Bringing hope to Brownsville – New York Daily News

I grew up in Brownsville when it was a very different kind of Brooklyn neighborhood. Today, as an 87-year-old Black man, I look around my old hood and I see so many young people full of potential who have been left to waste away, with few opportunities to harness their innate skills and talents. It didn’t used to be this way, and it doesn’t have to be. Let me tell you how it was, and what changed.

Back then in the 1930s and ‘40s, Brownsville was an integrated neighborhood. There were Black folks, Jewish folks and people from other European countries, from Ireland to Poland. We were all poor, but there was little visible prejudice; I didn’t know racism existed until I was older. We would all play ball together in the park on Christopher Ave. — we called it Nanny Goat Park because there used to be goats running free in the place — and sometimes the Black kids would have sleepovers with their Jewish friends from Slavin Fish market. We’d all go upstairs and their parents would cook fish for everyone.

And there were jobs. At the slaughterhouse, the pickle factory, and the ice cream factory on Dumont Ave., at the shoe factory and the knitting mills on Junius, at the doll factory on the other side of the bridge over the railroad tracks, and at the fruit markets on Belmont Ave.

We weren’t outsourcing to other countries back then — anyone could get a job right in the community, with profits going back into the community. Sometimes even us kids would make a few bucks. We’d go to the slaughterhouse, and we’d make a human chain and help them load the sheep skins into the trucks. Each of us could make $3 that way.

I was also a member of the integrated Brownsville Boys Club. With a scholarship from the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund, I participated in a summer program in Connecticut during which I partook in many outdoor activities and interacted with young people from different backgrounds.

Later, as a young man in the Army Medical Corps in the ‘50s, I traveled all over Europe and bonded with American guys from different parts of our country. This experience gave me the opportunity to encounter many cultures as well as develop a new perspective on global inequality.

Leaving America helped me understand what I needed to be grateful for at home — and at the same time, it allowed me to understand the caste system that still oppresses so many Black Americans within the United States. That perspective was life-changing. It made me feel like a somebody; it helped me become a service-oriented person, and it led me to a long career in the dentistry and health-care management fields.

Back in Brownsville, as an adult with a young family, I found that most of the white people in the neighborhood were leaving. It was becoming a Black neighborhood, and Black and Puerto Rican poor people from all over the city were moving in to live in the neighborhood’s many new NYCHA developments.

Still, it was a safe place, so safe you could fall asleep on a bench outside Van Dyke Houses without a care. In 1963, I co-founded an annual summer celebration called Brownsville Old Timers Day. We’d have a fish fry cookout, concerts and competitions between local baseball and basketball teams.

In the late ‘70s, however, conditions in the neighborhood began to change. By that time, all the factories had shut down, absentee landlords had stopped taking care of their buildings, and the city had cut back trash pick-up and left the schools to rot.

With the government’s complete neglect of Brownsville, people began to feel hopeless — that they were the lowest of the low on the human totem pole. Poverty and cynicism became the norm, and on one Old Timers Day, people got mugged on their way home from the celebration. Regretfully, we decided to move our annual gathering down to the Brownsville Recreation Center on Linden Blvd.

Then, in the ‘80s, crack hit, destroying the lives of many.

There have been some improvements since those hard days. The Nehemiah Houses program, an idea first proposed by Daily News columnist and builder I.D. Robbins, spearheaded by the local churches and funded by Mayor Ed Koch, created affordable homeownership opportunities in our community. Recently, young Brownsvillians have opened their own nonprofits that serve the neighborhood. The city has also begun rebuilding on Livonia Ave.’s vacant lots. But it’s still not enough.

Our kids are killing each other. They’re stuck in a box, locked in. In 2019, for the first time in 56 years of our annual Old Timers Day celebration, there was a mass shooting, with one man killed and 11 others wounded. I was heartbroken.

I’m the product of a Brownsville that wasn’t violent — I can remember, at least, only a handful of youth killings and only one gang related killing from 1945 to 1970. Before 2019, there had been no shootings at Old Timers Day. I live in Howard Beach now, close by but in different conditions, and it hurts whenever I go back to my neighborhood and see how much has changed. This year so far, there’ve been 50 shooting incidents in Brownsville.

I can tell people are tired of being tired. So many young men go outside, put in their numbers, get a 40 and a reefer, spend all day watching television, then come out to get themselves in trouble. These days, it feels like it’s only a couple of high achievers who have access to opportunities like the ones I had as a young person in the Brownsville Boys Club.

When I see our young people today, especially those involved in gang activities, I see how they continue to suffer from a dearth of opportunities to discover themselves. They barely ever leave the neighborhood.

Our city’s response has frequently been to send in the NYPD to crack down on our youth. But our young people are too often treated like animals by the police, and this again sends the message that they’re nobody.

You can’t break the cycle with “stop and frisk” and incarceration. That only pushes them deeper into the hole. These youth must be approached with love — including the ones who do poorly in school, the ones who seem quiet, and the ones with a tendency to act out. We’ve got beautiful and brilliant young people in this community with hidden talents and dreams.

I, for one, still have a lot of love for Brownsville. And I’ve started to worry that we — the elders of Brownsville, including people who have moved out of the neighborhood — haven’t done enough. I’ve been trying to come up with ideas to help my community before my time here is up.

This past year, along with other neighborhood activists, I launched a campaign to bring Brownsville Old Timers Day back up to Mother Gaston Blvd. and Sutter Ave. — its original location — and return the celebration to its roots.

Instead of bringing in many outside vendors, as has been done in recent years, we’d cater only from local businesses. We’d hold sports contests and collaborate with the 73rd Precinct to keep the event safe for all. Folks in the local NYCHA developments could look out their windows and see something beautiful, something positive, a coming together of community. We’d even have a ceremony to rename the local playground on that corner in honor of Brownsville’s own William F. Green — a public servant, social worker and hospital executive who vastly improved medical care in Brooklyn and created jobs and healing for countless Brownsvillians.

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Ultimately, however, local officials ignored our campaign without giving any explanation. I say with sorrow that the honorable Mr. Green passed away on Aug. 28, 2022, and we are still fighting for the park’s renaming.

But here’s another idea. The city should give Brownsville’s troubled youth a pep talk — and then a U.S. passport. That’s right: help the same youth you might think are destined for prison by giving them a chance to see the world. Imagine the impact we could have if we reached out to them and said, “let me put you in a position to see something different — you’re going to travel. You’re going to experience Ghana for six months.”

We wouldn’t force them, but many of these kids would be smart enough to take the offer, and an experience like that would change them. With private-sector help, Black youth could take birthright trips to reclaim their heritage or to see other parts of the world that would expand their minds. When they came home, they’d have a broader perspective. They’d be less susceptible to the old turf wars, and they’d help to change other young people.

We could start small, with five or 10 young adults, then grow big. The program would not only provide them with a stipend and a passport, but also provide support for their families — for instance, resources and childcare if a young person has a girlfriend and baby to look after at home.

Go ahead and argue with me. Poke holes in my ideas, if you want. But don’t ignore me. The violence won’t stop, the despair won’t stop, until you show each of these kids that they’re a somebody. I was encouraged to hear that on Sept. 22, the House of Representatives passed the Break the Cycle of Violence Act, a bill that would fund community-based violence intervention and prevention programs as well as invest money in workforce training and job opportunities for our young people. I hope to see the Senate move this bill forward and New York City take full advantage of it. Brownsville deserves — Brownsville is owed — far more investment than the few million here, few million there that politicians sometimes dole out.

To Mayor Adams: you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something big. Big like the Nehemiah Houses was big. To do something that really matters. Something for which you’ll be remembered. Give the youth of Brownsville a passport. Give them a chance to be alive.

Johnson is the former president of the annual Brownsville Old Timers Day celebration and an Army veteran. He is retired from a career in dentistry management.