After students held protests and an 18-day sit-in at Syracuse University last year, Nina Rodgers thought SU could use an opportunity to expand campus activism by holding a panel with the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown.

Martin and Brown, two unarmed black teenagers who were killed by a neighborhood watch coordinator and police officer, respectively, have become the faces of the Black Lives Matter movement. Lesley McSpadden, Brown’s mother, and Sybrina Fulton, Martin’s mother, will come together for the first time in a panel discussion entitled “(In)Justice For All” on Oct. 28 in Goldstein Auditorium.

Rodgers, a senior broadcast and digital journalism major and one of the organizers of the panel, said she especially wants to use the event as a reminder to the campus that violence toward people of color, such as Brown and Martin, does not occur in a vacuum, and these experiences need to be shared with people across communities.

“We can’t sit in isolation thinking that one thing that happens in one community is not relevant to us, no matter the walk of life we come from,” Rodgers said.

The name of the panel “(In)Justice For All” was inspired by a popular quote by Martin Luther King Jr. from his essay “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” Rodgers said.

The overall focus going into organizing this semester’s speaker was to have someone that was still buzzworthy, but could bring an impactful message to the campus community, said Travis Davis, a senior public health major and another organizer of the panel.

Davis and Rodgers have been working with the National Pan-Hellenic Council, which is comprised of nine historically black Greek organizations, since early August to organize the panel, he added.

The panel will also include National Bar Association President Benjamin Crump, CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin, CNN news anchor Fredricka Whitfield and SU’s Department of Public Safety Chief Bobby Maldonado.

McSpadden and Fulton’s voices can help provide insight into racial tensions in the U.S., Rodgers said, because they can show that the cause of their sons’ deaths was bigger than problems with law enforcement and police brutality — it’s about community policing as a whole.

Department of Public Safety Chief Bobby Maldonado has previously emphasized the need for community policing at SU. Davis added that Maldonado’s presence on the panel will help tie the conversation back to campus.

Though there have been recent efforts to hold DPS further accountable for officers’ interactions with students — such as the implementation of body cameras — some students of color say they still don’t feel safe on SU’s campus because of their race.

When students of color constantly see headlines about other people of color getting killed, it’s hard to trust any campus or police officer anywhere, Davis said. As a student of color, Davis said he and other black students he knows gauge their interactions with DPS by their previous personal experiences of racial discrimination off campus.

“Me, being a man of color from New York City from the Bronx, New York, I’m used to seeing my friends get racially profiled non-stop,” Davis said. “It’s happened to me multiple times.”

Rodgers said she grew up being told to comply with police officers’ orders and to not do anything sudden.

Davis agreed and added that he was raised with the same cautionary advice forewarning him to “fear the police, but don’t fear the police,” at the same time.

Issues of race on SU’s campus are not just related to DPS. Davis said he has been called a gorilla by others on campus and most recently, he said someone drove past him wishing him a good night while also calling him a monkey.

Matthew Fraser, a senior finance major, said he personally feels safe as a student of color on campus, but also said he doesn’t want to speak on behalf of all students of color at SU either.

Fraser, who plans to attend the panel, said he would like to see more protests and conversation about race again on campus.

Fraser was one of several students that organized the “March for Justice” in December, in which students marched from Hendricks Chapel, staged a “die-in” in Bird Library and then marched downtown to protest the lack of indictments against officers that kill unarmed men, like Brown and Eric Garner.

He added that it’s important for McSpadden and Fulton to repeat their stories firsthand since the issue of racial violence is ongoing, and there will always be someone who needs to be more educated about the issue.

“At the end of the day, you can become stagnant and lose track of what you were originally fighting for when the dust settles,” Fraser said. “Education never stops, and the more that you can do that the better we are.”

Davis, one of the panel’s organizers, added that the point of the panel is not to be a call to action but to help people understand the multiple factors that led to riots in Ferguson and Baltimore this past year, and that one person’s death was not the only reason the riots began.

Rodgers said providing McSpadden and Fulton the opportunity to continue to speak about their sons’ deaths is important, because it brings humanity and awareness to an ongoing issue, even though Martin passed away in 2012 and Brown passed away last year.

“Their moms never asked to be thrown into the spotlight — especially not at the expense of losing their children,” Rodgers said. “But thankfully they’re willing to share their story with people.”

Published on October 21, 2015 at 11:11 pm

Contact Anna: almerod@syr.edu