Local Events

The Black Card Experience at the The Bird Comedy Theater in the Crossroads Art District

When: Saturday, Feb. 24 from 9:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.

Price: $12-$15

Regarding this event, The Bird Comedy Theater said, “Fresh from performing live at SF SketchFest, Katherene Garry, (Let Me Explain My Blackness, It’s A Cultural Thing, The Anarchy Fun Time Show) brings back KC Fringe 2023’s Best of Venue show about the stereotypes of black culture for one night.” 

BLK + BRWN MOVIE NIGHT! @ Stray Cat Film Center on Broadway Blvd.

When: Sunday, Feb. 25 from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Price: $ Free

The Stray Cat Film Center, partnering with BLK + BRWN, is screening “The Spook Who Sat by the Door,” in honor of Black History Month.

Jewell Kitchen in YGCU Room 221/222

When: Tuesday, Feb. 27 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Price: $10 

Here is a description obtained from the BSA Brightspace Page: “Bring your appetite to enjoy some soul food! This event will feature a raffle for a campus parking space and trivia where you can win prizes like a Nintendo Switch or a massage gun! Sponsored by BSA.”

Reading and Local Businesses:

For a quick read, hop on over to the Kansas City Black History website and download this year’s pamphlet. This booklet highlights Black historical figures, including a musician, a teacher, a physician, a politician and many more. Some of the famous names include Samuel U. Rodgers, Vincent O. Carter, Myrtle Foster Cook and Annetta Washington. For a longer read, check out Goodreads’s Black History Month List that recommends books such as “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou and “Beloved” by Toni Morrison.

KC Black Owned created several lists that include Black-owned small businesses such as restaurants, cafes, bakeries, retail stores and much more. There are even some bookstores included, so check out the Goodreads list and pick up your next read at one of these Black-owned bookstores! Black History Month is an important celebration and commemoration of Black history. If you feel inspired by this list, consider using your voice to elevate Black voices.

Looking for something to do on campus this week? Here are some of the events that are hosted by and for the Jewell community:

On Tuesday, Feb. 23, the women’s basketball team will be going up against Drury University at 6 p.m. This away game, as well as other away games, can be viewed on the William Jewell College athletics page. 

On Wednesday, Feb. 24, Gender Issues and Feminism (GIF) is hosting a discussion about Black feminism in room 112 of the PLC at 10:30 a.m. The discussion will center around a video about Black feminism in celebration of Black History Month. 

On Thursday, Feb. 25, in room 221/222 of the Yates-Gill Union, Black Student Alliance (BSA) is hosting their annual Jewell Kitchen event to honor local Black foods and Black culinary influences. Tickets for this event will be sold during Jewell Time in the Union until the day of the event, or until all tickets are sold.

On Friday, Feb. 26, GIF is hosting a Menstrual Product Drive in the Union. Students can donate menstrual products to GIF for their “Take One, Leave One” campaign. This campaign allows the club to offer free menstrual products to the Jewell community in various bathroom locations across campus. 

At 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., the softball team will be going up against the University of Nebraska at Kearney and Northwest Missouri State University, respectively. At 5 p.m., the women’s soccer team will be going up against Drury University, and the men’s soccer team will also go up against Drury at 7:30 p.m.

On Saturday, Feb. 27, the softball team will be going up against Upper Iowa University at 11 a.m. The women’s basketball team will face off against Rockhurst University at 1 p.m. At the same time, the women’s and men’s tennis teams will be going up against Missouri Valley College. At 3 p.m., the men’s basketball team will play Rockhurst University. At the same time, the softball team will be going up against Midwestern State University Texas and the women’s volleyball team will be going up against the University of Southern Indiana. At 6 p.m., the women’s volleyball team will be facing off against Maryville University. 

On Sunday, Feb. 28, the women’s soccer team will play against Missouri S&T at 12 p.m. The men’s soccer team will play against Missouri S&T at 2:30 p.m.

If you are a student at William Jewell College, you have heard about, been involved in or at least gone to mandatory Radical Inclusivity training. In the recent years, Jewell has made an active effort to diversify their population of faculty, staff and, most importantly, students. There have been multiple efforts taken to further this, but the newest upcoming addition is a collection stocked full of books that explore many different multicultural themes. Library services and the Black Student Alliance (BSA) have partnered together to implement a brand new collection within the library, named the Critical Foundations Collection. 

The Hilltop Monitor interviewed Rebecca Hamlett, director of library services, and Tavarus Pennington, junior communications and English major and BSA president. There are many other students and staff in the works with this project, including, but not limited to, Claire Henry, sophomore digital media communications major; Rodney Smith, vice president for access and engagement; and Catherine Dema, senior physics and Oxbridge history of ideas major and engagement chair of Gender Issues & Feminism. When sitting down with The Hilltop Monitor, Hamlett was energized and excited to start the conversation about the Critical Foundations Collection.

Hamlett explained what inspired the inclusive collection, sharing that the library last semester had started thinking about ways to diversify their current books and add content that covered a wide range of topics. Soon after, Pennington reached out about a similar topic, ultimately leading to a successful partnership that reached across students and staff. Hamlett said that the main goal of this library is to bring diverse voices into the texts available at Jewell. 

Hamlett gave most of the credit to the students involved, saying this is almost exclusively their project. To get this collection started, library services and the group of students involved reached out to numerous donors, starting within advancement offices at Jewell. The donations collected for this library to be implemented totaled up to $25,000. The collection started with about 50 initial titles being ordered from library services to be put in Curry Hall. Now, through collaboration from the multicultural organizations on campus and generous donors, they are up to over 150 new titles delivered to campus with more in shipment and hopes to expand to eBook resources in the near future. 

“It’s endless in theory. We don’t want to restrict what diversity means,” Pennington said when asked about what titles will be included.

The books included cover a wide array of diversity-focused texts, including, but not nearly limited to, BIPOC, LGBTQ, feminism, religion and more. 

“We wanted everyone who possibly could contribute to it, to contribute to it,” Pennington said. 

The price of the titles ordered so far totals up to about $4,100, so a significant portion of the $25,000 funding remains to add more titles to the collection.

The library is hoping to add more to this in the near future with donations from alumni, the faculty and staff giving campaign and any donations they receive. The hope is high to grow this collection even further and keep the Critical Foundations Collection thriving. 

Ideally, this collection will be open this month and have a COVID-19 friendly launch party. They also hope to have book discussions, collaborations and to have authors come to campus to lecture and engage in many more conversations about inclusivity at Jewell. Essentially, the library and the students involved wholeheartedly agreed to take this further than just providing these books. 

The library and students are also committed to making the collection accessible and easy to find. The featured collection will be on the main floor of Curry Hall. The rest of the titles will be on the second floor of the PLC in the Tower Room, which will provide easy check-out. The library stressed that they understand that a topic like diversity is always changing, and they will be taking title recommendations for the collection at this link to accommodate for this fact. All recommendations are encouraged, and the library will endeavor to purchase all of the titles it can for the collection. 

You can also email Hamlett, Peter Johnson or library services with suggestions. Overall, this collection plans to to further the efforts Jewell is putting in to create a diverse and accessible campus. The Critical Foundations Collection will give students who fall into these underrepresented categories a place where they can be heard and seen, which was ultimately the inspiration behind the collection.

“[To me, Radical Inclusivity looks like] dropping all of the barriers, pushing all of the disparities that are created… all of that goes away,” Pennington said.

This collection is also intended to provide students who are outside of underrepresented communities opportunities to educate themselves and learn from multiple perspectives. These books and resources will further the concept of being the Critical Thinking College() and challenge the traditional means of higher education.

The Black Student Alliance (BSA) of William Jewell College released an open letter regarding their name change from Black Student Association to the Black Student Alliance. Read their open letter below.

“These “educated” people, however, decry any such thing as race consciousness; and in some respects, they are right. They do not like to hear such expressions as “Negro literature,” “Negro poetry,” “African art,” or “thinking Black”; and, roughly speaking, we must concede that such things do not exist. These things did not figure in the courses which they pursued in school, and why should they? “Aren’t we all Americans? Then, whatever is American is as much the heritage of the Negro as of any other group in this country.””

– Carter G. Woodson ‘The Mis-Education of the Negro’ (1933)

Dear William Jewell College community,

Moments of deep cultural awareness emerge out of events that conjure empathy among different groups of a society. That empathy is felt by other groups and during this instance of recognition comes something stronger. A bond that unites people across ideological, geographic, and economic lines. This is solidarity.

Unfortunately, the dislocation of Black consciousness is a natural impediment of White civil society. It seems inarguable that the presence of Black tradition, language, thought, and scholarship is at a deficit with the dominant process of learning proffered in a systemically White world. This is not a hopeless situation. Simply one that requires action.

We, the Black Student Alliance, seek to lean into the heightened awareness for racial inequity that the long-silenced activists, organizers, artists, writers, and teachers have been leading. We’ll do this by energizing the same passion toward discovery that drives the Nonames, Ta-Nahisi Coateses, Angela Davises, and Patrisse Cullorses of our society.

By building and hosting programs with the experience of Blackness being the top priority of our engagements, we will assert the fact of systematic neglect of particularly Afrocentric perspectives. We will reconcile our own experiences, as William Jewell students, with the broader body of history and theory surrounding the Black experience as told by scholars, activists, organizers, and allies alike.

Our commitment is to our members, our facility is support, and our goal is consciousness. To infuse intention into our activities, we ask that each person who takes the time to grow closer to this campus and its Black student population also invest with intentionality in the aim of our motives.

Rather than cultivating a closed circuit of camaraderie within the isolated confines of a ‘Black Student Association’ we will formally move forward as the ‘Black Student Alliance’. To better achieve our goals and forge productive relationships with the levers of power and influence on this campus, the concept of ‘allyship’ ought to be an ever present, primary concern of our activities.

BSA has a humble request for our campus of learners, educators, and administrators: That you engage in an, examination, to any extent, of the ubiquity of White culture. We further request that you consider joining our conversation and opening yourself up to truths that compete with your preconceived system of belief.

This is the mission of the Black Student Alliance at William Jewell College.

Respectfully,

The 2020-2021 Black Student Alliance Cabinet