Paulette Walker-Johnson was a physical education instructor with no coaching experience when she arrived at Virginia State College in 1974 and ended up in charge of the cheerleaders. Fifty years later, the style she built from that accident is how HBCU squads across the country cheer.
Virginia State University marked the anniversary of its WooWoos at its October homecoming game in Ettrick, Virginia, as Capital B reported. The squad is widely credited as the birthplace of the “stomp and shake” style: stepping movements borrowed from Black fraternities and sororities, paired with chants delivered in deep voices, built on rhythm rather than gymnastics.
The style began with a limit. “We made it do what it can do and the style evolved because I didn’t have a lot of gymnasts,” Walker-Johnson said in an interview with HBCU Connect. She also wanted to keep her athletes from getting hurt.
The name came from the crowd. “A guy says ‘that’s that Woo Woo Lady,'” she recalled. “He said ‘Because when y’all get out there, people say, Woo Woo.'” It stuck.
A style that spread
Walker-Johnson had cheered at Peabody High School and at Morgan State College, and drew on routines she had seen at Howard University. She coached the WooWoos for 35 years and retired from the sideline in 2010. She was also the first woman to serve as athletic director in Virginia State’s history, founded the CIAA Cheerleader Coaches Association, entered the university’s Wall of Fame in 2003 and the CIAA Hall of Fame in 2011. She remains the only cheerleading coach in that Hall of Fame.
Other schools built their own versions. Winston-Salem State’s Debra Rivers Johnson developed what is known as the Carolina style. NeSheila Washington, who directs cheerleading at Winston-Salem, told Capital B the form “requires more rhythmic movements” and demands that cheerleaders be able to “stomp, clap, shake, do motions and all of the above through everything in one.”
The style travelled far beyond campus through video. In December 2023, a 1995 photo of four Virginia State cheerleaders from the squad known as Spirit 94 (La Verne Burrus-Johnson, Bonika Wilson, Meketah Wyatt and Tawanna Tynes) went viral on X. They recreated it three decades later in their old uniforms, and the before-and-after drew more than 22 million combined views across platforms, WTVR reported. The women said they wanted to use the attention to celebrate 50 years of the WooWoos and to honor their coach.
“They were viral potential,” Walker-Johnson said of that group. “They are a special group.”
Glennis Singleton Crosby, a WooWoo in the 1980s, first saw the squad perform in 1978, while she was still in high school.
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