Black Lives Matter Forum by BSA

On the 14^th of November the Black Student Alliance hosted a Black Lives Matter Forum. Terra Shepard was in attendance, as well as the president of FSU. Sheppard noted that the provided reasoning for the hasty removal of the Black Lives Matter words was because of the promptness that it was brought to the President’s attention. To this Terra stated, “People are really skeptical of what was going on.” She continued to comment that it’s a possibility that the president is “ignoring” the ongoing vandalism. With the language and tactics used in this years election Sheppard feels that with Trump’s victory his supporter have started to show their “true colors” creating an unsafe environment for her and others. “I feel like this place never was safe,” Sheppard reflected. Also in attendance at the forum was speaker Rasheed Ali Cromwell who is a part of a consulting firm based in DC called The Harbor Institute. On their website the Harbor institute define themselves as an “educational consulting firm” that empowers students and administration alike. Cromwell spoke on the Black Lives Matter movement. He assured the BSA audience that BLM is legitimate organization with people actively working behind it and its purpose was not to incite hatred or violence. “He said that when we feel strongly about something we should protest.      

Craig Hampton, the executive vice president of Black Student Alliance (BSA) was in attendance when BSA held the Black Lives Matter (BLM) meeting on Nov 14th, 2016 at 7pm in CCIT, shed light on the meeting objective, the speaker and the issues discussed in the meeting. The speaker was Rasheed Ali Cromwell, he spoke on the three levels of racism; he broke them down into individual racism, institutional racism and structural racism. When asked how did you feel about the BLM meeting, his response was "great, there was a large turnout, I was especially surprised to see how many members of administration came out, the President of the University was there and the fraternity RLO." Cromwell's objective for this meeting was to explain the confusion about the BLM movement and the organization—he wanted to shed light on the difference between protests and riots. Students were allowed to make statements and ask questions; a lot of people wanted to address the Fatboys racism topic and how they would kick out black students even if they were paying customers. These frustrations and concerns brought on the idea of a protest against Fatboys on December 3^rd, 2016 lead by the fraternity against prejudice. In light of the election there were no talks of Trump becoming president—but there were questions addressed to President Ronald Nowacyzk about why the TRUMP writing wasn't as quickly taken care of as the Black Lives Matter writing around campus was power washed off.

This protest started out as a boycott to the local pizzeria for disrespecting two of the brothers, but as things escalated when Donald Trump was elected to be our next president the brothers of Pi Lambda Phi decided to really raise awareness to eliminate hate as they felt that Donald Trump stood for that and was encouraging it.  All of the brothers started the boycott on their own when the entire fraternity stopped eating from there.   After speaking to Pi Lambda Phi brother James Cousler, "The word has just spread from there" said Cousler, "Our president has a meeting on Tuesday December 6 with the Fatboy's owner, and the university president.  The owner of Fatboy's is really concerned about what the students could potentially do to his business.  So, because of this meeting we have postponed any formal protest to just continue with the boycott our [fraternity] is doing.  After the meeting, if nothing is resolved then we will have our forum and continue with our plan to protest."