Family

My passion is my family

There is a Museum in the city where I live in Montgomery AL called The National Memorial for Peace and Justice created by Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative or EJI. In that Museum on 2 different Plaques there is a name, Virgil Swanson, my great grandfather. He was lynched by an angry mob of terrorist white men in a little town called Greenville Georgia on August 25th 1913, for a crime he did not commit. This is one of the things that drives me and motivates me to be great and live my life to the fullest, because my great grandfather literally died for his legacy to live on.

The way I found out about my great grandfather’s story, I was in the US Navy and I was getting a security clearance, so I could do my job and handle sensitive and classified material. So I was on my ship, the USS Shreveport, and the man who would approve my security clearance and others was on our ship down from Washington DC where he was stationed. He immediately told my senior chief that I passed the background check with flying colors and that I would not have to be interviewed like others. His only question was, “who is VIrgil Swanson to you?” and I said I have a brother by that name, and they said no, this person would have to be older than that, and that is when I told him that my brother was named after my great grandfather. That is when he said that is the person we are asking about, and that I could get as high a security clearance as I wanted. I asked my dad about his story the next time I came home on leave, and he explained in great detail how my great grandfather had made a way for all of the kids to get out of the house before the terrorists arrived, and killed up to 20 of them before he was hung from a tree.

Up until that point in my life I was huge on family, I loved my brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and everybody in between. I felt very humbled that even my family members who had passed away were still helping along my life journey by making a way for me to get the job I wanted in the Navy to work in communication. Family is the main reason why I chose that job, because me and my brothers had dreams of becoming like Master P and his brothers from New Orleans, LA and creating Alabama’s version of No limit Records. My goal was to learn how to create a radio station that would broadcast our music and others on our Record Label, Tuskegee AL’s Reality Records. My Radio Station would be called Hunter(my mother’s maiden name) Swanson(my last name) communications or HS Communications for short. The idea behind it was to fill the airways with all of the things that we were doing at the time, and sponsors would be our businesses. For example, I have a morning show with my brother Virgil, who was a truck driver at the time and tell all of his interesting and exciting stories from the road. Another hour of programming would be with my brother Shadeed, who was very much involved in the growing Atlanta hip hop music scene in the early 2000s, and he had a million stories to tell. Like the time young TI got into a fight at an event he was hosting in Lawrenceville Georgia at a record store he was partnering with called Jay’s Music. Another interesting story was that there was a member of the group Goodie mob that got in a car accident and lost his leg, and the night he got in the accident he was headed to an event at the same record store, but never made it. The most interesting portion of the radio station by far would be broadcasting from the home base in Tuskegee AL, where our Music studio and the maestro of the whole operation, my Youngest brother Amir resided. His content would be the ground level day to day operation of running our studio, “the hole in the wall studio”, our beat production company, “beating down sounds”(a play on words of one of Master P’s production teams). There would be music from our main group, that we initially called, the 334 boys(a direct copy of Master P and the 504 boyz from their area code), and like their group our core was us 3 brothers, Me, Shadeed, and Amir. We later changed the name of the group to the 46ers to identify with our county in Alabama, and the tags there showed that as the first 2 numbers on all the cars that bought tags there. Amir had branched off and became something of a local legend back home while I was off in the navy traveling the world, and freshly overseas right after 9/11 as one of the first ships to go to Afghanistan. Around that same time Amir had just figured out how to work the $10,000 in studio equipment my dad bought us to help set everything up. So when I came home from our deployment that went from september 19th 2001-April 19th 2002, I went straight to the studio to complete our mixtape, the 46ers. When that was complete, we started passing them out in the places where we were at the time, Amir in Tuskegee, Shadeed in Atlanta, and me in Norfolk VA. The next time I came home in late 2002 Amir was something like a local rock star. He took me to a basketball game between Booker T. Washington high school in Tuskegee against our Rivals Bullock County, and before I go into what happened at the game, you need a little back story. Amir and some of his friends had made a song called, “Die Slow”. He got the idea after attending one of the many mandatory HIV programs that we were required to go to if you attended high school in the late 90s and early 2000s on earth lol. He added a twist to it in order to turn it into a battle cry for our school against our rival school bullock county. In the song the main character, who narrates, has sex with a young lady from Bullock County and contracts what they called, “that die slow”(HIV), and with a catchy hook and a Dr. Dre level beat, pulling from his expert level of musical knowledge from his time in the high band that was one of the best high schools bands in the country at the time, that was invited to the Macy’s day parade several times to perform. Walking into our high school arena that night it felt like that 2pac phrase, “all eyes me” or more accurately on us. I soon realized why, because at every stoppage of play on the basketball court, there was my brother’s song playing over the loudspeaker and the crowd going crazy, taunting the attendees from bullock county. I’m not going to lie, I was very proud of my younger brother for the traction he had generated, because due to his connection with the band, they also started playing the song as well, during their halftime performances at football games, especially when they played our rival school, bullock county.

I will never forget the day, I was at a hooters in Norfolk with some of my navy buddies that I was attending this school with to learn more about a particular type of phones that we used on the ship, and I got a call from my brother Amir. He tells me to stop everything I'm doing. He has a song he wants to play me over the phone. I step outside and he plays me a song from a poor, and I mean poorly produced song from a young man from Bullock county with a song called, West Nile, and apparently he was recording a response to “die slow” and saying that girls in Tuskegee give you the West NIle virus somehow, it was weird. Amir prompted gathered his gang of local talent, and recorded a response he called, “die fast”, because this time instead of the HIV virus being the slow killer, they were a little more direct and asserted that we, the Booker T. Washington Golden Eagles would be the ones to crush our rivals Bullock County, and the West Nile guy was never heard from again.

It was an amazing time to be alive and I think would have made for a great story to tell over the airways, this was before podcasts, but it would have made a perfect one. In the meantime I'm moving up the ranks in the Navy, and I'm now running the communications department on the ship. I'm responsible for over 100+ different voice, data, and satellite networks that have to be fully functional at all times. The Navy had a program that when they got rid of equipment they would auction it off to the local community, and in a perfect world I would buy all of the equipment I needed to get our radio station up and running. When I got sponsors for all of the radio stations, I would employ my whole family. My parents are in their late 70s and early 80s, so all they would be able to do was tell stories about back in the day. My brother Amir who is now a manager at a water authority in Tuskegee, I would definitely need his manager skills and put them to good use managing the station. My sister Najeebah is a wizard with administrative skills that you wouldn't believe, who was the director of the Lee county boys and girls club for like 10 years, she would be my head of HR. Her daughter, my niece Naimah would be my creative director, she is currently going to Troy State University in Troy Alabama to get her degree in graphic design. My brothers Shadeed and Jack and his two sons Omar and Muhammad would be hired to build the new structures for the company down on our 16 acres in Tuskegee AL down on Hunter Street, named after my maternal grandfather William Robert Hunter. My Brother Shadeed and my Nephew Yowseph Ziyad would be the musical talent, their performance names are POetic and Aether Solaris and can be found on all streaming platforms. My sister Asabi Hunter would be responsible for health and wellness. Her daughter Rahma would be responsible for creating a daycare facility for employees that is what her degree from Auburn University is in. The rest of their bunch Adam, Jaami, Tiye, Elijah etc.would fall under one of their mom's or sister's departments. My Brother Virgil who has a body shop and a lawn care service on our land in Tuskegee already would maintain the grounds and head up vehicles. Positions that aren't filled by family members I would reach out to my Navy Bros. My buddy J, would be in charge of website and app development. Aaron would be working in whatever role he wanted, that's my ace. Rick would be making sure we follow all of the rules when it comes to frequencies, the only one I know still working in the field and who trained me when I first got to the boat all those years ago. Obviously I would play the role of Owner, founder, CEO and would be working on a 5 to 10 year plan for the company to go public. The IPO would be a way for all of my family and friends, even the ones not working for the company to invest in the company and when it goes public to secure enough passive income to create our own destiny in this life. We would have statues, surrounding and watching over our facilities of Virgil Swanson, my paternal great grandfather and William Robert Hunter, my maternal grandfather, they would ensure that even after we all retire, pass on, and pass our shares down to our kids and their kids etc., that someone from the Hunter line and the Swanson line would forever be there as the guiding lights and more importantly to make our ancestors proud, that they didn't die in vain and as long as HS Communications lived on, so would they.