During the mid to late 1960s, Martin Luther King, Jr., paid several visits to my small hometown of Grenada, Mississippi, about 100 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee, to promote African American voter registration and to help desegregate Grenada’s public schools. I was one of the young people profoundly influenced by those life-changing visits.

There is a direct line leading from King’s time in our rural town of Grenada during the contentious civil rights era to the new location of the Student African American Brotherhood (SAAB) headquarters in Springfield, Missouri, more than 50 years later. In the aspirational group I founded, SAAB, or Brother-to-Brother, is an organization devoted to helping young men of color finish high school and get into college, ensuring that they graduate, and encouraging them to extend a helping hand to others and give back to their community. SAAB embraces an ecological framework recognizing that the fate of young men of color is not solely in their hands. We teach our young men that they are a part of a larger community that must be conscious of its capacity to change the systems and conditions of which it is a part, and they must take ownership as they promote practices, policies, and behaviors for improving opportunities for themselves as well as for others.