VOICES bySharisse: Recognizing community

A month after August’s crowds have faded, HBCU Legacy Week and the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival reveal what Black gathering on the Vineyard creates — and what remains after everyone goes home.

There is a particular kind of recognition that happens between people who discover they belong to the same community. It is more than familiarity. There is an ease in knowing you are in a space where your presence does not require explanation — where you can focus less on proving why you belong and more on what you came there to create, contribute, or experience. To be understood without having to first explain yourself is its own kind of freedom.

Sometimes it is a school name across a sweatshirt. Familiar colors. Greek letters. A chant you haven’t heard in years. You can be hundreds of miles from the campus where it all began, meet someone you have never seen before, and within seconds, recognize something of yourself in them. I felt that recognition everywhere this summer.

Now, a month after HBCU Legacy Week and the African American Film Festival brought thousands together across the Island, the crowds have thinned. Screenings have ended. Alumni have returned home. Martha’s Vineyard has begun its familiar transition out of summer. The significance of some gatherings only becomes clear after they are over.

As a proud Howard Bison, I experienced HBCU Legacy Week through something familiar: Being among people connected by institutions and traditions that have shaped generations of Black life. Moving from those gatherings into MVAAFF, I began thinking about recognition differently.

There is power in being part of spaces that shape how you see yourself — what you believe you can become, where you belong, and what possibilities you imagine for your life. And there is power in shaping how the world sees you, by telling your own stories on your own terms. One nurtures possibility. The other makes possibility visible.

This August, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) Legacy Week — more commonly known as Legacy Week on the Vineyard — marked its 10th anniversary. Created by Sheryl Wesley, founder of HBCU Brand Partners and a Howard University alumna, what began as a gathering has grown into something much larger.

“HBCU Legacy Week began as an idea,” Wesley reflected after this year’s anniversary. “Somewhere along the way, it became a community. And now, I believe it has become part of the Island’s story.”

The week moved from mornings at the Inkwell alongside the Polar Bears to conversations about HBCU history, Black men’s health, leadership and legacy, alongside networking, wellness, music, and celebration. That range was intentional.

“I wanted Legacy Week to reflect the full breadth of who we are,” Wesley said. “Because an HBCU is not simply a school you attended. For many of us, it is a place that helped teach us how to see ourselves, how to lead, how to serve, how to create, and how to understand the responsibility that comes with succeeding.”

For those of us who attended Howard University, we are Bisons — a nod to the university’s bison mascot — and sometimes all it takes is an “HU!” followed instinctively by “You Know!” for a stranger to no longer feel quite like a stranger. During Legacy Week, I watched versions of that recognition happen across HBCUs: school colors, Greek letters, graduation years, and embraces between people who had only just met.

Wesley described it simply: “The feeling that you can come to the Vineyard and find your people.”

That belonging has roots extending far beyond any single week. This summer also marked the 20th anniversary of Bison on the Vineyard, a separate initiative founded in 2006 by Howard alumni Margo Bouchet, Sarah Davidson, Donald Thigpen, the late Father Darryl James, and Lydia Padilla. Wesley became involved with Bison on the Vineyard before launching Legacy Week, which grew from a desire to recognize the wider HBCU alumni community already gathering here. An annual Howard alumni tradition, Bison on the Vineyard brings the spirit of Howard to the Island through reunions, social gatherings, networking, and community — turning Martha’s Vineyard into an extension of homecoming for generations of Bisons.

“Martha’s Vineyard felt right because Black people already had a story here,” Wesley said. “Long before HBCU Legacy Week, generations of Black families had made Martha’s Vineyard a place of gathering, refuge, entrepreneurship, creativity, friendship, and joy. So I wasn’t trying to create something out of nothing,” she continued. “I was adding another layer to a story that was already being written. Legacy Week is not something that happens on Martha’s Vineyard,” Wesley said. “It has become something that happens with Martha’s Vineyard.” And what happens here does not necessarily end here: “Friendships have become partnerships. Introductions have become opportunities. Conversations that began on the Vineyard have continued long after people left the Island.”

That same intentionality could be seen at the HBCU Presidents Roundtable and Brunch. Designer Kristi Riggs, founder and creative director of Kristi Love Creative LLC, described HBCUs as “incubators for greatness and safe spaces where potential can be developed and dreams realized.”

For the roundtable, she wanted a setting “worthy of the occasion, worthy of the important conversations being had,” describing beauty as a “psychological exhale” that “sets the tone for possibility, sharing, and for magical things to happen.”

There is meaning in that kind of care. It says, You are worthy of beauty. Your work is worthy of ceremony. This conversation matters.

But what happens when possibility that has been nurtured within spaces like these is ready to meet the world?

Sometimes, we take control of the lens.

At MVAAFF, the medium changed, but the question remained: What becomes possible when Black people have space to tell their own stories?

Throughout this year’s festival, Blackness was never asked to be one thing. Stories moved through sports and fatherhood, art and history, fantasy and adventure, politics, beauty, and identity. Black life could simply be expansive.

And the ecosystem stretched beyond the screen. For Oshantay Waite of Vineyard Caribbean Cuisine, participating meant sharing her family’s story through food. “I have been able to meet so many talented people and share my family’s stories with them through the food we’ve been able to vend at the festival,” Waite told me. “I’ve gained friendships that will last my lifetime, and been able to connect with opportunities that have propelled Vineyard Caribbean Cuisine forward.”

Film. Food. Fashion. Art. Conversation. Culture is rarely experienced through one medium. We watch it. Hear it. Wear it. Taste it. Gather around it. Because culture is not simply what a community creates — it is how a community recognizes itself.

For filmmaker Kiah Clingman, that space was the theater. Clingman came to Martha’s Vineyard for the first time this summer to premiere her directorial debut. What she found was an audience that did not require her to justify her story before telling it.

“I was surrounded by people where I didn’t have to explain why my story mattered,” she said. “I just got to tell it.” Then Clingman made the connection I had been feeling all summer.

“For a week, I got to soak up Martha’s magic and feel a sense of community and Black joy that I honestly haven’t felt in a long time,” Clingman said. “The closest thing I can compare it to is my time at Howard University. Being surrounded by so much Black excellence, creativity, and love filled my cup in a way I didn’t realize I needed.”

There it was. The institution and the screen. Different spaces creating a remarkably similar freedom: not having to explain why you belong before contributing something to the room.

The Rance Family Foundation, established by festival founders Floyd A.B. Rance III and Stephanie Tavares-Rance, grounds its mission in a striking belief: “Talent is universal, but opportunity is not.”

That is why these spaces matter beyond the weeks in which they take place. HBCUs created places where generations of Black people could develop their potential. MVAAFF creates another kind of space, where Black storytellers can turn that potential outward and show us who we are through their own lenses. One creates room to become. The other creates room to be seen.

Now September is here. The films have reached their credits. School sweatshirts have been folded into suitcases, flights have been boarded, and the Island has begun to quiet. But legacy was never meant to exist only while the room was full.

August gave us the gathering. What remains is what we carry forward: the spaces we create to become, and the stories we tell the world about whom we have become.