About US
Our Founder
ROBERT EAGER
Own Your History® was originated by Robert Eager, a teacher and a Stanford Ph.D. historian, who became a practicing lawyer, and is once again an educator. His passion for fact-based history education and reconciliation is fueled by his family heritage and a desire to address the country’s longstanding divisions.
Bob attended segregated schools from kindergarten through his freshman year at Vanderbilt University. In 1961, the courage of Freedom Riders led him to reject Jim Crow and support the end of segregation. He was chairman of the IMPACT Symposium at Vanderbilt in 1967, and brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Stokeley Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to speak on campus. Bob received his BA from Vanderbilt in 1967.
MLK and Stokeley Carmichael at Vanderbilt IMPACT Symposium, Nashville, Tennessee, 1967
He subsequently taught social studies in a New York City high school and earned a Ph.D. in U.S. History from Stanford University in 1978, under advisers Carl N. Degler and David M. Kennedy.
Bob received his law degree from Georgetown in Washington D.C. He was a practicing attorney and partner with the international firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP from 1982-2014.
After retiring from Gibson Dunn and law, he returned to education, establishing The Reconciliation Education Project, Inc. (REP) as a section 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit, & began to create OYH. A 2013 challenge grant established The Mandela Fund at the McCallie School in Chattanooga, TN. It brings challenging outside speakers to campus and fosters school activities encouraging reconciliation. The first Mandela speaker was Rep. John Lewis in 2014.
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
— Maya Angelou
Left: Congressman John Lewis with Bob Eager at McCallie, 2014
Through OYH, Bob has come to "own" a family history that parallels our nation's best and worst: a slave-owning New York Founding Father, antebellum & Jim Crow Southern Governors, and the Quaker railroad tycoon founder of a segregated university and hospital that served all patients. While not responsible for actions of his forebears, Bob acknowledges his family's past. His inheritance of this “hard history” informed the development of OYH as a program advancing values of justice and equity for all Americans.
TEAM MEMBERS
Since its inception in 2014, OYH has benefited from the commitment and work of informed advisors and part-time contributors who share a belief in its mission.
Advisors have included history professors from various universities; teachers, principals, and curriculum specialists from one of the country's largest public school districts; executives & program leaders of Boys & Girls clubs; and lawyers, academics & business executives who have longstanding commitments to civil rights, history education, and youth development.
OYHL modules have been researched, drafted, and edited in collaboration with a doctoral candidate at The George Washington University, a masters graduate of California State University at Northridge, and two doctoral candidates at the University of California - Irvine. Two retired 30-year history teachers/curriculum specialists in the Los Angeles Unified School District have edited and revised OYHL modules for use by public school teachers.
The Own It! program has benefited from significant contributions by experienced Boys & Girls Club staff members, a media executive turned playwright, and a life coach specializing in leadership & personal development training.
“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”
— James Baldwin