Somebody’s cousin is showing up to Tuskegee with a bonnet in their bag. That’s what set this off. Ahead of the upcoming school year, Tuskegee President Dr. Mark A. Brown sent a letter to parents laying out new campus standards: no do-rags, bonnets, bedroom shoes, or pajamas in classrooms, dining halls, or official university functions.… Continue reading Tuskegee University & The Weight of Institutional Standards
Call NeSheila Washington a cheer coach, and you capture the title. You do not capture the work. Since returning to Winston-Salem State University in 2021 to lead Powerhouse, Washington has transformed a historic cheer tradition into something far more significant: a leadership development system operating inside an HBCU institution. The routines are visible, the performances… Continue reading Everyone Calls Her a Cheer Coach. NeSheila Washington Built a Leadership Engine.
There are two numbers that define Johnson C. Smith University right now, and most coverage has only told you about one of them. The first number is $80 million what JCSU stands to receive through the Mayor’s Racial Equity Initiative, a $250 million Charlotte public-private partnership built to transform the university into a top-tier, career-focused… Continue reading Inside Johnson C. Smith University’s high-stakes bet on its own future
Nine weeks every semester, recruiting students for institutions that needed her to believe in them hard enough to convince someone else to. She was an admissions recruiter then not an executive, not an associate vice chancellor just a woman from Wilmington, North Carolina, who had not yet left the state she was born in, driving… Continue reading Before the Yard : What Cheryl Pollard built and what it cost her to get here
There are names that show up in the history books, and then there are the names that held the foundation together so those books could be written. Wilbert “Kent” Beatty is one of those foundational names and if you were on the yard at WSSU in the early 2000s until now 2026, you already know… Continue reading How Kent Beatty Built the Stage That Built Us
There is a particular kind of HBCU leader that the yard never forgets not because they were loud, not because they chased cameras or collected titles, but because they built something real and then kept building long after graduation, long after the applause faded, long after anyone was keeping score. Mo Wright is that kind… Continue reading The Blueprint in the Binder: Mo Wright and the WSSU Legacy That Keeps Leading
