Testimony: ONE PERSON’S STORY ABOUT HOPE : ‘These Conceptions of <i> Role Models</i> Are Distracting’

It’s hard to relate to what is going on now. This was the third-highest watched program . . . the O.J. Simpson chase.

And what you have is (that) a lot of things are being dismantled now that should be dismantled, so instead of looking at it in a negative way, you look at it in a positive way. All these conceptions of “role models” are distracting. Once you can get it behind you, you can get down to business. We have to face the facts any way we can--but it’s good.

The only time you can ever make a change is when you’re dealing with the truth--if we keep dealing with the hypocritical or the false, how are we going to talk to a kid when they see the hypocrisy? If you put a hypocrite in front of a kid, he sees.

Where I’m coming from, the O.J. thing don’t mean a doggone thing. The big deal is getting kids off the ground and being productive. They don’t have time to sit down and philosophize about O.J. and his situation. Anybody who’s got a job to do is not going to stop to get into depression about what’s going on.

Life is going to go on, and it’s going to be a better one, not because of what happened with O.J. What’s happening is we need to reinvest in young people.

Well, I’ll tell you--there are a lot of people that are working--a lot of young gang members, convicts--special people that are working in their own way, and they’re willing to work with other people. Like the NAACP, the Urban League. So there is an unpublicized positive movement going on.

I work with gangs and I work with convicts. I create job opportunities, I teach them life-management skills, I teach them at schools, juvenile camps, parole, probation. Some of them are working in the studios. We stop killing, we help create peace among gangs.

What we’ve done is taken those who are supposed to be lost and they’ve turned their lives around and are nowfunctioning as law-abiding citizens that are productive and take care of their own minds and helping others take care of theirs.

My men handle things with self-determination. We’re in the state of Oregon, we’re dealing with Denver, we’re dealing with Jacksonville, Fla., we are in New York, we’re in Chicago, we’re going into Trenton (N.J.) with a major contract, we’re going to probably end up in the state of Iowa, and in all of these places, former criminals are now functioning in a meaningful way.

The reason that I’m dealing with convicts and gang-bangers is because the present situation of killing, black-on-black crime and conflagration, all of the drive-by shootings and car jackings and drugs--until you do something about that, you cannot implement the entrepreneur aspect.

I’ll give you an example: the NAACP in San Diego invited us in to train 30 law-enforcement officers from the various agencies, the most cynical individuals on earth. In one week, the testimony was unanimous that it had affected their lives. So part of what we do is to get the ex-predators and the policemen together in the same curriculum so that they can understand how to work effectively; it’s a whole new approach. In all of this, young people understand how to work the system. But it’s almost low-key, because if you’re doing that kind of work, you can’t get notoriety. Notoriety makes no difference. We don’t even solicit funds from our core volunteers.

You got to get it to a sound business front; if you don’t get it to that, it becomes walking around, preaching, and hoping something’s going to fall out of the sky. You must deal with the system and it must be business, and businesslike. And you must give a service, and you must get paid for that service. And that’s what we do. We have a contract with the state of California for the last three or four years; we service them with manager skills, and they pay us and we deliver that service.

We don’t go and beg people for everything. (Boxer) George Foreman volunteered. (Former Clipper guard) Norm Nixon has done some work. That’s good. But I don’t go to celebrities. Most people who help these young people volunteer, they see what’s going on--(sportscaster) Jim Hill is going to adopt one of these schools. Jim is very kind.

Everybody needs support--they need someone they can relate to. These kids are shattered and so any rebuff, any separation, hurts them, and they can be highly aggressive in that stage. If you show them caring and respect and strength, you can work with them. But you have to have education that can be properly applied, with a combination of caring and education and economics.

You can’t create love and not try to create economic opportunity. I’m very energized, very optimistic. We have an office at 292 La Cienega that is run by ex-gang bangers. That’s our executive office. But they’re in that office everyday. You don’t have to have an office in the ghetto.

Jim Brown can be reached at Amer-I-can, ( 213 ) 652-7884.