SHEPPERDSTOWN — Local students honored great African Americans throughout history through art, spanning media from song to painting.
Saturday's event was held at Asbury Methodist Church in Shepherdstown and was planned and prepared by several local organizations, including the Jefferson County chapter of the NAACP and the Black Student Unions of Jefferson County. It raised money for the annual “Our Kids Count Us” summer camp, a two-day African camp that teaches children about African culture and history.
“We've never done this before, so this was a big effort,” event organizer Tanya Dallas said. “A lot of people came together behind the scenes to try to put together something great and we were very ambitious.”
Inside the church, an art gallery showcasing the work of local students celebrates important figures in black history using watercolors, oil paints, colored pencils, and more portraits of people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, and even some local figures, like Martin Delaney, the first black field officer in the Army. United States, who was born in Charles Town.
In the church gymnasium, local students showed off their musical talent as groups like the Charlestown Middle School Choir and the Joint Black Student Union Band performed for the crowd.
Dallas hopes this event will be repeated again in the coming years, with the help of more labor leaders and their families.
“We want to get into the habit of celebrating culture every day in every way,” she said.
