“What are you?” people would ask me. And when I was too young to answer, they would ask, “What is he?” and await my parents’ reply.

A Korean-American student was originally meant to write this introduction. But she was afraid that, as an Asian person, she was unequipped to produce a preface for a video project that aspires to capture Blackness at our school. Being 12.5 percent biologically blacker than the next blackest person at The Eye, the task of introducing Black Columbia-ness has thus been left to me.

A black man walks into a barber shop in the basement of the building on the corner of 114th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, where Strokos is now. James Franklyn Bourne, who graduated from Columbia College in 1937, and his friend, also a student at Columbia, are there for the 35 cent haircuts that Ralph’s Barber Shop has been advertising in Spectator since the late 1920s. That was back when the owner, Ralph Robibero, was still at his old location, next to Casa Italiana on 117th Street and Amsterdam.

It’s a quarter past midnight on a wintry Wednesday morning in April 1924. Four cars pull up to the University gate on Amsterdam Avenue. College Walk was just another part of 116th Street back then. There were no Public Safety guards at the gate to check drivers’ identities, so no one knows who the 20 men who got out of those cars were that night.