University Leaders: Stand with Black Students and Academics

In mid-august, a white supremacist media campaign lynched Jason Arday, the youngest Black professor to work at Cambridge University. This tragedy is the result of a deliberate strategy to undermine people and policies challenging and rectifying the historic exclusion of anyone who isn’t a rich, white man from prestigious institutions.

Across the country, a white supremacist faction is using the same lies and tactics that killed Arday to roll back civil rights progress and remove Black students and academics from our colleges and universities.

Our schools must refuse to comply with these attacks on Black students’ freedom to learn. But that will only happen if we, the people, demand it. Add your name to our petition calling on the college administrators across the country to ensure Black students and academics have a place on campus and repair their legacy of exclusion by committing to bring about real equality. 

Our colleges were built on the backs of our Black and brown ancestors on land taken from our Native relatives. For much of our history, universities were not only sites of exclusion, but were also instrumental in manufacturing and legitimizing white supremacist lies and tropes that justified enslavement, genocide, and discrimination. And staffing and admissions at universities have never been an equal playing field. They have always favored hiring and enrolling those whose families directly benefited from legacies of exploitation.

After student movements pushed back and made some progress in forcing their universities to become more inclusive, the MAGA regime is attacking students on the basis of race, perverting civil rights laws to strip funding from universities that enroll Black and brown students so they can ensure higher education is a freedom reserved only for a wealthy, white few.

Just like the civil rights movement stood up to segregationists, now is our turn to fight back and get free. We must use every tool at our disposal to make university leaders commit to bringing about real equality and make our campus actively contribute to creating a more equal society. Together, we’ll ensure students across races and backgrounds have the freedom to learn the truth of how we got here, the freedom to be our authentic selves, and the freedom to right wrongs and make a better future for all of us. 

Because when Black students and academics get free, we all get free.

Add your name and demand university leaders stand with Black people having space to learn and teach on campuses and commit to bringing about real equality by repairing their own colleges’ legacy of exclusion.