Bishop Lamor Whitehead strolled into The Root’s offices as he strolls everywhere: confidently, decked out in a tailored suit stitched together in a designer pattern. On this particular day—last Thursday—the pattern was Gucci, and his frame, about six feet or so, was consumed by it, from jacket and slacks (aquamarine) to belt (oversized double-g buckle) to eyewear (salmon frames).
Without too much preamble—we only had a half hour to interview him before Common showed up to plug his new Broadway effort—we sat down and started the process. There were ground rules, which any interviewer is leery of, but in this instance, they worked: in exchange for a verbal commitment to just be fair to the man, Whitehead would answer any question we asked. Nothing—not his previous jail time, not the lawsuits in which he’s either the plaintiff or the defendant, not that infamous robbery in his own church (“I’m outside, they didn’t have to do that in the church,”) not even where he finds the money to support his flashy wardrobe (he owns real estate in Hartford, New York and elsewhere, he says)—was off limits. Read more.
