Students have marched on Corcoran Commons, crowded the lawn of St. Ignatius Church, and occupied Gasson Hall, each time demanding racial equity at Boston College. Each time, they stood up against University policies and nationwide racial injustices, calling for change and insisting on their right to be heard.
Today many of these calls have been answered—by every student participating in the African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS) program, cheering on BC’s sports teams, and learning in a classroom enriched by a more diverse faculty.
Many of these changemakers were Black students.
Currently, Black students comprise about 4 percent of Boston College’s undergraduate population, a slight increase from around 3 percent in the earliest recorded demographic data from 1977, where they made up about 3 percent.
Despite their relatively small numbers, Black students decided from the start to write their own histories at BC.
But these stories have often gone untold.
The Black BC virtual walking tour and website changes this narrative. Here, Black students’ impact is not only chronicled, but showcased and highlighted, reminding all students and faculty of their influence.
Curated by BC English and African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS) Professor Rhonda Frederick, the tour features 27 locations that played a significant role in shaping the Black experience at BC. Users can walk between the sites and learn about their history through featured archival documents.
From Devlin Hall, the site where Casper Augustus Ferguson became the first Black student to graduate from BC in 1937, to St. Mary’s Hall, the site of protests against police brutality in 2014, the tour takes participants across campus, documenting important stories of “firsts,” activism, and institutional progress.
The virtual walking tour was created in the 2019–2020 academic year to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the AADS program.
As a former director of the program, Frederick wanted to find a way to honor this milestone. She took inspiration from a binder created during her undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania that commemorated Black faculty.
At the same time, The Heights was working on a timeline documenting important moments in BC’s history of Black activism.
The racial climate at the time further fueled her decision to begin developing Black BC.
The 2010s saw a surge in activism amid the Black Lives Matter movement and protests against police brutality. In December 2014, BC, students responded by staging a “die-in” at St. Mary’s Hall to protest what they viewed as the University’s restrictive free speech policies and inadequate response to police violence.
“After the activist moments to commemorate Black lives, the various moments, particularly the [die-in protest] at St. Marys, I wanted us to start thinking about Boston College as a place for black students,” Frederick said.
Making this happen, Frederick said, would require a mindset shift among many Black students, who felt ostracized as the University looked to punish students who participated in the “die-in.”
“A lot of the students did not feel at home at the University, so I thought what better way to make the point clear that Black students do have a place at BC and are part of the fabric of the University than documenting places, locations where Black students made an impact,” Frederick said.
As Frederick started researching for the website, Yvonne McBarnett, director of the Thea Bowman AHANA and Intercultural Center (BAIC) and BC ’05, encouraged her to explore the archives at Burns Library. There, Frederick was surprised to find some of the papers of Don Brown, the inaugural BAIC director.
“I was absolutely floored,” Frederick said. “There were photographs of different people who came to campus, notes about events that he planned. I found a photo of Jesse Jackson when he came to BC, and I was like, ‘Jesse Jackson came to BC? Who knew?’”
Documents Frederick found in the AADS office only strengthened her resolve to see the project come to fruition.
“I found boxes of information left by the first director, Amanda V. Houston, and there were boxes of information on the first Blacks in Boston conference,” Frederick said. “And going through this was just so exciting, and I’m like, ‘We need to do something with this information.’”
With her research complete, Frederick took to organizing the events by specific campus locations where they occurred. Part of this process involved creating summaries of the articles for each location’s page, allowing readers to get a quick snapshot of the story without having to sift through archival texts.
Many of these articles came from The Heights archives. Located at the BC Football Field, the story “Ahead of their time Black athletes break through at BC,” by Allie Weiskopf documents the monumental impact of the first Black athletes at BC.
The article documents some of BC’s greatest. Football star Lou Montgomery, BC ’41, made history when he became the first Black athlete at BC in 1937 as a running back on the team. Additionally, the article documents Ralph King, BC ’49, who rose to the top of his game when he became the first Black captain of the track and field team in 1948.
Weiskopf wanted to tell these stories not only for BC students, but for the athletes that might not have gotten the recognition they deserved at the time.
“I remember saying, we want to tell your story, and you are somebody to look up to, because times have certainly changed,” Weiskopf said. “You were a groundbreaker, and you were a trailblazer. We want to hear that.”
Not only were the athletes trailblazers in their fields, but BC as an institution was as well. The University accepted Black athletes 30 years before the ACC and 40 years before many southern colleges, according to the article.
“I think it’s important to look at the past and see, not so long ago, we were a discriminatory environment,” Weiskopf said. “And BC embraced diversity from the beginning.”
To find ways to incorporate The Heights articles and archives from the AADS office and Burns Library into the website, Frederick collaborated with departments across campus.
One key partner was the Boston College Libraries Digital Scholarship group, which helped determine how to digitally organize the information in a way that aligned with Frederick’s vision for the project.
Melanie Hubbard, the head of the group, worked closely with Frederick to get the project off the ground.
“Our initial aim was to help Rhonda make her vision happen, and we feel really good about being able to do that,” Hubbard said.
A key part of Frederick’s vision was sharing what she had learned with the community.
“Her genuine interest in representing student and faculty experiences—she has a real passion for this,” Hubbard said. “And she wanted to make sure other people could learn about this history.”
Another important person Frederick turned to throughout the process was Tim Lindgren, assistant director for design innovation at BC’s Center for Digital Innovation in Learning.
Lindgren explained that his role involves helping people around the University create impactful digital learning experiences. Throughout the process, Lindgren served as consulting support for Frederick and Hubbard.
For Lindgren, mapping these locations brought their significance to life in a tangible way.
“We can put things on a map, and we can have it appear, and we can, you know, use both text and image, and we can get creative with the ways that we tell the stories about history,” Lindgren said.
These pinpoints, along with the opportunity to view the digital map, made the project and its message feel all the more real to Frederick.
“When we were able to have an image to look at, it was a map with pinpoints, the different events on campus, and just to see it, it really sort of brought me back to one of the original intentions of this project—to make BC, make the Black contribution and Black presence of BC more visible,” Frederick said.
Reading about Ferguson, the first Black student to graduate from BC, Frederick couldn’t help but feel moved.
“I felt the pain of it, his experience, but I also had to hold that feeling in flow with the notion that he was the first,” Frederick said. “It was an important sort of intervention, but also not one that was without some pain.”
Those emotional moments did not come without difficulty.
While the summer provided ample time for Frederick to work on the project, she found herself constrained when classes started again in the fall. For a couple of months, the documents she gathered sat untouched in a file, as she hoped to revisit them later.
“I was just so overwhelmed, I just couldn’t do anything with them, so I just collected them in my folder called ‘AADS at 50’ and just let it all sit,” Frederick said.
Ultimately, Frederick noted that her feelings were due in part to how important she felt the documents within the project were.
“It’s just those moments where something triggers my intellectual self, my emotional self, and just all of myself, right?” Frederick said. “My whole person got involved in this. And sometimes the words, sometimes the images, and sometimes just sort of the collection of events on the timeline just triggered all of those things for me.”
One particular event that came as a shock was the connection between Robert Morris—a civil rights activist and the second Black lawyer in the U.S.—and BC, as his family donated a significant portion of his wealth to help establish BC’s campus in Chestnut Hill.
“I was floored,” Frederick said. “And if you look on the Robert Morris timeline, it shows that him and his wife were instrumental in starting Boston College. That is the kind of story that we need to know.”
Frederick believes his impact should not be forgotten.
“Robert Morris was a legal advisor for a lot of these Irish and Irish-American working-class white men. So we can’t separate. It’s not just Irish, Irish-American. It’s not just Black. It’s both,” Frederick said. “And they existed together, and it wasn’t a big deal. It’s a fact. There’s an is-ness to it. To leave out that truth I think is a failure for the University.”
Frederick was bent on not leaving out any important truths when compiling the timeline, believing this would be a disservice to those who don’t know about the work of Black students have done to shape the University into what it is today.
“I want this timeline to be one of the things that makes people aware of the program and its contributions to the University,” Frederick said. “It’s past and present and future contributions to the University.”
One major function of this communication is increasing general awareness of Black history on campus, especially for prospective students looking to apply to BC.
“One of the core motivations was to make this other history of Boston College more visible, particularly to incoming students of color,” Lindgren said. “To say there is this whole long history of people at Boston College that often is not as visible as other histories.”
A major part of Lindgren’s involvement with the project came when C. Shawn McGuffey, a sociology professor and former AADS director, wanted to utilize the site in his introduction to African diaspora studies class. McGuffey hoped to not only inform his students of the site’s existence, but have them build upon it through their own research.
“Sean got the idea, really really felt strongly that he wanted to have his students be interviewing former AADS students,” Lindgren said.
In doing so, they would transform the site from a compilation of archives into a dynamic resource that could be continually enhanced.
“It involves both public scholarship—which is what Shawn was really interested in—is having his students think about this research they’re doing, being for a general public,” Lindgren said. “And also this media rich kind of product that they’re producing at the end, rather than a traditional academic essay.”
McGuffey recognized the Black BC website as vital for its role in highlighting the Black experience.
“It’s helpful because we don’t have a lot of public discussions from marginalized students and their experiences at a predominantly white university in general,” McGuffey said.
McGuffey sees a future where other minority groups’ experiences on campus are highlighted. But this work doesn’t all need to be conducted by faculty—instead, McGuffy believes that students themselves can play a direct role.
“I don’t think it’s a mistake that most of the things you see on there are student-focused, or rather, say, faculty-focused or even staff-focused,” McGuffey said. “Which I’m completely fine with, but I think that’s why the focus is mostly on student participation, which I think it should be.”
Since the course was an introduction to AADS, students were new to both the field and to research and website-building.
“It was a really good way to introduce the idea of research methods and public scholarship,” McGuffey said. “Which I think is so vital for African and African Diaspora Studies and is at the root of African and African Diaspora Studies—that we are supposed to be a public discipline.”
The project had a 14-week timeline and consisted of multiple steps, including shooting and editing video interviews with former AADS students. At first, McGuffey said his students were intimidated by the project’s scope.
“Some students were nervous,” McGuffey said. “And quite honestly, I was nervous because I’m not that technologically skilled. I was learning along with them.”
Ultimately, the students compiled research spanning from the 1970s to 2021 for the website. In reflecting on Black history at BC, they saw not only the achievements of Black students in building a sense of community, but also the struggles they faced along the way.
“A lot of the programs here that are geared towards making the experience of more marginalized students feel more welcome,” McGuffey said. “Those were hard fought, like people worked really hard. It’s important that students realize that these were struggles, and those struggles have bore fruit.”
Lindgren found the project to be a powerful representation of the real change that students can enact on campus.
“There are ways to be active contributors to BC’s history and the scholarship of scholarship around that,” Lindgren said.
McGuffey agrees.
“The students who took this course—even if they never take another AADS course—they can hopefully 20 years from now go back and say, ‘Oh, that was me. I helped with this story,” McGuffey said.
Even as an instructor, McGuffey felt the real impact of the research within the website.
“There’s so many ways that your research comes to life,” McGuffey said. “Because you can teach about something in class, but then they can go to the archives or go to the timelines or go to Black BC and see how that actually played out at a particular institution that they are almost innately invested in because they are at that institution.”
Frederick saw it exactly the same way.
“It’s one thing to give somebody a book and say ‘If you want to know more about X read this,’” Frederick said. “I think that’s one way to intervene. But the more of yourself you get involved in learning—your physical self, your intellectual self, your emotional self, etc. — the more meaningful what you learn is to you as a human.”
Students that either wrote articles now featured on the site or conducted research that will soon be published saw this impact firsthand, as well as the importance they can have in shaping the history of BC.
The students’ impacts and the impact of all those that lead the way for race relations and equality at BC cannot be overstated.
“It’s something that isn’t seen as frozen in time,” Lindgren said. “But something that’s going to continue to grow in some way, and that it can be a kind of living repository of BC’s history.”
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