AfroCarolina Correspondence #56: A Letter to Students Occupying for Palestine
Reflections from a former student organizer
As student solidarity encampments and protests for Palestinian liberation persist, Ujima First, an organizing collective at Howard University, recently shared a post reflecting on lessons learned from HU Resist, a former political formation that I helped create and lead, along with several comrades, during my time as an undergraduate student at Howard from 2016-2018. I wanted to respond and build upon their analysis through my own reflections in hopes that it may offer some perspective to those who are currently occupying university campuses in North Carolina and across the country.
HU Resist was a political formation that emerged as a response to Howard University cozying up to the Trump administration. It was also created in the aftermath of a series of highly publicized murders of Black people by the police. I remember being in the streets the summer of my freshman and sophomore year, screaming the names of Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, and Orlando Castile. These murders, and the subsequent non-indictments of the cops who killed those individuals, were deeply politicizing to me as a young Black woman.
My political attention began to shift inward as the Black university I was attending failed to meet these catalyzing moments with any ounce of support. Beyond that, conditions on campus were rapidly deteriorating. From housing shortages and unsafe living conditions, to unchecked sexual assault, the “Black Mecca” began to reflect the violent world it purported to provide students solace from. This, in addition to the upswing in right wing politics within our campus environment was the context under which HU Resist was formed. We studied past Howard occupations in 1968 & in 1989 by Black Nia F.O.R.C.E, we held protests, town halls, and organizing meetings for a solid year before leading a nine day occupation of Howard’s admin building involving 500 students. For many Black students leading and participating in current campus protests, the schools they attend have undoubtedly failed them on many levels leading up to the most recent refusal of Universities to divest from the genocide against Palestine.
While the particular catalyst for HU Resist’s occupation and the current encampments are not identical, they stem from the same system of capitalist white supremacy that not only endorses, but funds violence on all levels. The campus and city police that are arresting and evicting students today have been trained in the same techniques as the Israeli military through police exchange programs. The rubber bullets that are being used in Gaza have been found on the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore after protests against police brutality.
Our occupations are connected by the systems that make them necessary and are also beholden to the same weaknesses and contradictions. The organizers at Ujima First were gracious in not explicitly naming the shortcomings of HU Resist in their reflections, but I believe it’s crucial to engage candidly in principled critiques of past movements in order to glean the most important lessons from them.
In the first few days of our occupation, the energy was magnetic and all that were allowed in the building used their gifts and talents to make it a safe space that embodied the demands we were making of the university. There were teach-ins, talent shows, plenty of food, a medic station, and an art gallery in the basement level. I’ve seen some of the same community building happening at current student occupations, and want to stress how important upholding the safety and care of the collective is to sustaining radical direct action. Through allowing joy, community, and care to emerge from our militant occupation, we were able to foster a collective sense of morale and trust beyond our small core of 20 or so organizers to a building full of students who were committed to our demands and took every means necessary to defend the occupation.
One of the ways I and those of us in leadership fell short was in taking that trust for granted. As the days wore on, and we rounded out a week of sleeping on the floors of the administration building, only taking breaks to shower or make it to a class we couldn’t skip, our fatigue and growing distractions began to tug at the radical intentions of our occupation. After initiating what became five days of back to back negotiations with the board of trustees, I and a few other core organizers moved our sleeping quarters into the sectioned off office we used for those negotiations. This signaled one of our first departures from “embedding [ourselves] in the masses,” as Ujima First calls for. Looking back, I understand that the board and the student representatives they used to infiltrate our movement were banking on our exhaustion and fatigue to wear us down. They isolated us from our base through pointless private negotiations; and although we had an outpour of community support, we lacked the skills and capacity to govern what had become a liberated zone and stay true to our demands.
After 9 days, we reached an agreement with the board that, on paper, satisfied seven of our nine demands. Student organizers today may know what we didn’t at the time, but task forces are where visions of radical change go to die. And we walked right into the trap of task forces Howard and our HU Alumna lawyer laid for us as we signed that agreement and allowed university staff back into the building.
I understand that today’s stakes for radical student organizers are higher as university administrators are calling on police to evict and arrest students for exercising their rights and standing up for the Palestinian liberation movement. I’m in awe of the unwavering solidarity and strength that students are showing in the face of brute force and state sanctioned violence. I encourage those in leadership to stay grounded and centered in your demands for your campuses to divest from the genocide Israel & the US government has waged against the Palestinian people. I urge you to only platform and trust those who are clearly and adamantly in support of your movement, and to place your people over everything.
I hope that these reflections are helpful to the analysis and momentum that has been reignited on your campuses, and are an affirming message as you navigate the moments that don’t make headlines or go viral. Thank you for reminding those of us who have watched in horror and struggled to create meaningful action, what solidarity truly looks and feels like. May you continue to illuminate what it takes to create the world we all so desperately need.
“The struggle is eternal. The tribe increases. Somebody else carries on." - Ella Baker