Tampa Bay SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) will rally on Thursday to support increasing enrollment of Black students at the University of South Florida.
Our guest on WMNF’s MidPoint from Tampa Bay SDS was Elizabeth Kramer.
According to the Facebook event page, “USF has a 10.7% African American student body which is not only the lowest it has been in the past ten years, but also a large gap compared to Tampa and Temple Terrace’s 20-26% African American population.”
Tampa Bay SDS’s rally to encourage the University of South Florida to increase its black enrollment will be Thursday beginning at 12:10 p.m. at the Cooper Hall intersection.
We spoke about SDS’s efforts to encourage the USF administration to address the issue and about a previous demonstration on campus in which the group was confronted by other students.
Kramer says SDS raised the issue of Black enrollment at another state university, the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. There SDS demonstrators were also confronted by counter-protesters. But Kramer says, in contrast to USF, the UNF administration took actions to increase the enrollment numbers of African-American students.
Tampa Bay SDS have also rallied for other issues recently at USF as well. They’re were called, “Rally Against USF’s Silence Around Sexual Violence,” “Immigrants are here to stay,” and “Rally to defend LGBT job rights.”
Listen to the full show here:
CIW and allies protest against Wendy’s
On Monday evening there was a demonstration against Wendy’s — beforehand we previewed the rally with our guest, Roger Butterfield with Tampa Bay Fair Food. That’s a local group of consumer allies of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). Those two groups along with the Alliance for Fair Food and the Student / Farmworker Alliance sponsored Monday’s “Boycott Wendy’s Day of Action!”
WMNF reported when the Student/Farmworker Alliance announced its boycott of Wendy’s more than four-and-a-half years ago.
Comments from listeners
At the beginning of the show, we heard voicemail comments left by listeners about the last show. It was audio from a recent speech by attorney John Morgan about his campaign to add a $15 / hour minimum wage to Florida’s Constitution. There’s also a comment from a caller responding to a recent news story where a local worker was severely injured on the job by a saw.
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