Brigid Archibald and Ashley Rose Rivera
Connector Editors
“I want to build a movement that powers our society with love,” said Reverend Mariama White-Hammond, an ecological and social justice activist, who spoke to the group of nearly 7,000 students and protesters in the Boston City Hall Plaza on Friday, Sept. 20, challenging them to fight injustices today for those who cannot.
“Love will be an endless supply and it will never pollute,” White-Hammond said.
98 UMass Lowell students RSVPed to join the Boston Youth Strike at the Boston City Hall Plaza to march on the Massachusetts Statehouse. This demonstration was part of thousands more just like it taking place internationally as part of the Youth Climate Strike.
These global strikes take place days before the United Nations (UN) will hold its Climate summit in New York, NY, on Monday, Sept. 23. Participants are hoping the strikes will be enough to convince law makers to support climate initiatives. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg inspired the strike based on her own school strike at the Swedish parliament over a year ago.
“The thing is most Americans are passionate about stopping climate change. It’s the corporations and politicians who are standing in the way,” said Nick Deane, a graduate student studying Mechanical Engineering at UMass Lowell. “We got to show them that they have the money, but we have the numbers.”
Deane was a key player in getting UMass Lowell to participate in the strike. Initially, he had reached out to the university for permission to hang posters around campus telling students about the event. However, when faculty, like Lori Weeden, an Associate Teaching Professor of the Environmental Erath and Atmospheric Sciences department and Craig Slatin, a professor in the Zuckerberg College of Health Sciences, heard about the posters, they helped Deane to spread the word around campus, secure free transportation for students to the strike and encourage professors to excuse any absences.
“There has to be a political will to make these changes, and young people are going to demand it,” said Slatin, explaining why it was so important to him that students attend the strike. Many students who attended the strike felt similarly.
Students like Freshman Environmental Science major Jaelyn Kassoy who said, “We’re here in masses to show the government that this is a big problem and a lot of people believe in it.”
Mark Costa, a freshmen computer science major, explained why he attended, saying, “When we all get older, we’re [going to] be facing [Climate change] head-on, and I think sending students down to protest is a good move because it shows that UMass Lowell is committed to fighting the issue.”
Protestors of all ages filled the City Hall Plaza with signs adorned in slogans and calls to action. Students were encouraged to write messages to policymakers on the sidewalk of the Plaza. One UMass Lowell Professor, James Nehring, a faculty chair in the College of Education, carried a sign that said, “Gravity is just a theory.”
“Gravity is just a theory,” said Nehring, “but we don’t see people jumping out of airplanes without parachutes. Climate change is just a theory, and we should be acting on it in the same way.”
Before marching on the statehouse, the Climate Strike invited multiple speakers to the stage including Michelle Wu, a Boston City Councilor, Mayor Marty Walsh, Student Activists working with the Climate Strike organization and many others.
As the speakers appealed to their government representatives, mainly Governor Charlie Baker, to agree to the Green New Deal, many spoke about injustice: the treatment of coal workers, how natural disasters disproportionately affect lower income communities, the disregard for indigenous people and how students felt the need to skip school to have their voices heard.
Around 1:30 p.m. the crowd marched from the City Hall Plaza down Tremont street, turning at the Boston Common, and surrounded the Statehouse. There, the crowd of students from elementary school to university aged and other supporters chanted and a few even entered the building.
