This is a tale of two young black men whose paths, for a time, were almost identical.
Johnny Johnson works a regular 40-hour-a-week job that pays him, at best, only in the thousands of dollars.
Rapper 50 Cent has made millions.
But Johnson is far richer than Curtis James Jackson III, better known as the rapper 50 Cent.
Both are 30 years old. 50 Cent was born July 6, 1975, not in 1976 or 1977 like some Internet websites erroneously claim.
Both started slinging drugs in their early teens, Jackson in Queens, N.Y. and Johnson in West Baltimore. Both were arrested and spent some time behind bars. Both dropped out of high school.
It is there that the similarity ends.
Jackson, through a combination of talent and luck, hit it big in the rap game. He has a string of hit records, a bundle of money and an autobiography that just hit bookstores a few weeks ago.
In the book, called “From Pieces To Weight: Once Upon A Time in Southside Queens,” the guy known as either 50 or Fiddy tells us just how he feels about education. He learned all the math he ever needed to know, he informs us, when he learned how to cut his first kilo of cocaine.
Fiddy said school was nothing more than a fashion show for him. He went to show off the clothes he bought with his drug money. To paraphrase the writer H.L. Mencken, the “itch to learn things didn’t afflict him.”
Johnson got out of the drug game in his late teens, after an undercover narc cut a rare deal with him: get out of the neighborhood, the cop told Johnson, and return to school, and he wouldn’t arrest him for drug dealing.
So Johnson took evening and weekend classes at a Baltimore high school to get his GED (Fiddy got his while he was doing time, not on his own initiative.). Once that was done, Johnson enrolled in Baltimore City Community College. From there he went to Coppin State College — now Coppin State University — one of the finest historically black schools in the nation.
Johnson got his bachelor’s degree in political science from Coppin. He followed that with a master’s degree in human services administration from the University of Baltimore. He’s currently taking classes at Howard University to earn his doctorate.
Needless to say, Johnson’s take on education is far different from Fiddy’s. Johnson remembers those black folks who never got a shot at a good education. Fiddy, whose people come from South Carolina, a state that once passed a law preventing black folks from being educated, seems to have forgotten his ancestors.
“My degrees are for all those people who were denied degrees or the chance to get them,” Johnson told me recently, “and for those who feel it’s impossible.”
But it’s Johnson’s work that makes him a far richer man than Fiddy ever will be. While Jackson is offering up salacious and ultimately worthless fare like “Candy Shop” and “Just A Little Bit” to his adoring fans, Johnson works at Project PLASE in Baltimore. PLASE stands for “People Lacking Ample Shelter and Employment.”
Johnson works with the mentally ill, the homeless and, yes, drug addicts. He recognizes the pain and suffering he caused when he dealt drugs in Baltimore.
“I used to hold myself partly responsible for what happened,” Johnson said of Baltimore’s drug scene, which is far worse than anything depicted on the HBO series “The Wire.” He is using his education to help restore the lives he helped reduce to shambles.
When he’s not doing that, he’s helping his seven-year-old son’s classmates with their homework when he visits the boy’s school or coaching a youth football team. Johnson is helping to solve, through personal involvement, problems that Fiddy is just throwing money at through his G-Unity Foundation.
That’s the essence of the difference between the two. Johnson took whatever opportunities were available to him and made good on them. Fiddy, in “From Pieces To Weight,” offered only excuses. He slung drugs, he whined, because there were no good jobs available in Queens.
Maybe one day, 50 Cent will realize -- as Johnson has -- that good jobs come only with education and marketable skills.
