Black Lives Matter Concert Raises Awareness and the Roof

The Office of the President teamed up with three groups—the Black Student Union, Black Lives Matter, and the Glory Project—to hold a series of events to highlight black life and increase black presence on campus. 

March 1, 2016

As the national Black Lives Matter movement has taken hold in the country in response to police brutality, several student organizations at Berklee felt that the time was right for increased awareness of the issue of racial injustice. The Office of the President agreed, and teamed up with three of those groups—the Black Student Union, Black Lives Matter, and the Glory Project—to hold a series of events to highlight black life and increase black presence on campus. 

Perhaps the biggest of these events was the sold-out Black Lives Matter concert at the Berklee Performance Center on February 16. A series of high-energy performances brought more than 1,000 people to their feet as the show went through a brief history of black music from the slave era to today. 

"They stood up in the second act and we thought they were going to sit back down, but they stayed standing through all the narrations and performances," said music business major Robert Gould, who is both the show's producer as well as the chair of the Black Student Union. The show featured seven segments, each representing an era in African-American history: Middle Passage (slavery), Jim Crow, Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights, Black Power, Pan-Africanism, and Modern. 

"Every song was hitting, there was no 'oh, now we're going to take it down,'" said music education major John Liner, who helped produce the concert and is the founder of the Glory Project, a group dedicated to raising awareness about racial inequality and educating people on the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Office of the President is also supporting other initiaties associated with the movement, including a series of YouTube videos. The first aired on Berklee's YouTube channel on Valentine's Day; three more are planned. 

Meanwhile, the Glory Project, which is not an official Berklee student group, plans to hold panels to address issues of concern relating to the African-American community. Past panels have included Berklee faculty, staff, and students as well as members from the Boston community at large. The next panel will be at the New England Conservatory on March 5. But the group's biggest project, and its namesake, was a video it produced of nearly 75 Berklee artists performing a cover of John Legend and Common's song "Glory."