As a Duke undergraduate, Marcus Benning, who served both as
president of the Black Student Alliance and senate president pro-tempore for the Student Government, was instrumental in establishing a new student social housing group focused on black culture. Now, as president of the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) and as a LEAD fellow, he is helping lead the diversity and inclusion effort at Duke Law.
“I really love Duke,” says Benning. “But my relationship with Duke is complicated, because I want to change so many things about it.”
Attending “Common Ground,” a student-led retreat organized by the Duke Center for Race Relations early in his sophomore year was a pivotal experience for Benning, who majored in history and linguistics. It helped him understand, he says, the experiences of diverse minority groups on campus, and laid the foundation for many of his leadership activities. “We spent three days talking about race, gender, and sexual orientation. We argued and cried and figured it out together. It kind of changed my life.”
Benning, a native of Atlanta, credits his mother with sparking his passion for community engagement and social justice. She also made sure he had people in his life “who would mentor me in ways she could not,” like his high school band director, who Benning says taught him the importance of punctuality, respect, hard work, and perseverance through music. Shortly after arriving at Duke he found two more mentors at the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture: Director Chandra Guinn and Assistant Director Sean Palmer. They were instrumental, he says, in his development as a leader and as a scholar.
Guinn says Benning’s personality was evident from the first day she met him. “He had very strong opinions, a willingness to share them, and a willingness to have his mind changed,” she says. “He is a young man with a desire to see other people excel along with him.”
Benning got started on doing that when he secured a $500 award from a Duke University think-tank during his freshman year to launch the Duke Connects Challenge, an effort to build ties between Duke students and Durham residents. He invited his classmates to submit proposals for projects that would benefit the city, as measured by their sustainability, affordability, and community impact.
“From talking to other students, I learned about lingering tensions between Duke and Durham,” he says of his motivation for the challenge. “I got the impression they were exacerbated by the lacrosse incident and were never completely resolved.” The winning challenge proposal, submitted by residents of Randolph Hall on East Campus, engaged students in cleaning up and improving public parks.
As a sophomore, Benning worked successfully to establish a new academic and social housing group at Duke for students interested in immersing themselves in black cultural awareness and academic engagement. Open to students of all races and ethnicities, the Black Culture Living Group on Central Campus houses 22 students and works closely with the African and African American Studies Department and the Mary Lou Williams Center to host educational events and discussions relating to the diversity of the African Diaspora.
“This group is particularly important as social justice campaigns such as Black Lives Matter take shape,” he says. “Hopefully students who have lived in the Black Culture Living Group and others like it will launch movements of their own to tackle the injustices they experience.”
Aiming for a career in corporate law, Benning decided that Duke remained a good fit for law school academically, and that his work on campus wasn’t finished. Active in BLSA as a 1L representative, he is pleased, now as president, to be partnering with “seven other talented, determined second-year students” on the executive board. “Because BLSA’s board is so diverse — they bring experience from a variety of industries, including education and energy, and have lived and traveled all over the U.S. and around the world — our initiatives and events will naturally capture a wide range of perspectives and reach broad audiences.”
In September, Benning served as both a host and panelist at a community discussion of the works of Harper Lee that attracted students and faculty from across campus. Framing the conversation as an exploration of idealism and personal responsibility to enact positive social change, he challenged his fellow students to “reimagine Duke and reimagine the world to seek and expect the best of this place, and to thrust that vision into reality with our activism.” He drew a parallel between the falsely accused character of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird, and the unarmed black men whose deaths sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.
“The story isn’t new, and neither is our responsibility as future lawyers and scholars of all disciplines to determine our role in reimagining the world as a just and equal place,” he said.
“One of the beautiful things about Marcus,” says Sean Palmer, one of Benning’s undergraduate mentors, “is that he left undergrad with an agile mind that I think is being empowered at the Law School.”
One of BLSA’s top priorities for the current academic year is addressing the discomfort students of color sometimes feel with the way race is handled in the classroom. As an example, Benning cites his own discomfort when one classroom video on dealing with difficult negotiators featured the cultural cliché of “an angry black woman” to make the point. “In the 21st century, racism is not about people’s intent, but about the impact of what they do and the signals that you’re sending,” he says.
BLSA recently surveyed black students about their experiences at Duke Law in class and out, and is working to compile the data into a comprehensive report with concrete recommendations for the dean.
Benning, who interned at Burr & Forman in Birmingham, Ala., and Smith Moore Leatherwood in Raleigh over his 1L summer, intends to spend much of his last two years at Duke advocating for increasing university funding for “the Mary Lou,” the organization that helped nurture his leadership skills and his activism. “The whole purpose of me being here is to shake stuff up,” he says. “There’s no reason why this place should be the same way it was when we got here.”
— by Rachel Flores
