Education

Students get scholarships, acceptance letters at Black College Expo

WAVE NEWSPAPERS — More than 15,000 high school students met with representatives from more than 200 colleges and universities.

Published

6 years ago

February 12, 2019

Oakland Post

By Shirley Hawkins

LOS ANGELES — Students from Riverside, San Diego and Orange County made their way to the Los Angeles Convention Center Feb. 2 for the 20th annual Black College Expo.

More than 15,000 high school students met with representatives from more than 200 colleges and universities including Ivy League schools and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) from across the country.

“The Expo started as a dream and a passion of mine,” said Theresa Price, founder of the expo who said that years ago, she was not aware that HCBUs even existed.

“Once I discovered historically black colleges and universities, I wanted to spread the history and legacy of these great schools,” she said. “It is great to see the students so happy and excited to attend the expo and I wanted students from all over the world to know about it.”

Some schools were able to check high school transcripts of students at the expo and hand out acceptance letters on the spot.

During a seminar titled “How to Get Money for College,” Gloria Ponce Rodriguez of the National College Resources Foundation said that there are billions of dollars available for high school students who want to attend colleges and universities, particularly if they come from impoverished backgrounds.

“There are all kinds of resources and money out there, especially for the African-American male,” she said while distributing a brochure filled with information about how to receive money for college.

“There’s state, federal, institutional and private scholarships available,” she added.

“If you’re currently enrolled in ROTC at your school, ROTC money is available. If you want to become a teacher, you can get a teaching grant as long as your grade point average is 3.2.”

“If your family makes less than $65,000 a year, you can go to Harvard, Princeton or Yale. There are also the Supplemental Education Opportunity Grant and the Pell grant, which offers students $6,095 in free money as well as schools that also offer work-study programs,” Rodriguez said.

“If a student really wants to go to college, the opportunities are definitely there,” Rodriguez said. “There are at least 80 colleges across the country that will offer you a pathway to acquiring an education, particularly if you come from a disadvantaged background.”

Rodriguez shared her own story, revealing that she only had a 1.1 grade average when she dropped out of high school to care for her six siblings.

“But I knew I was a smart cookie,” she said. “I finally went back to school and earned my GED.”

Rodriguez applied for and was accepted at Norfolk State College in Norfolk, Virginia. “After improving my grade point average, I received a full fellowship and majored in special education. I pursued my degree while I raised my special needs child,” said Rodriguez, who eventually became the admissions director at Norfolk.

“Don’t ever give up,” she told the students.

During the day-long event, a number of speakers who had attended HBCUs said that they formed close bonds with their alma maters that will last forever.

“I visited the University of Southern California and no one was going the extra mile to interact with Jawanza Harris,” said one speaker. “But when I went to Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia they said, ‘You’re great. We see something in you.’ The difference is your people surround you and affirm you,” he said.

“At HBCUs, they teach you about the rich legacy of African Americans that are not in the history books,” Harris added. “My HBCU experience taught me that there are great black people all around us.”

Amer Walton, who attended Bowie State College in Prince Georges County, Maryland, agreed.

“Most of your lawyers, doctors and judges graduated from HBCUs,” Walton said. “HBCUs help you to maximize your potential.”

Dozens of students flocked to a booth to pick up literature from Black College Tours, which was founded 30 years ago by Gregory and Yasmin Delahoussaye. The tour arranges for high school students to visit different colleges across the country each summer.

“I realized that young people would have a better chance to go to college if they knew that HBCUs existed,” said Gregory Delahoussaye, who estimated that nearly 5,000 students have taken the tour.

Seventeen-year-old Da’Shawn Lennan eagerly handed out literature detailing information about Miles College, an HBCU in Fairfield, Alabama.

“When I was still attending Pete Knight High School in Palmdale, I visited Miles College and they had the major I wanted, which was business,” said Lennan, who applied to Miles and was accepted at the school.

“I am so glad to see young people attending this expo,” said Lennan as he surveyed the crowd. “This is a great opportunity for seniors and juniors from high school to get acquainted with different schools from across the country.”

Eighteen-year-old Prosper Egbador, a student at Aquinas High School in San Bernardino who emigrated from Nigeria at 16, proudly walked away with an acceptance letter from Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Texas.

“It feels great to be accepted — this is a dream come true. Not a lot of people get this opportunity, but God helped me, and here I am — I’m going to college,” he said, eagerly clutching his acceptance letter.

Brandon Lee said that after checking his high school transcripts, admission personnel at Tuskeegee University in Tuskeegee, Alabama, also offered him an acceptance letter.

“I want to major in mechanical engineering,” said Lee, who traveled from San Gorgonio Hugh School in San Bernardino, to attend the expo. “I’m really looking forward to the atmosphere, culture and climate at Tuskeegee.”

Towards the end of the Expo, 25 high school students were led to the stage and presented with scholarships ranging from $250 to $2,500. They were greeted with loud applause from the audience.

“In order to win a scholarship, the students had to write an essay about why they wanted to go to college,” Price said.

Nicole Tinson, a speaker at the “Boom Careers” workshop, told the students, “Don’t be discouraged. You can have a 2.0 [grade point average] but you can recreate your grade point average. There’s lots of opportunities, internships, jobs and resources out there. You just have to make a plan and apply yourself.”

This article originally appeared in the Wave Newspapers.

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Art

Brown University Professor and Media Artist Tony Cokes Among MacArthur Awardees

When grants were announced earlier this month, it was noted that seven of the 22 fellows were African American. Among them are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit. Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the third in the series highlighting the Black awardees.

Published

1 day ago

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Oakland Post

Tony Cokes. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Special to The Post

Tony Cokes

Tony Cokes, 68, is a media artist creating video works that recontextualize historical and cultural moments. Cokes’s signature style is deceptively simple: changing frames of text against backgrounds of solid bright colors or images, accompanied by musical soundtracks.

Cokes was born in Richmond, Va., and received a BA in creative writing and photography from Goddard College in 1979 and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1985. He joined the faculty of Brown University in 1993 and is currently a professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media.

According to Wikipedia, Cokes and Renee Cox, and Fo Wilson, created the Negro Art Collective (NAC) in 1995 to fight cultural misrepresentations about Black Americans.^[^5]

His work has been exhibited at national and international venues, including Haus Der Kunst and Kunstverein (Munich); Dia Bridgehampton (New York); Memorial Art Gallery University of Rochester; MACRO Contemporary Art Museum (Rome); and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (Harvard University), among others.

Like a DJ, he samples and recombines textual, musical, and visual fragments. His source materials include found film footage, pop music, journalism, philosophy texts, and social media. The unexpected juxtapositions in his works highlight the ways in which dominant narratives emerging from our oversaturated media environments reinforce existing power structures.

In his early video piece Black Celebration (A Rebellion Against the Commodity) (1988), Cokes reconsiders the uprisings that took place in Black neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and Boston in the 1960s.

He combines documentary footage of the upheavals with samples of texts by the cultural theorist Guy Debord, the artist Barbara Kruger, and the musicians Morrisey and Martin Gore (of Depeche Mode).

Music from industrial rock band Skinny Puppy accompanies the imagery. In this new context, the scenes of unrest take on new possibilities of meaning: the so-called race riots are recast as the frustrated responses of communities that endure poverty perpetuated by structural racism. In his later and ongoing “Evil” series, Cokes responds to the rhetoric of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

Evil.16 (Torture.Musik) (2009–11) features snippets of text from a 2005 article on advanced torture techniques. The text flashes on screens to the rhythm of songs that were used by U.S. troops as a form of torture.

The soundtrack includes Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Britney Spears’s “… Baby One More Time,” songs known to have been played to detainees at deafening decibel levels and on repeated loops. The dissonance between the instantly recognizable, frivolous music and horrifying accounts of torture underscores the ideological tensions within contemporary pop culture.

More recently, in a 2020 work entitled HS LST WRDS, Cokes uses his pared-down aesthetic to examine the current discourse on police violence against Black and Brown individuals. The piece is constructed around the final words of Elijah McClain, who was killed in the custody of Colorado police. Cokes transcribes McClain’s last utterances without vowels and sets them against a monochromatic ground. As in many of Cokes’s works, the text is more than language conveying information and becomes a visualization of terrifying breathlessness. Through his unique melding of artistic practice and media analysis, Cokes shows the discordant ways media color our understanding and demonstrates the artist’s power to bring clarity and nuance to how we see events, people, and histories.

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California Black Media

On Your November Ballot: Prop 2 Seeks to Modernize Public Education Facilities

Proposition 2 would authorize the state to issue $10 billion in bonds with $8.5 billion dedicated to elementary and secondary educational facilities and $1.5 billion for community college facilities. If approved, the proposition will make changes to the formula used to determine the amount each district is required to contribute to be eligible to receive state funding from the bond revenue. It would also require the state government to cover between 50 and 55% of construction project costs and 60 and 65% of modernization project costs.

Published

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Oakland Post

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond (Courtesy Photo)

By Edward Henderson, California Black Media

Proposition 2 would authorize the state to issue $10 billion in bonds with $8.5 billion dedicated to elementary and secondary educational facilities and $1.5 billion for community college facilities.

If approved, the proposition will make changes to the formula used to determine the amount each district is required to contribute to be eligible to receive state funding from the bond revenue. It would also require the state government to cover between 50 and 55% of construction project costs and 60 and 65% of modernization project costs.

Supporters argue that the money is critical for making safety improvements in schools, as well as modernizing science labs, performing arts spaces and kindergarten classrooms. School districts in lower-income areas have no other way to pay for these improvements.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, 38% of students attend schools that don’t meet the state’s minimum safety standards. The research shows that schools with sub-standard facilities tend to have students with lower attendance rates, lower morale and lower overall academic performance.

California Black Media spoke with a Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) spokesperson on why she believes it should be a YES vote on Prop 2.

“Measure US, Los Angeles Unified’s Local Public Schools Safety and Upgrades Measure on the November ballot would provide $9 billion to upgrade Los Angeles public schools for safety and 21st century student learning and college and career preparedness. The average annual cost to property owners is estimated at 2.5 cents per $100 of assessed (not market) property value. The Los Angeles Unified Board of Education adopted a Resolution on October 22 to support Los Angeles Unified’s Measure US, and State Propositions 2 and 4,” the spokesperson said.

Opponents argue that the state should include school repairs in its regular budget instead of putting the burden on taxpayers. Opponents also argue that the proposition would not directly impact students. The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is on record as one of the organizations opposing the proposition.

“Proposition 2 is $10 billion of bonds, new state debt, to pay for school facilities. It is almost certain to result in higher property tax bills, because school districts must provide a ‘local match’ of funds in order to receive money from the Prop. 2 state bonds. That will lead to districts issuing new local school bonds, which are paid for by adding new charges to property tax bills,” said Jarvis.

Opponents also have voiced concerns about what they view as an inequitable distribution of funds. They believe that lower-income school districts should receive a greater share of the state’s sliding scale for matching funds.

“Enrollment is declining in both K-12 district schools and community colleges and the declines are projected to continue. But Proposition 2 commits California to pay an estimated $18 billion, including interest, for school buildings that may not even be necessary. Vote no on proposition 2.”

A “yes” vote gives approval to the state to issue $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and modernization of public education facilities.

A “no” vote will prohibit the state from issuing $10 billion in bonds to fund construction and modernization of public education facilities.

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Activism

NAACP California-Hawaii State Convention Highlights Black Voter Engagement, and More

A Friday panel featuring NAACP Chairman Leon W. Russell and Regina Wilson, Executive Director of California Black Media, examined Project 2025, an initiative perceived as a potential threat to civil rights, healthcare access, and environmental protection. This session emphasized Project 2025’s projected impact on Black communities, noting that policies within the initiative could diminish gains in civil and environmental rights over decades. Russell and Wilson highlighted the need for vigilant monitoring and community mobilization to address these challenges.

Published

1 day ago

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Oakland Post

NAACP State Conference President Rick Callender (right) engages in a discussion on voter engagement and community advocacy with NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson during the 37th NAACP California-Hawaii State Convention in Los Angeles. Photo by Rich Woods.

By Bo Tefu, California Black Media

The 37th NAACP California-Hawaii State Convention concluded on Sunday, Oct 27, following four days of discussions and workshops at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott. Bringing together civil rights leaders, policymakers, and advocates from California and Hawaii, the convention operated under the theme “All In.” The participants discussed critical issues impacting Black communities, including criminal justice reform, health equity, economic empowerment, education, environmental justice, and voting rights.

On Saturday, the President’s Fireside Chat brought together NAACP President Derrick Johnson and CA/HI State Conference President Rick Callender, who discussed the urgency of voter engagement and community advocacy.

Guest speakers included Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA-43), who spoke at the Women in NAACP (WIN) Labor Luncheon about the intersection of labor rights and civil rights. California State Superintendent Tony Thurmond delivered remarks at the Leadership Dinner on education equity, focusing on policies to ensure all students have access to high-quality education.

Honors were given to longtime social justice advocate and former Assemblymember Mike Davis for his work in community activism. At the same time, actor and activist Danny Glover and the Rev. Dr. Amos C. Brown received the 2024 Legacy Hall of Fame Awards, recognizing their lifelong commitments to advancing civil rights.

The convention also offered practical workshops, including “What’s On Your Ballot?,” where coalition leaders provided analyses of California propositions, explaining their potential impacts on community rights and resources. The Voter Turnout Workshop provided background and encouraged participants to promote voter turnout through community-centered outreach strategies.

Sunday’s events closed with a Prayer and Memorial Breakfast honoring the contributions of past and current civil rights leaders.