I audibly gasped when I read the news.
My alma mater, the University of Alabama, announced that its Black Faculty and Staff Association would be opening Scholar Day — a celebration created specifically to honor the academic achievements of Black students — to non-Black students. The program would be renamed after Harold Bishop, one of the university’s first Black professors. A gesture of recognition, perhaps. But also, unmistakably, a dilution.
I know this campus. I walked its grounds documenting the names and stories of enslaved people who built and maintained it. I sat in meetings, negotiated with administrators, and helped craft the strategic plan that ultimately created the university’s VP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion position and the Intercultural Diversity Center — spaces born directly from student protests and demands. I stood alongside the BFSA as it did what it has always done: fight for Black students to feel seen on a campus that has historically made that very difficult.
So when I say this news is deeply troubling, I am not speaking from the outside.
The Black Faculty and Staff Association was founded in 1974 — not as a luxury, but as a necessity. It was created to provide advocacy, strategy, resources, and spaces of celebration for Black students, faculty, and staff navigating a predominantly white institution with a complicated and painful racial history. Scholar Day was one expression of that mission: a room where Black academic excellence was not incidental but central. Where students who spent their days code-switching, overperforming, and proving their belonging could simply be celebrated.
That room matters. And opening it up changes it. This is not an isolated decision. It is part of a pattern. Across the country, we are watching the systematic dismantling of Black spaces, Black studies programs, DEI offices, and affirmative action policies in real time. It is being repackaged as inclusion and neutrality, but the effect is erasure. We have seen this before.
After the Civil War, former Confederate states launched what historians now call the Lost Cause Mythology — a deliberate effort to rewrite the history of a war fought over the right to enslave human beings into a sanitized story about states' rights and Southern honor. Memorials like those at Stone Mountain in Georgia were not simply acts of remembrance. They were acts of political messaging, designed to reinforce white Southern supremacy and rewrite the terms of defeat. What is happening now — the renaming of DEI, the repeal of affirmative action, the dismantling of multicultural centers — is the same project in a new package.
Black spaces at predominantly white institutions were never created to exclude. They were created because exclusion already existed. They were created so that a Black student at a university built by enslaved labor, on a campus that expelled its first Black student after a white mob ran her off the grounds, could find community, affirmation, and a place to breathe.
Autherine Lucy, the first Black student admitted to the University of Alabama, was expelled after the university failed to protect her from a violent white mob in 1956. It took decades of organizing, advocacy, and student protest to erect a historical marker in her honor on that same campus. That marker exists because people refused to let the institution forget. Scholar Day exists for the same reason.
To the Black faculty, staff, and students who have spent decades building and protecting these spaces — I see you. I know what it cost. And I know what is at stake. Black spaces are sacred. And they are worth protecting.
Teryn Denae is a former student activist at the University of Alabama, where she worked alongside the Black Faculty and Staff Association to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus.
