Cal Lutheran’s Black Student Union Launches First Soul Fest

By Tim Pompey

It’s a cool February afternoon at Kingsmen Park as volunteers mill around and prepare for California Lutheran University’s first annual Soul Fest. Not exactly the toasty environment you usually associate with Thousand Oaks, but it hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm of members of the campus’s Black Student Union, who are helping to sponsor the event.

It’s 2018 and something different is brewing on campus. Usually the big event for African-Americans at CLU is December’s Kwanza, but this year they decided to take a chance on another idea.

“This was the first year that they decided to take the money for their Kwanza celebration and use it instead to do a Soul Fest,” said Dr. Juanita Hall, CLU’s Chief Diversity Officer and the Senior Director for Multicultural and International Student Services. “It was Marvin’s idea that we wanted to do that instead during Black History Month.”

That Marvin would be Marvin Rue, a junior from Queensboro, North Carolina. He currently serves as a Campus Program Assistant for Hall. For Marvin, sponsoring Soul Fest was a personal undertaking.

Marvin Rue, a junior from Queensboro, North Carolina and a Campus Program Assistant, helped coordinate CLU’s first annual Soul Fest

“When I came to CLU,” he recalled, “I found that I had a hard time adjusting because the culture was so different. I left my family, my comfort zone, and flew out here. Before this, I hadn’t even traveled to the West Coast.”

Rue found life in Southern California to be a culture shock, but some good has come out of his struggles: “I went through a lot of turbulence because of it. It was tough. It took a good year. I came as a theater major, then I switched to an English major, and now, because I’ve realized just being here that I love culture, I became a global studies major, specifically focusing in Asia.”

Rue’s three-year odyssey living in California, as well as a mind-expanding trip to China, sparked a seed of an idea: “From the beginning of the semester, I wanted to put on a Soul Fest for spring and Black History Month because I feel like it will give us a way to represent our music and our culture in a way that’s positive.”

Understand that having a Soul Fest at CLU is something of a seismic cultural shift. Out of approximately 4,000 students on campus, Rue identified about 100 or so as black. That’s about two and half percent of the campus population, a small number to pull off such a major campus event.

Rue acknowledged his own hesitancy and credited many of his fellow black students who supported him in this endeavor.

“It takes courage,” he admitted. “There’s a larger Africa-American population on campus because the university’s trying to increase diversity. So a large enough group of us got together to build enough strength within each other to put this on.”

Dr. Hall believes this stretch for diversity is part of the university’s mission to broaden students’ perspectives about global culture.

Dr. Juanita Hall, CLU’s Chief Diversity Officer and the Senior Director for Multicultural and International Student Services

“California is a diverse state,” she said, “and so we’re actually seeking to mirror the state in which we reside and work and educate students. We’re educating leaders for a global society, and that’s not just California.”

She points out that the increase in campus diversity reflects the state’s increasingly diverse population, especially globally.

“I’ve been here for 21 years and the campus has become increasingly diverse as I’ve been here,” she said. “I think it’s because the demographics of California have become increasingly diverse, so it’s kind of a natural change.”

As evidence, she cites the fact that today the campus includes almost 500 international students.

For a regional university like Cal Lutheran, the campus administration has decided it needs to be more inclusive and educate a broader population. It follows then that the school has devoted increased energy and resources to making the campus more reflective of the real world.

“We’re trying to help students because the reality is that we’re going to be living and working in a diverse country, and so we need everybody to get along,” Hall observed.

For Laguna Hills junior Courtney Edukugho, Soul Fest is about outreach and increased understanding of the term “black culture.”

“The Black Student Union is really trying to get black culture out there,” she said. “We want to show people what it is.”

She would like to expose people to the term and give others a chance to genuinely participate. “We try to foster a sense of togetherness among the CLU community,” she noted, “not only for black students, but for any of our students so that everyone can come together and understand each other.”

Los Angeles senior Katherine Gregg thinks Soul Fest brings true representation to a campus that historically has had only a small African-American population.

Los Angeles senior Katherine Gregg (left) and Laguna Hills junior Courtney Edukugho (right). Gregg is the Black Student Union’s Secretary. Edukugho is the Black Student Union’s Vice President

“I joined the Black Student Union because I wanted to bring awareness of the culture to our school,” she said. “That can be through all the events that we have, the things that we do, even interacting with students on a daily basis. I just wanted to be able to bring awareness of that culture, which is a wide variety of cultures mixed together as well.”

Of course, the concept of black culture is broad. For instance, Edukugho has Nigerian roots. Rue and Gregg have Dominican family. But Edukugho believes there are some things that black cultures share across the board, such as togetherness and family values.

“Most black people that I know, they are very close knit with their family and focusing on morals and values,” she explained. “I feel like a lot of black families tend to hold their children to high standards for how they act in the presence of other people and how they represent themselves in the world.”

Gregg acknowledged that, while black culture is hard to define, members of the black community recognize it when they see it: “It’s a broad culture but I feel like there are different aspects within the culture that can come together, and people can relate to each other on those values or morals or even on the food.”

Rue has planned Soul Fest as a family reunion, complete with games, music, history, poetry, dancing and best of all, soul food.

“I want Soul Fest to be influenced by an African-American family reunion,” he emphasized. “We get together, we play music, we have games, we eat, and then we dance. I kind of wanted it to have that vibe, an event that really connects people.”

As for the impact on the campus community, Rue thinks that cultural knowledge should be shared. His trip last year to China reflected his own experience with cross-cultural education.

“It’s easy to stay ignorant of someone else’s culture,” he pointed out. “Like for myself as an Asian studies major, I can study China here. But last spring I actually went there and it’s completely different than what somebody can teach you from a textbook or what you see on the media, and that experience changed my life.”

Edukugho believes that “the benefit of Soul Fest is that we’re really trying to provide exposure to black culture just so people can see it and enjoy it and have fun at our event and absorb black culture and get a better understanding of it.”

Rue wants people to participate in and understand black culture in a positive light.

“I would like for people to experience the love that is the community of black people,” he remarked. “We tend to put a lot of heart into the festivities itself. I would just like to share and portray something that is good instead of bad, because it’s not often seen.”

Soul food was provided by Conejo Valley Catering, owned by Daphne King (far right)

Photo Credits: Tim Pompey

Now on Amazon from Tim Pompey: Dr. Bart’s Lonely Soul Collection Kindle or Paperback

Tim Pompey, a freelance writer who has done lots of local affairs and entertainment/cultural writing, lives in Oxnard. Tim is also a fiction writer (Facebook Page). You can learn about his books on Amazon.com: amazon.com/author/booksbytimpompey.

Get Citizensjournal.us Headlines free  SUBSCRIPTION. Keep us publishing –  DONATE