"If you're a black student here at Harvard you need an outlet that brings students together," she says. "For me, my identity is as a black woman. Every day, I wake up and think--I'm a black woman. That's very important to me."

Johnson is from Ocean City, N.J., where she went to a high school that she estimates is about 7 percent black.

Her home was half an hour away from Vineland, N.J., the Ku Klux Klan's largest center in the Northeast, she says. She served on a committee fighting hate crimes during her senior year, a time when her school was rife with racial tension.

"That definitely has something to do with why I am so compelled to identify, organize, socialize--to be president of the BSA," she says, pausing over a bite of shrimp scampi at dinner recently in Lowell Dining Hall.

Fraser was a tough act to follow, Johnson adds.

"She was very much respected. People would do what Dionne said," Johnson says, adding that she depends more on input.

Johnson's quiet command is different than Fraser's approach, but she has a firm hand on the group. At the general meeting featuring "Singled Out," she spoke briefly at the beginning and then explained that she had to leave, as she was scheduled to leave town. Perhaps the most telling thing about this year's BSA leadership is how smoothly the meeting ran in her absence.

And as the head of one of the campus' largest and most prominent ethnic organizations, Johnson is similar to mile-a-minute Fraser in at least one major way: she's always on the move.