Kimont Person, affectionately known as ‘Monty,’ typically carries himself with a wide smile and an encouraging twinkle in his eye. At Valley Stream Central High School—one of Long Island’s most racially diverse schools —the 17-year-old feels at home among peers who both look like him and those who don’t.
But at a recent ERASE Racism student conference, the Black student leader’s face tightened as he admitted that, beyond school walls, he hasn’t always felt safe.
“Here on Long Island, I’ve seen a guy on a motorcycle wearing a helmet covered in the Confederate flag,” he said—an unsubtle nod to the legacy of the South’s troubled racial past. Then there was the man in a McDonald’s in the city, pounding the window with his belt, hurling the N-word. Down South, he says he’s been flat-out denied a seat in restaurants.
It’s the “sad reality of racism,” as he calls it, but Monty says he wants to ensure the weight of racism doesn’t dim who he is, and he found the conference has made an impact. Awakening students to their capacity for leadership and providing practical steps to confront racial injustice was the goal of the 2025 Long Island Leaders for Tomorrow Conference at Hofstra University on March 14.
ERASE Racism NY, which advocates for racial equality via education, legal challenges to entrenched racism, and community organizing, sponsored the conference.
Ten high schools sent groups of eight to ten students to the conference. Through two breakout sessions, a presentation by a Hofstra student leader, and a campus tour, the attendees developed a vision for advancing racial equity at their high schools and learned practical steps for implementing their vision.
“We’ve been doing this every year for the past eight years,” said Sherley Cherenfant, comptroller and operations manager at ERASE Racism. “We have a student task force, a yearly summer paid internship program [Student Leaders for Equity Internship], and a yearly essay contest that distributes scholarships for college.”
The students who attended Friday’s workshop participated in two breakout sessions, where they sat down with students from other high schools, discussed what they would like to see changed around issues of race, and articulated how the changes would improve their schools. Some students pushed for more support for newly arrived Hispanic students struggling with English. Others called for more teachers of color in classrooms who can better relate to and connect with minority students.
Between sessions, the president of B.L.A.C., Nigerian-American Hofstra senior Favor Chibuzo-Enwere, delivered a 30-minute slide presentation entitled “Moving from Vision to Action.”
“Our mission at B.L.A.C. is to promote the creation of an inclusive and equitable Hofstra campus,” Chibuzo-Enwere said. “We advocate for the needs of black students and POC, and we work with students, faculty and administrators to forward our political goals.”
The slide presentation covered the steps for developing goals, contacting authorities, networking with other organizations, setting up mentoring relationships with professionals as students approach graduation, and creating outreach events to foster community among students from differing backgrounds.
“What has been most important,” said Nicole Grennan, community organizer for ERASE Racism, “is to enable the students to take themselves seriously as leaders.”
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