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Transcript
My name is Demond Briston. I’m 14 years old.
My name is Sheridan McHenry. I’m 17 years old.
My name is Ross Tedder. I’m 14 years old.
We interviewed Fred Brown on August 14th, 2014.
My childhood was very vivid. My mother took me camping when I was younger, so I had an opportunity to leave Pittsburgh. I’ve never spent a summer in Pittsburgh. I always worked with my father, who was a truck driver, so I drove all around the country every summer, and then my childhood was spattered with a lot of moving. I moved from different communities, even to different parts of the country, and those experiences really helped me cultivate my sense of myself, no matter which community I was in, I had to kind of define who I was in those places. And it taught me how to be more diverse and to build friendships from Atlanta, to Pittsburgh, from Homewood, to East Liberty, to Wilkinsburg.
The person you see before you is not the person I was growing up. I often tell people when I was a probation officer, they asked me why did I want to be a probation officer, and I told them because the only difference between me and the kids that I arrest or work with is I- I didn’t get caught. I did the same thing many of these kids did. A kid that was engaged in a lot of activity that probably would be questionable. A lot of my friends did questionable things, and back then we used to have a saying that the hood is good. There was love in the hood, so there was a certain affinity with protecting the hood, but I also got my greatest lessons from people in the hood. For example, one day a drug dealer that I looked up to saw me staring at him one day when he was having a stand off with the police. And later, on he walked up to me and he said, “You want to be like me?” I said, “Yeah, you know, I see how the police respect you. Everybody respects you.” And he just broke it down to me and said, “You don’t want to have anything to do with me or people like me.” And he said “I heard you were a good student in school.” I said “Yes, I am.” And he encouraged me to remain being a good student and to not follow in his footsteps because he basically told me that the life that I see is not the life that he has, that he lives every day worrying that somebody’s gonna shoot him, to try to rob him, whether the police are going to be after him. And that although he’s driving nice cars and- and everything like that, that at the end of the day he don’t sleep at night because he’s always fearful that something’s going to happen. That really helped shape me as a young man and really like, everything that glitters isn’t gold kind of a perspective, and then it really helped me be receptive to being in school and being educated.
I graduated from high school with a 3.8 grade average, and a lot of people, because I was cutting up, they didn’t know I was that smart. When I got to college, I had a 3.8 grade average as well. I went to Edinboro University, Indiana University, I went to the University of Pitt and I went to Fayetteville State University.
I’m the associate director of program development for the Kingsley Association. My hope and aspiration is that vulnerable communities, and there are about 41 of them in the city of Pittsburgh, with 80,000 people in them, I hope and pray that the work that we do and the work that other people do help the communities transform in a way that our youth understand the benefit of technology, and that technology is used to enhance the quality of life and not drive the quality of life. Teaching vulnerable people what the impact of living in the sustainable communities is very important. Solar panels to reduce their energy use, stormwater mitigation and management to reduce their water usage, and also food production, so the notion of creating urban farms is critical as a way for us to provide. Alternative food, organic food, and locally grown food. If you look at these type of bills on a monthly basis, they often are what breaks a family’s back with regards to their ability to have a healthy quality in life.
I’ve buried 50 kids from gang violence. I had a kid down in my arms in 1981, I saw a black kid turn blue. So for me, I have a real strong pension. If I work with young people or the people I work with work with young people, I want to see them succeed and be successful. I also realize that everybody can’t do what you want them to do. They have to kind of grow into that. So I believe that you have to mentor and grow people to fulfill their Dharma and their purpose. We have an obligation to humanity to give our good skills and talents to other people, and the universe will always reward you for those contributions. And I’ve never seen that not happen.