By Je’Don Holloway-Talley | For The Birmingham Times

Jason Burroughs remembers a time when he was not only carrying loads for his trucking business but also the weight of the world on his shoulders.

He started his first company, Able Body Moving and Delivery LLC, in 2010, at the age of 26. Eight years later, the life and business he had worked hard to build was crumbling before his eyes.

“I felt defeated in so many ways,” said Burroughs. “I had been beaten up and robbed by entrepreneurship. I had a business contract go south, and I lost [more than] 10 box trucks and the majority of my labor force. … My marriage of five years was failing, and we had two small children.

“My marriage had become so contentious that I moved out of the house into an unfinished garage that was fully furnished with spiders, roaches, and centipedes. … I was suicidal and didn’t want to wake up to life on a daily basis,” he said.

His saving grace was his faith and daily inspirational videos, including one from motivational speaker Eric Thomas, who said, “When you want to succeed as much as you want your next breath, you will succeed.”

Fueled by grit, faith, and determination, Burroughs got back to business and rebuilt his first company brick by brick. Then, in 2020, the 39-year-old Fairfield, Alabama, native started what he believes is his most successful venture yet: Carrier and Brokered (C&B) Transportation Systems, a flatbed trucking company.

C&B has since secured Tier 1 contracts with billion-dollar companies and become the single supplier for diversity, equity, and inclusion for pipe-and-valve-manufacturing company Consolidated Pipe and Supply Inc. (CPS Inc.). When a company secures a Tier 1 contract, it becomes the prime contractor and direct supplier and distributes the work to subcontractors.

Burroughs also set up a sister company to C&B: Sky Blue Logistics, which serves as a freight brokerage firm. In total, he has five businesses under his belt, including 3 Levels of Game, a digital marketing company founded in 2019, and Coach Jason Cultivates, a business coaching endeavor established in October 2023. He was recently selected as one of the Birmingham Business Journal’s 2024 Small Business Award winners.

Thanks to his numerous business ventures, Burroughs has become a regional leader in the trucking industry, and he has used his experience and business acumen to form the Magic City Joint Venture (MCJV), a cohort that helps other Black- and minority-owned trucking companies secure multifigure contracts with large corporations.

Game Changer

The Birmingham resident said he’s done nearly everything in trucking “from residential and commercial moving to delivery and installation contracts, all the way to 3PL, [or third-party logistics],” said Burroughs. “I’ve run everything from box trucks to heavy haul commercial vehicles. C&B Transportation Systems transports PVC pipe, coal, brick, and other commercial construction equipment on a regional scale.”

The real game changer came when Burroughs sought larger contracts with multimillion- and billion-dollar companies like Amazon, and became the sole in-house transportation concierge service for CPS Inc.

“When [the COVID-19 pandemic] hit, I started using commercial trucks and hauling freight throughout the Southeast, while acquiring dedicated contract work. We’ve transported freight for Amazon, and in 2021 we got a contract with [CPS Inc.], delivering freight to Southern Company and Alabama Power. We make all of their deliveries to over 50 locations across 20 different states,” he said.

“The partnership with CPS Inc. developed into a mentorship where they began to invest in us,” Burroughs added. “We are the first minority-owned trucking company they’ve partnered with, and we serve as their single supplier for diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Team Building

The divorced father of two has an 8-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son, and he has a great deal of empathy for businessmen and businesswomen who aspire to make a living and meet their family’s needs.

In 2022, Burroughs set out to collaborate with other minority trucking companies to help them reach their highest earning potential through the MCJV. The collective operates with a dozen Black- and minority-owned trucking companies and collaborates to secure Tier 1 contracts. Burroughs considers this one of his most significant business endeavors.

“I noticed that some small-business owners have individualistic perspectives and feel the need to try to do everything on their own. I think that methodology is incorrect [as it pertains to] success and how to obtain it.

“I learned the value of team building and collaborating, and I wanted to instill that perspective and enrich [the cohort] with my resources, experiences, and failures [to] help other Black- and minority-owned companies reach their full potential,” said Burroughs, who organizes and recruits on behalf of the MCJV.

He also serves as the group’s lead representative, making pitches before major companies and corporations to secure contracts: “I speak on behalf of everyone who’s part of the joint venture. … I’ve spoken before Shipt, [a logistics company owned by Target Corp.], and a host of other companies,” Burroughs said.

Freedom and Redemption

The trucking industry represents freedom and redemption in many ways for Burroughs.

“I established C&B Transportation because I wanted to create pathways to financial independence for impoverished individuals and myself. [Commercial Driver’s License (CDL)] opportunities are some of the highest paying jobs, [and people] can earn $70,000 or more a year. Those opportunities are the same for everybody, no matter who you are or where you come from,” he said.

“People transitioning from incarceration and disadvantaged circumstances can obtain CDL certification after a six-week program, and the opportunity can’t be diminished by blemishes on their background.”

Burroughs has always wanted to be a businessman.

“I remember collecting cans with my grandad [in Brighton, Alabama], and taking them to get recycled. I remember being 10 years old selling video games and basketball cards to my friends,” he said.

Nonetheless, Burroughs remembered “self-inflicted challenges” and not applying himself during his years at Oak Mountain High School.

“I was popular and had a lot of friends, but I was actually a horrible student,” he said. “I spent a lot of time in detention and being suspended. … Most of the time, I felt like school was mundane and boring from an academic standpoint. I usually did only enough to get by.”

In 2002, at the start of his senior year, Burroughs found himself enrolled in an alternative school, a necessary detour in order to graduate on time.

“Even then, I was highly intelligent. I just wasn’t scholarly,” he said. “I knew back then that I wanted to own a business and be impactful one day, although my current situation saw me as an at-risk youth headed nowhere fast.”

From there, he cleaned up his act. Burroughs attended Jefferson State Community College, at the Shelby-Hoover Campus in northern Shelby County, Alabama, and Shelton State Community College, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, before landing at the University of Alabama, also in Tuscaloosa.

“After a few semesters, I realized I really didn’t need a degree to be successful and that I was learning more about the business world from part-time jobs at moving companies and [the United Parcel Service (UPS)],” he said.

Family Life

Being the oldest of three sons allowed Burroughs to witness his parents, Darryl and Angela, rise to the upper middle class. His father attended the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and has had a long career as a computer programmer, and his mother is a graduate of Birmingham’s Samford University and a registered nurse.

“I got to see my parents work and build together,” he said. “Seeing them start out in a two-bedroom house in Brighton to moving us to an upper-middle-class subdivision off [U.S. Highway 280] showed me what hard work and planning could do.

“I have a lot of strong successful men in my family, and their success was a constant reminder that I had to make something of myself. My uncle Mark [always said], ‘Tomorrow’s successes are sown in the frustration of today’—and that stuck.”

Burroughs has two younger brothers, Jamile and Jeremy, and he recalled that growing up was “all sports, video games, and a lot of wrestling. I had a good upbringing, [wonderful] grandparents on both sides, good uncles, cousins. … I’m grateful.”

As for fatherhood, Burroughs said it’s given him a heightened sense of purpose. “I think on a transgenerational level now. How can I improve the lives of my children’s children? What type of values can I instill in them that will serve them throughout their life? That’s what motivates me to continue evolving and building,” he said.

By Sym Posey | The Birmingham Times

Before Randall Horton became a professor at the University of New Haven, a private university in West Haven, Connecticut, he was a drug smuggler facing almost 15 years in prison at the Roxbury Correctional Institution in Hagerstown, Maryland.

“I spent almost five years on the inside. I am the only full tenured professor with seven felony convictions that I know of,” said Horton, who was incarcerated from 1996 to 2000.

Born and raised in Birmingham, Horton graduated from A.H. Parker High School and left Alabama to begin his education at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he studied economics. During his senior year in college, he dropped out because of exposure to the drug trade.

“I got turned on to that and spent 30 odd years in that life. I was all over the world. If you’ve ever seen ‘Snowfall,’ that’s my life. It just happened on the East Coast,” said Horton jokingly, referring to the American crime drama television series that revolves around the first crack epidemic and is primarily set in Los Angeles, California.

The series was created by renowned African American director, screenwriter, and producer John Singleton, who passed away in 2019.

Horton, while serving his time in Montgomery County, Maryland, was a part of the Jail Addiction Services (JAS) program to shave a few years off his sentence.

“One of the components of the program was that you had to write,” he said. “They would ask tough questions that helped you get in touch with your inner self. I wasn’t an expressive person like that. I was in that life, [where] the less you said the better. I began to write in my cell, and I really started to take my writing seriously. I started to feel different about myself.”

Promise Made

Horton gained recognition for his writing, so much so that he made a promise to one of his teachers to never stop.

“She had been working with people to get them alternatives to incarceration, [and] she told me, ‘Go do your time, and we will bring you back here [to Seven Locks Detention Center in Montgomery County, Maryland], and do what they call a motion for reconsideration of sentencing,’” said Horton, who had served time in facilities in various states, including Maryland and Virginia, as well as in Nags Head, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia.

“I was looking at doing 15 years in prison at least,” he continued.

While serving time in a Baltimore, Maryland, facility, Horton continued to write short stories and essays. He also did a lot of reading, and one day while reading The Washington Post newspaper in the prison’s day room he came across a poem by E. Ethelbert Miller, an African American professor, poet, and literary activist who taught at Howard University around the time Horton attended.

“I wrote him a letter and told him, ‘You don’t know me,’ and I gave him my whole story,” Horton said. “He wrote me back, and that [was the beginning of] a long mentorship.”

Horton credits Miller with giving him the space to find himself as a writer and a poet.

After five years, Horton was called back to the place he got sentenced. While the district attorney opposed the motion for reconsideration, Horton’s father served as his character witness, and he “brought everyone to tears,” said Horton.

“[My father] talked about me in this third person. He gave the history of me, all the things I could do, and how I had a support system. He really laid it all out there. My lawyer was crying, I’m crying. The judge asked me if I had anything to say. I stood up and began crying,” Horton recalled.

After spending five years behind bars, Horton earned multiple degrees, including a doctorate in English and creative writing from the University at Albany of the State University of New York (SUNY).

During the same time, he also published a book, “Hook: A Memoir,” which explores his personal spiral from an unassuming Howard University undergraduate to a homeless drug addict, international cocaine smuggler, and incarcerated felon.

Promises Kept

Today, Horton is an award-winning author and poet, as well as and professor at the University of New Haven. He also is the co-leader of Radical Reversal, an experimental poetry band renowned for its innovative approach to the arts by emphasizing the transformative power of music and poetry. The group also focuses on amplifying the dialogue surrounding incarceration and showcasing rehabilitation equity through creative outlets.

“I wanted to do something that contributed to the discourse of the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex … from an artistic point of view,” Horton said after recent performances at the Birmingham Museum of Art (BMA) and Alabama State University, in Montgomery, Alabama.

Radical Reversal’s sound crosses many boundaries of music and poetry through literary text. It also is part of a larger effort—the Radical Reversal nonprofit organization—to spread the message about how art can play a pivotal role in confronting the criminal legal system by centering the voices of those impacted through the arts.

The band Radical Reversal performs in colleges and universities as a band, and the nonprofit works with interested detention centers and correctional departments to establish creative spaces directly inside the facilities to provide seminars, workshops, and performances that keep individuals engaged.

“Radical Reversal’s inception was always a performance group, doing social justice issues. Being that I was system impacted, we were thinking about ways to talk about things in that space. People make mistakes, but people are more than capable of coming back from those mistakes if you give them chances,” he said. “I don’t think I’m here without those series of chances, so that’s something I want to amplify, as well.”

In 2022, Radical Reversal received a $65,000 Equity in Verse grant for general operating support from the Poetry Foundation, an organization that evolved from the Modern Poetry Association, which was founded in 1941 to support the publication of Poetry magazine. Since then, Radical Reversal has expanded its mission, including efforts to strengthen its pilot program at the Jefferson County Youth Detention Center (YDC) in Birmingham with an acoustic makeover and continued support for the facility’s Resident Teaching Artists.

Radical Reversal also played a key role in the Birmingham Museum of Art’s Music at the Museum, a program launched last year to offer guests a relaxing evening of enjoying music as they peruse the galleries. The group kicked off the first show of 2024 in late January.

To learn more about Radical Reversal, visit the organization’s website, radicalreversal.org. You also can follow on Facebook (Radical Reversal), Instagram (@radical.reversal), and Twitter/X (@Radical Reversal).

By Je’Don Holloway-Talley | For The Birmingham Times

Being a mentor comes naturally for business owner Jason Burroughs who has seen both sides of what it’s like to help others and be helped.

Burroughs owns C & B [Carrier and Brokered ] Transportation Systems, a flatbed trucking company that he started in 2020 and has since secured contracts with billion-dollar companies and become the single supplier for diversity, equity, and inclusion for pipe and valve manufacturing company, Consolidated Pipe and Supply, Inc. (CPS Inc.)

Between 2018-2020 he worked for The Dannon Project, a Birmingham-based a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that helps unemployed or underemployed at-risk youth and returning citizens reentering society], as a program navigator and instructor before being furloughed due to COVID-19. Currently, he still serves in a mentorship and community partner role within the organization.

“I spent time going to prisons enrolling for The Dannon Project … I’ve seen thousands of individuals over the last several years reintegrate back into society and become productive, purposeful individuals,” Burroughs said. He’s also taught financial literacy at Build Up school in Titusville, churches, and other nonprofit organizations.

But he’s also been mentored. He’s participated in federally funded initiatives such as the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs, the Small Business Development Agency, the Minority Business Development Agency, Team Up Cohort, and the Birmingham Business Alliance Supplier Scale INTERISE.

“Continued education and personal development helped cultivate my leadership capabilities and ability to communicate a message,” he said. “It expanded my mindset and my network, and increased my capacity to solve problems and manage projects…,”

Most of what he teaches is rooted in and extracted from biblical principles which are practical frameworks that anyone can apply to their life…,” he said.

For example, “the law of sowing and reaping [which is found several times in the Bible.] Everything reproduces after its own kind so if you want money you should sow money. If you want friendship you should sow friendship. If you want a mentor then mentor someone,” he said.

He knows the importance of mentorship and has since created a cohort called the Magic City Joint Venture (MCJV), which helps other minority-owned trucking companies secure multi-figure contracts with large corporations as well as Coach Jason Cultivates, a business coaching endeavor, which he established in October 2023.

“My coaching and mentorship program shows individuals how to become entrepreneurs through personal development and skill stacking. You have to develop your mindset, skillset, and toolset in order to be an effective entrepreneur,” he said.

Burroughs’ plan is to “turn the world upside down for God,” he said. “Every single person on earth was created with a purpose and assignment for their life. I want to help cultivate the seed of potential in entrepreneurs so they can make the impact they were put here for. The framework I’m teaching is the same framework that helped me evolve from a high school flunky to a CEO.”