About 15 students posed a walkout demonstration in the Court of North Carolina Monday in response to the acquittal of Darren Wilson, the white Ferguson police officer involved in the shooting of the unarmed, black teen Michael Brown.
The walkout, named “#HandsUpWalkOut,” was a nationally organized event that took place on college campuses across the country at the time of Michael Brown’s death, according to the Ferguson Action Team.
The group of students met in the Court of North Carolina at 1:15 p.m. and marched to the Brickyard to continue protesting until 2 p.m. However, the protest faced some difficulty getting protestors to leave class to join the demonstration.
While marching from the Court of the North Carolina to the Brickyard, the protest lost about half of its participants as they left to attend their classes beginning at 1:30 p.m., an act contrary to what the event stood for, said Caroline Lima-Lane, a senior studying computer science.
“This is what it was about, right, walking out of class? Then they left to go to class,” Lima-Lane said. “I had a class too, and honestly I found it a hard decision to come here today as well. But this is about more than just today in physics class. This is about justice.”
The lack of attendance on campus and lack of engagement by fellow students was very upsetting, according to Lima-Lane.
“The fact that people are looking at us like we are trying to start trouble or whatever, it makes me feel like there is very little faith in this campus,” Lima-Lane said.
Qasima Wideman, a freshman studying Africana studies and the organizer of NC State’s #HandsUpWalkOut, said she arranged the event in response to the events in Ferguson, Cleveland and elsewhere.
Wideman also said she felt it was important that NC State be represented among the schools and businesses that walked out nationally.
The walkout represents an interruption of business as usual, Wideman said. The message of the event is that “none of us are safe and free until all of us are safe and free,” Wideman said.
“Peoples’ right to dissent has been brutally attacked, especially this past weekend,” Wideman said. “There were students and young people demonstrating at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, and they were brutalized by police, especially young people and people of color.”
The Michael Brown shooting has been a cause of a large amount of debate among students across the entire country. Wideman said she publicized the event on Facebook the day before the event, on which 34 people said they planned to attend, and an assistant professor of social work also sent out an email about the protest to her students.
“It’s important for young people of color and students to voice our outrage when we are being attacked and murdered without being called thugs and being brutalized,” Wideman said. “Having to see the media portray it as something that is justified, or something that we deserved, or that we started the violence is absurd, given the context,” Wideman said.
Wideman said the NC State chapter of the NAACP will organize a “Last Day of Classes, Last Day for Justice” event Wednesday in the Brickyard.
“I am hopeful that there will be an even bigger turnout on Wednesday, and I’m happy that our student organizations are organizing action, as well,” Wideman said.
