September 1, 2022
In her freshman year at Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, Kameron Sheats was thriving. She was making good grades and adjusting to being one a few young Black women in a predominately White academic environment —just as she always had. But as she thought about the future, she realized that the time to experience the world in the context of a nurturing, Black academic setting would not come again. So she made a plan: She would apply to an HBCU in the South.
Kameron, a behavioral scientist in NCIPC’s Division of Violence Prevention, boarded a Greyhound bus to Charlotte, North Carolina, to visit Johnson C. Smith University (JCSU). She didn’t know anyone, and she hadn’t booked a hotel room, so she planned to meet with the admissions team and get back on a bus headed back to South Hadley. That plan went awry—in the best possible way.