PORTSMOUTH – The Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire (BHTNH) will close its 2021 Elinor Williams Hooker Tea Talk Series with a special focus on the experiences of local students of color at predominantly white institutions.

This closing panel, On Shaky Ground: Students of Color in Predominantly White Institutions, scheduled for March 14, 2:00-4:00 PM will feature students from various schools who will share stories of what it means to navigate an environment in which most people are different from themselves. They will identify some of the social pressures they experience while attending these educational-institution, and also share ways in which they cope in these challenging spaces to achieve self-realization and academic success.

Drawing on the winter theme, Claiming Our Place: Blacks in “White Spaces”, the 2021 Tea Talk Series was designed as an invitation to rethink assumptions about how African Americans navigate various “white spaces”, spaces where Blacks and People of Color are marginalized, typically absent, or simply unexpected.

Students for this panel include:

Rekha Mahadevan, a sixteen-year-old high school sophomore at Berwick Academy, in South Berwick, Maine, who is currently working on a project to give recognition to several unmarked African American graves from the 1800s in her hometown of Madbury, NH. Rekha is the daughter of two immigrants from South India and identifies as an Indian American.

Grace Morelli, a Mathematics Education senior at the University of New Hampshire, whose campus activities interning with the Office of Admissions, serving as a member of the United Asian Coalition, and the CONNECT Program. Morelli is from Shrewsbury, MA.

And Curtis Linton, a Mechanical Engineering senior at the University of New Hampshire. a McNair scholar and a member of the National Society of Black Engineers, Linton was one of 15 students selected to present his research at the UNH McNair Scholar research symposium.

Also on this panel is Kenneth Holmes, the senior vice provost for student life at the University of New Hampshire. He will share his experience of working at a Historic Black University and at a Predominately White Institution. Jada Hebra, the Senior Vice President and Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at Southern New Hampshire University will serve as the moderator for this session.

Coinciding with the closing series, BHTNH will screen a video created by Alys Barton for their On The Trail Series, a program that is designed for students to research and share information on local Black history.

Alys, a BHTNH student intern from Phillips Exeter Academy, conducted research on her school’s early African American history.

“Working on this video,” she said, “I learned more about history closer to home. I saw ways in which we still uphold racist ideas and thinking of the past. And I saw the large difference in experiences between generations of the Hall family. Jude Hall’s children were taken from him and sold into slavery, while George Hall was able to send his child, Moses, to PEA.”

Barton’s first video can be viewed on YouTube at http://youtu.be/LjIPRGUvbo.