Urban Empowerment Today

0:00The following commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of the staff and management of WBCA or the Boston neighborhood network. If you would like to express another opinion, you can address your comments to Boston neighborhood network, 3025 Washington Street, Boston Massachusetts, 02119. To arrange a time for your own commentary, you can call WBCA at 617-708-3215 or email radio at bnnmedia.org. You've tuned in to Urban Empowerment today. The show where stories of resilience, struggle, and triumph echo across our airwaves. I'm your host, Deborah Sharif, and this is more than radio. It's a movement from the streets to the classrooms, from the elders to the rising youth, our voices matter. Together we lift each other higher and rewrite the narrative of our time.

1:05Stay with us. The conversation starts now. Good evening, Boston. You are tuned in to Urban Empowerment today right here on WBCA 102.9 FM Boston. I'm your host, Deborah Sharif, and this is a show that exists for this community, about this community. And today we have a conversation that this community absolutely needs to hear. My guest today grew up here in Massachusetts in Roxbury, where her family has lived for seven generations. She graduated from your mass Boston and Northeastern University School of Law. She became a criminal defense attorney. She served a federal prison sentence. And instead of walking away from the fight, she walked straight into it, deeper, stronger, and more determined than ever.

2:07She founded Families for Justice as healing. She founded the National Council for Incoscerated and Formally Incoscerated Women and Girls. She hosts the Free Her Podcast. I can't wait to hear that, Andrea. As she wrote a book, she has earned the Sorrows Justice Fellowship, the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, and Justice Year. Congratulations, by the way. The Massachusetts Black Women Attorneys Justice Geraldine Hines Public Service Award. And now she is running for the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as an independent candidate. No corporate pack money, a people-powered campaign built on lived experience, her message, a Commonwealth that works for all of us. Boston, please welcome Andrea C. James to Urban Empowerment today.

3:09Thank you. You welcome. Welcome, Andrea. Now, before our questions, I want our listeners to know who you are in your own words, because your story is one that goes far deeper than any introduction that I can give. You are a Roxbury girl. Yes. Okay. Very proud of that. Yes. Seven generations deep. Yes. My goodness. In this Commonwealth, you are a mother of five. You are a widow. Yes. You became an attorney. You experienced incarceration, and you built a movement from that experience in your own words. Who is Andrea? James. Well, thank you, Deborah. You've covered a lot of it. I am from here, from Roxbury. I'm very, very proud of that. We've lived in the same home. We've been in the Commonwealth for seven generations. We've lived in the same home for five generations that we still live in, that I raised my children in, that I was raised in them.

4:10My mother was raised in. My grandparents lived in. My grandmother, Corinne Allene, broke the color barrier for black nurses at Boston City Hospital during a time when they were bringing nurses down from Canada before they were low black women to work as nurses in the city of Boston. And so lots of firsts in my family of people that were all born and raised here in Roxbury. And I'm really very, very, very proud of that. I am someone who went to UMass Boston, proud of that. It was such a beautiful experience for me. I had my first daughter. I was pretty young. When I had my first daughter, I was 19 years old, and to be able to attend a college, like the University of Massachusetts, where I was just surrounded by professors. Like yourself, who teach at state schools that looked like me, that had their children on their backs and their backpacks, that, you know, I was the president of the Black Student Center, the co-chair of the Women's Center.

5:20I really became much more politicized, even more, having always been a community organizer. I grew up with educator activist parents, Matthew and Dolores Good. And I didn't know that. My goodness. Yeah. Your parents were activists. Oh, yes. And organizers in the community and fought for the education of Black children. They fought for our environment, for to get, you know, clean, clean communities, get the buses moved out, cross the mortgared park as an environmentalist. My dad did a lot. Fought for Franklin Pock, which he would be turning over right now. He passed away at 91 recently in mom at 90. But, you know, that fight over- You were blessed to have your parents that long and true. Yeah. And so my, what led me today to run had a lot to do with my entire alchemy of my life experience. Not just, you know, I came out swinging when I came out of incarceration because I saw up close in personal what I had always known.

6:25We happened to live in the most incarcerated corridor in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, you know, from Blue Hill Avenue over here to Warren Street and straight up the Blue Hill Avenue corridor to the housing developments. And so knowing these things and having already been a community organizer working for the benefit of our community. And for people working people, under employed people, marginalized people across, you know, the Commonwealth, that was something that I was raised to do. Having the experience of becoming a criminal defense attorney, which is what I've always wanted to do. And practicing in the courts and defending people and being a bar advocate, meaning, you know, I wasn't paid by those people I showed up and I defended people and gave them the most jealous representation that I could. I eventually became a, in addition to my criminal defense practice, I was recruited to do closings as a real estate conveyance lawyer.

7:28And at first, it was great because I was like, oh, my God, this is such a great way. It's lucrative. And, you know, I was proud that I had been selected as this black woman attorney who had a law office in Roxbury that I was so proud of to, you know, get into this niche industry of closing work. And then very soon began to realize that this industry was predatory. We didn't know those terms at the time. I didn't use the term predatory lending at the time. I didn't know anything about that. And I began, as the more that I got trained in that, I did more, had more understanding of that and that our community was being shuttered by banks. Because of predatory lending and families homes like my own that have been in our home families for generations, they were losing because they, they were trying to find a way out to create more income and access to resources for themselves.

8:34Financial resources, but ended up buying into these predatory lending practices, which caused too many of us to lose our homes. Speaking of that, when you mentioned about your criminal defense attorney, someone trained to fight for others in the courtroom, then you were incarcerated. What did those 24 months inside teach you that all of your years of legal training could not? Well, not only legal training, but growing up, as I said, in the most incarcerated community corridor and seeing most of my friends started going into the criminal law system early as children into the children and incarceration system, like up at Harvard Street that still existed to D.Y.S. and so forth. What it taught me firsthand, what very few people who are policy makers have had this experience, had they had the experience that I've had, they would do exactly the fight that I'm doing, because it's very different to govern or to make policy from a distance.

9:40You don't have the, never mind the empathy. Up front, close and direct gives you the compassion that you need, the understanding that you need. My parents were researchers of people of African diaspora and they were educators and so they traveled with us throughout our lifetime to the Caribbean, anywhere Black folks were, to Africa. And I remember our trip to Senegal and to Gory Island. And I remember seeing the slave ships and how they pulled up to those caves and literally, you know, took people away. And the way that they stacked those ships, when I was in prison on a bunk, on a top bunk and was able to overlook this sea of black and brown women, that's exactly what came to mind. What a metaphor. And so we were at the toe, head to toe, head to toe. And so I understood more acutely because of my privilege, I was privileged to have the education, to have had the life experience that I had that many of the women that were incarcerated in that federal prison with me did not have.

10:46So I came in there with an understanding acutely of what I was seeing, what I was experiencing, the inhumanity of it, the separation of mothers from their children, the incarceration for things that people should not have been incarcerated for, the lengths of sentences. I thought that as a criminal defense attorney, but I got to actually see that up close and personal. And I have to say, you know, my, my mistake that landed me on that prison bunk, you know, there's, there are regrets of course about that. It was a mistake that I made that has deeply affected my life. I have to say that that experience is something that I don't regret because I got to see up close and personal, the system that has been used in place of addressing poverty, the system that's been used in place of addressing the illness of addiction, the system that's been used to

11:55not approach reasonable ideas to address the housing crisis. All of these things that people who populate our state in federal prisons here in Massachusetts and across the country are in prison for trying to make a way, trying to deal with untreated trauma. It's almost like it's intentional how the system it plays out. It's almost like it's rigged, Andrea, from what you're saying, you know, you mentioned the analogy of looking at the slave ships when you were in Africa and how you saw the same thing. It was like, and you said, my goodness, how do I fight this? Because this is modern day slavery. Well, certainly it is disproportionately affecting, you know, black people and particularly look at our numbers in Massachusetts, African Americans make up 7% of the population. We make up 51% of the jail and prison incarceration population. We have a wealth gap of $8 to $200,000 that just goes on address. We have 1.7 million people in the Commonwealth predominantly black, brown and poor that don't vote because they don't feel like they count.

13:13Count their voice matters. They think that even if they do vote of the people that are able to get into office are not understanding of their needs and their issues. This is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, meaning of the people. And I think that the purpose for me running is about that. It's about restoring the priorities of the resources of the wealthiest state in the country. Back on to the people first and then everything else. We can do this. We can do it in the Commonwealth. We need transparency. One, we have one of the least transparent government structures in the country. We just don't know what's happening on the gubernatorial level. We are very unclear about, you know, whether it's from bond revenue to, you know, finding money to pay for all these things that we're told when it comes to the issues on our platform such as housing and child care and universal health care.

14:21Well, that's when the question comes up, how are we going to pay for these things? Well, how are we going to pay for a $360 million women's prison? How are we going to pay for it? How do we give so easily $47 million over to an open AI company? How do we now develop resources and investment in data centers that will put a significant drain and cause our energy costs to raise? So, you know, that's what I mean about transparency and priority. And one thing you can say what you want to say about me for having made a mistake that landed me more than 20 years ago on a prison bunk. And it's unfortunate if that's all you want to look at in terms of the value that I can bring to that office. And the education, but most importantly, the life experience that really is required to put the focus back on the people.

15:29Because when you have people who don't have an alchemy of life experience, who never have had to really struggle, who never really understand what it's like for everyday working unemployed, under employed, marginalized people right now, who are in a 70% of their paycheck goes to rent, if they even have a place to live, and another 30% goes to childcare, what is left? And so it's time. We know what we're going to get from millionaires who continue to run and get to sit in that seat. This current governor has demonstrated to us, it's not her first time, she's shown us, she doesn't support rent stabilization, she supports ICE. She supports ICE. Yeah, well, she's kind of changed, she came out saying she supports ICE and then she changed when the political wind was blowing so hard against that concept.

16:29You know, we've got to protect our communities, we have to protect the due process, everyone deserves due process. And so you just can't have masked people running rogue with guns, the fallout of that is very frightening because there's a nefarious element underneath the really bad already, already bad ICE. That Trump has created and we don't know what that fallout is yet going to be because we've allowed too much of these people who don't identify themselves, who could be anybody, who could be involved in human trafficking. There's so many other elements to ICE just not being put out of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, we should not be contracting with them, we do, with the only blue state in the country that does. So these are things that we have to significantly challenge. Andrew, I want to go back to the fact of millions of dollars that are being allocated to the women's prison, millions of dollars, and you're in opposition of that.

17:39Tell me what you would do with that money. Well, you know, we've, you know, this is the work that I've done for 15 years about finding, you know, what we call what different looks like. And so the governor is proposing $360 million to build a new women's prison. And to us, that's just fiscally irresponsible and nonsensical. Massachusetts has the very first women's prison in the country, 150 years ago, MCI framing him, the women's state prison opened. And if you're going to tell me for after 150 years, for one of the lowest incarceration populations in the country, that breakdown of $360 million would afford those women incarcerated, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars per woman and their children to figure out what different looks like. The other issue around this is that our incarceration population here in Massachusetts, men and women, the majority of those people are elderly. They're over the age. And so they have been in prison for too long.

18:44The cost of incarcerating elderly people and the needs that they have, who have dementia, who have illness, who have terminal illness, some are dealing with all kinds of things, cancers and diabetes is astronomical. They can be, there are tears that right away immediately as a solution, we can begin to release people and to build and move that money into the communities that are most directly affected by incarceration. It's not rocket science. If you look at who makes up the prison population in Massachusetts, people come pretty much from the same five towns, from the same five cities, from the same five areas. Decade after decade after decade. So as a black woman who does happen to just have as one of my life experiences, being a formerly incarcerated woman, who also lives in the most incarcerated corridor, which happens to be a black community, black and brown community. And when you say to me, and the women around me in our communities, in these cities, where most directly affected that you plan on spending $360 million to build a new women's prison.

19:54We say absolutely no. You're talking about telling me, I have two amazing young grandbaby girls. I'm not going to allow that when we have worked for more than a decade on what different looks like. So what would you have the governor or as governor James, what would you allocate that money for? The projects, first of all, we have to enact as a commonwealth, we have to bring back the people's assembly process. And so that's something that we don't do. We have fought for this, the city of Boston has done some of this, reclaim Roxbury has done this work and in a good deal. But we have to do it statewide. Most of the communities don't even know who the governor is. I've been crisscrossing the state since last summer. And most of the communities that do not vote do not feel they have a voice is because they don't know who the people are who are representing them. They couldn't even tell us who is our governor.

21:02We have to change that number one. Number two, we have to sit down with these issues. And we have to open it up for a community dialogue. And yeah, the more people it gets more difficult to do that, but we have these phenomenal models that we've worked with for years of a people's assembly process to really get to, it helps us to not just take for granted that this governor knows it's best to address the issue of women in incarceration is to build a new women's prison. Well, if you really were an expert and understood that issue, you would actually look at the lives of the women that are populating that prison, what their struggles are. And I always say if you look at the life of a woman on a prison bunk, all the issues on our platform address the real underlying causes of that, that's housing, that's health care. You know, that's so that money. So you're saying that money should really go into a prevention. Absolutely. It should go into prevention. It should go into so many of the resources that don't exist, even in our own community of Roxbury, there's only one family services.

22:09You know, we need in the crisis that we're in right now with the rank and file people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, we need solutions that saturate communities. We can invest billions of dollars into, you know, the biotech industry and AI and all of these other things. We need that same infusion in capital, in communities where there are working class families. Exactly. And I want to ask you this question. Your platform calls for universal free child care and health care for all. These are big commitments. Listeners are going to ask, how do you pay for it? Can you walk us through your thinking? Well, I think I would direct. There's a group here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I mean, 70% plus of voters in Massachusetts want universal health care. They want free health care. And I've had the privilege over the years of doing my work of traveling to countries all over the globe.

23:12And they have universal health care. They have free education. So we know it can be done. But here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, there's an organization, Mass Care, who is moving a bill for universal health care. And they have really nailed down how it needs to be paid for. We have to understand that there is a trust that would administer this system, that there would be an opportunity then that would allow us to negotiate for lower prices, to reduce administrative cost. And it would be afforded through this trust, but also there would be a taxation. People making under $500,000 a year would benefit dramatically from free health care. And people who are wealthy, people who are need to pay their fair share. It could, you know, mean that it would have to expand some of the tax on the very wealthy people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

24:17But that's okay. They need to pay their fair share. They sure do. And I just want to, because I know I don't want to get, I want to get these questions out. Andrew before our time is up. But affordable housing, this affects, I mean, when I came back from Nevada and was looking for housing, I could not find any. So my question to you affordable housing and a living wage are the center of your platform right here in Boston. People are being pushed out of their neighborhoods where their families have lived for generations. What concrete steps would a James administration take to stabilize communities and put real money and working people's pockets? Well, one for housing, housing has become this investment tool. Housing has become this lucrative opportunity for developers and for housing real estate, private real estate companies to invest in housing.

25:18If you just look around our community in Roxbury, several of the houses that used to be like my family home, raising generations are now owned by private real estate companies. And so we need to saturate the housing market with rent stabilized units. Because what it does is, first of all, housing is a human right. We are human beings. We need housing. Our children need safe housing. And we need affordable housing. And so to do that, we need to saturate the housing market with affordable housing. We need to build housing that is publicly owned, that is mixed income. We need to do these things so that we take the edge out of just these cash, wealthy buyers and private realtors from buying up the housing stock. They come in with a bag of money and buy the houses out from underneath the families. And then they manipulate it. They buy it and then they blame it on something else so that they can double the taxes.

26:21I mean, the rents as soon as they buy the house. So we need to saturate the market with rental properties that are rent stabilized so that it takes that edge off of those of making housing a commodity just to make money. And state lands, yeah, we got to build housing and the current administration is talking about that, but they're doing it by giving it to developers. As long as developers are left to do this, they're going to do it for a profit. Absolutely. I just have one question because we have like a minute left. I hate this. Your campaign, which is really interesting, calls for itself, people powered. The phrase gets used a lot in politics. What does it actually mean in practice? What would a people-powered government under a governor James look like from day one? Yeah, it looks like a people's assembly process. It looks like people who making sure that we don't just sit back and allow 1.7 million people who have expressed to us that they don't think anybody cares about them.

27:23It would be inclusion. It would mean transparency. It means making sure that we audit the legislature that we know when the governor releases bonds for bond revenue that we know where that money is going. What's being raised? What's going on with the gambling proceeds? What's going on with the cannabis proceeds? What's going on with the money that the state has? And what are the priorities that aren't contributing to creating change for the people, the working people, the unemployed, the everyday people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? Transparency, transparency, transparency. That's what a James administration would look like and inclusion. I love it. I love it. Andrea James, you are extraordinary. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for bringing this fight, this vision, and this truth right here at WBCA to our community. Thank you. You are welcome. Folks, you've been listening to Urban Empowerment today right here on WBCA 102.9 FM Boston. I'm Deborah Sharif.

28:30Our guest was Andrea C. James, attorney, author, organizer, Roxbury Native, an independent candidate for governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 2026. To learn more about Andrea and her campaign, visit ajformer a J F O R M A dot com. That's F that's a J F O R M A dot com. You can also find her, her organizations, families for justice as healing and the national council for incarcerated and formally incarcerated women and girls. And her book. I wanted to get into that opera bunkies. I love it. You night. Wherever books are sold until next time Boston stay empowered, stay engaged and stay in the fight. The preceding commentary does not necessarily reflect the views of the staff and management of WBCA or the Boston neighborhood network.

29:31If you would like to express another opinion, you can address your comments to Boston neighborhood network 3025 Washington Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02119. To arrange a time for your own commentary, you can call WBCA at 617-708-3215 or email radio at bnnmedia.org.