Engineering FABLAB grand opening
VWCC announces it will host a grand opening for its new engineering FABLAB on Friday, Oct. 30. 10:00 a.m – 1:00 p.m., for high school students, and 1:00 p.m.- 4:00 p.m. for the general public in Webber Hall W117.
Students, perspective students and members of the public are invited to come see the cutting edge facility that will provide new opportunities to experience the latest in engineering technology. Once open, the FABLAB will be available to the public when not in use for classes.
The FABLAB is equipped through funding from the NSF, as part of the college’s PACE-ME grant, and through generous contributions from partners like Plastics One. There are industrial-grade fabrication and electronic tools that use open-source software. Tools include multiple 3D printers, laser engravers and cutters, an injection molding machine, a sign cutter, a high-resolution NC milling machine for circuit boards and precision parts and more. Enrollment for the Spring Semester begins November 16.
Author presents untold story of Black D-Day battalion
VWCC and the Harrison Museum of African American Culture invite the public to attend a special presentation on Tuesday, Nov. 10, by author Linda Hervieux about her new book, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Black Heroes, at Home and at War.
The event will be held at the Harrison Museum in downtown Roanoke’s Center in the Square, beginning with a reception at 5:30 p.m. and followed by Hervieux’s talk at 6:15 p.m. A veteran from the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion will join Hervieux. The Harrison Museum requests a $20 donation for guests attending; college students with a valid student ID will be admitted free.
Published by HarperCollins on October 27, Forgotten is the story of an all-black battalion whose crucial contributions on D-Day have gone unrecognized to the present. In this extraordinary blend of military and social history, Hervieux brings to life the injustices of 1940’s Jim Crow America and finally pays tribute to the valor of these brave young men.
Drawing on newly uncovered military records and dozens of original interviews with surviving members of the 320th and their families, Forgotten tells the tale of these heroic men whose contributions to one of the most extraordinary missions in modern history have been overlooked. Like thousands of other African Americans, members of the 320th—Wilson Monk, a jack-of-all-trades from Atlantic City; Henry Parham, a bus porter who fled Virginia’s sharecropping country; William Dabney, an eager 17-year-old army volunteer from Roanoke; and Samuel Mattison, a charming romantic from Columbus, OH—were sent abroad to fight for liberties denied them at home.
In England and Europe, these soldiers discovered freedoms they had not known in a homeland that treated them as second-class citizens, and they would carry these experiences back to America, to fuel the budding civil rights movement.
