Talented area youth will compete in multiple categories as the NAACP Dane County presents the local competition for ACT-SO 2021 on Sunday, April 18, 6 p.m. via live stream.
“We are going virtual this year – both the local and the national competition – because we want to keep everybody safe,” Frances Huntley-Cooper, NAACP Dane County ACT-SO Committee Chair, tells Madison365.
Students will compete in categories like humanities and visual arts. Performing arts students have pre-recorded their work that will be judged at the event.
“We have 10 categories and nine students. We have a STEM [Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] student this year, which is very exciting for us, because we have never had one before. We have a student with a biology product, a student in engineering and a student in business entrepreneurship,” Huntley-Cooper says. “There are three new categories that we’ve never had students participate in before so we are really looking forward to their presentations and hopefully them winning gold and moving on to the next level.”
That next level is the national NAACP ACT-SO competition. NAACP ACT-SO (Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics) is a year-long youth program, informally named the “Olympics of the Mind,” that recognizes and awards young people who have demonstrated academic and cultural achievement. Local youth of African descent may compete in up to 3 of 33 categories ranging from the arts and humanities to S.T.E.M.
“The most popular category we have is poetry written. I’ve seen the poems and I think it’s going to be very competitive,” Huntley-Cooper says. “We aso have an original essay and a drawing.
There will be students competing in vocal contemporary and vocal classical and dance contemporary.
Huntley-Cooper says that it has a been tough year during the COVID-19 pandemic and that she hopes to have even more competitors in next year’s competition.
ACT-SO 2021 Competition will be held on Saturday and start at 10 a.m. and run until 3:30 p.m. There won’t be an audience on Saturday, but Huntley-Cooper says that they will edit everything and the video will be live-streamed on Sunday night at 6 p.m. for the whole community to watch.
“People will get to see all of the work the students have done or an interview they may have had with the judges. The awards ceremony will be the following Sunday [April 25] at 2 p.m. That will be a live event.”
Many Dane County NAACP ACT-SO past participants have gone on to national success in recent years.
“Since we are a small chapter and a small branch here in Dane County, unfortunately, we’ve always had a small number of people participate, but we’ve had some great successes in the past few years,” Huntley-Cooper says.
At the 39th National NAACP ACT-SO Competition & Ceremony in the summer of 2017 in Baltimore, Maryland, Amadou Kromah won silver in photography.
“The next year, Jhanae Harris was selected to go the [2nd annual] Hollywood Arts and Intensive Program in Los Angeles,” Huntley-Cooper remembers.
In 2019, ACT-SO Alum Makaya Drake won the 2019 WKOW American Idol Audition. That same year, Danielle Crim won the silver for music composition and Maurissa Powell won the silver in ballet at the 41st National NAACP ACT-SO Competition & Ceremony in Detroit.
“We had another student, Madison Mosley, who went back to Hollywood last year in February, just before the pandemic kicked off. She nailed it at the 4th Hollywood Arts and STEAMage Intensive Program,” Huntley-Cooper says. “And, finally, we had Tziah McNair who double-silver-medaled in dramatics and original essay at the 42nd National NAACP ACT-SO Competition & Ceremony, which was virtual.”
Local gold medalists at Saturday’s competition will advance to the virtual National ACT-SO competition on July 7-10 and compete for prizes and scholarships.
“We are looking forward to the event and we welcome the community to join us on Sunday,” Huntley-Cooper says. “It’s a fun and inspiration event with some very talented young people.”
You can watch this weekend’s NAACP Dane County ACT-SO Competition on Sunday at 6 p.m. at https://www.naacpofdanceco.org/act-so.html
