Until recently I always looked at myself as somebody that embodied Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Dream” (Though many that know me would say Post-Nation Malcolm). I come from a segregated, poverty stricken Brooklyn Housing Project, to having the privilege of receiving a high school, college and graduate school education from some of our nation’s most esteemed institutions that had previously been reserved for the wealthy and White.

I was brought to my high school as part of an attempt to increase diversity at a prep school that counted only 4% of its students as non-white. The efforts to recruit kids like me (deserving kids of color from NYC that just had not been afforded the opportunity to attend institutions that frankly we were both unaware of and ill equipped to pay for) became the eventual life work of a man who encapsulated Martin’s dream. John Hoffman was of Jewish descent, but he promoted the dream as a means of giving back as well paying it forward. READ MORE