“I simply recognized a grave injustice was occurring and I felt so deeply compelled to respond to it that I was willing to be arrested over it,” Bree Newsome said.
On Tuesday, the Multicultural Student Services Center hosted its annual Martin Luther King, Jr. commemoration featuring Newsome as a guest speaker.
The event was sponsored by many student organizations including the Multicultural Unity and Student Involvement Council, The Black Student Union, Powerful, Independent, Notoriously, Knowledgeable (P.I.N.K.) Women, Brothers on a New Direction (BOND) and Uhuru Sasa.
Newsome is an artist and activist best known for climbing a flagpole outside of the South Carolina Capitol building and removing a Confederate battle flag in 2015.
Newsome immediately addressed the audience of over 100 students by reminding them of the power of student activism.
“I hope that you all recognize that students have and continue to play a major role in social change,” Newsome said. “It’s also one of the reasons why your access to education is often under attack by people who are intimidated by the power that students can exercise.”
Although Newsome has been invited to speak at numerous events she acknowledged that none have felt more consequential than this year.
Newsome witnessed the invasion of the United States Capitol building in January following the election of Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof to the Senate. She noted the ongoing trauma caused by strides towards racial equality being met with violent racist backlash.
“The site of a Confederate flag being carried through the Capitol building just hours after Georgia elected a Black man and a Jewish man to the Senate captures a dichotomy in American politics that has existed since its founding,” Newsome said.
Newsome recounted her own experience becoming involved in activism in 2013 after witnessing years of racist backlash to the election of Barack Obama.
“[In 2008], the papers were filled with headlines asking if we’d finally arrived in a post-racial America,” said Newsome. “But, by 2013, our generation was clear that the answer to that question was no, and we began to fill the streets in protest at levels not seen since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”
In 2015, Newsome and a group of grassroots activists in Charlotte, North Carolina made a plan to remove the Confederate flag waving outside of the South Carolina Capitol building in Charleston.
The flag, which was raised in the 1960s as a statement of opposition to the civil rights movement, became even more controversial following South Carolina’s refusal to lower the flag following the Charleston church shooting.
The group of nine activists agreed that Newsome would climb the flagpole assisted by James Tyson, a white man.
“We wanted to communicate to everyone that the process of dismantling racism is not just the work of those who experience racism, but also those who belong to or come out of the history of the group that has been oppressing folks,” said Newsome.
Newsome never hesitates to recount the story of how the flag came down because she wants people to understand that the plan involved several people working together from different walks of life.
According to Newsome, activism begins by studying the past to transform cultural institutions and forge new ways of thinking. She clarified that she is not fighting to preserve democracy, but rather fighting to achieve an idea of multiracial democracy that does not currently exist.
“When we understand it in that context, it calls on us to do more than passively valorize figures of the past like Dr. King,” Newsome said, “but to see … a duty and obligation to be active architects in the building of the incomplete democratic project.”