Welcome to BLAC.

Listen to Our Self-Guided Black History Tour!

Image credit:
"Martin Luther King Jr. at UC Berkeley: A stirring and controversial last Bay Area speech" - San Francisco Chronicle
If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.
James Baldwin, 20th century poet, novelist, playwright, and activist
Black student raising her fist in cap and gown

WELCOME TO BLAC!

Black Lives at Cal (BLAC) is a multi-year initiative to celebrate, defend, and advance the legacy of Black people at the University of California, Berkeley, since the university’s founding in 1868. Formed in 2021 as both a research endeavor and an archival venue, BLAC researches, preserves, and publicizes insights about the people, events, and communities that have shaped Black history at Berkeley and examines the “living history” of the Black experience today.

BLAC advances these goals by (1) exhibiting in digital form the images, documents, and interviews in the archival record; (2) fostering and presenting new research by students and scholars; and (3) serving as a resource on the Black experience in the twenty-first century. To accomplish this, Black graduate students mentor Black undergraduate students through the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP) in three teams: research, content creation, and special projects. Students participate in every aspect of BLAC such as identifying and cataloging of resources, oral history interviews, web design, and community engagement.