Local middle and high school students, along with their parents and guardians, gathered for Pomona College’s third Black Youth Conference on Saturday, Feb. 8. Hosted by Pomona’s Black Student Union (BSU) and the Draper Center, the seven-hour conference — with the theme “Our Story, Our Glory” — featured various student-led workshops and discussions.
According to the Draper Center’s website, the conference’s mission is to create a safe space for Black middle and high school students from the surrounding areas to “explore, inspire and celebrate their Blackness.”
BSU board member Aminah Augustin PO ’28 said that events like the conference are important for inspiring Black youth.
“By us doing stuff like this and showing the kids that this is a student-led event, they’re seeing how you can do a lot of things to impact your community and [how] you can make a lot out of situations that weren’t exactly designed for you to succeed in the first place,” she said.
The day began with a panel discussion led by BSU’s executive team and student representatives from the Draper Center. The panel explored the history of similar programs in the 1990s, highlighting the importance of events like the conference and exploring their connections to the broader Claremont community.
Jeremy Mitchell PO ’27, one of the panelists, told TSL that serving on the panel meant a lot to him because he was able to express how much it meant to him to attend college.
“For me, college was an escape,” Mitchell said. “It was also an opportunity to be the first in my family to go to college and explore and live outside [my] comfort zone.”
Augustin, who also spoke on the panel, emphasized its significance to young attendees.
“It can be really discouraging for some of these kids to even want to participate in any institution,” she said. “Although these institutions have a lot of systematic issues and negative effects on us, it’s still important to recognize that you can still work with what you have and still make a name for yourself.”
Following the panel, conference attendees split into three workshops: “Our Black History in SoCal,” “Politics of Social Justice” and “Media to Material (Black Art & Music).”
Mitchell, who helped lead the “Media to Material” workshop, said that one of his favorite parts of the workshop was their discussion of superheroes, during which he asked attendees to name their favorite hero. Most responded with characters who wear masks.
Mitchell said that characters who wear masks are easier to envision themselves as, given that their faces are mostly hidden. He posed a follow-up question: how many superheroes looked like the attendees? Mitchell said it sparked a discussion on Black media representation.
“It just opened up a broader conversation of how we need more representation for people that look like us and that can tell our authentic stories in our own way,” Mitchell said. “I think that was so cool, just leaving that impression on them, just converting something as simple as a superhero to why we need more representation in spaces like media.”
After the workshops attendees gathered for lunch, followed by a resource fair on the patio fo the Smith Campus Center which featured Black-owned businesses, book clubs and other organizations aimed at connecting with youth.
Students then went to the Office of Black Student Affairs’ garden, where they painted rocks to leave behind as a symbol of their presence on campus.
Afterward, attendees watched a performance by Earth Tones, a 7C Black acapella group, who sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” frequently referred to as “The Black National Anthem.”
The conference concluded with a speech from the keynote speaker, Carolyn Ratteray, an associate professor and the chair of theatre at Pomona.
Ratteray shared her experience and story on writing her award-winning one-woman show, “Both And (A Play About Laughing While Black).”
Ratteray’s play focuses on a woman who travels to the afterlife on the eve of her mother’s death. “Within that framework of the story, joy is definitely a throughline,” Ratteray said in an interview for the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. “How do we have and access pain and process that in addition to still understanding and having access to our joy?”
Mitchell said Ratteray was selected because BSU thought her story was authentic and aligned with the conference’s theme. Reflecting on Ratteray’s speech, as well as on the conference as a whole, Mitchell shared his hopes for BSU’s future conferences.
“It would be a real good thing if this event could get pushed harder and on a grand scheme of things, if we were able to do more workshops and bring more kids on, is something that I hope to see in the future before I graduate,” Mitchell said.
Augustin said that she was happy with how the conference unfolded.
“Just talking about my college experience, the kids were really interested to see what life is like at college,” Augustin said. “Some of them don’t even know if they are going to college or what it looks like because they do not have access and representation to that at home.”
Mitchell said the conference was a great way to expose younger audiences to important topics, especially considering the current political state of the United States.
“I think we did a really good job of opening up their eyes and their ears to a lot of systematic issues and a lot of things that have happened to progress to African Americans in general,” Mitchell said.
Audrey Park contributed reporting.
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