5 Celebrity Videos That Will Inspire You

5 Celebrity Videos That Will Inspire You

Listening to the testimonies of highly-successful people can sometimes give you the boost you need to live out your own dreams. Be inspired and receive your blessing by watching the videos below.

1) Celebrity Stories of Faith: Lecrae

“God has called me to be way more than I could have ever imagined.”

Hip-hop artist Lecrae talks about how he initially wrote about money, cars and girls and stuff that mattered to him. However, a shift happened in his life when he began to see those material things as trivial without eternal value.


2) FAITH – Stephen Curry’s Motivational Speech .

“All you need to have is faith in God and undying passion for what you do or what you choose to do in this life…”

It’s a short video, but you’ll get a jolt of inspiration from his on-point advice on how to be successful. The video was shot after Curry won the 2014-15 NBA Most Valuable Player award.


3) Michelle Williams: A Story of Faith

“God’s Word is What Continues to Sustain Me and Keep Me.”

The Grammy-winning singer/songwriter and member of Destiny’s Child opens up about her life growing up and battling depression and suicidal thoughts until she dedicated her mornings to reading a Bible app.


4) Denzel Washington Motivational & Inspiring Commencement Speech

“Put God first in everything you do. Everything that I have is by the grace of God.”

Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington delivered the commencement speech at Dillard University, telling college graduates to put God first in everything they do.


5) Chance The Rapper Reads The Book Of Galatians On Instagram

“One thing I didn’t know about the Bible is that it’s not all narrative.”

It’s not so much that this video itself is particularly inspiring, but the fact that a rapper of Chance’s caliber is on video, reading Galatians IS inspiring.

400 years of black giving: From the days of slavery to the 2019 Morehouse graduation

400 years of black giving: From the days of slavery to the 2019 Morehouse graduation

Two of the top donors who made constructing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture possible were black.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh

Tyrone Freeman, IUPUI

When African American businessman Robert F. Smith declared during a Morehouse College commencement speech that he would pay off the student loan debt of the entire 2019 graduating class of about 400 young men from the historically black school, he provoked a frenzy. Footage of the jubilant graduates immediately went viral, with an outpouring of hot takes on what the news meant.

As a historian of philanthropy, here’s what caught my eye: Smith said that he was making this roughly US$40 million gift on behalf of eight generations of his family with American roots.

On top of paying tribute to his ancestors, I see this generous act as an extension of the underappreciated heritage of African American philanthropy that began soon after the first enslaved Africans disembarked in Virginia in 1619.

Robert F. Smith told the Morehouse College class of 2019 to applaud their own families and communities for helping them succeed.

Strong tradition

The West African people put into slavery brought cultures of giving and sharing with them across the Atlantic. In 1847, for example, enslaved Africans in Richmond, Virginia, donated money through their church to Ireland’s potato famine relief efforts. I believe that their ways of looking after others and pooling resources to survive forms the basis of giving by African Americans today.

And while Oprah Winfrey and basketball star LeBron James bring visibility to black philanthropy in unique ways, it’s important to realize that they contribute only a small share of the at least $11 billion African Americans give to charities each year.

Despite the toll that four centuries of slavery and discrimination have taken on black earnings, African Americans regardless of their economic status have long given generously of their money and time.

Black women

I have written extensively about the historical roles of black women as the creators, innovators and purveyors of African American philanthropy. In my forthcoming book about Madam C.J. Walker, the early 20th-century black entrepreneur philanthropist commonly known as the first American self-made female millionaire, I’ve documented this history through her gifts and those made by her peers – other black businesswomen and leaders of clubs.

Before Smith’s announcement, Winfrey had already donated at least $12 million to Morehouse, enabling more than 400 men to graduate debt-free. A $21 million gift to establish the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture made her its biggest donor – Smith’s own $20 million gift was also among the top three.

Countless other black women, from all walks of life, give of their time, talent and money generously through their churches, clubs, sororities and giving circles – groups of people who pool charitable money for nonprofits they collectively choose to support. Black women also made August Black Philanthropy Month, an international celebration of giving by people descended from Africa.

Smith has said his mother, Sylvia Myrna Smith, set him on a path of generosity. A high school principal, she instilled in him the habit of giving through her annual ritual of donating to the United Negro College Fund to help young people of color gain access to higher education.

A place in history

Smith earned his wealth through technology and finance, and has his own foundation. He has signed the Giving Pledge, through which dozens of the world’s richest people have promised to donate most of their wealth to causes they believe in. But in my view, it would be a mistake to look to the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, the billionaires who created the Giving Pledge in 2010, to understand Robert F. Smith’s philanthropy.

That’s because of the challenges Smith made to the Morehouse graduates benefiting from his gift and his peers as well.

“The liberation of communities we come from depends upon the grit and the determination and the greatness inside of you, using your skills and your knowledge and your instincts to serve to change the world in only the way that you can,” Smith said.

This idea of a responsibility to liberate one’s community links Smith and today’s black donors with those of the past.

Forten and LaFon

One of the black philanthropists in colonial times was James Forten, who was born in 1766 into a free black family in Philadelphia. Introduced to sail-making by his father, Forten apprenticed in the trade after serving on a ship near the end of the Revolutionary War. He became wealthy and a leader in the movement to end slavery.

Forten helped finance abolitionist newspapers while fundraising for the movement and aided runaways who fled slavery in the South.

Thomy LaFon, another early black giver, was born into a free family in 1810 in New Orleans. He grew up in poverty but was a natural entrepreneur who sold food, ran a store, brokered loans and eventually invested in real estate.

LaFon leveraged his clout to advocate for racial equality. He funded a black newspaper and the arts. He financed the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Underground Railroad. LaFon bought property for orphanages and following his death his estate financed two hospitals, a nursing home that still exists, the New Orleans college that became Dillard University and a black order of nuns called Sisters of the Holy Family.

McKee and Gaston

Colonel John McKee was born into freedom in Alexandria, Virginia, around 1819 but became indentured at a young age.

Col. John McKee’s legacy of helping young men without fathers attend college continues, more than a century after his death.
McKee Scholarship

McKee ran a Philadelphia restaurant in his twenties. Over time, he acquired a significant amount of property. He provided housing for the black migrants who traveled north to Philadelphia after emancipation.

When he died in 1902, McKee left most of his reported $2 million fortune to the Catholic Church and a school to educate black and white orphaned boys. After decades of disputes, the McKee Scholarship emerged in the 1950s. It continues to help cover higher education costs for many young fatherless men in the Philadelphia region today.

A.G. Gaston was born in 1892 in Demopolis, Alabama, to parents who had been enslaved. He began building businesses in Birmingham in the 1920s. He ultimately owned an insurance company, a funeral home and cemetery, a business college, motel, bank, radio stations and a construction company.

Gaston worked behind the scenes of the civil rights movement to maintain relations with whites while maintaining a reputation as having a non-confrontational approach to ending segregation. In the 1950s, the entrepreneur helped pay the legal bills tied to a court case seeking the admission of African Americans to the all-white University of Alabama.

He regularly donated or discounted the use of his facilities to house civil rights activists and host meetings. When the police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, jailed Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy for protesting in Birmingham in 1963, Gaston bailed them out, along with hundreds more protesters.

When the Alabaman, who was reportedly worth $130 million, died in 1996 he left several provisions in his estate for charity. Birmingham’s A.G. Gaston Boys and Girls Club is still operating.

With this gift and the rest of his big donations, Robert F. Smith has assumed his place in this philanthropic history, and encouraged other African Americans to do the same.

[ You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter. ]The Conversation

Tyrone Freeman, Assistant Professor of Philanthropic Studies, Director of Undergraduate Programs, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, IUPUI

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Bibles but Not Textbooks: Trump’s Tariff Exemptions Pick Winners and Loser

Bibles but Not Textbooks: Trump’s Tariff Exemptions Pick Winners and Loser

The article was originally published on ProPublica.org


President Donald Trump’s aggressive trade brinksmanship has split the American economy into new castes of winners and losers, with few consistent criteria defining who ends up in which group — as illustrated by the $2 billion in products that won exemptions last week from a new round of China tariffs.

Bibles and other religious texts got a pass after U.S. publishers and Christian groups argued that tariffs would infringe upon the freedom to worship around the globe.

Salmon and cod — caught in Alaska and processed in China — won an exemption after the state’s Republican senators successfully argued that tariffs would pose an “economic security” risk to Alaska’s fishing industry.

Chemicals used in fracking escaped tariffs after the oil and gas industry argued that taxing them would threaten America’s “energy dominance.”

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative carved out those products from an original list of $300 billion based on what it called “health, safety, national security and other factors.” About half of the original list was delayed until December in order to get past the holiday season, but after that, importers will pay 10% of the value of whatever they bring in from China.

Although the companies that won relief may not be markedly different than the interests favored by other Republican administrations, this cycle of tariffs and exemptions is happening faster and at a larger scale than any remotely similar exercise in the past, giving far more companies reason to protest.

Take religious texts like the Bible and the Quran, which were the only kind of publication exempted by trade regulators. Other written works, from pulp fiction to textbooks, were denied clemency.

In the weeks following USTR’s announcement of a new batch of tariffs ostensibly justified by China’s violation of intellectual property law — this one covering a huge swath of finished goods, since duties had already been assessed on most kinds of intermediate materials — Christian publishers and religious groups made their case for a reprieve.

In letters and testimony, they argued that China had become America’s primary source of Bibles because of its unparalleled proficiency in printing the 800,000-word text, which requires thinner paper and often more ornate, hand-stitched bindings. The U.S. imported almost $140 million worth of religious texts in 2018, 67.3% of which came from China, according to Panjiva, the supply-chain research unit at S&P Global Market Intelligence, a commodities data provider. The world’s largest producer of Bibles, China’s Amity Printing, said it produced 14.15 million copies in 2017.

Those volumes are already more expensive than the average beach read. Biblica, a nonprofit that gives Bibles away around the world, testified that a tariff on religious books would “dramatically affect” the number of Bibles it was able to donate, “impacting the religious freedom of individuals in countries where Bible access is limited and often nonexistent.”



Video Courtesy of NewsChannel 5


Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the 15.2 million-member Southern Baptist Convention, wrote that a tariff on Bibles would require “higher prices incompatible with the high and consistent demand for Bibles in the United States” and affect “all Christians’ ability to exercise their religious freedom in the United States.”

The USTR’s decision wasn’t all good news for churches and religious publishers, however. They produce and consume plenty of religious-themed books that wouldn’t qualify under a strict interpretation of the exemption. Besides, most of them urged a return to the long-standing practice of avoiding burdensome taxation on all publications on First Amendment grounds.

“All books should really be exempt, because that’s been the tradition of the United States,” said Stan Jantz, executive director of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. “It was never an intention to only be the Bibles. If anything, I would hope the Bible would help them open up and see the value of all books.”

That was also the hope of independent publishers and bookstores, which already operate on thin margins. Dan Reynolds, CEO of Workman Publishing, which has several nonfiction imprints as well as a line of children’s books, says the focus on Bibles was part of a conscious approach.

“We strategized when this started to happen about which parts of our business would get the attention of the administration, as well as which products that are reliant on Chinese production, with the hope that by making our case with Bibles and children’s books primarily, that that would make all books exempted,” Reynolds said in an interview. “So we’re partially victorious, but it didn’t help all the other categories.”

The tariffs for children’s books were pushed to December, but Reynolds isn’t sure what his company will do after that. Chinese printers are especially good at producing affordable children’s books with all kinds of bells and whistles, like pop-ups and textures. The fixed budgets of schools and libraries won’t expand to pay for tariffs, so Reynolds said he’ll probably sell fewer books. And if he has to move production out of China, he said, he’ll keep costs down by dialing back some of the fun features.

The situation is perhaps more difficult for small bookstores, which don’t have the cash on hand — or the space — to stock up on inventory before the year-end holidays. Jamie Fiocco, president of the American Booksellers Association and owner of Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is resigned to the fact that religious works were protected while others were not.

“I think it’s a statement about the environment we’re working in these days,” Fiocco said.

Books aren’t the only product where the USTR has had to make tough choices about which industries to favor and which to leave hanging. (The agency did not respond to a request for further explanation of why it exempted the products it did.)

The roughly two dozen product categories that escaped tariffs included frozen cod, salmon and haddock, which are often harvested in Alaska and sent to China for processing into fillets and nuggets that are sold in grocery stores and restaurants. A tariff on those reimports would have hurt the fishing industry. Under pressure from Alaska’s congressional delegation, they had been dropped from previous rounds of duties but ended up included again in the fourth batch, which meant having the argument all over again.

A joint letter from Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan and Rep. Don Young referred to their “many discussions” with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, and it warned him that failing to exempt salmon and cod would carry consequences. “You risk losing critical congressional support if your actions end up having the result of targeting and harming some of the very Americans we know you want to help,” they wrote.

In response to a question about what seafood tariffs had to do with health, safety or national security, Murkowski spokeswoman Hannah Ray highlighted the part of the USTR notice that said “other factors” could come into play.

“Beyond those explicitly listed, there are additional factors that USTR could consider in deciding to remove items from its final list,” Ray wrote. “This administration broadly interprets ‘national security’ to include domestic economic security. Senator Murkowski shares the administration’s desire to ensure fair and reciprocal trade.”

The lawmakers weren’t against all fish tariffs, however. They advocated for continuing to include pollock, a divisive issue in the seafood industry. There are more American companies that process pollock and also more Russian pollock that comes into the U.S. after processing in China, creating a stronger domestic lobby for taxing imports. But resellers and restaurant chains complain that all tariffs make food more expensive — in this case, pollock fish fingers.

“Compared to the range of outcomes that we could’ve had, it’s certainly better, but it’s still overall a very poor outcome in my opinion,” said Matt Fass, president of the Williamsburg, Virginia-based distributor Maritime Products International. “A couple of the species have been exempted, which is a good thing. The largest volume species has not been — that’s pollock. … Everything is immediately higher priced when the tariffs hit.”

Beyond fish and Bibles, USTR also spared several types of minerals with defense applications that would meet the “national security” criterion.

That’s also convenient for American industrial conglomerates. For example, zirconium goes into nuclear fuel rods used in the Navy’s submarines and aircraft carriers, according to testimony from Allegheny Technologies and BWX Technologies, which supply zirconium to the military. But it’s also used for civilian airplanes built by aerospace companies.

Other exempted products seem to only be priorities for powerful industries. Aluminum oxide, for example, is critical for steel manufacturers, who had been protected by earlier rounds of tariffs on imported steel but could have been hurt by subsequent duties on chemicals they need in order to produce domestic steel. Various forms of barium are used as a stabilizing additive to fracking fluids, and companies including the oil field services firm Halliburton testified that using alternative products would decrease drilling productivity. Fifty-three-foot shipping containers are essential for trucking and rail transportation, and big companies like J.B Hunt and CSX said that tariffing them would make all kinds of freight shipments more expensive.

No industry, however, got everything that it wanted in the exemptions. Take the juvenile products industry: Child car seats were waved through, but cribs and baby gates stayed on the list. Or oil and gas: Despite the reprieve on barium, tariffs remain in place on more than 100 industrial components used in both offshore and surface drilling, and the steel tariffs have pushed costs higher on everything.

“U.S. energy leadership and global competitiveness are also threatened by the ongoing trade dispute with China as U.S. natural gas and oil exports serve as targets for retaliation,” a spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute said in an emailed statement.

And of course, all of this could change in a flash. Previously exempted categories could be put on yet another list, as several were in this latest round, leaving business heads spinning.

“It just has gone so quickly, and it’s so volatile,” said Angela Bole, CEO of the Independent Book Publishers Association. “Everything was thrown in. It was like dropping a house on a fly.”