Cathy Hughes Shines at Inaugural Her Legacy Event in Durham

Enough. I am Kathy Hughes and I am happy to be here. The Triangle is my favorite area in the whole wide world and if Alfred had not been such a dominant voice in my ear, I would have moved here.

Oh, yes.

I keep saying that if I ever remarry, he's got to be from North Carolina. And I just learned the other day he needs to drive a red pickup truck. Ooh.

Not that she does not stop looking. Okay. Because North Carolina men are the best.

And Miss, you know they know how to cook, too.

Exactly. Okay. He better get it together. Okay. Yeah. Thank you.

I've never looked at it like that. I get asked frequently about success and other terms that I'm very uncomfortable with. I'm a work in progress. I feel that God uses me and I feel that my blessings have been based on my obedience to hearing God. I say to young people all the time, God never stops sending out messages. He never stops communicating. Our problem is sometimes our receiver is turned off. We've got to learn to turn our receiver on so that we will know what it is that God wants us to do. Older folks call it your gut reaction, intuition. There are a lot of descriptions. It's the voice of God.

We are.

Okay, number one, I come from a long line of freedom fighters. Ancestry.com did a project with us. As you two probably are well aware, 17 years ago my grandfather founded a boarding school in Piney Woods, Mississippi. I have 150 kids all of whom are on some form of scholarship. We've been in operation 117 years. So they pitched Ancestry.com to do me and Ancestry.com is a Black History Month project. They said, 'Well, she's a little older than what we had hoped for. We want a 40-year-old, a 51, a 50-year-old, and a 60-year-old.' I was 71. So they were like, 'Oh, well,' and my staff was so insistent and kept saying to them, 'Check her out.' They're thinking that they're pushing for getting some exposure for the boarding school. And what we discovered required a lot of people do not know that Ancestry.com is a Mormon Salt Lake City, Utah-based company. All right. Exactly. Very thorough. So all of a sudden the private plane is coming and the head of research is coming and we're like, 'Okay, why is okay?' and they're like, 'Oh my god, we can't believe this.' Turns out, short story version, my great-great-grandmother was a slave. She was half Cherokee and half African. And she had 11 children in Louisville, Kentucky. And she was the slave her whole family to a gentleman who had six sons and one daughter. And the daughter was the apple of his eye. And so she inherited the plantation with the slaves. And the first thing she did was say slavery is against God and I can't have slaves. So my great-great-grandmother partnered with her and she brought all 11 of her children to freedom. Left because her six brothers declared her insane. A lot of people don't know the history. A lot of times when white women marry black men, the fathers, the husbands were able to declare them insane and they would be incarcerated. Okay. That's part of American history that they don't talk about, but they could have them locked up. So, they had her locked up. They said that she was crazy. She had lost her mind. Well, lucky for her, she was having an affair with the sheriff. So the sheriff put her and my great-great-grandmother and all 11 other children in jail to protect them from her brothers and only escorted her with police escort to court and she won. All right. So my grandmother sets out with her 11 enslaved children. Now she's married to again another part of history that they don't talk about is that all Africans were not enslaved. Many were brought over as skilled craftsmen. They did iron work. They did things that there were not skills available for the wealthy plantation owners. They settled them in the Midwest. So my great-great-grandmother and her 11 children get as far as Iowa en route to Canada and she gets robbed of the money that the white former slave owner had financed for her to get to Canada with her 11 children. Her husband who was not a slave, he was a freed man, refused to go with her. Say you and the kids are going to get killed. All right. So, she gets stuck in Iowa. Iowa has the best historical story of her. She becomes, so, Harriet Tubman now is running the Underground Railroad. She said, 'Who in the world is this black woman who's half Native American?' Which had a lot to do with her being able to maneuver like Harriet Tubman. Who is she? She got herself 12 people out of slavery. Okay, some of my parties ain't but eight, nine, 10 people. Okay. And so she looked her up and my great-great-grandmother became second in command to Harriet Tubman. They were able to find written documentation of letters. She became the opening act for Frederick Douglass. She and Frederick Douglass became best friends. They have all this documented. He wrote a poem to my grandmother that was published on the front page of the Frederick Douglass Journal. Most people know about the North Star. They don't know about the Frederick Douglass Journal. And because of her speaking engagement with him, she was able to save $2,500 with wanted posters out for her because the crazy six brothers are still trying to kill the sister and look for the slaves, okay? Because now they broke, okay? Because she got the plantation and the slaves. Let the slaves go. And so she goes back to Kentucky with $2,500 and purchases at $1,250 a piece. And again, Ancestry.com was able to find all the paperwork and everything. Two males, both of whom, two different plantations, both of whom had fathered a child with her daughter. She, two daughters had babies by two slaves and she refused to allow her grandchildren to be reared in slavery. So she went back and got their daddies because she refused to let her grandbabies' daddies be slaves and bought their freedom. That $1,250 back then was more important to the plantation owner than keeping the slaves. They took the $2,500 and sent those two brothers on to Iowa. Okay. Sent them on. The state of Iowa has such unbelievable information of my great-great-grandmother. So here a lot of the stories that we found out that we were told about my grandfather starting the Piney Woods School in Mississippi and being the first graduate of Iowa State University with a PhD. It was actually an EDD which was at that time a PhD in education. It was about him. They're like, 'Him. Charlotta Pals is who you need to be talking to.' Ancestry.com. Go to the library. Go to her history people and find out who Charlotta Pals is because she's Kathy Hughes's great-great-grandmother. So, it's very interesting that I now understand my fighting spirit. I now understand my commitment to my people. Okay. So here, you know, two generations later, my grandfather marries, okay, her granddaughter, okay, and starts this school. So we have been freedom fighters for a very long time. So I still consider myself a work in progress. I love telling that story because there's so much of the history of black women that have been distorted, been denied, been erased. I just said on Thursday night of this week that who would have thought that three black women are responsible for the entire United States space program. John Glenn never once mentioned not one of those three sisters. We had to wait for Hollywood to make a movie called Hidden Figures to find out. Okay. I said, 'Now, John Glenn might have had a problem with one of the sisters. She got an attitude.' One day he took it personally. So, he's like, 'I ain't telling nobody how brilliant you are.' Second sister comes along. She sides with the first her and John. How in the heck could he deny three black women who created the space program for the United States of America and got his butt all the way to the moon. And so, I kind of viewed what was happening with my great-great-grandmother's story the same way. And since I haven't been able to get enough money out of you radio folks to finance a movie, we got to do better. We have to do better. We got to work harder. Got to work harder. Okay. Got to get my number one salesperson back out on the street. Oh. Okay. Okay. I really feel an obligation not just to help with the education of black men and women, but also to the reason I started the company and I'm a publicly held corporation. As you know, I'm the first woman of color to chair a publicly held corporation. So I have to say this for the camera that my number one priority is the enhancement and advancement of stockholder investment. I am here to make stockholders some money. Now that's my professional side. My personal side is I'm here to give black America a voice and a picture that is accurate. There's an old African proverb that until the lion learns how to read and write, the story of the hunt will always favor the hunter. All right. Lions eat up a whole bunch of hunters. Okay. That story is never told because the lion does not have the ability to express what's really going on in the jungle. And I know how to read and write. So, I have assumed the responsibility for expressing both through pictures and voice through audio the true story of what's going on in black America.

That's my problem. And our special guest today, Kina, knows she has that problem. We're just shrinking violets. We're quiet and just drunk.

I was born this way. That's, I told you the history of my great-great-grandmother is in my DNA. I probably looked up at the doctor in the delivery room and said, 'What the hell took you so long? Get me out of here. I'm cold. I got stuff to do. Come on. Let's wrap this up. Let's wrap this up to get me out of the womb.' I love that. It's my personality. So, it's almost like we're all born and we know this, but we're all born with a calling and with a purpose. God predetermined two things. Number one, your expiration date, which I say is stamped on your butt. We just can't read it. Secondly, is your mission. God just didn't create you to breathe his air and drink his water. Okay. The two most plentiful things. He created you with a purpose. And again, because we have our receiver off, many of us go to our graves never knowing what our purpose is. Okay. And I heard Tina during her interview with you all saying that it took her till she was 70. I was blessed. I'm known. Okay. My mama put me in Catholic school and the nuns and priests used to regularly say, 'No to them. She suffered from delusions of grandeur. She won't close her mouth. She talks all during class.' I made a lot of money running my mouth. But they considered me delusional and my mother would counsel me that I needed to be better in class and more quiet and all of the rest. Okay. I'm being told that we got to terminate this and get on stage. Is that what that's?

Let me say this to you that it's really about you all. Like I said, it's about giving a voice and a vision that's accurate to the black community. I can't do that alone. We are a team. I'm the face of the brand. But the brand is unapologetically in the black people business. Whatever is good for us. What's good for business is what we are about. And that is my personal, okay, sidebar because as the chair of a publicly held corporation, I know that my duty and obligation is to enhance stockholder investment. Black culture is the culture.