Students at Towson University in Baltimore County led an eight-hour protest at university President Timothy Chandler’s office Nov. 18, which ended after Chandler agreed to address the student’s demands.
Members of the group, as well as some local Baltimore media, tracked the event as it happened, posting videos and messages to social media sites like Twitter and YouTube as it happened.
The NAACP’s official Twitter account voiced their support for the protest.
“Students taking action. #NAACP commends these @TowsonU students for pushing for a better and just campus,” the group tweeted.
The students’ demands, which were listed on the website www.thedemands.org, included increasing Black faculty on the tenured track by 16 percent by 2018, requiring all faculty to take at least one cultural competency course every semester and ensuring that Black Greek organizations received the same amount of funding as the White ones.
The Towson demonstrators were among thousands of students who led peaceful protests all over the country, including at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Yale University in Connecticut, as part of the #StudentBlackOut campaign. Students said the protests were a sign of solidarity with students at the University of Missouri. Students there successfully protested to get former president Tim Wolfe out of office, saying the university did not properly address racial incidents on campus.
A list of all the schools involved, as well as their demands, can be found at www.thedemands.org