Graduate student earns national award for community-engaged history work

When the 23/54 Project’s Quilt Monument was unveiled in Pulaski last year, Kamille Simon ’25 saw years of history gathered in one place.

The unveiling brought together descendants of the 23 Black families who fought for better educational facilities for 54 Black children in Pulaski County in the 1940s. Community members, artists, researchers, and others who had helped tell their stories joined them.

For Simon, then a Virginia Tech undergraduate in history and social sciences education and a public history research fellow with the Calfee Community and Cultural Center, the moment showed what can happen when historical research extends beyond the archives.

She researched the families and their history, participated in quilt design workshops with descendants and community members, wrote interpretive material, and helped develop a digital exhibit.

That work has earned Simon the 2026 Excellence in Student Community Engagement Award from the Engagement Scholarship Consortium, a national organization of colleges and universities that advances community-engaged scholarship. The award recognizes her undergraduate scholarship and partnership with the Pulaski community.

“Talking to people who experienced a time that I’ve only studied through the historical record brought the past to life,” said Simon, now a Virginia Tech graduate student in history. “The stories of descendants and community members made my understanding of this history more personal and more meaningful.”

Simon will be recognized Oct. 7 at the consortium’s annual conference in Knoxville, Tennessee, which brings together higher education faculty, staff, students, and community partners from across the country. Several Virginia Tech faculty and staff members also will participate in preconference sessions, presentations, and workshops, listed in the conference schedule.

Recovering a community’s history

The 23/54 Project grew from a pivotal chapter of Virginia’s civil rights history.

In 1947, 23 Black parents in Pulaski County joined Percy Corbin in suing the county school board for better facilities for 54 Black children. The case, Corbin et al. v. County School Board of Pulaski County, became part of the broader struggle for educational equality that preceded the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.

The Quilt Monument features 23 squares, one representing each family in the lawsuit. Descendants participated in design sessions and shared family stories and artifacts that helped shape the squares. More than 400 artifacts are represented in the quilt.

The larger project includes oral histories, community story-gathering events, a traveling exhibit, a documentary, and an interactive digital exhibit that allows visitors to explore individual squares, photos, videos, interpretive writing, and family histories.

The project was created through Monuments Across Appalachian Places, a Virginia Tech-based initiative that supports community-led projects commemorating Appalachian histories.

“It brought together the descendants of the courageous people who inform this history, the families and community members who shaped this history, the hands and hearts that stitched together the quilt, the large network of contributors to this project, and the wider public,” Simon said.

Doing history with a community

Descendants served on the project’s advisory board alongside Calfee Center board members, representatives of regional organizations working to preserve historically Black schools, artists, and cultural organizations. Descendants and community members also took part in workshops that shaped how the families would be represented in the quilt.

Simon said developing trust and relationships was important because descendants held knowledge that archives could not.

Mariam Ismail, digital projects coordinator and assistant professor with University Libraries, supervised Simon’s work on the digital exhibit. She said Simon understood early that community members were partners in the work, not simply people to interview.

“She knew how to ask the right questions, but, just as importantly, she knew when to listen,” Ismail said. “She approached descendants and community members with respect and treated them as collaborators and knowledge holders rather than simply as sources of information.”

Jill Williams, executive director of the Calfee Center, said the partnership benefited both Simon and the families involved. Simon helped descendants uncover records, organize family histories, and preserve photos, stories, and other materials they shared.

“Her involvement gave families another partner in making sure their histories were documented and remembered,” Williams said.

Shaping a future historian

Clay Adkins, community engagement coordinator for the history department, research lead for the 23/54 Project, and research director at the Calfee Center, said he saw Simon’s understanding of public history change through the work.

“I witnessed Kamille evolve from a researcher focused on uncovering historical evidence to a historian dedicated to collaborating with communities to tell their stories,” Adkins said.

Simon’s work with the 23/54 Project was among the experiences that led her to pursue graduate study in history and public history. It also deepened her interest in Black Appalachian education and society, particularly community resistance and historical memory.

Ismail said Simon was already a strong historian, particularly at placing local history within broader regional and national contexts. The 23/54 Project challenged her to think more deeply about whose knowledge informs that history.

“She learned to hold historical context alongside community knowledge and memory, rather than treating one as more authoritative than the other,” Ismail said. “She also became very thoughtful about questions of representation: how a story is framed, what information needs to be included, and how the people whose histories are being documented should have a voice in that process.”

As a future educator, Simon said the project strengthened her ability to communicate complicated histories to broader audiences.

“I now feel a deep connection to this community,” she said, “and will continue to uplift the parts of its history I engage with.”