KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The Black Student Union at Van Horn High School in Independence feels its hard work is being censored.
“The title was called 'An Unfiltered Reality of Black America through the Eyes of Us,' and we meant every word of that," Kiyonnah Bell, Black Student Union founder, said.
The group created a 15-minute video to be shown during a virtual assembly for Black History Month.
“I want them to see it, I want them to hear us and I want them to acknowledge us," Tyrique Ross, Black Student Union member, said.
Van Horn's administration asked the BSU to create the video in mid-February.
“We had questions before the video was even produced, what are the time restraints, what are the things that can and can't happen, like what's going on," Bell said. "He told us just make a video and show it to me and then we'll go from there and we did."
The school's principal, Justin Woods, said the students gave him the video with too little time to review it, and they did not follow the time restriction.
“We were thinking this is just a little too long," Woods said. "We see this. We hear you. We hear your points, but for what we were trying to accomplish for our school, length was one of the main issues."
Instead, Tedx Talk called "Black History is American History" – with a run time roughly half of what the students produced – was shown during the virtual assembly.
In his three years as principal at Van Horn, Woods has asked the BSU to create a video for Black History Month and said those students followed his guidelines.
“It took more than five minutes just to complete one interview and the fact that we were basically just given the length of one interview time wise to put together a whole video with 10-15 complete interviews, I just felt super disrespected from that," Sean Mitchell, Black Student Union member, said.
41 Action News asked Woods if the video was trimmed down, could the group show it at a later date, and he said the project's purpose was over.
“It didn't meet our expectations," Woods said, "and I'm not saying I wouldn't review it again and look at it for another platform, but for being a school as a whole assembly, we did our Black History Month assemblies, so I don't know where it would fit."
A local group called Showing Up for Racial Justice heard about the video the BSU created and asked the members to show it and discuss it during a virtual event Tuesday at 7 p.m. Colin Barnes, Showing Up for Racial Justice member, said the group felt like it had a platform to showcase the students' work.
“We have an audience, and we host lots of regular online trainings and meetings," Barnes said, "and so we wanted to make sure we gave these students an opportunity to share all this hard work that they’ve been doing and to talk about what their experience was like there and to just partner and lift up their voices."
