More than just a class building
A white girl walks down the hallway of Oscar Ritchie with her friend. “Why is this building painted like this?” she asks, perplexed. “It’s the Pan-African building,” her friend replies.
Okantah once referred to the building and department as the “best kept secret on campus” — it appears that’s true for some.
“You don’t just sit and eat your lunch in Bowman Hall. But you do here. Black students feel accepted, comfortable.”
“We called it the ‘Bufferin of the campus,’” Moore says. “It was where you could come and relieve yourself of the tension and pressures of being on a predominately white campus.” Okantah has a similar sentiment. “You don’t just sit and eat your lunch in Bowman Hall,” Okantah says. “But you do here. Black students feel accepted, comfortable.”
Teddy Harris, the political affairs chair for BUS, describes the atmosphere of the building as feeling like home. “It’s not really the building. It’s who occupies it,” Harris says. “In a sense, it’s like a family there. That really differentiates it from other buildings.”
Not quite a happy ending
A gold sign in the Oscar Ritchie Hall main office reads “Oscar Ritchie Furniture Fund.” A drawing of a thermometer shows the amount raised by Alpha Phi Alpha, a black fraternity on campus. The marker lies at $101.76, well short of the $7,000 goal.
Mwatabu Okantah is an assistant professor of Pan-African Studies and the adviser for Harambee, a cultural organization. Okantah has supported the Oscar Ritchie renovation for years.
The fraternity is raising money because the proposed $9 million renovations budget does not include furniture. The department budget for furniture and other classroom materials is very meager, says Diedre Badejo, the chair of the Pan-African Studies Department. The department hopes to hold an alumni fair in the fall to encourage donations to pay for the furniture.
Black United Students President DaMareo Cooper says there is still a problem at the university with prejudice. “They renovated a dorm before an educational center,” he says, referring to the renovation of Oscar Ritchie Hall’s neighbor, Engelman Hall. “I think that’s wrong. We pay the same amount of money as anybody else here.”
In the past, BUS said the university attributed the lack of enrollment in the Pan-African Studies program as the reason why it wasn’t getting renovated. But according to Badejo, enrollment in the program has remained steady throughout the years.
Members of BUS have criticized the university for not properly marketing the program. Okantah, an assistant professor of Pan-African Studies, agrees. “My sense is that in general, they do not mention our program in marketing efforts,” he said.
The woman in charge of marketing the program after the renovations are completed is Michelle Edler, a marketing coordinator in the Office of University Communication and Marketing. An extensive print advertising campaign and a new departmental Web site are on Edler’s list of projects for the next few years.
“I’m hoping to focus on the rich uniqueness of this program,” Edler says. “Most other colleges are African-American studies or black studies, but this program focuses on more of a global view with an interdisciplinary approach.”
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