Bret Eynon

I’m pleased to celebrate African Heritage because Africans and African-Americans are so important in my life – my friends, my community, my culture and my world. In my lifetime, African-Americans led one of the most creative, powerful and impressive social movements this country has ever seen, and as a result my life and my world were transformed. The African-American struggle for justice and democracy has been a touchstone for me, inspiring my scholarship and my work as an educator. I learned from that movement something profound about what it means to combine a moral vision with strategy, creativity with effective action. In Mississippi in the early 1960s, Bob Moses and Fannie Lou Hamer and their partners created Freedom Schools, empowering thousands of young people to improve themselves and change the world. My hope is that LaGuardia is Freedom School for today, and for the global generation to come.