aren't very many banks in the inner city. And when you don't have banks in the inner city, you have to ask yourself why aren't there any banks in the inner city and why aren't there any products that can meet and help grow a black middle class in the inner city? Why is it that when you go for a loan and you have a 700 score but they say, well, you only have two credit cards on your credit report, so your interest rate would be 12%. But then when you go out in Germantown you can have a 620. And because Johnny knows Johnny's son, because they all went to school together at CBU or Rose College or wherever, and then give him a line of credit at 4% to where now he can make money on money or with someone else's money. The products are not designed for the inner city to grow a black middle class. How interest rates I mean? All it does is keep you in a cycle of poverty. That's the difference.
Speaker 1:But we don't have that's not a problem anymore, mr Hill. We don't have that issue anymore. I mean, you know, we got people, black folk are doing, we got plenty of black people that are doing okay here in Memphis, right, I mean, isn't that true?
Speaker 2:Well, they may be working in Memphis, but already in Memphis they're in DeSoto County.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're in Cargiville, germantown. They're working in the city as doctors and nurses and attorneys and dentist principals and school administrators. But I can tell you 70% of them don't live in the city of Memphis.
Speaker 1:Why not?
Speaker 2:Well, safety reasons, crime reasons, you want to make sure that they don't have property values to decline and decrease. They don't want to ride down the street every time they turn the block. You can see McDonald's cups and newspapers everywhere and folks just throwing their trash out in the street. I mean that wouldn't be acceptable. In some of the suburban cities That'll get you a ticket, maybe even put you in handcuffs.
Speaker 1:So black people? So let's just. Since we're here, what does race have to do with politics anyway?
Speaker 2:Well, it has everything to do with politics. It was designed that way.
Speaker 1:Of course, race has everything to do even today, even in 2023, you make that case today 2023 what they got to do for the thing.
Speaker 2:It's just a number. It hadn't changed the mindset, and so the best advice I can tell people how to abate racism is that you have to first make sure that you position yourself Economically. This thing I have, marching in the streets out here, shout you better. That will call me talking about marching and tearing up my good shoes out in that high street. If you got to do all of that and you have not come anywhere until my wheat shell over come, that's some foolery. What makes change is economics. Economic change to where you can Take resources within your own community, reinvest among each other without having a case of the craps and Scared of someone's gonna get more than the next, and it is inexcusable, it is incomprehensible. When we look at the Jewish community, the Jewish community turn a dollar nine times over in their own community. The Asians is roughly about ten. The white community is roughly about six. We're only racing that I'm familiar with that. A dollar on the stays in a hand roughly two hours and it goes to everyone else community except our own, and we have to change the mindset. You cannot be sit or considered a serious, viable Contributor to society when you do not have Any heavy carts in your hand, or you got his twos and threes and you tell my name. You want to play, you know, space and poker with all these little twos and threes in him, because we don't retain it. We have no sense of delay, gratification, we have no sense of Ensuring that generations behind us have generation of wealth to pass down. It still does me, myself and I mentality, and I can tell you the black church plays a role in it. The black church, which I don't believe in the concept of it, it's Christ Church. There's no such thing as the black church. It is irrelevant in today's society, in my opinion, and it has played a role anytime. You have mega churches sitting in the heart of in a city, in the ghettos of any inner city, and then these churches and these pastors who Do not live in parsages next to the church but yet rather live in the suburban areas and mansions and drive 200,000 dollar cars but yet their parishioners. Homes in the community need painting, yeah, they need a roof on them. They need to get the yards cut, they need to be sprayed, the yards trash need to be picked up. I think we have fallen for this thing of prosperity, preaching instead of Salvation, preaching to ensure that you have people who have healthy minds and healthy souls to understand the importance of how God blesses us with resources. We've been hoodwinked. We've been banned. Booze it. We've been led astray.
Speaker 1:What? What are you? How do you help? No, let me let me say this. I Know a lot of people. I'll take my brother, for example. He, he, we do this all the time we get. He gets on me, voting doesn't matter, like, my vote don't count, I, it doesn't matter why. You know, I posted something on on Instagram around about me voting, and, and he put a comment under there that said you know, I had to unlearn that that my vote counts, right, and. But he, he would agree with you, I think, in your comments around Black people needing to grow economically in order to have a real A voice, yeah, voice a significant contribution. Okay. So I think and I use him as an example but a lot of especially black people my around my age, I think have that same mentality. Yeah, we need to. We've got to grow economically, we have to move the dollar in our community, but my vote don't count. Do those things? Does that fit like? Is that true? Can you believe both of those things?
Speaker 2:You got a first divide define what is the vote. Okay, and oftentimes we have so much foolery, so so many Candidates who are poorly qualified and cities that have been abandoned by corporate America to where you could almost pretty much take a handful of confetti and throw it up in the air and in any piece of land and put your foot on and say that'll do right there, and that's what we got. Now in some of our elected offices it has been hypersensationalized by a person's name what you think sounds good. I've seen people go into the voting polls and only voted the first person at the top of the list because they automatically assume it Just so many of them. You don't know what and what the qualifications are, other than it's just name recognition. Oh, hey, I've heard of that, hey, I heard of that name, and so when you're voting like that, then you're an uninformed voter, uninformed voter, and so it's just a roll of the dice.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, you were telling me in our pre-conversation that in the last local election and let me make sure I get this right 6% of people under 40, is that right?
Speaker 2:That is correct Voted.
Speaker 1:And the vast majority where people over 50 to death.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was mostly. The ones who mostly vote in Memphis and Shelby County are teachers, preachers and those that work in civil service jobs, like the post office, firemen, the police officers, who work in the system and understand what it really means to have some sense of vetting process. And then they vote out of not so much of being well-informed but out of tradition.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and even some of the ones we thought we vetted correctly, correctly, when we elected them, later on found out they were just as incompetent as a bag of rocks.
Speaker 1:So what do you say to people we'll say my generation who say I'm not going to vote Like I don't. What's the point? What do you say to me?
Speaker 2:I'll say first make sure you register to vote and then make sure you can lawfully vote, because you have a lot of young people who have petty crimes on the record, that have taken their voting rights and don't know how to get those voting rights reestablished by getting some of the minor criminal infractions that may be on their record expunged. And you have so many young people now getting stopped, pulled over for a rock of cocaine or a damn bag of weed and now they're being charged with drug possession or with the intent to distribute and got six months in jail or 11 months and 29 days. And that is a large populace of some of our younger generation, and so that is one factor to consider. I do think that we may need to go back to. I remember I was a part of that people's convention back in 1991 when it was held at the Mid-South College of Sim where we had 12 candidates running for mayor at that time and the consensus came out for Willa Harrington and then two of them didn't show up. One of them never forget was Otis Higgs and he was mad because the people that chose Willa Harrington to get behind. And then everybody coordinated at that time to churches and such like to ensure that that was the consensus candidate, and so we may need to go back to caucuses to vet better and to make sure we don't have poorly vetted candidates. What I can take out I keep track of these numbers. I've read a lot of political campaigns in my life, some heavy campaigns, and what I can tell you from experience, I do see a paradigm shift now in early voting. The numbers are heavy in East Memphis. The inner city is not voting. District five is the heaviest voting block now, which is East Memphis.
Speaker 1:It is district five.
Speaker 2:So a lot of have to do with, like I said, a lot of people who had capacity, who were upper black middle class and solid black middle class, have moved to the Soto County and moved out of the city and then you have a lot of them. That's sick, and now that they're bedridden or at home to just have no interest in them. And then another thing in factory is when you have so many people, they don't know who to vote for, because it's just simply just too many people to choose from.
Speaker 1:So that because you've mentioned, we've mentioned, like the, the vastness of the candidates, the number of candidates in this race, and so, and just who do I choose? Right, who do I choose, that being a really prevalent question, I think for a lot of people. Part of it because and I was talking to somebody not too long ago, who, who we were discussing the differences between the way people look at politics and partisanship and how, a lot of times, when we conflate, you know, kind of national politics with local politics, those things get mixed in and it's hard to really. It's hard to really connect to candidates in the way we need to locally when we have on our minds the national stuff that's connected to political parties that don't necessarily translate to the candidates that are here. Is that, do you find that to be true, and how do you, how do you navigate something like that One?
Speaker 2:thing that also is divided as racially. Yes, it became a race of race and I've listened to some of the candidates and some of their speeches and, yes, all of them were very boring. Yes, all of them were very repetitive, with no real suggestions or ideologies. That was provocative, but one that stood out of my mind, several of them that stood out of my mind. So you have Floyd Bonner, who's currently the sheriff, who's running for city of Memphis mayor, but he has an issue with 57 plus deaths at 201, which brings in the question how does he run the 901 when he hasn't ran a 201? And then it brings in the question that he talks about crime because he's the chief law enforcement officer of the of Shelby County, which means he's over chief Davis at the Memphis police department, but yet he has not done anything. One of the things that are very disturbing to me. You see, a lot of people don't listen to hear, but they don't listen. The night when we had the police officers that they released a video that night of the police Memphis police officers that killed a young man, darius the interview Floyd Bonner, sheriff Bonner, on television and he acknowledged that he had not seen the video before it was released. So let's you know that there's a disconnect, that now the chief of police, chief Davis, saw it, da Morroy saw it, fbi saw it, tbi saw it, the mayor saw it, but yet the chief law enforcement officer did not. That's an embarrassment.
Speaker 1:What so?
Speaker 2:But now I'm a hard on all the candidates. And you got Willie Harrington, who's 100 years old, trying to run. I mean, that's just. I mean, come on, can we not find something a little younger, more progressive? You got Paul Young who, when he was the HUD director, quarter of a billion dollars went through his fingertips and no minority contractors got a dime of it. Not a dime to fulfill the minority participation for federal guidelines, contracts for the companies. Use white women, we get. You get a city to 70%. Black Van Turner, who called out the Republicans on this, republicans on that audit sounds good, but mind you that when Mayor Luttrell and Republican candidates swept the races for a total of two terms to for a total of eight years, 30% of the votes that they received were black and upper middle class. So I think that's a disconnect there, instead of just since this is a partisan race. Jw Gibson has been hard, but at the same time he's been in MIA and no one knows who he is in the community. You know and I know JW on a personal level, but he's not been. He's not a grassroots community organizer, he hasn't been in the community. And then you have the ones that just so far down on the end of the ballot you think you're just going to drop on off and somehow I can't remember the names. You know you got James Harvey, michelle, you got Karen Camper, you got Daffy Duck, you got a whole lot of them. And you know, at some point you just need to just say look, these are the top four and just come on off the ballot.
Speaker 1:What needs to happen in Memphis, in the what needs to happen in Memphis in regarding the way people think about politics, for some of these things that you're naming to shift and for Memphis to become a more efficient and effective city. It's so interesting. I think you know every, every, every issue you've touched on. We talk about all the time and have. I've been here for 13 years. I've been here in the same story for 13 years. You know, and I think that is. It is embarrassing. It's embarrassing to really continue to to harp on the same complaints, the same problems over and over and then expecting the same people to resolve them and and but, but yet it it doesn't feel like a priority for the people of Memphis. How do you shift that? What do people need to unlearn about politics that'll, at the very least, help us to move forward in some of these issues?
Speaker 2:well, a lot of it has nothing to do with politics on how we move forward to solve the issues. It really focus on the family okay and I made a joke about this, james D'Opse needs to have focus on the family. Well, hell, we need to focus on our own family and that's where the problem has been. We have a community that have not imposed education, job training and a sense of discipline in the leg, gratification to have an intelligent family unit which creates intelligent communities, which didn't have intelligent voices and mindsets to be able to to choose a political stream and system. When you look at Atlanta, atlanta has some of the top schools in our country. We only have a handful of good schools here in the city. When you look at Atlanta, you got the Emory, you got Morehouse, you have Spelman, you have Georgia State, georgia Tech. This litany just goes on and on. And so it attracts intellectual capacity for people to be able to deduce information and then discern what it is. But when you have schools that are at the top of the felling list, the more and on is the worst school in the state of Tennessee. It has the highest felling rate than any college in the state of Tennessee. And so there are some interstitial things that we must address in this city. One is education, higher education. We really need to have a Vanderbilt extension. We need to have a UT extension to come here to the city. When I look at the old Firestone plant, I look at that as that should have been something like a UT. That should have been a UT Memphis not UT Memphis medical, but a UT to attract a different type of hybrid citizen that want to come and create a metropolitan city that is so important in order to attract jobs to come here that can then have people to fill these high-tech jobs and some of these higher skill jobs. And we have poor public schools. One is because, like I said once again, the family structure. So when a child goes to school, he's on discipline, he's on training, he has no training, he has no support at home, he or she, and then it makes it almost impossible for a teacher to be able to have a quality classroom.
Speaker 1:Okay. So education, you know, higher education, primary, secondary, that's how do you and I understand the focusing on the family. I get that, but would you say that there are more people in Atlanta that focus on their own family and that's why they're thriving? Or would you say that it's a? It's a, they have a system that is that they have put more into and have capitalized on a system of government, a system of economics that has helped them over the course of these years that we just have not done, for whatever reason.
Speaker 2:It's the rabbit in front of the horse in Atlanta and when Manor Jackson was the first black mayor there, he imposed steep sanctions on ensuring that there was a quality minority participation in the restructuring of the airport in Atlanta. So that created black wealth. And when black wealth realized that blacks could migrate to a city that was impactful for black economic system, then it also created blacks to come to Atlanta to have a sense of high quality HBCU training as well as uh average league schools like Georgia Tech and Emory average league schools in the south. And so they made the horse run faster because now you have something to attract it and right now we we got a Mew running behind a stick with ribbon on it. There's nothing to attract a horse to come and run after. What is it to run after here in Memphis?
Speaker 1:So would would you say that um poverty people experiencing poverty it's more of a personal responsibility issue or a system?
Speaker 2:of issues it's self-imposed.
Speaker 1:It's self-imposed.
Speaker 2:Self-imposed 100%. Most of it is self-imposed. We'll pay us a stem.
Speaker 1:You think so really.
Speaker 2:I know so. I grew up poor, I know so.
Speaker 1:Huh.
Speaker 2:I grew up with a mother in the morning, great depression who wouldn't let us take charity. And we didn't take food stamps. We're a fair and nothing else. We all went to work. I've been working since I was 13 years old. We worked. If we didn't have it, we did it without. We had one car, we kept it up. We didn't run to the night clubs. We didn't go on vacation. We didn't buy clothes we couldn't afford. We'll go to the goodwill and buy them and we saved up money and sacrifice, and that's, that's the missing component. Yes, the poor will always be among us, according to the word of God that we believe, but for the most part it's self-imposed.
Speaker 1:But? But I mean, how can you, you know, you mean you would honestly say that in Memphis, where and I don't know the numbers and and I you might and feel free to call them out the the percentage of people who are currently experiencing poverty, you would say that that is a self-imposed thing, that there is. The system that we currently operate in now, you would say, has little to zero impact on that.
Speaker 2:Very minimum. I'm going to tell you you can get to Hope scholarship. Go to school for free. You won't go Anytime. You can get technical training for free you won't go. But yet we have thousands of Hispanics who have migrated here to Memphis because blacks used to do that work. Blacks used to be the brick leaders, they used to be the carpenters, they used to be the painters, they used to be the pipe fitters. Some of these Hispanic families are walking around for quarter of a million, half a million dollars, living in tenement and apartments, and and of course then the ones who don't want to go to technical school go back later on and rob them when they come into the apartment that night and then, because they're illegal immigrants and they have no, no resource to report it, so it goes. I'm reported as a large number. There is so much money to be made, especially in a city like Memphis. I tell people, if you can't make it in Memphis, you're just a loser. You can't make it. You can go get you a lawnmower for $300, the cost of a dying bag and then you'll get you a weed eater where you're going to get weed and all these nails and stuff done that you wasted money for and put it in the back of your trunk and cut enough yards. There's people out here right now would pay you $40 or $50 to cut a yard underpriced. Be fair with it and go on and bust rump and do the work and still make $500 a day.
Speaker 1:Why? Why don't you do it then?
Speaker 2:Because they lazy.
Speaker 1:You think it's a personal trait?
Speaker 2:It is, really it is. It is we. We have a generation, three generations behind me at I'm 52, to where our parents are so rough on us. You know, with the discipline and how they, how they talk with us and how they made us get up and go to church. Even if they didn't go to church here, they'd drop you off in front of it and if you didn't go to church on Sunday, you couldn't do no work right in the house on Sunday. You couldn't watch no TV, nothing else. You too sick to go to church and you too sick to hang your clothes. And so they gave us structure and they gave us this one and somewhere along in there and our little mindset, we thought that was too rough. So then we started calling our children and talking to them and re-importing to them and started giving them a good paddling on their behalf from missing school. Instead, what we did was we go tell them look, everybody has issues and you know, just psych the children up and made them weak, got them on drugs. Drugs are freedom, the drugs are not realizing that you have to fight for everything that you get in life and that life is hard. We made it just perfect utopia that everybody loves everybody and everybody has for this, not true?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I will concede to we have swung the pendulum a little too far.
Speaker 2:The black community is the most fragile community in the world. There's only 48 million of us in America out of 335 million. In America we do not have room to do what we see others do until we first build a foundation within our own community.
Speaker 1:How do you undo, then and I do. It seems like it is a political conversation in the sense of the broadest sense of the word, of political of just the different things that govern your life and a society so like? How do you, as a black individual, how do you unlearn some of those habits that were passed down, particularly the last couple of generations, in order to push forward? I mean, I work with young people every day and I see the unhealthy patterns. I see it and it's like I don't know how you recover from that, aside from a complete overhauling environment, which doesn't feel like it's happening anytime soon because of what you said. We have, you know, the poverty radius has grown. I mean, we are, and now we're almost saturated with poverty inside the loop. What do you do with it?
Speaker 2:Because, see, we've been brainwashed. And see, when we have all this stuff just hyper sensationalized on television and media, it has already been done purposefully to influence a person's mind who have not been disciplined enough to be self-sufficient. And I saw it, we saw it in the 70s, we saw it when we came out with LBJ, which is war on poverty, where you put where for food, stem, section eight and all this whole stuff and you take the black man out the house. She couldn't have none of that. So then they start building these large housing projects all across America. Robert Taylor Holmes is one of them in Chicago, the world's largest housing project. We saw him here in Memphis foot homes, fowler homes and Lamono and gardens. And then you start putting these Southern migrants into these concentration camps which we're really bored out to, and then you start feeding them propaganda. And we saw it with Sanford and Son and Good Times and the Jefferson's and sensational lives and poverty. Robert Taylor Holmes is Good Times with some foolery. Or you see, when a black person who becomes successful, then all of a sudden he has to be cocky like George Jefferson. He's a little jive turkey walking around for two little soup. Or if you're in business, then now you're scuffling in business so you're Sanford and Son where you're living in filth and swallow and so once you put that into a person's mind over and over and they have no concept and no sense of hope, then you got them. So I didn't ever let my children watch that. I let my children watch intelligent stuff, you know, like the young doctors that was up there that had a series of the young doctors that was going to Duke University veterinarian school and John Hopkins and stuff. I let them FBI stuff so they could go into law. One of them watched stuff that was wholesome. The same thing they do with your body. Put all these pig feet, neck bones and pigtails and chitlins. Who in they right man was spending $50 for intestinal waste organs.
Speaker 1:You know what? I just went to my husband's hometown this past weekend. You know what I had for the first time.
Speaker 2:Not chitlin'.
Speaker 1:Nope, I don't eat chitlins. I can't eat that. I had fried fat back.
Speaker 2:Oh, wasn't that just grumpious? Ha ha, ha, ha ha, you know.
Speaker 1:I had it for the first time.
Speaker 2:And that fat will make your back fat. Ha, ha, ha ha. And then it clogged your arteries Fat fat, fat.
Speaker 1:I said I can't eat more than two or three of these. This is I'm asking to die.
Speaker 2:Good old slave. And then the sad thing about it if you go to the stores now, that food that would kill you costs more than nutritious food. Yeah, yeah, you can get a rotisserie chicken for $5 at Sam's, but you would pay $12 for a pack of neck bones and 50 dollars for a bucket of filth. Yes, and then, being on your legs all day trying to clean them, you could be using that energy to go to work and put into an IRA. Ha ha, ha ha. See, we got it butt backwards. We've been hooked with bamboos and a leather strike. We got to change our taste. We got to change our desires in order for us to, and it's going to take a generation of sacrifice.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And nobody wants to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, I, I, I see, I see that and I think to your point. We hear, we hear a particular narrative all the time, and if you're not, if you're not getting the full story and the full picture, it's very easy to drift into a direction that's really not, that is not beneficial for you and as black people, I think politically we've been. There is no, I'll say this, there's no party that we are not being used by. It is simply that Like, and so we have been hoodwinked in that regard. This is my opinion. I don't, I don't, I'm not in politics and I don't know enough to really have an opinion but I'm a voter you know, and I and I pay enough attention at least vote intelligently and there is there is no evidence that any party out there represents that there's any benefit that they're. They're not speaking in a way that will benefit black people.
Speaker 2:And the key to what you just said Ruth is speaking.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And see, that's what we keep falling for. We keep falling for these sound bites.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's half a sense. So let me tell you something I flipped quite a few houses during the Trump administration. What I did was every house that foreclosed to my neighborhood I bought it, rehabbed it and I put a home on it so we wouldn't have gentrification in this solid black upper black middle class neighborhood I live in. And it was very easy to do because interest rates was 2.5% 3%. And so what a lot of black black people did? They fell for the shiny penny trick. They were so concerned with what Trump was saying about, you know, about a woman and about this. I mean these sound bites. What they should have been looking at was interest rates was 2.5% 3%. You could buy a $400,000 house for 1200 bucks a month, cheaper than rent. That was the time for you to say, look, hey, I need to get my credit straight now. I need to be buying these cat packs and these mustangs and all this foolery. I need to go buy me an old jalopy truck and go buy a house that will appreciate and value in roughly four or five years. And we didn't take advantage of that as a black community because we had so many people psyching you up, the same people who created the good times and the George Jefferson's of the world psyched black folks up with that foolery. I didn't listen to none. I looked at the money. Follow the money. Then those who had money that was saved up with Barack Obama oh, he was a wonderful president. He looked nice. His wife, oh, it's always dressed up so nice. Blacks did not prosper under Barack Obama. Okay, about you emailing me, see, mailing me, I don't really care. We did not prosper. Blacks lost their homes. Yeah from from a mortgage crisis. Instead of setting a mandate to say, look, if the banks get a bailout, every American who has a Adjustable rate mortgage must be modified, and that would have saved this huge crush that we saw in the housing market. Brock didn't do that. What he did was he gave billions of dollars to the banks, but not to the people. If the banks got the money, they should have modified every home loan to a fixed interest rate of around 4% In. Blacks would have still been in the house. It was a trick to begin with.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Then we noticed at that time to bear market. Yeah intelligent folks just kept putting their money away to stop putting it on in there and S&P 500 and index and growth in income and bond funds. And Then, sure enough, when Trump became president, interest went down and the stock market went up and people who had saved up their little money was able to retire early in the 50s because they had tons of money. They went on cash it out. Now put into CDs is getting five and a half percent interest and you can break them into half of me and all the jumbo certificates to where now the FDIC insurance. You don't have to worry about losing it. So you got a two million dollar portfolio drawn, a hundred thousand dollars, a hundred ten thousand dollars a year and you know how to go to work. And then you got a house at three percent. You got a six hundred thousand dollar houses at three percent for eighteen hundred dollars a month and that house of work, 1.2 million dollars overnight. And what do we get? We got us a good talking to. So we got well we got a good talking to on Sunday mornings from hyper sensationalized Preachers. They got a little checking the mail and get the palms greased In. The black community got nothing as a whole because it wasn't focused. Well, we focused on everything. Just focus on what got all family, and we didn't do it them four years. Blacks should have stepped into home ownership. If you don't have a home into your portfolio, you cannot grow as a black middle class. It is the only thing your portfolio that will outappreciate Most of those savings that you have. Then you can also leave generational wealth. Make sure you get insurance to pay it off. Or, if you double pay, pay the house. No, pay three principal payments a year on a 30-year mortgage. You cut it down to 12 years and then be able to leave generational wealth, and then by two or three houses. That's what you should have been doing instead of bad two or three ties or them big old long car sitting down on the sidewalk, parked all in the yard and it's not even your house.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's a buffoon. Oh they buffoon does that? But even what a turn right and blame the white man. Wait, man, I did this, you did this. You just like, like, pretty Tony. Turn around and stick yourself, pretty Tony, that's what you did. You stuck yourself Just like on the Mac. Stick yourself, pretty Tony, that's what you did.
Speaker 1:Mr Hill, you gonna have people not listen to his podcast now.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm very nice about it. I see you can email me all you like.
Speaker 1:Don't email me email me, don't email me now.
Speaker 2:But it's the truth. Yeah, and see, people don't want the truth. They want, they want lollipops and they want candy and want to make it sweet. This is not a sweet situation.
Speaker 1:We're in no right now we had a.
Speaker 2:we had a life of death situation as a black community.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah yeah, we are. I agree with that whole heartedly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're dying now. Yeah, we think we got some, some strength and some pull because it's Sensationalized it on the news. We don't it's a.
Speaker 1:It's a very clear difference between Having a position to have the power. There are plenty of people who have positions and no power.
Speaker 2:You don't have no money, you need to go somewhere, just hush up and sit down.
Speaker 1:You don't have it anyway.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I.
Speaker 1:I, I Could talk to you all day. I could. I don't want to hold you and and I would love I mean it would be cool to come back and listen and we, we keep going because, like I said, we, we, we barely did we need to get half a toe In the water with with your knowledge. But I appreciate you Giving I hope giving people something a different narrative to think about, because especially black people, all people you know a different narrative to think about, because I think we do hear one side, especially if you've you tune into one side. It's just too easy to do that. But before we go, I do want because you've done you've, your political life has shifted into something different.
Speaker 2:Now you have an organization that you have founded called friends after five, and I love you to share a little bit about that and what, what your purpose is behind that, your heart behind it real simple the black middle class is dying and the only way we're gonna be able to sustain a middle class society is we're gonna have to merge together, because not only is it the black middle class now as the white middle class, and once the middle class as a whole fail, the middle class is what's paying the bills nationally.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm upper.
Speaker 2:Rich white folks, wealthy, rich white and black folks. They don't pay into taxes. Poor people do not pay into taxes. It is the middle class that pay into taxes and so, as a result, what I've done is taken black middle class, white middle class, put them together and Then have taken those young people who've had the courage to try to go to college or technical school, mixed them in so they can start emulating what we do as middle class, so they can grow and prosper, and then put them into relationships, the same relationships that we've had, that are prospered us with banking relationships, legal relationships, medical relationships and Spiritual relationships, because none of it happens unless you have a relationship with God. Most folks don't go to church and I don't have an interest in just saying, well, you go to Greater Mount, morale, mounts me bowl. No, I want you to go any church that preaches the gospel. You need to be there and integrate these churches. You need to grow. Yeah and then not only that, but you need to grow economically and be able to grow socially. Exposed my boys to white and black early on. I did not. I did not Segregate them into a mindset, because the world, the real world, don't live the way we live here, memphis. We're on a island of patamus, all by ourselves. That's the truth when you go to New York and you go to Nashville you see integrated Racial couples and a racial couple walking up down the sidewalk holding hands. Everybody's prospering. They educated up to you got Vanity. We got a lot of great schools up there and it shows and reflected Somewhere along in here somebody that I polluted the water and got our man all twisted. So friends at the five dot com with the number five is what we're gonna do and and They'll call a little heat from people to where you're not helping the poor people. I said, well, they got enough programs. The real issues. We're not helping anybody's middle class. We're gonna get up right so cannot.
Speaker 1:Can I be a part of friends after five, of course?
Speaker 2:Singing invite.
Speaker 1:Okay, great, fantastic, I would love to. I would love to check it out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it is. It is a really rich environment of black and white middle class that really have Solutions to help grow economically, because now you get to support each other.
Speaker 1:It isn't. Is it that's good question? Is it invitation? Only how does one become a part of it?
Speaker 2:You go to WW dot friends After in the number five dot com got it. The first three or four meetings was in an invite out there free, and then if you would like to join, you can join, and that's how we grow and I can tell you there's been some deals that have already been made in the last few meetings, where People we don't issue name tags, we introduce yourself to a little bit about your background and say, hey look, I need to talk to you. I've been trying to get a relationship here at this bank. I've been trying to get a relationship with this contract. We have minority participation Contractors who are trying to do contract work for some of our larger contractors who are part of the friends at the fire. That's what it's about. Yeah and then bring this younger generation that have taken the courage to go to Weldon school, electrical school or graduated from college. They are working, they're making 60 and 70 thousand dollars a year but they buy a scat packs and Camaro's and still living in projects because they have nothing to emulate. You must emulate this thing and come out. You teach financial literacy until you blew in the face Everybody's from Missouri. The show mistake, mm-hmm. They have to see it, yeah, to believe it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, mr Hill. Thank you for being a guest on the unlearned podcast, sir. It has been an honor and a real like. I have really enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker 2:Thank you, abigail, I'm quite intelligent.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you, I appreciate it and Thank y'all for listening, and Y'all know if you've been listening for any amount of time. I don't know how to end these. I don't have an ending and maybe that's just gonna be how I end them, with no ending, except to say that we will see y'all next time. Let's keep unlearning so that we can be more free. Thank you once again for listening to the unlearned podcast. We would love to hear your comments and your feedback about the episode. Feel free to follow us on Facebook and Instagram and to let us know what you think. We're looking forward to the next time, when we are able to Unlearn together to move forward towards freedom. See you then.
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