Marty bing is here, founder voter Routs, Mobilized Justice, had me.
In these streets trying to convince.
Everybody and let everybody know why this election is so important and why we all need to show up.
And man, you're doing good work out here. My guys, bitch, how are you?
My love?
Tell everybody what the last first of all, good to have you tell everybody what the last two weeks of your life has been. Like just the two weeks, that's not the months preparing for these two weeks.
But so we've been doing these uh deep dive activations in Detroit, Philly, just finished up Atlanta, headed to North Carolina on Saturday. But it's like after one event ends, you're planning for the next event and you gotta drop a presson release the following day. You got to gather all the artists. You gotta book all this travel, gotta get the hotel, gotta find transportation, gotta get security, got to talk to the people in the community to make sure it's cool to come, they know we're coming.
How to coordinate so when you go into a town, right, So you've been picking like swing states, right mostly?
Is it all swing states? All swing states?
So you started in Michigan, Michigan, I missed that one. I popped in in Philadelphia. I was there for you, I was there with you in Atlanta. Next is North Carolina, absolutely coming there. And then what is so you come into the town and it's not just the panel and this one event, this is actually it's like multiple right.
So the first thing we do normally is we try to gather in the morning a multi religious community kind of gathering to have like a press conference, if you will, where we bring together Muslim leaders, Christian leaders, Jewish leaders, any leader of goodwill and just have a general conversation on while we're there.
From there, we normally go into the community.
We pick what I like to call a neglected part of the community where our people live and try to bring them some inspiration, education, engage them, let them know that this election is for them too, and they shouldn't sit out because up until that point, only the people that came was us. And then we do that in
multiple different parts of the city. And then depending on where we've been, we've either had like a rally slash lunch break, and then we head to the venue where we had this town hall, where we bring all the artists, all the leaders together in the same space to have this conversation around vote or else.
Thank you so much for, by the way, for including me in some of these sure these events, because you know, you have a perspective. It's nice to sit with other people and here what's important to other people that first panel, especially the one in Philly we had, you know, everybody just has a different.
Opinion, different perspective.
Some are organizers, recording artists, young talent that don't really even know how to maneuver through through the political system, or you've never voted, maybe it's their first time voting. It's just such a layered conversation and such an important one.
And so the thing that I think differentiates what we're doing versus what you normally see. There's a lot of organizations that try to use celebrities that call you and engage you and say come do this, record this call, or come to this rally or perform here.
But I think what we did was we looked at a.
Group of artists, influencers, leaders that sort of speak to a niche group of our community that's often neglected or left behind. Right, I mean, even in Atlanta, we was in Camelot projects, and it was I've been to a lot of places in this country. I'm talking about hoods. I've never seen nothing like what I saw in Camelot in Atlanta. It broke my heart. But us being there, them individuals that live there that are still there, they
have some hope. They're like, wow, y'all didn't forget about us, right, And I think we've been intentional every city we go to.
Let's not go to where it's safe.
Let's not go to where it's popular, Let's not go to where everyone's already educated. Let's go to the darkest that people consider darkest and try to move our people to a place of politics is for you too. It's affecting everything around you. The very reason why this Camelot housing project is neglected is because they think you're not equipped to engage in the political process.
That's why they don't respond to you.
But boy, if you wake up and you hit them polls and they see them numbers coming from this area, that's gonna change overnight. And that's really what the goal of what we're doing.
That always comes up on the town halls is like the money goes where the voting is.
Yep, you want to know where people are voting. And who said that on the panel? Somebody said, you want to know where people are voting, Go where.
The whole the whole foods are, art foods are because that's where you know, they put their money. Where the people are the vote for them. It's really that simple. It's really that simple.
But even the organizations. You know, again, my sisters shout out to Ti, Mika Mallory. We've been at this for quite quite quite a long time, and this is all new to me. I'm normally the guy behind the curtain out thanks to Ivy Ivy. You know, we we crossed
paths in LA some time ago. But you know, we we there's organizations out there that every election cycle, there's you won't believe it that I get in trouble too for telling the truth, but oh well, there's millions upon millions upon millions that get trinkled in to all these organizations. And these organizations are selling these funders dreams of I can get a million black people from the hood to come out, and I can get a million.
Latinos and agents.
You know, they sell these dreams to this core group of people who normally give out the money. And then organizations like Tamikas until Freedom, organizations like airkfore, organizations like what I have. We we gotta fight for scraps and we're doing the most impactful work literally going into situations that could be unsafe.
It was like, Yo, what's going on? You check in? You know?
I mean you know organizations aren't going to those places, right, but they're getting money to they just don't go. So you know, again, kudos to the people that I mentioned, And there's many others that are doing the real work, trying to make the real impact, sizeable impact that you could actually test and see if you just put resources engage those communities.
How did you get here? Man, give me, give me the give me the the cheat, the cheap sheet. I'm sure it was borny many different things, but many many.
I mean born into uh you know, A shout to my mother and heroin. It's the mother at the time she was murdered when I was four years old. A drug dealer that she took some stuff from murdered her
at four. I grew up in foster care and met my dad in jail, got first locked up when I was twelve, in and out when I was fourteen, and I said this to my first two year juvenile bid was home for six months, got re locked up to two more years, graduating from a quarter judicated high school, never been to a prom, missed a whole lot of high school memories. Came home same time my dad I released.
Somehow he got connected to politics. He was like, son, I know I ain't really been much of a father, but if this is one that I can give you, let me give you this, poor, all your anger, poor, all your experience into this and fight for your community.
And hopefully it's a gateway. And it has been. And wow.
The only other big moment is I met Bill Lynch and Hazel Duke's. I was on the als Helly farm in Tennessee. I met a guy named Bill Lynch who's a legendary in New York. He told me, if I'm ever in New York, call him. A year later, I came to New York, I moved to Harlem, called Bill Lynch. He put me to work, and that was my life in politics begin then, outside of my father and between Bill Lynch and Hazel Dukes. Thank god, my life has
changed for the better since. And again, even when I go back into the hood and talking to foster care kids and kids who's been in juvenile attention, I tell them, the only thing that separates you from me is somebody opened the door.
Right.
And you hear a lot of these organizations, you hear a lot of these politicians and people talk about what needs to change. Give these young people a door to opportunity. They gonna take it. They gonna take it.
Wow.
And it's crazy because that could have win, That could have went anyway for you, right, But for some reason, you have like a like you believe in this, in the system, you believe in like I do.
And again, I mean there's plenty of people between social.
Media and anybody could be throwing the system away like this system is.
You could feel that way, sure, And there's plenty of people that have worser stories of mine.
Right, I'm not an anomaly. I'm just one of many.
And I think for me, it's just I have been afforded the opportunity to sit close to political change and how it's actually done on every level, the good and the bad. And I know that government is really created to better people's lives. And again, if government doesn't do a good job politicians, no matter a Democrat, Republican, independent, if you're out every day trying to come and help people and fix problems that you already know exists, like you don't have to.
Be told what's going on.
Just walk around like shit's fucked up a lot of places, food, deserts, people starving, violence, access to guns, drugs.
It's not shit. Ain't a secret.
And we have a chance to in every chance that we get, no matter what city we in, we just got to come to the table and understand that we got the real power. We could choose who represents us. Shoe Angie, you could run like I could run, right, but we gotta have people that understand. Don't get angry at the political system, like step into it because you could literally be the person to change your entire community circumstance.
It just takes you.
I feel bad for politicians sometimes now and with.
Social media and the way people they are, like the second you step out on the forefront, it's like you are just subjected to anything. And so I think it limits the amount of quality leadership that wants to step into into politics or to be a politician. Because I'm not to say that there's no quality people out there. I'm just saying I can only imagine that there's people that may second guess taking that road because.
For sure, and again I mean that there are circumstances like that, for sure, and then there's entrench circumstances where some people feel entitled to like, oh, my family's been in this and my dad and my uncle, you know, and you have that in some places, you know. But I think again, more or less like for our communities that go out here every day and try to live a decent life, fight the good fight under crazy circumstances, Like it's so much ill shit that's happening in our communities.
Some that's talked about, some that's not talked about, But again, it just takes one of us to really just step up and say, hey, this shit got changed.
Even has has the work that you've been doing in this past, especially leading up to this election, does it make you hopeful? Have you what have you learned from some of the conversations or the experiences or stepping into these neighborhoods, say that like.
I do my love life. I'm a hopeless romantic.
So every you know, even when it should be fucked up and it don't work out the way we want to. I'm still hopeful, right because if I wake up and I get a chance to wake up, that means I got another day to try to fight for it, right, And I'm a fighter. I'm a fighting all my life, So you know, when it comes to politics and social justice and civic engagement, I'm gonna wake up and fight
for it, actually be pissed off. The person that we want to win may not win, and it may get dark, but I'm always gonna.
Be the guy like, come on, y'all, we got this ship. We're gonna figure it out. We survive orse.
We could survive of Moron's time in office for a couple of years if we had to, right, because we've been surviving our time existence, right, So we can figure it out.
So I'm always hopeful, but hopefully we don't have to.
Hopefully hopefully we don't have respect what about from some of the conversations, because even in the in the couple of panels that I hosted with you guys, I feel like I got a sense of just the different perspectives, different opinion difference energies that people.
Feel you missed. The first the first one was electric.
I mean what happened in so shout the ice word vessel Man, because me and Vezzo was like the first people to talk about this. The format of the conversation, and it was originally supposed to be like a great debate setup where you had artists on different sides of the spectrum coming together to like, you know, Kamalo or Donald and we didn't go that route, but it's still
got contentions. So the issue of reparations came up. So you got Black Sam and Vezzo like, may we're gonna do for ourselves, were gonna figure this shit out, like it's on us to figure out our shit And then you have other artists who's like, oh, we got to wait for that check the forty acres and the.
Mule, like we gotta wait for that, we need that.
And it just to see how passionate and educated our brothers and sisters are they going to show you, like there's so many gems in our hoods and so many talent, and just how in depth they got about the topic. And of course we know Black Sam and Nipsey's story, what they've built. Vezo's doing amazing working Detroit, opening up businesses and his wife. He even has a halfway house that he operates in a group home on six miles
in the hood. When he's taking people in, you know, stories you don't hear, but all these stories come out in these conversations that we've been having. So it's like a duality of hopeful happiness, if you will, because we're educating the people that's attending to inspire them to get involved with this campaign and not just this campaign, every campaign every election going forward, but we're also showcasing the high of talent that these artists have that you sometimes
don't see. You just think it's just about the music, and it's so much more.
And also like the ability to be able to have difference of opinions on things and it'll be okay and still care about the greater goods.
Absolutely.
We have our paneling. The one in Philadelphia got a little spicy too.
And then get spicy.
I was like, I'm gonna bring it up again because I don't want to bring a.
I think everybody was like.
Somebody said something on the panel.
We know there's some he is I love you, you know I love him too, So I love you so much, might even love you so much I.
Might even say your name.
Somebody on the panel said something about women being emotional and that being a factor. Now I appreciated this honesty because if there are people that feel like that, we should have that discussion.
So I did appreciate the honesty.
I mean, but also, sir, also, sir, also, sir, listen, I was raised by women.
Half a second we made up.
It was so good.
Even even Killer Mike and I have different his opinions on gun laws and things like that, but I respect him so much and he's I learned so much from him in different ways that it's okay that maybe one or two of the things I actually feel different.
About, But that's that's okay. Absolutely, you know what I'm saying.
I think these kinds of conversations and these kind of town halls, and especially the group of people that you are specifically putting together leads us all to like, yes, we may feel different about specific things, but ultimately what serves us and serves the bigger picture. And I think that's to me, that is the you know, the takeaway when I leave, When I leave these conversations, it's like, I really feel hopeful that we're all we all care about ultimately what happens with our kids.
But even like the first so this is sort of it's sort of emotional being here with you right now because you may not fully remember the first time we actually met. When is it twenty sixteen? Hillary was running for president. They were nervous about Florida. I got a call from one of our union brothers, George Gresham here in New York eleven ninety nine, and he said, Marvin, because you put something together in Florida to encourage and
get our young black and brown people excited. And this is like the beginning of like the mentality of who you put together and for what you hosted it t I did a poem, Jay Elect trying to perform in the Crimes.
Yes, push the tea.
Gucci Man, I mean we had Gucci Man on stage. Gucci has never talked about politics anything, but he came on stage to talk about I can't vote. They took my right to vote away when I went to jail. But I need all y'all to vote.
Right, marg I realized that was your event, that was me.
That was the very first time we were together.
Wow.
And I used to brag the Shaka like Ael you know again.
I mean you know, historically you you've been someone in our community has looked up to, love, respected forever. So we hold you, protect the Queen as we say so. It was honored having you then, it's honored you now is honored to be here with you now. Thank you man, just to get that out of the.
Door, Thank you so much. Thank you for that work.
That was a great event, too amazing. We didn't win it. We didn't win it. I still hope for the next day though.
Don't ever lose that. Don't ever lose that. Okay.
So next stop is North Carolina. What's happening there?
Saturday, November second.
So tomorrow, guys, this is tomorrow. Tomorrow, we're going to be in North Carolin.
Dam, North Carolina. It's actually Sewne's homecoming that.
Weekend, is it.
So it's gonna be a little little crazy about thirty forty thousand people down there.
Oh wow.
But we're gonna do the same thing we've been.
Doing on some doors in the projects corn Wallace and McDougall, the two public housing areas in Durham. They were doing a phone bank with a group of formerly incarcerated men and women. So we're going to We're gonna have the artists join some former incarcerati min and women and call other former incarcerated men and women to educate them on their voting rights in North Carolina. So we'll spend time doing that, and then we're going to have our town hall at North Carolina Central University HBCU.
Shout out to NCCU.
Wow, Marvin.
If nothing else, I hope you inspire people. Seeing your story and what you have made out of your life. I hope that inspires people to get up and take action, whether it's convincing the five people on your block, the twenty people in your family. You know, even if you don't go out and you're not an organizer, you're not
an activist. I hope that your life and your story will inspire people to just even at the smallest level, trying to make a difference and at the very least to show up at the polls.
Absolutely on Tuesday.
Absolutely so well done, sir, appreciate you. So what do we need anything we should know? How do we support you?
You can follow hit our website Mobilized Justice dot org, same thing or.
Handle on Instagram.
We're an infant organization as they say, we're probably in the month six, but we certainly got some plans to get busy.
During this is it only been six months?
Six months?
Only been six months, wow, So this is the first time I'm stepping out creating some of my own humble that the kind of support that we have gotten. There's a lot of people who told us no, a lot of people who said it wasn't going to work, but we got some numbers that just proved that in places that otherwise people want to went to.
So we want to keep working, keep growing.
There's some issues that we're gonna look look to confront in the new year, voting rights for forming and cars, people in the Deep South, sencing reform. So there's some things coming from us, and I'm excited.
I'm hopeful. Yeah, I love that man.
Thank you for all the work you do for real.
Thank you for giving people an opportunity.
Yeah, for sure.
What is the last thing before we close up? What what is your call to action for people out there? Like for somebody who's watching this inspired by your story, motivated, like what how what do you what do you say to people out here that they need to.
Do in the next couple of days.
Be hopeful. Vote period period, vote period.
Marvin Bang, everybody.
I'll see North Carolina, will see you on Saturday.
Saturday,