Water polo Senior Night

Celebrating Black history

By Sakari Wilson, Staff Writer

This year, African American history teacher Richard Nagy had a vision for Black History Month. He wanted to create something “big” and “inspiring” for students. He pitched an idea to create a Black History Live Museum on the second floor.

“Normally what we do is put up some billboards or some little things,” Nagy said. “Instead of that, I wanted to just paste all the walls with different angles of music, inventors, athletes, and important people in history.”

With the help of his African American Studies class, Black Student Union club, and Lafaris Dooling’s peer counseling class, this vision became a reality.

This was Nagy’s biggest project in his 10 years at this school. He wanted to encourage not only his students, but also everyone at school to learn more about Black history. He also wanted to make this museum fun and interactive by adding records, items hanging from the ceiling, and laptops displaying videos of important people in history in the hallways.

COVID-19 was also another reason that encouraged Nagy to create this museum. “This year we’re trying to make it more enjoyable to be at school especially with covid still going around.”

This museum isn’t the only thing that was made for Black History Month. During morning announcements, a student shared an event or a person that was a part of Black history. Nagy and his students played music and gave out prizes during A and B Lunches on Feb. 3. During those lunches, Nagy also set up a trivia game about Black History Month.

Nagy also recently introduced the Black Student Union club. In its second year, BSU allows Black students to come after school on the last Wednesday of every month, to talk, relate and share important issues related to race.

“I feel like we’ve created this kind of group, this kind of safe haven for the Black students at our school,” said senior Breah Campbell, BSU president. “We just want to spread awareness and remind everyone that we’re together and we hear you.”

Black history is important to many students at our school.

“My favorite thing about Black History Month is that we get to celebrate Black culture, Black beautifulness, Black power,” freshman Sakina Robateau said.

Nagy hoped that everyone got to learn something or someone new during Black History Month.

Senior Breah Campbell places a poster of Barack Obama on the wall of the second floor east hallway.

PHOTO BY SAKARI WILSON

Senior Taylor Sterling works on a poster for the Black History Live Museum on the second floor.

PHOTO BY SAKARI WILSON

Why do you think Black History Month is important? "Just remembering that we do have influence in our everyday society, it is much more than we give credit to and it’s important to bring that up…. Black people are kind of known for their suffering, people always want to bring up slavery but we too have done amazing things…. We’ve had many firsts." — senior Breah Campbell, BSU president

What is your favorite part of Black culture? "Music is very important as we’ve literally started almost every genre of music available from jazz, to hip hop, to even country. I think it’s a really important part of Black culture because as slaves, music is what would unite us, and so I really appreciate the amount of music that I can enjoy now that have a lot of Black influence and Black character." — junior Samyrah Lewis, BSU secretary