My name is Jaunaye Connell, and I’m currently in the eighth grade at Bedford Stuyvesant Collegiate. My family is mainly from England, but also branches out to various parts of the Caribbean. In seventh grade, my class read Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, which was about a young lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to help Black men who were wrongly incarcerated. I admire Stevenson because he and everyone at EJI tell the true, traumatizing story of racism and how our society has been shaped by our troubled past. My mother and grandmother are my heroes because all my life they’ve steered me in the right direction and never left my side. In the future, I want to be a teacher or lawyer to ensure my students get a quality education and my clients have their rights protected. In generally, I want to fight for a more equal society because that’s a huge part of my morals.

My favorite civil rights activist is Martin Luther King, Jr. because he truly stood against the mistreatment of Black Americans. He remained motivated and persevered even while people plotted his downfall. In 1963 MLK delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which over 200,000 people attended. My favorite part of this speech was when King said “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

I recently joined the BK2BAMA program, which strives to shape confident, active kids by exposing them to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s through 1970s. BK2BAMA engages their young students in the effort to make America a better, safer, and more equal place. I joined BK2BAMA to understand my true past and dig deeper into my history as a proud Black American. I’m especially ecstatic to meet some foot soldiers who played a big part in the Civil Rights Movement. For example, we’re going to meet Dr. Viola Bradford, who worked as a journalist to expose what life was really like for Black southerners in rural Alabama. In fact, she reminds me of the Progressive Era muckrakers we’ve been studying in history.