SHHS students: ‘Say their names’
To the Editor,
On Juneteenth at 7 a.m., the Wallingford-Swarthmore Sunrise hub executed a banner drop over the bridge on Chester Road over I-476. June 19, also known as Juneteenth, is the day on which enslaved people in Texas were finally granted freedom — two and a half years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The banner read “Say Their Names” and listed the names of recent Black victims of racially motivated police brutality and violence.
The purpose of this banner drop was to recognize the injustice our society puts on Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPoC).
The banner was held over the highway for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the same amount of time that a police officer in Minneapolis strangled George Floyd to death with his knee. The banner was then transported to the bridge connecting Strath Haven Middle School and High School over Providence Road. It was taken down less than a week later by an unknown entity.
We, as non-BIPoC, stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, supporting the call to defund police departments nationwide — a crucial step towards justice and equality. Defunding means reallocating the police budget to other areas in a community. In many cities, police officers are heavily armed, confrontational, and cannot be disciplined for their actions due to legal protections written into their contracts.
It is necessary to disassemble corrupt and racist police departments in order to rebuild a better system. This system would include affordable housing, equal education, allocating more funding to social services, demilitarizing the everyday officer, and so much more. Demilitarizing would include fewer weapons and more training for peaceful, not forceful, solutions, with a focus on avoiding violence.
We live in a privileged, mostly white suburb. Police brutality isn’t an issue close to home in Swarthmore, as our police department isn’t heavily militarized. However, in nearby places with a larger percentage of BIPoC in the community, police departments are more heavily armed, confrontational, and systemically racist. Philadelphia has an especially bad history of racist and violent police officers. As people living in Swarthmore, we cannot justifiably say racism has no place here yet let racism happen outside of our town.
We need to become conscious of our privilege, and one way of doing this is by educating ourselves and others about the injustice that BIPoC and other POC face in our society. We demand that our school district implement a mandatory course about the history of Black people in our country, and in the world, as well as present day social justice issues.
We’re calling on our school district not only to implement this curriculum, but to be actively anti-racist.
We stand in solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives while we uplift their demands.
Say their names. Black Lives Matter.
In solidarity forever,
Sunrise Wallingford-Swarthmore
Abby DiNardo, Eden Kaplinsky, Winnie Stach
Rebecca Friedman, Ella Grossman, Ellen Chapman, Owen Burk
Zoe Feinberg, Will Garrett, Sylvan Prey-Harbaugh, Ava Manaker
The Equity-Centered Education Initiative
Pendo Kamau, Jane Schmucki, Elia Brooks-Sims
Sunrise is a youth-led movement dedicated to combating the climate crisis while creating millions of good jobs.
The Equity-Centered Education Initiative is a group of SHHS students demanding racial literacy, a change of school climate, and the implementation of a mandatory course about historical and contemporary injustice.