Recap: adidas 2025 HBE Capstone Experience In ATL
Yvette Glasco
At a time when DEI programs built to promote inclusivity have experienced government-issued shutdowns, it makes the Honoring Black Excellence campaign by adidas feel all the more important. With The Three Stripes in a financial situation that doesn't require federal funding for a program like HBE, the sportswear stalwart is simply committing to a $20 million promise made back in 2020 in support of Black communities. Five years later, we can attest to the fact that adidas is definitely putting money to mouth. Many mouths, in fact.
On Tuesday (June 24), we braved the Atlanta heat for a special one-night-only event known as the HBE Capstone Experience, curated in collaboration with Paper Monday creative married duo Rog & Bee Walker. This year's honorees include Sekou Thornell of Kitboys Club, Jaycina Almond who we remember from The Tender Foundation and the soulfully Southern belles of Gee's Bend Quilters.
RELATED: Women's History Month – Jaycina Almond & The Tender Foundation
Utilizing a theme of 'Pathways & Pipelines,' Rog & Bee helped create an atmosphere that visually reflected the idea of Black creativity as a bridge to history and beyond. Whether it's the bridges of knowledge formed by quilt-making being passed down generation after generation, single mothers having bridges of access for support in any way needed or simply bridges of communication that develop when a friendship turns to family on the Kitboys-led soccer field, each honoree is creating both pathways and pipelines for success in our community.
Speaking with Sekou, he told us, 'I had a unique experience where I got to play at an all-Black youth club in Stone Mountain, so from there you sort of form your relationship with a lot of people that maintain over a long time. I fell in love with it, my parents kept [soccer] with me and a lot of opportunities I got in life came out of the game. ' He went on to add of the city's ever-thriving cultural diversity, 'You would think for a Southern city that [Atlanta] wouldn't be so progressive in a game like soccer — most people think it's football or baseball dominant. There's always been that love for the game in those pockets of culture [throughout ATL], and because the city is shaped the way it is we found it easy getting people into the fold of it. I dedicate it all to this city and having the right ingredients to really have a platform like [Kitboys Club] grow.'
Throughout the night, he made sure to always feel accessible to the many high school teenagers in the building who were given special access to the private event as a way to get inspired. Yvette Glasco
— Sekou Thornell, Kitboys Club Yvette Glasco
Similar sentiments were shared as we spoke with the ladies of Gee's Bend Quilters. Sitting together and representing all ages and shades of Black beauty, it was understood from jump that we were in the presence of a bonded sisterhood. 'I encourage [my granddaughter] by telling her how to sew and stuff, just different quilts and stuff, so she can teach her children when she have kids and it keeps going,' said Sharon Williams, who enthusiastically went on to describe their ever-growing legacy by busting out into song with the tune 'Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now' by McFadden & Whitehead. Hearing from a younger voice on the team, twenty-something sew pro Francesca Charley told us, 'Everything I learned from quilting came from my grandma, great-aunt and my mother. It's because of their words of encouragement that I am where I am today. There were so many times where I wanted to give up or I thought what I was doing wasn't good enough, or I simply could never make what they make, but to be here now with adidas is a lot to think about.'
Her mom, Claudia Pettway Charley, followed suit with beautiful insight by adding, 'Honoring Black Excellence is to honor your own legacy. Your honoring others who present excellence, but it really doesn't matter what the category or field is. It could just be that you live your life on a daily basis in your own excellence, especially if you're Black. It's a privilege just to be here being honored by a company such as adidas. Even being recognized by Rog & Bee, who take your stories and turn them into movies right in front of your face, is all the definition of excellence and honor. Doing it in ways that only Black people can feels exciting to me.' Yvette Glasco
— Claudia Pettway Charley, Gee's Bend Quilters Yvette Glasco
Good southern eats, drinks aplenty for those old enough to indulge responsibly, a live jazz performance that fit the mood of the party perfectly and studio-style portrait sessions being snapped by Rog & Bee themselves all came together to cap off a night we won't soon forget. When it comes to honoring our heritage and literally everything that make it so beautiful to be Black, we give props to The Three Stripes for pulling off a night worth coming outside on during one of the most humid days in Hotlanta! Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco Yvette Glasco
SEE ALSO
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
USA Today
3 hours ago
- USA Today
We reach 71 in our Raiders countdown to kickoff. Who wore it best and who's wearing it now
We've reached 71 days until the Raiders season opener at Foxboro against the Patriots, With our countdown at 71 days we take a look at who currently dons the number in Silver & Black and who has brought it the most distinction. No. 71 Who's wearing it now: T DJ Glaze Glaze was the Raiders' pick in the third round of the 2024 NFL Draft out of Maryland. He took over at right tackle for Thayer Munford due to injury and never looked back. Even with a new staff, Glaze remains in line to be the team's starting right tackle going into this season. Who wore it best: DT Bill Pickel The second round pick (54 overall) in the 1983 NFL Draft spent the first eight years of his career with the Raiders. The team won the Super Bowl in his first season with the team. Then he settled in as a constant presence on the defensive interior for the next seven years. This includes a run of three consecutive seasons with double digit sacks from 1984-86 culminating in being named a first team All Pro.
Los Angeles Times
8 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Yup, it's gay food. But what does that mean? Two new books tell all
Only seven pages in, John Birdsall offers a conclusion to the question that titles his book, 'What Is Queer Food?' It's a subject that has consumed him for decades, as a restaurant cook in the Bay Area and then as a journalist and author. In the last dozen or so years — when food media began more honestly grappling with identity and diversity in its subjects, and also with who is given opportunities to tell those stories — Birdsall won national awards for feats like his groundbreaking piece, 'America, Your Food Is So Gay.' 'Still, saying what queer food was on a granular level kept eluding me,' he writes in his new work, published this month. 'Lots of us could say that queer food, like desire, exists, but nobody could definitely point through what is was.' Drag-brunch eggs benedict? Rainbow cookies? Intentional diet choices? Suggestively shaped edible schtick? 'It shouldn't have taken me as long as it did,' he accedes, 'but at last I accepted the obvious truth that queer food is not a commodity. There is no essentialized cuisine of queerness, any more than there's one simple answer for what it means to be queer.' Acceptance is a doorway. He is freed to spend the rest of the book coupling meticulous research and gorgeous prose to illuminate lives that, in ways indirect and overt, shaped who we are as a culinary nation. There's Harry Baker, a man who flees from a sullied life in Ohio to Los Angeles and who, true to his name, develops a style of cake that becomes the de-facto dessert of young Hollywood; later it well be reworked and homogenized as a signature recipe for General Mills. There's Esther Eng, an early 20th-century film auteur, her movies now mostly lost, whose fluency with the group dynamics of creating cinema translates to a second act as a New York restaurateur. In her masculine clothes and bluntly cropped hair, she is at once successful and invisible. Birdsall notes that Craig Claiborne, then food editor of the New York Times and the father of modern American restaurant criticism, reviewed Eng's self-named restaurant in the 1960s. Claiborne used his platform to push dining and cooking toward their current cultural status in the United States. Privately he was far more tragic — 'haunted,' to use Birdsall's word, by his difficult Southern childhood and misguided in a mess of a memoir published in 1983, 17 years before his death at 79. Birdsall does not abide counterfeit joy. He narrates lives shaped by society's denials, prejudices and punishments, and he lays their suffering bare. Some (among them Alice B. Toklas, James Baldwin and Richard Olney, one of my all-time favorite cookbook authors) know to leave the country to love in greater peace. Where delight comes easy is in Birdsall's prose. He took the narrative lessons he learned from his 2020 biography of James Beard, 'The Man Who Ate Too Much,' to tighten the intricate threads of this opus. Characters that appear early in the book return for lightbulb impact. No strand dangles. Even when the reader feels his own rage — as when he veers into a personal story about making quiche for a Sunday open house in the storm-center of the AIDS crisis — his eloquence carries us through the bitterest aftertastes. Birdsall centers his elucidation of queer culinary culture on people, and by extension the worlds around them. In 'Dining Out: First Dates, Defiant Nights and Last Call Disco Fries at America's Gay Restaurants,' also published this month, Erik Piepenburg shifts the focus to place. His catalyst for his book: the accelerated disappearance of spaces by and for LGBTQ populations across America. He opens with a requiem for a 24-hour diner in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood where he was a regular in the 1990s. 'The Melrose was a gay restaurant because gay people made it one,' he begins. He watched older men share their meals and drag queens scarf bacon-and-cheese potato skins post performance, and took solace in blueberry silver dollar pancakes when chemistry fizzled with the guy across the table. The Melrose closed in 2017 after 56 years in business. 'When gay restaurants close, gay reliquaries empty of memory and meaning,' he writes. 'Gone are favorite waitresses and go-to-meals, safe spaces and party places in the night's last hours. For me and other gay people who love to eat out, losing a gay restaurant is a kind of dispossession.' Piepenburg traveled across the country throughout 2023, interviewing owners and customers of establishments still present and long gone. Chapters graft careful reporting with his own running commentary, at turns cheeky and poignant and angered by the tenuous state of gay rights and acceptance. Some salute institutions like Annie's Paramount Steak House in Washington D.C.; lesbian-feminist restaurant Bloodroot in Bridgeport, Conn.; and trans safe havens like Napalese Lounge and Grille in Green Bay, Wis. Others seek to debunk myths, including the supposed queer riot in 1959 at a downtown Los Angeles location of Cooper Do-nuts whose occurrence Piepenburg could find little hard evidence to support. To consider the future of gay dining, he considers two recently opened restaurants in Southern California: the Ruby Fruit in Silver Lake and Alice B. in Palm Springs. Piepenburg has been writing for the New York Times for nearly 20 years, concentrating mostly on film (especially horror), television and theater. He is, in the most wonderful sense, not a food writer. He self-identifies as a 'diner gay.' This is a work about history and, above all, community, not exalted poetry on the art of gastronomy. What strikes me most about Piepenburg's frame of reference is how explicitly and organically he twins the subjects of dining and sex. We rarely acknowledge the existence of sex in Food Writing. First, it's the hardest subject to not be cringe about, and food and sex analogies usually land as ick. But also, most of us who cover restaurants are keenly aware of ugly power dynamics that went unspoken in male-dominated kitchens for decades, and the industry as a whole is in a slow but sustained corrective era. The approach in 'Dining Out' succeeds in its matter-of-factness. Lonely people congregate over holiday buffets in bathhouses. Men frequented — still frequent — certain gayborhood restaurants to cruise, to pose, to be themselves. A bit of melancholy also winds through the book, as Piepenburg laments the 'golden age' of gay restaurants that halted at the turn of the millennium, if not before, and also his own aging. Here is where I mention: I met the author 35 years ago, in my early college years before either of us was out, so I relate to his feelings on the passage of time. When in the book he references his '90s-era club kid days, sporting 'shaggy wigs and carrying lunchboxes' at the Limelight in New York … I remember. Of course, the release of Birdsall's and Piepenburg's books was planned for visibility during Pride month. Their merits, individual and collective, make for absorbing, enlightening reading far beyond 30 days of designated LBGTQ recognition.
USA Today
11 hours ago
- USA Today
2026 4-star WR and Texas A&M commit has shut down his recruitment
Texas A&M's future wide receiver corps, outside of one 2026 five-star prospect who is set to commit early next month, is set in stone, as 2026 four-star wideout Madden Williams has reportedly shut down his recruitment after his official visit to College Station last weekend, joining four-star wide receiver commits Aaron Gregory and Mike Brown. Williams, who recently signed an NIL-based deal with Adidas ahead of his senior season, is one of the rising stars in the Aggies' 2026 cycle, possessing elite route-running skills and steadily improving as a consistent separator in coverage, utilizing his size. Williams was one of the early commitments in the class, announcing his pledge back in December, so credit to coach Mike Elko, OC Collin Klein, and WR coach Holmon Wiggins for keeping him in house. Texas A&M's California recruiting pipeline under Elko is similar to that of the former head coach Jimbo Fisher, who dominated Florida during his six-year tenure. Williams will enter his senior season at St. John Bosco, one of the elite football programs in the Golden State, and Williams is on track to best his 2024 stats after recording 50 receptions for 851 yards and 13 touchdowns during his junior campaign. So far, Mike Elko is on track to have nearly every one of his 21 2026 commitments shut down their recruitments before Early Signing Day on December 4, further proving that the program is in excellent hands from a recruiting and development standpoint. According to 247Sports, Williams is currently positioned as the 39th-ranked wide receiver prospect and the 27th-ranked prospect in California. Contact/Follow us @AggiesWire on X (formerly Twitter) and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Texas A&M news, notes and opinions. Follow Cameron on X: @CameronOhnysty.
