Paulette Walker-Johnson started the stomp and shake at Virginia State University in 1974. The style turned fifty this year. She coached the WooWoos for 35 years and stopped in 2010. Glennis Singleton Crosby, a VSU alumna, former WooWoo and homecoming ambassador, remembers meeting it. “It was a whole new style that we hadn’t been introduced to,” she said. On the sideline this autumn is Jada Graves, a 2026 WooWoo whose mother, Kim Johnson, cheered at VSU in 2000.
The style travelled. Debra Rivers Johnson and NeSheila Washington run cheerleading at Winston-Salem State, and Washington described what it asks of a body. “You got to be able to stomp, clap, shake, do motions and all of the above through everything in one,” she said. Sakina Riley coaches at Livingstone College, where Alexis Shelton, 21, said every squad does the style its own way. “We all have our own signature moves that we do,” she said.
What has not travelled is any benefit of the doubt. Asharia Merritt, a 17-year-old on the Armstrong High School squad in Richmond, Virginia, coached by Mikeisha Barber, said the words out loud. “We’ve heard that we’re aggressive, ghetto, too grown,” she said, and keeps cheering anyway, “only because this is something we genuinely enjoy.”
Walker-Johnson will not argue about who invented it. “I refuse to go into that debate,” she said. What bothers her is seeing it used to get in faces. “It makes me sad because we were never, never that way, never,” she said.
