Walking out from colleges across Boston, several hundred students gathered at the Boston Common Monday at a rally called #WAKEUPWORLD to show solidarity with students of color throughout the country.
The walkout took place at noon and, after students congregated on the Common, they marched from the Massachusetts State House down Beacon Street onto Arlington Street before turning onto Newbury Street and regrouping at Copley Square to hear speeches.
Nathaniel Charles, a junior at Emerson College who helped lead march, invigorated the crowd before the march began.
“We do not stop fighting until we have won. We do not forget simply because we are not the main news story of the day. These are our lives and they matter,” he said. “I will tell you what I did when I first heard about the student protests at the University of Missouri. I smiled. I smiled because black students miles and miles away were standing up for their rights to inclusion and respect at their universities.”
Students from 17 schools in Massachusetts participated in the walkout and rally, said organizer Sarah Alli, a senior at Emerson. Fifteen schools across the nation were also holding similar walkouts that day, she said.
Simone Alyse, a sophomore at Berklee College of Music who also helped organize the event, stressed the importance of college students coming together for one rally as opposed to many smaller ones taking place across the city.
“Instead of doing separate events, we wanted to have one as a community so that we can do this together, not just someone over here, someone over there, but as a family,” she said to the crowd. “We all matter, all of our college students are important to us. Everyone’s voices need to be heard.”
Current events, Alyse said, urged her to want to take action.
“Wednesday night, I was just watching the news and I felt complete disappointment with what the students of color, black students, are dealing with across the nation,” she said. “The whole reason we are doing a protest here in Boston is because I feel like there’s a model that most of the educational institutes are based off of and it doesn’t include students of color or black students.”
Having grownup around the city, Alyse spoke about how underrepresented she has felt in school. Even in college, “the general lack of support” from the faculty and administration is disappointing, she said.
Several students said they are passionate about expressing their anger at administrations for perpetuating racism within universities and colleges.
Zoe Gadegbeku, a graduate student at Emerson, explained what it was like for a person of color to move to America and experience the racism that takes place here.
“I moved here from Ghana a few years ago and I knew what race relations were like in America, but it’s different if you actually have to live the experience of being black in America, of being a person of color on a campus that is very lacking in diversity,” she said. “There are a lot of things that we have to go through and think about in our daily lives, when our classmates don’t have to.”
Stephanie Houten, a sophomore at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, expressed how sick college students are of the institutional racism within colleges and universities across the nation.
“I’m from MassArt, so recently we’ve just been going through a lot of things in regards to racism on campus and diversity and it’s a national thing at this point. We’re, all the colleges, we’re just kind of sick of the institutionalized racism,” she said. “Each school has something to offer. It’s great that we’re all here, organizing. We’re all bringing our different skills together.”
Dina Kleiner, a sophomore at Emerson, said all students need to be unified in this movement, regardless of what school they’re from.
“Anybody who reads the news knows that this is no longer a college thing, this is a national thing,” she said. “College people rallying together is super important, whether you’re from Emerson, whether you’re from [Boston University], [Boston College] it doesn’t really matter. You know things are happening in Mizzou, but it could just as well be happening here.”
