ONBOARDING BLACK HISTORY MONTH @ AT&T

Black History Month

Dakar is pulling all of its resources together for a meetup inside of AT&T Regional Headquarters, El Segundo, Ca. Friday February 22nd ; featuring invited guest: Marcelino Ford-LiveneShane NormanJay Tucker Stay tuned more.

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Dakar Foundation for the Performing Arts will feature a Black History Month Experience such as the one below.

Join us Friday, February 22nd, at AT&T Entertainment Group’s El Segundo, Ca. to support our Information and Communications Technology and Digital Media/Entertainment multimedia regional initiative for diverse community college students in the greater Los Angeles area.

In honor of Black History Month 2019, here are a few inspiring quotes from prominent black leaders and personalities:

  1. “You have to know what sparks the light in you so that you, in your own way, an illuminate the world.” — Oprah Winfrey
  2. “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
  3. “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” — Barack Obama
  4. “My mission in life is not merely to survive but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, some style.” — Maya Angelou
  5. “If there is a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” — Toni Morrison
  6. “You can’t just sit there and wait for people to give you that golden dream. You’ve got to get out there and make it happen for yourself.” — Diana Ross
  7. “I had to make my own living and my own opportunity. But I made it! Don’t sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them.” — Madam C.J. Walker
  8. “You are not obligated to win. You’re obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.” — Marian Wright Edelman
  9. “Every great dream begins with a dreamer.” — Harriet Tubman
  10. “I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’” — Muhammad Ali
  11. “I always wanted to be somebody. If I made it, it’s half because I was game enough to take a lot of punishment along the way and half because there were a lot of people who cared enough to help me.” — Althea Gibson
  12. “Success isn’t about how much money you make; it’s about the difference you make in people’s lives.” —Michelle Obama
  13. “If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow.” — Beyoncé Knowles
  14. “Hate is too great a burden to bear. It just injures the hater more than it injures the hated.” —Coretta Scott King
  15. “Freedom is never given; it is won.” — A. Phillip Randolf
  16. “Have a vision. Be demanding.” — Colin Powell
  17. “We all have dreams. In order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline and effort.” — Jesse Owens
  18. “Healing begins where the wounds are made.” — Alice Walker
  19. “The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of reeducation and regeneration that must be done. In fact, he should march right in front.” — Chinua Achebe
  20. “There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.” —Rita Dove
  21. “Miracles happen all the time. We’re here, aren’t we?” — Marilyn Nelson
  22. “Never be limited by other people’s limited imaginations.” —Dr. Mae Jemison
  23. “We love because it’s the only true adventure.” — Nikki Giovanni
  24. “When I was about eight, I decided that the most wonderful thing, next to a human being, was a book.” — Margaret Walker
  25. “Each person must live their life as a model for others.” — Rosa Parks

This Black History Month Experience will serve as an announcement of the partnership between AT&T and Dakar Foundation to provide job skills training to support the development and design of a pipeline to introduce, prepare and place students in careers in a high-growth sector that is the signature industry of Los Angeles County.

We are inviting all of our key education, economic development and community stakeholders who can benefit and contribute to the success of this Black History Month Experience.  Our partnerships will support important and high-profile new and innovative initiatives such as the Strong Workforce Program and Guided Pathways by connecting local community college students to challenging work-based learning and job opportunities closely related to their field of study. Your participation and support is critical to ensuring your students benefit from the employer – supported efforts in your area

Dakar wants to be a part of the resurgence of more activism in curating Black History, and this February marks our year-long effort to make Black History more relevant to all domestically and abroad. Everyone is racing to do that, and Dakar is working on emphasizing the history of civil rights, race relations and the history of slavery in a student-driven campaign to socialize and challenge them to know more about their past. One of our projects we’ll be sharing with the help of a select team of students from Los Angeles Community Colleges is, Victory By Valor, featuring the little known facts about iconic hall of fame athletes such as Arthur Ashe, Willie Mays, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Jackie Robinson.

Multiple factors have made our efforts more compelling to millennials and generation Z to identify with facts and figures such as: as pop culture, film, television, and music. We hope our target student audience will become more energized in this seemingly polarizing racial times augmented by Donald Trumps administration in contrast to Barack Obama’s presidency, the 50th anniversaries of many civil-rights milestones, the Black Lives Matter movement, controversies over Confederate monuments, protests by NFL players and violent reaction in places such as Charlottesville, Virginia.

“The country is changing. It’s looking at itself in different ways than it has historically, and we believe pop up installations can engage a younger generation to lean-in on the timelines and perhaps contribute to them using trans-media to augment to  their own interpretation of this information to make meaning of their own experiences.”

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Black History Month, or National African American History Month, is an annual celebration of achievements by black Americans and a time for recognizing the central role of African Americans in U.S. history. This event grew out of “Negro History Week,” the brainchild of noted historian Carter G. Woodson and other prominent African Americans. Since 1976, every U.S. president has officially designated the month of February as Black History Month. Other countries around the world, including Canada and the United Kingdom, also devote a month to celebrating black history.

The story of Black History Month begins in 1915, half a century after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States. That September, the Harvard-trained historian Carter G. Woodson and the prominent minister Jesse E. Moorland founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), an organization dedicated to researching and promoting achievements by black Americans and other peoples of African descent.

Known today as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), the group sponsored a national Negro History week in 1926, choosing the second week of February to coincide with the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.


Black History Month events  inspired schools and communities nationwide to organize local celebrations, establish history clubs and host performances and lectures.  In the decades the followed, mayors of cities across the country began issuing yearly proclamations recognizing Negro History Week. By the late 1960s, thanks in part to the Civil Rights Movement and a growing awareness of black identity, Negro History Week had evolved into Black History Month on many college campuses.

President Gerald R. Ford officially recognized Black History Month in 1976, calling upon the public to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.

SPOTLIGHT BLACK HISTORY MONTH MEDIA 2018