Perspectives

Perspectives is an occasional series exploring the ideas, principles, and long-term strategies that shape the work of the Black Alumni Association. Since 1975, Black alumni leaders have built programs, traditions, and networks that strengthened the experience of Black students and alumni at Denison. This series examines how the BAA, and Black alumni organizations in general, can evolve — developing the infrastructure, stewardship, and systems needed to sustain their work for future generations. 

For as long as Black alumni associations have existed at predominantly white institutions, they have operated in an informal relationship with their universities — connected to institutional infrastructure, reliant on institutional goodwill, but not formally constituted as independent organizations in their own right. For most of that history, that arrangement was sufficient. There were tensions at various points, ebbs and flows in the relationship between BAAs and their institutions, moments of friction and negotiation. But largely, the informal posture served. It allowed these associations to do meaningful work — supporting students, sustaining community, honoring the bonds formed at institutions that were not always designed with Black students in mind — without requiring the organizational overhead that full independence demands.

That calculus has changed. Not gradually, and not ambiguously.

The federal government's apparatus — one of the most powerful institutional forces in American life — is now in the hands of people with clear animus toward the communities Black alumni associations exist to serve. Executive orders, Department of Justice guidance, and the threat of funding consequences have already produced rapid institutional compliance from universities that, understandably, would rather absorb the cost to their communities than assume the legal and financial risk of resistance. Scholarships have been paused. Community spaces have been lost. Programs built over decades have been shuttered in weeks. Black alumni associations and their student communities are taking fire, and the informal posture that worked well enough in a more hospitable environment is no longer adequate to the demands of this one.

The word for what this moment requires is organize. Not in the narrow sense of a particular era's tactics — the march, the sit-in, the mass demonstration — though none of those have lost their validity. In the deeper and older sense that has animated Black institutional life since Reconstruction: the deliberate, disciplined work of constituting your community as a self-governing institution capable of acting with force and continuity on its own terms. The NAACP was organizing. The freedmen's bureaus were organizing. Every Black church, fraternal order, mutual aid society, and professional association that Black Americans built in the face of a hostile republic was organizing — converting the moral and social force of a community into durable institutional structures that could survive opposition, outlast individual leaders, and compound capacity across generations. That is what Black alumni associations must do now. Not because the current moment invented the need, but because the current moment has made the cost of not doing it undeniable. This is not a moment for despair. It is a moment of opportunity — associations need only understand what this moment is asking of them.

The Power Was Already There

Here is what the current moment is revealing: Black alumni associations are sitting on latent power that their informal organizational structure has consistently masked — and the nature of that power has characteristics unlike other arenas of American civic life.

Begin with what every alumni association has: the organizing force of collegiate identity. Universities provide brand legitimacy, social networks, and a shared chapter of life that retains its pull across decades. Alumni give, serve, and advocate in part because the institution that shaped them still matters to them. That is real, and Black alumni feel it as genuinely as anyone. But Black alumni networks carry something layered beneath that institutional bond — something their university experience did not give them and cannot take away.

They carry the shared lived experience of navigating an institution that was not built for them. Not just "we went to the same school," but "we survived and thrived in the same place, and we know what that required." The particular solidarity that forms between Black students at a predominantly white institution — the way they find each other, hold each other, build community from the margins of an environment that was designed around someone else's comfort — does not dissolve at graduation. It deepens with time, and it creates a quality of bond between alumni that no institutional affiliation alone produces.

They carry cultural memory — the accumulated knowledge of what Black students at the institution have faced, built, lost, and rebuilt across generations. The spaces claimed. The scholarships funded. The mentors who showed up. The moments of institutional indifference and the moments of community solidarity, of Black students alone and in concert with their non Black counterparts, that answered them. That memory is alive in the alumni network, passed through the generations of people who lived it, and it generates an obligation to the students currently on campus that is specific, personal, and morally serious.

And they carry something older and more profound than any of this — the weight and the will of four hundred years of a struggle that this community has never once considered finished. Black Americans are the descendants of enslaved people who were denied every instrument of civic power and still built community, culture, and resistance. They are the heirs of Reconstruction — of what was built when freedom was new and what was violently dismantled when it became threatening. They are the children of the Civil Rights Movement, of the organizing and sacrifice that forced a recalcitrant nation to extend the promise of its own founding documents to the people it had systematically excluded. Every gain that movement won — in voting rights, in educational access, in economic opportunity, in the right to exist with dignity in public life — was extracted from a system that did not yield willingly, and every one of those gains has been contested from the moment it was secured.

The alumni sitting in these networks are the beneficiaries of all of that — educated at institutions many of their ancestors were legally barred from attending, credentialed by a system that generations of Black Americans fought and bled to open. They did not arrive at Denison, or at any institution like it, through accident. They arrived through a collective inheritance of struggle, and they carry that inheritance with them whether they name it or not.

And now they are watching the gains of that centuries-long struggle being systematically targeted by people with the full apparatus of federal power at their disposal. This is not new — our community has seen retrenchment before. We know how to read this chapter of American history because we have lived through earlier versions of it. What is new is the speed, the scope, and the brazenness of the assault, and the degree to which institutions that Black communities have built relationships with — including our universities — are making rapid accommodations that absorb the cost into the communities they would serve.

This is the context in which the latent power of Black alumni associations must be understood. These are not networks held together by nostalgia for college. They are networks animated by a centuries-long moral project that is under direct and organized assault. They are communities that have, in their collective memory and their collective bones, an understanding of what this moment is and what it requires — because their grandparents' grandparents faced versions of it, and the tradition they inherited is a tradition of organized, sustained, intergenerational response.

What Black alumni associations possess at this intersection — institutional pride, shared lived experience, cultural memory, and the intergenerational obligation that four hundred years of struggle has made non-negotiable — is an organizing force with no real parallel in American civic life. Collegiate identity gives it a vehicle. Black culture and experience give it a moral and spiritual depth that sustains effort and generosity through conditions that would exhaust a network held together by institutional loyalty alone.

That is the power sitting in these networks. It has always been there. What has been missing is the organized system capable of harnessing it — the governance, the financial infrastructure, the communication systems, the visible public presence that converts moral force into institutional force. The informal structure that has characterized most Black alumni associations has not diminished that latent power. It has simply left it unactivated, waiting for the moment that makes its activation not just possible but necessary. That moment is now.

What Organizing Actually Means

Building organizational capacity is not about adding paperwork. It is not about compliance with some external standard of institutional legitimacy. It is about building the systems through which latent power becomes realized power — the documented governance, financial independence, active membership infrastructure, and credible public presence that convert identity and will into sustained institutional force.

Structure is what makes power durable. An association that depends on the energy and knowledge of whoever is currently leading it is not an institution — it is a recurring act of individual heroism. When that person's term ends, the organization resets. The relationships, the institutional knowledge, the momentum — all of it walks out the door. The next board starts from scratch, rebuilding what the previous board built, in an endless cycle that prevents the accumulation of real capacity over time.

A constituted organization — one with committees that hold defined authority and documented procedures, officers who inherit playbooks rather than blank slates, bylaws that are actually understood and practiced, financial systems that operate independently of institutional permission — is a different kind of entity. It does not reset. It compounds. Each leadership term inherits a more capable organization than the one the previous board received, and the capacity to act grows more robust with every cycle. That compounding capacity is what enables a Black alumni association to do three things that informal organizations cannot reliably do: influence its institution from a position of standing rather than supplication, protect its student community with the credibility and resources that organized advocacy requires, and build the kind of community-controlled philanthropy that is independent of what any institution chooses to permit. An association with those capabilities is a stakeholder. An association without them is a group of well-meaning people with no durable mechanism to act.

What This Makes Possible

An association that has done this organizational work is a different kind of institution — one that can act rather than react, influence rather than appeal, and build rather than simply preserve. It can sit at the table with university leadership from a position of standing rather than goodwill. A budget, a membership report, documented governance, a credible public presence — these are not administrative achievements. They are evidence of an organization that has earned the right to be taken seriously, and institutions respond differently to stakeholders than they do to petitioners.

It can build community-controlled philanthropy on a meaningful scale. When an alumni association has independent financial infrastructure, it can develop the giving culture its members deserve — one organized around the community's values and priorities, not the institution's compliance posture. Pooled alumni contributions, transparent allocation, visible impact reported back to the community — this is philanthropy as infrastructure, as leverage, as the long-term work of building resources that outlast any single political moment and remain under the control of the community that built them.

It can deter, respond, and create altogether different outcomes. The associations that will have the capacity to protect their communities in this environment — to push back against institutional decisions, to mobilize alumni in support of students under threat, to sustain the programs and resources that belonging requires — are the ones that have done the organizational work before the crisis demands it. Capacity built in advance is deterrence. Capacity built in response to a crisis is always insufficient.

The power Black alumni associations carry has always been real. It is rooted in four hundred years of struggle that this community has never once walked away from, carried forward through every generation that was called to defend what the previous generation won, and brought to these campuses by alumni who did not arrive by accident. What has been missing is the organized system capable of activating and directing it. This moment of institutional coercion is also, for the associations willing to see it clearly, the moment of necessary evolution — the recognition that what was sufficient before is no longer adequate to what is being asked, and that the latent power sitting in these networks is ready to be put to work.

The question is whether it will be organized in time.