Bernice King on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Legacy & The Urgency Of Now | NXT Chapter With T.D. Jakes

In this case, it was Kendall Jenner. She had a Pepsi Cola and it was one of the demonstrations. In this time, she emerges to give this Pepsi to a police officer. As if to suggest if they reach across and just give them a Pepsi, you know, we can break this divide and line and create real community and progress. And I'm like, wait a minute. People suffer, bleed and die, and had to do more than that. And so I made a crack. Well, if he had only known he could give him a Pepsi, then we wouldn't have had to go through all of this. All right. Hello, I am T.D. J. and I want to welcome you all the family from everywhere to next chapter. Everywhere you can tell all of your friends to download this podcast and listen in real close because we have a unique opportunity to sit with history, to embrace thoughts and ideas that we read about in books. But now we come face to face with in the person on my special guest. No, I'm not going to tell you it is yet. I'm going to tell you all about her and then I'm going to tell you who she is. She is an attorney. She's a minister. She's the CEO of the Martin Luther King Junior Center for non-balance social change. Civil rights advocate, peace champion, and the youngest daughter of the civil and human rights icon, Dr. Martin Luther King and global thought leader, Dr. Bernice King is who I'm talking about. We have the privilege of hearing from a woman whose leadership reminds us of the enduring power of hope and non-balance change. This is Dr. Bernice A. King. I'm glad to have you here. We go way back, been out there a long time. When you were laying on your mother's lap at the funeral of your father, I was sitting on the couch with my dad. So I was about the same age, about the same time, and I remember it like it was yesterday. I don't even have to watch it on film from the wood cart that they carried in and the horses to my hell you Jackson singing, move on up a little higher. I live with that through you, and I still know that I did not live it the way you lived it. You lived it up close. We lost an icon. You lost a father. And I've always understood the difference between the two. I admire you. I respect you. You, your mother, and I were great friends because your mother and my mother were great friends. So we have a lot of history. All the way back to Mary and Alabama, they sang together in the choir. But we have some things to say today that are not just historical. We're going to touch on the historical. But we're going to talk about the fierce urgency of now and what we need to do right now to survive the times that we're living in. It's MLK Day. We are releasing this episode on January 19th, 2026, MLK Day right on the spot. What does this day mean to you? What should it mean to you? And what do you want people to do on this day to commemorate the life, the legacy, and the mentality of Dr. Martin Luther King? I've got a whole lot to say about it. But there are many, many important things that I want to hear from you. John 1, Father's legacy. I want to know something right off the cuff. What is your favorite quote from your dad? Well, it's kind of hard to choose a favorite one. He says so many things that are just powerful and meaningful that transcends generations. But the one I quote the most, because I think it's critical that we get it. We get it in our system that we begin to understand that if we're going to really create a just humane, equitable and peaceful world, and that is, he said, we are caught. And an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. What affects one directly affects all indirectly. And I cannot be all that I ought to be until you are all that you ought to be. And you cannot be all that you ought to be till I am all that I ought to be. It talks about the interrelatedness, the interdependence, and the interconnectedness of human life. We live in a time, as you know, when everybody is into dismissing, pushing to the side, putting down one of the get rid of people. Yes. Now, in our philosophy of nonviolence, we're not trying to get rid of people. We're trying to get rid of injustice, misuse, rid of evil, or overcome evil. And so we teach that nonviolence doesn't seek to defeat people, but injustice. So that understanding of the interconnectedness and a relatedness and interdependence, if it's properly understood and embraced, puts you in a posture that the work that you do to resist injustice, you don't become unjust towards the people that you, you know, are fighting against in terms of what they are causing. I think one of the greatest injustices that I have seen in this country, and it's very appropriate to talk about it at this time, is that Dr. MLK, Jr. has been regulated in the minds of the media and everybody else as a black leader. I don't see him as a black leader. No. No. I see him as a national global leader whose heart was not just for black people, but for all people, and that we might have an equality and a better lifestyle that didn't rob from one to accommodate the other, but leveled the playing field in such a way that we can all sit down at the table, black children and white children and brown children and red children and say, free and last, free and last, thank God Almighty. We are free and last. We will not be free. That was a quote until we are all free. And so it is that freedom we come to aspire for, to pray for, to work for, to walk for, to write our senators for, to pick it forward, to do whatever we have to do, to make that a reality, not just for us alone, but for our children and our children's children. Your father has long reaching arms. His voice yet echoes in the anals of our mind to understand more fully and completely the shared humanity of the human race and how important it is. You know where that comes from, I believe for him. I want to tell this little story. When my father was five years old, he had some playmates that were white. Their parents owned a store across the street from the home that he was born in. And every day he played with them. Well the time came for both of them to enter into the public school system. And at that particular time he went one day and he was denied the opportunity to play with his friends. I mean for him they were his friends. You know he didn't see like color. They were totally. You're right. Even the friends oblivious to that world that they lived in of segregation. My, he went home crying. My grandmother had to explain to him all of the history finally from enslavement all the way up to Jim Croweism and the separation. And she said to him, which so many people still have to say to them, black children unfortunately, you're as good as anybody else. And I think that had such an impression upon him that for the rest of his life, this is the way I tell it for young people to understand, is that he was looking to be reconnected or reconcile with his white friend. Yes. So that led his, that set the stage for his entire leadership. And that's why although he had the obviously been a black man in America, he had those experiences, but he understood that whole connection that we are part of a human family regardless of how we define ourselves. We are part of interconnected again. Absolutely. You know the thing that really intrigues me about that is to begin to recognize and to stand on the impetus of the reality that we, that prejudice is a learned behavior. If he had little white friends and they were all playing until they were school age and school separated them, that means that bigotry and hatred and prejudice is something that children learn from adults. Little babies don't come here hating each other. It is a learned behavior. And if we can learn it, we can unlearn it. To my dismay as I began to study further and further, there was a time that the world existed without hatred towards black people. And if that ever existed, pre-slavery, then it's possible, just, just the possibility that one day again we can rise to a higher standard and reach for something better. And I think that we're going to be forced eventually to have to come together because we have so many external enemies and no doubt globally, maybe galactically, that will force us to defend the species in order to better the race. When you start talking about, Flint, when you start talking about Jackson, Mississippi, when you talk about COVID, when you talk about major illnesses that are attacking all types of people without discrimination, we are required to unite together in order to protect the species and your father was ahead of his time. They were myself. He was ahead of his time. We show could you him now. Because you use him right now in explaining that to us and moving the myths and the disparities that exist when the average African-American family makes $1 to every $10 that the average white family makes. When you recognize that home ownership only embraces 42% of African-American people, but 75% of Caucasian people, even when the credit ratings are the same, the approval ratings of access to capital still remain that kind of a golf standing in between us. The digital divide is frightening and the digital divide is critical right now. Very much so. Very much so. Chapter two, don't become complacent. I want to point something out as you're talking about all this, which includes the digital divide. There's something I've been trying to disprove with my father. I'm like on a mission. Most of his words, I embrace, I respect what he said. This one thing is troubling to me. He said one of the tragedy still of human history is that the children of darkness are often more zealous and determined than the children of light. As you were talking, I was thinking one of the things that we have to understand, as we know, out of our faith, evil is always present at hand. That means that we have to always be vigilant. We have to always shine the light. I think too often people get comfortable with progress and they settle in. We've seen that happen since my father's assassination. There have been seasons that that happened. The evil just begins to increase and increase. People need to understand in the spirit of Martin Luther King, the movement must continue. Mother said, freedom is never a struggle in every process. Freedom is never really one. You earn it and win it in every generation. I used to be disturbed by all of these racial disparities and discrepancies and all of the injustice in the world until I listened closely to both of them said and said, our role in responsibility is to stay on the wall, be the near-mightiest. Don't come down and get distracted by the different things that are strapped. We have to continue to do good day by day and we have to do it in a collective sense. You're right. I think one of the problems that we have in getting good people to speak up is not always bigotry but the illusion that in giving us our share, it diminishes their share. Instead of recognizing that we want to make the pie bigger, we want to be more inclusive so that we have more customers, more consumers, more building, more economy. We have the strongest GDP in the world but it's not evenly distributed amongst all people. We need to understand that we can distribute it amongst all people and not be communists and not be communistic but to be fair and just and give equal weight, not just through black and white and brown but male and female between millennial and baby boomers. If you do the work you ought to get to pay and it's not going to happen through natural means, it's only going to happen when we speak up and we cry out and we write senators and we do letters and we have meetings. There's a lot, you can't have income without influence. You got to understand your influence is capital. There are some of you that could pick up the phone and do more than we did in a march all the way across Atlanta. Just one phone call. One phone call. You could have five people over for dinner and solve a whole neighborhood worth the problem and be profitable and make money. We got rid of DEI not realizing that the companies that embrace DEI made 25 to 30% more profit margin than those that did not. So we are cutting off our nose despite our face. Yeah. I think people don't understand it's an inside game and an outside game and the two have to connect. You know, when you talk about the phone call, the relational. Yes. Yes. And the situation with OpenAI, my father's image was misused. I saw that. And OpenAI didn't necessarily do it. Right. They didn't also think about the guard rails that were needed in advance. So when me and John Hope Bryant were talking about this, I said, hey, this is Sam. Let's just reach out. You know, most times in people on social media wanted me to speak out. In that instance, I needed to use my influence inside, which I did and it made a tremendous difference and helps set the stage for even other historic figures and how they choose. So I want people to understand that there is power in your influence. We don't always have to look. I'm for a margin. I'm for demonstrating. But I think we missed a very important aspect of the movement that people don't know about. That's why we do the work. We do the King Center and teaching people about Kenyan nonviolence, which we call nonviolence 365 because there were five steps. Right. Direct action was the fifth. Right. Right. The negotiation was before that. Right. Right. Right. And sometimes we can call people behind the scenes. Yes. We can work behind the scenes. Even if people have to be in the streets. Right. I don't know if there's connectivity between that because as the people in the streets from my father, there was also, okay, Andy will tell you. You heard the stories. Yes. He'd be in the room. Yeah. Talk. Well, you know, others were in the streets and daddy understood that both have to work together synergistically with a strategy. I think that the people in the streets draw attention to it. But the people in the room make decisions. Yes. You're not going to make a decision in a march holding up a flag. Exactly. You're going to draw attention. You may get the presses attention. And today that doesn't even work as well as it used to because so many people have marched about so many things and massive numbers and so many cities all across the country that the media doesn't always cover it. The algorithms are always bringing it to the top. It doesn't have the punch that it used to have when we had three TV stations. Now we got 300 and some stations. You know, we got cable. We got streaming. We got all kinds of things. And we just have everybody in their social media. Yeah, everybody thinks they're a reporter. You know, and so I think we're going to be going to have to be more progressive. And the way that we approach problems and seek the influence that that's necessary to be able to hold court around a conference table rather than standing around a statue having an argument or having a dispute. Let me ask you this. I don't think that America as a whole is as bigoted as it's some of its leadership, some of its influences and some of its press. I don't see us getting on elevators, getting into a fight. I don't see us in the grocery store slapping each other, knocking each other down. A lot of us really do want to get along at least to a degree. But when you watch the news, it looks like we're all getting ready to pull guns and shoot each other. And I think that if our better angels to borrow Abraham Lincoln's phrase, if our better angels would climb up on our shoulder and begin to speak to us, it would be, it would cause a transition of all of the hatred and malice. It seems like the people who have the most mouth have the least sense and the least integrity. And we need people who with calmer heads to prevail in such a predominant way that we begin to redefine what it means to be an American. Because in the last ten years, there has been a steady erosion of the capital of being an American. And I'm glad I use that word because I wanted to talk about that. The last frontier your father was really working on was extending capital and fighting for capital and economic justice for us to have. And the striking and the marching and the people who were working on trash dumps and everything else were fighting trying to get a fair wage. And treated with dignity. You had treated with dignity. And so the Southern Christian D.C. conference that he led, they launched an arm of their organization called Operation Bird Basket in Atlanta around 1962 and it spread across different cities in the nation. And people need to know that the SELC was founded by 100 ministers. And so when they launched Operation Bird Basket, it was with the mission to get companies number one to respect the personhood of black people. Because we were not being hired in higher paying jobs. We were not always treated with dignity on the job. And so they would use the nonviolent philosophy and principles to call on corporations to hire more blacks, to promote more blacks. And also they ended up, they started out in affordable housing as well. So they had this whole economic structure that they were building out for the black community. And in Memphis, when he went to Memphis, someone invited him there because of what happened to the sanitation workers. And he joined that. But he was in the middle of organizing the poor people's campaign to kind of elevate these economic injustices that didn't just affect the black community. You know, the white appellation, the Hispanic population, the poor whites, and women. And women. Indigenous population. So it was bringing all those people together to highlight the economic inequities in our country. And a lot of people don't realize that DEI encompassed more white women than it did black people. Well, it sure benefit the people. The gay people, handicapped people. Exactly. They made up the preponderance of the number. And so they thought swiping out DEI was swiping out blacks. But they looked around, they swiped out the grandmother's, they swiped out the preference. They swiped out the LGBTQ community. It is backfiring. And the fruit is dying on the vine. And we can't get a lot of produce that we need to get. And sometimes we fix something that isn't broke to our own detriment. Exactly. Do you agree with that? Yeah, that's very true. But I mean, that goes back to the vigilance that I think we need to have in this nation when people are doing that. I mean, you talked about my father being ahead of his time. We need more people ahead of what's happening. Right. You know, and we need to see. We need to read the tea leaves. Right. Right. You know, I put it, what is it called? 2025? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, you know, that became as a surprise. I suppose a great, big beautiful bill that went so beautiful. It became as a surprise. But some of this has been in the working. Yeah. We've seen it. We've heard it, but we discounted it. Right. We dismissed it. Even dismissed when Trump was running for office the first time. We counted just brushed it off and then take it serious. So we got to start really paying attention so that we can prepare better to ensure that we can keep moving in the right direction. I keep telling people about the time you read something and the paper is over. That's, that's, it's over whether it's a land sale, whether it's a mall being built, whether it is an injustice, a murder, a rape or killing. By the time you read about it and the paper, it is done. By the time they started talking about the great, the beautiful bill. I was saying project. Yeah, project 2025. It was already done. It was already done. All the buttons that already been pushed, the books were being printed. It was already in place. Things, big things take time. You can't throw them together at the last minute and have the impact that we need there. And I think we need a strategic plan that has the deposit of time and capital behind it. And we have to talk about capital. Trump, you three, opening up a bank. You got to have some serious capital now to be heard, to even get in the conversation. America has become so capitalistic that it has ceased to be, it has ceased to be about right and wrong. It has ceased to be about mercy and compassion. It has become so capitalistic that America has become eaten up. If you don't have capital, you don't have a position. You're not on the cabinet, you're not on the board, you're not in the meeting, you can't get things done. And one of the great things that you did is to get involved in capital and to start a bank in the middle of the country and to invest into a bank rather in the middle of the country. The first time that a black investment has been done in a place like that, what was it that led you to move in that direction? So my business partner, Ashley Bell came to me and said, you know, he had an opportunity to purchase a bank in Salt Lake City, Utah, really holiday Utah. And he wanted me to join him with the effort. He told me about it. He went to meet with the banking officials with the Latter-day Saints Church because they were very influential in Salt Lake City and Utah itself. That's where the headquarters is. And when he met with them, they told him, hey, you need to talk to Bernice to get you to the Gar family. I happened to have a relationship with one of the influential families in that church. And I had a conversation with him, connected them with Ashley. And the rest became history. They brought along some of the other members of the Latter-day Saints Church to help us with some of the fundraising and they invested in it. But we all along were getting more and more black investments because in order to convert it to an MDI, a minority depository institute, we had to have black owners. And so it was a majority of black owners with the undergirding of the Latter-day Saints that invested in already existing community bank with no delinquency. Yeah. So we started good. I don't know if they heard you. I don't, first of all, applaud the fact that you understand that sometimes you have to make alliances with people that you don't line up with about everything. But let me tell you this, Bishop. You got to hear this story because it's incredible. In 1974, the leader of the Mormon church said there was nothing redeemable about black people. Wow. Hear that. Fast forward to 2025. We purchased, we closed in June of 2025 on this bank. A good portion of our investors, our largest investors, are members of the Latter-day Saints Church and the bank is called Redemption Bank. And that is only true because there are some financial advantages to black owned properties that may prejudice have to go out the window. You can have enough capital. That's right. You'll be surprised. Black is not white. It's green in America. And understanding that that is a part of the process and not just feeding off our own, feeding off our own, eating off our own books. Don't get on one leaf and just eat the one leaf up. We have to be able to make connections and associations. We might not agree about everything. Our theology might not line up. Our doctrines might not line up. One might be a bartender and the other might be a permedian leader. But if it's going to move the community forward, it took everybody, the barber, the teacher, I grew up when we had black communities. And the barber and the school teacher lived around the street. You couldn't do nothing because they tell your mom in a minute. But we had real community. We had real community. We have to understand that today in order to get things done on the scale we need to get them done, we have to join hands, black hands, white hands, brown hands. That's why the movement was important. Right. Because their fight to do away with desurey segregation by law was it critical? The fight to create integration. Because while yes, as people said, in the days of the movement, we had more black businesses but we were confined to our little neighborhoods. You don't want to just be in your own neighborhoods. You want to be able to collect and have customers and clientele from other communities and bring some of that back into your community. Absolutely. And so it opened the door. Oh, you made me want to shout. You made me want to shout because so many times we are fed the line that the money must stay in our community. But it won't grow if it stays in our community. It definitely won't grow if we're not placed in other communities. Yes. I mean, we're here in Atlanta right now. We have many black businesses that are in Buckhead, which has been a predominantly white community in Atlanta. We have some in Alpharetta, a place in Forsyth County where even in the 80s we had to leave before a dog. It was sundown town. We were mother and them combined forces with what happened. The Jose Williams being attacked by white supremacists and they marched on Forsyth County from that march. Oprah came, did her show and then from that there was a racial commission established. And now black people live in Forsyth County, have businesses in Forsyth County. That's what the movement for justice and freedom represent and continues to represent if we align with it. And it also represents the equity of influence. It's not just about money. It's also about influence like Oprah did her show there. That made a big difference, bringing to light. See a lot of truth is being smashed down to the ground. One of the things your father used to say didn't write it, but I love it. It's true smashed down to the ground. We'll rise again. Undaunted. And right now truth is being smashed down to the ground through books, through other means, through all kinds of statements. No more black history. Day, month, no, no more libraries trying to be shut down. Books taking off the shelf, but they're taking books off the shelf at a time that we got AI. You're not going to be able to stop truth. Truth is going to run like a mighty stream. It's going to come up again. It's going to rise up again. It's going to come up for women. It's going to come up for all people. And that's very, very important. And people are still going to have Juneteenth. But then you like it or not. They're going to have Juneteenth. They're like bigger hair, cabbage, and black apes on January 1. They're still going to do it because it's culture. And you can't kill culture with the tweet. Chapter number four, big picture. When you look at the economic forecast of where we are, and you understand that currency is a global discussion, and you understand that it's not just America, it's Africa, and what's going on in Africa. Fastest growing GDP in the world is coming out of Africa. We did not start when the boats landed. We existed before the boats landed and understanding and make connections so that we don't have nothing against Asian people. But we don't need the Asian people doing our hair products, doing our face products. We could do that ourselves. We can connect and we can do it through our phone. We don't have to be rich now to make connections with people overseas and join forces together just like Jewish people do with Israel. We have to be able to make connections for the betterment about all other races. Exactly. All other races use their global influence to get things done and not just people in the neighborhood. And connection is important, but the connection needs to be very strategic. Right. So, I think we should figure out how to truly create enterprise. I think it's important that we have small businesses, not knocking that. But I think it's time also to shift to creating enterprises. I think there has to be a connectivity, you know, Delta understood that. That's where they're one in the marketplace. What airlines, they started merging. You know, I'm challenging even the small business owners. How do you create an enterprise? How do you connect? You know, it's a similar fashion. You don't, it may not have to lose your identity, but how do you create something larger? Right. Because we haven't cornered anything as a people in the black community. I mean, like you said, hair care products, we should be, you know, the leading manufacturers and distributors of all of that. But we're not. Yeah. So, I'm going to go back to Neha May again when you hear the sound of the trumpet rally there and our guy will fight for us. There's something about joining first forces connecting and coordinating our efforts. Right. So if we want, we need to build, we need to have chains. Right. You know what I'm saying? All right. Right. Absolutely. In different areas. And we have the skill sets and the engineers and the technological people. We have it all. We have it. It's not that we don't have it. We don't always use it properly to its best intent. And understand the vision and a lot of it comes down to something that cannot be counted by an accountant, cannot be charged by the IRS. It's called trust. Trust is a commodity that has to sit at the table of every board room or you can't get it done. Now, to help trust alone, we must have some contracts. Yeah. In contracts, we trust. Yeah. In contracts, we trust. And there's a way to do international business in such a way that we can build these things more rapidly. China has been pouring money into Africa like crazy. And now there's highways, now there's hotels, now there's plants, now there's lithium, now there's gold and diamonds. And Africa has started saying, you're not just going to come in here and take all our stuff and leave us helpless. But they are looking to make connections with us. And we need to be present at the table when the divisions are made because we are one people. We are one people landed on different spots. But throughout the diaspora, we are one people. I think it's important. When you start talking about reparations, other people who have been through atrocities, receive reparations, do you think that people of color deserve need or have a pathway forward as it relates to reparations? Absolutely. I mean, my father often said it didn't cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters. Right. To provide the right to vote. But going forward is going to cost something. He said, any society does something against the people for hundreds of years must do something for people. So absolutely, how it looks is where the challenge is because there's different thoughts about whether it should be cash payment or whether it should be investment in different things like education, health care, etc. I think it needs to be a combination of the above because there is a price that can be paid, especially for those who descend from the enslaved. There's a way to trace that now. Thanks to the ancestry.com, 23 and me, and so many others. So we don't have to be trying to guess, well, who does it go to? No, no. And there's a way to do it as it relates to real estate, as it relates to down payment, a lot of real estate. It relates to access to capital, as it relates to social grants, as it relates to CDFIs. There's so many different ways that we can access capital in a way that makes it possible for the dream to come through. But once you have the capital, you also have to have the human capital to go along with the capitalism in order to get to the place that we really need to go. I want to know this. Dr. King was alive today, right now, seeing the state of our country right now in my view, sliding backwards in so many areas. What do you think he would say? You know, when people ask that question, I say, well, he's not here today. So I don't know what he would say. Because what I would I would I usually say is contextually, we know what he was working on before he was assassinated. He was working on a livable wage. He was working on an opportunity for people to have access to capital, to own homes, to start businesses. I think number one, he wouldn't necessarily be shocked because of his prophetic insight. He would be disappointed that we didn't make the kind of progress that he wrote about. We need to do this. This is another. I don't think we picked up the blueprint. So I think he would restate some of this blueprint, you know, and re-talk about the things that he was already talking about. You're right. So that's the way I think he would see things if he showed up after what is this now, 57 going on 58 years. You know, I think that's true. And I also think the devil wears Prada now. You know, I think the devil wears Prada. And by that, I mean liquor stores on every corner in our neighborhoods, fast food that is killing us, giving us cancer, dying at earlier and earlier ages. And women having hysterectomies, immediately black women have twice as many hysterectomies as their white counterparts. Some of these health disparities could be resolved because it is a subtle, quiet, nice, well-dressed genocide. And we have to recognize that we don't take the first opinion that's offered to us, that we have our own doctors that we have other people to research things because some of our best and brightest and not just blacks, but across many, many minorities are being eradicated because clearly there is an ongoing movement to sanitize the country and move everything that has differences out of the country. But to me, the thing that makes America America is its diversity. If you lose its diversity, democracy is just an idea. It's not a building, it's not a place, it's not something you buy or drink or sell or eat. It's just an idea. And an idea is fragile with the changing of generations and the changing of leadership, ideas change. And we can easily lose our opportunity to go forward. When we look at the ideas of today, when we look at the currency changing, for example, we start looking at cryptocurrency and we start looking at XRP and we start looking at all of these things that are coming into the world. I think we have to start teaching our children a little differently about capital. Not just spending it. Not I got a iPhone, I got stock in iPhone. Yeah. Not I got a Ford, I got stock in Ford. We got to get to the point that our money is making money. Instead of us working for the money, we got to make the money work for us. And that is a cultural distinction in our intellectual way of dealing with money that has not penetrated beneath the hard soil of if I get it, I got to spend it. We need to turn it around and take what we gain and leverage it to produce more capital. If you can't get the loan without black people being a part of it, then black people need to take advantage of those opportunities. A lot of times we don't know about it. Yeah, the minority partnerships with the majority. Exactly, exactly. That was a true in South Africa too. They couldn't do business without doing business with black people. And it helped a lot with Johannesburg and Cape Town and places like that. And it will help a lot of years. That's how HR Russell's company grew here in Atlanta because he was often the minority partner in a lot of these real estate developments across the city. And so we have to think about that. I believe, as we said earlier, investing in our people in each other, but we also have to diversify. Just like you diversify an investment, we need to diversify in the way we do business. And we need to bring others into the fold. I think about our bank, they knew when they came in as white investors that it had to be a black on bank. Right. And they respected that. So now we have a black on bank with white investors. We knew they were important to the equation. Talk about the bank. Is the bank focused more on mortgages or land development or business? Small businesses. Small businesses. We actually are the only African American black on bank that originates SBA loans in the country, originates them. That's because Ashley was formerly the Southeast Regional Director for the SBA. And the intention is to grow the bank to become national and eventually to trade it on Wall Street. That happens with prayer and regulators. Yeah, I know, but a lot of regularly. A lot. Then it will be the first time a black bank will be national and goes public. So that's the work that we are trying to do to expand it. It's right now a community bank, you know, so the focus is on the community right there in Salt Lake City. But the plan is to continue to expand. And there may be a possibility that some of the bigger banks may give capital to the bank in a way that redemption bank that they might not give to individuals and distributed that way in order to meet regulation. Yes, that's part of the vision as well. I had to figure that out. I figured you'd already thought of that. I didn't think I was enlightening you. But the reason I took the time to say this is that a lot of people don't understand. It's not always a name on the door that's feeding the capital that's making the business run. There are many, many, many, many authorities that are connected to anything to make it run. Government contracts. There are different ways that you can do business. There are different ways that you can form alliances, LLP's, LLC's and do business in such a way that you get into a game that you couldn't get in. I would rather own 10% of $20 million then 100% of a $20 bill. Exactly. Yeah. And we have held out for the 100% of the $20 bill to the chagrin of losing the opportunity to do more and to have more money. How does it feel not only as a black person but as a black woman to be leading the charge in this way for redemption bank? It's very umbling to be honest with you. But I know there's a great responsibility on my shoulder. Again, banks are regulated. Yes. Yes. They are heavily regulated. And so you want to be very strategic smart. And every day as I said, the prayer is important because there are people that don't want this to succeed. Yes. You know, and when she said regulated, she means federally regulated. So you can't have a bank and be autonomous from politics because politics have regulations that banks have to go by. And you have to understand that sometimes a loan is not just turned down because you're black. It's turned down because you don't meet the regulations in a necessary. So do your homework before you go after the loan to find out one what kind of loan you need, what kind of grants are available. You might not need as much capital as you think. And who the regulators are in Washington who control the purse strings for the banks that can release the capital to get you going. Sometimes it's not as hard as you think it is. Right. Yeah. But there's a way to get it done. And it's not easily, it's not often discussed. And that's why I'm doing this podcast because there are some things that we need to discuss that I can't do from the pulpit. But at this age and at this stage, they need to be talked about. We have to leave smooth stones behind us that the Lord was with us when we crossed the Jordan. The stones had to be left behind and we have to be able to have these kinds of conversations. And sometimes in church, the only conversation you can have is from Genesis to Revelations. But I think we need to have some bigger conversations because we're at the point now that people are coming up for prayer, believing God for a car. A car is not a miracle. No. All kinds of people have a car. You don't need God to come down and get you a car, if they call it a lot. There are practical things that you can do to get a down payment. They're down payment grants. There are all kinds of things that are available to us. You can leverage your money rather than spending your capital and be able to get to end the places that you can't get into before. Don't you think that financial literacy, even though it's changing right now because of the currency, is something that we need greater emphasis on? Oh, definitely. I mean, I grew up as the daughter of Martin and Curtis Scott King and I was financially illiterate. Isn't that interesting? And educated. And educated. And so our community needs more education in this area. We need to be equipped in this area. We need to know where the opportunities and the information is. And so I'm glad you're doing this and hope more people. I know with Operation Hope and John Hope Bryan and what he's doing is so incredible. But we need more and more people to do this and make sure the information is being disseminated into those pockets where a lot of times people not getting in for this. Right. And we don't have to be in competition. We support Operation Hope. We give capital to Operation Hope because we have to get rid of the spirit of competition and get into the business of collaboration. Chapter number five. Preserving our history. Your mother says something that she was attributed to saying something I thought was quite profound. They keep trying to assassinate your father over and over again. And you look at character assassinations and you look at some of the things that people are doing with AI right now. How vigilant is the fight not to have our history distorted or aborted by the current technology that we have out there now? Well, I think it's very important. I think that's another concern at an area that we have got to equip our people in. You know, the interesting thing is when I was talking to John and his conversation with Van, when it comes to AI, a lot of people are clueless, regardless of race. But the problem is oftentimes we don't spend the time necessarily to educate and expose and prepare our people. And we need to do that because we have the capacity to take AI and use it as a tool to continue to teach about who we are as a people. And I'm hoping that will happen. I mean, we have to have the vigilance that way. I tell people as things are being quote unquote removed, number one, I'm not sure where they're being removed too. But our history tells us that we are great storytellers, information stores somewhere in our culture. And so we're going to keep sharing it. But now we need to figure out how to use the tools of AI. That's right. And then we need to do it exponentially. I think you're exactly right. And that's why I think they're going to fail because you can move all the books out of the library, but you can't move AI from being able to dig into the history of our ancestors. And you can't remove the memory too of people that the stories they got from Grandma. Yes. You know, I mean, think about this when you and I were growing up in middle school, high school, we didn't get a lot of black history. You're right. I learned most of the night and later, like in fact, I've learned more about our people in the last 10 years. Right. Then my entire life, and I'm 62. So that information is coming from somewhere now. I mean, it's emerging. I'm on social media and I'm finding out new things every day about our people. Right. And so I'm like, I'm not concerned. Remove your book. We're doing some other work. We're going to get this information out. And even when they did teach black history, what I was at school is started from the boats. Yes. And so we started from the boats and said, if we just, we were made in the ocean. Yes. You know, and started from the boats. And that's where the story began. We came here slaves and changed around our ankles. And that's how we started. We were born as babies with handcuffs on. That's not true. We were a people before there was slavery. We had an order. There were black people that were on this continent before there was slavery. Yes. And you need to look at it and study the boat. And they were free. Yes. And they owned property and they helped to skill some of the people that you admire today. And so before we got into this bigotry, we were better together. We did more together. We helped one another along. And a lot of people who created a lot of things that we take for granted now were not created by just one group of people. It was a collective influence of intelligence coming from different races of people. Blacks included that brought America to where it is today. And I'm afraid just like the fruit rotting on the vines when you drive people away, you drive your advantage away to be able to have a more perfect union in a better way. So I think that's real important. One of the things I want to go by too that I think is important to at least discuss. I think that you can produce television, short films, snackable content for a fraction of money and send it all over the world, whereas when I came along, if you didn't have $15 million to put into a movie, there was no discussion to be had. And if they put up the $15 million, they control the narrative of the story. There's an expression in an LA, whoever has the gold makes the rules. Now you can almost produce a movie with a phone. You can. Yeah. You definitely can. You can do it for a few hundred dollars. Exactly. So if we lose our history, it's because we gave it away. Exactly. Because we can capture our history and we have enough of our elderly people alive. And the other thing that I think is important is that when you look at baby boomers, we are getting the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of America from one generation to another. That generation that receives what the baby boomers are leaving behind, have to be prepared because money has to be aimed at something. It can't just be put in cans like my grandmother did and buried in New York. Under the mattress. Under the mattress there. Under the yard somewhere. We have to have a plan and a strategy for capital-perfect profit without purpose is always going to lead to failure. And so I think that's such an important thing. That's why I was so inspired and wanted to have an opportunity to talk to you because you have a purpose and you have profit and you have the potential to take this as a start out as a community bank. Everything starts out as a seed and then grow it and cause it to be ill. Never laugh at a seed. Never laugh. Never despise a small beginning because old trees start out as acorns. And so when you have something small nurtured and don't let anybody laugh at your dream. That's right. We started out as a seed. We started out as a seed. We were a seed. That's right. That's right. We started out as a seed. And life is a seed. Absolutely. What do we have in this world? Absent what God placed here when He placed us here, we produced. That's right. That's right. So never despise it. So the whole earth survives under the seed time and harvest. Seat time and harvest is an unbreakable law. Whether you're talking about trees, whether you're talking about people, whether you're talking about business, growing that seed and fertilizing that seed and understanding what kind of ground that seed needs to be planted in. You might have the right business in the wrong place and figuring out where it ought to be to be the most fruitful and how to geo target and market different areas in order to have the greatest impact that you need. Our universities are finding it out. They're teaching it. They're teaching entrepreneurship. We've got Good Soul, one of the programs that we started. They're teaching entrepreneurship so that we can get access to capital and have opportunities to bring about change in life. But I think that the more we know about what each other is doing, the better it's going to be. Sometimes we don't get the front page. We don't get the headlines. We don't get the news. I was going to say six o'clock news. You don't have no six o'clock news. Now, 24 hour news. But it's harder to get in the news because of sensationalism. And we are prone to this too. Whenever you watch sensationalism, more than you watch educational material, whatever is the most profitable is what they're going to show you the most and it's what the algorithms are going to bring to you. You ought to be digging into AI and technology and learning a little bit more about it. If you just learn a little bit, if you learn one thing a month by the end of the year, you know 12 things and you're a little bit better off than you were before. You can't help your kids with their homework if you don't study yourself. So this is a- And study the trends. Yes. I mean, so many people are afraid of cryptocurrency. You're right. You know, I have cryptocurrency. You're right. And when I tell other people, they're like, hmm, I said, okay, you're going to be left behind. Right. Yeah. And when you start seeing banks like JP Morgan Chase investing into cryptocurrency and other types of currency, cyber currency in general, that's a wake up call. Those people aren't going to put billions of dollars into something that they're going to let go down easily. And we ought to be right behind them, like a man with a basket of vegetables saying, me too. Me too. I might only have $20. But me too. And that's important for people to understand because most people don't have the hundreds, a thousand. Right. They don't have the thousand. Right. Start with what you have and build from there and do it as young as you can. It's very young. It's very young. Not saying it may start. Yeah. Start is the point. Yeah. But start when you're young, especially. You got some young and start it now. Yes. And there are tax exemptions incidentally that are available. A certain amount of your income can be exempt from taxes if it's put away for college fraud. Even if they don't go to college and they get to the end of the road and decide to go into business, you still have secured that amount of money that is not taxed. And those kinds of things are the things that we're just starting to wake up to and find out about. So I have to ask you about the Pepsi ad and you're speaking out about the Pepsi ad. Why did you do it? Well, what impact did you have as a result of it? I think sometimes the issue with social media is there are only so many words you can use. Right. And so when people do things, it takes things out of context. And so for me, when I see people use little small clips to show something and people assume one thing, I'm like, let me come and respond to this and give context. In this case, it was Kendall Jenner. She had a Pepsi Cola and it was one of the demonstrations in this time with the young people Black Lives Matter. And so she emerges to give this Pepsi to a police officer. As if to suggest Pepsi, if they reach across and just give them a Pepsi, we can break this divide and line and create real community and progress. And I'm like, wait a minute. People suffer, bleed and die and had to do more than that. So I made a crack where I feel you don't only know you could give them Pepsi, then we wouldn't have had to go through all of these. So there are times when things happen on social media. I don't do it with everything because I don't want to blow everybody's platform up. But there's strategically, there are times when I feel the need that I have to speak either for contextualization, a clarity, or to point people in the direction of where they need to refer, especially with my dad. Right. I want you to purify them. I want you to purify them. I want you to purify them. purify them. in this country and they're exacerbating the problem to make it worse to divide us and distract us. And while we're running around fighting about something that really doesn't matter, they're taking over the country and moving over the world. We've got to have a change. Chapter number six. MLK and Malcolm X. They tell me you have done the runway with Malcolm X's daughter and walked together hand in hand. Tell us about that. It was a powerful experience. And I have to say it this way. I had a shirt on with my father said, I'm black, I'm proud. I'm proud of it. I'm black and I'm proud. I can't even remember the words now. When you think about what's been happening in the black community with all of the taken away of the DEI and what seems like direct attacks on our black women even in business. When I got in that room, Bishop, there was so much energy in there. It was unbelievable. It was a relief to see our people together in that room. And to see both the descendant of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. connecting on that runway because they've always been presented as opposites. Yes. Or in opposition. And the gentleman... But they really weren't. No. The gentleman who produced this show was able to find these clips that I hadn't seen. And I was like, wow. And he put something out to Malcolm said, then put something out with my father said. And it was like parallel. And very powerful. Now, my father had the philosophy of nonviolence. People talk about the inmates there, say we can go off on a tangent on that. But the point is that both of them were committed to uplifting the black community. Right. And for us to be on that runway together, at this time, what was happening with our people was so refreshing, rejuvenating for so many people. I haven't seen smiles like that in a long time. Wow. And it was Iliasas Shabas, who was a friend of mine. And we connect and talk from time to time. My mother and her mother and my mother had a very close relationship. And so it was just so rewarding to be there. And I'm just excited about it. And I'm sure we're going to be doing some other things. I think she spoke to your mother's friend or her head. No, that was the other door. That's the other door. Okay. Atola or Ambassador Shabas spoke. Because she's the oldest. And she had a very close Ambassador Shabas had a very close relationship with my sister Yalanda as well. Yes. They did performances together. And there were people there from South Africa, Nelson Mandeldes, family. And all of the presidents, living presidents with their wives. Yes. And the only one that couldn't come, Gerald Ford, wrote us a letter and said he would have been there. Yeah. You know, if he wasn't affirmed, and of course the future president Obama was there. That was absolutely amazing. And you were there. And I was there. And you know. And I was there. And proud to be there. Thank you for being one of the teachers and leaders and four runners that's the out front. You don't make a lot of noise. Get a whole lot done. Walks in quiet. That's how she does. She walks in quiet, but you look around. There's a big explosion coming from Reverend Bernie's King. Thank you for being on our podcast. It's a real pleasure. Thank you so much. Hey everybody, I want to take this time to thank you for watching the next chapter podcast. If this conversation inspired you, it helped you. Reflect on an idea or spark something new inside of you. Make sure to like, comment, and subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. Remember, life isn't about how you begin. It's about how you finish strong. So start your next chapter with us right here every week.