National History Day Contest awards Kansas LGBTQ+ project, sends it to Smithsonian 

A Kansas middle schooler has won the Equality in History Prize at the 2026 National History Day Contest for her project on a lesbian community in Kansas City.

Éabha Klinksick, 13, who will enter eighth grade this year at West Middle School in Lawrence, Kansas, created a poetry performance about Womontown, a living space in Kansas City dedicated to lesbians in the 1980s. Lesbians during this time weren’t widely accepted and experienced backlash for their chosen lifestyle, according to a PBS documentary.

Klinksick presented her project at the 2026 National History Day Contest, which took place June 14–18 in College Park, Maryland. About 3,000 students representing all 50 states competed in multiple categories.

Klinksick wanted to research Womontown for her project after a video about the community was released last year by The Moth Radio Hour.

Klinksick’s project, Breaking Ground: Womontown, received the competition’s junior division Equality in History award. The award is sponsored by Celie Niehaus and her wife, Tabitha Niehaus, and is meant to highlight strides in human equality, “especially with respect to the role that individuals and/or organizations have played in the efforts for isolated groups (e.g., LGBT, women, and girls) to have the same status in certain respects,” the contest’s website says.

Projects about civil rights, voting rights, property rights or freedom of speech movements were eligible for the award.

“This award really means a lot to me, because it’s not only me that’s being recognized, it’s an entire town of women who changed history and fought for their rights,” Klinksick said in a press release on West Middle School’s website.

Some winners of the National History Day Contest, including Klinksick, presented their projects at the Smithsonian, which has recently received scrutiny from the U.S. government for its display of woke ideology. A previous Heartlander News investigation revealed that even Smithsonian gift shops presented woke content, such as a children’s book explaining sexuality and sexual orientation.

The project that won the Equality in History award in the contest’s senior division also covered an LGBTQ+ topic.

A group of four students from Westview High School in Portland, Oregon, created a group documentary titled Measure 9: Oregon’s Hate and Oregon’s Pride. The project covers Oregon’s 1992 ballot Measure 9, which would have outlawed homosexuality.

“Oregon is queer and here,” one student says within the first 20 seconds of the documentary.

“Can you imagine a version of Oregon without our annual pride parade? Without the rainbow flags flying on every building? Without the self-expressive, queer stickers on every street sign?”

The National History Day website states that National Contest entries aren’t censored and don’t necessarily represent the views or opinions of the organization.

Several other students from Kansas and Missouri competed in the contest, and some of them also won awards for their projects.

Rohan Deshpande, who attends Marquette Sr. High School in Chesterfield, Missouri, won the E Pluribus Unum in History award for his documentary, Cleared for Takeoff: How the TWA Mothers’ Fight Against Gender Discrimination Reformed the Aviation Industry and Civil Rights.

Harrison Lowenstein, who attends Cameron Veterans Middle School in Cameron, Missouri, won the History of the Physical Sciences & Technology award for his documentary, From Silence to Science: How the Fujita Scale and the 1974 Super Outbreak Changed Meteorology Forever.

Bella Antone, Charlee Wells and Hadley Wells, who attend Christian Learning Center in Fort Scott, Kansas, won the Indigenous History award for their group performance, Bridging Two Cultures: A Crusader That Revolutionized Navajo Health Care with Lasting Reform.

Deshpande’s and Lowenstein’s projects weren’t presented at the Smithsonian, but Antone, Wells and Wells’ group project was.

(Photo credit: National History Day)