Litzi Duran
Contributing Writer
On Friday, Feb. 4, at 11:30 a.m., Black student organizations took over Social Hall to celebrate the beauty of Black History in an engaging and COVID safe way.
For the first time, The National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC), the Black Student Union (BSU), the Black World Studies Academic Club, and the Center for Cultural Liberation (CCL) all collaborated to make this event a reality.
Around 50 students met leaders of Dominican’s Black student organizations, where they listened to music from DJ Dapper, and ate traditional Black foods like jerk chicken from Three-Ds Jerk Chicken or baked chicken from 6978 Soul Food.
All the clubs and organizations at the event had their own table station and were spread out in Social Hall. Some of the activities at each station were a ring toss game by the NACWC, trivia where BSU had a Family Feud style game show testing how many iconic Black figures and Black superhero characters students could name, and the CCL tested students on naming historical Black leaders for a chance to enter a Chicago Bulls ticket raffle.
Student and BSU member, Morgan Lanton, who is majoring in communication studies and has a minor in Black World Studies,
“I love BSU. Being Black is like a major thing for me and being a part of BSU provides that [representation] because we only have like 4% of Black people,” she said. “You really want people to have that outlet, and feel like they have a place, where you [can] be seen and heard amongst everybody else…I think [it is] really fun to have these events during Black History Month because it kind of gets overshadowed by Mardi Gras or Valentine’s Day and there is just so much history and things that we are not being taught in school so being able to teach these things is just great.”
According to Gabby Nicholas, Assistant Director of the Center for Cultural Liberation, planning for the event began before the end of the 2021 fall semester.
Originally, all the organizations wanted students to be able to dance and eat in Social Hall, but the rising cases of the omicron variant urged them to take a different approach. This was when Nicholas had the idea to model the event after DU Fest, for the sake of the health and safety of students.
“We wanted to make it a great food and music festival with the goal of kicking off Black History Month with food, music, activities, and community and just celebrating Black joy and all the amazing organizations we have on campus in a fun and safe way,” Nicholas said.
Each student had to go around the Social Hall counterclockwise to connect with each organization one by one to collect a ticket from each table. Going table by table helped to prevent overcrowding. Students had to collect five tickets to be able to get a meal in the end, where they chose between Soul Food or Jamaican food. All the meals were prepackaged for students to take to eat socially distanced from others in the Dining Hall.
Overall, the hosts of the event said they were happy with the turnout after facing the obstacle of rising COVID-19 cases and weather-related two-day closure of campus earlier in the week.
Kymbrea Valrey, Madam President of the NACWC, expressed, “Amongst those that were attending, I feel like the biggest take away was just learning the different cultures and just taking in consideration that we are all similar just in a different way,” she said. “It makes [others] aware that we are still here and that we are all one regardless of what race or ethnicity we are.”
lduran1@my.dom.edu
