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A group of Florida high school students is waging war against a local curfew.
The law — which bars under-18s from downtown West Palm Beach after 10 o’clock on weeknights and eleven on weekends — is, they say, unconscionable age discrimination. But that’s not all.
The law exempts married young people, but not those who are out with parental permission. On the contrary, it imposes fines on parents who “knowingly permit or by insufficient control allow” their children to break the curfew. “Insufficient control” is apparently nowhere defined — is a parent whose 17-year-old is in college expected to exercise “sufficient control” to keep him or her indoors at night?
The most bizarre — and, in a bizarre way, comforting — provision of the two-year-old law is one which exempts young people who are “attending or traveling directly to or from an activity that involves the exercise of rights protected under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution” from the curfew.
That’s right. The curfew as written only applies to those young people who don’t intend to speak while they’re out on the town. If you’re going to be exercising your freedom of speech (or assembly, or religion, or the press, or, you know, petitioning the government for redress of grievances), you’re golden. If you’re heading out to sit by your grandmother who’s in a coma, though, you’re getting a ticket.
(Only not really. The city is mostly just using the law as a mechanism for rousting young people rather than going through the hassle of ticketing them — as of the end of March it had issued a thousand warnings but only five citations.)
It’s ridiculous, is what it is, and the National Youth Rights Association of Southeast Florida is doing something about it.
NYRASEFL leaders Zach Goodman and Jeffrey Nadel (both 16) spent a big chunk of the spring explaining to the mayor and city commission just how farkakte the law is, but didn’t get anywhere. Then in late March they retained local civil rights attorney Barry Silver, who managed to get a law that criminalized feeding the homeless (yes, really) overturned last year. But so far he hasn’t had any luck either.
So on the evening of May 1, they took to the streets, letting the city know when and where they would defy the curfew.
During the protest they were tailed by two officers on Segways, but otherwise left alone. Their presence does seem to have gotten under the cops’ skin, though, as police ticketed several teens who were waiting for their parents outside a nearby movie theater as the protest was going on.
NYRASEFL intends to make one final effort to convince the city commission to repeal the curfew law before filing suit against the city. We’ll keep you informed as the story develops.
Update: As Justin Graham notes in comments, NYRASEFL is on Twitter, too.
Bucknell University’s administration has denied a conservative student group permission to hold an affirmative action bake sale.
Such sales, in which cupcakes and cookies are offered at full price to white male students and cheaper for women and students of color, have become a common attention-grabbing tactic for right-wing campus groups in recent years. Clashes with administrators over the sales have been common too, with sponsors claiming that they’re protected speech and universities noting that they’re — by design — a discriminatory practice.
Wikipedia has a pretty extensive article on affirmative action bake sales, including mention of a nice move by the Graduate and Professional Students of Color student organization at the University of Illinois, which responded to one such sale by holding a white privilege popcorn giveaway in which white white men were given a full bag of popcorn, while women and people of color got a mostly-empty bag.
Late last Saturday night, at about 3 am, there was a shootout at a Georgia college student’s apartment.
Charles Bailey, who was present but apparently not one of the shooters, says that two masked men burst into a party, intent on robbery and rape, and that one of the partygoers fought them off with a gun he had in his backpack. By the end of the altercation, one of the outsiders, a man named Calvin Lavant, was dead and one of the women at the party had been shot several times.
Although the incident did not take place on campus property, supporters of campus concealed carry legislation are trumpeting it as evidence of the effectiveness of armed self-defense among students.
Others aren’t convinced. A lot of Pandagon commenters, for instance, think the story doesn’t quite make sense.
Was this a massacre averted? Maybe. A drug deal gone wrong? Perhaps. Could be either, could be something else. But I have a hunch we’re all going to be hearing more about this story.
8 am Thursday update: Pandagon has been down since last night, so that link above doesn’t work.
8:30 am update: Police have arrested a man named Jamal Hill who is suspected of being the other perpetrator of the home invasion. An article on that arrest identifies Charles Bailey as living in the apartment.
The mayor of Providence, Rhode Island is looking to close a $17 million budget deficit on the backs of the city’s college students.
Mayor David Cicilline is proposing a new tax of $300 per year on all undergraduate and graduate students in the city’s four private universities. The flat tax, which he’s calling a “student municipal impact fee,” would — if he gets his way — be paid as part of students’ tuition bills.
Story via the usually-excellent blog The Kept Up Academic Librarian, which unfortunately gave it the pointlessly anti-student headline “You Attend College Here So You May As Well Pay Taxes.”
Ari Melber of The Nation has put together a sharp overview of the flap over Condoleeza Rice’srecent comments on torture, and his piece does a better job than any other I’ve read of highlighting what a student power moment this is.
Three Stanford students — one with a video camera, the other two just asking questions — buttonholed Rice at a dorm event, and changed the direction of America’s debate on Bush-era torture policy. There was none of the preening or shouting that the talk show pundits wallow in, just good, solid questions and deeply inadequate answers. (At least one of the questioners didn’t even know he was on camera — he was just engaging with Rice in the moment.)
And the three students who made it happen? Sammy Abusrur, is a sports reporter for the Stanford Daily. Jeremy Cohn is a public policy major and an alto saxophonist in the Stanford marching band. Reyna Garcia, who taped the exchange and uploaded it to YouTube, is a sophomore.
studentactivism.net 
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