 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Good afternoon. My name is William South, and welcome to Think Tech. I'm excited this morning for two reasons. The content of the show and my remarkable guest. Justice for All is a book written by, actually, sacred writings, Viking Peaceful Bold, by a man named Lloyd A. Barby. He's an attorney. He was a Renaissance man. He was a man with gifts and talents that preceded us. And he was doing things 50 years ago there now, just being talked about today. I have his youngest son, Rustin Barby, and his daughter, Daphne Barby-Wooten, both of whom were attorneys. I want to preface my remark before I engage them in the show and say this. In the African-American community, there was a shortfall. Most young African-American men have daddy problems, daddy issues for a variety of reasons. Some as neglect, some as a lack of attention, some as a lack of presence. But one thing is certain, that role model of father is probably the most important relationship that we enjoy. And sometimes, we get lucky. And I think in this instance, Lloyd Barby got lucky. Speaking of models, Lloyd Barby was an attorney. His son is an attorney. His daughter is an attorney. His daughter's husband is an attorney. That's remarkable. Good morning, folks. Good morning. Good morning, Bill. Thanks for being on the show. If dad were around today, how would he interface what's going on in Hawaii and what's happening in America currently? Be a leader, Rust. OK, I'll start off. My father had a small connection to Hawaii. I know when Patsy Mink was elected to represent Hawaii in Washington, he was a great admirer of hers. She championed women's rights. She championed civil rights. And there was that connection there with Hawaii earlier. I believe that he would be very supportive of native Hawaiian rights and their movement going on now. And Daphne knows some of the players in that movement, much better than I. I know one person, Hounanike Trask, went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And she knew of my father and was an admirer of his, watching his struggles in the state of Wisconsin. She, of course, returned to Hawaii and was a champion of civil rights for native Hawaiians here in Hawaii. Let's dare to be real for about 30 seconds and tell me about your father's struggles with Daphne, specifically, with civil rights, women's rights. It was all rights, which is the title of the book, Justice for All. My father was born in Memphis, Tennessee, segregated south. And he went to the north, Madison, Wisconsin, to law school, segregated north. And in fact, a statistic show that now, Wisconsin is one of the most segregated states in the United States. And that's north, not Mississippi, where a family originated. So he came from a very segregated society, a very prejudiced society. Separate was not equal. And at a young age, he was the president of the youth NAACP. He decided he was going to do something about it. And one of the ways he did it is become an attorney and to do civil rights law. I understand. Let's educate our audience real quick. What does NAACP do? Do they, in fact, redress grievances on behalf of those disenfranchised or otherwise outside the system to address that grievance? Well, NAACP, National Association for Advancement of Color, people started them in the early 1920s. And if you've read or know about Thurgood Marshall, he was one of the lead attorneys that sued with the help of the NAACP to stop segregation in education, Brown versus Board of Education. The NAACP has been in the forefront of advocating for civil rights for people of all colors and for minorities. And presently, I think it has morphed a little bit. Now they're- In what direction did you mention morphed? Well, specifically what? Yeah. Right now, I think the NAACP is more focused on people who are disenfranchised, people who are discriminated against, and not just African-Americans. Of course. So they would file amicus briefs, for example, against the recent anti-immigration orders that have come down from 45, the administration, and also find supports other groups like the American Civil Liberty Union, ACLU. In the past, I think they were more solo and more focused on the treatment of African-Americans, but now they have branched out. OK. Well, it seems like to me if we can put our differences aside, we become a real force in the culture in terms of change. Absolutely. Remember what Nelson Mandela said, if your hand is like this, if your hand is like this, you're individual, and it's not as strong. But if you come together, that's a fist, and that's very powerful. And so I think you see that happening now. Although I still get a bit of people saying, well, they want to go different directions by themselves. Not all women have supported African-Americans. Not all African-Americans have supported gays. But we need to realize that we have the same common enemy, which is actually, I think, it's more, at least nowadays, money, the rich and the powerful. And you look to see who they are. And very few of them are women. Very few of them are minorities. And so one has to really take a look at what's going on in Hawaii, specifically the homelessness. There's a big divide, economy-wise. And you have the super rich who come from the mainland or from China or from wherever buying these condos for millions of dollars. Whereas you have someone who's lived here all his or her life. They can't afford to get into the game. They can't even afford the bench at the bus stop. Yeah, this is true. That's why in justice for all, it's a moral imperative. And when I say moral, I mean to imply that it's, as the brothers would say, it's righteous. Imperatives, that it's crucial. Rustam, your father was a forward thinking. Matter of fact, he was fighting for gay and lesbian rights in 1967 when the concept couldn't be sold. Even the legendary Martin Luther King took a step backward in terms of stepping out for gay rights. And your father introduced legislation to reduce discrimination against gays and lesbians. Give me some more examples of your father's forward thinking. OK, he was the proponent of decriminalizing victimless crimes. So he wanted to drug crimes. So if a person wants to choose to imbibe in some sort of stimulant or narcotic, he felt that that was their personal decision to stage and step aside. He proposed legislation to legalize and decriminalize marijuana use. That's really progressive. My god, 50 years ago. And other drug use. He proposed legislation to decriminalize gambling. He proposed legislation to decriminalize prostitution. All of these he viewed as a personal individual choices that the state and government should have no business being a part of. He proposed legislation to outlaw sex crimes, such as sodomy, and things like that. And sodomy, of course, is a legal definition that doesn't necessarily mean what people popularly think it does. It means going against nature, I would presume, or something. Or oral sex, or anything that is a sexual relation with another person that is consensual would be called sodomy back in those days. I'd like to, Bill, if I could just read a quote from the book. Please do. OK. I mean, get up, or they can see it. One of my dad's quotes that I found very compelling and timely today. Freedom and democracy is not achieved just once. It must be one time and time again. Those who do not recognize this will soon find they are no longer free. And that's from 1972. And that's in the book that Daphne had to do. You know, I can't put the book down. I don't want to sound like your best audience, but it's one heck of a read. What I find surprising about the book is that your dad was so frank in his discourse. And he was so fearless in his approach. And when I look at his picture, I can see his intelligence jump off with him. But there was also a cool reserve about the man. I could see that he was dispassionate in many ways, along with that passion. What was it like for you, Daphne, growing up as the daughter of Lloyd Barbie? Well, he was a very good father, I have to say. He took us children to his demonstrations. We marched across the bridge for fair housing. We marched for the integration of schools. He didn't hide things from us. We all had to work in his law office and answer the phone, type for him, meet with his clients. And so he included us in many of his events, civil rights events, so that we would catch the bug. And obviously, since I'm an attorney and my brother's an attorney, we caught that bug. Yes, you did. Very well, by the way. And so he did influence me quite a bit. He was an excellent father in my opinion. He even made us omelets on Sundays. But then he also took us to the arts to have greater appreciation of the arts. He was a great father. We met a lot of his clients. We went to a lot of his speeches. And he taught us, I think, one of the most important things I learned from him is never give up, keep going forward. And it doesn't matter what people say about you or think about you. You just do the right thing. When we talk about imperatives, there's a, when we talk about money, life in America presents all of us with an economic imperative. And that's almost a strategy put in place against many minorities. They can't seem to escape the poor house. Rustin, how would your father attack this economic imperative today? Very good question. I think he would be more aligned with folks like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who advocating for trying to equal the playing field as much as possible by proportionate taxation. My dad, very early on in the 60s, proposed legislation to tax churches. That's interesting. That would cause an uproar. Starting at the Vatican, yes. So he felt that churches are engaging in political activity and had no reasonable reason, no sensible reason not to be taxed for their activities. But he was always had a saying that he was for the have-nots. And the have-nots would be those 98% and not the 2% of people that have the majority of the resources in this country. And there is a disparity when you see a priest in his $200 shoes and his $500 robe and his crucifix and his spanish and black children giving their nickels to the offering plate, when you would think that would be disseminated among those needed most. You would presume that those who are in need of help would get the help first. That doesn't appear to be the paradigm of the model. Yeah, and then nowadays you have issues like a gerrymandering where- Break that down for us. What is gerrymandering? Gerrymandering is when the party in power, the political party in power, will change the district boundaries to ensure either that they have more of their party members represented or they will and dilute the minority vote or they will pack the minority vote into one distinct region so that they just get that one seat as opposed to possibly winning three seats in a state house. So the gerrymandering that's been going on for the past 12 years is a specific strategy employed by the GOP on the mainland. He would be opposing that and in the courts, fighting that as the NAACP has done recently in other interesting groups. I mean, the dilution of the vote and the mainland is just incredible. You know, we're coming up onto a break. I want to make a point very, very quickly. That's why we must study the spider because the spider, as you well know, she's nodding her head. As you well know, they defeat by strategy, not by confrontation and that's what's happening and I think in the political arena, it's the strategy that defeats. Yes. Anansi, they call it Anansi, the spider, the African, Ghanaian, Akan, and Jamaican. Anansi stories. You don't know nothing about Jamaica. Yaman, I know about Anansi. Thank you. As a matter of fact, I read in the book, Russ, where you told your father, you urged your father to buy land in Jamaica. I'm not mistaken. He was, my dad was in most of his professional career, what we'd call a workaholic. A workaholic. He would leave before six in the morning. He would come home after 11 at night. He would read for two or three hours before he went to bed and he promised me that he would take me on a vacation once I graduated undergraduate school. So I said, I'll go on vacation on one condition that you come with me. So we went off to Jamaica. We went to Negril, Jamaica, which is travel agent. Back in those days, you had travel agents make the arrangements. It was very shocked that he would go to Negril, Jamaica with me. He fell in love with it. He came back from Jamaica and he took Daphne down there for the next trip. And within three months. And this is a workaholic now. He fell in love with the culture and the people of Jamaica and then made a third trip and bought a beautiful house in Jamaica, which he loves and we still have today. Which you still have. Yeah, and one other thing, one other thing about Jamaica is he, when he came there, he said he wanted to spend his money in a predominantly black country. So he's tired of America racism. So that's why. I get that. I get that. This is kind of a sample of Asia living in Hawaii. And I can't imagine Japanese-American families buying Ford, they buy Honda. They get the concept. I see this interweave of ethnicity here in Hawaii and how it works, how they support one another. Chinatown is Chinatown. It's an excellent model or paradigm for us to forget our differences. And more recently, Vietnam town. Thank you. Fascinating what's being done. When they put those differences aside, and as you express moving one direction as a force, that's what I like about the bear. The bear's resolve is apparent. The bear is committed. We're gonna come up on a break if you'll give us a few minutes to introduce these commercial messages. We'll get right back to you folks. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Greetings, it's me, Angus McTech, the longtime host and star of Hibachi Talk. Think Tech is important to our community because we bring all kinds of cool ideas and I bring gadgets to the show. So you gotta watch it for sure. But for the first time, Think Tech Hawaii is participating in an online web-based fundraising campaign that raised $40,000. Give thanks to Think Tech. We'll run only during the month of November and you can help. Please donate what you can that Think Tech in Hawaii can continue to be public awareness and promote civic engagement through free programming like mine, and I'm in charge. I've already made my donation and it's really hard to get the Scutsman to make a donation, but I already did. Please send in your tax-deductible contribution by going to this website. Thanks for to thinktech.cosbox.com. Say that three times fast. Closing on behalf of the community enriched by Think Tech, Hawaii's 30 plus weekly shows. Thank you and we're mahalo for watching Think Tech and your generosity. Let your wing gang free wherever you be. Aloha. Hi, this is William Self. I'm here with Rustin Barbie and Daphne Barbie. Wooten, I stand corrected. This is injustice for all. It is a moral imperative. And I wanted to breach this idea about realness and talk about the need to not only introduce people to what's coming ahead of us, but what's happened in back of us. I'd like to direct this to you, Rustin, in a very real way. Give us the strategy put in place against Hawaiian and native people to take power in their own land. Well, I think it's pretty well demonstrated what happened in Hawaii's classic colonial techniques to subjugate people. You bring in the missionaries first to pacify and convert the population to Christianity, make them docile and worship Jesus and a white master and then follow that with economics by disenfranchising them from their land, taking their land through various strategies, including marriage and other means. So effectively taking their economy and their culture, denying them the right to speak their own language and to do their... That's huge. And then finally you bring in the military to enforce all that on top and what you see as the result of a disenfranchisement of a people, you know. Is it safe to say they don't know who they are if that's not too bold of a statement? Once you take away the language, tradition, culture, you intermarry, the lines become blurred. That's right, and then sort of two masters. And sometimes the subjugated buy into this. Subjugated means to conquer, is that? Break it down for the brothers out there who are listening to us. Sometimes the people that are the victims of this strategy buy into it and identify more with the victimizers than their own people. And why is that? How does that psychology work? Well, I'll let my philosophy and psychology sister explain it. By all means. Well, as Bob Marley says, brainwash education. And that's what happens is you get brainwashed, propaganda of the media, propaganda in the newspapers, propaganda in the churches, and in the schools. And they teach you things such as that you don't need to learn African-American history, you don't need to learn Hawaiian history, Native American history. Christopher Columbus discovered America, what a big lie, what a big lie. And it completely obliterates the culture that was here before he got lost and came to. It changes that whole narrative. Yes, came to the United States. People did not, there's all kinds of horrible philosophers who are still read today who say that black people built nothing and they have nothing to offer culturally. Well, you look at African history, human beings came from Africa. And people should be proud of being African. People should look at Africa and see who built the great pyramids. It wasn't slaves, it was Africans who built that. Africans in Sudan, not just in Egypt. And I remember going to Egypt with my husband and there was a school teacher from the South Georgia and she was on board and we were looking at all the pyramids and looking at all of the majestic monuments in Egypt and finally she turned around, she couldn't take it anymore and she says, so are the Egyptians' Negroes. What's a Negro? Yeah, and the tour guide said, well, they're Egyptians but yes, we're black and it's like what? And if you look at pictures that are shown in the majority of the schools in America, you won't see that, you won't make that connection but if you actually go to the source, you will see that connection, you will know that connection. I think they're being misdirected. Yeah, yeah, as part of the strategy. It's propaganda. Yes, I was talking to a Hawaiian woman. My journey started on Kauai almost 30 years ago and she was explaining to me that there are 27 different forms of rain in Hawaii. Well, the spectrum of blackness, there must be at least 30 forms of blackness. That thread, and speaking of Africa, the original people, speaking of Jesus Christ in the Bible and that lineage, the Torah began in Africa. All the applied sciences from the fulcrum to the pulley to the wheel to the lever, Africa, the fast drying process, Africa, how to grow all the world's agriculture, rotating crops, Africa. The history is, as a matter of fact, I studied martial arts for about 25 years and my first class was in Korea and it was taught in Korean and then the master said that we are all a little Chinese because what is shared with the world from the Chinese and then he said, what is older than Chinese is the African and we are also all a little African. Russ, I want to try to keep it real here, if I can. There was a landmark case that your father won. It could rival Plessy versus Ferguson. I think it was called Armstrong and... Versus Board of Education. Thank you. It put his name on the map. It immortalized your father. It confirmed his work. Yep, Amos versus the Board of Education. He worked on the case for, I believe, 16 years. 16 years, Lord. He organized, well, he knows right away, Stephanie said in the earlier part of the show, Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. That's hard to fathom. Yeah, it's more segregated than Chicago, believe it or not. You can pick streets and tell by somebody's neighborhood what ethnicity they are. So what happened was there was the de facto segregation of the schools, meaning that you had schools that were 100% either Caucasian or African American. And they also had in place a busing system that would do intact busing, which meant that when intact busing would be, generally speaking, taking black kids out of a black neighborhood school and that was under repair and moving them to a white neighborhood school, keeping them in a segregated classroom, according to the people that came over on the bus, segregated cafeteria times. It was just in-your-face, blatant racial discrimination in public schools where public taxpayers are paying for that school. I'm gonna... And he was just very upset with the situation because, as again, Daphne mentioned, it was not separate but equal. Separate, unequal, and pure bigotry. Your father introduced a legislation that eventually brought the system down and integrated the school system in the state of Wisconsin. He bought a federal lawsuit. Initially, it was backed by the NAACP, but they felt that they had a very slim chance of winning in Milwaukee. So they dedicated their resources to a different part of the country and that legal team. So my dad ended up doing it by himself with an expert witness and a team of volunteer lawyers, not affiliated with the NAACP, to carry this lawsuit forward in the Federal District Court in the Eastern District of Wisconsin and went through many appeals in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and he prevailed and that was David versus Goliath. That's true. Kudos and we're coming up on the end of the show and when you're having fun, boy, time goes so quickly, but I'd like to be as frank as I can beyond the ensuing 30 or 40 seconds. What are they afraid of? What are they afraid of, Daphne, the power? What are they afraid of? They wanna keep power. Remember, Frederick Douglass said power concedes nothing without a struggle. Thank you. Okay, so they wanna keep the power. They wanna keep the money. They wanna rule the world. Yes, they do. And they don't wanna anybody who doesn't look like them, talk like them, speak like them, involved. Okay, so they're self-absorbed, insecure, correct? And the same question very quickly. What are they afraid of? I would ditto those comments right there. Well then, let me challenge you. What are you afraid of? Well, with the help of my father, there's not a whole lot that makes me scared anymore, but we used to get calls at home from racists. You mean death threats? Yes, racists would call our telephone and say, we're gonna kill your nigger father. They'd talk to Daphne on the phone and say, you nigger bitch, we're gonna kill your dad. Just horrible stuff. And my dad would say, just ignore those people and keep on steppin', man. Yes. He was fearless. Yes, he was. Justice for all. It reads like a menu. That's how quickly it reads. It hits with the power of a buick. You put it down and it provokes thought. This man is a cultural treasure. He is an American icon. The gentleman's name is Lloyd Barbie, attorney at law, legislator, assemblyman, civil rights activist, women's rights activist. He was a man. I wanna thank you for joining Think Tech today. Please join us again. I wanna thank Russ Barbie, Daphne Barbie. Thank you so much, folks. Thank you for having us and being real. Well, thank you. Thank you, Bill. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.