NU’s African American Institute is being relocated

Serghino René

Northeastern University’s John D. O’Bryant African American Institute is close to ruins now.

The crumbs of brick now serve as a distant memory of what was once a free-standing symbol of the African American community.

“If you see what’s being done and remember what the institute was like, it’s sad to watch what has become of it,” said Marly Pierre Louis, a Northeastern alum.

With what’s left of the institute, there is some consolation that all its programs are surviving and transferring to the new location. Building F, which will be the new home of the African American Institute, is a state of the art, 150,000 square foot, multi-purpose facility that will include 230 beds for students, 8 general use classrooms and a 270 seat lecture hall. The new institute will no longer be free-standing, but it will have its own entrance and address.

Although open to all students, regardless of race, the old building was an area of campus where African American students didn’t feel like numbers.

“It was a place where I could walk, relax, be myself and not feel like I was a product of affirmative action,” says Pierre Louis.

It was a place where students could come for academic support, cultural clarification on issues of identity and a place where students could voice their opinion freely on socially controversial topics.

“The institute was more than a building and the functions it held,” said Kat Powell, 2006 alum and former editor and chief of the Onyx Informer. “Along with its historical relevance, it was the people in the building that made the institute valuable.”

A candlelight vigil, coordinated by Pierre Louis and Powell, was held a few days before the demolition began. Students were able to say a few words on what the institute meant to them.

What was once considered the outskirts of the Northeastern campus in 1971 has now become the center of activity and the prime location for new real estate.

“The visionary founders saw a need for the institute on campus then and maybe saw the need for the future,” says Lula Petty-Edwards, associate dean and director of the African American institute. “If they didn’t, then they surely do see the need now.”

It was six years ago that Northeastern students began protesting against the decision to demolish the 30-year-old building.

Richard Freeland, then Northeastern president, formed an advisory committee made up of administrators, students, faculty, staff, community activists and members of the O’Bryant family. Students were presented with various options like moving to the basement of Dodge Hall or the top floor of Columbus Place, but students weren’t having it.

Students staged a 39 day sit-in at the institute. Not long after NU president Richard Freeland told an advisory committee of students and faculty that the university would tear down the institute and replace it with a larger building, hundreds of students protested on Huntington Avenue, forcing the street to shut down in the middle of rush hour.

“The thought of the building being torn down was like a slap in the face,” says Powell, “especially when you examine the history.”

That history is woven into the recent history of Boston. About thirty years ago, during the years of racial unrest in Boston, as well as across the nation, five Northeastern students proposed 13 demands to then Northeastern President, Asa A. Knowles, insisting on increased black student enrollment, scholarships and curricula reevaluation.

Four days later, all 13 of those demands were accepted. In a memorandum addressed to Northeastern’s faculty and staff the president stated: “[The] demands were reasonable and, in fact, some will contribute to the improvement of our curricula in the light of these times in which we live.”

The actions of these five students sparked further activism on campus, including the creation of the African American Institute, then called the Afro-American Institute, located on 104 Forsyth St. The Institute moved to its current location at 40 Leon St. in 1971.

The former laundry facility soon became the gathering place for Northeastern’s African American community, as well as for non-black students, and stood as a symbol of their presence on campus.

History was seemingly repeating itself in 2001.
Building F is expected to be complete by the Fall of 2006. Students are also in the midst of erecting a monument on the institute’s former location. That proposal is still under discussion.