While police officers and administration workers watched the protest from the second floor, protestors congregated around the spiral staircase and the dinosaur skeleton that decorates the lobby. The main lobby was illuminated by the sunlight that penetrated through the glass ceiling. As the group shared their stories, they drew solidarity from their collective struggle.
In the SAC plaza beneath a gray sky, Julie Sato held a megaphone to her mouth and read her favorite Nelson Mandela quote to the 50 Stony Brook University students assembled in front of her.
“People must learn to hate,” she said, “and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.”
Sato is the secretary for the Japanese Student Organization, which held a #StopAsianHate Awareness Walk on Saturday, April 17.
If you ask a Stony Brook University student about activism on campus, they’d likely have little, if anything, to say. To Mitchel Cohen, a student from 1965 to 1975, that reality is hard to swallow. Just half a century ago, Cohen’s days were punctuated with protests on what, according to him, was the most politically active campus on the East Coast. As it turns out, the history of Long Island’s “sleeper campus” is littered with smashed windows, smoke bombs and student arrests.
On June 6, the baby-boomer battles between left and right at a hallowed Long Island intersection collided with an outpour of younger people calling to end police brutality and systemic inequality. Over 250 peaceful protesters co-opted this battleground for a three-hour Black Lives Matter protest and unknowingly threw tradition by the wayside when nearly 100 of them crossed North Country Road — No Man’s Land — infiltrating the land held by the Patriots for nearly two decades.
As protests for George Floyd spread throughout the U.S., Salt Lake City, the quiet capital of Utah, has become boisterous with Black Lives Matter chants as another group of protestors demand justice for Bernardo Palacios-Carbajal, who was shot and killed by the Salt Lake City police.
On March 11, hundreds of Stony Brook students protested in front of the Administration building, demanding answers from the board that has been silent.
Hundreds of students crowded around the fountain to voice their concerns and chant, “Send us home, pay us back” and “Coronavirus in the air, administration doesn’t care.”
Conrad Noronha, a student at Columbia Law School, and his friends were discussing the politics and the protests in India when they decided they wanted to raise their voices.
Members of the New York City Transit Authority Committee and more than 65 citizens watched as Christine Serdjenian Earwood addressed the lack of elevators on the subway, calming her son nested in her baby carrier at the same time.