REMEMBERING NOT AGAIN SU

Syracuse seniors reflect on #NotAgainSU’s legacy.

Words by Jojo Wertheimer Art by Hallie Meyer

In 2019, before she had even taken her first college final, Clarke Johnson slept on the lobby floor of the Barnes Center for over a week straight. Every night, she shifted uncomfortably as her head hit the foot of the student next to her. She drifted in and out of sleep, waking every few hours from the fluorescent lights shining brightly in her face or the presence of an armed Department of Public Safety officer looming in the distance.

The week-long sit-in was the beginning of #NotAgainSU, one of the largest student protests in SU history. The student movement stemmed from the university’s handling of a hate incident in Day Hall. Sometime overnight between Nov 6 and 7, 2019, anti-Black and anti-Asian slurs were written in the bathrooms of the 4th and 6th floors. In response, DPS officers and university administration met with the floors’ residents, asking the students to keep the news of the occurrence to themselves.

While this incident was seemingly the spark that lit the fire, for many students, the anger fueling #NotAgainSU stemmed from feelings that the school neglects marginalized students. This feeling, and the university’s long history of bias incidents, was only reinforced in the following days as more bias incidents piled up. On Nov 13, the day that the sit-in began, graffiti targeting the Asian community was found in the Physics Building. In the following three days, more vandalism was found targeting the Asian community in two different residence halls; Black students were accosted with racial slurs by non-Black students; and a swastika was drawn in Day Hall and in the snow near a student apartment building. The hate crimes crashed down in waves, repeatedly crushing the campus community.

“Every time you got an email, it was [a matter of] making sure that something bad didn’t happen,” senior Kellen Reiche said.

The stress permeated every corner of campus, leaving students on edge.

“I don’t think I’d ever been in a situation where I could feel the tension on campus before… this was like an ‘everybody was just waiting to see what was going to happen next’ type of tense,” Johnson, who is now a senior, said.

Senior Adia Santos, an integral part of the #NotAgainSU organizational board, agreed.

“The campus climate was hot,” she said. “From the Black student population, there was an extreme sense of anger, fear, sadness, all the things that go along with a bias incident like that, and everyone felt really motivated to just do something about it.”

During the sit-in, students involved in the #NotAgainSU organization created a list of demands for the university to implement, including an allocation of $1 million for culture and diversity curriculum and an overhaul of SEM 100, a class revolving around discussion of diversity, equity, and inclusion. On Nov 21, 2019, Chancellor Kent Syverud agreed to 16 of the 18 demands, dissolving the occupation of Barnes.

“I remember seeing people cleaning up the Barnes Center [and it] was such a surreal thing. [For] one, to see it end, which is like it’s great that it’s over and the demands had been signed, but also scary because we felt like we didn’t have this hold on the university anymore, like who knows what’s going to happen after this. But there was something symbolic about seeing people literally cleaning a space when we’re trying to clean a university.”

Following the first protest, the university created a website to update the public on its progress. However, Santos noticed demands that were supposed to take three to five years were beginning to be marked off.

“Clearly you cannot complete that in a month. I just remember feeling extremely sad and burdened by their incapability or unwillingness to cooperate, so that’s why we had the second protest in CrouseHinds in February,” she said.

Like the protest in Barnes, students occupied the space all day and all night. This time, however, the school pushed back with more force. When students refused to leave Crouse-Hinds Hall after its 9 p.m. closing time on Feb 18th, 2020, over 30 students received letters of suspension for trespassing (although the suspensions were eventually dropped). In the following days, DPS officers stationed around the building denied the entry of any food, people, and feminine products.

Johnson, who understood Syracuse’s history of racial bias incidents, was not surprised by the presence of racism on campus. What #NotAgainSU did lead her to realize, however, is SU lets student protests take place.

“Of course, being a Black woman, that’s just my life. Racist incidents, I knew it was going to happen,” Johnson said. “But I didn’t expect it to blow up into what it was. They might cover up [the protest] after it happens, but they do let it happen in some sense.”

However, upon remembering that the university stopped the protestors from receiving food and supplies, her tone changed.

“But that’s not to say it doesn’t happen without intimidation, without any form of violence.”

Like Johnson, Reiche’s view of the university also shifted based on the events of #NotAgainSU.

“I appreciated [administration] putting on a huge event in Hendricks Chapel and freeing up time for the Dean of Hendricks Chapel, the chancellor of the university, [and] the whole board of trustees [to] listen to students which is an incredibly empowering thing,” Reiche said. “[But] I definitely lost a little respect for the university in trying to silence an issue as part of their goal to make more money.”

Four years later, remnants of #NotAgainSU still exist on campus, particularly in the manifestation of the demands. Most visible is 119 Euclid Ave, an oncampus house serving as the center for Black life and community at SU. Additionally, the university turned SEM 100 into FYS 101, a required class for first-year students with the intention of facilitating conversations about DEI. However, many students feel the class does not effectively accomplish its goal.

“That class is bullshit,” Johnson, who has been an FYS Peer Leader for multiple semesters, said. “The fact that there are minority students in the classroom, or just anyone who’s already aware of DEIA, and they’re basically being lectured about bias? How about getting into political history or critical race theory or maybe discussing how race has intersected with the law ever since it’s been a part of the land? It frustrated me that as college students we’re being spoken to as if we’re fifth graders.”

The class discussion of #NotAgainSU revolves primarily around a video created by the university describing the events that took place. According to Johnson, it’s surface-level, inaccurate, and lacks information about why the protests began. For Santos, FYS misses the nuance that makes the movement so significant.

“It was really important just to demonstrate to the university that there are a good number of people here that care about wrongdoing to the Black community... I just had higher hopes for the administration, people that actively wanted me here and were trying to get more Black students here like they are now,” Santos said.

#NotAgainSU took an immeasurable toll on students. In the midst, though, the amplification of students’ voices and their extensive collaboration shined through.

“That was a time when a lot of people on campus came together in a way that I had never seen before, anywhere,” Johnson said. “International students were chopping it up with Black students, and Jewish students were there too, and we are all in this space where we were like, ‘yeah, we’re all being attacked right now, let’s do something about this,’ which was incredible.”

The class of 2023 is the last class left on campus to have experienced the events of #NotAgainSU. Their final days at SU are dwindling, leaving an abundance of ambiguity about how the movement will be remembered in the future.

“I want it to be remembered how it truly happened, not as this idealized, ‘oh we let the protests happen,’ version that Syracuse University’s admin loves to tell,” Johnson said. “We had to raise hell on campus in order to protect ourselves, which is saying a lot about how Syracuse maneuvers when it comes to student protests. I just want it to be recognized and remembered as what it was.”