Aswad Thomas was born on the north end of Hartford, Connecticut. He grew up in a single-parent home along with four older brothers. He lived in a community riddled with systemic and personal barriers that provided little to no hope for young men of color. Despite these obstacles, Aswad went on to excel in the classroom and on the basketball court at Elms College in Chicopee, MA.
During his basketball career, Aswad helped lead the men’s basketball team to the program’s first-ever and school’s first-ever victory in the NCAA Division III tournament and was the NCAA Division III Statistical Champion in steals per game.
On May 6, 2009, Aswad became the first male in his family to graduate from college with a Bachelor's Degree. On August 24, 2009, just three weeks from going to Europe to play professional basketball, his life changed forever. He became a victim of gun violence. As he left a convenience store, two men approached him, intending to rob him. After a brief scuffle, eight shots were fired as he tried to run back into the store. Two bullets pierced through his back, collapsing his lungs, dislocating his shoulder, and just missing his spinal cord and aorta by inches. These two near-fatal gunshots to his back ended his basketball career. He was released from the hospital back into the same community where the incident happened with little support to heal from this tragedy.
After years of physical and emotional pain, he started a new journey in his life by becoming one of the nation's most outspoken supporters of additional resources for victims of violence in urban communities and has been a leader in building coalitions across racial lines to address criminal justice reform and violence prevention.
In 2015, Aswad graduated from the University of Connecticut School of Social Work with a Master’s Degree in Social Work and later made Connecticut history by becoming the first student ever to win the NASW-CT Chapter Social Worker of the Year award while still being enrolled in school.
Aswad’s story has been featured in the New York Times, Time Magazine, The Hill, New Yorker Magazine, NBC LX, MSNBC, NBCLX, Huffington Post, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Trace, Detroit Free Press, The Guardian, NPR, VICE, The Marshall Project, Hartford Courant, and dozens of other media outlets.
He is currently the Managing Director at Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, a flagship project of the Alliance for Safety and Justice. He helps expand a national network of crime survivors to include those most commonly affected by violence, including young men of color, and help elevate those voices in local, state, and federal policymaking debates.
Aswad is the Co-Founder of King & Queen Publishing, creator of the Black Men That Write Podcast and author of The Stars Represent You and Me. Aswad received an MSW, with a Community Organizing concentration from the University of Connecticut and a B.A. from Elms.
