The Black Student Union (BSU) organized the PACC for Black event for Urban’s Month of Understanding (MOU). The event took place on Jan. 17 and had over 100 people in attendance to listen to jazz music and celebrate Black culture. The BSU also brought in the Oakland-based dance group TurfFeinz for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day all-school meeting (ASM). 

The BSU co-leaders Owen Brown ’25 and Anthony Larkin ’26 coordinate events like these at ASMs and during MOU. They also lead closed weekly affinity space meetings and advocate for the Black community at Urban. 

“Being the leader of a Black Student Union has to mean responding to what you see, both with Black students and with the broader, often non-Black community,” said Lingerr Senghor, the BSU’s faculty advisor. “I think [the co-leaders have] done that particularly well.”

The closed affinity space meetings are for talking about both current events and longer-term cultural issues. “I want to make a space where people don’t have to be media-trained, where they don’t have to be filtering, and they can just say what they feel,” Brown said.

Some of the topics that the BSU discusses are specific to Urban, while others are related to the general Black experience, all of which help the BSU in its mission to create a safe space for Black-identifying students. 

“BSU feels like family in those meetings,” Brown said. “We have a check-in question, which I always love to make a little goofy, and then we talk about whatever we need to talk about. One time we played Black Jeopardy. Other times we’ve talked about culture.”

Beyond cultural discussions, the BSU deals with pressing political events. The 2024 presidential election posed new challenges for Brown and Larkin. Racist attacks on Black immigrants, major shifts in African American political dynamics and the fact that one of the candidates was the second-ever Black nominee for President were all issues discussed in the BSU. “When you see a Black woman who looks like you or someone in your family you start to see yourself in her, then the attacks on her start to feel personal,” Larkin said. 

Larkin spoke to the importance of being sincere and setting a tone in their meetings. “One of the things that I think makes Owen such a special leader — and such a special guy — is that he’s always authentic,” Larkin said. “He’s able to make people feel like they can be vulnerable, that they can be themselves and that leads to some really amazing conversations.” 

 When addressing the community at ASMs, the BSU often presents a speaker or performance group. “I want to showcase Black joy [and] show that, yes, we may have suffered in the past, and yes, we still even suffer today, but there is so much joy that comes out of being Black,” Brown said. 

The PACC for Black MOU event showcased African-American music culture, and the Willard Harris ASM on Feb. 9, 2024 — one of Brown’s personal favorite BSU-led events — featured Willard Harris, a Black figure who has advocated for health equity for decades. 

The BSU co-leaders also frequently advocate for making Urban a more hospitable community for Black-identifying students. “In Making America, there was an assignment about depicting Black suffering. … Every year, [it] was resulting in things that were hurting Black students,” Brown said. “So we talked to the history department, and it actually got taken out of the course.”

Another area of advocacy has been to reduce students’ reading the n-word aloud during class. “Every year, someone would say it in class,” Larkin said. “So we talked about it with our teachers to try to get some more education to stop that.” 

A more recent issue is the slur being used outside of class, with no context. “We had to deal with it on the level of how it made us feel,” Brown said. “But we also talked with Lingerr, with Charlotte, with Dan, and we put together an ASM trying to make people feel that impact.” 

Taking initiative is at the heart of Larkin and Brown’s work in the BSU. “Standing up [and] having everyone know that you’re here to represent Black people is its own form of advocacy,” Senghor said. “It shouldn’t be radical to just be yourself, but it is.”