The Cultural Organization

SAAC Black Orientation Form Letter, August 10, 1971.

SAAC and Student Orientation

By 1971, the SAAC was operating a “Black Orientation” program out of a room in the basement of the King Religious Center. This space served as their primary meeting spot and was termed the “Ghetto" by the group. Their orientation was specifically tailored to incoming black students, and included a meeting between black students and black faculty members, a picnic, a party, and a guest speaker. The 1971 speaker was a former NC State student known as “Brother Jim Lee,” an instructor at the short-lived Malcolm X Liberation University (MXLU) in Greensboro, NC. This, along with a Black Panther rally planned by the SAAC for the NC State University Plaza, demonstrates that the SAAC aligned themselves philosophically with the Black Power movement at various points in their early founding.

The SAAC’s alignment with the Black Power movement is in keeping with larger national campus trends during this period. As black students grew increasingly frustrated with the white institutions they attended, they began to embrace Black Power ideology. In North Carolina, this was particularly evident in the October 1969 founding of the Malcolm X Liberation University in Durham and, later, Greensboro. Stemming from late-1960s black student protests at Duke University, MXLU and its leaders such as local activist Howard Fuller embodied the Black Power movement in North Carolina.

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