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When Brian Tarrant first thought about starting the Black Oranges collective, he typed up Facebook messages and tried to gauge interest. He sent some notes to his former Syracuse football teammates from 1991-95 and other former SU athletes, asking what steps they wanted to take following the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.

Tarrant had already received letters from friends asking what they should do to help enact change, too. It was early June, and the United States was amid nationwide protests over police brutality and systemic racism. Tarrant felt he, and everybody, needed to do something.

So he helped organize Black Oranges’ first call. That started with five or six people. The next one had 15, then 30. By early July, less than a month after Black Oranges’ initial Instagram post on June 7 and days before its first social media challenge on the Fourth of July, there were 200. “It definitely grew organically,” Tarrant said.

In the two months since, Black Oranges has expanded to around 360 members and is part of the diversity task force implemented by recently hired Associate Athletic Director for Diversity, Culture and Climate Salatha Willis. The collective met with members of #NotAgainSU — a Black-led student movement that protested SU’s response to racist incidents — and its future plans include meeting with SU’s Department of Public Safety and a four-panelist voter registration webinar scheduled for Monday.

“This has got to be more than a campaign. This has to be a movement,” Tarrant said on a July 2 Zoom call, hours before Black Oranges’ #GetOffTheBench campaign launched. He shuffled in front of a nighttime Carrier Dome Zoom background, the same one that appeared in a future Instagram post documenting the expanding Black Oranges’ meetings, before glancing back at the screen.

“Although we started out with a social media campaign, it’s going to continue past that,” Tarrant said. “This is just more of the — what do they call the bonfire thing in football?”

“The pep rally?” David Walker, a former SU running back and NFL assistant coach, replied.

“Yeah,” Tarrant said. “This is not the game. This is just a pep rally.”

• • •

Early on the morning of July 4, Etan Thomas published the first of three Facebook posts that day. All contained #GetOffTheBench, and the former NBA player and current social activist also mentioned guidelines for being a strong white ally and his plans to watch the movies “Django” and “Harriet” with his kids that day.

But the first post directly addressed the string of racist events at Syracuse University last year, events that Thomas, Tarrant and the other Black Oranges members learned more about in the collective’s first three months.

“What happened last year at Syracuse University cannot happen again,” Thomas wrote. “That was a national embarrassment.”

He outlined a two-hour meeting he and Malcolm, his son, had with #NotAgainSU, commended the organization’s “strength, courage and commitment” to establishing a safe environment and, at the bottom of the post, linked a petition calling for SU to acknowledge its role in anti-Black racism.

Tarrant said that his Facebook and LinkedIn pages — the same ones he sent those initial messages from — contained dozens of posts with the #GetOffTheBench as more people discovered what Black Oranges was. It’s one of at least three groups of former Syracuse athletes that formed this summer, including one group of 124 football players.

Movements across the country led to suspensions for coaches and players when racial slurs resurfaced. Players reacted on social media to police brutality, and football athletes from the Pac-12 released a list of demands, including a task force of students, administrators and experts to address racial injustice in society and college sports.

During that time, Black Oranges and the two other Syracuse alumni groups embarked on similar paths. The day before the July 4 social media campaign, Tarrant had a call with Cameron Lynch, one of the other group’s most active members, and they planned to have a “huddle” the following Monday.

“I look at it almost like a Greek system: Just because they add another fraternity doesn’t mean it’s a knock against the other fraternities,” Tarrant said

One week after the #GetOffTheBench challenge, Syracuse announced the hiring of Willis, who was brought in to oversee diversity programming.
Tarrant said that Director of Athletics John Wildhack reached out and asked to meet with some of Black Oranges’ founders, Willis and Senior Deputy Athletics Director Herman Frazier. Wildhack was interested in the collective’s plans and mentioned that SU was looking for alumni to assist on a task force. The founders agreed to join.

“We’re just a part of the machine,” Tarrant said about the task force.

Recently, Black Oranges published an Instagram post after Syracuse placed a chemistry professor on administrative leave for referring to the coronavirus as the “Wuhan Flu” and “Chinese Communist Party Virus” — condemning the “disgusting display of bigotry by an SU faculty member.” Tarrant estimates the Syracuse task force, which contains about 16 to 20 people, has met six times across six weeks.

In those meetings, where Willis comes with an agenda, challenges and dialogue starters, they’ve begun to lay the foundation for a better athletic environment.

• • •

Monica Belk knew that the campaign had to be July 4. It would be a starting point, a day for Black Oranges to use its platform to stimulate conversation at gatherings, a way to provide information and guidance for its audience to better understand systemic racism. There would be no fireworks or large gatherings because of the coronavirus pandemic, but the opportunity was still there.

Belk, an ESPN and SEC Network director, worked with others to establish plans for #GetOffTheBench. They launched a website with an action library that contained more than 53 options to help combat racism — from articles, books and movies to writing a state legislature bill, supporting Black businesses or making financial donations.

“If we do these movements and we get these things in people’s minds to start, to research and to look at themselves and how they can better themselves, it’s going to improve their community,” Belk said. “It’s going to improve the country.”

The ultimate goals, Walker said in July, are police reform and voter rights — the latter of which Black Oranges organized a webinar for Monday. The webinar will feature Anthony Vaughn, Adolphus Belk Jr., Shaun Z. Tarrant and Project 444, a group of Syracuse athletes concerned with political awareness and voter registration.

It’s a project they’ve spent the last five weeks on, and they plan to highlight why mobilizing citizens is important and why local elections are often some of the most important for change.

That’s item No. 7 under the bolded and underlined “DO” list on the Black Oranges’ action page. Also buried near the bottom of the three-page document was the option to donate to Syracuse University’s Office of Multicultural Advancement’s “Our Time Has Come” scholarship — donors could submit money and mark it as a tribute to Black Oranges.

Tarrant didn’t expect many people to donate or even read that far in the action list. At that point, he just hoped that people would implement something from the list into their daily lives.

Later, Tarrant found out that over $2,000 had been donated in Black Oranges’ name.

Published on September 17, 2020 at 12:08 am

Contact Andrew: arcrane@syr.edu | @CraneAndrew