Photo by Nick Romanenko
Sana Colter, a classically trained flutist at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, remembers growing up in Harlem, learning to play the flute and piano in fourth grade and thinking that she would have to stop because her parents couldn’t afford the lessons.
“I would bug everyone for lessons,” said Colter, a senior flute performance major, who received the NAACP New Brunswicks Chapter’s James Baldwin Award for Artistic Achievement last spring. “Eventually my mom helped me land an opportunity to play through a church. But every year that I continued to play, the number of kids at school who still played instruments – especially classical instruments – got smaller and smaller.”