An Update from Chesapeake, Virginia

Hey, folks. For the first time in a few months, I’m writing this blog post from my home in Virginia, where I returned for a few days on account of my de jure Thanksgiving “break.”

At the time of this writing, I’m fairly certain that we no longer have any other active Student Brand Ambassadors from Virginia. So, since I’ve been home again for a bit and have been thinking about my home state and since I just spent my longest-ever sojourn outside of it, I thought I’d spend a little bit of time seeing what the Digital Archive has on the good ol’ Old Dominion.

In total, there are 97 HistoryMakers who were born in Virginia. Of course, there are even more who lived and worked in the commonwealth. Of these, there are a few that I immediately recognized—Oliver Hill, Vernon Fareed, Tim Reid, and Leland Melvin. Hill, a civil rights lawyer from the Richmond area, is the namesake of a scholarship program that I was part of while I attended the University of Richmond. Tim Reid, an actor, is a household name in my hometown of Chesapeake, and he is known for playing the dad in the TV show, Sister, Sister. And Leland Melvin, like myself, is a graduate of the University of Richmond. After graduation, he became an astronaut, and is something of a meme around UR for this impressively wholesome photo, which happens to be his real, official, NASA portrait:

It was also fascinating to see an interview from William E. Ward, who was the mayor of my hometown for the entirety of the 1990s and some of the early 2000s. He finished his tenure as mayor in 2004. Since I was born in 1997 and moved to Chesapeake before I was one year old, Ward was in office for essentially all of my early childhood. It was very interesting to see what he had to say about being the chief executive of my town. After a little back-and-forth with my parents, I was reminded that I myself received an academic award in the form of a scholarship from Ward when I was a senior in high school in 2015.

I was also incredibly surprised to see several HistoryMakers clips about my own high school, Indian River High, which I attended from 2011 to 2015. The clips I watched weren’t, uh, incredibly flattering. But I can’t say my time at the school wa anything close to perfect, either.

So, overall, it was interesting and worthwhile to dip my toe into what the Digital Archive has to offer about Virginia.

Student Brand Ambassador Update

To be honest, this hasn’t been an extremely eventful week in terms of my other work as a Student Brand Ambassador for the HistoryMakers. As I alluded to earlier, I spent about half of this week at home in Virginia, but I am set to return to Massachusetts early in the morning on Sunday, November 28. While at home, when I wasn’t making myself sick by eating too many sweets and whatnot, I was doing schoolwork, of which I still have a ton left to do, because Lord knows that letting students have a normal break for a few days before finals is just too tall of an order for a university!

In terms of specifically HistoryMakers work, I did a little bit of the assignments I received from the university library staff in order to get the word out about the Digital Archive to the Northeastern student body. Also, just because I like him as an actor on POSE, I watched a good portion of Billy Porter’s interview.

I’ll be getting close to finals when I return to Boston tomorrow, but I’ll try to keep up with my HistoryMakers work and update y’all on my progress!