Babatunde and Dr. Rodney Duckett talk business as a form of community growth

Babatunde and Dr. Rodney Duckett discussed how grassroots business can serve as a foundation for community growth, cultural identity and generational leadership. Babatunde’s Under One Roof bookstore became more than a retail space — it functioned as a hub for mentorship, networking and historical education in Killeen. Duckett, one of his protégés, carried that model forward through his own outreach efforts, emphasizing youth development and community engagement. Both stressed the importance of economic support within the community, consistent business practices and preserving history as key elements in building a sustainable future.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Inside Clean Podcast from KDH News. My name is Dalen Che, one of the hosts of Inside Clean Podcast. My co-host is Amita Botwit and the producer is Kevin Lemony. The Inside Clean Podcast is a podcast about news, events, and politics in the Kaleen Fort Hood area. And also today we have two guests. We have Mr. Baba Tounde and Dr. Rodney Duckey. How are y'all doing today?

SPEAKER_02 0:38

Great. Just great. I woke up this morning and I like to say everything else is secondary.

SPEAKER_03 0:44

That's good.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

I dillo his sentiments.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Today we're going to be talking about grassroots and business. Both of you gentlemen have had a long extensive history with this. So, first and foremost, can you tell me what grassroots and business is?

SPEAKER_00 1:01

You know, I I think I should shift that over to the man himself because I'm a byproduct of what he produced. So Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Well, I have a saying, which you've heard me say before, right? To whom you give your money is to whom you give your power. Well, I'm originally from New York City. All right. I was born in New York City at three years old. My mother took my brother and I to North Carolina. We stayed there for seven years. And at 10, I went back to New York Harlem. And there we had a lot of African-American businesses in Harlem. And at the ages of 12 and 13, I was working in those businesses. Now, I was learning things, didn't know I was learning things. And over the years, it resonated with me throughout my career in the military that I always wanted to be in business. Matter of fact, even a soldier said, you need to be in business because of the way I handled business, okay? And so at any rate, when I got to Colleen in 1985, I was here for I was eight years actually on active duty, and I retired in 1993. But prior to that, I opened a business in Coppers Cove, Texas, it was called Under One Roof, African-American Bookstore and Culture Shop. And that's where I began to learn business. You know, I always wanted to be in business, but I didn't know business. And they were trial and errors. And you know, I think the greatest thing for me was I had a mentor. A mentor, his name was Doctor, uh, not I almost call him Doctor, but Mr. Hall, okay? And he had businesses, and so he saw potential in me. And he put me under his wings, and we went from there. He showed me exactly what I was supposed to do, how to do it. And of course, I I heard, I listened, and it took me about seven years to really see any profit, but I was still putting money into the business instead of, you know, saying it was profit or right to grow the business is what we were doing. And at any rate, Mr. Hall and I, we also opened a chamber of commerce in Compress Cove at the time, which wrote which covered the whole area, okay? Now we opened that change of chamber of commerce due to the fact we didn't have a location that we could really come together. We had one called Centab, Central Texas Alliance of Black Businesses, but they were doing something a little different. We needed something where we could bring in all of our businesses, you see. And so we founded that. And after that, as I said, I opened not just one store in Coppice Cove. I stayed there until 97. I opened another store in Kaleen in 97 as well. Okay. And the store in Carpus Cove was opened in in 95, let me put it. No, in 93. I'm sorry. I'm getting okay, 92. I'll get it all together. It was open in 92. And from 92, it went up until 2018.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

Sir.

SPEAKER_02 4:03

No, I should say 18 years. 18 years, okay. I closed it in 2010. And the reason I closed it in 2010 was my daughter was in Houston, Texas. She was getting her education together, things of that nature. And so she had my grandson. He was five years old. So my wife and I, we closed the business. We went up there. I took him for about eight years. And she's now Dr. No, Katitia Jones. She's the deputy superintendent of Longview Independent School District. My grandson, he's at Morehouse College in his third year. Now, this gave me an opportunity, you see. I wanted them to one day possibly take over that business, believe me. But they had their life and they're quite comfortable with that. But getting back to business, one of the things that I focused on was getting us to support each other. Now, to do that, you have to know who you're dealt, you know, who you're dealing with, and you have to treat them like they should be treated. And that was one of my major goals. And one of the things I always said, you know, we have to support each other. Not just uh customers, but the business community need to support each other, you see. We need to support, when I say support, we need to purchase from each other. We need to sit down and talk to each other. When people would come into my store, I talk about the other businesses as well. Not just mine. When I advertised, it wasn't just under one roof. It was about the community, the African American business community.

unknown 5:41

See.

SPEAKER_02 5:42

So that's one of my, like I said, that's one of my biggest things. I talked to you, I was talking to you earlier about some of the things I learned. I learned how to advertise, to market, was my biggest thing. I learned how to pay my taxes. I learned how to have insurance because I made some mistakes. Someone broke into my store early in my career in business and told. And I didn't have insurance. And that money came out of my pocket. And so that from that point on, I had insurance. And as I said, we have to know these things. Unfortunately, too many of the African-American businesses go out of business because they don't do those things. I said there's about three things: pay your taxes, have insurance, and advertise. If you can't afford to advertise, you can't afford to be in business. How can anyone support you if they don't know about you? All advertising is good advertising. We think sometimes that social media is the only advertising. But guess what? Everybody's not on social media. They say that people don't read the clean paper any longer. That's not true. They're still reading it. The key is all advertising, get it wherever you can put your advertising, period. We're in a transient community, as I said to you earlier. Soldiers here, that's what this is right now. They come and they go. So when you think you've got your customer base, guess what? They're gonna leave. But the new people coming in, they're not gonna know about you. So you have to have your business name out there. Word of mouth, I hear them say, oh, that's the best advertising. How many people does word of mouth get to? We've got a commercial now that I run for small black businesses now that I'm doing. One commercial costs twelve hundred and fifty dollars. Now that's expensive. So what I've done, I broke it down among four businesses on a 30-second commercial. Now they pay $325. There's a QR code on the commercial on each one of their businesses. You click on it, you get to go on their webpage, you get to see everything they're doing. It gets sent to about 250,000 households. And it's still difficult to get them to advertise. But Miss Barbara and I, we work with them. In many cases, we actually we pay for some of those just to get them started, just to show them that it can work. That's one thing I do right now in this community. That's another thing that's important that the African American business give back to the community that supports them. Everything I do is free to the public. Why is that? I'm giving back to the community that supported my business, the African-American community. That's who supported my business. So those that's one of my things, and I stick to it. You know, well, you could charge for it. Even they try to give me money some of them when I do uh events, okay? I said, well, give me a donation, but not money. I needed some tablecloths or things like that, you know. I'll take that. You see, so we've got to give back. We really do. You know, we want our people to come in and support us, but what are you putting back into that community? Now, I could tell you a lot of things that I did. You know, I had a mentorship program when I was in business. It was called Building Children instead of repairing men and women. I uh I had first black Santa Claus in my business, you know, where they could come in and take photos like they did in the mall and other businesses here in Kaleen. All right. Uh so I did things like that, you know, to make sure that our children got to see us as well doing what we do. So, like as I said, he can probably talk about it a lot too. He was a part of it. And this young man here, everything I did, he did in Temple. Well, talk about that, Dr. Duncan. Yeah, he'll talk about it.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

First of all, I'm next to the architect of infrastructure right here. So basically, a lot of the infrastructure you see in our community right now is either directly or indirectly linked to Under One Roof. Myself growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I always tell people as a running joke, I didn't realize there were other businesses outside of my community until I got into high school. And then this thing popped up called the mall that everybody was hanging out at. And the mall has been the number one precursor that closed a lot of the black businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when I was there on Rhodes Hill North Regional Suburban Acre Library in that area that's there. So coming here as a military transplant, being connected in this area, when I first landed here, the first thing I wanted to know was where was the actual black community? You know, what was here? And synonymously, people would ring out the name Under One Roof. They gave me the addresses as long before you Google stuff and a little voice talk to you. You know, you had to look on the map and find your way there, and you find your way there and you walk into this, this, this architect of infrastructure, because when they say under one roof, everything happened under this roof, so to speak. The first greeting, the first impression that I got was, hello, welcome to Under One Roof. My name is Baba Tunde. How may I be a service to you? And when he said service to me, like military gives you a resource packet when you get here to Ford Hood. And they they give you, tell you the layout of Ford Hood. He gave me a resource packet of everything I needed to know from barbershops to beauty salons to apartments that I need to live in, to businesses I need to go to and connect to. And then also on top of that, he dropped one of his free African posts within my little resource pack when I walked out, you know? So that place was highly frequent by a lot of people. Sometimes people didn't come in to read books, sometimes they just came in to have a conversation. Even the ones that hated him always found themselves back in the Under One Roof to pick up something from Under One Roof. Because, see, this is before way before the days of Amazon. You click and it can be at your door the same day. You know, most people, when they order something by mail, it took 21 to 30 days to get there. But see, Under One Roof already had those black choir robes. He already had the regalia, he already have the frats and the sorores types of stuff that you needed there for there. So everybody kind of could prize there. They may can't come in, get their stuff, have a quick conversation, and leave. So the infrastructure which was was planted here long after you left, that infrastructure still stayed in place. I have a running joke that I say, you know, sometimes my my Muslim community get a little bit upset, but this is a North Star, this is the Mecca, you know, of society, and it happened right here. You know, so many young men was built, so many young women was built. There's so many people that I've talked to that actually talked about buying their first book or being encouraged to read or bringing their report card there to receive something out of the store because he would reward them for good grades and good behavior. So again, as you see this, we are the byproduct of that here. I remember buying $100 worth of books when I was deploying out from here for me. That's the only place where I can get my books was under one roof. So when you see this, it's amazing of how it has grown and how it has become a part of the bloodline of a lot of us in the community. Like for myself, Miss Lavina Sabri, Miss Ms. Darlene Golden, you see these different people and then people that it indirectly connects with, like Ronnie Russell. You know, sometimes people always say the first, and I laugh. It's like, well, there was already a Black Chamber of Commerce. They was already here. This is what you got to do. You got to plug into the source. You know, don't re-invent or recreate something that's already always been here. You know, so that is the beauty of what Colleen, Texas had. And I just pretty much pilfered that information like the Greeks did in Africa, and I ran back to Temple, Texas with it. So that's what I done. And I started what I needed to start in Temple, Texas, that was there with the events and the programming and things like that. So that's how we we grow as one. And this is nothing different. This is nothing different when people went into places like Egypt or Sudan and went to the pyramids, which are the universities that study at. They took that information back to the tribes, back to the clan, back to the nation. And that's that's what underroof was. It was the Mecca, the Mecca that people went to and they took the information to their dinner table. So that is the infrastructure. This is the architect of infrastructure.

SPEAKER_02 14:35

I'm gonna put that in my book when I read that.

SPEAKER_01 14:39

So one thing I'm starting to see is when you had these businesses, it was definitely community-driven, trying to bring a community together and then also educate and then prepare the young generation. Yes. The way you did with Dr. Duncan, Dr. what you're doing right now with Impact Outreach. It all has a purpose to build a community.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

Yeah, directly connected to him because he had a young men's mentorship program. The things that he's doing, like it's kind of funny. You know, they talk about footprints in the sand, right? Okay. And sometimes when you see footprints, you need to make sure they're going in the right direction before you follow them. His footprints were easy. I just had to follow that direction. And when they stopped, I had the ability to pick it up in the honor and the name of the person that started it. So, and you just keep moving those footprints forward. So when I talk to people and I say, Oh, you've been doing this for a while, it's like, no, there was someone before me that done this. I just seen there was a need to continue on with these footprints in the sand. And a lot of times we forget that. Now, unfortunately, you know, I don't have like, you know, bigfoot feet like he does. So so I mean, his fit his footprint is very wide, but for whatever I can do that fits within that frame and that model of that with a with my own little modern twist to it, it it works well because the majority of the kids that I work with, their parents come from under one roof. So when they say, you sound a little bit like Baba Toonday, well, I am Baba Toon Day. You didn't know I was Baba Toonday? I thought I call him Baba Toonday Jr.

SPEAKER_02 16:07

I do. But I I have a quote that I use quite often. You know, we've heard knowledge is power, but it's not power until you pass it down to someone younger than yourself. The youth represent the future. And that's what I focused on it under one roof, and I'm doing it even today. Because again, you young people represent the future. And so that is my goal, that is my passion, is to make sure I pass this information down to someone younger than myself. If it dies with me, what good is it?

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 16:41

So that's why I do what I do.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Yes, sir. You tell me how you kept your business sustainable for so long?

SPEAKER_02 16:49

Uh I didn't compromise. I didn't bend, I didn't vote, yeah, I didn't bow. I was resilient, and uh, and I didn't quit. I had a lot of opposition during those years here in Kleene, Texas, okay? I can tell you, one of the things I share with people now, a long time ago, I wouldn't have done this, but I was put on a no-fly list out of Kleene. My wife and I went to the airport right here in Kleene, and all of a sudden I couldn't fly out. So I wanted to talk to someone, but they wouldn't allow me to do that. So I went to Waco, assuming I could fly out from there. Same identical thing happened. But they allowed me to talk to someone, and when I finished, they took me off. To this day, there's people in Kleen that knows who did it, because it came from Kleene, there's no doubt about it. I don't always share that. This is something now that I'm letting people know that we cannot allow things like that to stop us from doing what we need to do.

SPEAKER_01 18:02

You don't mind me asking, why were you putting on the no fly list?

SPEAKER_02 18:05

My voice, the things that I was speaking of. I was focusing on our community, the African-American community, focusing on us, competing with the rest of the community here in Kaleen. There were some people who didn't like the way I did it. They didn't like what I said, but it was necessary for me to say it. They wanted me to be quiet, and I would not be quiet. And I still I'm I'm still unapologetic right now as we speak. I say what I feel I have to say because I've done my research, I know what works, I've studied our history, and I know what makes us successful and what does not make us successful. All the things that I did in Killeen has been done in the past. Those townships in Oklahoma, where the two of you from, they were burned to the ground doing Jim Crow. Burned. The only bomb that has ever been dropped on the American community was his hometown. Tulsa, Oklahoma. And we have to ask ourselves why. Once you understand that we had banks, we had, I mean, um towns, cities we built, not just in Tulsa, throughout America, to be quite honest about it. It wasn't just in the Confederate States, it was throughout America. In my hometown, New York City, it happened there. Now the reason in the southern states that they did those things is because it was about land. After the Civil War, they had a period, and he's heard me speak of this, they had a period of Reconstruction. It was called Reconstruction. And during during that Reconstruction period, African Americans that fought in the Civil War were allo allocated fifteen million acres of land. Most of it was in the southern states, the Confederate states. Fifteen million acres of land. And we built those communities, we built cities, we built townships on that land. It was the most important asset we had as a people. Even now. But within a hundred years, we own less than a million acres of land right now. How did that happen? You may not have heard it, but it was called Jim Crow. Okay. A period that almost lasted a hundred years. They wanted the land back. The only way they could get it back was to destroy it. Destroy the communities that was on the land. Six million African Americans migrated from the southern states. It was called uh this the Great Migration. Six million migrated. You know why they migrated? Because they were letting thousands and thousands of black men and women and children. This is history. So I know we are a resilient people. We're unique to all cultures in this country as a result of our history in this country. Our history is unique, and we endured, and we're gonna continue to do that, and that's what I do. We can't stop. We've gotta pass it down to you and you, so you can do the same thing for your children.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Yes, sir. And this was the history you're passing into the bookstore, and even recently the museum that you did in the Walter. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 21:42

Yeah, I got to walk through that. It was really nice to thank you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:46

Thank you. Well, that's what it's about with me. It's about teaching history. And everybody has history, don't get me wrong. But uh, we haven't been telling our history. You know, that had history that we Get even in the school system, wherever it might be, it's not based on our psychology. Even now they're taking our history out of the schools, out of the libraries. They're even at the Smithsonian Black History Museum in Washington, DC, taking out the history, defunding it because it gets federal dollars as well. So there's a lot of things happening. So we have to, as I said, we have to take charge of our own destiny, is what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Sir. And that knowledge you're spreading to the community, through your business. Was that striking the nerve of some people because it was starting to reach too close to Colleen's history? Yes.

SPEAKER_02 22:44

Well, you gotta know the history of Colleen first. When I first got here, I didn't know anything. When I got here in 85, I knew absolutely nothing about Colleen. And for the eight years I was in the military, I was the first sergeant. I retired after 24 years, Vietnam vet, you know, Desert Storm vet. I've been through it. But when I got here, I saw something different. Even in North Carolina, as a kid, I got to see Jim Crow, you see. And so I had some idea of it. And I began to see little things, just little things. I say something, I write. And so there was a young man by the name of Eric Gaither, and he's from Marlborough, okay? And he used to be in that store all day and all night. I had to run him home. But at any rate, he knew his history here. And that's where it began about the, you know, the sundown town. What happened on Fort Hood was even a sundown post. You know, African Americans couldn't live on Fort Hood. They couldn't live in Clean. The closest they could live was in Belton and Saledo. You see, and those were enslavement towns as well. They had plantations at one time. So Saledo had the largest plantation within Central Texas. Belton had enslaved plantations, you see. But at any rate, getting back to Kaleen, Sundowntown, Jackie Robinson, for instance, was here. And I think you saw some of that during the walkthrough museum. When he was here, he was with the 761st Tank Battalion, segregated, all black, except for white officers. But guess what? Jackie Robinson was an officer as well. Jackie Robinson was on a bus. When they came from Fort Hood, they had to get on a bus. They couldn't stop in Killeen. And I've been told he even had shades on the bus, so when they got to Kleene, they had to put shades down. But he was sitting in the back of the bus and he refused to get up because they thought he was sitting next to a European American. By the way, he wasn't. He was biracial. But at any rate, he was court-martialed. That's before he played baseball now. Before he was famous. And right here in Colleen, Texas. So there's a history here, you see. And so I learned a history. And once you learn a history, you begin to see things. It's clearer when you know your history. Your history. There's a there's a an African proverb that says, until the lion has his own storyteller, the hunter will always have the best story.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

Sir. Alright. And Dr. Duggett, being under Baba Tunde for so long, you said you had went over to Temple. How were you spreading that history as well, and then attaining more knowledge to pass on to pass along to others?

SPEAKER_00 25:40

Ooh, I love I love my city of Temple. I love my people of Temple. Very difficult and challenging thing because Temple, again, a lot of people are set in a system. And I have to say this because a lot of times people don't understand what we're dealing with. To win a war, you have to win the battle. And the first battle is to win the battle of the mind. Once the battle of the mind is won, then the casualty that lays on the ground is truth and adhemators. And then the innocents have to figure out where they lie. Do you lie on the side of righteousness or do you lie on the side with the masses? So many times people go where it's safety and they lie on the sides with the masses. And my my shift through Temple at that time was a very difficult one because there was a lot of people that wasn't going to step outside the comfort zone of the day-to-day routine operations. Now, there were some trailblazers that was there. Miss Bennett Curtis is tough as they come, God rest her soul. She's a beautiful one. She frequent under one roof multiple times. And one of his, I would say, adversaries at the time, but he had this love for him, but it was kind of one of those loves that you know you're not going to go public about, you're just going to shut the door and talk about it, was Reverend Roscoe Harrison, which was another one of my mentors. And he pulled me to the side. He says, Man, I love what you do. I really love what you do. And it's needed. But I'm telling you, be careful around here in Temple. He says, he says, go back down to Clean, hang out with Baba Tunick, bring stuff down here every now and then. I'll open up my church to you. I'll let you speak. I'll let you do your programs. But, you know, just the continuation of it, you got to hit these people in short spurts here, you know, because you scare them. You know, you really scare them, you know. So that was one of the things that I had to keep in mind with dealing with with Temple. Because in Temple, like a lot of history that they have there, it was a very, you know, Temple's very unique because 8th Street, which is is the MLK that they call now, was like a little Black Wall Street at the time. Like Baba Tunde said, these so these soldiers would come there and they would spend their money on 8th Street. And that boomed the economy because you got soldiers there, you got pretty Southern women there that's in church, you got a little movie theater there, you got like a little nightlife that's there that the Chitlin circuit rolled through. And a lot of people has been in that in that area, you know. So again, that really sparked that that area at one time. But anything outside of that you see, you know, you do have some people that have stepped outside of the box to do things in that area. You notice that that that temple now is slowly progressively moving towards more of that, but you still kind of see a bit of separation in between. And it's a safety net because a lot of times people have to choose a side when truth is lying on the ground that's bleeding. And and I say this based off of what Baba Toon Day said. I I truly believe that when you look at certain situations, you got to understand that there's three levels of this thing. You got the people that are dispositioned, the people that are being hurt, you got the situation that hurts them, but you got the system that causes all of this. And the beautiful thing about like Under One Roof, Baba Toon Day and other people, you know, uh around this world, there's a lot of people that fight the system, but it's just unfortunate when you fight the system, you don't have a lot of people standing behind you to fight the system. You know, you know, everybody says that's good, that's good until someone is either publicly lynched, or if someone could be literally lynched by what they say or what they do. That's the truth because everybody says it hurts feelings. Right now, when you look around here, we have our educational system that's here. You have all black city council here in Kleene, you have a whole black education system, but you got turning point in the school. Makes you scratch your head. Makes you scratch your head. You know, there's no black organizations like Impact Outreach that's in the school. No one has really reached out to me. And I know everybody on that school board, and I know the community person that's there. And that one time, we want your black studies in our school based off of your degree, because I have a pedigree. I'm not a peacock, I got a pedigree because of your degree and your structure and your ability to work with young kids, but turning point finds its way into the school. And it's amazing that turning point is here because turning point turns us back to making America great again. So a lot of times we don't think about what we're doing with our our kids that's actually in the school system, allowing some of these things to come back in. So I will say this and I will say this to the roof falls off. Anytime you remove something from someone's life, it creates dysfunctionality. So if black studies is no longer in the school and you replace it with something else, you're gonna have more dysfunction, which you already have. So we have to keep that together. Black history is not to make people hate themselves or not to make people hate other people. Black history is to teach our story, and our story teaches people about our story, and then this is how we make this American lexicon work for us, because everybody understands our story. The Jewish population never water down their story. We never see that. I've never seen that anywhere I went. They have no problem talking about the Holocaust whatsoever. But when it comes to our story, we have to be careful with our story because our story could hurt little Timmy and little Bobby, and we don't want him to hear that, because then it questions grandmother and grandfather and great-grandmother and great-grandfathers, the sons and the daughters of the Confederate. So, again, here we go again. It's this loop turning point back to make America great again. Once you make America great again, you jump back into Texas Confederacy. And it kind of scares people when you really think about it. So that's the reason why Roddy Doug is not invited to a platform because I know my history. I know what this place is about. And some of the people that you see that are in these political positions, especially House representatives, are directly connected to sons and daughters of the Confederate. Look at their history.

SPEAKER_02 31:52

The governor just was rolled into it. I don't know if you know that just a couple of days ago. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Yeah, yeah. But I would like to tag on to what you're saying there about the history. You know, with I have a walk, I'm a walkthrough museum. You know, once I did it here, and it was a big success. So Miss Barbara said, maybe we should do this 365 days a year of traveling. And that's what we're trying to do now. I've done it in three different places since I did, or two different places since I've done it at the eCenter. But I'm trying to get into the education, you know, into the independent school districts. Now there was one district that we actually got invited to by a young lady, okay, young African-American. And so when it was time for us to go, all of a sudden things changed. I was supposed to have been a guest speaker, I was supposed to have been, you know, with the, you know, the walkthrough museum, everything. And all of a sudden, I got one table and I wasn't the guest speaker. The principal of that school was Eugene-American, the young lady was African American, she's a teacher there. And I had to turn it down. I wasn't gonna do it. I didn't do it. But that's what I'm trying to do, get into the system. Because if you're taking that history out of the schools, how do we get it to our children? To whom you give your children to educate, it's to whom you give your future. It's time for us to control that future. That museum, and I want everybody to learn about my history or our history, not just African Americans. Everybody needs to know it. But they assume that it's only for us. Now, why don't they want it in the school system? What is it about it they don't want their children to learn? We learn about their history. So that's my goal is to get it into the schools so everybody can learn our history. Not just during Black History Month. That's when we honor Black History Month, is Black History Month. But we need to do it every day. And that's what the museum that I have now, the walkthrough museum, is a traveling. I've got a vehicle for it, I've got all the things I need. All they have to do is provide me tables. And he well, one of them was a church, he had a big area, and he I went to the church and we did it. They bought me twenty red, black, and green tablecloths. You know, yeah, that's what I asked for. They said they wanted to give me something. But this is what's happening, you know. They would that that's and so we have to do that. We have to be responsible for our children as well.

unknown 34:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:41

And if you look at every culture, just about, I don't care where you go, they have a method of teaching their children. Okay, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 34:51

No, no, and I and I want to say this, and this is an amazing thing, and I I and this is gonna really spark you guys. Uh, two years ago, I took my last group to Washington, D.C. We always go to the Black Museum. Baba Tune, one of my major sponsors or sponsor kids to get there. When we get to the museum, I told the kids was through impact outreach. Through impact outreach, yeah. And I told the kids that when you get there, I want you really to do some situational observation, really look around. So they looked around, of course. I saw all the little red hats of the kids that was wearing that, which is fine. You know, I wanted them to mingle with those kids because these are going to be your adversaries here in a couple of years. So when we get into the museum and we we sit there and we're looking around, I said, tell me what you see in the museum. And only one kid got it around. He said, You know, it's a it's the African-American Smithsonian museum, but I see a lot of white people here, Dr. Ducett. I said, Exactly. And you know what? They're here to study our history and our culture, and this is what's being under attack. Now, it's not really that we're under attack, they don't want that culture to get into the eyes of little Timmy. And I told them about a story that I seen my very first time when I went to the museum, like about nine, ten, eleven years ago. When I went to the museum, little Timmy was there. And little Timmy was with his mom, and he was down in the bowels of the actual museum where the slave ship was, and he seen a picture that looked like one of his classhood, class, class friends that he had there, and he asked mom, he said, Hey, that looks like Mark. And his mom was like, Yeah, that similarly looks like Mark, and he's going through the history and everything, and he's finding out about slavery. So he asked a question, little Caucasian kid, he asked a question, and he says, Well, why would y'all do that to Mark? Mark is my my best friend. I don't understand. Now, the guy happened to be a Caucasian man himself. He had a difficult time explaining that even to that child. You know, he is instructed and he has a guide that he has to follow, but he can't ask, answer those critical questions, which caused little Timmy to cry. Because now little Timmy's learning that in order for, as we say, to make America great again, it came by cost of hurting someone like Mark that directly impacts him, which is his good friend, close to like a brother, because when he was next to his mother, he says, this is not right. So you have a seven-year-old kid that knows the difference that this is not right, but you got 70-year-old men that don't know that this is not right. So that's why they're making holes in the museum, removing things so that little Timmy can't point it out and say, This is not right, because little Timmy becomes the next politician to make changes in Congress. So we put gaps in there. So where me and Baba Tunde come in is we're gap fillers. We fill those gaps. You remove the museum, he makes a mobile museum. You remove the museum, we create a platform that we can talk on. So it's the art of war. You remove something, we add something.

SPEAKER_01 37:46

In this platform, you're talking about the lively art of conversation.

SPEAKER_00 37:49

Yes, the lively art of conversation where we live, we learn, we earn, my goodness, we pass it along. And Baba Toone's been there. And the reason why this platform started for two reasons. And I say on my show, one of the reasons is Roscoe Harrison, with his focus show, we practice the lively art of conversation. I ask him, we have it. And the other reason was I needed a more digital platform to mimic the African Post. And one cool thing about the African Post was Baba Toone had ordinary people on the post, was doing extraordinary work. And they were writing those articles, him and Eric and Ms. Wanda Gunter, they were writing these powerful articles to this day that that people you can get a paper and you can read the paper and you can go to the grocery store, run into one of these people. You know, they were our our community celebrities, and he was showcasing our community celebrities the good work that they were doing.

SPEAKER_02 38:40

So there was a voice. We have to have our own voice. I'm actually in the process of uh bringing it back. Yeah. Sooner than most people would expect, but I'm working on it. And hopefully it'll be out before the year is out. That's what I'm working on. We need a voice as well.

SPEAKER_01 39:02

Absolutely. And I've actually answered a lot of things that I've had questions already. But I think now it's what's the future gonna look like? Because now the generations that y'all have been raising up on a 10 day, Dr. Ducket is getting to that point now where they're just gonna start becoming their own business owners. I know you have some kids in Impact Outreach who are still 12, but I know some of them are in their 20s now. They graduate college, transition into that life. So as mentors, what's one thing that you often see what's zero? Once they're breaking into the mold, and it looks familiar to what y'all see. All right.

SPEAKER_02 39:48

Let me say we have a lot of our young people that's doing great. There's more of them doing great than not. The percentage that we talk about, you know, everybody talks about the young man, the young black man is this, he's this, or the black, you know, woman is this or that. I'm talking the youth now, okay? That's a small percentage. It's like a battery in a car, I'll tell people. It's got a negative cable and it's got a positive. If you take one cable off, you know, the alterator might run it for a little while, but it ain't gonna run very long. Well, it's the same thing when we're talking about our children, you see. We have to if we speak negative, we've got to speak positive. Now, he's heard this proverb as well. I'm fond of African proverbs, you know. But uh it says, when a man or woman is coming towards you, you need not say come here. Okay, and that means we have to begin to put emphasis on the majority. When I when they had the uh election here last year, the last one they had here, I went through the barbershop talking to young black men, okay? And many of them, first thing they said, why should I vote for either side? You know? All they doing is putting all black men in jail. And so I corrected that. I said there's more black men in college than in institutions, you know, correctional institutions. And they couldn't believe it. I had to go off and Google it to show 'em the percentage. So we're not focusing on the ones that's doing the best. That doesn't mean we forget about the other ones. But when you focus on the ones that's doing the best, the those the ones in that best won't become in that small percentage, you see. I told that to the superintendent of Clean and the School District. She wanted to have lunch with me. And everything we talked about was, you know, black kids, black kids, and this, this, this. I said, Well, what's you know, you you gotta have some good ones there, you know, some that's excelling, you know. And I gave her that proverb and she started, she matter of fact, she put it in one of her classes that she was doing with her teachers and things of that nature. Because it made sense. We have to focus on the ones that's doing well. So they won't do what the other ones are doing, first of all. And listen to this the ones that's in that small percentage, they're watching, they want to be embraced, they may turn and become a part of that higher percentage.

SPEAKER_00 42:34

By example, yeah, no, no, he's he's absolutely right. You know, great Nealie Fuller says when the the the student is ready, the teacher will appear, uh, similar to the African proverb, and I truly believe that. And where I my where I buy for K4 and go a little bit deeper is I'm in the detention center with those kids. And I and this is the one thing that I say, and this is if people really have to open up their mind to think about that. And I know Bob Mr. Babatoune knows this very well because I bought the book from his store. Yeah, so The Miseducation of a Negro by Carly G. Woodson breaks this all down. Like majority of our scholars that written wrote this scholarly material, the answers are in these books. And there's a difference between schooling, which most of our kids get, and there's a difference in education or to educate, which is a verb, meaning that you transfer something within to someone to make them better or make them whole again. Many times our kids get schooling, you know, and some of our kids in the school that we think are troublemakers, it's not that they're troublemakers, it's that they're more tactile learners than they are rope memories. They say, Well, blacks do better in sports. It's not that blacks do better in sports, it's that blacks are better tactile learners than most people are. And this is This simple thing is tactile learners. And I learned this a long time ago from my mom because I was making fun of somebody when we was doing one plus one equals two, and he couldn't get it, and we were kids. So my mom had one apple and one apple and she put it together, and she's never laughed, he just learns differently. We're tactile learners. Even if you go over to Africa, you see how they study in school, they're very, they're very mobile when it comes to school. They touch things, they move things, they they move it around, they have a lot of energy. That's how they learn. So what happens on the IQ test is when blacks take the IQ test, which is a very racist test to begin with, they are they score high typically on critical thinking, which means they have to think outside the box, it means they use more energy. Then it deals with vocabulary or mathematics. Those are very important too. But if they don't score high on roles, they're called SPAD students at that time. A lot of times we don't get this. These are gifted, smart people. Use perfect example, Mike Tyson. He was a SPAD student. But if you ask Mike Tyson anything about boxing history and about life, he reads all the time. He knows about boxing and he's deadly with his hands. But see, at the time, no one could embellish those two weaknesses that he had. So we move him into SPAD, we make fun of him being on a short bus, but our kids are different learners. And until the schooling system realizes that, and school boards realize that, and teachers realize that we are dealing with outdated technology. And the outdated technology is our school system. It's very outdated. Reason why kids are not doing well is because they're not being educated by an educator that has the ability to infuse education within a child. It is a fair exchange. It helps you grow a child so that child pours out that information as by way of wisdom later on in life. And I tell people this all the time because they don't read the literature that's there. They trust other literatures. Even Europeans, compared to Asians, compared to Africans, we all learn differently. It's amazing how we learn. And African Americans, being a very mixed race of people, really learn differently. Just because we we tell the story of Thomas Edison all the time. And everybody knows that Thomas Edison was spared, but we call him a genius. All right. We call him a genius, but he learned differently. He learned very differently than most of our kids that's here that's learned. So what we have to do is we have to understand how to educate our children. And sometimes education goes outside the classroom. So, and and that's the challenge that we have.

SPEAKER_02 46:38

I'd like to tag on to that as well. I'm an example. I've never sat in a college classroom in my life. All right. I was raised saying if I don't go to college, I would never be successful. Think about that. Everybody can't go, everybody's not qualified to go, everybody can't afford to go to college. So what do you do? When someone has raised you, literally, you hear it in your community everywhere. If you don't go to college, you cannot be successful. So once I don't go to college, then what am I supposed to do? And that's what we've got to do now. There's many other ways of being successful that we have to teach our children. There's trades. You look at who makes the most money in America, small business. All these college graduates, guess what? They're paying those people. That's where most of their funds go to. Now I'm not saying we don't need college graduates. Don't get me wrong, that's not what I'm saying. But everybody can't go. But we make we have to make sure that the ones that don't go have another form or way or a way of making a living. So that kind of tags on to what he's saying as well. But I wanted to make sure that I put that out right here, right now. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 48:05

Yeah, I totally agree. College isn't for everybody and it shouldn't be pushed to be something that everyone should do. Like me personally, I don't think I need college because the career path I want to go, it doesn't require college. And I'm always like pushed, like you need to go to college, but it's not something that I need to do to be successful.

SPEAKER_02 48:24

But focus on what your passion is. Exactly. That's the key to it. Yeah. That's what I did.

SPEAKER_03 48:30

And look at you.

SPEAKER_02 48:31

Absolutely. I'm an example.

SPEAKER_03 48:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:36

Sir. A last question for y'all be is being behind the scenes, doing a whole lot of work. I know Baba Toone, I tell you this a million times. I'll probably tell you a million times more. First time I met you was at Star Award. But watching the work and impact you made, it told me I'm like, this is the guy to know. But to think I've been here for 12 years, 12 years being here, never once did I know you were. And same goes with you, Dr. Duncan. Didn't know you till I got here at KDH. So be behind the scenes and probably never getting that recognition, but your work speaks for itself. Is that the goal entirely? Even if you don't get the recognition still in your work speak for itself?

SPEAKER_02 49:18

Well, first of all, I didn't do it for recognition. That was never my goal. I did it because I had to do it, regardless of what feedback or what was, you know, the pushback. I never did it for recognition. I did it for the benefit of our children and their future. My whole focus in life right now, at 77 years old, is you young people. Our children. That's what I focus on. So it doesn't matter if I get recognition as long as I get results. And that's what I've gotten in the 18 years that I was in business and the time that I've been in Coleen since 85. Recognition, but I've gotten results. That's what matters to me. Results. He's an example of it right there. And I told you earlier, John Crow, he's running for city council. I mean, you can't imagine Chris. I mean, there's just you can go on and on. And some of them didn't come to the store. They saw me on television, you follow me. And what I used to say on television, you know, the commercials that I used to do. And so that's what I'm concerned about as results. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 50:40

Thank you for listening, everyone. In Cycling Podcast is brought to you by KDH News, produced by Kevin Lemony.