The Terry Buffington Foundation’s second-anniversary fundraising gala will be held on Nov. 1 at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Center in Moscow.
WSU professor Terry Buffington said the foundation’s role is to promote the cultural contributions of African Americans in history.
“The Foundation was established in November 2022 if I’m not mistaken,” Buffington said. “Immediately we decided to figure out how to take the collection to the people, so we formed the Terry Buffington Foundation and Terry Buffington Productions LLC.”
The Terry Buffington Foundation aims to enrich and educate the community to feel connected through their projects by producing events and performances that reflect their times’ social and political issues, she said. She wants people to see the history of the civil rights movement so they can form independent ideas about it.
Last November, the Foundation hosted the Clark Lewis State Community Choir which performed “Negro Spirituals from the 1800s and 1960s Freedom Songs” at St. James Episcopal Church, she said. This year, the event will open with Stephine Ann Johnson, a Seattle-based BIPOC artist, and a staged reading of the late Eddie Brooks’ oral history interview taken from the Terry Buffington papers.
In order to contribute to the community culture aspect of what we do, we take the information from the collection and bring it to life among the participants that come to these different events,” she said.
The Terry Buffington Papers are a digital civil rights collection spanning from 1952–2014, she said.
The gala will open at 7 p.m. and run through 11 p.m. Student tickets will be $10, general admission tickets will be $30 and VIP tickets will be $50.
Buffington said she grew up in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era and sees her role in the community as an educator, cultural anthropologist, folklorist and oral historian. She hopes to enlighten the community with historical information and connect Black Americans’ history, culture and contributions to the American landscape.
“I teach the Terry Buffington papers, I focus on the oral tradition, storytelling, culture and social justice movements,” she said. “That’s what the Terry Buffington Foundation and this gala is about.”
For now, the proceeds from the Terry Buffington Foundation will help sponsor a Fulbright Scholar in Columbia, Buffington said. The Fulbright Scholar is a WSU visual graduate artist who has been able to show her work throughout the Pacific Northwest and not be limited to what she can do on campus.
“[The Foundation is] working with another graduate of our school who has applied to go over to the UK and attend the economic school in London,” Buffington said. “In my class, I urge students to interact with other people who are unlike them. So the Foundation, [in the] fall of 2025, it is our mission to award an academic scholarship to a WSU student in the digital technology and culture department.”
Buffington said she first came to the Pacific Northwest when her son Kwasi was accepted to the University of Idaho graduate school of theater arts. Kwasi did not want to leave her in Mississippi and asked her to come, so she came too.
“I had no idea where we were going, but it was probably one of the best moves we made in our lifetime. We like it here, we enjoy living here,” she said.
Living in this region has validated a lot of what she thought about racism growing up, she said. It is alive and well, but if you do not know it, you can not acknowledge it and if this country does not start figuring out how to bring people together, it will never solve its problems.
“We can never have another Holocaust and we can never have another slavery. We can’t do it, but if we don’t get this together over here, we are in trouble in terms of race relations,” Buffington said. “The same things we were fighting for in the ’60s are the same exact things we’re fighting for right now … I tell my students, ‘There’s no such thing as race. It’s a figment of your imagination, it’s an illusion.’ But as long as we perpetrate the ideological concept that there are races, we’re going to be forever divided as a country. That’s how I see myself in the world. I want my legacy to be one that tried to help make our world a better place.”
Despite having to continue many of the fights of the ’60s today, Buffington said she is not discouraged. It instead makes her more encouraged to make the world a better place than when she was born.
“In the book of Proverbs, there’s a chapter that tells you that people without knowledge will perish,” she said. “So you take your skills and take it back to your community. Teach it, one student at a time and that’s important when you’re doing social justice work. While you’re there, learn as much as you can, don’t be afraid of people who are unlike you, walk up to people and engage in conversation.”
Tickets can be purchased on the Terry Buffington Foundation website and at the Kenworthy Box Office. More information can also be found there and by emailing [email protected].
