UNC Story Archive recording with Adreonna Simmons Bennett4 items
Date Deposited: 2021-12-17
Collection: UNC Story Archive (70096)
Collection Number: 70096
Finding Aid: https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/70096/
During a remote recording session, Adreonna Simmons Bennett (Class of 2015), a first-generation student from Trenton, North Carolina, shares the challenges and triumphs of finding community as a Black woman from a rural town at UNC. Simmons Bennett explains how she found community “with other Black students and people that looked like me” as well... Read more
During a remote recording session, Adreonna Simmons Bennett (Class of 2015), a first-generation student from Trenton, North Carolina, shares the challenges and triumphs of finding community as a Black woman from a rural town at UNC. Simmons Bennett explains how she found community “with other Black students and people that looked like me” as well as a supportive “home” in the Communication Studies department, where she connected with professors who cared about their students. Joining the Omega Iota chapter of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Incorporated introduced Simmons Bennett to “five phenomenal women, who I know as my sisters now” and “gave me a purpose [by] giving back to the Carolina community”. In addition to the community work Simmons Bennett engaged in with her line sisters, she also took part in protests against the University’s racist Confederate statue and to being attention to the crisis of “the violence and death that’s wrought against Black bodies on a regular basis”. Bennett Simmons is appreciative of the meaningful community she found at UNC and hopes that the University hires “more professors of color to relate to students” who “need that kind of mentoring from people who look like us” as well as expand its outreach to rural communities so that young people know that “Carolina is a viable option” for them.Read less