Tallahassee, FL – Tuesday, November 19, Student Activists at Florida State University came together to condemn the institution’s complicity in the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. Student demonstrators laid themselves along the graveled concrete, just outside one of the campus’s most busy academic buildings and refused to move – symbolizing the 40,000 plus Palestinians killed since October 7, 2023.

The demonstration was organized by the Tallahassee Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in coalition with other community advocacy groups. The turnout was about 30 people, with an even greater number of law enforcement watching from afar.

Throughout the demonstration, student activists held up signs detailing the lives of Palestinian children whose stories had been cut short, while others stood up and spoke against the university’s cooperation with war profiteers.

As soon as the student activists began to lead the crowd in chant, campus police quickly intervened, ordering the demonstration to “quiet down,” lest the FSU students studying inside “be made aware of their university’s complicity in genocide,” as one of the activists powerfully put it.

Eventually it rained. Despite the unfortunate weather, the student activists picked up their things and got together for a final march, solemnly chanting affirmations of Palestinian liberation.

Florida State University (FSU) and Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University (FAMU) have a joint engineering school, with long-held ties to weapons manufacturers Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and the Boeing corporation, among others. These corporations sponsor internships, make massive donations to the universities, and often appear as guest speakers on campus in engineering classrooms in the hopes that new talent will funnel into the weapons manufacturing industry. These corporations actively produce and sell the weapons given to Israel, which are then used to carry out the televised genocide.

FSU sophomore JJ Glueck has been organizing with the Tallahassee SDS for the better part of a year now and was beyond enthusiastic to talk about FSU’s involvement with the genocide, and her own, deeply passionate reasons for activism.

Glueck stated, “If you, as a person in Palestine who has experienced genocide, can continue to resist and speak, the least I can do is speak up for them in my own country, playground, and backyard and try my absolute best to demand FSU divest from Israel.

Glueck’s advocacy, and “radicalization,” as she puts it, is anything but new, with roots tracing far back to her youth. Glueck was in elementary school during the Ferguson unrest - a series of large-scale protests against police violence and militarization, sparked by the killing of African American Michael Brown in Saint Louis, Missouri. She witnessed the protests firsthand from her car window.

This experience had certainly taken root in her; by the time she had moved to Florida and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 had begun, she was out there with the rest of them – organizing and doing the work.

“I saw what police officers did to protesters. I saw it when I was young in Saint Louis, and I saw it again in Florida – I saw what police did to Black people. That was my radicalizing experience.” Glueck’s passion for advocacy didn’t end at racial injustice in America, however. The similarities between the struggles of African Americans in the U.S. and Palestinians in the Middle East were a turning point for Glueck.

“I think back to what I remember of the Ferguson [unrest], I remember seeing that from a car, but also seeing it on the news, and seeing the way the police responded to those protests; seeing the way the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] responds to the people of Palestine, if you take out the headlines, it’s the same god damn thing. It’s so eerily similar, and they’re shooting people in the streets, massive amounts of people, our police don’t look that different - it should terrify all Americans,” stated Glueck.

Repression at FSU

During the wave of pro-Palestinian student encampments across the country, FSU students held their own, only for campus police to relocate the protesters several times, ultimately turning on sprinklers to disburse demonstrators.

Tallahassee’s SDS was then interrupted again by campus police. During SDS’s general body meeting set to discuss tactics on keeping protests safe, campus police arrived and ordered them to relocate from the Landis Green, despite it being designated as a “free speech zone.”

Police presence escalated further after Ron Desantis signed a bill into law banning DEI initiatives in public Florida colleges. SDS held a protest in opposition to the law, only for police to watch from afar in a militarized armored vehicle, as what Glueck described to be an intimidation tactic.

Then, Tallahassee’s SDS was de-listed as a registered student organization after protesting at the university’s board of trustees meeting. The university alleged that the students failed to leave after being asked by police, despite video evidence of the contrary. Tallahassee’s SDS released a statement condemning the university’s decision, alleging that FSU has “shown their fear of the student movement by wielding campus police in cowardice.”

At the time of writing, members of Tallahassee’s SDS are currently undergoing mandatory disciplinary hearings at the hands of the FSU administration. Considering the University of South Florida’s willingness to expel student protesters, these disciplinary hearings aren’t to be ignored, and could have grave, disproportionate consequences for the students activists involved.

Students across Florida have shown their teeth, and university administrations have done the same. If the suppression of FSU students is anything to go off of, life as a politically conscious Florida college student may just get worse – somehow. Only continued activism and organizing can prevent this and build the student movement into an even more powerful vehicle for striking blows against this rotten system.

#TallahasseeFL #Tally #TallySDS #SDS #FAMU #FSU #Desantis #NorthropGrumman #LockheedMartin #Boeing #FreePalestine