Coachella turned BeyChella

As mostly everyone knows, the very popular music festival, Coachella, started on April 13 for its first weekend of festivities.
For those who don’t know, again, Coachella is a very popular music festival that is held every year in California and lasts for two weekends. Between the two weekends, an array of popular artists perform throughout the day with the top artists headlining at night from Friday to Sunday.
Beyoncé rocked the Coachella stage on April 14 where she single-handedly transformed her performance into the dynamic space for African Americans, despite the majority of the crowd basically being white.
Not only that, her entire set was a clear celebration and homage to HBCUs. From her marching band (several of them actually were members in FAMU drumline), to her dancers and their costumes, to the music break sequences, all the way to using actual members of Black Letter Greek Organizations (BLGO), or the Divine 9 if you will, to formulate her own fictional BLGO, Beta Delta Kappa. Not only that, she also sung, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, which is the Black National Anthem. Her performance was dripping with nothing but HBCU love, black culture, and influences. And I could not have been any happier.
I have always felt like HBCUs are constantly overlooked when it comes to almost everything. Our education standards are questioned by those who don’t go here or go to a predominately white institution (PWI), or by our ability to prepare our students for career readiness and the real world. Yet, HBCUs provide 22 percent of bachelor’s degrees that are given to African Americans. HBCUs provide black students with an experience that they would most likely not receive at a PWI. They also provide a safe space for us to be challenged and to be educated at the same time.
Even Beyoncé’s mom was worried about the audiences understanding what her performance was based off of, but Beyoncé took it in stride and responded that it was her duty to use her platform to showcase Black pride and “bridge the gap” across all races. And her performance did that and more.
Her HBCU-based band integrated “traditional” songs that we know of such as her marching in to “Do Watcha Wanna”, a staple song performed by our very own Human Jukebox and other HBCUs.
Other songs included,“Back That A** Up” by Juvenile, “Down for My N****s” by C-Murder as a transition from her songs “Crazy in Love” to “Freedom”. Then she used the iconic “Swag Surfin” by F.L.Y. in the middle of her performance to “Drunk In Love”. She also put Southern in the spotlight after using a very popular catch-on created by our own Fabulous Dancing Dolls.
What made her performance even more historic is the simple fact that she is the first Black woman to headline the Coachella stage, for which she thanked them and then she said, “Ain’t that bout a b****?”. Yes Bey, yes it is.
Following her performance, Beyoncé continued to give back to HBCUs by creating a scholarship donating $100,000 to Xavier University of Louisiana, Bethune-Cookman University, Tuskegee University, and Wilberforce University each. All in all, Beyoncé showed us why HBCUs matter and why they are here to stay.