La Salle Junior, Narragansett Girl Wins Women's History Award

Brooke Friday, 16, of La Salle Academy in Providence, was honored with the Women’s History Award at the National History Day Competition held at the University of Maryland last month for her performance as Eleanor Roosevelt. 

According to Friday, every sophomore at her school has to participate and work a project to be entered into the competition. 

The competition begins at state level and any middle school or high school can participate. Students can create a poster, website, documentary, performance piece, etc to enter at the school level and the top two go on compete at state level. From there, the  top of each category go on to compete at national level. 

Friday, who has been acting since she was eight, says that she decided to write and perform a theatrical piece about Roosevelt for the competition, after she learned during the school year about how she was the chairwoman of the committee that created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Students had to use 35 sources but were only allowed to make their presentation 10 minutes long, which Friday said was quite a feat, given all that Roosevelt did. 

“She really promoted human rights; she traveled around the world and would come back and let her husband [then president Franklin Roosevelt] know when people were in real poverty and she would bring the news people to come see it so that Americans would see how awfully some people were living,” Friday said. “She was her husband’s eyes and ears because he had polio and wasn’t able to get out a lot.”

Friday said there were 76 in her category at the national level.

“When I first performed in Maryland, I was a little disappointed with my performance,” Friday said. “But I was more disappointed for Eleanor than I was for me because I was really in touch with the character I was portraying.”

When she gave her second performance, she felt much better about it. Although Friday found out that she didn’t win anything she still decided to stick around to watch the rest of the awards being presented. 

“While they were announcing special awards, they called my name and said I won the women’s history award,” Friday said. “I was really proud and I know Eleanor would be really proud if she could know.”

Friday was awarded a $1,000 cash prize and a medal. 

“I really felt like Eleanor was apart of me by the time I was done,” Friday said. “I hope that I can make a difference in the world someday, just like she did.”