Every story has a beginning.
Mine has three.
The first one came easy.
I was born in St. Louis, at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, into a family that runs through Kinloch and across North St. Louis County.
And that’s where I learned how people actually live—not from anything written down somewhere, but from being there.
Watching people move through things, how they look at each other, how they look out for each other. Watching how they step in for others when nothing else does.
Kinloch, North County, and the city were never the same entity to me.
They were entirely different worlds.
Each carries its own conditions, its own pressures, its own history. But moving between them, you start to understand how those differences are connected—how decisions made in one place show up in another, and how people end up navigating the results either way.
That was the foundation.
I didn’t have to go far to find it.
The second beginning didn’t arrive gently.
It came with the Ferguson unrest.
Before that, I had been reading—seriously reading—Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse —working through ideas, arguments, histories. I could make sense of all of it on the page.
Ferguson made it make sense in a way it hadn’t before.
In that moment, I saw how far reality could stand from the ideals I had been studying.
At the same time, I understood in a new light how necessary it is to carry those ideas into practice—to defend them, to fight for them, to stand on principles of freedom and the liberation of all people when it actually matters.
Ferguson changed everything for me.
I carried that spirit with me into my time at St. Louis Community College, and I wasn’t willing to leave it abstract.
I served first as student body vice president, then student body president at the Meramec campus.
I founded the Student Social Action Committee, and we fought—directly—for higher education, for labor rights, for union rights for adjunct faculty.
We fought against the firing of full-time faculty.
We fought against the deactivation of the computer science program, which was predominantly Black and female and unlike anything else in the state.
We fought to protect DACA students and Dreamers.
We were only a few dozen students, but we organized around real issues.
We stood alongside faculty and staff, working in alignment with the AFL-CIO and National Education Association chapters connected to the college.
We worked closely with SEIU Local 1 as they supported adjunct faculty organizing efforts at the time.
And that work didn’t stay on campus.
We stood with the community in opposition to the Bach Avenue dispute, raising environmental concerns alongside residents who were being asked to live with the consequences.
We marched with Bruce Franks Jr. and others in defense of residents at the Peabody-Clinton Complex.
We stood with Larry Rice and Momma Cat during the crisis surrounding the New Life Evangelistic Center downtown.
That period taught me something I’ve never unlearned:
nothing moves in this world unless you move it.
The third beginning came quieter, but it stayed.
By then I was working in masonry, learning restoration across the city.
I spent so much time with old structures in St. Louis, but I learned their habits—where they hold and where they give and where something small left alone becomes something serious.
You begin to see that failure doesn’t happen all at once.
It builds, slowly, until it forces attention.
At the same time, I fell deeply into the arts and music scene in St. Louis.
Not casually—fully involved.
I supported, promoted, managed, and invested in artists and collectives across hip hop, R&B, jazz, blues, and the high-speed sound the city is known for.
That work forces you to build something from the ground up and keep it moving without guarantees.
Somewhere in the middle of that, I found something I wasn’t expecting.
I fell in love—with the work, with the city in a different way, and with a person who became steady in the middle of everything else.
That part of my life is still unfolding, but it matters just the same.
And through all of it, I continued direct advocacy for the unhoused across St. Louis.
Working with people trying to navigate housing, services, and systems that don’t always connect the way they should.
After a while, you start to recognize the repetition.
Different people, same barriers.
Different situations, same outcomes.
I’ve seen St. Louis fail people directly.
Not in theory—in real time.
And if I’m honest, the final push came with the tornado recovery.
Working as a mason during that period, I saw entire neighborhoods trying to hold themselves together while people waited for answers, resources, insurance responses, inspections, basic coordination—things that should have moved faster than they did.
I saw how much of recovery in St. Louis still depends on ordinary people stepping in for each other while systems struggle to respond.
Being that close to it made something clear to me:
representation cannot just be symbolic.
It has to function in real time, especially when people need it most.
That’s why I’m running for Congress.
Because what’s happening here goes beyond disagreement or delay. There’s a breakdown in representation that people feel when they try to get help and nothing moves. I’m not running to step into that and maintain it. I’m running because I understand the work that needs to be done, and I’ve been close enough to it to see where it breaks.