The Historic Durham Armory, the hopping location downtown that once featured acts from Duke Ellington to Ella Fitzgerald and was the inspiration for Ernie Barnes’ The Sugar Shack, hosted another lively event this week: A celebration of the 10th cohort of Young Scholars from the Hank and Billye Suber Aaron Young Scholars Summer Research Institute.
The Young Scholars program is one of the flagship educational programs of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center, in partnership with Durham Public Schools (DPS). The three-week program provides DPS high school students training to help enhance their writing, research, and presentation skills. The capstone event is when students present their research projects, which explore curriculum related to economic, social, and political dimensions of inequality.
On Monday evening, research posters from students in the first cohort ringed the hall as attendees mingled and learned about projects exploring topics like the lack of mental health training in the police force, media and institutional responses to conflicts in the middle east, and the effects of systemic bias on black businesses.
Founding Director Dr. William A. “Sandy” Darity Jr. took the stage to formally launch the proceedings. After noting the connective nature of the various cohorts of the program—indeed, two instructors this year were previous Young Scholars themselves—he introduced the keynote speaker, Monique Carswell, the Director of Opportunity & Corporate Philanthropy at Walmart and the Walmart Foundation. Carswell emphasized to the audience how preparation creates opportunity and encouraged the high schoolers to “dream beyond your current reality.” After attaining the building blocks provided by the Young Scholars program, Carswell added, “you are not starting from scratch—you are starting from strength.”
The program continued with presentations from the six students in the second cohort, including:
- Amani Truitt, “Geography, Race, and Education”
- London Saxton, “Gender Based Discrimination in Female Physicians: Results of Burnout, Depression, and Anxiety”
- Dante Lawson, “Refineries in the Backyard: How Housing Policy, Industrial Power, and Environmental Racism Shaped America’s Sacrifice Zones”
- Kayla Lewis, “The Cost of College Readiness”
- Kennedy Brazile, “Medical Mistrust and Low Health Literacy Effects on Maternal Health Outcomes In Black Women in the U.S.”
- Bernadine Dela Pena, “Cultural Crossroads: The Impact of Cultural Assimilation on Asian American Youth Identity and Mental Health”
Dr. Iwinosa Idahor, Executive Director of Equity Affairs and Program Evaluation for DPS, closed out the event with laudatory words for the students, encouraging them to accept the praise from their support network for taking on the “tremendous challenge” of exploring controversial and complex topics during their summer.
In concluding, Dr. Idahor invoked the wise words of scholar Angela Davis, words that provide hope for the future and validation for the importance of a program such as this: “Young people should be able to see further than the collective us,” Dr. Idahor said, “since they are standing on our shoulders.”
Additional photos from the event will be posted on the Cook Center Flickr page. Student research projects will be posted online shortly.