The Young Black Leadership Summit's Origins and Impact

Showing 16 Young Black Leadership Summit videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.

The Young Black Leadership Summit grew out of an early effort by Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens to expand Turning Point USA's outreach beyond its mostly white campus base. Owens first outlined the initiative at a high school leadership summit attended by nearly a thousand students, part of a broader strategy of building coalitions rather than dismissing entire communities as unreachable. The summit became Kirk's standard rebuttal whenever accused of racism on campus — he cited it directly during one heated exchange with a protestor who pointed to his association with Black conservatives like Owens, Ben Carson, and Larry Elder as evidence of prejudice rather than outreach.

Chandler Crump's own story illustrated the summit's lasting impact firsthand. He met Kirk at age 14 at the first Young Black Leadership Summit in 2018, an encounter he said launched his own activism and shaped a friendship he carried for a third of his life before Kirk's assassination. The summit also became Turning Point USA's defense when Texas State University's student government voted to ban the organization from campus over accusations of promoting racism, with Kirk pointing to the summit's scale, alongside a parallel Young Latino Leadership Summit, as evidence the university administration ultimately cited when overruling the ban and upholding the organization's right to operate on campus.