Audio File
Transcript
My name is Pernell Blackburn, Jr. I’m 12 years old.
My name is A’mon Rice. I’m 13 years old.
My name is Ross Tedder. I’m 14 years old.
We interviewed Ed Gainey on August 13, 2014.
I had a good childhood. Me and my mom and my sister. My mother was a single mom, but I had a good childhood. I give my mother a lot of credit. One thing I never lacked was love. My mom always loved me, you know? I mean, she made miracles all the time and we didn’t have a lot. But whatever we had, she made sure that she stretched it to a point where it was good for the family. I had a mom, I had uncles. My father was later on in life. But I had a family that loved me. So now that I’m a father, it teaches me how to love my children.
I grew up on Collins Ave. and at the time we had three high rise buildings, a lot of drugs, a lot of dope in my community. And so watching the whole East Liberty transform meant that if we could change the community, that means I could change as well. And I think the number one thing that I got out of it was education. And how do I put myself in a situation to become better educated so that I can make more moves.
When I first went to college, I went to Norfolk State, was like 18 hours. So when I got to Norfolk State, I’m from Pittsburgh, so I had never been on the beach. I probably spend too much time on the beach and not enough time in class. So I came home. But when I came home, I didn’t want to be another statistic. I wanted to be able to say I did something positive with my life. So I’m went to Morgan State University, and when I went to Morgan State University, that’s what really got me into politics.
I had never met a politician till I went to Baltimore. I didn’t know what a politician was. No politicians ever knocked on my block in my community. The first politician I ever met was an African American in Baltimore. His name was (Merrick Hurt Smoke), and he was doing mixed income housing. That means he was tearing down projects and creating mixed income housing, some low income, some home owners. And when he first said it, I said, “man, you committing genocide.” Where all the poor people gonna go when you get rid of the projects? But he said something that really made me get into community development, that led me into politics, he said.
“Listen, I’m tired of my young kids walking out their homes and seeing abandoned buildings, drug addicts, crack addicts, drug dealers, gang bangers hanging outside.” He said “that’s not the life that they should see.” He said “they should be able to come out and see people going to work and being productive, dressing up to go to work, dressing up to go to school. And the only way that you can do that is if you change the community. So we’re not getting rid of poor people. We will bring everybody back,” he said. “But I will replace the ones that don’t want a better quality of life, because if I allow them to become a cancer in this community, then we’ll have some of the same gang bangin drug activity that we had before,” he said. “My job is to show the kids a better way and a brighter future, so I will build the right type of mix of housing that’s necessary to give them a new outlook on life.” I think that when you look at the Housing Authority and with the work that they’re doing, you have the federal government that’s called HUD, Housing and Urban Development. They own a lot of the land in this community, particularly in Larimer, and they own the three high rise buildings’ land. So when you see some of the developments that they helped create to reduce the density of poverty in the community, give people new homes, particularly in Garfield, East Liberty, and now in Larimer, I think that has been a benefit to us.
You see the transformation in East Liberty, you got new stores now. You got Target, Home Depot, Whole Foods, and Larimer’s now getting ready to be redeveloped, and Homewood is next. I think one of the positive ways the community has changed is that we have more opportunity in regards of employment inside the neighborhood cause we have more commercial development. Education was my way out and I tell my daughter all the time. “You can marry this thing called the streets and birth a lifetime of problems that you will spend your whole life trying to overcome. Or you can marry education and birth a lifetime of opportunity that you can spend your whole life enjoying.” So when young kids come to my office, I don’t care where you from, cause at the end of the day, I’m from all those communities. So what can you tell me about those communities I don’t know? But if you tell me where you want to go in life, I can help you get there. I’m not real interested in where you come from. I’m more interested in where you want to go and how education and network will get you there.
Whenever you cut education, you cut future, and when I look at how much the state spends per pupil on education, we spend like 14,000 per pupil. We spend 34,000 per inmate. I think that’s a backwards equation. Incarceration should never get funded more than education. Education gotta be the primary budget that you never cut, that you continue to find ways to fund because the more we educate our kids, the more we change the world and there’s no question about that.
My future goals: be the best state representative I can be. To leave this position better than where it was when I received it. Fight for education, so more money goes to education and not incarceration. Community development where we’re building new homes and new houses and we don’t have whole communities that’s ran by poverty. But we have mixed income communities so that the children can see something different, and grow up in communities where they don’t have to see abandoned homes everywhere, but they see families going back and forth to work. To make sure that my children are OK. That’s my future goals.