Sometimes your gift takes you to a place that your character is not prepared to handle.
My kids want to go back to Detroit everyday, that's their home. They want to be there. But Detroit is going through something that I don't want to be a part of.
Personality is a person among persons. There is no personality of one man on a desert island.
I was building the plane while flying it in the first term.
I heard somebody say that you can't judge a tree by the bark it wears but by the fruit it bears.
This is the United States of America and unfortunately, race still matters to a lot of people. The evil head of racism doesn't hide, it sticks its head up.
Michigan is very racially separated and the city of Detroit itself is 84 percent African-American and the surrounding suburbs are 86 percent White.
As a matter of fact since Barack Obama has been president it is more overt - I believe - than it's been since the 1940's and 50's and so I am not surprised by it. I think it's an excellent teaching tool, particular for my sons and our people to understand that we still have to build within our community. We still have to work with one another. We still have to connect even with people outside of this country.
I can be the mayor; I can do it right now. I can go in there right now and put things together. I was truly anointed for that position and I wasn't mature enough in my spirit, in my manhood to handle that responsibility at the time it was given to me.
I was never fearful or scared. I knew God had me and my wife and children knew it as well so we just marched.
What I learned in politics (is that) it's a very enslaving place to be. It's hard to be free in politics and if the search for your spirit is to be free, it's hard.
I learned that you can go after things before you are ready and so if you are going after it, you need to make sure that your spirit is ready. I learned also how to surrender to His will and not mine. Sometimes when you are going through something - and I am a guy who runs campaigns - I can make this happen. There has never been a campaign where I was picked to win.. I was always coming from behind.
I don't think there has been any mayor in America scrutinized that way. I don't think there has been any mayor as a matter of fact, Coleman Young I think received an incredible amount of scrutiny and he was kind of the poster child for that in Detroit. He was the first Black mayor who really expressed his manhood in a different way than had been seen from African-American man that was projected across the country.
The job of being president, understanding the particular policies that America has gotten itself into over the past 400 years.
We do need brothers and sisters to go into elected offices and political offices and do that, but my spirit is telling me something different. Because you are a Democrat or Republican you have to do this but you can't do that and so it's somewhat limiting in what you can actually do and I've done that.
When you are going through something like compaign run nothing happens without Allah's permission. So a lot of the times you just have to surrender to his will and learning how to surrender was a major thing for me, getting me out of the way, surrendering to the will of God.
I've been mayor so I believe there is something else for me. I don't know what that is yet, but I definitely have a testimony now brother! As far as talking to young couples, talking to brothers who are strong, they have it going on, they know exactly what they want to do, how they want to do it but they don't have any God in their life. They don't really move by a spirit. They are not really connected to the community. There is a testimony in here somewhere that I think I can share but I don't know.
My dream in growing up in the city of Detroit was to be Mayor. At the family picnics from the time I was 9-years-old that's what I told people I was going to be. The mayor of the city of Detroit.
I didn't want to be president; I didn't want to be governor; I didn't want to be a congress person. I just wanted to be mayor of the city of Detroit. I lived there my entire life.
I know in the Christian church the old ladies use to say "what the devil meant for bad God meant for good." So some of the things that I think they went out and tried to be detrimental to my life saved me in a lot of ways.
I loved the city, so the feeling in 2001 [election] first was shock, then (I was) nervous, then scared but then it's - I really wasn't happy and ecstatic like I thought I (would be). I was immediately hit with the enormity of the responsibility and the fact that most people in that town - particularly those that voted for me were placing their hopes and dreams in me. That is a big, big stressful place to be.
What is happening in Detroit is not good so I don't even want to be a part of that, but there is something on the other side that I may want to be a part of so I don't know yet.
There were never a lot of attacks on my work. We were building more parks than were ever built in the city, building more recreation centers, fixing more streets. We had national events, the Super Bowl, the (Major League Baseball) All-Star game, Final Four. We built seven hotels. The city hadn't built a hotel in 20 or more years.
Character issues such as drug abuse are not exclusive to Detroit Public Schools. My reference to substance abuse, not intended to focus on any particular school district, was simply used to illustrate this position.
