The creation of a physical space on campus dedicated to students of racial, ethnic, gender, sexual and religious minorities. They had a space in mind — a few dusty rooms off Maywood Street, on the ground level of Dana Commons. The building, which opened as part of a campus expansion in 1967, had a long history of use by Clark’s student identity groups, but for the previous two years had housed Clark’s LEEP Center offices, which were about to move to the University’s new Main Street building. The students called their effort “Reclaim Dana Commons.” “We hoped that Dana Commons could be a space where we would hang out,” Doss says, “a space where we could have serious meetings, a space where we could build community, a space where we could go if we had problems or just need someone to talk to. It was meant to be a space where we would feel comfortable, we could feel safe, and we could feel supported. I often didn’t feel those things at other spaces in the institution.” After some initial struggles, the students found common cause with a parallel faculty effort to create the Center for Gender, Race, and Area Studies (CGRAS) to institutionalize interdisciplinary scholarship and research that had been happening on an ad hoc basis across the University for some time. The new center needed a home, and by the fall of 2015 the two efforts had all but merged. And then, on November 15, a dozen students stepped onto the basketball court.
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ulu Moyo ’16, CDP ’17, wasn’t the first speaker on the court that night — that was Joanna DaCunha ’15, CDP ’16, who organized the protest alongside Moyo and Florcy Romero ’15, CDP ’16 — but she took the mic next, exhorting students in the bleachers along the north side of the gym to come down onto the court and stand in solidarity with students protesting racial discrimination on college campuses across the country. At Clark, students spoke powerfully of an existence of sustained vigilance that left them feeling unmoored, uncomfortable and out of place on a campus that should have felt like a home away from home. “At that time,” Moyo says, “with everything that was going on in the world, the climate at Clark started to shift for students of color. We started talking more openly about our own experiences and Clark’s role in those experiences, and the kind of complacency that Clark had with not addressing things that were happening on campus or in the country. We felt that the only way we could make an impact was just to have a jarring visual representation of how we were feeling, and making it so
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We felt that the only way we could make an impact was just to have a jarring visual representation of how we were feeling, and making it so that they couldn’t ignore it. that they couldn’t ignore it.” Moyo stood in one corner of the gym with her microphone and called for the stands to empty onto the court and stand in solidarity with student protesters who’d organized at the University of Missouri and at Yale. Within a few minutes, the bleachers on the north side of the gymnasium were almost bare, and a crowd was milling about (albeit a little bemusedly) near center court. Then things took a turn. The police were called to break up the protest, and as Moyo, Romero, DaCunha and other organizers were led peacefully out of the Kneller — no arrests were made — some members of the crowd began to chant “U.S.A., U.S.A. …” “In that moment,” Moyo says, “there was this visceral feeling of us being ‘othered’ and made to feel un-American by our actions. That they were the representation of America.” An hour later, Clark wrapped up an 83-78 win over Worcester State.
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hat happened at the Clark basketball game,” Huang says, “precipitated everything that happened afterwards in terms of direct action.” The University held a “race forum” in Tilton Hall