SU Ag Center hosts black history quiz bowl

In honor of Black History Month, the Southern University Agricultural Research and Extension Center hosted its 13th Annual Black History Quiz Bowl competition on February 16.
The event featured nine teams, which included Agricultural Economic Seniors, AMTX Scholars, The Collaboration, The Elite, Timbuktu Red, Timbuktu Blue, Timbuktu Green, Timbuktu Gold and Urban Forestry Plus One.
Questions asked stemmed from areas of history, science, literature, religion, art, social sciences and urban/hip hop elements of the African-American culture.
The program began with welcoming remarks from the sponsor of the event, Owusu Bandele, a professor at Southern.
Four teams were eliminated in the first round followed by two more in the second and so on.
The final battle came down to Timbuktu Blue prevailing as the winning team, followed by AMTX Scholars as the runner-ups with The Elite finishing in third place.
Played with a lockout buzzer system, each round consisted of 25 toss-up questions. A moderator read questions to the teams, whose players endeavor to buzz in first with the correct answer, scoring points for their team.
Bandele said the inspiration for the occasion came from his personal undergraduate college experiences.
“I attended a predominantly white university in the sixties during the self empowerment movement,” he said. “As a result, I think it’s important for young people to be grounded in the history of their ancestors.”
Suitably, he said his name means, “clearer of the way, born away from home.”
Bandele is a professor of horticulture at the SU Ag Center and much of his work has involved identifying and evaluating alternative crops and cropping systems for limited resource farmers.
He earned his B.S. degrees in history and secondary education from Towson State University in Maryland. He later earned a B.S. in agronomy from the University of Maryland.
He holds an M.S. in Plant and Soil Sciences from Tuskegee University and a Ph.D. in horticultural science from North Carolina State University.