A nasty message in a Spring Lake Park High School bathroom sent the Black Student Union into action. Members and their friends posted messages like "You are loved" around the school rotunda to drown out the words of hate, "Go back to your home," scrawled in the girls' bathroom.
Throughout the Twin Cities suburbs, students are turning to black student unions to confront recent incidents on their campuses and form safe spaces to talk about race in their mostly white schools.
Black student union leaders are meeting with school administrators, hosting "blackout" days and offering support to other students at a time when Black Lives Matter protests and post-election hate crimes are exposing the nation's racial tensions.
"Our role and our overt actions have become so much clearer to people in the school," Eemanna Rivers, president of Edina High School's Black Student Union, said. "We have to be very intentional about everything we do. People are really watching the club right now as a leader of what to do next."
Following the Nov. 10 Spring Lake incident, students in the Black Student Union held a meeting to discuss their fears for the present and concerns for the future, said Baher Hussein, the club's co-historian.
At Robbinsdale Armstrong High School, the new Pan-African Student Union held its first meeting on Dec. 1.
Edina High School students of color first banded together in 2014 to talk about the police shooting of a black man in Ferguson, Mo., that helped the Black Lives Matter movement. English teacher Sarah Jarrett became the group's adviser.
Jarrett, who moved to Minnesota from Southern California, said she noticed immediately that the school had no cultural clubs for its minority students. But students in the club have made their voices heard in the school.