The Gantt Report
If you’re Black and you live in a capitalist country like America like I do, you don’t have many problems that money can’t solve.
I really believe one day Lucius Gantt will have more money than Lucius can spend.
Before I tell you why, I want you to know a little about me because I’ll be writing fewer and fewer columns. The time I spend writing opinions that many people don’t agree with and even more people don’t read is time that I hope to spend doing something else.
If you ask some people “Do you know Lucius Gantt?” they may answer yes. If you say “Well, who is he?,” most will respond, “He is that crazy N-word that writes The Gantt Report.”
I write The Gantt Report but I am not The Gantt Report and many of the topics discussed in the column have nothing to do with me or my personal beliefs.
Anyway, I grew up in some of Atlanta’s toughest housing projects like Carver Homes and in neighborhoods like Fourth Ward, Kirkwood and Buttermilk Bottom.
I didn’t choose journalism. Journalism chose me.
After the Atlanta riots of 1968, Black Atlantans demanded more diversity in media. I got a job in the Production Department at WSB-TV, then ATL’s biggest and most prestigious station. Early on my job, I asked if I could write some promotional commercials and a coworker was so impressed he asked me why I wasn’t in college and I told him I had no plans to attend. My co-worker, a white news reporter named Jim Gilchrist (who was injured by rioters while covering disturbances) said, if he would fill out an application to go to Georgia State for me and if I was accepted would I go to college. I said yes. I was accepted and the rest is history.
My second year at GSU I was 19, had a wife and baby to take care of, took a full time course load at school and worked full time at the TV station.
In 3.5 years I graduated with enough credits for degrees in Journalism and in Philosophy.
Today’s media pros will never tell you, but I and a few others paved the way for their bootlicking behinds. I left ATL to work at AP in New York, Washington Post and National Public Radio in D.C. and The Atlanta Journal, before taking a job as News Director at a Florida radio station at age 24.
Now that’s enough about me. There is more but enough is enough. I am not just a guy who had to work in Black media. I do it because I want to.
From day one people hated me in Florida because they couldn’t “control” me. I was like a runaway media slave. I and my news staff won national awards (in competition with CBS, NBC and other major broadcast networks) not because we played the game, we won because we got the facts!
Today, the media chickens have come home to roost! The news anchors that you love have been exposed for lying on air and for making up news events.
I was fired from my Florida job more than a couple of times, but every time they did God put me in a better position that paid me better money.
When I left radio to start my own company, in a matter of months I had a variety of powerful clients and subsequently became one of the top earning Black lobbyists and political consultants in the country. I even trained many of the negro lobbyists you love today.
One day, while still lobbying, I was arrested and charged with trying to kill a police officer in Tallahassee. Before the devilish State Attorney could press charges, God sent the racist cops a message (a sign) and I walked right out the jail cell just like the three Jewish boys walked right out of the fiery furnace in the Biblical story.
In 2002, I was in a horrific car accident that caused me permanent and severe brain damage. People gave me up for dead and that is why I called my second book “Beast Too: Dead Man Writing”. I had no insurance so I lost all my money and everything else I had including my clients, my career, my strength, my voice and the woman who pretended to love me. When I was released from the hospital after months of therapy, I came home to a pretty much empty house.
People were telling me I would never work again. They said no one would hire me and I told them I would never want a job again. Now that wasn’t quite true.
It was just my way of saying I didn’t believe in the devil’s job or the devil’s ways. I believed in myself and I only feared God!
I wasn’t afraid to call devils devils in The Gantt Report. I wasn’t scared to stand up and speak on issues of interest to my people. I wouldn’t bow down to police brutalizers. I would never suck up to corrupt politicians.
As long as you continue to believe in modern-day slave masters more than you believe in God and yourself, you will never have any “real money”.
That rapper money is not big money. That trial lawyer money is not big money. Even that Oprah and Tiger Woods money is laughable to people who have enough billions in the bank to earn hundreds of million dollars a month in interest!
Sometimes to make big money you have to take big risks, you may have to take an undesirable chance, you may have to compromise, you may have to sacrifice.
Don’t take my word for it, ask your Babalow, your Preacher, your Imam , your Priest or whatever you claim to have. Sometimes God will lay you down in order to raise you up and God will put you out in order to bring you in!
After all I’ve been through and all I’ve lost I believe I will be blessed with more than I ever had before and nobody in my family or in my community had to die in order for me to get my reward!
Your wicked boss wants you scared that you might lose your job. You are better than Satan and Evilene. All you have to do is act like it!
All you haters, if you want to be scared of somebody why not be scared of a Lucius that has more money than you do and more than the TV Lucious on “Empire”?
Take the devil’s nipple out of your mouth and come help me make this money!
If you love God nothing can kill you. You will be protected!
Inspiring, thank you for sharing.