For the first time ever, there is a Mr. and Ms. Black UNM.
Before a packed SUB Ballroom Saturday evening, UNM's Black Student Union deemed Kevin Walton and Vanessa Kidd the most deserving of the titles from the three men and four women who sought the crown.
"It's a great feeling to be appreciated," Walton said, waving his shiny king's scepter and adjusting the oversized crown on his head. "It turned out well."
UNM's Gospel Choir began the event with the Negro National Anthem before BSU chairwoman Nikiyah Gill introduced the five-judge panel of UNM faculty and staff that faced the task of naming the University's royalty.
"It's a great, great feeling," Kidd said. "Everything turned out great."
Gill said the Mr. and Ms. Black UNM competition was formed, in part, to counter the negative portrayal of African Americans on campus.
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"The Black students on campus aren't represented positively all the time," she said. "Most of our campus is predominantly white. It's hard for our African-American students to be voiced, and this event is a way for us to be a voice and get acknowledged."
Candidates were first judged on the basis of their contributions to the community through volunteer work and by raising money for the New Mexico Sickle Cell Foundation. Claude Terrell and Ndidi Okoli were recognized for raising the most money for the foundation, which provides support and social services for sickle cell disease patients and their families.
Next, the candidates impressed the audience and judges with performances that included poetry, humorous impersonations and dance.
Walton, in a composition titled "We Need a Change," critiqued, among other things, misplaced spending among the poor and elements in popular culture that encourage such excess.
"Claiming that you're broke/ when you get cash you float/ on fashion trains and ice/ a hot car with no cash for a meal/ you can't pay your bills and you're telling me you're keeping it real," he said. "It seems to me we're all striving for attention/ why else we be flashy and showy? You see the connection?"
Jay Tillman recited a risqu love poem that at first unsettled the crowd until the poem's conclusion revealed, amid audience laughter and applause, that he spoke not of a lover, but of a piece of fried chicken, which he savored afterward for effect.
The candidates were judged last on their political acumen. Asked beforehand to research recent Daily Lobo articles, they rendered detailed judgments about current events.
"Freedom cannot be advocated with a firearm," Okoli said of UNM's Rebel Alliance, the radical group that requested funding from ASUNM for assault rifles. Freedom should be promoted not by violence, she said, but by "education, intelligence, self-upliftment and world peace."
Gill said the event went as planned and she expects it to grow in the years to come.
"I couldn't ask for anything better than what took place tonight," she said.
