Black RSOs offer a community within a community

It’s Thursday night outside the student center, the last few rays of sunshine beating a feeble retreat towards the horizon. The air is cold and empty, a frigid wind snatching away the words of the handful of students in Faner courtyard and scattering them to the stars above.

People shuffle around spasmodically, and skulk in their coats against the biting weather. As one draws near, you can make out conversation in impish tones and cheerful celebrations of the group’s own wit. Through the front doors, the halls of the student center seem monolithic, and every room cavernous by their abandonment and silence. Of course, it’s only because it’s 6pm and all the school’s own activities are through for the day. Most students are home, starting in on dinner or dozing off over unattended homework. But there’s something very odd about the feeling when you come up through all the emptiness where the schools thousands of other students toil day in and day out, most probably unaware or indifferent to a community that surrounds them each day of their time at SIU.

“Well, I think the biggest issue in the Black community and Carbondale, especially SIU, is that we’re not as close knit as we should be,” said Amir Ferguson, president of Project Love. “We should be here to help everyone else. We should be here so make sure all the Black students who we see we know, but a lot of Black students get separated or they get, like, in their own groups or cliques. And I feel like we should start by being more close knit, like, we’re all the Black students on campus. We’re a minority so we should be tight - closelike we should be a family making sure everyone succeeds.”

Forever singled out by its differences and yet painstakingly curated, unified, and moved to excellence by their fellow students, SIU’s Black RSO community is a whole unto itself, a community within a community and eager to celebrate the fact. Gathered in Faner auditorium on what was more or less the eve of Black History Month, hundreds of Black faces looked to their more experienced peers for advice on professionalism, how to be a better man or woman, and how to engage more with the community of Carbondale.

“The most important issue is to be heard and to be seen,” said Kayla Vaughen, the president of Naturalistas, a beauty and personal hygiene club at SIU. “I think us having our RSO fair is a good way to be heard and be seen because, yes, we have an RSO fair that student engagement offers but I think us having our Black RSO fair tends to help the issue.”

Many organizations came to the student center auditorium to present their missions to students, from the Black Male Roundtable, which offered the men in the audience guidance on how to achieve professionalism and lessons on how to network, to Project Love, an RSO dedicated to helping the less fortunate of Carbondale.

As one member of Black Male Roundtable told the audience, “This is that time where reality comes in. That’s what it did when he was 18. It happened when I was 16. So go have your fun, go play basketball, it was a stressful week but you need to get involved, get some experience, know how to talk to people, because without that you’re really just in school for no reason.”

Many students at SIU arrive with little to no parental assistance in college life, whether that is because of their parents own lack of college education or due to poverty or strife at home. According to EAB, a national education consulting firm, one-third of all college students in the U.S. are first generation. Though SIU has won several awards due to the success rate of its first generation students and has a dedicated First Saluki Center, it is difficult to make up for a public school’s failings or a lack of enrichment early in students’ lives with class time alone. Especially with discrimination and cultural differences to think about as they enter college, communities tend to be tight knit and supportive.

“I feel like it’s [SIU’s] a good environment to start something,” Vaughen said. “But I also feel like you can still bring more people out because I feel like right now we have half of the Black community. We are trying to get the whole percentage of the Black community because, yeah, we see the same people here and stuff like that. Other people we never see.”

As well as trying to tap the potential of their peers, many Black RSO’s concern themselves with social issues, and the advancement of understanding and compassion between different groups of students. The Black Women’s Task Force, an RSO dedicated to supporting women and teaching them to help themselves, hosts a prevalent event called girl-code guy-code, wherein women and men describe their different life experiences to each other, and share their opinions about being the gender they are.

“I think that we made a name on campus and I feel like everybody knows they appreciate what we have here,” said Kyleigh McDavis, a member of Black Women’s Task Force. “From a personal standpoint, I feel like safety at SIU is a big issue. And in Carbondale also, I feel like there’s a lot of things going on and not enough being done to fix that. So I feel there are some ways we can come together and try to work on that issue, to make it safer for a lot of people here. I want everybody to feel comfortable.”

Recent shootings in Carbondale have taken lives as close as University Village, where many SIU students live and work. Additionally, police were increasingly active during the Polar Bear celebrations.

“I feel like the RSOs has helped give people more to do after class,” McDavis said. “I think that, for some RSOs, it’s a stress reliever. It’s a place for people to express their thoughts and just feel comfortable and then to see a familiar face. I feel like more people are more inclined to join when they see somebody that looks like them in RSOs and that gets the numbers up and more people in.”

Perhaps contributing most directly to a reduction of present and future violence in Carbondale is Project Love, which drew a long line of volunteers at the RSO fair, many of them already members of other organizations at the fair.

“We basically just help with the empowerment of everybody in the community,” Ferguson says. “We go to nursing homes, churches, on campus, anywhere where the less fortunate need help, we go to help out. We clean up, we do fundraisers. Anything pretty much. Food drives, clothes, drives, we do anything we can do to help out everybody.”

Towering over the action whenever people come over to his stand, a wide grin splits Ferguson’s face no matter who he talks to.

“Basically, I had a troubled childhood myself,” Ferguson said. “So I want to help the less fortunate because I know how it feels to feel like you don’t have help. It feels like no one hears your voice and nobody’s here for you. I just want to make sure everybody is heard, everybody has a voice and everybody has help. I’ve gone through traumatic experiences to become the man I am today. And I don’t want nobody else to have to go through what I went through.”

All over the room, over the blare of speakers pumping out several different beats, and the bustle of the crowd, connections sprang into place between students, or were renewed for another semester of growth and community and ownership over that community.

“Just because you don’t need help or you’re not part of the less fortunate doesn’t mean they aren’t out here,” Ferguson said. “They are out here and they are very much in need of help. So we all need to help each other and that’s what this is. This RSO fair shows students that there are successful Black men and women on this campus. You could become one of those successful Black men and women.”

Staff Reporter Daniel Bethers can be reached at commonitem6damage in Instagram, or at