Leadership Montgomery was born from the ashes of "The Todd Road Incident" which occurred in Montgomery, Alabama February 28, 1983.  The Todd Road Incident (see resources below for further details) racially divided the city and tore at the fabric of the community.   As a result, the Founders of Leadership Montgomery, known as the Original Steering Committee, sought to bring together a diverse group of community leaders to embrace change, leverage diversity and address critical community issues.  More importantly than the issues of the times leaders in the "white " community and leaders in the "black" community did not know one another and it was glaringly obvious a mechanism was needed to rectify this disconnect and the solution was Leadership Montgomery. 

The Original Steering Committee set out to bring a class of forty individuals together; composed to ten (10) black men, ten (10) white men, ten (10) black women, and ten (10) white women, together for a year, meeting one-time per month during the program.  The program was designed to offer the participants a safe environment to learn about the various aspects of the community and to voice openly and freely their perspectives and concerns with one another in hope to work together for a better community for all.  The outcome of bringing the leaders together was each side discovered they were both concerned about the same things; education, jobs and quality of life.  The greater outcome was they made friends, true friends, come over to my house, meet my family and kids friends. 

Leadership Montgomery has assembled and graduated over 1,600 community leaders from the original program, now called the Legacy Class, and our young professionals program, the Torchbearers Class (Formed 2008).  

An amazing outcome of participating in Leadership Montgomery is anyone of these individuals can pick up the phone, send an email, text, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn communication to a fellow graduate of the program and have an instant connection with someone who might otherwise be a stranger and get things done in the River Region.  Now, that is "connectivity". 

Leadership Montgomery "connecting leaders to effect change".

The Todd Road Incident | February 28, 1983