NAACP’s Freedom Fighters Week begins Feb. 24 with a mock sit-in in the student center cafeteria. The organization got a head start on Freedom Fighters Week by hosting a showing of The Butler on Feb. 17 to about 20 students.
“It really brings people back to what black history is about, and not just the fun of it, but the real hard problems that we’ve had,” Shayla Owens, freshman in nursing and secretary of NAACP, said. “I hope they see that we’ve grown so much as a race and as a country, and we still have so much to do, but what we have done should be rewarded and looked upon as great.”
Members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority were invited to help with the showing. They provided free drinks while NAACP provided free popcorn.
“We just wanted to make sure that each organization that is an ethnic organization was in on it and they all got to participate in everything we did for Black History Month,” Owens said.
Olivia Whitley, senior in international studies and president of NAACP, said the mock sit-in on Feb. 24 is an attempt to educate students on desegregation as well as pay homage to one of the first sit-ins, which she said was the college student’s contribution to the civil rights era.
“We’re kind of channeling the four college freshmen that sat-in in Jonesborough, N.C., the very first one that’s documented,” Whitley said. “For the most part we know our history, but it’s the education of people who aren’t people of color so that everybody’s opening those blinders of things that they either ignore in the history classes or they ignore on TV or they ignore in society.”
NAACP will host a voter registration event on Feb. 25 in the Sundance food court to inform students on voting rights. Whitley said she is deputized to register voters and will be registering students at the event.
“My initial hope is to just educate people on the process that was desegregation. It just didn’t happen over night,” Whitley said. “Even here when we were just Hardin Junior College, the desegregation process had to occur. There had to be people with initiatives to get MSU to what it is now, so we’re trying to bring it home to how it affects you.”