On Monday, January 17, 2022, Jennifer Vaughn-Blakely, a pillar of the Inland Empire community, passed away. She was 73 years old.
While Vaughn-Blakely was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1964 at the age of 16, she made her way to San Bernardino to live with her uncle and planted roots in the community. From a young age, she was encouraged by her family to value education because of the opportunities education could provide.
Vaughn-Blakely graduated from San Bernardino High School and attended San Bernardino Valley College before transferring to California State University, San Bernardino where she received a Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology and a Master’s Degree in Education with an emphasis in counseling. She described teaching as her niche.
“I can teach people how to be their own advocates. Groups and folks who have advocates do better, but if you don’t know you need an advocate and you don’t know how to be an advocate, you’re not even a voice in the wilderness. So, that’s my career in a nutshell,” Vaughn-Blakely said in a 2016 interview for an oral history project titled “The Bridges that Carried Us Over.”
