ICView Magazine

TODAY, THEY ARE CALLED “students of color,” and their individual perspectives and cultural memories might be very different from one another. But still, they have for more than 50 years found comfort and inspiration in each other, bound together and even supported by whatever common threads ran through the fabric of their respective experiences. When their support network somehow fell short, they found hope and encouragement where they could. Sometimes, it even came to them like a care package from another time or place. 

In 1996, young Ithaca College administrator Dr. Jill Holmes- Robinson ’89 was conversing in the African-Latino Society room with someone who did not know her or her particular frustrations, but still, she recalled how this stranger “got it.” 

“She said, ‘Don’t cry. Just know you are here for a reason,’ and she gave me this big grandmother hug,” Holmes-Robinson remembered. 

The other woman was Maya Angelou, a towering figure in literature and civil rights, who three years later would deliver these words of inspiration at IC’s graduation: “Each of us has the possibility of being a composer, to compose the climate in which one lives,” Angelou said at the Commencement ceremony. “To indeed compose the neighborhood, to compose the melody of life, to compose the richness of it. To decide, ‘I will have a climate in which all men and women must be treated equal. I will compose that.’” 

For generations, IC’s students of color have composed their stories here, which in a very real way meant writing a new history for Ithaca College, one that included more students of color and their perspectives. If there was one place where that history took shape, it was likely the African-Latino Society (ALS), which provided students with the sense of home they found elusive at IC, where the food, culture, and curriculum did not reflect their identities. What they sought at IC they had to build—and many continue to build it today through ALS. 

The students’ backgrounds were diverse. Many were Black and Latinx—and the first in their families to attend college—while others came from wealthy, college-educated families. Some grew up in neighborhoods and schools where they were in the majority. Others had been among a handful of students of color in their predominantly white schools and communities. Once here at IC, they learned from one another’s perspectives and they fought together, and sometimes they even fought each other, as their visions collided. Some were seeking to overturn the entire system at once, while others sought to push for change incrementally, from within. 

“People would come to the ALS room when they were feeling the most distant from their families and from what they knew, just to get back to a sense of belonging, a place and space where you could reclaim yourself and be unilaterally accepted,” said Traci Hughes ’85. 

“The biggest culture shock for many first-generation students of color from metropolitan areas was Ithaca itself. It definitely wasn’t a big city, 24/7 kind of vibe, so... we found so much community in a group that was very much us,” added Hughes. 

Ultimately though, it didn’t matter where the students came from. 

“It mattered that you had a shared experience of being a student of color at a predominantly white institution and needing a place to feel like yourself without explanation, without apology, without retribution,” she said. “You could always find it in ALS and specifically in the ALS room.” 

A first-generation college student from Jamaica, West Indies, Carlos Perkins ’99 saw it as “a place of respite…where we went and collectively built energies and determination to be able to deal with what was outside. It was a place where we cried together, and we argued. It felt like our space.” 

The ALS room was a launchpad for student activism and the helm for protests that called for justice, not just at the college but in the state, and even abroad. 

Under Hughes, ALS organized protests that supported Nelson Mandela and opposed IC investments in companies that supported South African apartheid. ALS has also pushed for more diverse faculty. At times, they made suggestions to the administration, and other times, they made demands, sometimes even in person, delivered across the president’s desk. They even called the president to their own turf, stipulating that one particular meeting had to be held in the ALS room. 

“Nobody gives you permission at 20-something years old to organize people or to lead people, and nobody tells you that you’ve still got to do your work, you’ve still got to get your finals in,” Hughes said. “This ability to lead others was a voice that I found at IC. And it was because of ALS and having that need to try to give the administration that perspective of, ‘We are here. We are not content to just be ignored. Can we meet? Can we talk?’ that was so important.” 

As spokesperson in 1995–96, Rashaand Sass ’97 led a protest of Black and white students against the state’s proposed defunding of the New York State Higher Education Opportunity Program. Though the cuts were at the state level, IC’s then-president James J. Whalen bore the brunt of the outcry. 

“The administration wasn’t saying clearly what they were going to do to preserve the funding for a lot of students like myself. There was real concern...with so many students of color facing that uncertainty,” Sass remembered. “We had heard about the protests prior to us coming to IC in the ’70s and the ’80s, and for us, we felt like that was a way for us to just let everyone know what was important to us. Getting quoted in The Ithacan wasn’t enough. Having opportunities to talk to the Board of Trustees wasn’t enough.” 

Ultimately, Sass, who even lobbied in Albany for the HEOP, helped save it, and the next year Sass became president of IC’s Student Government Association (SGA). 

“The decision to lead the protest, the decision to become student body president, those decisions came out of that [ALS] room. There was so much beauty in that room, in those ideas, many of which have helped me become the leader I am today,” said Sass, who is now the principal of KIPP DC KEY Academy in Washington, D.C. 

The experience was a training ground and a place where leaders honed or even found their voices. Some took their leadership skills abroad. After rising to vice president of human resources for Colgate-Palmolive’s Africa Middle East Division, Hughes led human resources for their Latin America Division and then Europe Division. She now lives in Switzerland. 

All of the ALS leaders from the past are still part of the ALS story, either through their legacy or through their continued involvement. To assist current students of color, alumni formed the African-Latino Society Alumni Advisory Board. Holmes-Robinson says she hopes ALS continues to offer the signature voice of Black/African American and Latinx students and alumni as they help compose the story of the changing college. 

By Nichole Owens ‘94 

On South Hill, on the first floor of the West Tower, tucked into a little corner is a room, a room you might pass unaware if you didn’t know to look for it. But inside this room are hallowed walls, walls that have heard and borne witness to the hopes, dreams, secrets, frustrations, and plans of generations of IC alumni of color. 

And it’s not just what has happened inside these walls over the years, but also what is on the walls that matters. Painted in black, against a pea-green background, and spanning the circumference of the entire wall is a journey-on-acrylic of people from the African Diaspora—from the Egyptian pyramids on the African continent through the Middle Passage, to the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the Civil Rights Movement— celebrations of our collective success in sports, in academia, in the arts, in surviving.