THE REFOUNDING: How BlackBoard Got its Restart
BY CAMILLE WILLIAMS
A
fter researching on-campus organizations, Sierra Boone was eager to join BlackBoard Magazine and the National Association of Black Journalists when she arrived at Northwestern University in fall 2013. But when she and a friend from her PA group, Jesse Sparks, spoke to Black upperclassmen, they were shocked to learn that there was no BlackBoard, and NABJ
27 | SPRING 2021
was functioning mainly as an exec board. How could it be that one of the country’s top journalism schools had no Blackinterest student publication or thriving pre-professional group dedicated to Black student journalists? Alumni pointed out that during this time predominantly white publications didn’t feel welcoming.
“A lot of people just wanted the opportunity to write and be Black and that was something that was not very easy to do,” Boone says. Unwilling to accept defeat, Boone approached Medill professor and former Blackboard editor-in-chief Charles Whitaker, an alum of both organizations, with a plan: revitalize NABJ and then BlackBoard.
The next year, NABJ made its comeback and was nominated for Chapter of the Year. At an NABJ dinner at Professor Ava Greenwell-Thompson’s house in fall 2014, Black faculty and students discussed the possibility of reviving BlackBoard. “We were just talking about why BlackBoard had gone and what it was, and I remember Charles saying ‘It’s
