On a Friday afternoon in mid-September, DePaul's Lincoln Park Quad will fill with the smell of grilled hamburgers and hotdogs, the sound of a live DJ, and the low hum of student organizations working their tables. The occasion is the 2000s Welcome Back Block Party, a free, open-to-all celebration hosted by DePaul's Black Student Union. It runs from 4 to 8 p.m. on September 18, 2026, at the Quad, 2325 N Seminary Ave.
The event is billed as the official welcome and welcome-back celebration for BSU general body members, but its organizers are explicit that the doors are open to the wider student body. Alongside the DJ and the cookout food — burgers, hotdogs, sodas, and water — there will be tabling opportunities for student organizations and vendors, turning the Quad into a kind of open-air fair for the first weeks of the academic year.
What makes the block party notable is what it is replacing. According to the event listing, it is a variation of an annual BSU tradition called "The Cookout," which the organization hosted in past years and which the listing credits with "proven student engagement." The rebrand is not a departure so much as a remix: the cookout format — food, music, community, an open invitation — stays intact, while the 2000s theme gives it a new hook for a student body that increasingly arrives on campus with no memory of the decade itself.
The choice of the Quad as the setting is itself meaningful. The green at the center of DePaul's Lincoln Park campus is the university's most visible gathering space, the place where student life is most publicly staged. It has hosted everything from college festivals to voter registration drives, and it is the kind of space where an organization can be seen by students who never intended to attend its event. For a BSU welcome party, that visibility is part of the point.
The Black Student Union at DePaul is not a recent arrival. According to Fourteen East magazine, DePaul opened its doors in 1898, and the first Black student union formed in 1967 — nearly seventy years later. That gap is a reminder that Black student organizing at DePaul grew out of a specific historical moment, the same era of campus activism that produced Black student unions across the country in the late 1960s. The BSU has been a fixture of DePaul student life in the decades since, and its programming has often centered on the same goals the block party serves: building community among Black students and making that community visible to the wider campus.
That work has not always been easy. In 2016, The DePaulia reported that BSU executive board members met with then-president Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, C.M., and Provost Marten denBoer for a two-hour conversation about race at DePaul. The discussion ranged from micro-aggressions and racial profiling to a larger proposal: a dedicated gathering place on campus for students of color. Mario Morrow, then BSU president, described the meeting as "very successful" and said Holtschneider was "very receptive to what we were saying." The push for a Black cultural center was a long-running theme; the article noted that other universities, including Northwestern, already had such spaces.
The broader ecosystem of Black student life at DePaul has continued to grow. The DePaul University Black Leadership Coalition has for years hosted an annual Graduation Celebration for Students of African Descent — by 2019 it was in its 23rd year, according to a video of that ceremony, and The DePaulia covered the 16th annual edition years earlier. The DePaulia has also documented cookout-style gatherings organized through the university's Black Cultural Center, including a 2022 event that the paper described by noting how the very word "cookout" evokes "good food, music, and celebrations with the community." That is the cultural register the BSU is drawing on.
It is also a register with deep roots beyond DePaul. The cookout as a form of Black communal gathering — informal, food-centered, music-filled, and open — has become a staple of Black student organizing on campuses nationwide, from Yale's Afro-American Cultural Center, which has hosted a "Welcome Back Cookout," to Black student unions at schools across the country that use the format to open the academic year. At DePaul, the BSU's version has been "The Cookout," and the block party is its next iteration.
The 2000s theme adds a layer of nostalgia that is likely to land differently depending on who shows up. For upperclassmen and graduate students, the decade is a memory; for incoming first-years, it is closer to a period piece. Either way, the formula is familiar: a DJ, free food, tables staffed by student organizations and vendors, and a Quad full of people who might otherwise never cross paths in the first weeks of the semester.
The event is free and open to the university community. More information and RSVP details are available through DePaul's event calendar and the DeHub listing for the block party.