First local HBCU scholarships awarded at Two North Carolina HBCUs

By Michael B. Hardison

After only officially being formed near the end of 2023, Sampson County’s first ever Historically Black Colleges and Universities Council was able to bestow inaugural scholarships to Sampson students.

The HBCU Council recently awarded two $500 scholarships to a pair of local students who are attending an HBCU this fall. Those recipients were JaNiya Jacobs, a Union High School graduate attending A&T State University, and Kamari Bell, a Lakewood High School graduate attending Winston-Salem State University.

The idea behind the scholarships came from HBCU Chairman Larry Sutton who wanted to waste no time in fulfilling the group’s mission of assisting youth who are interested in attending HBCUs.

“Well, the idea was part of fulfilling our mission as the Sampson County HBCU Council, because we did form a scholarship committee, and that committee became active,” he said. “We discussed things as the council and as a scholarship committee and we decided to go ahead and do our inaugural scholarship for this school year.”

Sutton said their members went to work soon after forming, and they were quickly able to collect funds to award one scholarship.

“We began to get new members who were paying their dues and we had enough money in the treasury for a scholarship so we put the word out at the various schools,” he said. “We had several applications returned and we ended up viewing several applicants.”

Their members didn’t stop there. Sutton said after he pitched another idea for doing a second scholarship, the council went in their own pockets to make it happen again.

“We pretty much had a desire to try to do a second scholarship this first year as well,” he attested. “Then we asked our membership if they would be willing to make donations toward a second scholarship, and we had a pretty good response to that. It wasn’t long before enough funds were raised to do a second scholarship for this current school year.”

Sutton called the two scholarships in the group’s fledgling year “an amazing feat.”

“(It) was made possible by our members and we feel pretty good about being able to aid two students in our first year of being a new HBCU Council in Sampson County.”

The scholarship committee was formed, committee chairwoman Dr. Linda Brunson, said because of the council’s burning desire to move forward to help youth as quickly as possible in the educational arena.

“We just got incorporated in September last year and our mission is to ensure that all the youth in Sampson County are familiar with HBCUs, their value and importance,” she said. “We encourage them to, of course, go to a college of their choice, but to consider an HBCU for the experience, that’s kind of the foundation of the scholarship committee.

Brunson also noted that while the funds for these initial scholarship were formed through their own funding, they are hopeful to implement some fundraising ideas in the future.

“How we got the money this time around was donated out of our pockets and, hopefully, this year coming up, we are planning some fundraising so that we can give more to deserving youth,” she said. “But, this first year, we just made personal donations to get scholarship funds.”

While the scholarships for this coming school have already been awarded, Brunson did share the criteria for how they will select recipients so the process could be known for future candidates.

“We offered it to all seniors; the only criteria was you had to enroll in HBCU, just like the first two who are going to A&T and Winston-Salem,” she said. “I just want to emphasize again that’s it’s open to all seniors, not only minorities; they were just the only ones that applied this time. So again, that’s the only requirement is that you have to go an HBCU.

“The last thing I’d like to add is that this whole process has been really good. It took us a good while to kind of get up and going but there’s probably 40 or 50 of us that live in Sampson County who are a part of the HBCU Council, that graduated from at least one HBCU ourselves. It’s really rewarding to be able to give back to future HBCU students.”

Sutton was also the one who had the idea to form the HBCU Council when he noticed the need to spread awareness of HBCUs in Sampson County. He began to put the word out around March of last year then, before he knew it, his concept had taken off.

“It was my idea about trying to organize a county-wide HBCU Council or organization,” he said. “Once we began, the first meeting was probably in, I want to say, maybe March or April of 2023. We began meeting sort of regularly ever month, and when we finally got the word out, more and more and more folks began showing up at our meetings.

“I would say, by August of last year we had begun to put some ideas and a framework together. When that happened we began to commit to meetings to sort of put this together as far as having a purpose, a focus, a mission, and we began to draft some bylaws. We pretty much accepted our constitution and bylaws in September of 2023, and every sense we have been meeting every fourth Thursday evening at 6:30 p.m. at First Baptist Church on College Street and we invite anyone interested to join us.”