Since his debut, J. Cole has always been one of my favorite rappers of the past few years, and when he recently dropped his album ‘2014 Forest Hills Drive’ he reaffirmed his status as one of the best lyricist and socially conscious artists in the game.
Well now Cole is doing something that is even more amazing than his music. He recently announced plans to use the childhood home which inspired his new album and is featured on the cover, as a rent-free haven for single mothers with multiple children.
According to UrbanDaily—Cole recently spoke with the ‘Combat Jack‘ show for a lengthy breakdown of his new music, childhood, and rise to success, Cole explained his experience moving from military housing to a trailer park to the single family home that graces his latest album cover. Explaining his excitement as a kid to move into the now-iconic address, Cole said he wants to give other kids that same opportunity.
“In the South, especially in North Carolina, it’s like this,” he said of his family moving to a trailer park when he was 4. “I can’t speak for Atlanta, I’m not from there. But North Carolina is like this. That was my first glimpse of the hood. This is not Eminem, 8 Mile. Shit was fucked up. No disrespect to people that’s still in the trailers and shit but that’s what it is. It’s very affordable housing. Very affordable. The neighborhood we lived in was fucked up. I was a kid. The reason why it had such a big effect on me is that I was coming from somewhere else. I was coming from a military base. My father was in the army and my mother was too, she got out when she had me. Before I was 1 we moved back [from Germany] to Fayetteville, Fort Bragg.
My parents separated before I was even conscious. After we moved back they were separated. When they got divorced we had to move out of the military quarters ’cause you can only live there if you’re married. That’s like real nice housing, it ain’t no mansion but it’s safe. Everybody got jobs, everybody got benefits ’cause they’re all in the Army. When I’m four years old we have to move; it’s me, my brother, and my mother and we moved to Spring Lake, a little outskirt area of Fayetteville. We moved to the trailer park in Spring Lake. It was my first taste of like, ‘Oh, shit. This is nothing like where we came from.’ I knew the energy was not right. I knew my mother was the only white lady in the neighborhood and there was no man in the house.”
Cole went on to detail how his mother ultimately lost their childhood home and now years later, he repurchased the property and decided to flip it and put it to good use.
“Nah, I don’t really live there,” he said. “What we gon’ do, we still working it out right now, obviously it’s a detailed, fragile situation I don’t wanna play with. My goal is to have that be a haven for families. So every two years a new family will come in, they live rent-free. The idea is that it’s a single mother with multiple kids and she’s coming from a place where all her kids is sharing a room. She might have two, three kids, they’re sharing a room. She gets to come here rent free. I want her kids to feel how I felt when we got to the house.”
Cole says he takes the project very seriously but joked briefly about fans visiting the property since the address has become popular thanks to his album cover and title.
“By the way, tell people to stop going to my house and sitting on my roof taking pictures,” he said. “And they stealing the fucking street sign.”
Quite honorable and admirable for Cole to undertake a project such as this. If only more artists were as gracious as he is and invested their money into worthwhile causes instead of cars, jewelry and other materialistic things. Kudos Cole!
