I Too Am America
On Loving and Leading Black Men & Boys
There is no cavalry coming!
We are the iconic leaders we have been waiting for; curators of the change we're seeking to see.
America is currently rumbling with a reckoning on race and wonder whether it will finally reconcile its history of systemic oppression of its Black citizens, who have helped build this country. The 2020 murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, in the midst of a global pandemic ignited a wave of racial justice protests and activism analogous to how the murder of Emmett Till in August 1954 sparked the Civil Rights Movement 65 years ago.
We are facing the fierce urgency of empathy and the overdue dismantling of long-standing barriers that prevent Black people from realizing their full potential in America. Research from the Opportunity Agenda reveals that stories of our lived experiences, more so than data and numbers, is what evokes the empathy that changes hearts and minds that might push us further toward "a more perfect union."
I Too Am America: On Loving and Leading Black Men and Boys, written by Shawn Dove and Nick Chiles, delivers timely insights and inspiration that humanizes the stories of Black men and boys, while offering strategic recommendations on how together we can from our current rumblings with a racial reckoning to loving, learning and leading with and on behalf of Black men and boys.
Shawn Dove is the founder of the Corporation for Black Male Achievement, a consulting and publishing enterprise that produces community-building and leadership engagements that amplify stories of loving, learning and leading Black men and boys. Previously he led the Campaign for Black Male Achievement, a national intermediary membership organization committed to ensuring the growth, impact and sustainability of leaders and organizations committed to improving the life outcomes for Black men and boys, including supporting the launch of President Obama's My Brother's Keeper Initiative.
During his career journey, he has served in leadership roles with the Open Society Foundations, Harlem Children's Zone, The DOME Project; First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, NJ; the National Guild for Community Schools of the Arts; and MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership. He was awarded Black Enterprise's inaugural 2017 "BE Modern Man of the Year," and Ebony Magazine's Power 100 in 2016. Dove is also a recipient of the Charles H. Revson Fellowship at Columbia University and awarded a Prime Movers Fellowship for social impact leaders.
A graduate of Wesleyan University and Columbia University Business School's Institute for Not-for-Profit Management, Dove currently lives in New Jersey with his wonderful wife, Desere, and four adulting children, Nia, Maya, Cameron and Caleb. Nick Chiles is a bestselling author and an award-winning journalist. He is the author or co-author of 20 books, including three New York Times bestsellers he wrote with R&B icon Bobby Brown, civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton and gospel legend Kirk Franklin. He is the co-author with Academy Award-winning actor Jamie Foxx of the parenting memoir, Act Like You Got Some Sense, and the co-author with Atlanta attorney Robbin Shipp of Justice While Black: Helping African-American Families Navigate and Survive the Criminal Justice System, which was a finalist for a 2015 NAACP Image Award. Chiles served as a newspaper reporter (mostly covering education), magazine writer, and magazine and website editor-in-chief during more than three decades in journalism, winning nearly 20 major awards—including a 1992 Pulitzer Prize as part of a New York Newsday team. He has served as a professor at Columbia Journalism School and at Princeton University. He is a consultant for the William Julius Wilson Institute at the Harlem Children's Zone. He currently teaches journalism at the University of Georgia. Chiles, a graduate of Yale, lives in Decatur, Georgia, with his wife Sadiqa Chiles.
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