On Friday September 23rd, just as the bell was about to strike noon, 12 SJU students including myself, gathered together on the edge of Lapsley Lane. Alim Young ’19 walked down the street with a professional camera slung around his neck and a tripod in hand as we waited for further instructions. On any other day our gathering might have appeared normal, as if we were a few kids going to class; but our group of mostly black students wearing all black certainly caught more than a few people’s attention. Alim yelled for us all to get in the street.
As you know City Ave is always bustling, drivers eager to get where they are going sometimes not caring about who’s in the way. Usually students scramble to get across the street before the light turns green, but not us. We stopped right in the middle of traffic, no doubt confusing drivers.
Across the country college students much like ourselves were participating in what was being referred to as National Blackout Day in solidarity of the black lives lost at the hands of police. This demonstration, as well as the current events that have led up to it, past and present, affected us all in many different ways. For me, it was crazy that just a few days earlier a white pickup truck was driving up City Ave with a confederate flag waving on the back reminding me that racism was never too far away, yet now I was standing with my fist raised in the middle of City Ave in support of black lives.
When asked why it was important to have a blackout, and what she hopes to see in the future, sophomore Sydney Villard said; “It’s very important to bring these issues to light. SJU can very much be a bubble for a lot of students, but as a black woman I don’t have the privilege to ignore police brutality. I have to speak up and speak out in any way I can. In the future, I would like to see more actions of solidarity from other communities on campus and I think a serious conversation needs to be had.”
As a university that prides itself on diversity and inclusion, we hope to generate conversations on campus about race relations in and outside of our community. This show of solidarity is just one step in continuing to achieve that initiative and to show that black lives do matter.
HCXO,
Kiana