Students at March For Our Lives UNC advocate for intersectional change

After the Aug. 28 shooting on UNC’s campus, first-year student Samuel Scarborough joined March For Our Lives UNC as a communications liaison and activist to put his feelings into a place where he could advocate for change. 

The chapter was formed by students at the University following a national March for Our Lives movement that began after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in 2018. MFOL UNC advocates for gun violence prevention and intersecting issues on both a state and national level.

Senior Alexander Denza, co-president for MFOL UNC, said the chapter has an estimated 40 to 60 members who attend events and contribute to organizing efforts. 

“We must escape the paradox of gun violence prevention organizing,” Denza said. “It waits until we get to a shooting or an anniversary of a shooting.”

In September, MFOL UNC organizers held a protest at the N.C. General Assembly building in Raleigh, where they were removed by police. A video of the students chanting “vote them out” to the legislators was shared by prominent gun control activist, David Hogg. 

Apart from state activism, students from UNC's chapter of MFOL have also received national attention. 

Denza and junior Andrew Sun, the chapter’s lead writer, wrote an op-ed titled, “We will not wait for the next school shooting,” in January. It was published in over fifty different college newspapers across the country, including The Daily Tar Heel, the Yale Daily News and The Duke Chronicle, and was signed by 144 students representing 90 different student groups. 

Sun, who began writing the op-ed in October, said that his passion for writing is a way for him to share stories. He said he wanted to show their activism is proactive rather than reactive. 

“We wanted to disentangle organizing on gun violence from survivorship,” Sun said. “We wanted to make the very simple point that you should not have to be a survivor to be an advocate.”

Denza said he received a message from students at the University of Southern California saying the op-ed inspired them to start a MFOL chapter at their university. The op-ed also gained the attention of President Biden, who quote-tweeted the op-ed along with a statement that called for Congress to take action toward gun reform.

Scarborough also said the organization’s work has expanded to include global issues, such as the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. 

“You can't just be against gun violence in the United States and not against gun violence and the bombings and the starvation violence that's happening in Palestine,” he said.

At the Poor People’s Campaign on Mar. 2, March, Denza and Scarborough announced that they are in the process of building The Southern Student Action Coalition. Denza said that the coalition will unite student groups across North Carolina and the South to take a stance against intersectional injustices that stem from colonialism.

“It's about looking at things from an anti-colonial lens of figuring out how we can dismantle the structures of colonialism that are hurting us, and when you look at gun violence specifically, gun violence is almost central to colonial violence,” Scarborough said. 

MFOL UNC is continuing to work with the Marian Cheek Jackson Center, which aims to address housing justice and preserve Black history in North Carolina. The chapter is also in the process of building a community library of activist literature.

“It's never just about one issue, though,” Denza said. “It's all these issues that intersect, and the way that we will come to a society that actually moves forward on these issues is when we unite together across all issues.”

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