Authentically Detroit
Authentically Detroit is the leading podcast in the city for candid conversations, exchanging progressive ideas, and centering resident perspectives on current events.
Hosted by Donna Givens Davidson and Orlando P. Bailey.
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Authentically Detroit
Black Detroit Democracy Podcast: Fighting for Justice in Detroit with Reverend Larry Simmons
The Authentically Detroit Podcast Network in collaboration with Detroit one million presents: The Black Detroit Democracy Podcast, hosted by Donna Givens Davidson and Sam Robinson!
Together, Donna and Sam illuminate the complexities of Detroit’s unique political landscape and give residents a resource for navigating civic engagement and election season.
On this episode, Reverend Larry Simmons rejoins Donna and Sam to discuss how we can restore Detroiters’ faith in democracy and community during these times of crisis. They explore what’s possible for Detroiters as local elected officials focus on military investments and insist that providing necessities, such as affordable housing, is not the role of government.
For more episodes of the Black Detroit Democracy Podcast, click here.
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Speaker 2:The Black Detroit Democracy podcast starts right after.
Speaker 3:these messages are for studio space and production staff to help get your idea off of the ground, just visit authenticallydetcom and send a request through the contact page. Hello everyone and welcome back to the Black Detroit Democracy Podcast. I'm Dinah Gibbons-Davidson, president and CEO of the Eastside Community Network.
Speaker 4:I'm Sam Robinson, founder of Detroit. One Million.
Speaker 3:Thank you for listening in and supporting our expanded effort to build another platform of authentic voices for real people in the city of Detroit. We want you to like, rate and subscribe to our podcast on all platforms. The purpose of this podcast is to encourage Detroit citizens to stay vigilant in the fight for justice and equality. With a special call to action for Black Detroit, we seek to build awareness of our history as a gateway to freedom, a beacon for justice and a laboratory of liberation. Sam and I are joined again today by Reverend Larry Simmons, the executive director of Brightmoor Alliance, who has been a fixture in the city of Detroit for decades. Welcome back to the Black Detroit Democracy Podcast.
Speaker 5:Thank you, good to be back, yes.
Speaker 3:It's good to see you, Larry. How are you doing today?
Speaker 5:I am, you know as well as you can be in the midst of a coup doing pretty good.
Speaker 3:And how about you, Sam?
Speaker 4:Oh, it's amazing. Always good to be here, donna. You know we went down 20 degrees this morning, yesterday night, but we seem to be back up. Man, it's like nice. I'm wearing a Carhartt jacket that I could just take off right now because it's still pretty warm out there. Pingree Park I passed by Gleitley Elementary Park. I passed by Golightly Elementary School. I passed by and kids are outside. Shouldn't they be at school? Well, one of them is at school, but they're outside playing and they got their field days going on. Nowadays it's getting to be about the summer, so it's a good mood for me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's always a good mood for me, but Larry and I were in a meeting the other day. We're not going to say where.
Speaker 5:We're not going to say where.
Speaker 3:But we were in a meeting the other day and, Larry, you had such a graphic description of what that meeting was like. Can you just share?
Speaker 5:It was like being on the Titanic having a debate over the color of the chairs.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is like am I the only person around here who really sees these conversations as conversations that really need to guide our discussion about everything we do? I mean, we can't just talk about it, but we have to certainly talk as if these things are happening. And we sat through a 90-minute meeting and Orlando was also in that meeting and he sent me a text message saying I am not here to listen to a 90 minute commercial, and so he left early. He left before it really got spicy, because I said something and then I batted the ball to Larry and he knocked it out the park and then the rest of the meeting was spent really just letting people know don't bring us together unless you're ready to really talk about the hard stuff.
Speaker 5:That was the second meeting we were in. We've actually been in two meetings this week. You're exactly right. In fact, I've taken this. I think this has almost become my theme song. You know, in the 70s, in the black exploitation movies, the hero would always have like a song, a song, a sound music.
Speaker 1:That's become a theme.
Speaker 5:That's my theme. Are y'all paying attention? I should put that. Give me a rap. You're a young person Right. Give me a T-shirt.
Speaker 1:Are y'all?
Speaker 5:paying attention. This dude is trying to seize control. I'm going to stop saying that, because this is not the president. This is a group of people.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 5:And we need to recognize that when Donald Trump has gone on back to Mar-a-Lago or wherever, the political energy that's driving this coup attempt is not going to leave with him. At any rate, I digress.
Speaker 3:No, I mean he's a very effective voice for that coup attempt.
Speaker 3:The other thing that's happening is that he's not just driving voices of the coup attempt, and what's the other thing that's happening is that he's not just, you know, driving voices of the coup attempt.
Speaker 3:I'm seeing other people sort of walk into a vacuum that's been created. People who we may have thought were our allies are people who are now very openly saying things like well, we don't like DEI or, you know, don't stay woke, stay woke is broke or whatever it is that you know Senator said. They're just the way that I've seen people who I thought would have at least given lip service to supporting our cause have completely abandoned it. And, in all honesty, I feel very much that way about the mayor. I feel like the mayor of Detroit, rather than standing up and saying we're going to defend democracy and we're going to do things, is giving, you know, using this as an opportunity to say things like well, people are mad at both sides, as if this is a both sides conversation and this is not a conversation where one side is just trying to take away all of our rights. How do you broker a deal with the devil?
Speaker 4:Whitmer seems to find found out how to do that. I mean she says it's worth 30 000 jobs at the selfridge air base in macomb county. Um, you know, democrats are now trying to. There are some democrats, pro whitmer, dems that are saying you know, look guys, twitter is an echo chamber. Everyone that is mad at her, uh, is irrelevant and we're just going to keep powering ahead, keep delivering results, because she's defending the people of her state. And I guess, guess how do you argue that?
Speaker 3:I don't feel defended, no, by the F-16, whatever fighter jets they got. Now I don't know the FX-20ES.
Speaker 4:you saw that? Yeah, I did.
Speaker 3:I don't feel I feel offended. Quite honestly, I feel as though, as Larry said, you know, not only are people figuring out what color to paint the deck, they're also trying to figure out how to position themselves at the top of the deck, as opposed to not understanding the whole damn thing is sinking and being on top of a sinking ship. It may delay your demise.
Speaker 3:But this is a problem, and when we try to broker those types of deals, what we do is normalize stuff and we act as though there is a legitimate case for eliminating. Yesterday. What did we find out? Americorps is gone. Yes, yesterday woke up. Americorps is gone, and that's not theoretical to me. I have two AmeriCorps people and one who is going to come on deck who no longer have the possibility of working here. Under those conditions, I might be able to find them other jobs, but for them to be able to just disappear, millions of workers, millions of young people who had jobs right.
Speaker 5:It was their one hook into getting into college and getting support through college, because AmeriCorps contains within it this commitment that if you stay through your commitment, they will give you financial support to go to school and just like that, people came to work yesterday. This program is concluded Shut off.
Speaker 3:And then you have the Michigan Community Service Commission, which, by the way, awarded us that lovely plaque over there and I shook hands and took a picture with the governor last year for the recognition that we received. They lost their funding. So, while they've lost their funding, while you have, you know, millions of people across tens of millions of people who have been sidelined, just lost their only source of revenue, their college support, losing everything. Here you are in photo ops talking about F-16-29 jets.
Speaker 4:New fighter mission. We're going to have a new fighter mission to go over there and kill the bad guys. Right there from Michigan. If Russia nukes us, then we're right there. We have a base to protect our state in the Great Lakes.
Speaker 3:Thank you. I feel safe, Sam. Thank you for clarifying the significance of this, those 16. So you know, I said, you know, someone pointed that out and I said if politics is a sport, then if you can't beat them, join them. But if politics is about something more than a sport, if politics is about principles and values and things that you truly deeply care about around justice, then you have to at least stand for the people who elected you to defend them.
Speaker 5:But you know, this goes to a point that you made earlier in which, as having been a political operative for most of my adult life, the politics of today does not really seek to represent everyone. It seeks to represent that portion of the few people who cast ballots. So I want you to hear what I'm saying. First off, more than half the adults don't vote Of those who do. Adults don't vote Of those who do. The politician is seeking to get 50% plus one of them, so that we've grown more narrow and more narrow and more narrow as to who people focus on, until you have the ultimate now in President Trump, who plainly only speaks to the very wealthy and to his MAGA base. He doesn't even care about the other Republicans. This process, which began long ago, is not finished yet and is the mechanism through which this tearing apart of the United States experiment is driving. I do not believe it is overstating. I encourage people to do this. Don't take my word for this.
Speaker 5:Go back and read the newspapers that you can find in the library there are still libraries open you can find in the library and read the tenor of the conversation leading up to the Civil War in this country. It is very akin to this. Read the conversations that took place in Germany leading up to the takeover by the Nazis and I remind people I know people tell you all the time, don't use Hitler. But I want to remind people. Hitler did not run a coup. Hitler was elected to office. Once elected, he then manipulated the system to become the dictator. So we have to learn from history and we have to practice the diligence. And as we look around, clearly the governor has made a decision, along with others, that she's going to move to the right. She's thinking undoubtedly that the left won't have anywhere to go because there won't be anybody over there for them to vote for and the people who are likely to support them don't vote. So they don't matter.
Speaker 4:She's thinking in the lens of 2020 presidential.
Speaker 3:I also think that there has been this pragmatism mindset among Democrats that we have to be pragmatic and that really good politics is pragmatic, that we've got to figure out how to get things through that are possible. We've set aside ideals. Now the difference between Democrats and Republicans is they have ideals.
Speaker 5:They do their ideals are horrible but they have them.
Speaker 3:Democrats' ideals are. We're just not going to be bad as Republicans. We're going to be softer and gentler, kinder and gentler Republicans. In fact, wasn't that what George W Bush was running on? Kinder and gentler. And so you kind of run on this. Or you know, rick Snyder, one tough nerd, this idea that I'm not really making decisions based on trying to harm people. But now one tough nerd and kinder and gentler has become the Democratic Party. And President Obama told us. He said, if I were running for office in 1980, I would be running aligned with Ronald Reagan. He compared himself to Ronald Reagan and there is nothing about anything that I've ever done. If you compare me to Ronald Reagan, we're fighting. Okay, those are fighting words.
Speaker 5:But I at least have to go look in the mirror and say is there any truth to this?
Speaker 3:Right? Well, you know, listen, I'm going to assume there's not right, Because I've worked my entire life to try to be other than that. To be able to say that and to be able to be in the mainstream of the Democratic Party tells you how far away they are, because you know most people who are of a certain age. Ronald Reagan is not somebody that most of us can tolerate. Most of us have, you know. You fly into Reagan National Airport and it's like well, I'm glad the planes crashed there, because maybe that's karma. I'm just joking. I have such negative feelings I don't even like flying into an airport with his name because of the tremendous amount of harm that happened on his watch, because of the way he ran for office based on what welfare queens he was going to put welfare queens and other black women in their place. And yet the whole nation, for the most part other than black people, still regards this man as a hero.
Speaker 5:You know, but the same forces, not the same people, but the same forces which aligned to elect and sustain Ronald Reagan. You know everybody talks about President Biden was diminished in his term and that he wasn't really the president. It was an open secret that Ronald Reagan had become mentally deficient, that his wife was actually the decision maker, and everybody knew it, and every now and then people would report on it, but it made no difference, because what's driving what we're experiencing, which is what is driving the catastrophe that the people in Detroit confront, is that the way we produce and share our products in America has radically changed. It is not the same, and Donald Trump is lying, not making a mistake. He is lying when he says industrial production is going to return again to America.
Speaker 5:We talked last time about your Diego Rivera mural on the wall here in the studio. Nobody produces anything like that anymore. It's a beautiful capture of a moment in history which is long past. Just like you can hardly find a blacksmith today, you cannot find that kind of methodology to produce things. And so we who are the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the workers who are depicted in that mural, we find ourselves without the very thing that caused our parents, great-grandparents, granduncles to move to Detroit, the opportunity to work in that big industrial complex. So Detroit now is occupied by this whole group of folk who either don't have a place to work or who are working in an area that most of us cannot find a spot. The fundamentals here are what's challenging us and, in many ways, the mayoral election. I don't want to say it's not relevant or it's not significant. It is. But make no mistake, whoever is the mayor alone cannot do.
Speaker 5:This coalition of people who are committed to shifting the fundamental ways in which we produce and distribute the enormous amount of wealth in this country $30 trillion, with a T dollars a year, every single year growing at the rate of 3%, which I think is somewhere around $900 billion. My math might be off a little bit, but it ain't off much. That is gargantuan money. Why am I driving past men and women standing at the corner of the freeway? Why am I having to stand in schoolhouses where there are mushrooms growing out of the side of the wall? Where there are mushrooms growing out of the side of the wall?
Speaker 5:Why are we arguing about $2 million or $10 million, or $10 billion, for that matter, allocation for education in a country. I said billion. It takes $1,000 billion to make $1 trillion $1,000 billion and we're arguing over $3 or $4 billion to educate the children we claim are our most precious resource. We who are leaders have got to lead in shifting this discussion to look at the source of the problem and pretending that some individual who— I'm not going to do that Some individual who clearly does not. Did you hear the president's speech yesterday? Did you watch it?
Speaker 3:On mental health. I don't listen to anything he says he was virtually incoherent.
Speaker 5:He was virtually incoherent. He started talking something about chairs. I mean the guy. Were it anyone else, they would be. You know what Article 25 is? That's the article that allows you to declare that the president is not fit for office and can be replaced. He would be Article 25.
Speaker 4:Not fit for office and can be replaced. He would be Article 25. I saw yesterday he was still defending the Photoshopped, superimposed letters of MS-13 above the symbols that were tattooed on the guy's knuckles, and I wonder like am I going to get MS-13 and he can do it to me? Next he's pushing back on the ABC News reporter trying to tell him no, mr President, that was Photoshopped onto the thing as people are trying to—.
Speaker 3:The answer to your question is yes, he's literally a hateful person. But I kind of disagree with you a little bit, larry. Okay, I think that there is a certain nostalgia by white men in America, and white people in general in America, for a time where they felt like they were better than everybody, and I think some of them do think they can turn back the clock. I think some of them do think, I think that you know the browning of wealth across the world, the idea that you have to negotiate with these brown people and they control industries. There's so much hatred and resentment of China, even though they don't bring it to China. I think this idea that Chinese people are actually, you know, own so much here is very threatening to them, and so I think what you're saying is correct, that they're not going to bring it back because you can't turn back the clock.
Speaker 3:I just think that you know, white supremacy is irrational at its core. You have to not see things and not believe things. You have to pretend that Barack Obama is not Trump's equal. There's no evidence. As much as I criticize him for some of his policy decisions, there's just no way that you can say he is not intellectually superior to Trump. The only way to get at that is irrational. And so you have a bunch of people talking crazy talk around him. Marjorie Taylor Greene, lauren Boebert, I mean. The intellectual stupidity of these people is just stunning and they get away with it and they say things like Kamala Harris is the most unintelligent person ever. You have to be irrational. You can't have a rational argument with people because the reason they say that is because they need to believe it.
Speaker 3:The problem with white supremacy is they have to make everybody else small to make themselves feel big.
Speaker 5:I don't disagree with that. Because they're small, I don't disagree with that. But my well, I have two points to make. One is, while they may be irrational and they may believe that, because they were born in an oven, that they're a biscuit doesn't change the fact that they're not and at some point they're going to discover that. But the bigger point for us, donna, is those of us who are on the other side of these questions. We've got to do a better job. First we have to articulate a vision and what we want to have happen, and then we have to do a better job of communicating that I agree.
Speaker 5:Together we have been trying to get a coherent articulation of policy around development in the city for several years.
Speaker 5:Every time we get close, it becomes clear that to articulate one that really benefits the majority of people in Detroit, who are making less than $40,000 a year with a family of four, is going to offend some people, because there's no way in the current context we can keep doing what we're doing and adequately house everybody, adequately, feed everybody, adequately, provide medical care for everybody.
Speaker 5:We've got to have the courage to articulate an alternative vision and while I don't agree with everything that Bernie and AOC are talking about. The one thing I will say for them is that they are forcing us to consider alternatives that everybody else in this knee-jerk Democratic Party won't even allow to come to the floor for debate, won't even allow to come to the floor for debate. That's where I think we have to begin to spend the energy and the capital, the political capital, to offer folk who are sitting at the House who will not get up and go vote because they have concluded, and not necessarily wrongly. You can go to Finkel and Burt Road, you can go to Conant and Seven Mile, you can go to Gratiot and Seven Mile and you can go back. Pick whichever president you want and look at Barack Obama, look at Donald Trump, look at Joe Biden, look at Donald Trump again, go back further and for life, life for the people who live and shop and work in those places is essentially unchanged.
Speaker 3:I mean, you know you and I are going to agree on this Right. So you know we agree on these things Right. Because the reality is, bernie Sanders is cool, but Bernie Sanders, you know, is talking about everything but housing. When he was talking about $15 an hour and I was going to the rallies and I was saying, wait a minute, what about? There's actually a picture of me at one of the Bernie Sanders rallies with my granddaughter, luna, who was just about two. She's standing there looking at him and I said you know, what about housing? And he said well, if people make $15 an hour, then they can afford housing. And there's like no data that says that Everybody.
Speaker 3:When some of our friends I'm not going to name them because I love them were running for Congress the first time, and I said what about housing? He said well, I want homeownership. I said I'm not talking about homeownership, I'm talking about housing. If housing is a human right, then people who are not homeowner eligible. Yeah, but homeownership is so good, it's the American dream. Why do we keep on believing that fallacy? And, as other people have pointed out, I just love it because the reality is that if you own a home and you owe the bank $200,000,. That bank owns your home, okay, and they're just letting you call yourself owner.
Speaker 4:You're running from the bank.
Speaker 5:You're running from the bank, and if you don't think so, don't pay them.
Speaker 3:Don from the bank. You're going to get from the bank and if you don't think so, don't pay them. Don't pay them, right, they can take it back in a minute. So I think that we live in this world right now where we're unwilling to imagine anything different, and it's important for us to remember that 100 years ago, we didn't have Social Security, we didn't have workers' comp, we didn't have unemployment insurance.
Speaker 5:We didn't have the weekend off the minimum wage the weekend off.
Speaker 3:We didn't have child labor laws. We didn't have any FHA government, any kind of housing policy. A hundred years ago we didn't have bridge cards. Somebody had to think that up.
Speaker 3:If people could imagine a different world a hundred years ago, why is it that we cannot imagine a different world right now? And I'm not talking about the incremental kinds of stuff that I'm hearing from me, even from Sanders, and you know my issue with Bernie Sanders. I do admire him and I think he's done a lot of good in some ways, but I think the issue I have with Bernie Sanders is he acts as though racism is caused by financial struggles and he does not understand that racism is the source of a lot of these financial struggles, that the way that you can racialize campaigns, the way that Donald Trump is acting right now, is to try to create a fissure between black people, mexican people, asian people and white people. And as long as white people think they're on the right side of all of that badness, then they will accept having their food stamps cut, having their kids removed from AmeriCorps, because keep in mind- most of these AmeriCorps members are not black, are not brown.
Speaker 3:Most of them are white kids across America who have lost it and they'll tolerate it as long as they're harming us. And so I think, but? But I think that he started a conversation Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez started, but it's up to us to take that conversation somewhere else. It's up to us to imagine a beloved community. It's up to pick up us, to pick up that conversation and say let's not even look at what's on the table. We're doing housing right now and we are acquiring and rehabbing housing.
Speaker 3:And the question is are you going to rent them or are you going to sell them? I don't want to do either. So now what? So you know, my challenge is trying to get a bank to agree to let me own them and sell them to people by way of a land contract. That, you know, is not the. There's a whole construct of a beneficial land contract where you can own these homes and you can set up really productive, you know, contracts with the potential buyers. They have a low buy-in fee. You can, you know, provide them with a lot of support while they're in the home so that you can call yourself an owner, and sure they won't be an owner, really, you know, but at least I'm not a bank. It's nonprofit, right? We can set these kind of contracts up because we have to innovate, we have to think through how can I get you to be a homeowner without having to go through a bank.
Speaker 5:But you know, donna, here is as we envision and we're thinking about, you know, about candidates for the office of mayor. Can we envision a city where every single person in this city has a decent place to live? Let's start with that vision. Maybe it's 900 square feet a person, maybe it's 1,000, because actually I've been reading about this and there are various definitions as to what that is. But where the interior of the home is air-conditioned not necessarily mean cooling, but cooling too. But it's warm when it needs to be warm. It's cool when it needs to be cool. Can we envision that? Now let's back up. What does it take for that to happen?
Speaker 5:Well, there are, I don't know, 300,000 households in Detroit and let's say it costs $100,000 a household to create that, then maybe you're at $30 billion, you're in the billions of dollar range. But remember, now we're talking about a country that produces $30 trillion. So, in order for, let's say, it's 300 billion I'm picking a number out there let's say it's 300 billion, where could we find 300 billion dollars? And let's say we have to do that in 100 cities. So we're talking 30 trillion dollars. Well, if we do that over 10 years, then we're talking $3 trillion a year, and we're only talking 1% of the gross domestic product in this country.
Speaker 3:All right, so we're going to take a break so we can come back, and I want to have this conversation. And yeah, and.
Speaker 2:Detroit One Million is a journalism project started by Sam Robinson that centers a generation of Michiganders growing up in a state without a city with one million people. Support the only independent reporter covering the 2025 Detroit mayoral race through the lens of young people. No-transcript. Interested in renting space for corporate events, meetings, conferences, social events or resource fairs? The MassDetroit Small Business Hub is a 6,000 square feet space available for members, residents and businesses and organizations. To learn more about rental options at MassDetroit, contact Nicole Perry at nperry at ecn-detroitorg, or 313-331-3485.
Speaker 3:And we're back. Larry, you did a great job of really trying to figure out. Now, obviously, as you said, you've been thinking about this for a minute, right?
Speaker 3:This has been, and when we try to talk about affordable housing in our peer groups with other community development organizations. You've pushed the envelope. I want to hear about that. But I also have a question to ask you. Okay, Around the world, everybody does not have 900 square feet per family. No, Our ancestors did not necessarily have 900 square feet per family. There's ways for people to live inside this world where they don't have an abundance of space, but they live well. And I think part of our imagination has to also be how do we challenge the individualism and move more towards a collective ideal of how people live in our communities?
Speaker 5:Well, see, once you have the discussion. So maybe 900 isn't the number, maybe the number is 500. Maybe the number is 400. Maybe the number is 200. Maybe the number is 100 square feet, but there is a number because there is also too little space. So somewhere between my 900 and whatever too little is, let's say it's 50, somewhere between my 900 and 50, there is a range of sweet spot.
Speaker 3:But you know, Larry, there's a loneliness epidemic. We put senior citizens in nursing homes. But this doesn't have to be standalone. What I'm saying is we have there's a loneliness epidemic, we put senior citizens in nursing homes.
Speaker 5:But this doesn't have to be standalone.
Speaker 3:What I'm saying is we have there's a loneliness epidemic.
Speaker 5:Yes, there is.
Speaker 3:We put senior citizens in nursing homes. Our culture says that if a child turns 18, it's time to get out. Get out. If you stay in your house, you're a failure. We make fun of people who stay in their parents' homes. Other cultures don't do that. You have extended family members sharing a home.
Speaker 5:And you know what they do they add on to the house.
Speaker 3:They add on to the house Exactly.
Speaker 5:Actually you can see that process in Detroit if you go to some of the older neighborhoods.
Speaker 3:You add on to the house by either going out, going up and sometimes redeveloping the basement, but the idea that you have to get out and take care of yourself. Part of it is that we have such an individualistic culture that everybody has to get their own and, you know, God bless a child who's got his own. My mother used to sing that song to me when I was a kid.
Speaker 3:She used to drop her head, Mom may have and Pop may have, but God bless a child who's got his own, and that's a great song. So you think about what the message is for a child who doesn't have his own. So when I didn't have my own, I felt like a failure. I felt like a failure, I felt like I didn't deserve more and I think, if we're really rethinking, let's rethink what housing looks like, let's rethink what neighborhoods look like.
Speaker 5:So let's have that discussion. I am open to that. The point of the little arithmetic exercise I was doing was to make the point that you could get there and not overburden the productive capacity of this country. You could do this well within. And let me say this this doesn't even make rich people poor. They would still be rich. But we have to first have the courage to see a new thing.
Speaker 5:It can be a communal circumstance, but the point of the matter is let's start with what we want and then work back to where we are, because where we are now is we're starting with where we are and then we're saying, oops, we can't get to where we want because that's in the way you know I talked to the current mayor about home repair.
Speaker 3:You were there. Remember that conversation we had? I do. Last time he ever spoke to me, we were in his office, gathered in his office, because he's trying to pass the blight bond, and so we had pushed back and I said if you're going to raise $250 million, why not spend it repairing the homes of people who are living in poor homes? And he said well, it would take a billion dollars to do that. I said well, and all of a sudden we don't have a problem spending a billion dollars tearing down homes, we just have a problem spending a billion dollars investing in homes. And he said that is not the role of government. To create housing, affordable housing. He said, right in our faces, that is not the role of government. And so I said well, is it the role of government to build stadiums? And after that he was like he's seriously, he's the man with our peers.
Speaker 3:He actually scheduled a meeting to talk about housing and uninvited me and said I'm not allowed to sit in which. You know I should have been offended, but I was kind of, you know, flattered because I thought if I get under his skin so much he won't even sit in the room with me. I must be saying something right. But you know, I think if we're really talking about this, I agree with you. I think we have to look at our priorities. I think let's look at how we spend our money, because I think that's what you're talking about how we prioritize our spending. Let's look at how we live.
Speaker 3:Let's look at how we live, how we buy things. I'll give an example of something Food desert. Right, what's a food desert?
Speaker 5:Well, since it's a, desert.
Speaker 4:deserts don't have things. I can figure that out when you don't have a grocery store within a two square mile radius.
Speaker 3:A full service grocery store right Now. I didn't grow up like this. I grew up where you had little small grocery stores, though, and they weren't considered full. We didn't have a Kroger where I grew up. We just walked up to the grocery store.
Speaker 4:Full service has to include a deli maybe. Yeah, because I mean is Rivertown Market in Lafayette Park, full service grocery store.
Speaker 3:You know, the reality is it's not not according to the data, but if you want to get certain things, if you go to Lafayette Market, you're going to get catfish there, even during the pandemic. You get toilet paper from Lafayette Market, but the idea is a full service grocery store, and you know so if you have a. You know, my mother grew up in an era where there was a fish market. You bought fish one place, you went to a vegetable store, you went to another place. Those constructs still look like a food desert. According to the research, the concept of a food desert is really tethered to the capitalistic concept of a full-service grocery store, the Kroger model. Do we need Kroger in every neighborhood, or is Kroger what ships food in from around the world? Or do we need to figure out a way to have food sovereignty so that we can have a people's food co-op all throughout the city of Detroit?
Speaker 5:I don't, but how would you do that? See, this is. But let me first say this is the debate I want to have. This is the discussion I want to have. It's the one I'm encouraging people to have, because this is how we get to the vision we want. I'm really tired of reacting to Project 2025 and whatever other contract on America. What was the guy's name?
Speaker 5:Yes, I know who exactly you're talking about the Speaker of the House, newt Gingrich. I'm tired of having their discussions, and so our discussion is we're against what they want. Let's articulate what we want. And so let me say this about what you're saying, donna it is it takes you know you hear me say this all the time it takes three pounds of food a day for every person. To harvest three pounds of food, you have to plant an enormous amount of food. You have to grow an enormous number of animals. If you're into flesh as your source of protein, those are very significant challenges to overcome. What I would say is I think that, as part of our work as leadership, and whether we want to be considered a leader or not, we hold titles, we hold positions. In the communities that we come from, there are people who look to us, who make their decisions based on the opinions that we share with them. We're leaders.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, larry, I'm going to say this. There are nine corporations that control every level of food production in the world. They control the land that people grow food on in other nations. They control the seed, they control the equipment, they control the lending, they control the transportation, they control the canning and they control the equipment. They control the lending, they control the transportation, they control the canning and they control the distribution.
Speaker 3:That kind of setup sets us up to, first of all, eat a whole lot of unhealthy crap. Right, because they're financializing all of this and they're taking the health and value out of a lot of it. But it also means that local people who used to farm and we have black farmers even in Michigan who farm outside the city of Detroit I'm not saying we can do it all in the city, but I am saying that it's possible for communities to have food sovereignty, to grow the food that they want, purchase from nearby and have more of a circular economy. We don't have to buy oranges from China when we can grow them or even purchase them from California. The way we do food production is really a financialized system that creates poverty. We're growing almonds in a desert in California and when we grow almonds in that desert, we are taking groundwater and we're creating droughts because we're taking that groundwater. There are whole towns in California that don't have water because of the farming practices that happen there. Why would we grow almonds in a desert?
Speaker 5:Almonds are a very good source of protein.
Speaker 3:Yes, and they should be grown in a place where things naturally grow. We grow alfalfa in I think it's Arizona or New Mexico, and sell it in Saudi Arabia for their cattle, right? Yes, because you can't grow alfalfa in Saudi Arabia because they say wait a minute, this is environmentally unsustainable. But it's sustainable for us to do it here. We're draining our aquifers and Michigan has 20% or plus of the freshwater supply in the world.
Speaker 5:It's about 40% 75% of the freshwater in America.
Speaker 3:In America, but about 25, 20 to 25% in the world, depending on who you listen to. Okay.
Speaker 5:It's a lot.
Speaker 3:It's a lot. We have to stop Nestle from taking some of our water because that freshwater is coming from somewhere, and so when I look at it, I think all of what we're doing is unsustainable. The more I read, the more insane this all looks to me. You know I teach this class. It's my last day teaching at Columbia today by the way. I'm done.
Speaker 3:I'm bringing it home to the hood after this because I had to, in order to teach at an Ivy League school, learn so many things that seem unnecessary.
Speaker 3:Food was the one that blew my mind when I found out the extent of corporate control over food. How do you have hunger and then we send people canned food and we send them boxed food and we say this is going to get rid of your food, your hunger. That's not how you do it. You need fresh foods, and we know the importance of healthy nutrition. You know, we know that even with WIC Women, infants and Children, that whole program, the list of food that they're giving pregnant women so many things are on that list that pregnant women should not eat and most OBGYNs would say don't eat that while you're pregnant, you're not supposed to eat lunch meat, you're not supposed to eat canned sardines, and yet people are eating that. And so I am a food advocate. I don't know how we get at it, larry, but I know that there's ways for us to grow the food that we eat in our nation and grow it according to what makes sense in our nation.
Speaker 5:So you're head of ECN, I'm head of Brightmoor Alliance. Why don't we just get some folks from ECN and some folks from Brightmoor together and start a visioning process about what we want? See, you mentioned this earlier. You said that 100 years ago, things which we take for granted today didn't exist. Now, in the late 1800s, the organized labor movement began to agitate for a five-day work week. They began to agitate for sick days. Many of the things for which they were agitating, FDR took up in the New Deal. In fact, that's what Trump is really trying to dismantle is the New Deal government. But that's a whole other discussion for the nerd Deal. In fact, that's what Trump is really trying to dismantle is the New Deal government. Yeah, but that's a whole other discussion for the nerds. My point is that those things didn't exist. But people came together and began to visualize and articulate that.
Speaker 5:Everybody thinks that the civil rights movement started with Rosa Parks or with Brown versus Board of Education. The truth of the matter is, African-Americans began organizing against the separate but equal Plessy versus Ferguson. That passed in. I think it was 1898. The Supreme Court decided they began immediately organizing against that. The first manifestation that we know about is the Niagara Movement, which became the NAACP. The envisioning part has always been one of our strengths and what's happened is, as we have become more and more atomized, pushed apart, disconnected, we don't have those dialogues anymore. We don't come together like people used to do in the AME church. In these annual conferences, which are now just a floor show, we don't come together and debate the issues and walk out of there with something that we can all agree on.
Speaker 3:The church has gotten swept up in prosperity.
Speaker 3:Yes, it has, and the church gotten, you know, swept up in prosperity. And the church, you know the worst thing that happened. Remember when it was George W Bush started the faith-based movement, or it was HW Bush started that faith-based movement and the idea that we're going to invest in faith-based entities so that we can have justice, and all of a sudden churches saw themselves as economic developers and everything like that. And you know, I know, you're a pastor, I have no disrespect, but the church has gotten swept up in some stuff. I think yesterday we saw 150 pastors endorsed Mike Duggan. I actually decided for myself earlier this year I'm not endorsing because my job is not endorsed, my job is fighting. So whoever becomes mayor, whoever becomes governor, whoever becomes whatever, it is my job to act on behalf of the people who feel like they don't have representation.
Speaker 3:I imagine Rosa Parks at an endorsement convention. Or you know Martin Luther King saying who do I endorse? What kind of movement do you have? You know going back, but also you know what you say about the civil rights movement not beginning in the 1960s. It didn't even begin with the Niagara Movement. The civil rights movement began with the first black person who tried to free himself from slavery.
Speaker 5:OK, the Civil Rights Movement began. That's a larger, larger movement.
Speaker 3:It's absolutely. What I'm saying is what is the the, the, the man who was enslaved and he sued for his freedom. Oh, my goodness, the famous case Amistad.
Speaker 5:Well, Amistad is an example.
Speaker 3:Oh, my goodness, the famous case Amistad. Well, amistad is an example, but there's one where the Supreme Court Judge Taney said a black man has no rights, that a white man is bound to respect that court case. This was civil rights. This was people fighting for their rights, and they were doing it through the court system. They didn't always do it at the ballot box, we didn't have a vote, so we fought, you know, fought there. We actually did it through organized rebellions that people don't even know anything about, and so when we understand the history and power and rebellion does not Do you have the name it?
Speaker 4:was Dred Scott. Dred Scott, oh my thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 3:It's like on the tip of my tongue, Dred Scott, that decision. Dred Scott was a civil rights leader. He was fighting for his rights as a human being. He was fighting for his rights for citizenship. It's innate. People will always fight against oppression, and when people but there are those of us who believe we are not oppressed anymore. There's those of us who think we've made it. You know.
Speaker 5:Going back to the church, most people don't realize that the AME Church, which has this system of general conferences, meets every four years, has annual conferences that meet every year and there are aggregations of churches in different geographies. But it was in the general conference that the anti-slavery movement organized, because the AME church had churches everywhere and Mother Bethel, mother Emanuel, when he attacked that church it was because it's the church that was formed by one of the anti-slavery rebellion leaders. The history of the church up until about the middle of the late part of the 20th century was at the forefront because the church leader was dependent upon the parishioners and the church leader had to articulate their vision. Now, that's not true of every pastor, but as an entity the church was at the forefront of the struggle for freedom and liberty. What's happened now is and you make this point before and you correctly make it again that too many people in the church are only focused on getting paid access to power in exchange for a vision, in exchange for a aspiration, in exchange for a advocacy.
Speaker 5:Well, I'd rather just have influence and I'd like to be able to call. I almost said something I want to be able to call fill in the blank and so I'm not going to say anything that might offend them. And so who then is the voice? And you see the fact that the population, the people, recognize that those folks who hold the quote unquote leader title don't represent them, because they don't do what they ask. You know, everybody goes to the church nowadays because they want to get these endorsements. You know everybody goes to the church nowadays to progress. They want to get these endorsements, like the pastor endorsing them is going to get them the vote of the parishioners. And over and over and over, the parishioners say I want to come in here and you preach, I'll make up my own mind about who I'm going to vote for, not to mention that in local elections it really gets funny because half the people that have these churches don't even live in Detroit.
Speaker 3:That's true. It's like why are you going there? You know they won't come here in the same way. They will go to a church. We have more people coming to ECN than many churches have coming to them who are from this community. I'm saying so. I think that we have got to get over this notion that pastors are, that churches are sources of liberation unless they are intentionally about liberation. And there are some churches that are intentionally about liberation. Those churches should be treated differently. Those churches actually have sway over the thinking of the people who belong to those churches because they're talking about, they're sharing those ideals. But we're not seeing it as much here and I think it's a concern of mine.
Speaker 5:But if you go back to the three pounds a day thing, every human being gets up in the morning to solve that problem. Whether you're Elon Musk, or whether you're Eduardo, or whether you're Imogene over on Finkel and Byrd, you are getting up every day having to solve this problem. And what we tend to forget, because a lot of things get in the way or in between, is that, depending on where you sit on the income ladder, getting that three pounds takes up progressively more space of your life. The further down the ladder you go, it's inversely proportional to your income. You have to spend enormous amounts of time to get food when you are poor, when you're trying to feed a family of four on less than $40,000 a year, as do half the families in the city of Detroit. Who speaks for them?
Speaker 3:You're right, we do, and that's why we have the Black Detroit Democracy podcast.
Speaker 3:We all come from people with humble beginnings who had to figure out how to do this a long time ago and had big jobs and had even larger families in a lot of instances and sometimes fed the kid across the street, because they had skill sets that a lot of people today don't have. There's a lot of people who don't know how to cook, don't know what to do with a fresh vegetable. Those skills have been lost. There's a lot of people who don't know how to grow their own stuff. Now, we didn't grow everything, but we grew our tomatoes, strawberries, cucumbers, greens. There were things that we grew and we took care of ourselves with. We've lost that, and so one of the things I think we have to do is also help people become more self-sufficient. I always forget names, and so this is embarrassing. This is the second time I'm going to do this today. The man who talked about peanuts the peanut guy.
Speaker 5:Oh, Booker W, not Du Bois, but George Washington Carver.
Speaker 3:George Washington Carver. George Washington Carver taught nutrition.
Speaker 3:And he taught the peanut as the perfect food to help people who were poor, because he saw malnutrition on people even who farmed, because they did not understand how to maintain nutritional balance. To help people who were poor, because he saw malnutrition on people even who farmed, because they did not understand how to maintain nutritional balance. I think that we have two things that we are responsible for. One of them is policy, and the other one is building people's power so they are not so dependent on systems political and economic systems that do not love them, because I don't think that we're going to get that love anytime soon. And in the meantime, how do we leverage what we do have so that we can support people?
Speaker 5:So how do we do that? For me, that's when we come together and have productive conversations. It is clear. You don't have to be you know WEB Du Bois, you don't have to be Sojourner Truth to figure out the politics of what's happening now. There is a food fight going on among the wealthy in this country and we are just a fodder in the ground for that. But it doesn't mean that there is not a strategy and a way forward for us if we will stop and do what our parents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents did. They figured out a way to thrive in the midst of all that was held against them. I was reading online today did you know that there was a black airline in Illinois, someplace like Rupert Illinois, apparently not unlike what happened in Tulsa, oklahoma? These folks got together before the First World War and decided you know what this plane thing might be something? And they built an airport which, once it began to thrive, the government came in and shut down.
Speaker 3:Wow, there's so many examples of erasure of our power and our ingenuity and the creativity that we have been taught, and also internalized, beliefs about our inferiority. Super important, sam, you're a young guy. I am? Yeah, I want to hear, because you know what, larry and I go back. He goes back a little further than me, but we go back A lot further than me, but we go back.
Speaker 4:I'll tell you what I think about being a young person is that when I go to these faith-based events, I see no young people there. Even in Triumph, I think you can go, and there are young people there, but they're there because of someone that they respect, who is their ancestor, their elder, their superior ancestor, their elder, their superior. And you know, of course, on Monday, when I went to this event at Straight Gate International Church on Grand River, there was a handful of local pastors, some I think I saw Gongwer it's a Lansing-based publication described Wendell Anthony and Charles Ellis, bishop Ellis at Greater Grace Temple or Darrell Gaddy or Bishop Vaughn of Second Ebenezer they're talking about these folks are black power brokers. Is that accurate? Are they wielding and yielding power amongst a group? Because you know, when I talked to the mayor on Monday, he's really excited. He says you know if people didn't think that this was going to be a major campaign, you know there's no illusion here.
Speaker 4:You know, courageous is what I heard him describe some of the pastors who said. I talked to Charles Ellis, he told me that he had met with Jocelyn Benson. He was surprised not to hear from Chris Swanson, obviously as a relationship with law enforcement because he's related to Ray Washington, but he said Garland hadn't reached out to him either. If you're a candidate, should you be reaching out? I mean, I guess in how powerful are the endorsements of figures like these?
Speaker 5:So here I'll give you some of what goes on inside the door. In strategizing politics, the rule is it doesn't hurt to ask somebody, even if you don't need them. So I would say, yes, the people you named are power brokers. They have very large, are power brokers. They have very large. The ones you named have very large congregations, but there are not that many who are like that, who have congregations that large. And you are also correct that you will not see a great many young people, because young people have a historically low relationship with faith-based matters, with the idea of God, with religions as religions or with the people who represent them. Their power lies in the fact that, having grown these very impressive congregations and they are quite large they are able to deliver a message and people will pay attention and they are able to articulate a point of view that the media will pay attention to because they have the large churches Are they going to be able to convince those members, though, to vote for an independent for the first time, are they?
Speaker 3:going to be able to convince those members, though, to vote for an independent for the first time. I think that they are powerful in some ways and not as powerful in others, for reasons that you just mentioned. I think that, having worked for a church and seen the church, I never have pastored a church, but I certainly ran a nonprofit for a church and saw a lot of things happening, I think you know, sometimes in those churches it feels to me like the congregation almost worships the pastor and there's a love-hate relationship there where, on the one hand you know there's resentment, on the other hand there's almost a worshipful stance and when that happens, sometimes you really expect people to bend their knee if you want their support and you don't necessarily base your support on what's good for your congregation. Because your congregation, you see yourself as a representation of the congregation, and when that distance happens, it's problematic to me.
Speaker 3:But, let's go back to the water. Let's go back to the stormwater drainage fees, right? All those churches protested stormwater drainage fees and said wait a minute, my church is going to suffer. And they got the mayor of Detroit to lower their stormwater drainage fees. But the only group of people who had lowered stormwater drainage fees were churches, not nonprofits, not low-income households churches. If every single one of those pastors had said we need a water affordability plan and spoke on behalf of the people who had their water shut off, just imagine the power they could have leveraged there. But the power gets leveraged on behalf of the church building, not on behalf of the people who are members of the church. Way too often, from what I've seen.
Speaker 5:I wouldn't go that far. Well, were they fighting for water shutoffs? No, some of them were, but the ones you're talking about weren't fighting out loud about that.
Speaker 3:But I would say it this way, and I'm going to go back how do you fight, I'm sorry, how do you fight for people not having water and not have it be out loud?
Speaker 5:Because you do it behind closed doors.
Speaker 3:And so what was the result of that? Because Monica Lewis, patrick, was out loud fighting and demanding policy change and she was by herself working with a few other people fighting and demanding policy change. And she was by herself working with a few other people. They weren't with her. And so I hear what you're happening behind closed doors. But I think one of the reasons young people don't trust the church is because the church was not at those front lines when they were dealing with literally, I don't have water.
Speaker 5:I agree with you, I don't disagree with that. But I think to not recognize that the church that, but I think to not recognize that the church. See, two things can be true at the same time. The church can decide to do what I call you know, in the Braff and Brenner model they can decide to do micro sector things, things that are near people, but avoid those macro level things that are policy level that you're talking about. So I can help my parishioner whose water has been cut off. By picking up the phone and getting a call back from the mayor or somebody on their staff, I can get the 10 other people's water cut back on. Now I don't have the power to get the policy for water rates changed, but I have the power to get help for Ms.
Speaker 3:Jones. But I have the power to get my stormwater drainage fee lowered, so there was a public use of power.
Speaker 5:Here's what the people in church would say to you. I'm paying that bill.
Speaker 3:I understand that that's what people in the church would say to you. And if the people of the church were only paying that bill and were not paying for the luxurious lifestyle that some of these pastors also live? That's one thing. I'm not trying to be cynical. What I'm trying to say is from the ground level. One of the reasons that churches have lost influence over people is that people see some people, some of the most powerful pastors, as self-serving. I don't disagree with you.
Speaker 3:And until when people see their pastor? If Reverend Barber I don't know if he has a congregation, but if he has a congregation, if Reverend Barber tells people to do something, they're listening because they see him as acting on their behalf and they see his values aligned to their own.
Speaker 5:But what I'm telling you, donna, what you don't see, is the pastor acting on the behalf of individuals within their congregation.
Speaker 3:I'm not saying that they are not power brokers for individuals. I'm talking about policy and I'm saying they acted on behalf of themselves. If they had stayed silent with the stormwater drainage fees, that would be one thing, but the time they came out and held the mayor's feet to the fire was when they were being impacted.
Speaker 5:We are not disagreeing on that. But where I was going in response to Sam's question is if, once you accept that people are operating out of this sense of self-interest, then it becomes easier to understand the choices that they're making and the fact that you went to the church and did not see young people there. Who do you think the pastor is representing? When the pastor goes out to speak, Unless it's a pastor who has that liberation theology calling and everybody does it unless you're talking about a pastor who has that, then you're going to get a pastor who's going to operate in many of the ways you talked about, Because many of these pastors owe Mike Duggan for those favors that they got from Ms Jones when she was about to have her water cut off.
Speaker 4:Wendell Anthony told me two years ago, duggan came to him and asked for his support. That was back when he was a Democrat. He said it doesn't matter, I'm not voting for a party, I'm voting for the person, and I think too. Something that Charles Ellis told me is after the election. You know, he said we have a felon in the White House. Things have to change. There is no more. We got to do this because you tell us to.
Speaker 3:There isn't. But I'm going to say this because I just want to make this point really clear. Some of the people whose water is still shut off go to church. Everybody who has their water shut off does not go to church and every pastor did not operate to get their water turned on. There's a whole lot of people. Look at the tax foreclosure crisis. Look at water shut off. Seize our human basic needs. When you talk about housing and family housing, one out of three households lost their homes to tax foreclosure. And yet there's who's fighting for that Bernadette of Tua Henne. What church is she fighting with? I can't think of any, and my point is this If you want to be in a political arena, you can't just show up for an endorsement. Be in that political arena. I hear what you're saying, but I want you to hear me.
Speaker 5:I do.
Speaker 3:We had tens of thousands of Detroiters losing homes and some of those people went to church. Bernadette goes to church, you know we're not talking about people who are unchurched. I think that there is a perception that when we're fighting these battles we are on our own and if we want the church to be more powerful, then the church can't just fight for us behind closed doors.
Speaker 5:The church has to fight with us when we're in the streets doing the work, but see the church is not saying it wants to be more powerful.
Speaker 3:But I'm not saying they do, but I'm saying that when they give these endorsements, let me finish.
Speaker 5:So let's say that there are only 10 people who pay attention to the pastor's endorsement. That's 10 people that you otherwise wouldn't have had. The person who is running for office says it doesn't cost me anything to get Pastor X's endorsement, and I get 10 people that Pastor X has influence over. This is an isness thing. I'm not advocating this as a way of life. I'm simply describing to you the reality of the political context in which we live. And so it is possible how can I say this in the most general way? It is possible to pick any sector and identify people who are making business decisions and not value decisions.
Speaker 3:But when it's a church sector and the church is rooted in values and the church is supposed to be the source, it's supposed to be rooted in values and that is the reason I know so many young people who believe in God, who believe even in the gospel of Jesus Christ, but who do not believe in church because they do not trust. I'm talking about a lot of young people.
Speaker 4:I mean you talk to them? I know more that just don't believe in God and think church is uncool.
Speaker 3:Honestly, Really, yeah, okay, more of our just cynical when you say they don't believe in God. They don't have any spirituality.
Speaker 4:No, yeah, I mean, a lot of people are just out here, like a lot of black young people too, which is surprising because you know they're raised in a church I was raised in a church.
Speaker 3:Do you believe in God?
Speaker 4:You know, sometimes I do yeah, so being raised in the church?
Speaker 3:what turned you off?
Speaker 4:Nothing really turned me off of it, it's just not. And I was raised in a church. I worked for a church when I was in college. I grew up in the Sanford Methodist Church. I went to the Western Michigan University, had a Methodist church there on campus, so I've been a part of it my whole life. My grandmother is a deeply religious person.
Speaker 3:So you haven't heard of people talking about church hypocrisy I would describe myself as agnostic.
Speaker 4:Some days I'm like no, there's no other way we could be here, and some days I'm kind of like it's not possible at all and that's kind of the thing. We kind of sidelined it as an important thing in our lives because it hasn't been. Our path to civic engagement hasn't been through the church, right, it's been through watching Trayvon Martin get killed on TV. You know, and that's the interesting thing, now that we're getting older and some of my friends are going back and reassessing their beliefs, I do it almost every day and saying maybe I do want to get a little bit closer to you know when I grew up, but I don't see it as people are. I do see also, homophobia is probably when you talk about the archaic beliefs and the values. I think that's just a through line. I think most people that are to the left of center, that are my age and peer group, they find that there are bygone era beliefs within the church settings that they are in.
Speaker 3:Definitely that, but I've also heard a lot of church hypocrisy. I've heard a lot of hypocrisy, even pushback against Kenlock. The mindset is he's greedy, he's. I mean these mindsets. There's not a lot of trust in pastors.
Speaker 4:Yeah, well, I mean, I've talked to a few of his members that are very trustful, but I do talk to a few.
Speaker 3:I'm not talking about his members. I'm talking about people who are not members of the church.
Speaker 4:No, I was going to say people that are members have told me they are uncomfortable with their pastor, who they deeply admire and love being the mayor of Detroit more than just a few.
Speaker 5:But let me have Bible study, a second Jesus. Maybe I should go, larry, maybe.
Speaker 4:I should go there. Maybe I should just go right with you.
Speaker 5:Jesus accused the church of hypocrisy Exactly. Hypocrisy is not like it just happened under George Bush. Hypocrisy has been an aspect of faith since at least the Bible being written.
Speaker 3:I mean, when Martin Luther King wrote the letter to the Birmingham jail, who was he writing it to?
Speaker 5:Exactly.
Speaker 3:He was writing it to pastors and I'm not disagreeing with you. I think that people, many people, believe pastors are Martin Luther King, or they should be, and there's always been more of an exception than a norm.
Speaker 4:Many pastors believe themselves to be nice.
Speaker 3:Because they can sound like him. Right, If I can sound like him, I can be like him.
Speaker 4:Lorenzo Sewell.
Speaker 3:Even if I'm preaching no, don't be nice, I'm being real, but no, I think that all I'm saying is that what we really need from the church and you talk about paintings what color are we going to paint the walls in the Titanic? You get that in church too, I think, a lot of times. What people are seeing is that there's a lack of urgency and a lack of representation for the least among us, and I am saying that until we see those things, you're going to see a disconnect between but see, just as you say that, I'll show you Pastor Samil Thomas from just blocked out the name of his church on Stout and Schoolcraft.
Speaker 5:Pastor Samil has a food program every day. He, like you are doing. He has purchased homes. I can show you our brother over on Graham Boulevard in Lafayette, messiah. There are many examples of churches who are led by people who have a heart for the liberation of their people.
Speaker 3:Can I just say that I went through this program years ago and they were differentiated between little steeple and big steeple churches and said a lot of that work is being done at the little steeple churches.
Speaker 5:That's true, but see here's what.
Speaker 3:And again, I'm not trying to justify this A lot of them are more rooted inside the neighborhoods and have more neighborhood congregations, don't they?
Speaker 5:Yes, that is because yes, short answer is yes. But here's what I would say to you Once you grow your church to a certain size, you evoke a set of economic dynamics that demand to be taken care of. So if I've got a 75,000 square foot church, I don't know what square foot costs to heat in a building that large because my church was small, but it's a lot. If it's only a dollar a square foot, if it's 50 cents a square foot, it's $37,000 a month. There are any—so when you talk about the little steeple churches, then you're talking about a church like Baber, the one I pastor. Our heating bill was a lot when it was $500 a month.
Speaker 3:Right, and I understand the economics.
Speaker 5:I do understand the economics, so I can stand up and beat my chest and still pay the gas bill.
Speaker 3:And I understand the economics and I believe that there are churches who've managed both and I really am calling on churches to do a better job because it's very personal to me. I'm calling on churches to do a better job. I'm calling on churches to remember that when you take care of your people, your people will take care of you more often. When people trust that you are there to fight for them, they will fight for you more often. I just believe that, and it's whether it's a nonprofit and my nonprofit. You know, the reason I know people fight for me is because they see me fighting for them, and I think it's the same thing with the church, and I think that what we want to see is.
Speaker 5:So do you know of any nonprofits, maybe, where people are living high off the hall?
Speaker 3:Absolutely, we do, oh, okay, absolutely do. And you know what? We absolutely know that. And that could be our next conversation. Eric, I'm not trying to.
Speaker 4:I know some nonprofit newsrooms that are doing that.
Speaker 3:Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I'm sorry. What did you just say? I?
Speaker 4:was going Going about whether or not a pastor can be the mayor. His name's Warren Lee. He owns it's called 44th and what 44th and 3rd Bookseller. It is a bookstore in Atlanta, georgia. He sits on the board of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual home of Martin Luther King, where Senator Warnock is the pastor there, and he told me inside of Source Booksellers on Cass a couple weeks ago I'm looking at his business card now that he hadn't heard of Solomon Kinloch or his attempt to become the city's mayor.
Speaker 4:But when Senator Warnock came to the church and said, hey, I want to run this. You know, I want to do this. I want to be a US senator. Here's the responsibilities and requirements and the time away from the church that it would require. Um, they had conversations and they came and felt like it was appropriate. When I asked, uh, uh, warren, what he thought about the idea of a mayor being, uh, you know, the pastor of the largest, the city's largest church, um, you know he hesitated and he said you know, I'm I'm not sure the responsibilities are quite similar, suggesting that maybe a city mayor might be a little more busy than a US senator. I think you might be right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think you might be right, a whole lot right, a whole lot right. And I'm not trying to. What I was just talking about is power, and it's bigger than pastors. But when people are looking at the pastors as being the most politically influential people inside of the black community, then I really need pastors to step into that role. I really hope and pray that more of them will step into the role of being politically influential in more than just drumming up votes.
Speaker 5:But also in pushing policy. Donna, the only way you're ever going to make that happen is to go join a church and make that case from inside the building.
Speaker 3:I belong to a church and I ran a nonprofit for the church and I'm going to leave it right there. Did that for nine years. I will leave seven years. I'll leave it right there. I'm going to say that the organization, the corporatization of the church. You know, I was running a church, a nonprofit for a church, which was a successful nonprofit at that time, and the church was moving to a new building, building out something brand new, and so the first thing they had to do was stop some of the ministries so they could have the money to build the new church.
Speaker 3:I was there and I saw it happen and all I'm saying is that we have to always remember who we serve and if we're serving Jesus then, if we're serving Jesus and we call ourselves Christian, then feeding, clothing and making sure that people have what they need has got to be at the top of our agenda, whether it's on a policy level or it's on a spiritual level, in my opinion, and I would say to you that's Matthew, chapter 25, that you were just quoting, and so that what you say is absolutely correct.
Speaker 5:But I will also say to you that the Bible will tell you that when Jesus returns and he is coming to judge he's going to begin in the church, in the pulpit. The pastors will be the first to be judged for how they have led those who are of faith. I hear you when you say that you want more churches to do differently.
Speaker 3:I would only offer that there are a great many churches who are doing what you described and just acknowledge them as you identify the others I agree with you, larry and so I don't mean to put them down, because I appreciate the little steeple churches in our community doing God's work and they have been wonderful, including yours, right, I appreciate them. My very good friend, like a brother, brian Ellison, is running one of those churches and I love him. I love listening to him. He fights the fight, he talks the talk. He has so many things that he does wonderful. I'm talking about those people perhaps who are seen as the powerful pastors, not the people who are actually doing the work of the Lord in our community. So I do want to differentiate and not just shame everybody with a broad bunch, because, you're right, there's a lot of great work happening in our communities.
Speaker 3:Our partners at Mack Development, leon Stevenson, is certainly doing a great job and when you look at what's happening with Genesis Hope, and so I don't want to overstate and I thank you for helping to clarify it and keep me in check, Larry, Well, I wouldn't say I'm keeping you in check. Uh-huh, yeah, we keep each other in check.
Speaker 5:But City Covenant Church is Pastor Samil's church, because I definitely want to acknowledge him. Here's what I would say definitely want to acknowledge him. Here's what I would say. Let me make a spiritual statement. The scripture, the Christian scriptures, which a lot of people talk about and few read, speaks to people who have sheep's clothing but are inwardly wolves. I would direct you to Matthew, chapter 7, if you'd like to see one instance of that. And in the book of Revelation which if you don't have somebody to help you, you ain't going to never understand, but you can read chapter 7 and Jesus' Sermon on the Mount which can be more easily understood there is something moving here beyond just the normal political thing.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 5:And part of my case. I wasn't going to do this because this is your show, but part of my argument to the black community is that we rescued the gospel from the hands of white supremacy when, in order to justify the abuse, rape and exploitation of people from African descent exploitation of people from African descent they recreated a Christianity. I would say that the church, the descendant church of those slaves, has to remember its roots and begin to speak to the justice that we found in that gospel. When Jesus came out of temptation and said the spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach to the poor, that's in Luke, chapter four, if you want to look it up.
Speaker 3:Larry, I can't think of a better way to close the show than with that statement. Thank you, because I absolutely agree with you, and I'm probably so passionate because I agree with you so passionately about the fact that we've got to rescue our faith. We've got to, and I agree with you also that this is a spiritual moment that we're at. I absolutely believe that there's a spirit moving in our mouths. I believe in God. Right, I believed in God. I grew up with atheistic parents, by the way, so believing in God in my household was a dangerous thing, because I was mocked.
Speaker 3:I was reading the Bible at 10, like I need some answers and y'all don't have them, and so that's been a part of who I am. In the same way that you were able to walk away from the church, you can't walk away from no faith, right? You have to find some meaning, you have to find some purpose, some belief, and so I had to construct my faith out of whole cloth, right, and I say that to say it's important to me, in the same way that many converts. It is where we see what happens without it and when I think we see right now a world where people are just caring about money just caring about financial interests, believing that power over people matters, and if we don't rescue our community in Detroit from these mindsets, then we fall.
Speaker 3:For anything, then it's oh look, downtown is so pretty. Oh look, we got this grant that we forget to care about the least among us. And I refuse to do that. And the reason why you and I are always in these fights in these rooms that we're in is because you refuse to do that. And the reason that Sam is here at this table is because Sam is really a voice where he's saying let's tell the truth and, trust me, be patient with Sam.
Speaker 5:We have this conversation 10 years from now with Sam. He may have a different answer. I certainly may.
Speaker 3:I certainly may you know what I'm going to say? This, sam, and I'm going to challenge you this because you don't believe in these things, but you still embody those values.
Speaker 4:That's not that I don't believe I am literally without a home in that way, in the same way, in politics, I am a listener, I am a convince me and I will come.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but you embody the values, sure.
Speaker 4:Well I that you were raised with right. It's easy, because I was raised with those values.
Speaker 3:You embody those values, and so you still believe those things are important?
Speaker 4:Yes, I do.
Speaker 3:And I just always want to honor that, because to not have faith that these things are true and still have faith that these things are the right things in our world, that's still commendable, and I see that in a lot of young people who are accused of not having faith and yet they're the ones really fighting for truth and justice and all the great things that many people say that many religious people say, oh no, that's not my problem, but I see young people making it your problem.
Speaker 3:So I, you know we separate ourselves in these ways and you know, to honor my mother, who did not have faith but lived the life of a person who believed in everything good is important. I want to thank you guys for this conversation. I hope it was good for you as it was for me. So thank you so much for listening as well to the Black Detroit Democracy podcast. Be sure to like, rate and subscribe to our podcast on all platforms and, of course, support Black Independent Reporting on Detroit1millioncom no-transcript.
