Walking onto the campus of Harvard University, 26-year-old Brandon Fleming was overcome with the gravity of his past, present and future. After dropping out of high school due to a basketball injury, finally landing at one of the most prestigious universities in the world to coach their highly acclaimed debate program seemed surreal. He’d put in work to recover from the feeling of crippling failure and arrive at this proud moment. But being here, in such dramatic contrast from where he’d come, Brandon couldn’t help but remember so many just like him. And for that matter, a question began to form – one that surely he wasn’t the first to ask… where WERE all the black people?

And soon after came an answer: why wonder, when he could bring them along?

His experience tutoring students in Georgia had given him first-hand knowledge of just how much things could change for kids who were given the tools and opportunity to succeed. But without intervention, that was most unlikely in Atlanta, the Bloomberg-described “inequality capital of the United States.” So with his past and present circumstances well in mind, a little persuasion and lots of fundraising, the permission of his new employers at the Harvard Debate Council Summer Workshops, and the help of countless other professionals who’d been in his shoes elsewhere, Brandon created an intensive 10-month “diversity pipeline to recruit, train & feed students of color into the Harvard Debate Council’s Summer Institute” – a program he named the Harvard Debate Council Diversity Project.

Designed to help Atlanta’s best, brightest and most marginalized “gain a level playing field in society and leading academic, social, and political institutions” where black Americans are still struggling for representation, Brandon’s coaching has led 120 students in his Harvard Diversity Project to do much more than just level the playing field. In their inaugural 2018 summer cohort at Harvard, the Diversity Project WON, becoming the only all-black debate team in the program’s now 128-year history to do so.

Their success might have shocked the other 100 competing teams from 15 countries, and perhaps even the Atlanta kids themselves. The viral news on nearly every media outlet was proof that it shocked the country. But of course, the one person who wasn’t surprised at all was their coach, Brandon Fleming.

From day one, he knew that compared to the preparatory and internationally educated students they were competing against, his were “just as good, just as talented & it [was] up to us to create opportunities for them to show the world exactly that.”

But Brandon’s always been clear that when it comes to opportunity, there’s only so much that he or Harvard can do. “Be intrusive in places that are not inclusive,” he insists. “Trailblazers don’t wait for opportunities – they create them.”

And intrude they have. Not only did Brandon’s second year cohort at the Harvard Debate Council Summer Tournament win AGAIN in 2019, his championship team went undefeated, by all accounts dominating the competition.

In words shared by one of his scholars, Brandon identified that “academic debate is the single most powerful tool that equips students to increase standardized testing, gpa, and overall college readiness but most importantly, the intellectual and socioemotional skills needed to emerge as world leaders and changemakers.”

And when it comes to being a changemaker, the man who embodies his mantra “excellence is attainable” by inviting black students to claim their seat with him at one of the oldest and most exclusive debate circles in America couldn’t be a better example of how much can change for so many when just one makes himself heard.

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