Zoë Powell-McCroey ’24 Earns Gold Medal at National ACT-SO Competition on Original Essay

Powell-McCroey joins a community of Rivers students and alumni who have recently won at various levels of the competition; Kayla Thugi ’25 also advanced to the national competition this year after winning gold in the regional competition for the “poetry - written” category. And last year Sadie Carroll ’23 won the bronze medal at the national competition in the “music composition” category. 

Run by the NAACP since 1978, ACT-SO “inspires young Black students to expand their horizons and sharpen their skills.” From performing and culinary arts to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), students can demonstrate their talents in up to three competition areas across 32 competitive fields. 

To qualify for the competition in the category of original essay, Powell-McCroey submitted writing from the project she completed for History Department Chair Ben Leeming’s honors thesis class. The senior history elective delves deep into historical research and offers seniors an opportunity to refine their independent research and writing skills in a close seminar environment with peers.

Leeming, who served as a mentor and thesis advisor, encourages students in the class to craft historical writing that engages the reader with elements of storytelling and descriptive writing, something that Powell-McCroey excelled at.

“She’s a superb writer,” recalled Leeming. “Her ideas are very well-formed. She’s very thoughtful, she makes good connections, and she’s passionate about the ideas she’s engaging.”

Powell-McCroey said her essay, which focuses on food as a tool for Black liberation throughout African American history, resonates deeply on a personal level. “Food is the main way I see my culture presented in my life,” Powell-McCroey says, recalling familiar dishes her grandmother would make at family gatherings. Throughout history, the central idea of food and community as soul food persists. “Through slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, from the Black Consciousness movement to the present day, food has empowered the Black community for centuries,” she wrote.
 

Powell-McCroey researched foodways in Africa and how that influenced cooking in the time of slavery, how those influences were brought North to cities like Boston and New York in the Great Migration, and how Black people used food as a tool for economic empowerment. For example, soul food fed activists fighting for change in the Civil Rights Movement. And after the Civil War, some newly emancipated people took to growing and selling watermelons as a way to build wealth and stability for themselves and their families.

For her source materials, she says she “looked at cookbooks, journals, history books about Civil Rights or slavery,” such as those from the National Council of Negro Women, from which Powell-McCroey excerpts glossaries and recipes in the notes of her essay. 

More than an academic account, though, Powell-McCroey’s writing is descriptive and evocative. In the introduction and conclusion, she connects her topic back to the soul of the people the food has carried, imagining a mealtime scenario for two families: an enslaved couple working on a plantation and a present-day Black family, their descendants. 

Some examples of traditional foods mentioned in the piece include sweet potato pie, collard greens, red beans and rice, and baked mac and cheese. 

Powell-McCroey’s writing, and the topic of food, were very well-received by her classmates and the competition judges. “Mr. Leeming was so enthusiastic about the food—it made him want to try my grandmother’s cooking,” recalls Powell-McCroey.

She went on to explain that African American cuisine is not something everyone understands as a cultural food category.

“I grew up exposed to all types of food cultures—Mexican, Japanese, Dominican—but I never saw my own culture’s foods represented in the same way. I realized that not a lot of people know about the food originated by African American people nor do they know of its historical significance within our country,” she says—something she hopes she can change through her work.

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