BY BRYAN SABELLA
Staff Writer
EDISON — The Metuchen-Edison NAACP held its seventh annual black history trivia competition Thursday.
The event was held at the Edison Job Corps Academy on Plainfield Avenue.
Around 60 local residents turned out to test their knowledge and compete for prizes like T-shirts and mugs.
Topics included literature, movies, music and sports.
The contest made use of a multimedia presentation that included movie and television clips and song snippets.
Reggie Johnson, president of the Metuchen-Edison National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said the free event has been a success for years.
The contest was set up "like Richard Dawson’s ‘Family Feud,’ " Johnson said, complete with buzzers and a bonus-point lightning round.
"What we do is divide the audience up into four teams, and then whittle it down to two finalists," Johnson said.
The teams are named after important moments or groups in black history.
The participants this time were dubbed the Underground Railroaders, The Tuskegee Air People, the Freedom Fighters and the Black Panthers.
The Black Panthers emerged as this year’s victor.
The spirit of the event is less on the competitive side, and more on the side of being fun and educational, Johnson said. "Because the subjects we tend to cover are very serious — we do roundtables on gangs in the community and AIDS and school issues — this is something just to lighten things up."
The contest also provided the opportunity to unveil a new stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service to commemorate Black History Month.
This year’s honoree is the late Paul Robeson, a writer, Rhodes scholar, activist and "man for all seasons," who is often referred to as Rutgers University’s most celebrated graduate.
"We celebrate black history 12 months a year; we just highlight it in February," Johnson said. "Our history is American history."