Thirteen Diamonds: A Story of Love and Letting Go
When Bijoux Bios asked Kanika Tomalin, the Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, if she had an interesting jewelry story to tell, she immediately thought of her AKA sorority pin. Alpha Kappa Alpha, founded in 1908 at Howard University as the first intercollegiate historically African-American sorority, had been, after all, in the news lately thanks to fellow sorority sister and now U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris. Harris joined the Alpha Chapter when she was a student at Howard University in the 1980s in Washington, D.C. Tomalin was an AKA debutante in 1993 when she was a journalism student at FAMU (Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University), another historically black university. Looking in the box where she kept her AKA pin, however, Tomalin found the engagement ring that she had placed there nearly five years ago. The ring was the most significant piece of jewelry that she had ever owned. It is the story of that ring — and the love that it represents— that she chose to tell us
