For the first time, Queens Empowering Every Notable Sister (QUEENS) and the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance (FMLA) held the #Blackherstory event, showcasing prominent African-American women in history. Among those showcased at the event were notable women from this era such as Beyonce and Michelle Obama, but also women from past eras including Rosetta Tharpe and Katherine Johnson.
The event was hosted on the second floor of the student center with panels that had posters of 18 different women, with three women featured per poster, and each poster had a description of what these women did.
“This event is about appreciating black women in history that our history books tried to erase, but also those who are refusing to be silenced,” FMLA President Piper Jones said.
Many of the women featured in the event have been suppressed in one way or another and the goal was to educate students and show them the accomplishments that the women were able to achieve.
“Like I said, history tries to erase a lot of this, so it’s important to educate when you can and to learn. I learned a lot myself when we were doing this event,” Jones said.
Along with Jones, QUEENS President Jariah Campbell helped make this showcase a reality and also believes that education on these women is important.
“Some of these women I had never heard of, so it was a very touching lesson for me to be able to learn about them,” Campbell said.
#Blackherstory wasn’t a thought until after Jones wrote an article.
“I wrote an article titled ‘Black women did it first’ and I was obsessed with the idea that a lot of ideas come from not only black women, but black individuals, and they were appropriated and stolen by white people and made their own,” Jones said. “We don’t appreciate that enough, so we wanted to make an event that focused on educating about it.”
The hope is that everyone gained an understanding on the topic that they may not have had before. Campbell believes that Black History Month is an opportunity to others to educate themselves on things they may not have known in history.
“I feel like this event will have someone going home with the knowledge of something they didn’t know before,” Campbell said.
