Four Years Later: HBCU Advocacy In New York

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Published on January 06, 2019, 2:55 pm
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In December 2014, I finished the first half of my undergraduate freshmen. I was studying African and African American Studies at Claflin University.

Claflin University is a private, coeducational, liberal arts institution in Orangeburg, South Carolina. I had been very homesick, and I was extremely excited to be going back home. When I got back to New York though, I realized that nothing had changed. Everything was pretty much the way that I left it.

As December went on, I made it my mission to go across my community and, “Beat the Drum for HBCUs”. This was a phrase that I got from Professor Patricia H. Koger, a former Professor at Claflin University and one of my mentors. Professor Koger has helped me with so much. As I beat the drum for HBCUs in 2014, I was well received by students at each high school that I went to, and they started following me on social media. Follow requests on Instagram started to roll in. And like that, I had a platform.

I started to think buy levitra south africa that I could really make a difference talking about education. I came up with this idea to start an HBCU initiative, a New York thing. The New York State HBCU Initiative, a volunteer project, was born. I needed people to help me financially though. During the rest of the month, I met with people like the CEO of Hudson Valley Bank at the time, James Landy, the Executive Director of The Nepperhan Community Center, Rev. Dr. Jim Bostic, City of Yonkers, New York Councilwoman Corazon Pineda-Isaac, and the Mayor of New Rochelle, New York, Noam Bramson. All four of them helped me with my mission to educate people about HBCUs.

The rest is history.

Since December 2014, so much has happened in my life all because of God and the fact that I decided to attend an HBCU. Below, are a just a few highlights of my life since starting the Initiative:

2015

2016

2017

2018

I would like to thank everyone who has assisted me to get to where I am today. That is a lot of people.

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Jonas Bronck is the pseudonym under which we publish and manage the content and operations of The Bronx Daily.™ | Bronx.com - the largest daily news publication in the borough of "the" Bronx with over 1.5 million annual readers. Publishing under the alias Jonas Bronck is our humble way of paying tribute to the person, whose name lives on in the name of our beloved borough.