 All these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These words from the Declaration of Independence are familiar to many of us. And yet it took 143 years for women to get the right to vote, and 189 years for black people to get the right to vote. And still today, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are still only words for many people. Here in Boston, life expectancy varies by 30 years, depending on where you live. In Roxbury, with many poor and black people, life expectancy is 59 years. In the back bay, wealthy and mostly white life expectancy is 91 years. It's tough to have liberty when you are in prison. The United States incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 people. Our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most countries in the world. Millions of people in our country don't have health care, a decent job, good education, a home they can afford, and that makes it pretty hard to pursue happiness. So on this show, you're going to meet people who are making it possible to have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. People today who are making the words of the Declaration of Independence come true. Hi, I'm Michael Jacoby Brown, your host for We Hold These Truths. And today we're very honored to have with us Priscilla Flint. Priscilla Flint is the executive director of the Marcus Anthony Hall Educational Institute, a leadership program for young people in Boston. And so Priscilla, I welcome you. I'm glad you're able to make it out here. And can you tell us a little bit about yourself and where you grew up and where your values and interest and passion for justice comes from? So I was born and raised in Roxbury. I grew up in Ojipac Projects. I think I was a different child. I had a lot of things that happened to me when I was young. I lived with my aunt, raised me, and when I turned 12, I moved with my biological mother and stepfather. So it was rough living in Ojipac Projects in the 60s. And so I loved that life, being able to enjoy life, living in the projects, living in Ojipac Projects. It wasn't a lot of, at the time in the early 70s, it wasn't as nowhere near as bad as it is now with the violence and everything. Everybody knew everybody, everybody was friendly. So we, of course we did our little things that we did, but it was a good time, it was a fun time. And then the era of Harron and all those other things came into play and just kind of destroyed our neighborhoods. But I remember when John F. Kennedy got assassinated, I'll never forget that. And I also remembered when Martin Luther King got killed. And so those things stuck with me and I always loved and appreciated Martin Luther King for the work that he did. I didn't know a lot about Malcolm X, but over the years I've learned a lot and I just wish, I know that they were in the process of getting together Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. And so, but it didn't happen because they both were assassinated, they both were killed. And of course we feel like they were taken way, way too early, you know. And I guess that's, you know, my mom raised me, my mother raised, had seven children. But out of the seven, I was the one that she let my uncle and aunt raise. So she probably knew I was going to be a problem child. But I went to Boston Public High School, but had to leave early, had to quit because I got pregnant at the age of 15, had my first son. His name was Little Milton and he passed away at the age of four in the fire. And so I moved to Anchorage, Alaska for about a year and I came back in 1975, 1976. That's when the bussing was going on and they were just tearing up Boston, you know. They tried to, they literally tried to stab Ted Lansmok with a, with an American flag and I was in Alaska like, oh my God, what is going on down there? I got to go home, you know, but it was just so much that was, you know, what's happening. I came home in 1976 and it just seemed like nothing had changed, you know. And that was the time that Jimmy Codd was running for president. So I remember that and I always liked it and admired Jimmy Codd and one of the reasons because he was a Sunday school teacher, you know, and I was a Sunday school teacher too. So I grew up, you know, I worked hard, I worked in banking, I worked in city government. I ran the payroll for the city of Boston for over 20 years. I worked with the Mass Affordable Housing Alliance helping people purchase homes for the first time because we know in the 80s they redlined, they just took a red mark and went right through Roxbury, Dorchester, Madapan. And that's how MAHA, Mass Affordable Housing Alliance was built, was created. And I'm very proud of the work that I did there. I worked there twice. I worked there as a home counselor, putting all the classes together for the first time home values. And I also worked as a foreclosure prevention specialist. And so I've always been for the community, working around the community. And then when I retired from the city of Boston in 2010, after my book came out, it was a shameless plug for my book. That's what you're changing about. It's a great book. I read it. Yes, it's called I Look Back and Wonder How I Got Over. It was published September 2010 and December that year, same year I retired from the city of Boston. I had just had it. It was just, you know, the things that were being done to the workers, it didn't make any sense. But one good thing about working at the city of Boston that I did for five years, which I really enjoyed and I'm bringing it back to city hall, we had a prayer ministry there. And every Tuesday from one to two we would pray in the curly room. And we did that for five years straight. And so looking at what's been going on with the city and even though I didn't work there anymore, I was able to approach Julia Mejia, who's one of our city councilors at Lodge, and say, you know, and told her about the prayer, you know, and we stopped in 2005 and 2008 Ayala Presley came on. And then it just kind of like changed the whole, you know, the city council started looking more like the people of Boston and not. We only had two black city councilors, Charles Yancy and Chuck Turner, and the rest were all white. You know, so I feel, I'm the type of person, I believe like if you have a group of people, if you have a board or committee or an advisory board, and the people don't look like the people you're representing, you know, there's no one near to represent you, you know. I ran for office in 2019 because I was just sick and tired of being sick and tired. I didn't win, but that was okay because I was able to get a lot of the issues out that we talked, that we still talk about, the pilot, the payment and lower taxes, you know, the Boston resident job policy. I'm also a Boston Employment Commissioner because for years I went to those meetings and I just, we protested, I protested at sites like the Bruce Bowlin Building before they built it, 225 Center Street. I just, you know, we just saw the need because nobody was talking, nobody was saying, this is wrong, you know, we shouldn't, you know, we had to protest tropical foods when they were building a new one because they promised to pay workers $50 an hour and only wanted to pay them $11 to $15, you know, so it was like, wait a minute. So we created something called the Good Job Standards, Chuck Turner, so he was with us, you know, in the fight and so it was just, you know, I've just been an advocate, you know, I've just always been a fighter. After I lost my second son in the car accident in 1990, I gave my life to Christ, I turned my life around, I got saved and I just, you know, I just had a new, totally new different attitude, you know, about my life and the work that I was doing and so I knew that God had a plan and a purpose for my life, I didn't know what it was. But as I get older and as I see these young folks that I'm working with, these young people that I'm mentoring, I see them fighting for us, you know, I see them, you know, like what happened with George Floyd, for example, you know, that was during COVID, everybody was at home, everybody was in the house watching it, you know, and you just got to get to a point where you say, enough is enough, you know, how much more do they want us to take? And I feel like as a black woman born and raised in Boston, that we are always at the bottom of the totem pole, that's the way I feel, you know, we see a lot of people come from a lot of different states and cities and stuff and they rise right to the top, you know, but the people who've been here digging in the grass roots, you know, they, you know, it's hot, it's hot, but I trust God, I believe God, and I know that He don't make any mistakes, and so I'm happy to be here, I really appreciate you inviting me on. I appreciate you opening up your house to me and our organization, you know, these young kids are amazing. Oh, I know. Tell me a little bit about Marcus Anthony Hall Educational Institute, you want to talk about Marcus Anthony Hall and what led you to want to do this as opposed to, you know, some of the other work you've been doing in the past, Priscilla? Well, I wanted to do, Marcus Anthony Hall was a young man that worked with an organization that I was a part of, and he was an organizer with us, so he helped bring young folks to us, you know, he worked, we worked really well together, you know, we would do protests and, you know, go to community meetings and stuff, and he was shot and killed in the barbershop on Blue Hill at June 14th, 2016, he was 31 years old, and his four-year-old son was sitting in the barbershop, getting his hair cut while his father was outside getting killed, and so I, me and his mother were very close because me and his mother used to vent together because I had a book and she has clothes and stuff that she would sell, so I met his mother like in 2010, and so when he got killed, I'll never forget the day because I was actually at my friend's wedding, and you know how the bride's always late, right? So I was opening my phone, and I saw the post on Facebook saying that he, I was like, oh my, I couldn't believe it, I couldn't even stay at her wedding, after she said her vows I had to leave, you know, because I was having a hard time finding my friend's phone number, and because I had it under a different name, I call her Popcorn Lady, her name is Francine, so I couldn't find her, you know, the phone number was just distraught, so I had to leave, and I, and I said, I don't know, but I'm gonna, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna try to do something, and then I found out that some of the churches were turning him away, he had started an organization called Booth, Brothers Out of the Hood, and he was going to, like, some of the churches asking, you know, could he come in and talk to some of the youth and stuff, and they were like turning him away, like, you know what I remember here, you don't pay your tides here, so no, so when I found that out, I was like, we're gonna do something for him, you know, and I didn't, at the time I didn't know what, I didn't have no idea, I remember he had came on my radio show one time, him and McKee and Baker Gomez, and I cannot find that tape, if I wish I could find that tape, you know, because both of them are gone now, you know, and so, and so basically I didn't know what we was gonna do, but I just kept thinking about it, and then in 2020, I was like, we should do an institute, an academy, teaching young folks how to run for office, because that's what Marcus was about, he was about helping folks, you know, like, if they, he knew a lot about constitutional law, he knew a lot about state law, you know, he knew the, like, the medical field, he was just a young genius, you know, and so I said, well, let's try to create someone we could teach young folks like him, and younger than him, how to run for office, you know, how do you work a campaign, you know, whether it's a campaign for a candidate, if it's a campaign for, like, a question, you know, like, we have ranked choice Boston, getting ready to, you know, so it was different things, and he was very involved, very intelligent, just a nice young man, and so we, in 2020, of course, COVID hit, and so we were gonna launch July 20th, but we couldn't, so we waited until July 21st, July, we waited until January 2021, and we launched it, and we did it by Zoom, and so we had, like, 25 students, we had some from North Carolina, some from Texas, and some from Minnesota, and it was interesting because at that time, that we did it, that was around the same time that George, everything was going on with George Floyd, he had been killed and everything, and so one of the young ladies was actually from Minnesota, so she was in college, so when she would come home, she would let us know what was actually going on in Minnesota, you know, and so, yeah, so we graduated these young folks, we had, we gave them a book called The Black Tax, and the author was Sean Rochester, and he came, he didn't come, but on Zoom he did a fireside chat, and now that's one of the books that we give out to our youth while they're at the end of the program, and we also have another book that we give them called The Community, is the Community Builders, the book you gave us? Oh, yeah. Yeah, and so we gave them a copy of that book as well, as well as a copy of my book, because I feel like they need to know, there's a lot, you know, we want to give them a lot of other books too, as well, you know, because there's a lot of things that they don't know, and we're finding this out, but these young kids, especially this cohort I have now, I agree. And this cohort now is in Boston in person, not on Zoom, this is in person. This is our second, this is our second in person one. And where do you run it, and tell us a little bit about what actually you're trying to help the young people learn? So we, we hold it out of the DeWitt Center in Roxbury, and we teach it, so we have people come in, we have professors come in, like Professor Jeremy Darry from UMass Boston. We have people like Glenn Lloyd come in, who's the president of Seamills, I think that's the name of his organization, I can't remember, but he has also started a family of fresh foods, I think it is, and his brother, they started it, and so they now, their food is now being fed to the Boston Public School youth. And there's, we also, like we got Professor Vice Chancellor Charlie Titus, who, he was a UMass Chancellor, and he's one of our instructors. We have people like Shugarn, Shugarn Adewoo. We have James Mackie, who has his own line of clothing. We have someone come in and teach them how to do research. So it's both people like Shugarn, who's a city official and black entrepreneurs. Yes. And what are some of the messages you're trying to sort of in general get across to these young people, and tell me who are the young people? So we want to get the message to them that we are the people and we have the power, and we want them to know that you can stand up for yourself, you can speak up for yourself. We teach them how to like write testimony, you know, so that if we have to go to a or a city, or the state level, they know how to speak up for themselves, you know? We're trying to train them to be advocates. We're trying to teach them how to like run their own businesses and stuff, you know? We have, we have a program where we're getting ready to start as part of this, where we want to take them, have them, you know, purchase some things and then turn around and come back and sell it like pop-ups and things like that. So we We have Charlie Cofill who was a carpenter and a business agent for like almost 30 years. He retired. We want him, because that's another option, you know, that being into the trades. The trades are very good, they pay very good money and you know you get great benefits but it's hard to get in the unions if you're a black or a woman or, you know, so these are the injustices that I fight and these are what I try to tell our young folks is that you have power and you just have to learn how to use it and how to assert it. And just this Tuesday we went on to the State House for a press conference around the Poor People's Campaign and this Saturday they're having another rally and so we're going to go and support them because I think they said, I can't remember the exact statistics but I think they said there was 138 million low and moderate income people and we are looking to mobilize these folks to get them to vote because that's another thing, you know, we're teaching our young folks how to door knock, you know, how to do phone banking, you know, how to sit together and create different things that we can do to better ourselves. But one of the things that we have to instill is you have to vote. It's so important. A lot of people say my vote don't count. I say the only time it don't count is when you don't cast it, you know, and we have a presidential election coming now so it's just, you know, we're doing everything we can. Pastor Hobbs from Boston Prairie Radio and TV, he's going into the prison, registering people to vote, you know, we just found out a few years ago that you can register to vote if you're incarcerated as long as you're not serving the felony. Who knew, right? And so that's been his work. He's been, you know, going into Nashville Street and South Bay, literally registering folks to vote. Right. So tell me how many, just so people, listening, how many people are in the program? Where do they come from? So are they here about it? Who are they? So right now we have about 20 students, and half of them come from Madison Poc CBC. Madison Poc CBC has a whole youth program of over a hundred youth, and they take them and they give them, they pay them to go to different job sites. So Michael St. Anthony Hall is one of the job sites. And so they come in and they learn what we're doing, and this is, and this is their work. And they come in on Saturdays? And they get paid? Yes. And that's important because otherwise they need money, otherwise they'll be working in a pizza shop because they need money to help their families probably. Right. They'll get it. Yeah, so, but it's wonderful because, you know, some of the youth I've gotten from people who go to different churches, you know, like my sister, a couple of folks come from her church, you know, and then there's other people. So basically once we get the fly out, we let people know that we're, you know, we're going to start the cohort up. They come, they live, and they live all over, they live in Boston. They live in, you know, and most of them are in the Boston area. Some of them go to school though, some of them go to Mecko. Some of them go to child schools, and some go to the Boston public. And they all come every Saturday from way to when? From ten to two. And so we do field trips. Like we, our first field trip was to the Common School library so everybody could make sure they had their library card because we know if you have your library card you can get free interest into like museums, like the Museum of Science, Science, Museum of Fine Arts, Science Museum, the Children's Museum, the Aquarium, you know, and so these are like little field trips that we would take. Right, that's great. So you've been working for a long time in a lot of different areas. If you could tell young people today, you know, some of the most important lessons you've learned, what would they be? You know, if you can say this is really important for you to know, this is some of the things I've learned, what's really important do you think from having been working in this world of justice for so many years now, Crisilla? I feel like, first of all, our young folks should have confidence in themselves. I feel like they should look in the mirror and say I am somebody and I can do whatever I need and want to do. It's difficult because most of our young folks are black and brown, you know, and they come from different homes, different home settings, you know, and they're her and we want them, we show them love, we want them to know that we love them and we want them to grow, we want them to be able to speak up for yourself, you know, we want them to learn, you know, how to talk to people, you know, there's always, a lot of times the young folks say well, you know, they're old, they're old, you know, they don't know anything, you know. We know a whole whole lot of things. What are some of the things you know for sure, you know, having been through so much and a book is great, I really recommend you read this book. One thing I know is that as a black person born and raised in the city, I feel like we have gotten the short end of the stick. And so what I want our young people to know is that, but we can make changes, you know. Things can be changed if we come together and work together, collaborate. It's not always about competition, you know. Sometimes it's about collaboration, you know. I see you doing this, oh I might be able to help you, I see you doing that, oh I might be able to assist you, you know. It's about us coming together and unfortunately because of slavery, because of Jim Crow, because of the new Jim Crow, the 13th Amendment and all those things, they hurt us more than they helped us. The Constitution was written, they said we were three-fifths of a person. How could three-fifths of a person build a whole country? Because black people built it, slavery built this country, you know, and now they want to fight, you know, we're trying to get these reparations. We should get reparations. You all just need to figure out how much you are, how you're going to do it, whether it be free education, whether it be free housing, whether it be very good jobs, but you all need to figure out how you're going to pay us back for the labor that we've given you. That's what to me reparations is about, you know, it may not be putting money in somebody's hand, it may be going and fixing somebody's house up, you know, or it may be going, you know, there's a lot of ways that they can do it, you know, and so it just needs to be done. You know, we've waited for so long, and so this is 2024, and I know you must have heard of the Willie Lynch letter, right? The Willie Lynch? Go ahead. He's the one that said, you separate them, I'll give you something, you keep people fighting against each other for 400 years. And that's the word, he said, you put the, you pin the light skin person against the dark skin person. You pin the person who got long hair against the person who got short hair. So basically you just keep those fighting against each other, you know, and we have a lot of millionaires and billionaires, but it just seems like for some reason we can't all come together. Unfortunately, you know, and I say, you know, a lot of times, it doesn't matter where, what country you came from, if you're Haitian, if you're Jamaican, we're all black when they look at us. They just look at our color. They don't know where we come from. And it's a shame because if I cut my arm, I'm going to bleed red. If you cut your arm, you're going to bleed red too. You know, so I feel like we're all fighting the same battle in a sense, you know, it's just some of us, the perpetrators and some of us are the victims. And I just feel like black people have really gotten a bad, a bad case of being brought over here when we were kings and queens, stolen from our native land, not teaching us how to, didn't want us to read, you know, did not want us to read. And that is the most important thing you can do is read. Because if someone's telling you, oh, sign this and you don't read it, you don't know what you're getting yourself into. Right. A lot of black folks lost their land in the south by signing things they didn't know what their friends of that happened to. Right. South Carolina. And let's not forget about Beacon Hill. We were on Beacon Hill. Then we got pushed into the south end, you know, and now we can't even look at the south end that much, you know. Who is this, you know, but I'm a believer, I believe that, I believe in God, I believe that, I believe he doesn't make any mistakes. And even though we had to lose Marcus Anthony, this organization, I think, is going to be very powerful. I have connected with his girlfriend and their son, and I found out that his girlfriend, she does potties for kids who have lost their parents, free, it's called potties from above. And she's such a nice woman and her son, he even came to one of our classes. He's eleven. Wow. And we were going to let him in the class. And he said, no, I'll wait till I'm a little older. My friend wants to wait till he thinks they're too young, but you're never too young to learn. No, you're absolutely right. Well, we were really lucky today to have Priscilla Flint, the executive director of the Marcus Anthony Hall Educational Institute in Boston, and also the author of this book. I look back and wonder how I got over. It's a great book. You can get it anywhere. Books are sold. It's her memoir of growing up in Boston, I've read it, and it's a great read. It'll teach you a lot about what it's like for some people growing up in Boston and anywhere in this country. So, we're really lucky to have you. I hope you all will spend time looking at the Marcus Anthony Hall Educational Institute. They have a great website. We are having this fundraiser at my house in Arlington Sunday, March 10th, from 3 to 4.30. Priscilla will be there along with a number of her young people, and we're also having some great food, as she said. So, I want to thank you for listening. Again, I'm Michael Jacoby Brown, your host for We Hold These Truths. And I hope you'll enjoy this and tell your friends to keep watching. Thank you very much for watching so far, and we hope to see you next time. Thanks a lot. And thank you, Priscilla. Thank you so much, Michael. I appreciate you. I really do. I appreciate you. I appreciate you opening up your house to be my young folks. Happy to do it, and look forward to seeing you soon.