Family, friends and neighbors gathered at Malverne High School’s Performing Arts Center last week for the district’s annual Black History Month celebration. This year’s theme was “A Century of Black History Commemorations.”
This month marks 100 years since Carter G. Woodson established Negro History Week in 1926. The week was dedicated to recognizing the achievements and experiences of Black Americans as significant moments in the country’s history. What began as a week eventually expanded into a month-long national celebration of Black communities.
“The month of February was selected because it fell between the birthdays of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln,” Sheryil Straker, the high school’s student activities coordinator, explained. “Two pioneers in the fight for enslaved people.”
Student members of the Black Studies Club, which is advised by special education teacher Kristi Thompson, spent months organizing the annual performance on Feb. 12. To represent 100 years of history, the students performed songs, dances, skits and more to honor the resilience, innovation and cultural impact of Black communities throughout the decades.
After senior Faith Eliely sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a hymn often referred to as the Black national anthem, the Malverne High School Jazz Quartet gave a performance that paid tribute to the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. The period was marked by an explosion of African American cultural, social and artistic expression by Black artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals in Harlem, and laid the ground for the civil right movement.
A ballet performance by Morgan Daly and Victoria Esposito represented the resilience of Black communities during the Great Depression of the 1930s, which saw reduced financial support for the arts. BSC members celebrated the founding of Ebony magazine in the 1940s with a skit about the publication. “During this decade, Ebony magazine emerged as a groundbreaking platform,” Master of Ceremonies Melanie Clement, a Malverne High senior, said, “celebrating black excellence, culture and success at a time when Black voices were too often overlooked.”
In a multimedia performance, students discussed the importance of the magazine and its cultural impact. “At a time when mainstream magazines refused to show Black faces with dignity, Ebony made us the cover story,” Emmy Pierre, BSC vice president, said. The magazine archived Black history and contributed to the representation of Black journalists in newsrooms today.
The students honored the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s with a spoken word performance by the Poetry Club titled “Colors.” The poem reflected on the history of civil rights, racial disparity and the history of segregation in the Malverne school district. It was followed by Jacob Sandoval’s singing “Make Them Hear You” from the musical “Ragtime.”
To celebrate the 1970s and the Black Panther Party, students walked in a fashion show. Showcasing important pieces of Black fashion history, they took to the runway wearing furs, leather and bold accessories. Fashion has long served as a way to comment on social and political times, rooted in the history of Black Dandyism and reflected by the Black Panther Party, whose members wore black during protests.
Recognizing many Black figures that influenced society in the 1980s, students asked Malverne teachers about the people they look up to. Those who were mentioned included Jackie Robinson and Coretta Scott King.
“My hidden figure I truly look up to is Zora Neale Hurston,” MHS Principal Kesha Bascombe said, referring to the writer, anthropologist and leader of the Harlem Renaissance, because of her “dedication to tell authentic stories about Black life in the South.”
Students Lorraine Akou and Pierre read an original poem honoring Black contributions during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “Too often, the stories of black first responders are overlooked,” Clement said, “even when their courage was just as real and their sacrifice just as great.” Titled “12,” the poem recalled the 12 Black firefighters who died while responding to the attacks.
To end the evening, the BSC Step Team performed a routine that highlighted “hidden figures” from Black history. They included trailblazers such as Katherine Johnson, a mathematician and aerospace technologist who made critical contributions to NASA’s early space flights and was one of the subjects of the Oscar-nominated 2017 film “Hidden Figures”; Lewis Latimer, an inventor who created evaporative air conditioning; and Garrett Morgan, who invented the traffic signal.
“Black History is not over — it is happening now,” Clement said. “It lives in our movements, our voices, our culture and the next generation leading the way.”
