 HBC Digest Radio, welcome back. This is our alumni spotlight on our podcast series. And today, we have a really special guest. It's one thing to talk so much and so often about how HBC use nurture us to excellence and success. And it's another thing when they teach us to be free thinkers, even to the point of going in the face of what a lot of folks think we should do, think we should wanna do, and think what our purpose is. And so today our special guest by way of North Carolina Central University and before that, by way of New York, Reggie Angelo, an artist who just dropped a significant EP on iTunes and everywhere where you download your music. It is called Be Free, correct? It's called More Free. More Free, I'm sorry. More Free, yes, More Free. And I think that that's totally appropriate for your life and career. First, let me ask you this question. What has been the reception so far for More Free since it dropped on iTunes and Spotify and all those places? It's a really dope project. Thank you. For everybody who loves rap, we're all very, very distinguished and particular about our music. But this is something you can definitely ride around to and people will be like, who is that? What is that? When did that come out? It's one of those vibes. What has been the reception so far to the album? The reception first was curiosity. And then I say curiosity because I think a lot of people that I spoke with about my interest in pursuing rap on a level where many people would hear from me. I mean, I had always rapped and sung and performed, but that was on the level of, you know, small things like my friends, my campus, my family, me and my sorority sisters. We would make little songs together and share them amongst ourselves, but it was never something that I was comfortable with telling the world, this is what I do. This is what I do well. And I'm so confident in it that I would be willing to put it out there for you to not only feel, but also to critique. I had never been so confident to say that. So at which point I was so confident to say that. I think many people were like, hmm, okay. Well, if you're putting it out there for me to critique, let me take a listen. And I was surprised, firstly, that so many people immediately were like, I'm going to download, I'm going to play this because I want to know about it. I want to know about this person who was an educator who had never said to the world before that she's a rapper. And now at this point, white principal, you know, educator, this very specific character that we've known for a very long time, now you're saying that you rap, I want to know about it if they really liked it. Let's backtrack a little bit. So you are a credentialed and trained educator and developed a notable career in education and education leadership. And on medium, you wrote a post about, you know, this process of becoming a rapper and you wrote at length about working with charter school education, working in areas where educational resources are limited or are outright under resourced. And you talked about the passion you had for it and how many hours it took. How did North Carolina Central play a role in developing that side of you that wanted to be an educator and help young people along in their lives? Well, I'm from New York and all of my family is from New York, but I had this special experience of moving to the South and going to high school in North Carolina and college in North Carolina. So I had an experience in my family that no one else in my family was able to relate to. So for the people that were closest around me, I did feel kind of isolated in my experience of knowing what it's like to grow up around all black people because when I moved to North Carolina, we moved to Rocky Mountain North Carolina and it was an all black neighborhood. The schools that I was supposed to go to, the people that lived around me, the store owners and everybody else, they were all black and it was beautiful. They were black homeowners. You know, I lived in a black neighborhood where all black people owned their home and everybody had a yard and a car and they owned stores and businesses and I hadn't seen that in New York. That's not what black meant to me in the 90s in New York. Well, black meant to me in the 90s in New York was struggle. It was a lot of struggle. There was an idea that we had to do things better and to do things differently and part of our struggle was specifically because we were black people in a black neighborhood and when I went to North Carolina, part of my beauty specifically was because I was a black person in a black neighborhood and I went to an HBCU and the beauty of that was that I was in a black place with black professors, with black owners, with black creators, with black everything. So to go to a place that was so homogenously black and to see greatness in all of it is not something that schools teach you as a child in New York City. It's almost as if they teach you the opposite that in order to be great, you need to be a little less black. You need to talk a little less black. You need to look a little less black. You need to do things a little less blackly. So that is, there's still being taught that. And as an educator in New York, I recognized that that was still what we were teaching children and not that teachers wanted to teach that way but that there's a whole system dedicated to teaching black kids that the right has already been determined. Like this is what's correct. That's already been determined. If you're not sitting into that box, then you ain't it. And having gone to an HBCU and to know that my students in New York City had never even heard of an HBCU and didn't know that there were places with 10,000 black people that are and would be educated. They didn't know that such a culture existed. And that's something that I wanted to create an experience that I wanted to create for my kids that I was teaching every day in New York City. So that's how I got on the journey of not just educating and being a teacher in a one classroom with 30 kids at a time but wanting to create a system where black kids could love being black and could understand that blackness, greatness, education and any other thing that you can possibly think of can all exist in the same body. They do all exist in the same body and they can exist any way that you want them to and it's all correct. And talk a little bit about that. Cause that's a big deal. The system that you try to launch well not try to launch but you spearheaded it and you talk about the struggle of getting that off the ground and its connection to when you decided out of this 10 year plan of yours like, okay, time to wrap. How did that transition take place and why? Was it the struggle of leading this effort to create a new thing in the school system? Or was it just, A, it's time. This is the artistic part of me and it's time to put it to work. So here you go with this charter process where you use public funds to open a public school but you use your private ideas from your own research. It's almost as if you became a medical doctor and you could go work in a hospital or you could go open up your own independent practice. That's essentially what chartering a school is. I could go work in a regular public school and do whatever that public school is doing and just be an administrator of that system or I could start a whole new school through a chartering process and that was what I intended to do. But Newark is, it's kind of, it's sold up already. I mean, the game is sold up. You have a lot of charter networks that dominate it really. They already have it locked down with resources and relationships and all that. They have it locked down with resources and this process to open a school could be like five years. Who has five years? Who has the money to sustain themselves with no salary while they work tirelessly full time to open up a charter school because it does require full time. You know, and then you have to keep a whole board engaged. You have to, you're looking for a building. You're doing community outreach. You're going around to the middle schools to introduce yourself to the principal. You're hosting programs. You're getting to know the community leaders. You're going to their events, your hosting events. Yeah, there's so many things that you have to do to start a charter school, to open a charter school. And once you do all of that, you apply. And this last round, I think about 57 people applied and went through a whole process of writing a 500 or more page application. I think six people got it. Yeah. You know, and that's what I was looking at. And I'm just like, I don't think that this, what I'm doing right now is going to work towards my purpose, which is making sure that black and brown kids know that they are able and know that the qualities that they have are quality and that they can do anything and that all of their experiences are valuable in that school and education, anything you learn is for the purpose of making you your best you. And that's what my intention of transitioning from being an educator full-time to being an artist educator is because I felt that I'm an educator with my art. So what was that moment like where you said, this is it? It's something, you know, I think only artists can kind of identify with. Like this is building up and eating at you and eating at you until you finally do it. And it's like an escape. So what was the escape moment where you said, I don't care, I'm doing it. I don't care what people think. I don't care how big this purpose is. I don't care what this work is involved. I don't care how much I've paid. I'm turning away from this and going to that. Oh, it took a long time for me to convince myself that I'm worthy and that I'm capable. That wasn't so fast. I knew at one point that the effort for Legacy Academy had to come to a halt. Like that effort had to come to a halt because I saw how it was getting just chipped away, chipped away from its original purpose and getting more and more like the system that I did not want to be a part of because the process is so bureaucratic. And there was just so much effort that went into getting approved and getting favor and getting people to notice us that we weren't really just talking about how to love black kids anymore. We weren't talking about how to nurture black kids anymore. We were talking about a lot of process. We were talking about testing and scores and accountability and numbers and how can we compete and so all these other things that had nothing to do with how do we truly create a system where black kids are learning more and more every day how valuable they are and how much they can love themselves. So that process came to a halt because I just didn't want to continue going off the path. I didn't know what to do. After I stopped that, I was just, like I had dedicated so about two years completely of my life and myself to that process and to end it, I mean, I felt like my, my marriage had been significantly damaged by the amount of energy that went into the effort for Legacy Academy. I had moved around so much. I felt like I really didn't have a home. I came back to New York City gentrification. It happened so much. I didn't even know New York anymore. I'm like, damn, in two years, it looked different over here. Like if so many things were so different, I really didn't know where I stood on myself. And I just needed some time to get my head together. I was really like just hibernating and in that hibernation, that's what I was doing was rapping in my hibernation. Like that's what I was doing just to like ground myself and to feel just comfortable sitting in my own skin because I just felt so pulled in so many directions and all of a sudden I'm like, okay, we're all just gonna let you go. And I was just floating aimlessly. So I really had to ground myself and what happened was that I was just writing and just writing and writing and singing and meditating and hanging out with my friends who are also artists, who are so supportive and it just felt good. And I thought to myself, if I'm doing this and it feels so good, why wouldn't this be something that I do? I don't want things that feel good to be a treat or something I can only have every now and then. Why wouldn't it be something that I do all the time? And it's when I decided to be bold about saying, this is what I'm gonna do because it makes me happy. This will be my art and my expression of myself and it needs no permission and it needs no acceptance of if it's the right thing to do to go on the right path, but it feels so right and it feels so good for me. And I just felt like I couldn't go wrong doing what felt good. How challenging was it to put out, to produce and put out an album in comparison to going to school and earning degrees, working to establish a charter school? Where does it rank on the, this is some of the hardest things I've done in my life? I didn't think that it was so hard. I didn't think that it was so hard. I felt like I wish that I was so bold to have made this decision a really long time ago. That's how I felt. I wish that I was so bold to have made this decision a really long time ago and to, I think we all like had this idea that we had to go to school, like coming out of the crack era. Coming out of the 90s and having family that is just like, okay, somebody, we going through a lot right now, we going through a lot for a whole generation, like what are y'all gonna do? What is y'all generation gonna do? And a lot of my generation moved out. I came back to New York, I don't even know you. Everybody that I know from my childhood in New York, they don't even live here anymore. So we were all like, we have to go, get up, get out and do something. Many of us went to HBCU's and we got our good dose of art from there. But a lot of people were just like, Dr. Lawyer Firefighter, what you gonna be? Dr. Lawyer Firefighter, you have to do something big and kind of made to forget the talents that we really did have. How many people were athletes but felt like that wasn't good enough? They had to be something else or were singers and dancers and felt like that wasn't a real job and they had to be something else. And then we get to a culture where the internet says, hey, you, what I would tell what you have? Like no, that really is good enough to make a career out of. So don't think that that's not a real career. Pursue that. And if I had the courage and if I had the courage and the ideas that I could truly be whatever I want to be, if you can decide to be a rapper when I was in college, when I had the best artists around me at North Carolina Central, oh my God, there are so many great artists. There are so many good singers, dancers, poets. And if we had decided in the time to, if we had decided in the time that we were in college at HTC youth to become a collector, to pursue our art then, it would have been a breeze. We would have done it so easily, you know? So now I feel like this was, there was a lot of work that went into it, but it didn't feel difficult. It felt right. It felt really good. It's amazing. So I, thank you. How do you stay in touch with the side of you that wants to help the youth and create systems of access and opportunity through education? Part of it is my content. And then another part of it is legacy lens. So what Legacy Academy was, it was essentially a model. You know, it never became a physical school. That was the work that we were doing was to make it a physical school. Now it simply lives as a model. And the idea of the model is that this is research. This is research from first hand, from going to schools in Mexico, to going to schools in Iceland, and all over the East Coast, excuse me, all over the West Coast, and seeing the way that they do things in different places and how they teach kids to love each other. We have this model, and it's sharing that with other people, sharing legacy lens with other groups, with other people who are opening charter schools, who do want to know how they can modify their charter models to get their kids to be more free, to get their kids to be more free. You know, that's the idea of more free is just like anything that you can do to use what you know, to use your skills and your abilities to contribute to someone else being more free. That's all of my intention. Part of it is legacy, and part of it is my artistic expression. Boom. This has been, it's extraordinary. Again, when you're able to find your freedom in any respect, it's beyond liberating. We congratulate you on your project. We appreciate the project. We appreciate, you know, you extending yourself through this way. Let everybody who's out there listening know how they can find out more information about you, how they can get to more free, and where we should expect, and when we should expect more from you. Yes. So, breddianjalu.com, and my name is felt just like Regina without the N.A. So, R-E-G-I, angelulikemya.com, and it's also that name on every streaming platform. Anywhere you get your music, you can find my music there. And I'm also working on a project that I'll release in August with another artist, Jana Booth, and she's just an amazing singer from Philly, and her music is so good, and we're doing a full joint project with her and I, like on every track. So, that'll be in August.