Beyoncé and Tina Knowles Lawson offering coronavirus relief in Houston
This Mother's Day weekend, Beyoncé and her philanthropy initiative BeyGOOD is teaming up with her mother, Tina Knowles Lawson, to promote coronavirus testing in minority communities in their hometown of Houston. The initiative will provide free test kits, personal protective equipment and household supplies to participants.
Knowles Lawson created the #IDIDMYPART campaign to bring awareness to the daily COVID-19 testing administered by the United Memorial Medical Center in Houston. The pandemic has hit the African American community especially hard.
"We hope this will become a movement and that it will encourage us to get tested and find out our status," Lawson said Wednesday in an interview on CBSN.
The mobile testing begins Friday and continues through Saturday. Medical center staffers will administer 500 free tests at Cullen Middle School. An additional 500 tests will be administered Saturday at Forest Brook Middle School.
Participants will also receive a gift card from BeyGOOD that can be used at H-E-B Grocery stores and vouchers for hot meals at two local restaurants, Frenchy's Chicken and Burns Original Bar-B-Q.
Knowles Lawson said she challenged several celebrities who plan to continue the movement: Tyler Perry in Atlanta, Magic Johnson in Detroit and Octavia Spencer in Mississippi.
Proceeds from Beyoncé's remix of Megan Thee Stallion's song, "Savage, will go to the Bread of Life organization in Houston. The pop star shouts out her mother on the track, saying, "My mama was a savage, got this s*** from Tina."
When asked about the lyrics, Lawson Knowles told CBSN she was proud of her daughter's philanthropy and admitted that she was surprised about the lyrics.
"It is funny because I wrote her and told her how proud I was because she and Jack Dorsey teamed up and they helped a lot of organizations during this COVID crisis. I wrote her a text to tell her how proud I was of her and that she was doing God's work. She said to me, 'Yeah, because I want to be like you," Lawson Knowles recalled. "I really got that message across to them as kids. We have been feeding the homeless since Beyoncé was 10 and Solange was five."
"As far as the 'savage' is concerned, you know it is funny because people started texting me and calling me a savage, and I was like why are they calling me a savage? Then someone sent me a video of this girl doing a dance and I was like, Oh, it is something good!"
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Jonathan McDougle is a CBS News segment producer based in New York City.
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