Lakeside School

This year Lakeside’s Black Student Union (BSU) had the goals to inspire, empower, and elevate the Black community at Lakeside. Throughout Black History Month, we worked on multiple different projects that aligned with our goals, including a BSU assembly, a collab with Lakeside’s Imago team, biographies in the Bull about various inspiring African American leaders, and a display in the library showcasing Black authors and stories about mental health in the Black community, social justice, anti-racism, and navigating predominately white spaces in our world.

BSU started Black History Month with a school-wide BSU assembly. We choose to highlight the language of Black excellence as one of our assembly goals. A group of eight BSU members ranging from almost every grade shared either their own literature or a Black poet/author/musician they were inspired by. Through this assembly, members were able to read their selected piece and discuss the impact it had on them and what could be learned from it. This was BSU’s second assembly, and we had to navigate it through Zoom as well, but through the hard work of every member and the collaboration, we showed Lakeside the beauty of Black literature.

One of the first projects during the month BSU worked on was the display and bookmarks for the school library. A group of eight BSU members came together and wrote summaries on books made by Black authors that positively impacted them to share with the greater Lakeside community.

Furthermore, BSU decided to continue the tradition of creating virtual “posters” of inspiring Black leaders in our communities. All members involved in this project chose leaders they believed to be empowering and wrote a short biography about them, so Lakesiders could learn more about incredible Black figures every day throughout the month of February.  

Lastly, BSU worked in partnership with Lakeside's very own Imago to produce a special publication to celebrate and highlight the richness and diversity of Lakeside's Black community. Every image, poem, or design included in the magazine shows the meaningful stories and provides a glimpse of what it is like, as Lincoln W ’24 writes, “Being Black in America.” Through this project that was released at the beginning of March, we wanted to continue the conversation past Black History month, and as Lael G ‘25 writes, “28 days isn’t enough time / For the stories you have yet to hear.”

We hope you all were able to understand a little bit more about Black history this past February but also learn that the conversation plus education around it needs to continue for the many months ahead! Please feel free to watch the 2022 MLK assembly recording and read our virtual publication of the BSU X Imago magazine.