Since 1928, joining Hope Valley Country Club was a natural step on the social ladder for Durham's most prominent citizens. Businessmen made deals on the links, local politicians' wives chatted over tennis, and everyone enjoyed life at the top-everyone who was white, that is. The club, like most similar institutions throughout the South, remained segregated into the 1960s.
And that's when a group of black students calling themselves the Afro-American Society gathered to protest Duke President Douglas Keith and other administrators' membership to the segregated institution.
Their 1967 study-in-the first political act of the precursor to today's Black Student Alliance-protested institutional discrimination, but the message it sent was slightly different: We have arrived.
The University only began to admit black students four years earlier, in 1963. A year later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in Page Auditorium. Then, as now, a group of students banded together to advocate for minority rights on campus.
Now, as BSA commemorates its 40th anniversary, the student organization caters to approximately 300 members out of a black undergraduate population of 650.
Even after the 1967 protest, black students described feelings of isolation and discrimination on campus.
"People were waiting for us to graduate so that the issues we were bringing up would dilute and go away," says Brenda Armstrong, director of admissions at the School of Medicine and the AAS's president in 1969. "We decided that the only choice we had short of leaving school en masse was that we would take over a major building on campus."
In February 1969, 49 black students barricaded the doors of the Allen Building and submitted a list of demands to University administrators. They called for an end to what they saw as racism, an increase in the number of black faculty and students, and the creation of an African-American Studies department.
The latter goal came to fruition in December 2006 when the Board of Trustees elevated the program in African-American Studies to a department. Armstrong says she is "ecstatic."
In 1971, the organization's members changed its name to the Association of African Students; this shifted five years later to the current Black Student Alliance.
With BSA's support, black students made major strides. In 1976, students elected sophomore Reginaldo Howard as president of the Associated Students of Duke University-DSG's precursor. Howard died in a car accident before assuming his leadership role. His family and the University established a scholarship in his name to benefit high-achieving black students.
The Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture, established in 1983, quickly became a cornerstone of black life at Duke.
In 2001, The Chronicle published David Horowitz's anti-reparations advertisement. The timing-just before BSA's annual invitational weekend for prospective students-could not have been more incendiary. The emotions raised by the Horowitz ad reinvigorated the Black Faculty Initiative and the President's Council on Black Affairs.
The Mary Lou upgraded its location to the Oak Room's former location in January 2004. Then, in October, business magazine Black Enterprise ranked Duke tenth on its list of the Top 50 Colleges for African Americans.
In August 2006, the University released the first report from the Campus Life and Learning Project, a major study examining undergraduate experiences at Duke. Though Dean of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences Robert Thompson insisted the study was not limited to race, the report's most prominent data described gaps in experience between students of different racial backgrounds.
One finding showed that Asian students held the highest GPA, with an average of 3.39, while Black students averaged 2.97. The report also found that 15 and 18 percent of black students reported having experienced discrimination from instructors.
"Students aren't feeling comfortable in the classroom because they may be the only one, or they may be intimidated, or they may be exposed to unfair treatment, discrimination, racism," BSA President Malik Burnett says. "I didn't find it surprising, not at all."
In response to the report's conclusions, BSA launched a slogan: "3.0 and not below."
As it looks to the future, Burnett says BSA is still committed to raising the number of black students and faculty at Duke, finding a new space and, of course, making sure the next generation of leaders can carry the torch-at least, as long as is necessary.
"In theory, you'd want to work to a point where there's no more need for your organization anymore," Burnett says, smiling. "That might happen in the next 50 years."
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