Black Alliance at UC Merced Growing, Serving and Advocating

By Patty Guerra, UC Merced l February 8, 2024

An organization that was created in a time of tragedy and crisis has been a force for good for UC Merced’s Black community.

The Black Alliance was formed after interdisciplinary humanities Professor Maria Martin brought together Black staff and faculty in the wake of the May 2020 death of George Floyd, who was killed by police in Minneapolis.

“I wanted to provide a supportive space for people to express themselves,” Martin said. “I was really feeling the heaviness of that period.”

Since then, according to the organization’s website, the Alliance has “sought to connect, serve, and advocate for Black individuals on and off campus.”

The Alliance holds regular meetings, speaker events, movie screenings and socials to bring those groups into one room together.

The off-campus part of the Alliance is intentional, and important.

“We do center our work around the campus community but we do like to bring in our external community as well,” said Charah Coleman, the current director of the Alliance. Coleman is the founding program manager of the campus’s Financial Wellness Center, which provides financial educational services to students.

“As a university that serves the Valley, we want to create a positive relationship with our community members,” she said. “We’re not just here to take from them; we want to elevate their voices and their concerns.”

The Alliance creates opportunities through a wide variety of programs and services.

“We provide more professional wellness services to Black faculty and staff and create culturally relevant spaces for them to network, while broadening our reach to warmly invite Black undergraduate and graduate student group representatives, and Black community group representatives so that we can hear their concerns and needs, and support them,” Martin said.

The Alliance has hosted several events. This includes faculty and staff healing circles with the Black Girl Doctor, a welcome event each fall, walk-and-talk socials, a glamorous end-of-year dinner, and various speaker series including perspectives on global Blackness, environmental justice and health disparities. Most recently, members held a disability activism series which featured a panel of entrepreneurs, nurses, Ph.D.s and mothers who care for Black people with Down syndrome. The Merced community’s Liz Dobbins, who owns a business that cares for the disabled, was also featured. The group also did a theater buyout with free concessions, in collaboration with the African Student Union, for all campus and community members to see the movie “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”

In terms of advocacy, the Alliance holds accountability meetings with Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz that center on staff and faculty support and student and community member concerns, helped to finalize the Black Student Resource Center on campus, supports events of the Black Student Coalition and advocates for fellowships that would support graduate cohort diversity at UC Merced.

Martin said she worked with UC Merced’s Medical Education director to conduct two focus groups about healthcare in the Central Valley to pinpoint issues and how the new Medical Education pathway curriculum could address them.

“I also made suggestions of Black doctors to invite for consultation on the curriculum and to do talks so that there are diverse experiences in the building of the medical curriculum,” Martin said.

Externally, Martin said the Alliance has worked with community organizations such as Love, Faith, and Hope, Sharing Love Ministries, Restorative Justice League, Harvest Park Education Center, and the Deltas of Atwater.

“We have met with school districts in the area as well as supported the Black middle school and high school graduations yearly,” she said. “Recently we formed a collaborative of Black community groups that offers diverse mentors to Black and Latino community youth through College Corps. The Black Alliance fellows, who are UC Merced students, collectively received $65,000 in stipends from doing this work.”

Though the Black Alliance focuses on the Black community, it does not limit participants.

“We invite allies as well,” said Coleman. “Our spaces are Black-centered but we invite anyone who wants to learn.”

Recently, the Alliance welcomed a new board and members are looking forward to continuing to grow the organization and expand what it offers its members.

“There are a lot of opportunities for scholarship,” Coleman said. “We look forward to hopefully providing work-study opportunities, as well as professional and skill development.”

In addition, Martin said going forward, “the Alliance hopes to press for UC Merced to cultivate more of a culture of inclusion, including the hiring of Black faculty, staff and senior staff, supporting recruitment and retention of Black grad and undergrad students and more connectivity with the Black community in Merced. We will also be doing more events that center on community building, wellness, rest and recreation.”

Indeed, Coleman added, the theme the new board crafted for this year is “Centering Black Joy and Rest.”

Said Martin, “I look forward to the Black Alliance becoming a strong and supportive organization for the faculty, staff and students we are advocating for and for community members that we want to connect with and welcome to campus.”

Engaging the Black Community Inside, Outside UC Merced

By Jody Murray, UC Merced l February 28, 2023

On Feb. 18, she was the grand marshal and a speaker at a program and march honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in downtown Merced.

This weekend, she and the university will host a two-day gathering that investigates Black identity from multiple points of view and contexts. Martin was the driving force in creating the UC Merced Global Africana Studies Research Conference.

The Black Alliance, a university organization Martin founded, advocates for Black faculty, staff and students while, just as importantly, building meaningful connections between the young campus and its surrounding community.

And, of course, she is a teacher and researcher. A professor with the Department of History & Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, she embraces the responsibility of helping students shed hidebound beliefs and allow lessons of the past to illuminate their perspective on today’s racial and cultural struggles.

“I’m trying to make sure I leave a legacy of honor and integrity,” said Martin, a native of Cleveland who earned a Ph.D. in African American and African Studies at Michigan State University. “There is a lot of room for me to have influence and impact, and I want to maximize my impact.”

Calling on her faith, she paraphrases Acts 10:38, saying she wants to “go around doing good.”

Martin arrived at UC Merced in summer 2018. She was slated to start here a year earlier but instead grabbed an opportunity to be a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. There, she taught a graduate course in gender studies and developed a mentoring program for students. She returned to the States and alighted in the Central Valley with lessons she still applies to her work. She calls it humanistic teaching.

At the midpoint of a semester, she and her teaching assistants will sit down with students who appear to be struggling. They will ask: What’s happening in your life? What’s important to you now? What might be affecting your performance in the course? Martin and her aides will suggest resources and create a “success plan” with the student that sets goals and dates.

Martin said the need for this approach hit home in West Africa when she realized many of her students might lose power at their homes for days at a time or simply have difficulty traveling to the university.

“So, I try to build this support in my classes,” she said, “and that is a direct impact and result of my teaching in Nigeria.”

Another experience – one that rocked a nation – spurred the creation of the Black Alliance. The killing of George Floyd Jr. in the custody of Minneapolis police in May 2020 brought together dozens of Black staff, students and faculty looking for ways to channel their horror, anger and grief. The Alliance was established that June to provide a unified voice for people in the campus community. Just a month later, the group created an Accountability Unit that brings the Alliance’s concerns directly to the chancellor, provost and chief diversity officer.

The Alliance, true to its name, has formed partnerships with organizations and Black-owned businesses and services in the Merced area. It has secured about $65,000 via College Corps fellowships for Black undergraduates working with community partners. Members have suggested Black doctors who could contribute to an inclusive curriculum for UC Merced’s new medical education program.

UC Merced’s efforts to establish its place in the Valley is a challenge for a research university that broke ground only two decades ago, miles from the city’s center. The Black Alliance has put a premium on meeting with residents, developing community liaisons who are invited to Alliance meetings, and telling people “we want them to have a voice in what we’re doing,” Martin said. “We want their youth to come here and be educated here.”

Speaking of education, Martin has a first stage to her courses that prepares students for the knowledge to come. For the first couple of weeks, the classes focus on what students think about Africa or how they perceive Blackness. What pre-conceptions might they bring to the table?

“We have some in-depth conversations,” she said, “to deconstruct what they may have learned. Then they have a better chance of not ‘other-izing’ the people we’re going to learn about.”

Martin said this reset helps students look past color or culture and focus on principles. It leads them to more penetrating questions.

“Now they have a better chance of having tools that will help them say, ‘Oh, wait a minute. Let me check that thinking,’ or, “This is something I need to investigate deeper.’”