Over the last couple of days, Americans across the country have been coming together to take a stand against Donald Trump’s incendiary comments about NFL players who kneel in protest. One of those people, University of Michigan graduate student Dana Greene Junior, decided to take a knee on campus for the entire day.
Greene Junior, a first-year master’s student in UM’s School of Public Health, knelt down on campus all day yesterday to protest against Donald Trump and social injustice. Greene Junior’s protest drew quite a crowd days after President Trump called the NFL players who kneel during the national anthem ‘sons of bitches’.
“Trump has made it harder for people who look like me and people who don’t look like me to walk this campus, to feel comfortable in our own skin,” Greene Junior said.
Speaking to Michigan Live, Greene Junior said that his demonstration was in support of “every student on this campus that has ever felt that they didn’t belong here.”
https://twitter.com/CEALumich/status/912345190169489413
via Michigan Live:
Greene’s demonstration Monday came after a week that saw several black students from UM targeted with racist graffiti on their name tags inside the West Quad dormitories. Students protested the incident later in the week, before protests across the NFL on Sunday.
Greene said Trump has worsened issues of race relations in the United States. While pursuing his degree, Greene said at one point he grew numb to what the country had become, but was inspired to take action by both the kneeling protests and recent incidents of racist vandalism on campus.
“He’s made it harder for people who look like me and people who don’t look like me to walk this campus, to feel comfortable in our own skin,” said Greene, who earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from UM. “I’m here to tell him and our own campus president that what we are dealing with is not OK, it’s not right. If I have to kneel here until my knees bleed, that’s what I’m going to do.”
The protest drew hundreds of people, with many people stopping by to provide him with water and food throughout the day. According to social media, Greene ended his protest at around 3:30 AM on Tuesday, September 26.
Green Junior also sent a letter to the University of Michigan president explaining his actions:
https://twitter.com/AustinMcCoy3/status/912380670881693696
Incredible stuff out of the University of Michigan. Greene Junior is a true patriot, not the fraud in the White House.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4NSOHSo9f4
