County High School Students Receive Social Justice Awards

Uplifting and hopeful for the future. These words reflect the annual Student Social Justice Awards Ceremony of the Prince George’s Lynching Memorial Project, hosted by the Greenbelt Black History and Culture Committee.

For the past five years the program has attracted youth from Prince George’s County high schools and their parents, reflecting the rich cultural mix of this county and this country.

There are three categories to the contest: Essay, Creative Writing (Spoken Word) and Visual Arts. Given that there were 82 entries, the nine student winners presented exceptional works.

Essay

First place: Livia Luu, Eleanor Roosevelt High School. The title of her essay was Spinning Stereotype on Its Head: Racial Injustice of Figure Skating. Luu gave an informative presentation about the difficulties of African Americans and other non-white athletes to become world-class figure skaters. The bronze win of Debi Thomas at the 1988 Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, showed that opportunity, ability and determination have no color.

Second place: Zoe Smithen, Frederick Douglass High School. Her work was titled Black Women: Our Pregnancies’ Struggles Being Exploited. Smithen’s emotional and historic work focused on the exploitation of Black American women’s bodies from enslavement to the present. She pointed out how J. Marion Sims, considered the father of gynecology, experimented on enslaved women using nothing to deaden their pain. Sims’ claim that Black women could tolerate high pain levels is a lie that persists to this day.

Third place: Aniyah Marie Bryant, Oxon Hill High School. She wrote her essay on Forgotten Sons. Bryant was unable to attend the ceremony.

Creative Writing

First place: Sidney Foster, Academy of Health Sciences at Prince George’s Community College. He wrote Silhouettes of Prince George’s County.

Second place: Hannah Louis, Academy of Health Sciences at Prince George’s Community College. She titled her work, From Our Roots to Our Leaves, which described intersectional trauma as a tree trunk. Louis encouraged her peers to not get discouraged and to attend to their physical and mental health for healing.

Third place: Isaiah Ali, Frederick Douglass High School. He wrote the poem They Built Walls. We Breathe Smoke, about racial environmental injustice. Ali describes how industrial companies build their sites near mostly African American communities and spew hazardous materials in their direction, causing numerous health challenges for the residents. He called for clean air that blows truth and asked that those who learn the realities of the health challenges demand change.

Visual Arts

Art piece: a wistful, sad brown-skinned woman with voluminous hair and star-pattern makeup, in a blue crop-top and skirt with fishnet stockings, is in a cage with green bars. She holds a drooping microphone and rests against a TV that seems to depict herself in better days. A sign on the cage reads POC Pop Artist and has smaller text below. Outside the cage, in the foreground, you see two blond heads looking toward it. — Seen, Not Heard by Kennedy Chapple.

First place: Kennedy Chapple, Suitland High School. She used mixed media in her work, Seen, Not Heard, to describe the alienation and challenges of her peers. Her mother was present to accept her award. Chapple was attending the band competition at her high school.

Art piece: An arm in a gray suit, with a brown-skinned fist, pushing downward into a ballot box while holding a paper reading Voting Rights Act of 1965. A yellow rope wraps around the hand's finger, leading downward into the box. Inside the ballot box, shadowy figures hold up pink signs reading "Literacy Tests!" and "Grandfather Clause!" In each of the four corners of the artwork, black shading surrounds the word NO! in white text. — “Fighting for the Ballot” by Michele Washington.

Second place: Michelle Washington, Academy of Health Sciences at Prince George’s Community College. She called her work Fighting for the Ballot. Washington used digital design to complete her work exploring the historic fight by African Americans for voting rights. Her subject connected the audience to the recent gutting of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Art piece: at left, the left half of the face of a brown-skinned man with dark hair. At right, a pink background with the swirling light-pink words STOLEN FROM OUR LAND. The man's hair is bordered with cut-out words (black print on white paper) in a curving vertical, reading: "Learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing." — The Hurt of Knowing by Nicole Igbozulike.

Third place: Nicole Igbozulike, Charles Flowers High School. She honored Frederick Douglass in her work The Hurt of Knowing. Igbozulike described how learning to read, especially during Douglass’ time, was both a blessing and a curse, because reading broadens the mind which then enables one to see the constraints and opportunities in the world at the same time.

Also Recognized

Dr. Khadija Ali Coleman, the former Prince George’s County Poet Laureate (2023-2025), shared a Langston Hughes poem about the djembe drum or what is called the spoken drum. Djembe drums represent a village and mean “let’s gather for peace.” Ali Coleman explained that the drum was banned by slave owners because it called on enslaved people to escape or revolt. She said enslaved people embraced the banjo in place of the djembe drum.

The program opened with a welcome by Mayor Emmett Jordan. Councilmembers Frankie Fritz, Kristen Weaver, Jenni Pompi and Silke Pope attended. Greenbelt Access Television was present to record the ceremony.