Cuse Youth BLM organizers hope to combat overpolicing in schools
Gabe Stern l Enterprise Editor
Cuse Youth BLM began with a group chat of four people.
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Ruell Branch had never considered himself a leader — until he found himself leading a crowd of thousands through the streets of Syracuse, during a protest he helped organize.
Branch, a Syracuse University freshman, is the co-founder of Cuse Youth Black Lives Matter, a high school student-led branch of the greater Syracuse Black Lives Matter group. The group’s first demonstration on June 12, the one Branch led, attracted an unexpectedly large crowd, Branch said.
“When the rally came up and I had to speak in front of thousands of people, I gained that confidence,” Branch said.
Cuse Youth BLM formed last spring, when Branch was a senior at Henninger High School and after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who is white, killed George Floyd. As protests condemning Floyd’s alleged murder swept across the country, Branch and a friend decided they wanted to organize their own demonstration against police brutality and racial injustice.
But what started as plans for one protest quickly grew into a youth-led organization determined to create change in Syracuse. The movement’s main goals now include removing school resource officers from city schools and ending what they say is overpolicing in their school districts.
Cuse Youth BLM began with a group chat of four people. After about a week, the chat had expanded to include about 200 people.
There are now hundreds of members in the GroupMe for Cuse Youth BLM, encompassing high school and college students from both Syracuse and the surrounding suburbs. The members meet on Zoom every Thursday evening to discuss the group’s current agenda, such as fundraising and planning events.
As involvement in Cuse Youth BLM increased, the group began to organize itself and assign members different roles, said Lauren Ashby, a Syracuse native and member of Cuse Youth BLM.
Ashby, who is a senior at Sarah Lawrence College, recalls holding several meetings a week with the group’s organizers in preparation for the June protest. Her assignment was to work out the health and safety logistics of the June protest, such as supplying masks to protesters. She now helps coordinate fundraising for the group.
“It became a full-time job for a few weeks there trying to get it all handled,” she said.
Madelyn Malgieri, Cuse Youth BLM’s media director, has attended protests since she was in sixth grade. But attending one she’d helped organize from the beginning was a life-changing experience, she said.
“It was really emotional to see that many people show up to something you saw grow from the beginning,” said Malgieri, a sophomore at Fayetteville-Manlius High School. “I was there when there were less than 50 people in the GroupMe.”
Shukri Mohamed, a Syracuse native and senior at Le Moyne College, also helps coordinate the group’s events, securing permits and finding an American Sign Language translator for rallies. A week before the June 12 protest, Mohamed and a few other Cuse Youth BLM leaders co-hosted a rally outside City Hall with a few other local activists groups, including Syracuse Black Lives Matter.
Mohamed remembers seeing more and more people in the crowd as she approached the top of City Hall steps, where she worked up the courage to address the crowd.
“I could never relive that moment,” Mohamed said. “I get shivers thinking about how spectacular it was to be standing in front of 2,000 Syracuse people and to know they were all listening to what was coming out of youth’s voices, to what was coming out of our mouths.”
When Branch arrived at Clinton Square in June, he only saw about 20 to 30 people and worried not many more would show up.
But after almost an hour, the crowd had grown to over 100. Their route merged with other protesting groups, including Last Chance for Change, until thousands had joined them in marching through the city streets.
“It just felt so right in that moment,” Mohamed said. “Like, wow, this is how I know times are changing.”
After the first march, Cuse Youth BLM members began discussing what they should do next, and how they could keep the momentum from their first march going, Malgieri said.
Members of the group asked themselves what impacts students the most, Mohamed said. They decided to focus their efforts on their campaign to remove school resource officers, who are police officers assigned to work in city schools.
School resource officers often arrive at altercations between students and other incidents too late, and react in a way that escalates the situation, Mohamed said. Cuse Youth BLM has pushed for alternatives to the officers, including starting a student intervention program that brings counselors to schools to prevent altercations from happening rather than responding when they do, she said.
Cuse Youth BLM launched an online campaign to gather student testimonies about their experiences with school resource officers, which the group plans to present to local school districts, Malgieri said.
“(School resource officers) are just something that negatively affect brown and Black students in school, which is supposed to be, as they all say, a comforting and welcoming place,” Malgieri said.
Instagram has been the group’s main source of communication with the public, Mohamed said. Maglieri has leveraged her passion for digital design to create promotional content for the Cuse Youth BLM account.
Malgieri has also met with faculty and administrators at her school to discuss the removal of school resource officers. She has made it clear Cuse Youth BLM won’t back down from this demand, she said.
Mohamed said local leaders have been slow to listen to students’ demands, though. She was shocked to hear a member of the Syracuse City School District Board of Education refer to “gangs” in city schools to justify maintaining school resource officers.
“Do you think gangs are just running around in the hallways?” Mohamed said. “The majority of the students are there to learn and go home.”
Cuse Youth BLM hopes to continue engaging with school district officials, as well as promoting their campaign on social media. The group’s petition to remove school resource officers from Syracuse schools has garnered over 1,200 signatures, Mohamed said.
“You want to go into a school feeling safe, like people aren’t criminalizing you every time you step through the door,” Mohamed said. “That’s the basis of our demand. We just want to feel safe and comfortable in our schools.”
Since starting at SU, Branch has taken a step back from Cuse Youth BLM. Although he isn’t currently active and attending meetings, he feels secure knowing he has left the movement he started in the hands of its current leaders.
“It feels good knowing they all believe the same thing I do,” Branch said. “They all want to create change.”
While Ashby regularly attends the groups’ meetings and remains actively involved, she said the high school students living in Syracuse remain at the forefront.
After watching many of the group’s original leaders leave the city for college, Malgieri felt grateful to be trusted with her leadership role at such a young age. She said she wants adults and school officials to take Cuse Youth BLM seriously and know that its members are dedicated to change.
“We may be a bunch of young adults, but we aren’t going to back down on what we’re demanding,” she said. “We’re going to continue and we’re going to make some serious changes, no matter how long that takes.”
Published on September 30, 2020 at 1:15 am
Contact Sarah: scalessa@syr.edu | @sarahalessan
