As part of the DEI office’s Black History Month series, guest writer Maude Bascome-Duong ’22 interviewed LMU alumnus Ikweba Bunting ’71, Ph.D., to recognize his contributions to the LMU community and to uplift his role in establishing infrastructure to support Black students at LMU. What follows is Bascome-Duong’s edited version of that conversation:
Thanks to Ikaweba Bunting ’71, Ph.D., there is a community for the Black students of Loyola Marymount University. Before The Learning Community, the Office of Black Student Services, and the Black Student Union, LMU’s resources to support Black lions did not exist. Across the country, student activism was prevalent on college campuses throughout the 1960s and ’70s. The Civil Rights and Black Power movements empowered Black students on college campuses to unionize, protest, and demand an environment that fosters growth.
Racism, particularly discrimination against Black people, is the foundational layer for just about every institution established within the United States. Higher education is no exception. According to the U.S Census Bureau, the percentage of Black people who had completed at least four years of college in 1960 is 3.1 percent. In comparison to the 8.1 percent of white college-educated individuals. This gap has narrowed but, the educational attainment for Black individuals falls at a below-average rate accounting for the 21.3 percent of individuals who have completed four years of college among all races in the U.S. American education policies are designed to serve white populations. Although institutional racism is widespread in schooling, its existence becomes conspicuous in tertiary education. This discrimination appears in the inequities of taking entrance exams (this includes access to tutoring, quality of teaching, and/or additional resources for aid in applications), implementations of sensitivity-and-racial-bias training in classroom environments[1], and even the exploitation of Black student-athletes on white campuses[2].
This Black History Month, we wish to honor Bunting, “Ika” as he is known by friends and family, an alum and activist who became radicalized during his time at then-Loyola University, now LMU. As a graduate, Bunting went on to become the first African American to earn a doctorate from the University of Wales, train as a sound recordist, and work as a journalist in Africa in the ‘70s, ’80s, and ’90s. Today he continues to advocate for the education of fundamental rights and resources for Black students and global Black liberation.
Bunting and the 13 other young Black men in his class were the largest cohort to date of Black students to matriculate into LMU in 1967. One year before Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, there was collective hope, passion, and speculation around what change would look like regarding racial equality. Going to college was a priority for Bunting and his family. The decision to matriculate to LMU came from being awarded a full ride.
“I wanted to go to college,” Bunting said. “That wanting to go to college was a legacy from my parents because [I grew up hearing], ‘Get an education so you can do something for your people.’ When my mother was on her deathbed we found out she used to, as a 14-year-old in Fort Smith, Arkansas, deliver The Crisis magazine for the NAACP … this idea of education and commitment to the people was always there for me and my whole family.”
Women were not yet on campus, and there was one dorm with a designated floor in Whelan Hall where the Black cohort resided. “The Watts Wing of Whelan,” laughs Ika as he explained how they also happened to have the only Black R.A. on campus, too. Sticking together was essential in a space where they were implicitly not welcomed. For the sake of having a sense of community, the group organized what we now know as the inaugural chapter of the Black Student Union. The resistance was immediate.
“When we started trying to organize it,” Bunting said, “Father Casassa, who was the outgoing president, brought in two Black graduates … to discourage us from starting a Black Student Union. The B.S.U was started as a student union because we were so isolated and excluded. The Loyola Student Union was for white students. The counselors didn’t want to deal with you, the professors didn’t want to deal with you, of course, there were exceptions but, institutionally you were not wanted.”
After-school routines involved confiding in one another about feelings of being a burden. “Ghetto Stories” was a term the group coined due to how often they had to share palatable stories about the Black experience and culture for the sake of learning. Racism was an inescapable experience regardless of social status and setting. Ika described the environment as hostile. He summarizes his time as a student with one story: He recalls a peer of his, Richard Dixon, who happened to be a notable student-athlete at the time. He remembers walking through the Hall of Fame in the athletic department and seeing what was supposed to be a photo of Richard, but instead was a photo of a different Black student.
One of the biggest successes Ika recounts was the development of the BSU’s outreach to the Upward Bound Program. The program is recognized as the country’s first federal program catering to high school students from low-income households who wish to attend college. Additionally, until the formal establishment of the BSU, there were no Black faculty. Eventually, the university hired Robert Taylor for Black Student Services after ongoing demands made by the BSU and other organizations. As more Black student unions continued to become established across private universities in California, they all started collaborating on future initiatives. Ultimately, this was the birth of the Black Student Alliance.
Black identity and pride were incredibly important to the BSU’s values. 1969 was the year for the firsts for chapters of Black sororities and fraternities and Black History Week founded on campus. Resistance continued as Ika recalls being placed on probation by the university and at risk for losing his scholarship. Even after graduation and returning to LMU as a professor, Ika said the work he and other students had done did not go unnoticed. In 2002, he became aware that the university likely lost major financial support in response to activist Angela Davis’ visit to campus. Ika and his colleagues took it a step further to call for African American history to be integrated into their education.
The most important demand that did not come to fruition until Ika’s return to LMU was creating a Black Scholarship Fund. It was a goal he remembers pushing for as a student in the ’60s. Later he would donate personal earnings while working for the TLC program to kickstart the Black Scholarship Fund. “Claim this space because we fought for it,” said Ika.
Ika said there are two essential components American education lacks: critical thinking skills and global understanding. He calls for Black people globally, regardless of educational status, to continue commanding spaces previous generations sacrificed their livelihood for. He encourages young people to question what is taught in the classroom and its origins.
“Across the board, from my experience, in private or public institutions, the Black student is not being taught to be a policymaker, the thinker, the innovator in thinking,” Ika said.
He calls for Black students to turn their minds to guerilla intellectualism. The education needed for complete liberation has still not been implemented. Many of the structures Ika and his classmates challenged must be carried forth by the following generations. One way this starts is by celebrating, integrating, and acknowledging Black history all year round and not just for a month.
[1] theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/01/balancing-academia-racism/424887/
[2] Murty, K. S., Roebuck, J. B., & McCamey, J. D. (2014). Race and Class Exploitation: A Study of Black Male Student Athletes (BSAS) on White Campuses. Race, Gender & Class, 21(3/4), 156–173. jstor.org/stable/43496990
By Maude Bascome-Duong ’22
DEI Buzz
- JOIN US: Today for our first Systemic Analysis Report Out Session of the semester. Units can share their progress and receive feedback from the community. Register here.
- Feb. 15, 4-5 p.m., BCLA
- March 8, 4-5 p.m., SOE, Marketing and Communications
- March 29, 4-5 p.m., Mission and Ministry, Student Affairs
- CHECK OUT: DEI’s spring 2022 calendar.
- CELEBRATE BLACK HISTORY MONTH WITH LMU: Visit the hub.
- SAVE THE DATE: For the official launch of LMU’s Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) Center Alliance launch on Feb. 24, 2022, from noon to 1:30 p.m. at St. Robert’s Auditorium. Register