The History of Black and Latinx Clubs on Campus

By The Rewriting

1968- Establishment of Black Students United (current day Black Student Union, BSU)

1968- Establishment of the Puerto Rican Student Organization (current day Latin American Student Organization, LASO)

1969- Presence of Stony Brook Black Voice on the Statesman (current day Black World)

1974- Establishment of the Caribbean Club (current day Caribbean Student Organization, CSO)

1975- First Black World records indicating the presence of the African Student Union (ASU)

1976- First Black World records indicating the presence of the NAACP

Preserving and Documenting SBU

History: About the University Archives and SBU Libraries

The information in this timeline was gathered from Stony Brook University’s Special Collections and University Archives.

The University Archives serves as an institutional memory for Stony Brook University and has an integral role in documenting and preserving materials of enduring historical and evidential value. Archival materials in their original formats and digital collections form the collections. For more information, visit https://www.stonybrook.edu/libspecial.

1976- First Black World records indicating the presence of L’Overture (current day HSO)

1978- Establishment of the Black Womyn’s Weekend (precursor to current day Black Womyn’s Association, BWA)

Covid provided universities with a recess that, in effect is more organizational than substantial. Zoom meetings are here to stay, and distance learning has recomposed the structure of classes and pedagogy beyond the classical challenges of online teaching. For Africana, the recess is a different one, though. To understand it, it will be necessary, to listen again to Malcom X’s 1963’s ‘Message to the grassroots.’ This means: listening to listen to it, having the political landscape of the last three decades of world politics in the background. Of course, it is challenging to articulate inherently Black politics today because the multiple assaults against the concept of ‘Black’ made it practically disappear from institutional language. ‘Africana’ is also culpable here. The genuine effort to incorporate the study of cultures and languages from Africa and the Caribbean, can be read as the code word for a positive alliance of Black people across the globe. But very often, it was done at the expense of the politics of Blackness. The Obama Decade even went so far as to suggest what is a clear aporia: the study of Blackness