KOLUMN Magazine
On a chilly morning in the late 1960s, a university administrator somewhere in America’s sprawling system of higher education could have looked out across a quad and seen what the institution’s brochures never promised: students refusing the terms of their own marginality. They were not staging a protest about cafeteria food or dorm rules. They were challenging the basic architecture of campus life—who belonged, whose history counted as knowledge, whose safety was negotiable, and whose presence was treated as a temporary exception rather than a permanent fact. On some campuses, Black students organized into what would become one of the most enduring forms of student power in modern American education: the Black Student Union.
The Black Student Union—often abbreviated as BSU, sometimes styled as Black Students Union, and sometimes named differently while serving the same function—did not emerge as a club in the conventional sense. It emerged as a corrective. It was built to counter the lived reality of Black students navigating overwhelmingly white institutions at a moment when the nation was both proclaiming civil-rights progress and inventing new ways to ration it. The BSU became, at once, a homeplace, a political instrument, a cultural archive, and an emergency response system—often doing work that universities were unwilling, unprepared, or ideologically opposed to doing themselves.
That origin story matters now because the pressures that made BSUs necessary never fully disappeared; they evolved. In the past decade, waves of campus activism have returned to familiar demands—representation, safety, curricular truth, institutional accountability—often after racist incidents or broader political shocks. The contemporary landscape is defined by a paradox: institutions publicly celebrating “belonging” while, in some states, defunding or restricting identity-centered student organizing under the banner of anti-DEI policymaking. A 2025 Guardian report described BSUs facing defunding and diminished institutional support in the wake of anti-DEI laws, forcing some groups to detach from universities to continue operating as they had.
At the same time, a quieter, equally consequential story is unfolding further down the educational pipeline, in public high schools. Students are asking for the same thing their predecessors asked for on college campuses: a space to gather, to name what they experience, to cultivate leadership, and to insist that Black life and Black history are not extracurricular. The difference is that, in many communities, the very idea of a Black Student Union in a high school is treated as suspicious—political, divisive, or discriminatory—rather than what it typically is in practice: a student-initiated support and leadership organization that can be open to all students while centering Black students’ experiences. When schools try to block these groups, students increasingly turn to the law. In one Pennsylvania case, students sued after their school district denied their request to form a BSU, arguing violations of the First Amendment and the Equal Access Act.
If the BSU began as a demand to be seen and served in places that profited from Black students’ presence while resisting Black students’ power, then the case for more BSUs—especially on high school campuses—is not an argument for segregation. It is an argument for infrastructure. It is a recognition that student achievement, student safety, and student belonging are not abstract values. They are built, maintained, and defended—sometimes by the very students institutions claim to educate.
The BSU as an answer to the campus America built
To understand why the BSU took hold so quickly, it helps to remember what college campuses looked like from the inside for many Black students in the mid-20th century. Desegregation did not automatically translate into inclusion; it often translated into isolation. Black students encountered admissions systems and financial structures that limited their numbers, curricula that treated Black history as marginal or nonexistent, and campus cultures where racial insult was normalized as tradition. In that environment, the BSU became a mechanism for survival and self-determination.
One of the most frequently cited points of origin for the modern BSU is San Francisco State College in 1966, where Black students organized in ways that would soon reverberate nationally. The campus became the epicenter of the 1968–69 student strike—widely recognized as the longest student strike in U.S. history—during which Black students, allied with the Third World Liberation Front, demanded institutional change that included culturally relevant curriculum and structural inclusion. The strike helped catalyze the creation of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies as formal academic fields on that campus, making visible an argument that BSUs have carried ever since: that representation is not only about faces in brochures, but also about what a university recognizes as knowledge.
At the University of Washington in 1968, the BSU’s activism was similarly direct and strategic. Records from the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project and HistoryLink describe how UW’s BSU presented demands aimed at increasing minority enrollment, changing curriculum, and improving conditions for Black students—demands that were not rhetorical gestures but specific institutional interventions. The story is significant not merely because it shows students protesting; it shows students governing—naming deficits in institutional practice and proposing a different operational standard for a public university.
And at Cornell in 1969, a two-day occupation of Willard Straight Hall by members of the Afro-American Society—another name for a Black student organizing formation—became one of the era’s most nationally visible confrontations over racism, campus governance, and the establishment of Black Studies. Cornell’s own historical retrospectives describe how the takeover became a turning point in university life and a marker of the broader transformation underway across American higher education. Even where tactics differed across campuses, the underlying premise was consistent: Black students were no longer willing to accept an institution’s moral language while living inside its racial contradictions.
It is tempting, looking back, to frame these moments as dramatic exceptions—eruptions of the 1960s that gave way to a calmer and more equitable modern campus. That narrative is comforting, and it is incomplete. In reality, the BSU model persisted because it kept meeting ongoing needs. Even when universities created offices of multicultural affairs or launched diversity initiatives, students repeatedly found that institutional promises did not necessarily convert into daily support, rapid accountability after racist incidents, or the kind of cultural and political community Black students sought. The BSU remained the place where those gaps were named plainly, and where students could develop the competence to challenge them.
What BSUs actually do, beyond what outsiders assume
The BSU has always been legible to the public in two competing caricatures. In one version, it is a social club—useful for hosting cultural events, occasionally visible during Black History Month, largely harmless. In the other, it is a militant political cell—defined by confrontation, exclusion, and grievance. Both stereotypes miss what most BSUs spend most of their time doing: building an ecosystem of support, leadership, and cultural continuity inside institutions that often scatter Black students across departments and dorms without ensuring they have a meaningful base of connection.
On many campuses, the BSU functions as a first-stop network for students navigating a predominantly white institution, especially first-generation students and students who arrive without a preexisting roadmap of informal university culture. It becomes a place where students trade information about professors, programs, scholarships, and internships, and where they can name the racialized stressors of campus life without first having to persuade someone that those stressors are real. It also becomes a leadership pipeline: student government, campus advocacy, peer mentoring, event planning, coalition building. Over time, BSU alumni networks can become professional networks, and professional networks can become donor networks—one reason defunding BSUs is not only a cultural blow but an institutional self-sabotage.
In the 2010s, as campus racial incidents and student activism surged again, national commentary often treated the moment as novel. The Atlantic, reflecting on student protest waves, emphasized that contemporary campus activism was part of a longer lineage of Black students and allies organizing around racist campus climates and institutional inaction. That continuity matters. It underscores why BSUs persist even when universities insist their environments have progressed beyond needing them. Progress is not a permanent condition; it is a practice, and it is reversible.
In fact, reversibility is now a defining feature of the terrain. Recent reporting has shown BSUs and adjacent cultural organizations losing funding and institutional footholds amid state-level and federal political pressures targeting DEI infrastructure. When lawmakers and administrators argue that identity-centered support violates fairness, they often ignore how “neutral” systems can produce unequal outcomes. They also ignore that BSUs generally do not operate as exclusive clubs in the legal sense; they operate as purpose-driven organizations, typically open to any student willing to participate in good faith, while centering Black students’ experiences.
The high school question: Why the pipeline matters
If the BSU is an enduring instrument on college campuses, why argue for its expansion into high schools?
Because many of the issues BSUs address—racial isolation, curricular erasure, unequal discipline, biased tracking, and the mental load of navigating whiteness as a default—begin earlier than college. In fact, for many students, high school is where their racial experience of education becomes most sharply consequential. Course placement shapes college admissions. Discipline shapes graduation trajectories. Belonging shapes attendance, engagement, and academic identity. The absence of supportive infrastructure at that stage does not just harm students emotionally; it can alter their life outcomes.
History offers a direct bridge between college BSUs and high school activism. In Seattle in 1968, Black students and allies organized around Franklin High School, where a sit-in and broader mobilization demanded Black administrators and teachers and the inclusion of African American history in the curriculum. The episode is documented in the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project and HistoryLink as a significant local civil-rights moment, involving both high school students and members of the University of Washington’s BSU. In other words, the BSU model was never purely collegiate. It has always had a K–12 shadow, because the conditions that produced it were never confined to universities.
What has changed is the policy and cultural environment surrounding race-conscious support. A high school BSU is now more likely to be pulled into national debates about “divisive concepts,” censorship, and the politicization of identity. Legal fights over classroom speech and school governance have multiplied, including lawsuits challenging laws that restrict teaching and learning about race. In that climate, the case for high school BSUs must be made with precision, because the opposition often thrives on imprecision.
A high school BSU should be understood as three things at once. It is a student leadership organization, cultivating civic skills and peer support. It is an academic support and advocacy structure, giving students a place to surface barriers they encounter in school systems. And it is a cultural continuity space, where Black students can experience school not as a daily negotiation of stereotype and isolation, but as a place where their humanity is assumed rather than debated.
The legal and ethical stakes: Access, not special treatment
When a public high school refuses to allow a BSU while allowing other non-curricular clubs, it invites a straightforward question: on what basis is this group being treated differently? This is not merely a political argument; it is often a legal one.
The Equal Access Act (1984) prohibits public secondary schools that receive federal funds from denying equal access or a fair opportunity to student groups to meet during noninstructional time when the school has created a “limited open forum” by allowing at least one non-curriculum-related student group to meet. The statute’s definition of a limited open forum is explicit: if a school allows one or more non-curricular student groups to meet, it has triggered Equal Access Act obligations. Guidance documents and civil-liberties organizations have long translated the law’s practical implication for schools: if you permit a range of student clubs, you cannot single out a club for denial because you dislike its mission or message.
This became concrete in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, where students filed a federal lawsuit after the school district denied permission to form a Black Student Union. The ACLU of Pennsylvania described the case as involving alleged violations of the First Amendment and the Equal Access Act; reporting later noted a settlement that allowed the club to move forward. The specifics of any given case depend on local facts, but the broader point is clear: “We have clubs, just not that one,” is a legally risky position for a public school to take when “that one” is denied due to viewpoint, identity, or purpose.
The ethical stakes extend beyond legality. When schools deny a BSU on the theory that it is exclusionary, they often ignore what exclusion looks like in practice. Exclusion is not always a posted sign saying “you can’t sit here.” Sometimes it is a curriculum that treats Black history as episodic. Sometimes it is a discipline pattern that punishes Black students more harshly for the same behavior. Sometimes it is a counseling office that under-recommends Black students for advanced courses. Sometimes it is a social environment where being the only Black student in a classroom becomes a daily performance. A BSU does not create separation; it addresses separation that already exists.
A practical argument: Belonging is an academic intervention
There is also a pragmatic case for high school BSUs that does not require anyone to accept a moral argument about identity. It requires only that we take student success seriously.
Over the last decade, rigorous research on culturally relevant coursework—especially ethnic studies—has demonstrated measurable academic benefits for students, including attendance, GPA, credits earned, and longer-run outcomes like graduation and college enrollment. Stanford-affiliated research on San Francisco Unified School District’s ninth-grade ethnic studies course found significant improvements in outcomes for students near the threshold used to assign the course, including substantial gains in attendance and GPA. Follow-up research reported sustained impacts over time, including improved attendance and graduation rates, with publication in peer-reviewed venues including PNAS.
Ethnic studies is not the same thing as a BSU. One is curricular; the other is extracurricular. But they share a foundational insight: cultural affirmation and relevance are not distractions from academic achievement. They can be mechanisms that make achievement more likely. A BSU, when done well, can operate as a parallel form of culturally relevant infrastructure. It is not a replacement for curriculum reform, equitable discipline, or diverse staffing. It is one of the few immediate, low-cost structures a school can allow students to build themselves—one that can increase connection, leadership, and support in ways that influence day-to-day school engagement.
This is particularly salient in districts where Black students are a small minority, and where the isolation that BSUs historically addressed on predominantly white college campuses now appears in high school hallways. In such settings, the BSU may be the only consistent space where students can speak freely about experiences that otherwise remain unreported or misunderstood, including microaggressions, biased grading, or unequal access to advanced coursework. The value is not only emotional. It is informational: BSUs often function as sensors, picking up patterns before administrators do.
The backlash era: Why BSUs are being targeted again
Any honest argument for expanding BSUs must contend with the contemporary backlash. On college campuses, BSUs are being squeezed by political campaigns that recast DEI work as discriminatory. The result is not merely a rhetorical fight; it is a funding and governance fight. Reporting from 2025 described BSUs losing budgets, cultural centers being repurposed, and organizations being forced to seek private fundraising to sustain basic activities. Legal challenges to anti-DEI laws, including lawsuits brought by professors and students, have argued that such laws can impose viewpoint-based restrictions and undermine the ability of institutions to support marginalized students.
This broader climate matters for high schools because policy often travels downhill. When universities in a state begin dismantling DEI infrastructure, K–12 schools frequently interpret the signal as permission—or instruction—to reduce race-conscious support, even when student needs remain unchanged.
There is also a second pressure point: confusion, sometimes willful, about what BSUs are. Opponents often frame them as race-based exclusion. But many BSUs explicitly operate as open organizations, inviting participation from non-Black students while centering Black students’ experiences and cultural education. Public-facing descriptions of BSU programming in some educational contexts emphasize openness and cross-student learning, underscoring that the organizing principle is not exclusion but focus.
The more sophisticated critique is not that BSUs are exclusive, but that they are “political.” This critique misunderstands education itself. Every school has political values embedded in what it teaches, what it omits, what it punishes, and what it celebrates. The question is not whether student organizations are political. The question is whether students are allowed to organize around the realities they live, or only around the realities adults find comfortable.
What a high school BSU can be, if adults don’t sabotage it
A high school BSU is most effective when it is treated neither as a public-relations ornament nor as a threat to institutional authority. It is, instead, a student-led civic space with clear boundaries and support. It should be grounded in student initiative and voluntary participation, consistent with the Equal Access Act’s framework for student groups in public secondary schools. It should have an advisor in the way that other clubs do, without that advisor becoming a gatekeeper who dilutes student voice. And it should be allowed to do the ordinary work of student organizations—meet, plan events, invite speakers, collaborate with other clubs—without being subjected to extraordinary scrutiny simply because it centers Black students.
In practice, a well-supported high school BSU often becomes an incubator for the kind of leadership schools claim they want: students who can convene peers, articulate concerns, analyze policy, and propose solutions. It can also become an early training ground for the work students may later do in college BSUs—meaning that expanding BSUs in high schools is not only about meeting immediate needs, but also about building continuity in civic and educational leadership.
Just as importantly, a BSU can become a stabilizing force during moments of crisis. When racial incidents occur—graffiti, slurs, online harassment, unequal discipline—schools frequently respond with generic assemblies or scripted statements. Students rarely experience those responses as adequate. A BSU can provide immediate peer support, help students document concerns, and create a channel through which administrators receive coherent feedback instead of fragmented outrage. That does not eliminate conflict. It makes conflict more governable and less explosive.
The deeper point: BSUs are a form of democratic education
The United States regularly frames education as preparation for democracy. Yet schools are often uneasy with students practicing democracy in real time, especially when students organize around race. A BSU is a form of democratic education precisely because it forces institutions to confront the gap between what they say and what they do. It requires schools to treat Black students not merely as recipients of policy but as participants in institutional life.
This is, in a quiet way, the throughline connecting the BSU’s origins to its contemporary necessity. In 1968 and 1969, students at places like San Francisco State, the University of Washington, and Cornell were not asking for symbolic inclusion; they were demanding structural recognition—curriculum, recruitment, faculty representation, and institutional accountability. Those demands helped reshape higher education. The reason the BSU remains essential is that the underlying work of making institutions live up to their stated values is never finished.
For high schools, the argument is even more urgent. High school is where many students first encounter systems that will track them toward or away from opportunity. It is where young people develop an internal sense of whether school is something done for them, something done to them, or something they have agency within. A BSU is a vehicle for agency. It tells students, in a language schools rarely speak explicitly: you are allowed to gather, to name what is happening, and to lead.
In a time when college BSUs are being defunded and constrained, expanding BSUs in high schools is not merely additive. It is protective. It builds earlier support structures so that students do not arrive at college already exhausted from years of racial navigation without institutional acknowledgment. It also signals that the work of belonging is not a boutique service reserved for higher education, but a baseline condition of public schooling.
The most persuasive case for high school BSUs is, ultimately, the simplest. If schools permit student organizations organized around interests, faith, service, culture, and identity—and if they claim to care about student wellbeing and achievement—then denying Black students the right to build a structured community is not neutrality. It is a choice. And it is a choice history has already judged, many times over, to be both harmful and shortsighted.