Silently, about 200 people collapsed on top of one another on the middle of Turlington Plaza. They lay lifelessly for four and a half minutes.
Cardboard signs read “AmeriKKKa we can’t breathe,” “Justice for who?” and “I am your citizen, too, America.” Shirts read “black lives matter.”
Students and community members marched onto the plaza with red-taped mouths at 12:35 p.m. Friday to stage a die-in following the non-indictment of the police officer who killed Eric Garner.
The group, dressed mostly in black, formed a circle, and two people shouting, “we can’t breathe” cued the collapse. They lay silently on the ground, symbolizing the four and a half hours Michael Brown’s body lay lifeless, said Dream Defender member Trenton Brooks.
“It is a die-in, but it’s actually the opposite,” the 22-year-old Santa Fe College anthropology sophomore said. “This is life. We’re going to live to the end.”
At least 15 organizations were present, including the UF Dream Defenders, UF Institute of Black Culture, Students for a Democratic Society and the Women’s Student Association.
They met the night before at the Civic Media Center to hash out the impromptu event, Brooks said. On Friday, they lay in solidarity with others around the nation who have been angered by the deaths of unarmed black males.
“We were born to do this,” he said. “I really feel like I didn’t really do anything new. All I did is speak for those who didn’t have the opportunity to do so. This campus is going to start to shift. It’s going to change. We’re a unit. We’re a community. And we’re going to build that. And that’s what I tried to do.”
Diamond Delancy, a UF public relations and women’s studies junior, said she found out about the die-in Thursday.
“The community has really gotten together,” the 19-year-old said. “What one person knows, we all know. And I think that’s important: to come together and fight together.”
Unity brought the organizations together.
“It shows that if you’re killing one of us, you’re killing all of us,” Brooks said. “We all can’t go down. There’s not just one body in the street. We have to come together so there’s no more bodies in the street.”
Delancy said she thinks the die-in made a difference. Awareness is just the beginning, and action follows right after.
“We can’t breathe anymore. We can’t stand for this injustice anymore. We’re not going to just sit down and die anymore,” she said. “We’re going to fight for our lives. I think it’s important that the world start to wake up to injustices, and this is the first step — to put it out on display in front of campus and say, ‘Wake up.’ You need to fight for your right to breathe.”
[A version of this story ran on page 1 on 12/7/2014]
