Interview with James Brown from Your View Your Voice

Welcome to NFB Newsline Tennessee Presents, the show that keeps you informed on blindness issues, up to date on innovations, and brings you engaging stories from people like you. Now, on with the show.

Hi, everybody, and welcome to an NFB Newsline Tennessee Presents extra. We've recently started a zoom meeting. It's the first Monday of the month. It's called you'd View youw Voice. It's divided into several segments and one of the segments is a spotlight on one of our NFB Newsline subscribers. We definitely started this series out with a bang. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with James Brown, famous soul singer, great dancer, but, sorry, that's not our first spotlight guest, even though his name is James Brown and he definitely can sing. If you've ever heard this song, you.

Can live the life you want.

Yes, we know the truth.

Then you've heard our James Brown. James is the affiliate president of the National Federation of the Blind of Tennessee. Welcome, James, and thank you for joining me today.

Thank you very much for the invitation, Yvonne.

Around the nfb, it's not uncommon to hear the phrase NFB family. I believe Tennessee exemplifies this phrase. With that in mind, when you're not wearing your NFB hat, who is James Brown? What's something that you would like for people to know about you that they may not know?

Wow. Something that people don't know about me? Well, I would say, you know, over the past few years or so, I've had two granddaughters born and I have another grandbaby on the way. We're not sure what the gender is yet, but. And I'm going to let my guide dog out. My wife just got home and she wants to go meet Crystal. So zero, out of the room.

Hello, Z.

Well, yeah, I would say that I got grandkids and a lot of people who hear my voice or see me think I'm quite a bit younger than that. But I am 50 years old, so I do have some grandkids.

50 years old. So you're old enough now to play with the big kids, with your family, your job and what you do around the affiliate. You stay really busy, but you still have time for other advocacy efforts. So let us in on what you're doing on a local level.

Yeah, so I do a lot of local advocacy, too. Off and on for about the past, I would say, seven years now. And now I've got to let my dog back in, but I do a lot of local advocacy and I think that's one of the keys for Blind people in general, because it's just not about national advocacy, which our national office does in Baltimore. It's not just about state advocacy, but much of what we can do that will affect us the most is in our own cities. And so I have been the chair of the mayor's advisory committee for people with disabilities. I think I've done that total of around four years. I'm currently on an off cycle where I cannot be the chair, but I'm still on the committee, actually the chair of the transportation subcommittee. And so one of the things that I helped do here locally was advocate very strongly, came up with the idea that we should have on demand transportation here in Nashville. So currently here, you can take an Uber wherever you want to go in the city on weekdays for $5 a trip. So that's pretty amazing. And it should transfer to weekends as well here pretty soon. But, yeah, a lot of the advocacy you can do is very local, and it can affect you the most if you put some time into it. Yeah, but I still consider that part of sort of my NFB hat as well. But still, you can do a lot in your local community.

My favorite words of the NFB pledge are, participate actively. I always say, if you want a place at the table, you have to show up for dinner. So what's some advice you have for people who want to show up for dinner and want a place at the table?

Yeah, I would say the first step is probably to attend some city council meetings, maybe to schedule a meeting with your mayor or your, you know, assistant mayor, whatever that looks like in your town. And I would definitely recommend doing that, because when you start doing that, you can get up during public comment, you can say, hey, metro council, you know, you're doing a lot of stuff for young people. You're doing a lot of stuff for this group. But what can you do for the blindness community? Can you make sure that your recreational centers are accessible? That, you know, you get a talking peloton bike or you do this or that? It's like, for example, I worked with our metro recreational centers in our Metro parks to make sure that they get peloton bikes that are accessible to the blind. They have talking screens on them. And I was actually able to help them go around the current procurement system, which allowed them to take the lowest bid, et cetera, which limited what they could do. But I helped general services rewrite the procurement code language. And so if there is a product that's accessible to the blind, they can skip kind of the normal bidding process because the companies that offer, say, text to speech on a nice bike, there really are none. So Peloton is really the only one who can come in under that sort of scope. So you can do some different things. You just kind of have to be creative. But I would definitely recommend, you know, sitting down, talking to your local council member, going to Metro council meetings, going to the mayor's office, etc.

Now, I would like for you to let everybody know when and how you got involved with the NFB.

Oh, wow. So this was back in 2007. I won a national scholarship. And that's the quite a few scholarships that are given away by the NFB. But the NFB typically gives around $250,000, $300,000 a year away in collegiate scholarships. And so this particular year, I was in graduate school at Triveca. I was working full time. I was going to school on Saturdays full time. And I won a scholarship. So I went to Atlanta. They flew me out to Atlanta to this huge hotel. And I remember, you know, stopping at the airport, taking the subway to downtown Atlanta, and walking right over to the hotel that was really close. And my first thought when I saw, you know, two to 3,000 blind people in the same place really was that God didn't make 3,000 blind people to be in one spot. But I soon realized, after being mentored several days by blind role models who were on the scholarship committee, I realized pretty quickly, one night I went up to get some dinner at the bar and had a really busy day because they do keep you very busy as a scholarship winner. And there was something like a blind television producer to my right, a blind lawyer to my left, a blind scientist who worked on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico to the left of them. And I was at the point in my career where, you know, I really kind of limited myself as to what I thought I could do, especially in the Department of Transportation where I worked. And it inspired me to really do more and to sort of take the top off what I thought the limits were career. And so that was really a point to where I realized I got to figure out what these people have and, you know, been going ever since because I was in school full time and working full time. Really wasn't able to get involved until 2009. At that point, I went to Washington seminar, to our legislative sort of days on the Hill. That was great. And I've kind of been hooked ever since. So I've been been advocating ever since I think I became president of 2012. I won't give too much information. In case you've got another question planned.

For me, I do have more. But before we continue, I would like to share this blast from the past. Here's A clip from U.S. representative John Lewis at the 2007 NFB Convention in Atlanta, where he led a march of blind people. This is truly inspirational.

You have the courage, you have the ability. You have the capacity to get in the way. Get in the way and stay. You must continue to get in good trouble, necessary trouble, until we build a wall of equal opportunity for the blind.

I believe that together we can achieve great things. It begins with a dream. A dream manifested becomes a vision. What's your dream? What do you envision for the future of the blind of Tennessee?

I hope we can create a state. We can create an environment where blind people can really thrive. I think one of the ways we can do that is to transform the system of vocational rehabilitation that has failed so many people in our state. And I envision a state where there's satellite training centers in Memphis and Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga. Up, you know, in the tri cities areas, like day centers up there where people can go train. I envision a training center that's residential where people can go for six to nine months and get comprehensive training where people can fully get the skills they need to live the lives they want. I envision a state where we have a university who is actually feeding TVIs, actually feeding orientation and mobility instructors, along with a commission for the blind where blind people can actually control their own destiny and become employed and all those kinds of things. So that's. And I see a stroke where people can get technology and can get technology training. So, yeah, it's a dream and we'll see if we can make it happen. We're going to try here.

Recently, we've begun to attract younger NFB Tennessee members. Before we wrap this up, I would like for you to give some advice to our young and our new members.

I think, you know, the younger generation of blind people, as well as probably the newly blind kind of have. Have this idea that if something is not accessible, then they should just kind of boycott it. Like if, if they go into a college course and they find that something's not accessible in their class, I'm just not going to take that class. And I think we sort of pigeonholed ourselves a little bit in the fact that back in the olden days, if something was. Wasn't accessible, we would just get someone to make it accessible for us. Like we just rent some eyeballs for a few minutes and you know, we would get the school to provide, etc. And I think we've kind of limited ourselves to jobs, we've limited ourselves to education by not going back sometimes to the old fashioned way of just eyeballs to do some work for us. And so I would recommend if, if you have sort of had that philosophy of just boycotting accessible, just maybe try some ways of getting to that information.

Thank you for joining me for this extra. This was taken from our Zoom meeting that's called you'd View youw Voice. It's an interactive Zoom meeting where we discuss topics of interest, some technology, and of course, our Spotlight feature that you just heard. If you've enjoyed this and you enjoy the podcast, be sure to follow on your favorite podcast provider. And if you're catching this on YouTube, subscribe to the channel. If you would like more information on NFB Newsline or the podcast or the Zoom meeting, drop me a line at NFB Newsline [email protected] that's N F B N E W S L I N E T N at N f b t n.org thank you for joining me and I will see you next time.

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