How 2020’s racial unrest led four friends to create a scholarship for Black students

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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April 19, 2023

Cameron Goodnight, Delaware News Journal

Quadir Phillip, Caeser Rodney High School Class of 2022, was awarded a $1,500 scholarship from the Black Seed Scholarship Foundation after applying last year. Photo Credit – The Black Seed Scholarship Foundation

In 2020, Dominique Nziffa felt inspired to make a difference in her Camden community after witnessing something that shocked the world.

Outrage erupted over footage of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, being killed in police custody by a white Minneapolis officer. The officer pinned him to the ground with his knee for nearly nine minutes until Floyd stopped breathing. Images of Floyd’s lifeless body were shown repeatedly on news channels and social media.

Driven by the terrifying footage and racial justice protests, Nziffa decided she wanted to do her part in honoring Black Lives Matter — a social justice movement formed in 2013 dedicated to fighting racism and violence against Black people.

[…]

This desire led Nziffa, with input from her three childhood best friends, to create a scholarship for their alma mater in Camden, Caesar Rodney High School.

Continue reading about the scholarship foundation here.

In the Jim Crow era, Black students received education under the philanthropy of “Rosenwald Schools“.

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