i lived the tale of two cities.

Before I ask you for anything, I need you to know who I am.

I was raised in the 79th district. My grandmother's house. The same house in which my mother was raised. That is where this story starts.

We moved when I was seven. And from there, things got hard in ways I don't need to explain to most of the people in this district, because many of you lived through a version of it too.

I bounced between schools. Irving Elementary. Dunbar. Jefferson. Garfield. Through the desegregation program, I attended Truman Elementary, Crestview Middle, and Lafayette Senior High in Rockwood. Every morning I left North City, and every night I came back. I lived on Pleasant, on Hebert, on Iowa. I stayed in shelters. I stayed in alleys. I lived in the homeless shelter on Park Avenue. I worked out of NexCore in Fox Park.

But I never stopped coming home. This district raised me. The 11th Ward raised me. It caught me every time I fell.

By the time I was ten or eleven, I was sitting in a juvenile courtroom. A judge looked down at me and asked a question no child should ever have to answer: “ Did I want to go back to my mother or not. I said no. And I went home to my grandmother. Back to the 79th ward. Back to the house my mother was raised in.

What I haven't said on a stage before is what came before that courtroom.

My mother has paranoid schizophrenia. She loved me. She still does. She never stopped loving me. But her illness took her somewhere I couldn't follow. There were moments where I had to fight for both of our lives using nothing but my mind and whatever God placed in me before the age of twelve.

My first trial was not in a courtroom. My first trial was held in the court of a filthy one-bedroom apartment. I was a child. She was an adult. We were both victims… I won.

I have been winning against insurmountable odds ever since.

I have always been the outlier. The angle that was unaccounted for. The perspective that didn’t exist in the room until I walked in, and it didn’t leave the room even after I left.

That is what we need now more than ever.
A Leader with vast lived experiences, not a politician with a research team.

I won because I understood her well enough to reach her. I found the one thread still connected to reason, and I pulled it.

I respect every credential in this race. I do. But there is not a law degree in the world that teaches you what I learned before the age of twelve. That is not arrogance. That is testimony.

I was saved by the Krumsiegs, the Huntspuns, the Gills, the Mains. Black and white families who chose each other on the same block. Coaches at Lafayette who bought my first pair of cleats. Teachers who refused to hand me excuses. A grandmother who took me in and refused to let me fall.

I returned from college and spent over a decade building quietly. ConsciousFest. Harambee Youth Training. I built community infrastructure without asking for recognition because the work was the point. That was intentional. That was also a season.

That season ended the morning my son walked in wearing his favorite superhero costume and something settled in me that I can only explain as God. How I show up right now will determine whether I have ever earned the right to be his hero. I don't have a costume. But he carries my name. And this community carries burdens that deserve someone in Jefferson City who knows exactly how heavy they are.

I am a husband, a father, a small-business founder, a proud member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, and a lifelong resident of North City, St. Louis. I know how to build things. I know how to fight. And I know that the north side of this city has not failed. It has been systematically failed. By disinvestment. By decisions made in rooms without any of us in them.

I intend to be in the room.

Family is the foundation. Community is the load-bearing wall. Government is the roof. Get that order wrong and everything collapses.

I know the order. I lived the collapse. I will not let it happen to my son's generation the way it happened to mine.