“We did have a speech written, but to be honest, when I heard there was only 21 scholarships given today, I actually got really upset,” Public School’s Maxwell Osborne told the crowd at the 10th Annual Awards Dinner and Auction for The Gordon Parks Foundation, which included Chanel Iman, Prabal Gurung, Victor Cruz, Martha Hunt and Constance Jablonski. “There needs to be one scholarship for everyone in this f—–g room. Excuse me, mom.”
Osborne and Dao-Yi Chow were both being honored. The design duo created limited-edition hats for the scholarship students and scholarship auction donors that are embroidered with “WNL,” which has a dual meaning for We Need Leaders or When Nobody’s Looking.
Other honorees included singer Janelle Monae, who proudly proclaimed that similar to Gordon Parks she’s from Kansas; Leonard A. Lauder, chairman emeritus of The Estée Lauder Co. and his wife, photographer Judy Glickman Lauder; photographer Latoya Ruby Frazier; Bryan Stevenson, founder of Equal Justice Initiative, and special guest Kathleen Cleaver, a former Black Panther leader who was photographed by Parks with her husband Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers in 1970.
Music producer Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean co-chaired the event along with his wife Alicia Keys, Usher and Grace Raymond, Alexander Soros, Nejma and Peter Beard and Karl Lagerfeld, who didn’t attend the event but was there in spirit — the foundation auctioned off a pair of tickets to Chanel’s spring 2017 show in Paris this October that fetched $16,000.
To the audience and Osborne’s surprise, Swizz Beatz later revealed that the co-chairs helped raised an additional 30 more scholarships.