ROCKINGHAM — Soon-to-be graduates Joydan Styles and C’Nedra Hinson will have some financial help attending their respective colleges.
Both students were awarded scholarships late Wednesday morning in the Richmond Senior High School Media Center.
Styles is the first recipient of a scholarship named in honor of the late Latronda Bright.
Bright, a 1998 graduate of RSHS, who was killed in a wreck while on her way home from UNC-Greensboro in 2002.
As fate would have it, current RSHS Assistant Principal Alan Parker drove up on that wreck on U.S. 220 in Candor.
Twenty years later, Parker received a phone call from a man named Ron Davis, of Greensboro.
Davis had met Bright while attending UNCG and said they “just clicked.”
He said they would meet early mornings at the Bryan School of Business and Economics where Bright was trying to become a finance major.
“She was the hardest working young lady I ever met,” Davis recalled. “Unfortunately, we lost her way too young.”
Davis and a few other students attended her funeral and he said he wanted to do something for the community and family.
“Twenty-one years later, in the middle of the night, I woke up and started crying, thinking about Latronda … and had to do something,” Davis said. “And I decided the best way to do it was to try to continue what she could not finish, which was to go to school.
“I never met anyone who was so determined to become a finance major,” despite the difficulty at the Bryan School, Davis continued.
Being horrible with names, Davis said he couldn’t remember Bright’s first name when he started the process.
Eventually, he connected with Parker and Simmy Rivers, who helped Davis contact Bright’s family.
Mary Bright, Latronda’s surviving mother, said he cried when she heard Davis wanted to honor her daughter with a memorial scholarship.
The minute Davis started talking, the mother says she remembered him being at the funeral.
“Sometimes you think people forgot,” Mary Bright said. “But he’s a true man, he ain’t forgot nothing … He loved my child.”
The mother said her daughter “was good, never complained; always went hard for what she went after, and she just liked helping people.”
Davis established the scholarship with his own money and was able to raise a little extra through a GoFundMe campaign.
The recipient of the scholarship, Davis said, had to be a young lady from the same community.
Styles wound up being that young lady.
“So it all just kind of worked out together,” Davis continued. “It just was like God’s plan … What woke me up in the middle of the night and put Latronda in my head could only be God.”
Davis presented Styles with a scholarship for $3,600 to help her pay tuition at N.C. Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro.
During the school’s Academic Awards Banquet last month, Styles — a member of the National Honor Society — was presented with: the Delta Sigma Theta Scholarship; the Richmond County Democratic Women Scholarship; a Emmanuel S. Douglas Scholarship; the Mary L. Quick Memorial Scholarship; a Cole Foundation Scholarship; and a Golden Leaf Scholarship.
Styles plans to double-major in psychology and business administration.
Davis hopes to be able to provide more scholarships in the future.
Prior to that presentation, Hinson received a full ride to Livingstone College.
The Presidential Scholarship was presented to Hinson by Bruce Stanback, president of the college’s National Alumni Association.
“She won’t have any expenses during the time she is at Livingstone College over the next four years,” Stanback said, which was followed by several crowd members saying, “Amen” before clapping.
A two-sport athlete, playing both soccer and basketball, Hinson was recognized in March 2022 as the RO’s Female Athlete of the Week.
Click here to read that story.
“Welcome to the Blue Bear family,” Stanback told Hinson.
Hinson plans to major in business administration and management and join the U.S. Air Force upon graduation from Livingstone.
Both Livingstone and N.C.A&T are historically black colleges.
