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Beulah Baptist Church celebrates Black History Month with talent program
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From left to right, Willie Chapman, Dee Hill and Annette Pack act out a skit during the Black History Month talent program on Sunday at Beulah Baptist Church in Youngstown. In addition to skits, the program included singing, miming and black-history readings.
By EMMALEE C. TORISK
YOUNGSTOWN
Taekwon Driver wasn’t the least bit nervous in the minutes before reading aloud about the life of Garrett A. Morgan to those gathered Sunday afternoon at Beulah Baptist Church.
The 12-year-old Chaney student said he’d been diligently practicing his reading for the church’s annual Black History Month talent program — and admitted he hadn’t previously known about Morgan. He was an African-American and Ohioan who could count among his many inventions the first patented gas mask and the first three-position traffic signal.
Raising awareness of those and other achievements blacks have made was precisely the talent program’s intention, said the Rev. Michael Write of the Sherwood Avenue Church.
“If people are not aware of the contributions we have made spiritually, culturally and as a whole, it dampens our empowerment,” Write said. “Especially for our young people, getting them excited about the accomplishments they see people of color make gives them a hunger for learning.”
Write added that because “our future lies with the young people,” it’s only through events like Sunday’s talent program, which renew people’s sense of pride and their faith, that the city and its people can be revived.
In addition to black-history readings like Taekwon’s, other offerings at the talent program were singing, miming and skits, all of which were put on by members of Beulah Baptist Church, Tabernacle Baptist Church, Mount Vernon Baptist Church and We Walk by Faith Bible Church.
Such a collaboration “shows the community that we’re unified in our blackness,” noted Brenda Logan, widow of the late Harold R. Logan Jr., former pastor of Beulah Baptist Church.
“Our children need to know where they came from,” Logan said.
“And that we contributed a lot to this country,” added Rose Wilkins, who has coordinated the church’s Black History Month events for the past seven years.
Wilkins noted that she began planning this year’s celebration — which included a gospel concert, a program on the civil-rights movement, and a showing and panel discussion of “Hidden Colors II” throughout the month — immediately after Kwanzaa ended.
Wilkins explained that education is “the key to everything,” but is dismayed by the large number of black youth who don’t want to go to school, or who don’t value the right to vote, even after their ancestors fought for those rights. Those are the people who “made everything possible for us,” she said, and if blacks don’t celebrate their own history, no one else will.
“Black history is American history,” Wilkins said. “We want everybody to know we do this every year, so come out and celebrate with us sometime.”
Wilkins added that she and others from Beulah Baptist Church are working to put together a black study program that would meet each month. Topics of discussion would include “cultural things,” Wilkins said, including the importance of education and voting, along with responsibilities within the community.
Though a date and time hasn’t been finalized yet, Wilkins said the first meeting likely will be in March.