Testimony : ONE PERSON’S STORY ABOUT EMPOWERMENT : ‘Let’s Look at the Inner City As an Opportunity’

John Bryant, 27, is chairman of the Bryant Group Companies in Century City. He is also a member of RLA, formerly Rebuild L.A., and was honored by President Bush in 1991 as a successful inner-city role model and entrepreneur.

I started my first business when I was 10 in the city of Compton. It was called The Neighborhood Candy House. I bummed $40 from my mother and went to the liquor store and got the guy there to teach me how to buy candy wholesale. I then went down to Iris Food Store and bought candy that I knew my friends would buy. They were all being late for school because they had to detour up to the liquor store to get the candy, but the store was selling the wrong kind.

As a kid, I knew what you should be buying. So we bought the right candy, had the right location and created a niche market and an opportunity, empowering ourselves with a job and with an income when we couldn’t get it from anyplace else. I made $300 a week at the height.

I went to one year of Los Angeles City College, so I didn’t have much formal education. I learned through the school of hard knocks. Tom Bradley’s aide Bill Elkins once told me, “John, you’re too dumb to fail. You’ve never been taught risk, you’ve never been taught what you cannot do.” So I never set limitations on myself. I didn’t wake up in the morning and say, “Gee, you’re black, you can’t do those things.”

I donate half my time to this organization called Operation Hope, which is part of the Los Angeles revitalization effort. We’ve put together 40 banks to lend in the urban areas, and we’ve made it our mission to become the voice for minority and urban economic empowerment.

A lot of black folks don’t feel good about themselves. And quite frankly white Americans have helped us accomplish that great feat and so we’re now trying to look at life from a standpoint of self-reliance and empowerment. It is a very difficult thing to do, but it can be helped greatly if the mainstream sees it in their best interest to do so, and for the first time in modern history all the dynamics have reached a point where it is in everybody’s best interest.

The next time you’re driving through South-Central, get off the freeway, go three blocks in either direction, hang a left or right and go down a residential street and you will see tree-lined, beautiful, well-maintained homes--private ownership. You don’t burn that which you own. Conversely you don’t give a damn about a system that you don’t participate in. There are reasons why things happen.

We need to use our diversity as a strength and stop using it to pit each of us against the other. There are more than 100 ethnicities in the city of Los Angeles. We can’t afford to be throwing rocks at each other. I’m suggesting that you stop just training folks for a job and start showing them how to build something, make something, own something, control something, buy something.

For example, in urban America you have underserved everything, I don’t know even where to start. Basic services. Gas stations; it would be nice if there was one more than every three miles. Grocery stores, corner markets, movie theaters, you’ve got one first-run theater in the Baldwin Hills Mall. Why don’t we have a six-plex at the Baldwin Hills Mall, why don’t we have an eight-plex in Lynwood, why don’t we have one in Compton?

If you treat the minority community as an afterthought, and if you market to them with public relations versus strategy, then they will give you back what you invested. If you treat the Community Reinvestment Act as a weight around your leg, or as a public relations afterthought, you’ll get back exactly what you put into it.

If you say to yourself, let’s look at the urban situation as an opportunity to create a market, create a profit center, and to do well and do good, then you will prosper, because anytime a successful entrepreneur focuses his energy or her energy in an area and commits resources, they will find a way to be profitable. This is not rocket science. People have done it. People are doing it. But you’ve got to make it a priority.

I’m telling business, don’t give me a handout, give me a hand. Don’t go in with a donation because it won’t last very long. And it’s condescending anyway. And I say to government, don’t come in with some big solution and drop it down with a parachute and keep going. Come in partnership with the private sector, take away some of that risk by creating credit enhancements, by creating public value. Lower the risk of doing business in the inner city; create paper profits. Provide some leadership, facilitate.

Bernard Kinsey, co-chairman of RLA, said that in white America the role model is a businessman but that in black America, you’ve got 26 million folks trying to be 200 athletes and 300 entertainers. You’ve got about as much chance of being a Michael Jordan as Grandma Moses. Somehow our role models have gotten screwed up. Somehow our priorities have gotten screwed up. I think a large part of it is that we’ve lost hope in the American Dream.

We’ve lost hope that we can buy into that and through competence we can excel at that. Where have we excelled? We’ve excelled in sports, we’ve excelled in the military, in government service, in the arts, why? Because there are finite rules of engagement. A hundred-yard dash is the same distance for you as it is for me; in the military I have the same test that you have to pass--either you check the boxes or you don’t. America would never think about not taking its best team into the world championship in some athletic competition, and that team is going to be highly minority. The only place we don’t take our best team is in corporate America. Why? Because there are no rules of engagement, it’s an old-boys network. It’s the way things are, it’s relationships and there are no advocates of color with any power to bring people into the system.

I didn’t get involved with the community because I’m running for anything. I just thought I needed to do the right thing. And all I did was exert some leadership, initiative, and take some action. And what I am suggesting is wherever you are in your corner of the world, that you take a problem and create a solution, that you do something, that you contribute somewhere, that you live for something a little bit larger than yourself.

What everybody needs to realize is that there are freeways, carjackings are coming your way, crime is coming your way, problems are coming your way. You cannot insulate yourself from it just by moving out of the city.

The problem is, you cannot put a Band-Aid on an amputated leg--the problem is too large and government has less and less of an ability to deal with it. It’s going to require more projects like RLA. RLA was a test--the first one that has ever been done in this country. I think they have made some mistakes, no doubt about it. But I think that they have humbled themselves to the task, they have the intelligence and the resources to do what needs to be done. We’ve never empowered people. Every time we go into an urban community we put up a monument, slap somebody’s name on it, throw some government employees in it. We never ask the community what they want, how they want it, how they are going to participate in it. No wonder it gets vandalized.

You’ve got to empower people. You’ve got to include people, you’ve got to listen to people, you’ve got to treat them as if they are intelligent, and give them some respect and give them something to fight for. Give them a reason to live. A purpose. Everybody has a place and a role to play in this world. Not everybody wants to be a Rockefeller. Not everybody wants to be a Michael Jackson. But they don’t know what their options are.

We need folks to provide human capital before they provide financial capital. We need the chairmen of banks to come down and do seminars in the community. We need this Harvard education to come down and mentor. Just give a little bit of yourself. Success breeds success.

To get involved with Operation Hope, call: (310) 843-5906.