A&T student wins national Gracie Award for A&T Four project

Chyna Black, a junior mass media production student at North Carolina A&T State University, turned a WNAA-FM Black History Month segment on the A&T Four into national recognition, winning a 2026 Gracie Award in the Radio-Student category.

The honor lands Black among a broader field of student winners and puts a Guilford County student on a national stage usually reserved for established broadcasters. The Alliance for Women in Media Foundation will recognize local television, radio and student recipients at the Gracie Awards Luncheon on Tuesday, June 16, at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York City, where Black is expected to travel for the ceremony.

Black’s winning entry, listed as “A&T Four/Black History Month,” grew out of a series of vignettes for WNAA-FM. N.C. A&T said the station’s program director was impressed enough to submit the project, which Black produced as part of her work in the university’s Department of Journalism and Mass Communication. The project also drew on intensive research into the historical figures whose names appear across campus buildings, giving the work both journalistic depth and archival value.

That research-centered approach is part of what gives the project its local force. Black’s segment traced the legacy of the A&T Four, the four freshmen, Ezell Blair Jr., later Jibreel Khazan, Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond, who sat down at the whites-only Woolworth lunch counter in downtown Greensboro on Feb. 1, 1960, and refused to leave when denied service. North Carolina A&T says that sit-in helped catalyze desegregation and changes in public accommodations laws across the nation.

The history behind the project has also been elevated in recent years. In January 2025, the National Park Service designated the F.W. Woolworth Co. Building, the site of the sit-in, a National Historic Landmark. Black’s award shows that the story is still moving, not as a museum piece but as living material that a current A&T student can translate for a new generation of listeners.

For A&T, the recognition reinforces a campus identity built on both civil rights history and media training. For Greensboro, it is another reminder that the city’s most consequential story still carries weight well beyond Guilford County, especially when a student broadcaster gives it new voice.