the Student Struggle Against the Re-Segregation of UNC Chapel Hill
The Triangle Gaza Solidarity Encampments
(Photo Courtesy of Rafael Linhares)
On April 26, UNC students and allied organizations, inspired by Columbia University’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment and dozens of other solidarity encampments across the nation, launched a solidarity encampment of their own. A week before UNC’s peaceful student action, the New York City police department, at the request of the University‘s President violently swept Columbia’s non-violent Gaza Solidarity Encampment.1Minouche Shafik, “Letter to NYPD – Apr. 30 | Public Safety,” Columbia University in the City of New York, April 30, 2024, https://publicsafety.columbia.edu/news/letter-nypd-apr-30. Columbia’s brutal retaliation ignited global outrage, and students collectively organized their campuses to disrupt the genocidal status quo and force the world to bear witness to the atrocities in Palestine.
UT Arlington
Tokyo University
University of Toronto
University of Sydney
After months of rallies, panels, emails, and meetings, UNC SJP was at an impasse with the University administration. There was no movement on disclosure or divestment of University finances. In addition to serving as an act of solidarity with other Pro-Palestinian students, the Triangle Gaza Solidarity Encampment was also an escalatory step to get the University to engage in good faith with their demands.
For a little over 90 hours, UNC Students for Justice in Palestine members, joined by people from across the Triangle, occupied the space, attempting to educate administrators, faculty, staff, students, and anyone passing through. By capturing and holding such a central University space, the Pro-Palestine protesters demanded to be seen, to be impossible to ignore, in order to stop business as usual.
(Photo Courtesy of Rafael Linhares)During the evening of Sunday, April 28, on Polk Place, tents are reassembled as part of the pro-Palestinian encampment at UNC. (Photos Courtesy of Heather Diehl and Rafael Linhares)
The encampment disrupted the rhythms of everyday campus life. Sleeping bags, signs, music, and chants filled the quad, recasting the symbolic heart of the University as a persistent reminder of the ongoing atrocities across the globe. It served as a reminder that while students on this campus were preparing to celebrate the last day of classes and begin finals season, 88,000 higher education students in Gaza were not afforded these same opportunities as Universities in Gaza were indiscriminately all obliterated.2Sondos Fayoumi, “Every University in Gaza Has Been Destroyed. So Have These Students’ Dreams.,” The Nation, July 26, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/gaza-students-future/. Instead, these students and their families were fleeing and sheltering from being indiscriminately bombed.
Simultaneously, as the encampment forced attention onto Palestine and to pressure the University administration to disclose their finances and cut all University dollars invested in Israel, it also served as a space for new possibilities, constructing alternative ways of organizing, relating, and imagining what the University could be.
The University administration has historically isolated itself from the surrounding community. As Davarian L. Baldwin writes in In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, this pattern is reflected in a national trend in which universities have “wall[ed] themselves off from the low-income and largely nonwhite populations,” effectively functioning as semi-autonomous governing bodies whose expansion has plundered nearby urban life. At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, these dynamics are reflected in the repeated encroachment into historically Black neighborhoods, which has led to the displacement of Black residents. Because of its land acquisition, tax-exempt status, and limited accountability, the University has reinforced and reproduced systems of racial inequality. For example, many researchers have connected the University’s presence to the local Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools (CHCCS) having the second largest achievement gaps between Black and white students in the United States.3Julia Masters, “Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Is North Carolina’s Best School District-but Not so Much If You’re Black,” INDY Week, January 11, 2023, https://indyweek.com/news/chapel-hill-carrboro-city-schools-racial-achievement-gap/.
Participants in the encampment rejected this prescribed version of the University as a parasitic landlord. Instead, they saw a vision of the University as a place to cultivate strong, reciprocal relationships within and beyond campus walls. The encampment relied heavily on community support: restaurants donated an abundance of food; and community members drove long distances to deliver dozens of cases of water bottles and other supplies; and when calls for assistance circulated, people would stop by after work to donate supplies. These loving acts of solidarity were pivotal to the success of the encampment and bridged ties between the campus and the wider community.
University administrators’ priority is to make policies for student, staff, and faculty populations. However, these decisions they make extend far beyond campus boundaries, shaping the lives of people in the surrounding communities as well. Policies related to housing, transportation, safety, and local development directly affect residents who may have no formal affiliation with the institution.
Recognizing this broader impact affirms that those who live beyond the borders of campus are not separate from the University’s influence and that they can impact the University.
Participants of the encampment invited unhoused folks on Franklin, a population often forgotten or antagonized by the University administration and student population. At the encampment, the unhoused folks were offered a free meal and a place to stay. In exchange, they shared their life stories, engaged in programming, and watched the encampment alongside students.
By challenging entrenched power structures, the encampment transcended rigid borders and transformed into a connective site linking the past, present, and future while also redefining relationships among students, staff, faculty, and the broader community. The encampment space itself created the culture/world that students were dreaming about. We asked ethical questions – ones that should have answers. Perhaps chief among them was: what’s wrong with standing against the killing of whole populations of people, non-human animals, and plant life?
Cat at encampment (Photos Courtesy of Grace Richards)Encampment member holds baby after children’s story hour (Photos Courtesy of Grace Richards)Derrick waking up to cicada on sleeping bag (Photos Courtesy of Derrick Davis)Encampment participants collectively gardening and tending to plant life (Photos Courtesy of Derrick Davis)
Encampment participants radically (re)imagined what they wanted to see in the world and transformed the encampment into a safe, accommodating, and inhabitable environment. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes, “Freedom is a place that means we make it, and we make it again, we make it in all these different configurations.”4Ruth Wilson Gilmore et al., “Freedom Is a Place. Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Abolition Geography,” GEOUSP Espaço e Tempo (Online) 28, no. 1 (June 17, 2024), https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2179-0892.geousp.2024.222824Students actively worked to shape the University into a space of freedom. The first couple of days of the encampment featured extensive programming and free resources: tables with free medical supplies, meals, and snacks; a wall of water bottles; art-making sessions; and educational teach-ins.
(Photos Courtesy of Derrick Davis)(Photos Courtesy of Derrick Davis)UNC SJP member holds a children’s story hour on the morning of April 27, 2024. (Photos Courtesy of Grace Richards)
“I can’t remember how much I was here. I know I was here on and off, but one of the most beautifulest moments ever because you literally have everyone just taking care of each other. I think the part that they won’t show on the media is people just laughing together, just hanging out, just chilling, or lying out in the grass. It’s actually very spiritual too, because we’re meant to live in this world in very natural ways, and connect to the earth and land. I feel like a lot of energy from the land had just came back out, and on top of it being very joyful, especially in a time where we could be really sad, it was also very intentional. And education opportunities. So like workshops, there was a film screening, that’s where I learned about Leila Khaled. Basically, I just started learning even more while there, on top of meeting new people. That’s where I met Sam, I met a bunch of other friends, comrades at, and it was just really cool. And on top of that food was a thing, we knew that food was being provided, there was really an excess of food. Probably one of my favorite pictures is there was a wall, which I have all these pictures, if you want me to share them with you I can, there was a wall of water bottle cases, and just food supplies that were present because community showed up so much, even people couldn’t make it to the encampment, so people were bringing supplies. People were donating money, and it was just really beautiful.”– Derrick Davis
Medical Table at Triangle Gaza Solidarity Encampment (Photo Courtesy of Rafael Linhares.)Supplies of snacks, water and first aid (Photo Courtesy Heather Diehl)Free Food (Photo Courtesy of Kennedy Cox)Art Station with Free Art Supplies (Photo Courtesy of Derrick Davis)
The encampment was also constantly evolving to meet the needs of its constituents, including students, staff, faculty, and Triangle area community members. After receiving critiques of inaccessibility, student organizers put down duct tape to mark accessible routes for wheelchair users.
(Photo Courtesy of Derrick Davis)
Through this collective community-building, the encampment was able to shelter, feed, and educate hundreds of its members — all without University administration institutional support. In fact, the encampment members adapted community-oriented safety practices in recognition of the University’s failures to keep its constituents safe and in fact historical hostility towards students – especially queer and students of color. The University administration’s “safety” is ostensibly largely confined to the UNC Police Department.5UNC-Chapel Hill Office of Ethics and Policy, Review of Current UNC Safety Policies for the UNC Campus Safety Commission, July 10, 2019, https://csc.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1094/2020/02/FINAL-Campus-Safety-Commission-Initial-Policy-Research_1.pdf Instead of depending on harmful carceral systems that uphold anti-Blackness, encampment members trained in de-escalation marshaled the borders of the encampment, members travelled in pairs and masked to prevent the spread of illness.
The University, organized systems that prioritize profit margins and demands constant productivity with its tenure processes, escalating student debt, alongside enduring ties to slavery and settler colonialism, cultivates an environment that reproduces racial hierarchies and promotes bootstraps individualism amongst its constituents. The encampment, however, emerged as a site of continual community-building and freedom-making.
“Those were some of the best days of my life. But I can tell you, I’ve never been more stressed. It’s like, it’s so much because most people are not sleeping, and the exhaustion doesn’t help anything. Yeah, there’s stress from the unpredictability of the administration that causes a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress. You invite, I don’t know, 200 to 500 people together and try to make decisions, and we and it was really hard to know how to make decisions, because there’s the people that put this thing together that are trying to make decisions, but then naturally, of course, it feels like exclusive that there’s a decision making body. So then, how do we make decisions horizontally, as a 200-person collective that has an extremely diverse makeup of even political affiliation and identification? Quite literally, student anarchists want to make different decisions than student socialists. That’s just like how it goes. And so, how do we have horizontal decision-making when baked into the political makeup of the encampment are different ideologies, and I don’t think we ever really figured that out, but we definitely were in the process of growing into a harmonious decision-making process. I think we just learned that decision-making cannot be behind a wall. You have to open it to all of the people that are involved, even though that makes it really, really, really difficult, but at least then there’s transparency and honesty.” — Lily
A memo from Jewish Voice for Peace praised the encampment’s work towards “collective liberation”
“I remember the first day when I went out there, we put the tents up, and people were just out there studying together because it was around the time of finals season. So it was a space where people were sharing book recommendations or studying together. I remember that first evening, we had Muslim students praying, we had Jewish students praying, we had Christian students praying. And it was very special to see all three Abrahamic religions in the broader conversation of this specific topic are kind of seen as forces fighting against each other. The Eastern Islam that’s fighting against Western Judeo-Christian values all that bullshit unraveled in real time, and see that again on a basic human level, we have our different cultures, we have our different experiences with our God, and all of those things like that, or Gods or whatever. But we’re willing to sit here and respect each other.” — Sam Scarborough.
People pray during a Shabbat service, a Jewish day of rest and celebration, organized by the encampment on the evening of April 27, 2024. (Photo Courtesy of Grace Richards)Protesters pray as the sun sets on Friday, April 26, 2024. (Photo Courtesy of Heather Diehl)
This microcosmic world with free food, free medical care, collective collaboration, and multireligious intergenerational community revealed to us that if we imagined, believed ,and were willing to fight for it, a liberated future was possible.
