U.S. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries urges 5000 Role Models to ‘press on’ at annual MLK breakfast
U.S. Rep. and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) delivered a keynote speech to the 5000 Role Models of Excellence members that evoked the journey of Martin Luther King Jr. urging them to have the courage to continue even when times are tough.
“We know that this is a moment of great challenge here in our community, in the county and in the country, throughout the world, turbulent times are in front of us,” Jeffries said with the cadence of a Baptist preacher. He continued, urging the young men to “summon the strength and the resilience of a Dr. King and those civil rights heroes, the strength and resilience that Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, that your mentors and role models have shown, that you all have shown to get to this point on the brink of taking the next step in your higher education and professional journey to press on.”
Jeffries encouraged the young men to “press on” in the face of adversity at the 32nd Annual 5000 Role Models of Excellence Foundation’s Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Breakfast at the Miami Beach Convention Center on Saturday. Jeffries recounted Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal journey, connecting it to the civil rights Black residents now have as a result of King’s perseverance.
The breakfast serves as the cornerstone event of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend in South Florida, honoring Black and brown youth and mentors in the region. Typically held on the King holiday, this year’s festivities were moved to Saturday, avoiding conflict with Inauguration Day.
U.S. Rep. Frederica Wilson founded the organization in 1993, when she was a Miami-Dade County School Board member, out of a need to decrease the school-to-prison pipeline among young Black and brown boys. The program seeks to provide educational opportunities and mentorship to students in South Florida and has since expanded to other areas in the U.S., most recently in the Los Angeles.
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Wilson touted the success of the program, saying that often mothers and grandmothers stop her and thank her for instituting the program. “We steer little boys on a carefully chartered course and bring them up on that carefully chartered course to manhood, and then we send them to college,” she said, donning a gold hat.
The organization honored four elected officials, North Miami mayor Alix Desulme, North Miami Beach mayor Michael Joseph, Miami-Dade County commissioner and vice chair Kionne McGhee and Miami-Dade Commissioner Oliver Gilbert. Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust Chairman Ron Book and the Arc of the City Foundation founders Terry and Sherria Elliott were also honored at the event. The organization also received a check for $250,000 from CareerSource South Florida that will go toward scholarships.
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Also among the honorees Saturday was Wilson’s son, Paul V. Wilson Jr. who followed in his mother’s footsteps working as an educator before becoming a consultant. Wilson said it hadn’t occurred to her to honor her son until recently.
“When I started the 5000 Role Models, he was a little boy and I used to come home at night out of my mind,” she said, recalling a time when she wanted to stop her work with the organization to focus on him. “He said, ‘Mommy you can’t do that. Do you think that the president cares about these little black boys…nobody cares about them but you. You give this up, what are these boys going to do?’”
Wilson told anecdotes of each of the honorees, but particularly recalled fondly how the program shaped each of the elected officials honored, rattling off memories of how the men joined the program in their youth or how she came to know them. “I’ve watched these children grow up,” she said, affectionately. “How do you think I feel?”
After the breakfast, Wilson said she’s looking to continue expanding the program, which already has spread to other parts of Florida and Detroit. She has her eyes set on Nashville, Minneapolis and the Bahamas. She hopes the expansion helps continue to address the school-to-prison pipeline.
“The difficulty with the 5000 Role Models is this: Unless you experience it, you don’t get it. People don’t understand prevention,” she said. “They understand criminal justice. ‘Oh, I have a brother in prison’ or ‘oh, I have a cousin in jail.’ They understand that, but they don’t understand what they could have done for that brother and that cousin to prevent them from going to jail.”
This story was originally published January 18, 2025 at 4:04 PM.
