05/20/2026
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Maya Blasingame, Amaia Calhoun, Sydney DuPree, and Chandler Nutall all graduated Spelman College with a perfect 4.0 — and shared the valedictorian honor together.
Spelman College's Class of 2023 produced four co-valedictorians. Not one student who edged out the competition — four students who each maintained a perfect 4.0 GPA across their entire undergraduate careers, consistently enough that the institution recognized all four of them at the top of the class simultaneously. Maya Blasingame, Amaia Calhoun, Sydney DuPree, and Chandler Nutall. Four names. Four perfect records. One shared moment at the top.
The setting carries its own weight. Spelman College is a historically Black women's college — an institution built specifically to educate Black women at a time when most institutions wouldn't, and that has spent decades producing graduates who lead in medicine, law, business, politics, and the arts. The valedictorian of Spelman isn't just the top student in a class. She's the top student at an institution that has always understood the stakes of Black women's education and has always taken them seriously. Four of them sharing that position in the same year is not a coincidence. It is the result of four individuals making the decision, repeatedly and over years, to be excellent — in a place that expected and supported exactly that.
The comment sections that met this story did what communities do when they see themselves in an image that was built for them: they celebrated loudly and personally. ""Yaaaaasss."" Pure congratulations. The specific kind of pride that comes from watching people who look like you reach a summit that the world has historically told people who look like you they couldn't access. Maya, Amaia, Sydney, and Chandler didn't just graduate at the top of their class. They graduated at the top of it together — which might be the most Spelman thing about the whole story.
