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10 Student Organizations Every Black Leader Should Joining

10 Student Organizations Every Black Leader Should Joining

Source: Nicholas Klein / Getty
College isn't just about the classroom — it's about the connections, the communities, and the causes you choose to pour into.
For Black students, finding spaces that affirm your identity, uplift your voice, and challenge you to lead is essential.
That's where student organizations come in.
Joining student orgs isn't just about padding your résumé — it's about building your tribe, sharpening your leadership skills, and making sure Black students are seen, heard, and represented across campus.
Whether you're passionate about activism, art, academics, or entrepreneurship, there's a space for you to thrive.
These organizations are where culture is preserved, legacies are built, and movements are born.
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From the Black Student Union to professional networks like NSBE or Black pre-law societies, these orgs connect you with mentors, opportunities, and peers who understand the unique journey of being Black in higher education.
They're also the training ground for the next generation of changemakers — leaders who are unafraid to speak up, show out, and shift the culture.
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10 Student Organizations Every Black Leader Should Joining was originally published on hot1009.com
The heart of Black student life on most campuses. BSU is where advocacy, culture, and community meet. You'll find leadership opportunities, networking, and a space that centers Black voices unapologetically.
Think long-term impact. NPHC orgs — historically Black fraternities and sororities — offer brotherhood, sisterhood, service, and a powerful alumni network. D9 life is a commitment, but the legacy is unmatched.
These cultural orgs are perfect for celebrating heritage, sharing traditions, and connecting with students from across the African Diaspora. Bonus: some of the best events on campus.
Bring national energy to local action. These chapters give you tools to organize around civil rights, policy, and justice — while connecting you with one of the most iconic Black institutions in history.
For STEM-minded leaders, NSBE opens doors to internships, scholarships, and conferences. You'll be surrounded by like-minded peers who want to build and innovate for the culture.
Thinking about grad school or a professional career? These organizations offer mentorship, test prep resources, and networking with Black professionals who've already walked the path.
Whether it's theater, dance, music, or visual art — these orgs are where Black expression thrives. Join to share your voice, preserve culture, and collaborate creatively with your peers.
If you want to influence policy, funding, or equity on campus, this is the place to be. Run for office, propose change, and represent underrepresented voices where decisions are made.
Calling all future CEOs. These orgs teach you how to build, pitch, and profit — often with guest speakers, business plan competitions, and internships tailored for Black students.
If your passion is rooted in justice, education, or community uplift — orgs like Future Black Leaders and similar initiatives give you a national platform and practical experience to lead beyond campus.
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HBCU offers a full ride scholarship to ten-year old
HBCU offers a full ride scholarship to ten-year old

Miami Herald

time2 hours ago

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HBCU offers a full ride scholarship to ten-year old

Kendall Rae Johnson, a 10-year-old from Atlanta and Georgia's youngest certified farmer, has received a full scholarship to South Carolina State University (SC State)-one of the nation's top HBCUs. This milestone honors both her extraordinary journey in agriculture and the strong support HBCUs continue to offer young Black leaders. A Life-Changing HBCU Campus Visit Kendall Rae was touring 1890 land-grant HBCUs with her family when they visited South Carolina State in Orangeburg, SC. While exploring the school's 300-acre Research & Demonstration Farm, she was invited to meet SC State President Alexander Conyers. In a surprise moment, he offered her the 1890 Agriculture Innovation Scholarship, worth $83,598. The scholarship covers full tuition, fees, and room & board. President Conyers said he was inspired by her energy and focus. "We were blown away by Kendall Rae's focus and maturity. She speaks with passion about crop cycles, soil health, and even longhorn cattle. Her future is bright." From Backyard to Full-Fledged Farmer Kendall Rae started gardening with her great-grandmother at just 3 years old. By 6, she became Georgia's youngest certified farmer. Today, she manages about an acre of land and grows a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, including strawberries, tomatoes, apples, and okra. Her story has made headlines across the country and inspired other youth in agriculture. Leading With Heart and Purpose Kendall Rae is also the founder of Kendall Rae's Green Heart, a nonprofit that teaches kids about farming, sustainability, and entrepreneurship. She serves as a USDA National Urban Agriculture Youth Ambassador and uses her platform to raise awareness about food justice. Her father, Quentin Johnson, said she has inspired their whole family. "She pulled me into this. Now we're all growing together-literally." Big Dreams for a Bigger Impact Kendall Rae has no plans of slowing down. She says she wants to own at least 100 acres of farmland and raise longhorn cattle. She's especially excited about SC State's international agriculture programs, including a goat research initiative in The Gambia. Despite her age, she's already thinking about college life. During her visit to campus, she told staff, "I'll be back in 10 years to see all the new buildings." SC State is investing more than $250 million into new campus development-timed perfectly for the future freshman. The HBCU Difference This full-ride scholarship highlights the powerful role HBCUs play in supporting young Black innovators. Schools like South Carolina State invest early in youth who have the potential to lead industries and inspire change. President Conyers believes Kendall Rae's potential HBCU story is just beginning. "Kendall Rae Johnson is exactly the kind of student we want to support. She's a future leader-here at SC State and beyond." The post HBCU offers a full ride scholarship to ten-year old appeared first on HBCU Gameday. Copyright HBCU Gameday 2012-2025

The Complexity of Home: What Alabama Taught Me About Life
The Complexity of Home: What Alabama Taught Me About Life

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The Complexity of Home: What Alabama Taught Me About Life

It depends on who is doing the looking. Since the cementing of the American union, the story of Alabama has lain in its being the most visible stage for the best and worst results of our democratic experiment. But while outsiders have often glanced at the state—to draw a contrast, to make a point, to make an example of—its true nature has rarely been understood. Alabama is too racist, too religious, too backward. It either needs outside intervention or is a lost cause. If the Deep South is the essence of the nation—as Howard Zinn put it, a region that 'is a distillation of those traits which are the worst (and a few which are the best) in the national character'—that could be why, when I am outside the South, I can always predict the responses of people once I tell them I am from Alabama. I never really left the South until I graduated from high school; moving to college in New Jersey was the second time in my life I traveled by plane, the first being seven years earlier. Leaving hadn't been necessary. Every place that was important or desirable to me, from school to where we vacationed, was reachable by car, and everyone around me learned how to drive by, at the latest, the age of 15. My first car, which I raced from my high school parking lot to the mall to my house while blasting Three 6 Mafia, Trina, and OutKast on HOT 105.7, was my family's stop sign–red Plymouth Voyager minivan. It was so uncool my friends found it endearing. When I was growing up, my hometown of Montgomery was the source of what I knew about how people related to one another and what I could assume about a person from how they carried themselves, how they talked to me, and where they lived. The things I thought I knew—that there was always a geographic direction in which to aspire to move, that talking to everyone regardless of their schooling or money was vital to both your spiritual and your social standing, that it mattered that you let others know your educational and material statuses with grace and that you let them know what those statuses were—still felt essential when I looked back years later. As a child, most of my travel came about when my mom, my two younger brothers, and I followed my dad to academic conferences in cities around the region, like Baton Rouge and Biloxi and Raleigh, or when we went on weekend vacations to Atlanta, the Black southerner's version of New York City. We usually stayed in my parents' favorite hotel chain, Embassy Suites, on these trips; my parents rented a one-bedroom suite with two double beds and a pull-out couch, and we fell into a sleeping arrangement that allowed us all just enough space. Our tastes were modest, decent. We drove from Montgomery every trip, no matter how long it took. But I fantasized about indecency. After 18 years of imagining the world outside the South, I arrived on the baroquely lush campus of Princeton University in the fall of 2002. I remember walking over what felt like acres of clipped, vivid green with my family, looking up at Gothic arches. We were staying in an Embassy Suites–like hotel not quite in the town of Princeton, and we had driven onto campus in our rental car to move me into my dorm. Later, I was standing in a crowd of people from my freshman class, waiting to leave a lecture hall after orientation, in front of a boy who would become my editor at the campus alternative weekly; he was talking with his friend, who would become known as the campus coke dealer, about a girl who had brought a DVR to install in her dorm room because she couldn't miss her favorite television shows while she was in class. The boys sounded amused and impressed. They mentioned the girl's skiing vacations and her boarding school, the name of which seemed to be shorthand for a good pedigree. Her name, which was Tobin, also seemed to be shorthand for the kind of taste that preferred wealth to style. I had had no idea there were even kids who wanted to venture beyond the driving radius around their homes and go to a place like boarding school. Standing in that crowd was when I realized that many of the symbols of status I knew—summers spent at the lake, membership to the right church youth group—no longer applied and that I would soon have to learn what the new, relevant symbols were. I was sheltered by parents who had refused to let me date or go to late-night parties, but who had seen no problem in taking my brothers and me to weekend matinee showings of erotic thrillers like Single White Female or letting us read anything we wanted as vicarious experimentation. I needed to transition from consuming whatever adult novel I could find in the public library to expertly responding to the late-night drunken voicemails from the boy standing behind me at orientation, the lovely coke dealer. Modesty and decency were relative here. I knew very little about Princeton before going. I zoomed in on photos of its campus on Google, examined carefully chosen images on its website to see how students were dressed and which ones were grouped together, and spent time looking around to see what people did with their days besides going to class. I never visited the campus, despite Princeton having a 'Pre-Frosh Weekend.' Visiting seemed too expensive, would take up too much time, and no one suggested it. After receiving my acceptance email, I celebrated for a few minutes with my parents and then went back to the computer to email the admissions office. I needed to ask how many Black students were at the school, because it was impossible to tell from the photos. 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Even at a university that, by reputation, was the most preppy-attired, conservative values–holding, and thus 'southern,' of all the colleges in the Northeast, there were few people who claimed to belong to the last two categories. Any comfort I took in Princeton's reputation as a southern-minded school was supposed to make me feel better that I was one of a handful of students in my high school class leaving Alabama; college would be something like home far from home. So when I met other students and professors, and we introduced ourselves, it took a while to get used to the routine. Their reactions, depending on how much time they had spent down South, would head down one of two distinct avenues. If they hadn't lived lower than the Carolinas, they'd say 'Alabama?!' with outright surprise or, if they were able to fix their expressions soon enough, a 'Whoa, Alabama' with careful wariness. 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So much so that, over time, I began to forget parts of how I had grown up, the nuances of how Alabamians lived and thought, and could recall only broad strokes about race and politics and religion. I began to forget that Alabama is, before anything else, home. Those people and I weren't ready for what lay in between: the worth of a place and why people choose to call it home. Why do people stay? And what happens to them? Alabama was the best place to find the answers. Adapted from BLESSINGS AND DISASTERS: A Story of Alabama by Alexis Okeowo, published by Henry Holt and Co. on August 5, 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Alexis Okeowo. Printed by permission.

Inside San Francisco's new restorative justice hub
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Every inch of San Francisco's first restorative justice center is designed for healing — from the cozy reading nooks and colorful communal spaces to the comfy lounge-style chairs and art displays telling stories of survival. The big picture: Community Works ' new 6,000-square-foot space in the SoMa is one of the nation's few hubs focused on providing support rooted in restorative justice to youth affected by the criminal justice system, survivors of domestic violence and formerly incarcerated people. What they're saying:"We were built on a foundation of restorative practices and art," Adrienne Hogg, co-executive director of Community Works, told Axios. "It's important to have good quality furniture and furnishings, so that when you come here, you can feel like you belong, that this is a space for you." Between the lines: The space, which officially opened last week, offers reentry assistance for adults, therapy for teens, a youth diversion program and support for children of incarcerated parents, among other services, with the capacity to serve between 1,500 to 2,000 people annually. More than 80% of participants are people of color and 75% of staff have lived experience with incarceration or system involvement, Hogg said. The goal is to curb incarceration rates and the criminal justice system's toll on low-income communities of color through a process rooted in resolution and accountability rather than punishment. The latest: The Bay Area-based organization partnered with the architecture firm Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS) to establish its first location in the city, expanding upon programming offered at jails, prisons and their longtime hub in Oakland. Follow the money: Getting the center up and running cost just $600,000 — down from an estimated $1.2 million — thanks to pro bono work from Turner Construction and donations from furniture vendors and other partners, Hogg said. Zoom in: Jakaela Foster, a 26-year-old east Oakland native, started as a participant in Project What!, which supports children of incarcerated parents, when she was 15 years old before later becoming a coordinator in the program. She's gained confidence and new skills and takes pride in continuing to be involved as program leader to support Black youth, she said. "'The most common way to give up your power is by believing that you don't have any,'" Foster said, quoting poet Alice Walker. "I feel like that's a great summary of what Project What! did for me as a young person — they taught me that I do have power."

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