Black UMD creates and ranks 25 demands for President Pines

Screengrab of a post from @BlackTerpsMatter on Instagram. The post contains the link to the 25 demands and allows the UMD community the ability to rank each demand in a matter of importance. (@BlackTerpsMatter/Instagram)

The University of Maryland’s President Darryll J. Pines’ anti-racist student working group, comprised of undergraduate and graduate students, has taken one step forward by creating a list of 25 demands. 

Pines met with 32 student organization leaders before choosing five at-random for his student working group. These demands are specifically by and for the Black community at the University of Maryland. The demands were created through a series of town halls, protests, and petitions. 

They may be reminiscent of demands created by the Black Terps Matter movement. Black Terps Matter held their first protest on June 25th, 2020 to encourage a conversation about community safety. Here, student organizers senior government and politics and public leadership major Nadia Owusu, senior philosophy, politics, and economics major Saba Tshibaka, and senior government and politics and public policy major Alysa Conway finalized a list of 10 demands.

Black Terps Matter’s demands ranged from increasing diversity at the university, defunding and demilitarizing the University of Maryland Police Department (UMPD), and providing a permanent memorial for Lt. Richard Collins III, who was killed in a hate crime on campus in 2017. 

Tshibaka is not only a Black Terps Matter organizer but also a part of Pine’s student working group. 

“None of those things are going to solve the issues, none of them,” Tshibaka says regarding the list of 25 demands. 

She notes that while they are community-generated, they are “not pointing towards the issues that the community most direly needs to face.” 

The anti-racist working group has created a survey for students to rank the 25 demands. The survey allows the UMD student body to remain involved in these community-generated demands. 

These demands are similar to Black Terps Matter’s demands, but also include specific ways to redistribute funding from UMPD to the Black community. For instance, one demand is to “reevaluate and reduce the excessive funding to UMPD publicly. Redistribute these funds and resources to Black organizations on campus, Nyumburu Cultural Center, and the African American studies department.”

Other demands on the survey include immediate removal of hate speech, partnering with Prince George’s County schools to increase student acceptance to UMD (especially Black students), adjusting all major curriculum to include Black figures, and bias incident training/support. 

Tshibaka thinks that it’s important to recognize that nothing is ever guaranteed. At the very least, the survey and list of demands serve as a way to increase awareness about issues pertinent to the Black UMD community.

There are concerns that the ranking of demands means that some will be forgotten. Junior government and politics major Imani Nokuri appreciates that there are a variety of issues being recognized. 

She emphasizes that these demands are not an issue of “what is most important.” Although, Nokuri does say that “disarming and the demilitarization of UMPD is pretty important, because it is putting students in danger, and that should be first and foremost.”

Unfortunately, this has not been the first time that the university's Black community has been concerned with the school’s handling of racial issues on campus.

Back in 2016, a coalition of 25 student organizations called ProtectUMD, issued 64 demands that reflected issues pertinent to many different marginalized communities on campus. Similarly, they expressed concerns about a lack of progress and unfulfilled promises. 

However, Nokuri remains optimistic, believing that this is an “opportune time for us to go and make some change.”