After College of Arts and Sciences junior Brandon Wood attended an Occupy Wall Street protest at Liberty Square in New York on Sept. 17, he wanted to draw in more Boston University students to the movement.
“People are really into this. People really want to get involved,” Wood, who also attended the Occupy Boston march at Dewey Square Friday, said in an interview.
Inspired by both protests, Wood decided to create a Facebook group titled “BU Occupies Boston” on Sunday. Within two hours of its creation, he said he saw the group gain more 200 members.
“If we really organize the correct way and have a message that reaches every student we can do a lot for BU, Boston and our generation as a whole,” Wood said.
BU Occupies Boston is working with Students Occupy Boston, which was formed by College of General Studies freshman Kaya Juda-Nelson. The group, also organized via Facebook on Sunday, met Monday night for its first meeting and headed out to march at Dewey Square with other protesters.
CAS sophomore Luke Rebecchi, a member of BU Occupies Boston, said that the movement speaks for the economic disparity between 99 percent of Americans and the top 1 percent.
“There isn’t one unified message, but if I had to sum it up it’s that there’s a lot of money in our political system and it kind of distorts what should be getting done. Good policies don’t come out and they affect people,” Rebecchi said.
“The quote is ‘99 percent,’ we’re the 99 percent,” he said. “We’re the people who don’t have all the money to throw at Barack Obama or whoever else is making decisions, and we want that back. We want to assert our place in our democracy.”
“It seems a bit backwards going into the streets and then planning,” Wood said. “But this is the very beginning of a movement and it is very different than any other movement.”
Demonstrations in connection to the Occupy movements have formed across the country in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland since the first protest in New York.
More than 1,000 protesters attended the Dewey Square protest on Friday, The Daily Free Press reported on Monday.
Aditya Rudra, a School of Management sophomore, said the movement is about who has money and who doesn’t.
“What upsets me is that the people that are wealthy have such political power, that corporations are treated as people and that we’ve created a system where these people can make their rules and do what they want,” Rudra said. “That’s why I’m here.”
Juda-Nelson said that Students Occupy Boston is organizing a student-led march that will join the general march in Dewey this Friday at 5:30 p.m., which will likely start at Marsh Plaza.
“It feels really good to be a part of something that has potential to change the system as opposed to a bunch of people sitting around and complaining about things,” Juda-Nelson said.