Soul Food Dinner at Heights High School More Than a Meal

On Friday, families from Cleveland Heights High School gathered and brought dishes such as baked chicken, mac and cheese, rice and beans and sweet potato pie to the Soul Food Dinner.

It’s one of the many ways the Cleveland Heights-University Heights School District celebrates Black History Month, and it is much more than a dinner. 

The Heights High Girls’ and Boy’s Barbershoppers and the Gospel Choir performed that night, as well as Kevin Richards, executive director of Roots of American Music, a nonprofit organization that brings music programs to schools.

The Minority Student Achievement Network created A Walk Through History, a series of exhibits describing different time periods in African-American history in the U.S. Kris Austin, one of the parents who coordinated the event, read before the musical acts, which each represented different decades in the 1900s. 

“When your child attends a school, it is a community, so it’s not just the students, it’s the teachers, it’s the parents and all those individuals in the community,” Austin said before the event.

Austin has a daughter at the high school and helped coordinate the evening with the Parent  Connection Council, PCC member Carla Bailey and Joy Henderson, the parent-community liaison at Heights High. “This is just a wonderful opportunity to bring school families together, and it’s also a wonderful opportunity to bring people into the school so they can see what our students do.”

"It's not just about the food. It's about people coming together." 

Henderson said the Soul Food Dinner is the largest of the events the PCC organizes. 

The two barbershop groups performed first, then everyone lined up along the long table in the back to get dinner. The tables in the Social Room at Heights High were covered in black, red and green tablecloths, and photo cards of important leaders in African-American history, such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, served as the centerpieces. 

Meanwhile, students in the MSAN spoke about specific decades in American history and the exhibits they created. Raven Jackson, an eighth grader at Roxboro Middle School, told someone walking through about the difference between new and old Jim Crow Laws, pointing to photos and text on the poster she designed.

After dinner, Richards performed and spoke before each song about the significance of his selection, as each musical group represented a different decade in the U.S. and what was happening in African-American history at the time. He ended his performance with the song Sweet Home Chicago, and people clapped along to the music. 

The gospel choir performed last.

"The one institution that stuck with us the whole way — the church," Austin said before the group performed. She read from a document written by Nathan Williams, a social studies teacher at Heights High. The choir, led by Sandra Dixon and accompanied on piano by Jonathan Thomas, a senior at the Legacy School, lit up the room. People nodded their heads, smiled and clapped along with the choir members as they sang lyrics such as Lord, We Praise You.

Austin closed the evening. 

"We really need to be celebrating our achievements every day."