Student Role In Diversity To Be Explored At Lawrenceville School

LAWRENCEVILLE, NJ — The Lawrenceville School and WNYC Radio are coming together to lead a community conversation on race. “The Power of Youth Movements: From Little Rock to Lawrenceville — and Beyond” will take place on Wednesday, April 25, in the School’s Woods Memorial Hall Heely Room at 6:45 p.m.

It is part of WNYC’S “The Other Box Project on Love, Race, and Identity.” The event is open to the public, free of charge, with no tickets required. The Lawrenceville School is located at 2500 Main Street, Lawrenceville, and a campus map can be found at www.lawernceville.org.

Jami Floyd will moderate the program, which will explore the role of students' identity in their activism and the changing nature of student struggle from the Civil Rights Movement to #BlackLivesMatter to the Women’s March to the #MarchForOurLives. Floyd is the host of WNYC’S “All Things Considered,” and conceived, created, and curated “The Other Box Project.”

Speakers will include Civil and Human Rights Attorney Raymond Brown, who was one of the student leaders of the 1968 Columbia University Uprising, and Ruha Benjamin, associate professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Princeton University and Jared Marcelle, a freelance reporter with WNYC. Lawrenceville alum/Princeton Freshman Chisom Ilogu (Lawrenceville Class of 2017) will introduce the panel.

“The student movement has always been a major part of American political life. We are seeing it now, of course, with Parkland, but if you go back to the Civil Rights Era, the Little Rock Nine and the Birmingham bus boycott were very much student driven,” Floyd said. “Student movement has always been alive and well in the United States, either loudly and proudly or sometimes quietly. So we want to reexamine that now by looking at the continuum of youth movements as they are informed by the identity of the students who breathe life into them.”

WNYC’s “The Other Box Project on Love Race and Identity” is a series of public conversations about love, family, and the evolving notions of racial identity. The “Other Box” refers to the dilemma faced by multiracial Americans each time they fill out an insurance form, take a standardized test, or participate in the U.S. Census.

Until 2000, individuals were required to check just one box – to choose between the heritage of their biological mothers and fathers. There was no box for multiracial or biracial Americans – just an “Other” box to check.

The project launched on the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s "Loving v. Virginia" decision, a precedent that forever changed the lives of interracial couples and allowed their children and grandchildren to express their identities in unprecedented ways.

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