PHOTO/PHIL SEARS, AP
CARBONDALE, IL — A new student movement has sprung up in response to Trayvon Martin’s murder and the subsequent acquittal of his killer, George Zimmerman. The Dream Defenders, a multi-racial human rights organization dedicated to defeating systemic inequalities in our communities through direct action, nonviolent civil disobedience, and rational organizing, coalesced about six weeks after the murder of Trayvon in colleges and universities throughout Florida. The Dream Defenders have occupied the Florida State Capitol, camping outside Governor Rick Scott’s office since July 16, following Zimmerman’s acquittal. Executive Director of the organization, Phillip Agnew, a student at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, in an impassioned speech from the steps of the Florida State Capitol on July 19, stated they are a “unified, organized student and youth resistance standing against what seems to many to be an unmovable object.”
The group is drafting the Trayvon Martin Act which they intend to present to a special session of the state legislature that they demand Governor Scott convene. The Act is composed of three pillars. The first: End racial profiling. Second: End the school to prison pipeline, as Agnew defined it, “a prevalent and corrosive list of policies and disciplinary procedures that funnel Black, brown and poor children out of schools and into prisons” and “perpetuates a generation of second-class citizens who enter high school with felony records” prohibiting them from having a voice and a choice over their futures. (Florida leads in more school-based arrests than any other state. In 2012 there were 12,000 students arrested approximately 14,000 times in public schools.)
In an interview with In These Times, Agnew said, “We have from our onset talked about the criminalization of young people, people of color, of the poor, of folks not in a position of power in our community.” He links many of these issues, like privatization of prisons and the decline of public education back to the profit motive, the drive to boil down everything, even the lives of children, to a way for corporate entities to make money. “Kids are cash crops in Florida,” he said. (In These Times, July 25, 2013)
The third pillar calls for a repeal of the Stand Your Ground laws. Not an amendment, but an absolute abolishment of the corporate-backed fascist law. Agnew went on to declare, “We will not be silenced. We will not be stopped. We will not be moved or co-opted. We do not honor the results of a task force that upholds a law that eradicates us based on fear and out of emotion… You cannot confront the world as it is without presenting a vision of the world as it should be, as it could be…We are presenting a way forward.”
In drawing a line in the sand, these fighters for a better future are standing tall against a fortified corporate-state. They are sending a clarion call to the millions of us who have no future under a dying system, to join them, for their struggle is also ours.
Cathy Talbott is a former telephone operator, a job lost to automation. She was a homeless mother of two and fights for welfare rights. A former co-host of a weekly community radio program out of Carbondale, IL, “Occupy the Airwaves,” Cathy is the Environmental Desk for the People’s Tribune.
