In 2021, a teacher at Longfellow Middle School, Tanisha Walton, or as her students call her Ms. Tanisha, organized a group dedicated to unifying and uplifting Black female students. Black Girls United (BGU) started out as a club of around 30 Black girls. Over time, the club grew and spread to neighboring middle schools. The program strives to impact the members of the club as well as the Berkeley community as a whole.
Shavon Johnson, a junior at Berkeley High School, was in seventh grade at Longfellow when she joined BGU. When the club was founded, students had just returned to school after the COVID-19 lockdown. “There was always a lot of fighting, a lot of beef, so we were just kind of figuring out how to stop that,” Johnson said.
The group meetings took place after school on Wednesdays, and members participated in discussions within focus groups as well as group activities and games. The space provided for the girls to bond proved to be crucial in assisting the restoration of community and relationships among the students.
“There’s so many other girls who have gone through so much of the same things that are in my community that I probably would have never talked to, or would never think that I would communicate with. I think it just brought us all together overall,” Johnson said.
As the opportunity to have a space to be themselves appeared, many girls and staff took comfort in the freedom presented in BGU.
“I feel like sometimes when you are a minority, you do need your own space, especially Black girls,” Walton said, “I feel like they’re shushed and hushed and not able to be as expressive as they want to during the school day (and) we need our own space to debrief, just to be ourselves, to be as loud or (as) expressive as we want to be without fear of judgment.”
In addition to helping the girls establish connections with one another, BGU also impacted the members individually. “It helped us to see that working hard in school was important, and Ms. Tanisha made us feel important (when) we didn’t really feel important all the time,” said Jae Marie Howard, a junior at BHS and former member of BGU.
Being in a unity group can provide people with life lessons that shape the way they show up in other environments. “I took away the experience of just having love for my community and having love for the Black girls I run into every day. We talk to each other, give each other advice, and just be a little community in ourselves and in our club,” Howard said.
Not only did the members of BGU learn useful skills from the experience, but so did Walton, the founder of BGU. “When I was in high school, I was in a lot of white spaces, so I felt very invisible. I felt like my beauty or my brains didn’t really matter,” Walton said, “(BGU) feels like a way to give back to a group and a population that I care about dearly, and that I want to see prosper.”
In addition to wanting to impact girls within the club, through having BGU be a program in elementary schools and middle schools, Walton hoped a unified way of perceiving the glory of being a Black girl would be established. “When everyone finally matriculates to Berkeley High, I hope that we have built this culture of solidarity among one another, where we are supportive, we are kind, we are helping each other, we have conflict resolution skills, we know who we are, and we are embracing our beauty,” Walton said.
According to Walton, Black girls are often discriminated against, and BGU provides an outlet for self discovery and pride over their identities.
“BGU (provides) the opportunity to bring Black girls to the center, to center their voices (and) their beauty, to teach them that they don’t have to look like everybody else, that they can be proud of how they show up in the world, and that their voice is important,” Walton said.
Walton hoped that the girls would leave the club with a commitment to helping each other throughout life. “We are not each other’s enemy, we are here to build each other up. I think that’s really needed in our world today,” Walton said.