From Skidrow to Wall Street
A Black Man’s Journey of Living in Two New York Worlds
“I was a product of my environment,” Terrence Johnson says as he unbuttons his suit jacket and leans back in his chair. “I just looked for qualities of someone I wanted to be.” At first glance, one might assume that that someone Johnson chose was one of high caliber. The 25 year old wears shined brown shoes, a golden wrist watch, and a clean cut blue suit. It’s his “uniform” as an operations specialist in hedge fund services at Bank of America, Merrill Lynch.
“I onboard institutional clients’ hedge funds onto one of three of the prime brokerage platform schematics.” Johnson shuffles his feet as he looks out onto a view of the World Trade Center. However, his Wall Street view doesn’t last very long. In fact, it surpasses no longer than 12 hours where he takes the 3 train, downtown, to what he considers another world — Brownsville, Brooklyn.
“It’s a place full of crime and disparity, sickness. It’s rated one of the worst neighborhoods in Brooklyn.” Located in east Brooklyn, Brownsville is one of New York’s poorest neighborhoods, with 40 percent of its population living below the poverty line. According to DNAinfo’s 2011 Crime and Safety Report, Brownsville had the second-worst violent-crime rate in the city and ranked highest in New York’s per capita murder and robbery rates. With a wrap sheet such as this, it’s hard to believe Johnson is from here, but also was involved in its world.
“When there’s no male role model you look for it in other individuals and I didn’t know who was the right positive person to choose. I looked at where I lived and I said let me start here.”
Raised in Harlem on 129th street and Lenox Avenue, Johnson lived with his lenient sister. At age 15 he would play basketball in the park, making friends with fellow neighborhood teenagers until eventually, they became apart of a gang.
“On that block there was an old group of 19–21 year old guys and they called themselves ‘OTN’ which stood for ‘129.’ They came over to us and told us that the block was getting ‘hot’ and we had to ‘hold things down.’ We would get into fights all of the time. As we got older, we graduated from fighting to actually being involved in their drug trade. We’d go to the rooftop of my cousin’s building and shoot guns off in the area.”
However, the solidarity found within this life didn’t last long for Johnson. According to him, it took a single life threatening situation to cause him to question his choices. When I asked him what had happened, he simply nodded his head. The desire for change made him turn to an unlikely source for young, black men growing up in a gang-filled ghetto — books. He says it turned his isolation into rehabilitation.
“The first book I picked up during that transition was ‘Think and Grow Rich’ by Napoleon Hill. It gave me a new perspective.” With more reading and embracing what Johnson calls. “the harvest stage” of his life, he began to immerse himself in what he was learning. “Knowledge is only power if execution follows so when I put it into affect everything in my life began to change and quickly.”
“Knowledge is only power if execution follows so when I put it into affect everything in my life began to change and quickly.”
He bounced around from borough to borough, eventually attending school at BMCC. After moving to Brownsville with his mother in 2015, he joined YearUp, a career development organization that helps young adults secure corporate jobs after completing a series of professional skills workshops, internships, mentorships, and more.
However understanding the perplexities of a neighborhood like Brownsville and getting out of it aren’t as simple as picking up a self-help book. There are systems in place that can help regurgitate upward mobility and the leading of black families out of poverty. Living in this world, but working for another makes Johnson all too familiar with its complexities.
“There’s a scene in a James Bond movie where he’s tied up in a chair and his antagonist is in front of him telling him a story about rats on an inhabitable isolated island. The antagonist says that when his grandmother bought the island, she’d put food at the bottom of a barrel and then they’d get trapped going after it They’d get hungry and begin to feed on each other. The black community is almost the same. It is confined in every single area to limited resources. You’ve got your pawn shops and Kentucky Fried Chickens but all of these things are low quality resources which causes people to search for the highest of quality. That’s where the criminal activity comes from — the eating the rats.”
With such an idea on the very world he lives in I begin to inquire on why even bothering still living here. With a Wall Street job and a sense of his reality, why stay? Johnson reluctantly laughs and begins to tell me about his family — his 10 nieces and nephews, mother, several sisters and their “no-good” boyfriends, all of whom he describes as financially illiterate, living beyond their means, and solely dependent upon him.
“One flap of the wing can cause a tsunami, one person can cause a generational shift.”
“If I could break that generational gap and teach them how to invest and financial management and give them these tools and finances…it takes one person. One flap of the wing can cause a tsunami, one person can cause a generational shift.” Suddenly, it begins to rain.
The name of the subject has been changed for their privacy and confidentiality
