black student union
June 4, 2024
Farewell to the founders
The University of Washington honors Eddie Walker, Eddie Demmings, E.J. Brisker and Lee Leavy, trailblazing activists who recently died.
May 9, 2024
Campus was their canvas
Eddie Demmings, E.J. Brisker and Eddie Ray Walker—founding members of the UW's Black Student Union—fought for a better University.
March 3, 2022
The Kelly ECC at 50
Once a student activist’s dream, the Samuel E. Kelly Ethnic Cultural Center celebrates five decades as a space for diversity and inclusion.
June 4, 2021
Can’t hold him back
From radical youth to senior statesman, Larry Gossett is an activist for us all. The 2021 Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus award recognizes his lifetime of service.
October 27, 2020
Students for a safer campus
“A lot of institutions in our society are inherently not built for our needs—the needs of Black people,” writes Navon Morgan, class of 2023.
March 8, 2018
A day with DeRay
Few activists have a higher profile than DeRay Mckesson, who spent the final day of Black History Month with UW students, staff and faculty.
March 4, 2018
Keeper of the flame
A founding member of UW's Black Student Union, Emile Pitre has spent 50 years building solutions from the inside out.
March 3, 2018
OMA&D at 50: The people behind the movement
Student activism in 1968 led the UW to create one of the nation’s first offices of minority affairs. Here’s their story. And their outlook for the future.
March 1, 2008
40 years of change
In the mid-1960s, only two of the UW’s 1,734 professors were African Americans. Students of color made up only 4 percent of the total enrollment that year. That began to change on May 20, 1968, when students from the Black Student Union staged a sit-in at the office University President Charles E. Odegaard.
Leading lawyer
Praised as one of the best and brightest by his peers in the most recent edition of Best Lawyers in America, Rodney Moore, ’87, has been practicing law for more than 20 years.
September 1, 2005
Student leader
A graduate of Tacoma’s Lincoln High School, Anthony Rose came to the UW in 2001. He is the current president of the Black Student Union, a former member of the Higher Education Coordinating Board and a volunteer helping prepare students for college.
March 1, 2005
Gossett up for challenge
Larry Gossett became Region 10’s first — and it now appears last — representative on the King County Council.
June 1, 1994
Being black at UW
To preserve the memories of other African-American students, we interviewed black alumni who went here during the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s.