Tuskegee University Outreach Week of January 28, 2023

This week, we focused on promoting our Black History Month contest and providing more overall awareness for the archive.

Tierney Macon, a sophomore HistoryMakers Ambassador and I worked closely to ensure that we had the specifics needed for the project. We also coordinated with school staff to post flyers and ensure that we were able to present the archive to various classes. We also met with our advisors to discuss the necessary logistics for our presentation at Tuskegee’s annual Black History Month Culmination Ceremony.

We were overjoyed to learn that we had three registrations within 24 hours of the contest being made public to the student body!

This is the flyer that we have been posting around the school. We have several flyers located in Tompkins Hall, Kenney Hall, and Chappie James Hall.

Both Tierney and I worked together to do demonstrations of how to use the archive. On our registration link, which can be accessed via the QR code in our flyer, we offered scheduled appointments for students to learn how to use The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Once we worked with them, we also gave them insight into what specifically will be needed for their competition presentations.

I also directed them to Ms. Samuels, my advisor who works in the Ford Motor Company Library on campus so they can be tasked with further instruction. While speaking to her, we devised a plan on how we should utilize our competition results and implement them into our presentation for Tuskegee University’s Black History Month ceremony.

In regards to the Black History Month Ceremony, we also spoke with Dr. Worth Hayes and Dr. John Tilghman, two of our judges for our archive contest, about how the rubric for our contest should be tailored to ensure that students are properly using the archive.

This is a copy of the rubric that will be provided to our judges comprised of three teachers and two students, and has been approved by them as well.

In conjunction with the development of the rubric, we also worked on presenting our PowerPoint to various classes.

When presenting, we have found that it is most effective for us to include videos of individuals that the student body is familiar with. Therefore, we played a video of Dr. Walter Hill, the former Dean of the College of Agricultural, Environmental, and Nutrition Sciences. In the interview he did with The HistoryMakers, he talks about his determination in a way that perfectly culminates our accomplishments for the week.

“…The first thing is you got to look in the mirror and totally transform yourself. So I want to be a part of that team that transforms us. And we're right in that nexus, as we speak. So there's hope that I can be a part of that; we've done a little bit of it, but really out of the box. A kind of revolutionary term that puts us in the right place, you know. So that means your partnerships, you know, your politics, everything in it. So, that requires God's help, number one, and it requires a team who are determined.”

~ Dr. Walter Hill from ‘Walter A. Hill talks about how we he would like to be remembered’