Natalia Lara
A few dozen students spent Thursday afternoon staging a peaceful sit-in as a protest to an extremist rally on campus earlier in the week.
Students held a four-hour sit-in on the lawn outside of Careers on Oct. 2 as a way to protest a demonstration hosted by the conservative Key of David Church on campus two days earlier.
A few dozen students held a peaceful protest with signs, music, dancing and food for anyone to participate.
“This is how you want to do it,” part-time student Casian Holly said. ”You create a presence, a safe space, where students walking by can ask and get more information, if they want or just enjoy the good vibes without having to have all of the angry shouting and fighting.”
Nine members of the Key of David Church stood outside of Careers on Tuesday, holding signs that said, “Jesus or hellfire,” “Homos are rapists” and “Feminists are whores,” as they yelled at students who walked by.
At the sit-in, dozens of pride flags and signs spreading positive messages like “Being kind is the new punk rock” and “Stop the hate” littered the lawn to uplift the students as they passed.
Protest organizer Mikayla French said she wanted to spread the message that hate speech has not place on the AACC campus.
“Seeing all the hate that was spewed [Tuesday] was really disheartening, and I felt it was essential to get the morale back up,” French, a third-year transfer studies major, said.
After the church’s demonstration, French said, she was enraged by the response from campus administration.
“The response from the college made me more angry,” French said. AACC President Dawn Lindsay “sent a nothing burger of an email that she has absolutely no response.”
In a campuswide email, Lindsay explained that a public college like AACC has “a legal and ethical responsibility to uphold the right to constitutionally protected speech, even when that speech is unpopular or offensive.”
She added that the college “does not endorse or subscribe to the views expressed by this group.”
Still, first-year business and advertising student Nate Finn said he was upset “there are people out there that would do stuff like that, but also that we live on our campus where hate like that wouldn’t be shut down.”
He added: “And I definitely think there is a line when it comes to, you know, free speech, and a lot of a lot of people try and hide behind the First Amendment to try and spread hate.”