Boston College faculty, students, and community members came together Tuesday evening to celebrate the beginning of Black History Month and call for resistance through joy and community.
“Let this guide you throughout the month and challenge you to seek that joy in every person you encounter by listening, uplifting, and honoring the stories and experiences that shape them for who they are,” Esosasehia Owens, recipient of the 2025 Martin Luther King Jr. scholarship and CSOM ’26, said.
The event, sponsored by the Thea Bowman AHANA and Intercultural Center, featured live music, trivia, and several speeches by students and faculty that addressed the importance of intertwining honoring achievement with effecting meaningful change.
In her address to the crowd, Owens wrestled with celebrating Black history amid the upheaval of Black identity across the country.
“In reality, is it right to explain happiness in a time where our identities are being broken down, humiliated, and overall disregarded in society?” Owens said.
Owens acknowledged how past and present challenges are impacting the Black community, including Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration, and the banning of affirmative action, which she noted can distract from the meaning behind Black History Month.
“I understand that Black History Month is a time to celebrate the success we as a people have achieved,” Owens said. “But sometimes a celebration can feel like a facade or distraction from the challenges we face daily.”
Situating Black History Month within these ongoing challenges, Owens called on attendees to use joy and happiness as a form of resistance against today’s attacks on the Black community.
“With the theme this month being restoration as resistance, the real question we must ask ourselves is how can we restore that happiness that should be found and grounded in the words ‘Happy Black History Month,’” said Owens.
This journey of restoration, Owens explained, comes from the collective act of resistance formed within a strong community, even in the face of adversity.
“Restoration as resistance doesn’t just come from within,” said Owens. “It comes from a village that is bound together to rejuvenate the joyful spirit within each person in a world that constantly attempts to strip Black peoples of their dignity, joy, and belonging.”
Latrica Best, professor of sociology and African and African diaspora studies, was the ceremony’s keynote speaker.
Her address focused on maintaining well-being during politically and racially fraught times.
“I don’t really need to tell anybody else in this room here, just sort of the magnitude, the gravity of the situations that we’re living in right now,” Best said. “We must intentionally think about our wellness, awareness of ourselves, but also the wellness of others.”
Reflecting on historical achievements by Black individuals, Best explained the underacknowledged stress that many leaders in the Civil Rights Movement faced.
“What really strikes me is thinking about the amount of stress and trauma that they always sort of had to endure,” Best said. “Not only as sort of one particular off event, but these are sort of multitude of events that were occurring in various spaces across their life course.”
Best also noted that despite their challenges, these activists created communities that fostered unwavering support, which is essential to maintaining individual well-being.
“They were whole people,” Best said. “They had families, they had friends, they had community, they had hopes, they had dreams, they had wellness.”
Connecting with a community is still relevant today, according to Best, as constant, emotionally distressing news has heightened the need for individual wellness.
“There still is a need for us to think about the ways in which we rest, but also the ways in which we connect—both internally with ourselves, but also with others—even as we’re fighting, sort of perpetually fighting for equality in this country,” Best said.
