Al Barlow: Technologies for Justice Partner and Attorney Shares his Experiences with Racism
well welcome everyone to our monthly conversation on racial healing and reconciliation uh we have our a guest tonight al barlow these sessions are sponsored by the jacksonville urban league and its center for advocacy and social justice i'm the director of the center dennis stone and we're pleased to have all of you here and those of you who will be watching the recording going forward i want to thank jamie krasnigor julie miller and sophia berger for their assistance in making meetings like this happen um and i also welcome tami hodo who's just joining um who has been a active supporter and in fact we're working together on a second annual conference on rate racial healing and reconciliation and she may be able to talk about that towards the end of the program so um i'd like to introduce al barlow a longtime attorney in jacksonville born and raised in jacksonville has a fascinating history to share we're so grateful he's taken time out of his schedule he actually had to drive up from miami today and here he is with us looking as fresh as ever so al please take it away well first of all thank you for this blessed opportunity to uh come and participate i just found out about this when you all consulted with me to invite me to come so i've watched a couple of them they were very informative um and i was asked to just tell a little bit about myself i was um and by the way i'm going to title my topic just for organizational purposes and i know we're talking about racial healing and reconciliation but i want to title this from the cradle to the casket racism and prejudice are baked into the american psyche from from cradle to casket racism and prejudice are baked into the american psyche um and i'm just gonna uh give you a little bit about my background first and i'll go into some you know life experiences um i was born in a separate but equal hospital here in 1961 it was called brewster a lot of african-americans who are older probably than 40 or 50 or so they know about that hospital um it was a separate but equal really unequal hospital and i was born there so from the cradle like i said you know from the from the cradle to the casket so i was born in a separate but equal hospital which was really unequal because the facilities were not you know up to par with the other facilities then i went to my mother's day care she ran a daycare for 40 years i went there it was predominantly um african-american although we did have two white students who went to the school so that was my first introduction to a whites when i was in kindergarten at my mother's day care which is on which was on the north side of town um edgewood area that's the kind of you know the area most people know about um and i went to carter g woodson elementary school in the 60s and i was there in the sixth grade when integration came into effect so i was in predominantly um all african-american schools until they bust whites in to us at carter g woodson elementary and so it changed the dynamic of schools of the school immediately um and i'm gonna come back to what happened to me in in the third grade or the second grade before that but anyway uh when they bust in white students it changed the dynamic and i found myself having to protect white students from some of my friends who just wanted to beat him up for no reason whatsoever so one of the first experiences i had was protecting a minority of whites from a majority of blacks in my elementary school went to northwestern junior high at the time it was predominantly african-american and um so i was in a majority as well went to reigns high school from 76 to 79 graduated with honors in 1979 all in the majority still it was a handful of white students who went there but we were in the majority so i never experienced any kind of real overt racism prejudice or discrimination with the exception of that uh experience i had in the uh third grade which i'm gonna come back to because that kind of laid the foundation for the rest of my life albeit i didn't know it until i was being interviewed by a reporter for a story last year and it all came back to me so i went from uh reigns in 1979 to the university of florida and that's when i became a minority i never knew what a minority was until i really went to the university of florida 33 000 students back then in 1979 and i came out of high school one friday or thursday and i was in college the next weekend and it was a total culture shock for me i was uh used to being you know in the know president of this leader of that all of a sudden i became nobody overnight and i started experiencing immediately some direct racism prejudice and discrimination um at the university of florida and i didn't know whether or not i could you know hang there until my first set of grades came out and once my first set of grades came out in the summer of 79 i knew that i could hang with those students and you know the rest is history i did graduate on time in in 1983 with a bachelor's in political science i was accepted at howard university florida state university and university of florida which i started i really wanted to go to howard but i couldn't afford it and they were not going to give you a scholarship until your second year so they're going to make you prove to them that you could make it well by that time i would have been 30 000 debt so i went to fsu on a scholar on a tuition waiver and a stipend but after i started there about two days the university of florida offered me a full virgil hawkins scholarship to go to the university of florida college of law free of charge so i wound up breaking my lease and tallahassee went back to the university of florida and finished law school in a year in uh two and a half years my class was first class to receive the virgil hawkins fellowship which was a three-year full-ride scholarship for african-american students no one else was qualified for that and they did that in honor of virgil hawkins who integrated the state university system a lot of people don't know that but he he applied got accepted showed up black and they told you you cannot go here because you're african-american well before he applied there were no race there was no race bar on the application you just knew not to apply so he applied met all that qualification but when he showed up african-american they wouldn't let him sit he filed a lawsuit it went for almost a decade or so he ultimately won that lawsuit but they gave him money to go to another school out of state and what they did was they gave a scholarship to 15 i think african americans at fsu and 15 no uh five or 15 at each school and i was one of those to get it and by virtue of the fact that i graduated a half a year earlier than my class i am technically and historically the first african-american to graduate as a virgil hawkins fellow from the university of florida uh college of law a good friend of mine he's a lawyer here in town from pensacola he's the first one to graduate with that from fsu so we're the first in the state of florida came back to jacksonville as a public defender for 18 months went into private practice from there i want to go back to the third the second grade because something very very significant happened to me and one of the things that i want to discuss tonight is racism prejudice and discrimination we know about overt racism we know about that but a lot of people don't understand about um implicit bias and and harvard has a good test it's called it's an implicit bias test it's a real good test i recommend that anybody take it because what happens is most racism prejudice and discrimination that i've experienced was not over it was it was it was in a way that the person who did it was not even aware sometimes of what they're doing now i'm not making an excuse for racist people but what i'm telling you is that there are a lot of people who don't even know that they're racist now i know that might sound kind of odd but let me give you some just basic examples before i get to that third grade teacher even today i can go to when dixie dressed like this after work or whatever before work and i can see two or three white people ahead of me okay the clerk who let's say it's a white clerk or cashier they'll speak to two or three white people in front of me like hey how you doing how's your day how's everything going when i come up it's hot that's it that's it that's all i get but i'll sometime i'll wait and count my change and the next person behind me let's say they're after their their white it starts all over hey how you doing how's everything going that person had no concept that they treated me differently than anybody else so what i'm trying to tell you is if i ask that person if you ask them did you treat all your customers and saying today they'll say yes they did they really cognitively believe that they did but they didn't so if you show them a video they're shocked that they if you show them that video sometimes they'll cry because they don't they didn't understand what they did until you showed it to them now there's a word for that a phrase it's called cognitive dissonance cognitive dissonance and what it is is anytime our minds come upon information that conflicts with our natural cultural tendencies we tend to fight the information before i go to the third grade again let me tell you what happens what was happening to me in the courthouse when i became a lawyer i would sometimes the judges would have chambers which means you go in and talk to the judge before court starts and you tell the judge what you're going to do before you do it so all the lawyers are going in to chambers and the baitiff has to let us in let's see two or three or four white lawyers walk in before me all of us are dressed the same with sewing and briefcases he's letting one white lawyer go in two white lawyers go in but when i walk up he's like wait a minute where you going i'm like uh i'm going to chambers uh your your case can be called later by your attorney i'm like no i'm the attorney i have a client outside and the lord in the bailiff will apologize not in other words he saw a pacman that's all he saw he didn't see my tie he didn't see my suit he didn't see my briefcase all he saw was a black man and he was not accustomed to seeing black attorneys and so he stopped his first thought was to stop me because he thought i was the defender or a client in the wrong place in other words his first mindset was not that i was a lawyer even though i was dressed like one that's cognitive dissonance now once he learned that i was a lawyer was a lawyer he apologized to me but the point is his first mindset was that i was not a lawyer that's the problem that we have in society now let me go back to the third grade teacher because that that really uh it really laid a foundation for my life that i didn't really even understand what happened was um the teachers would line you up to take you to lunch and then when lunch was over they would line you up and walk you back to class well what we would do just you know a little bad children the teacher would be leading us like a mother duck and while we're behind her we would jump out of the line like pistons one would jump out this way like little pistons you know and my timing got off one time so i jumped out of the light just as i jumped out she turned around and saw me so she stopped the line well i know i'm in trouble that's not even an issue so i jump back in line i'm thinking i'm just gonna get some you know reasonable punishment that white female took her hand slapped me as hard as she could i hit the ground her whole her phalanges prints were in my face and then she kicked me now i'm in the second grade now here's the problem with that number one did i do something wrong yes number two should i have been punished yes that's not even an issue the issue was i got excessively punished and you cannot tell me she would have slapped a white kid like that no now some issue was happening with her life who knows she might have been going through divorce or whatever the case may be i don't know what the issue was but she took it out on me she had no mercy on me whatsoever and so that gets to what happens a lot of times in society in society what happens a lot of times is there is no break given to an african-american or any minority with whom the perpetrator cannot readily identify that's how most prejudice racism and discrimination happen it happens with the lack of the benefit or a blessing or a break being equitably distributed or dispensed to a person doesn't look like you or with whom you cannot identify in other words what the most racism prejudices and discrimination i've experienced in my life although some of it is overt and i'll share that with you as well most of it was was subconscious from the perspective that this person treated me differently but may not have actively known that they were now i'm not making any excuse because here's the reason why because the results are the same the results are absolutely no different if a person mistreats you ignorantly not understanding that they're mistreating you the results are the same there's just the same as a person who's racist prejudiced and discriminatory a member of the aka the results are the same you can have a racist judge on the bench who hates african americans and gives not one of them a break or you can have a person on the bench who is ignorant of their own cognitive dissonance and they will sentence the person the same as the racist person on the bench the results are absolutely no different the difference is one can be educated to understand what they're doing is not right whereas the other one doesn't care i don't care how much education you give them it's only going to take a heart conversion that's salvation or something like that a radical conversion and belief in the bible can save them that's it but the average person who doesn't understand what they're doing they can be helped now let me give you some instances of some direct racism bridges and discrimination i remember one time i was riding my motorcycle on fraternity row at the university of florida and some some guys i was on fraternity road to all the frat houses on this uh street and i was riding my bicycle i mean motorcycle 750 suzuki around the curve probably doing about 20 miles an hour okay because that's what the speed limit is on campus and some drunk white boys came out and tried to pull me off that motorcycle at 20 miles an hour it just so happened that i didn't fall another uh respiration situation i have had happened to me at the university of florida was um i uh i went out with some some friends of mine who happened to be white and we we go out we're having a good time and everything and um i didn't notice it until something happened i was only african-american in that whole establishment i didn't realize it until we were walking out and somebody said let's kill that [ __ ] and i'm like who's the [ __ ] they're trying to kill looking around it was me in other words i was oblivious to the fact that never happened to me again after that i was oblivious to the fact that i was the only african-american in that establishment and what had happened was i had let my car down because when you're raised on the north side of jacksonville you understand quite well you cannot let your anywhere you go ever i remember when we were kids children and we would get we would be going downtown my parents and here's this lecture all the way downtown listen when we get downtown do not raise your voice do not look people in the eye do not do all of these don'ts don't stones well it was because they knew good and well if an african-american child did something a child did something they would wind up they could wind up getting killed or going to jail just for an african-american kid talking out of line or looking at a white person the wrong way or whatever the case may be and so we would get those lectures all the time the problem today is that people don't understand that there's still active racism prejudice and discrimination going on and i would say it's worse now than it was before because a lot of people think that we've arrived and we really haven't i remember one example that happened in law school um our law school exams were like four hours so when you come in you know you're gonna be sent down there for at least even if you're good you're at least three and a half hours okay it was a white kid in my class who would always brag about his father and how much money he made an hour and it was a lot of money back then when he was talking about his father this is like 1980 83 84 85 he was telling us what his daddy was making his daddy was a bull gator which is you know they donate to millions of dollars to the university of florida this kid we would be in exams after 30 minutes he'd get up and walk out and everybody would look like where's he going he walked out he never came back you know what because his daddy was giving money to the school we all knew it and he was so prideful and arrogant and ignorant that he wouldn't even sit down and act in other words the professor would help him he wouldn't even sit down for four hours and play the game he got up after 30 minutes and walked out and he graduated you know on time i graduated early but he graduated on time there's another scenario i remember happening i remember i was studying one one one friday i believe and i was walking out the library and i heard one of my professors hollering across the breezeway to a student who was in my class and he called his name he said hey so so tennis nine o'clock in the morning i'm thinking to myself okay this is my law professor playing tennis with one of my classmates so i started watching the classmate from from then on sure enough the professor was taking care of them i'm quite sure they had some relationship whatever parents i don't know what they can a lot of those kids i went to school with their parents went there mothers went their fathers went their grandparents went there i'm the first generation of family to go to college so i didn't have those connections but you know there were other ways to to get around that system i remember i wanted to um and let me just say this right here i'm gonna give you some positive things about racism prejudice and discrimination but before i get there i'm gonna tell you what happened with with a white professor they brought a white professor he was an exchange professor from south africa they brought him in to teach one of our political science classes and so it blew me away what happened because i saw i saw reverse racism against white people with him and this is what happened he had given us a tough assignment and he gave us a timeline and uh one of the kids didn't meet it one of the white kids didn't meet it and uh he got on him right in front of the class he said listen you will get this right next time or you will flunk this class and so the kids say you know i'm going to do it i'm going to do it and i remember this like it was yesterday the kid said i'm going to do it it's gonna be right and the professor said it had better be in his accent i remember that i locked it in my mind he said this had bet to be because i wanted to see if he was gonna hold that white student do it and he did not only did he hold that white student to it but he was harder on all the white students i had never seen anything like that in my life he was treating white students like i was used to white teachers treating black students but he would treat us with deaf words and i could tell i said you know what he has seen some real racism prejudice and discrimination in south africa and he knows about the existence of it in america and he wasn't playing the radio i you know i felt sorry for some of my white students because that man was he was hard on them but he was light on us i mean he gave us deference so i remember thinking to myself i wonder if white people feel sorry for us when they feel when they see us being discriminated against by white people because i felt sorry for those people but i could identify with what they were suffering from because i had suffered from it but let me say this to you ladies and gentlemen if you never suffered through any of the things that i'm talking about i'm probably speaking french to you and you speak english okay a lot of people who have not suffered through these things cannot readily identify with these problems and it permeates from the cradle like i said to the casket it is baked into the american psyche and most people don't understand let me give you some positive things about racism prejudice and discrimination from an african-american's perspective i try to be very very cognizant or aware of what's going on so when i first got back here from law school i noticed that you know white white lawyers didn't really respect me they didn't they they presumed that i was i guess dumb or ignorant until you know i developed a reputation for trying cases but once i developed that reputation it was too late for him because i had already beat him and let me tell you what i would do i would never let if i if i could avoid it i would never tell a opponent that i went to the university of florida i would never tell them that i went to the university of florida college of law i would never tell them that i went on a scholarship i would never tell them that i graduated early i would never tell them i was in this i was in that i was president of this i was president of my i was vice president of the law student body at the university of florida i'm gonna tell you how i want it because it was only about 45 african americans up against about 2 500 students and i had to campaign to white students to win but what i did was i campaigned to the seniors and i basically told them i said look we know you guys are going out and doing some great things and making money and everything else we know you don't care about what's going on but somebody like me we care so i went to the seniors and i had a white female who just knew she was going to win didn't campaign hard just kind of lackadaisically handle her election assuming she was going to win i killed her and became vice president of the law student body at the university of florida got got more votes than her on all fronts definitely gotta block african americans but that wasn't enough to win it for me but let me tell you what what what i did was i used people's prejudice against them i would never tell a a white opponent how smart i was i i wouldn't want them to think i was smart you know why because what i found was i would let their ignorance work against them what i found was they did when they thought i was ignorant or whatever when they played the stereotype they didn't prepare like i was preparing i'm over preparing and they're under preparing they're assuming that they're just going to mop the floor with me and ladies and gentlemen i cannot tell you how many times i've seen my opponents you know we've won the case the jury has come back and i'm looking at them and they're sitting down at the con at the council's table looking down and i know what that look is that look is what in the world just happened let me tell you what happened to you what happened to you was you assumed that i was dumb you assumed that i was ignorant you assumed that i went to some ranking college you was but after it's all over it's too late it's way too late for that so what i'm telling you is there's some positive sides to people being racist towards you and presidential towards you if you let them think what they want to think see by the time you get in a trial baby it's too late you know and i'm standing up you know doing the closing argument talking for an hour with no notes because i know it and my my opponent is over there write writing notes no my closing argument isn't my hardest in my mind i've lived this case for six months i know it like the back of my hand and so when you come to me with some crazy stuff i got a counter argument for it immediately because i've lived this case i understand this case but to them it's just another piece of paper that the shuffling and the file or whatever and they assumed that the opponent who was african-american it took about maybe maybe about five years after five years nobody took me uh for granted anymore a matter of fact i heard that um in the state attorney office that um they will put two lawyers on me so i would always try cases against two lawyers still win the case i'm trying to case against two lawyers a pro an investigator a detective and an arresting officer and a paralegal we still win the case because we over-prepared um some of the best things that ever happened to me in my life long term were when i was mistreated by other people i'ma tell you why because even that scenario with that teacher i wanted to hurt that lady at at whatever age i was but i couldn't it was nothing i could do to her i couldn't do anything to her okay that's when i first heard about the naacp because they called it end up my mother when i went home these fingerprints were in my phalanges prints were in my face marks with my face they called the naacp and the n-double acp excuse me president went up to school the next day and i remember this like it was just like they they called me in the principal's office and asked me what happened i told them and then they called each one of my classmates in individually and asked every one of them what happened and all of my classmates said the same thing and the only thing they did for that lady was transferring her to another school that's all they did for her in the 60s that wouldn't happen like that today it wouldn't she would have a more of a consequence my parents didn't even sue the school system for that back then that's how you know you just didn't do anything like that back in the 60s they were too afraid to do it but um those are the kind of things you know that happened back then but some of those things like that scenario right there uh it burned in me a will to want to right wrong i didn't realize that until i was going over my life with a reporter last year and it hit me like a ton of bricks i'm partners with two guys in a software company the software company it's called technologies for justice and what we do is we've been blessed by god to create some software what that software can do is go through two million records in seconds and pull up apple the apple lawrence orange comparisons so that judges and prosecutors and defense attorneys public and private can see what former sentences have been handed down so that they can now issue sentences that are consistent with those that have been handed down in the past it's called equity and sentencing analysis system and um it's technologies for justice.com is the website technologies for justice.com is the website the other area that i'm heavily involved in right now is trying to secure housing for homeless people now the greatest common denominator for racism prejudice discrimination and just um lack of helping people is is uh economics that's the greatest common denominator i see a lot of poor whites being discriminated against just as badly as poor poor and rich african americans as a matter of fact um in the system and so the most the greatest common denominator is economics african americans who are well-off and can afford to hire top-notch attorneys do quite well however poor whites who cannot hire top-notch lawyers top-notch lawyers excuse me they don't do well as well as whites who can however the average white defendant will do better than the average black defendant when both of them have public defenders i can't explain to you why but i've seen case after case after case whereby the situations and circumstances are the same same charges same uh history but the sentences are diametrically opposite one person getting seven years another person getting 15 years yet the cases are the same and so a lot of times it's because of that cognitive dissonance that i talked about earlier and so um i'm working with housing for the homeless and that website is housing for the homeless dot com housing for the homeless dot com and trying to work with our city government uh to get them to change the law on their own they wouldn't do it so now we got a petition drive going got to get 30 000 uh signatures together by the end of november to change the law our city gives away millions of dollars to to the rich who don't need it to renovate downtown buildings okay the same buildings where they don't want any homeless people around well i have a proposal that if it passes it'll require the city to set aside five percent of the millions of dollars that they give out to the wealthy to renovate downtown and what we have is a corporate welfare system that helps the rich the downtown development downtown investment authority evaluates proposals and sometimes the evaluator will say that the the company can afford to build the project on their own we shouldn't give them any money they'll veto that person and give them the money anyway last year alone the city of jacksonville gave away a half a billion dollars in grants and forgivable loans okay and some loans that are not forgivable to the wealthy all i'm saying is if we set aside five cent on every dollar that they're giving away and grants them forgivable loans to the wealthy they just set aside five percent of that your and my homeless problem will be resolved because that more than enough to pay for permanent housing for the homeless irrespective of whether you're man or woman black or white and with that i've been talking about 30 minutes so i'm going to open it up and allow you all to take it from there i think we might have a q a session thank you all any questions yes we have mixed results so far but let me before i answer that question directly i'm going to answer it indirectly here's what you have this this is so revolutionary that it's hard for people to wrap their minds around it okay so it's it is it is fundamentally changing the way we have done criminal work forever and so since it's so new you know anything that's new especially when it's technologically inclined it's a slow process so there's mixed results but in my opinion it's right on the right trajectory and schedule for it i know so my business partners think it's too slow i don't think it's too slow i think it's going to just slowly permeate society so we have several public defender officers using it right now and um and a lot of private attorneys and i do help private attorneys all over the state you can buy a subscription and use it yourself we'll train you up on how to use it yourself so you can do your own searches but what most lawyers do is they'll hire me to run the searches for them and then some of them will hire me as an expert to testify in course i write expert witness reports so we do have officers using it throughout the state and a lot of private attorneys using it but we we have something working that i'm not in liberty to discuss right now that um we're working on and it's very promising that a prosecutor's office and a public defender's office is trying to come in and use it um together which is that's revolutionary that's a cat and a dog sitting down having a having dinner together you know what i mean but they both of them understand the significance of it from the prosecutor's side if you can look at data and look at the average sentences that have been uh handed out let's say for burglary charge in the past you can formulate now reasonable offers in the present and the future that's based upon prior case uh dispositions which we call that case law press case precedent we do it in the law in terms of legal research and writing in the cases but we have not done it with respect to sentences so that's what esses does and so it's very promising and you're going to hear more about it as more and also i'm working with some judges right now which is very important so if the judges embrace it it'll kind of start snowballing but i would give it like within the next five to seven years or so i think everybody will be using it but on in my opinion is it's right on the right trajectory because anytime you want to bring something that's different you know it's going to be a slow process for people to use it amen usually no sir abs no see because what happens is appeals are normally directed towards whether or not a mistake was made at trial okay there are some that can take place whether mistake was made as sentencing okay but usually um those appeals do not really work because the system is not geared towards appellate cases towards sentences that are excessive um the the uh equal protection clause protects people from excessive sentences the problem is there's been no objective means by which to prove that a sentence was excessive until this software and so this software just came on online in 2018 okay and watch this the first case it was used on the person was facing a white male who was 20 years old turned 21 a day after his sentencing was facing 10 years minimum to 150 years maximum because he had five no 10 counts of five 15-year felonies so that's 10 times 1550 years so his minimum sentence was 10 years his maximum 150. well when they use the data from our system the state attorney i mean the public defender offered uh two years they had a hearing and she presented the data to the judge the judge sentenced the young man to two years of the youth in a youth camp two years of community control that's home detention and two years of probation so he had a six year sentence that was split by two years incarceration in the youth camp two years home detention and two years probation that went down from a minimum of 10 to a maximum of 150 years you know why because the judge was able to see that that same court had issued other people probationary sentences for for 20 30 40 50 60 counts this guy only had 15 counts so that's the power of this system that we have any other questions hold on let me answer that one first okay that's a good question here it is we all have free will god gives us free will there are many people i've met i know a veteran that i served you know um he's been homeless for 15 years and he likes being homeless those people are minorities that's in the minority okay the vast majority of people that i serve and i work with okay i'm a minister as well so i preached to him on sunday mornings outside in the hot sun okay and you know give them clothing food and tents and all that stuff the vast majority of them were not homeless within the last two or three years they're homeless now because of the economy in kobe 19 everything else the vast majority of those people want housing okay but what i do run into a lot is the things that you just say and what i what i find i was talking to a councilman who said well though some of those people want to be homeless yes sir but it's only a very microscopic feud so please mail this service don't get it twisted there are a few who want to be homeless but there are some of us out here who drink too much we waste our money we gambling away you know what i'm saying so a lot of us out here are not exercising our free will properly either it's just that we're not homeless but we're just as irresponsible as some of them so my focus is on the ones who want home want housing permanent housing okay and i want to help them if the others want to exercise their free will to maintain their homelessness they have the right to do that but i'm not going to believe that the vast majority of people want to be homeless just because of an unfaithful few okay what's your second question but uh and i get that question a lot as well i get a lot of questions like this so thank you for it because it give because it gives me an opportunity to answer because it's a legitimate question here's the reality of what's going on i can only do what i can do okay that's not my job to get them jobs what they need right now is housing i gave a guy a tent last let me just give you an example i'm talking i gave a guy a tent last february of last year i ran into him in the summer he seized me i hadn't seen him since i gave him the tent he starts crying he said you don't remember me dude i said no i don't he said you gave me a tent in in february and it changed my life i said attempt change your life how did it do that he said because when you gave me that tent i had somewhere to put my clothes to keep them dry i was able to go and interview for a job i got the job okay i got an apartment i got a car he pointed to his car it was a used car he bought it and everything but he said the tent is what situated him to be in a position to be comfortable enough to go get a job so my responsibility that i'm taking upon myself is to try to facilitate them getting housing now i work with soulsbarker i work with uh changing homelessness and i'm working with anybody else but my that's not my lane my lane is to get them housing and then there they have a multiplicity of services through source walker and changing homelessness and trendy rescue mission city rescue mission that they can get them off drugs and everything else that's not my lane that's not my lane my lane is to help them get housing once they by the way a lot of them have social security i've helped one man get his social security check cut back on he was without it for six months he lives in the shelter right now he gets over 600 a month in social security but guess what that's not enough for an apartment now because the rents are so high so a lot of these people have income but it's not enough to get them housing so i'm trying to get them housing that's paid for by the city i know people don't like that here's what the main i'm i'm meeting with a counselor and somebody from the mayor's office last summer i'm meeting with a councilman i thank god for him he set a meeting up for me to talk to somebody in the mayor's office somebody in finance about this idea so i'm talking to them and somebody from the mayor's office asked me this loaded question they said well pastor barlow um what do you think the city's responsibility should be towards giving housing to homeless people now what she was really saying is should the city be in the business of corporate of of uh welfare giving houses to the homeless here's the answer to that question no the city should not be in the business of giving welfare to homeless people for them to have housing but let me show the hypocrisy of it the city should not also be in the business of giving millionaires money to renovate downtown yet you have no problem with that none you have no problem with giving a half a billion dollars to rich people even when the people say they shouldn't get the money you give it to him anyway and grant's unforgivable but my answer to her is as long as you give money to millionaires you should be able to give money to the to homeless people because i call it what it is it's corporate welfare that's what it is so what i want to do is tie a law to that as long as they give money to millionaires let five percent of that money go towards housing for the homeless if you don't want to give housing to the homeless stop giving it to millionaires and i'll leave you alone that's how i answer those questions but thank you for that um for those very uh insightful questions i appreciate it anybody else got some questions i i have a few yeah a few statements if i could just real quick because it surely is not my show and thank you so much for your for the information but i would like to present this to the group i'm an educated woman historically black colleges undergrad and grad i sustained a severe stomach injury in that process i lost my home i was homeless excuse me for that um when i sought shelter they told me that i couldn't get it because in order to get the emergency shelter i had to be coming from a domestic violence situation i wasn't i had to be on drugs i wasn't i had to be a woman with children i'm single i don't have any children i had to fit all these parameters that i didn't fit yet i couldn't work and i lost my home i was homeless there was a facility in my neighborhood that they wanted me to go to i refused to go in it you know why because they had to sit they would have a sit in chairs and in the evening they closed out the lights the men saw me come in and say yeah we want you to come in here so i didn't go but people on the outside felt like well you should go in there if you're homeless go in there get what raped hurt harmed so all the stigma in the biases that were a part of that system kept me homeless and unsheltered and thank goodness i had friends who eventually uh i went to stay with but i was still homeless so i'm presenting this to the group when people are out there walking down the street homeless and maybe even crying it's not just because they want to be there our circumstances put us there and that's all i wanted to say and that's so i'm glad you said that because i mean listen y'all minister to these people i know them by name i hope some of the veterans get connected with the um programs and everything and see here's it's a vicious cycle there's i there's one lady i call her miss betty i met her uh last year she was sleeping on the sidewalk this lady is in her 80s 80s white lady she could be my grandmother i'm like what are you doing out here she told me that she had been renting a home from somebody i think in springfield or whatever for years decades maybe at a low cost the owner sold the house to someone else okay they immediately went up on her rent i can't remember what she told me it was he couldn't afford it they kicked that lady out that lady was sleeping on the sidewalk 80 something year old white female sleeping on the sidewalk at jefferson and you and i bought her a tent and i gave her some gift cards for harvard's grocery store down the street but that lady was sleeping outside and when i started making a bunch of noise about what was going on up there you know the city came in and they took a lot of them out uh from we call it the camp on the corner of jefferson union but what they did was the city very uh clandestinely took them away and gave them temporary accommodations you know at a facility around the corner and then they put them in um hotels for about six months or whatever when that money ran out all just about all those people were homeless again but what they wanted to do was clean off clean up that area because it was receiving a lot of negative publicity but there are a lot of people out there they were not on drugs before they became homeless now some of them get introduced to drugs to try to cope with homelessness because they've never been homeless before they don't know how to deal with it so then they get in a vicious cycle yeah some of them were on drugs before they became homeless but a lot of them were not they were just like you and me and here's what i asked people how do you feel in your heart when you see a homeless person can you empathize with them or do you just like bruce holmes being arranged song says uh go get a job because see if you cannot have any compassion on those people it's something wrong with you something wrong with you because guess what it's only but by the grace of god that we're not homeless i was talking to a lady just three days ago she said she would used to look down on homeless people until guess what she became homeless and now she helps me help homeless people because she's coming out of homelessness now and she understands it so sometimes god will providentially allow us to fall into the same negative situations and circumstances that we cannot with which we cannot empathize to get some compassion in us is there another question you're correct you're absolutely correct i think i'm glad i'm glad that you opened up because that reminds me of this um i did an interview with one of the new i think action news jax it's on the website if you go to housing for the homeless campaign.com is the interview that i did with a television station here news
station and you know how reporters do they'll go behind you and ask somebody else i'm not an expert in that area at all you know homelessness i'm learning about it but they asked a expert about my idea i guess thinking that she was going to disagree with me and this is what the expert said and your statement reminded me the expert told the reporter listen it's less expensive to get them permanent housing for the very same reasons you just articulated so well so he was shocked that she agreed with me but it is correct now i'll say this i won't name the person but there is another expert in this area who i consult with in homelessness they've been in it's their career so i asked this person and this what they told me and this is sad but it's true they say pastor barlow the city is not gonna city officials are not listen to this now i'm being trained schooled on this how to present this stuff they said city officials will not listen to your compassionate pleas that it's the right thing to do the moral thing to do to get these people houses for the homeless they won't listen to that but let me tell you what they'll listen to if you go in there and tell them that it's going to be cost it's going to be less expensive for the city to give them permanent housing than it would to keep them in shelters okay which shelters are very expensive very expensive you got the salaries you got the food you got the insurance and everything else okay now shelters have a place to to uh to work they should be there but for emergency situations only but that's not what's happening now they're permanently housing homeless people in shelters which means the people who temporarily need housing for emergency situations can't get it because they're already over they have over capacity so what she what this person told me was if you go down there and make economic arguments to them it'll work so i put it to the test i'm talking to an official one day a week or so after this and i'm telling them about you know the homeless and the problems everything they were just giving me up a deaf ear until i said this i said you know what if you if you provide them housing you know away from downtown away from the businesses that you're building up and everything you know it'll help the business owners and they'll like it all of a sudden the person started paying attention to what i was saying that's sad but that's true so with a certain group of people i highlight the morality issues with another with other groups of people especially hard-headed politicians who are only concerned about the dollars i come from a different perspective but i bring it all together as much as i can because i'm also a minister and i'm going to tell you the truth okay if you can have if you can harbor hatred in your any human being but especially one that's poor and destitute and and hurting you got a problem your problem is you got an eternal problem you might not get into heaven like that you might have all the money on earth that you want you might have all the nice cars houses boats motorcycles 401k playing full and fat but guess what if you don't have any compassion in your heart towards your fellow man you are just as homeless spiritually as a physically homeless person on earth right now any other questions comments or concerns i have a comment attorney barlow just want to let you know i like what you're doing and i'm so much in your corner because we do need to provide housing for the homeless so we can get the people up off the street so that they can have a chance or opportunity to go forward and to do better like you said a lot of people are homeless because of their financial situation a lot of them do not want to be homeless but because of financial situation a financial hardship that is what happened to them so kudos to you you know that you know if you can get housing affordable housing for these people we need more of that and downtown would be a perfect location like you say a lot of abandoned buildings that could be utilized so thank you so much for what you're doing and keep up the good work and thank you for thanking me but let me say this right here because i i get real uh with people you know um this is not about me at all i'm so far afield and what i was trained to do and what i thought i was gonna be doing in life is not even funny but here's the reality of it i have a certain skill set that can be used to to kind of kick the donkey in the butt to get something done i mean i'm a move in the shaker i know they've been doing it all my life so i'm not going to cow down i'm not going to cower down and not do it for these people but here's the reality of it this is not a city government problem to solve it's really a societal problem to solve it's really a church problem to solve to be frank with you but i'm leaning on the government because the government is giving our tax money to rich people who don't need so what people what you have to understand ladies and gentlemen is it's a fixed fight going on downtown people are not playing fair they'll stay on tv up you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps no sir you don't mean that because you're getting corporate welfare now don't get me wrong ladies and gentlemen if i were a billionaire and i got 40 billion dollars in the bank and it's going to cost me 15 20 million dollars for a project but the city is going to give me half of it don't you know i'm going to take that half yeah i'm going to take it i'm not stupid so they can build these buildings and renovate them without city finances but they have created what's called the downtown investment authority it is a corporate welfare machine that's what it is so i call it what it is i have a degree in political science i know it like the back of my hand i have a law degree i know that light in the back of my head that's why i drafted that petition i know what they're doing they're taking you're my tax dollars and giving it to the wealthy and then turn right back around and say they're pulling themselves up by their bootstraps no you're not you're using my tax money to do it when i come to you and tell you you need to give a small percent of proper share to build housing for the homes you got the audacity to ask me what i think the city's responsibility should be towards homelessness it should be the same thing as it is towards corporate welfare recipients they should not get anything but if you want to give them that money then you need to be setting aside five percent now the city needs to do that on their own i shouldn't even have to waste my time getting petitions going around i'm having to leave my law office and everything else go around getting petitions to sign and here's the other thing a lot of people don't even support it yeah they'll tell me thank you and good pat me on the back and all that listen that won't help them get in the house they we need campaign donations we need petitions signed and everything else yeah and one of the things about social media is it got people confused people think that if they get on social media and say amen glory to god and hallelujah to an issue they supported it no it takes shoe leather to do that it takes money to do that it takes volunteers to do stuff like that so i appreciate all of the things that and everything else but that won't do it we need help to help these people amen so i'd appreciate any kind of help you can do how can we help you okay well actually how can you help me help the homes go to the website housing for the homeless campaign.com i asked them to put it up and just go it's a petition you can print out a petition now there's a certain way you have to sign it and everything you know but you can print out a petition and everything sign it and um you know get it to me and and um you can donate to the campaign you know if if you know uh 10 uh i'll just maybe you know 500 people give 10 that helps you know that those small amounts help because we're gonna even if we get the petitions we're gonna have to do a campaign to put it on television because you know what's gonna happen the people who don't want this to happen they're gonna run a hundred thousand dollar media campaign flipping the script telling you why you shouldn't vote on something like this when all of us know we should so go to the website and you can do a donation through that website you can comment through that website you can sign up as a volunteer through that website and everything else and learn more about about the issues but ladies and gentlemen let me say this right here before we get off here we are in so much trouble that people do not understand all you have to do is do a google search and look at homelessness in america you'll see some chronic homelessness across the nation that is overtaking cities and they don't know what to do well this measure here will save us there's nothing like this across the united states of america no no one else has done anything like this and it's probably because the rich won't don't want him to do it amen and that other website about the sentencing is technologies for justice.com all right well thank you everyone and uh have a great evening and great rest of the week and uh again thank you attorney barlow thank you
2022-08-11 21:53
