Hundreds of students, educators and policymakers flocked to a three-day summit in Tampa, Florida, over the weekend to focus on how best to empower Black and Latino men in college.
Now, in its fourteenth year, the Black Brown & College Bound (BBCB) summit — sponsored by Hillsborough Community College — continues to be one of the nation’s largest convenings that highlights the challenges African American and Latino male college students continue to face. More than 5,000 students have participated in the annual summit since it first launched in 2006.
Over the last decade and a half, the summit has emerged as the preeminent forum to address the unique barriers facing minority males when it comes to academic success, said Dr. Ken Atwater, president of Hillsborough Community College.
This year’s gathering included talks by Drs. Frank Harris and J. Luke Wood of San Diego State University (SDSU); author and television commentator Juan Williams, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas; Ndaba Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela and co-founder and co-chairman of the Africa Rising Foundation and television journalist John Quiñones.
“You flower where you are planted,” said Williams, author of Eyes on the Prize, My Soul Looks Back In Wonder and a 1998 biography of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. “Make the best of a situation so you position yourself for future opportunities. You will then have exceeded the limitations people have tried to put on you.” 
Williams told the attendees that much progress has been made in the fight for civil rights over the past few decades but urged the young men to continue to push for social change.
“Yes, you can be like Dr. King,” he said, referring to the iconic civil rights leader who was gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis in the spring of 1968. “Education and activism leads to things that people didn’t think was possible a generation ago. You can make a difference in your age.”
