Nebeu Abraha, sophomore and co-chair of the Black Student Union, said that President Tiefenthaler’s email sent the day after the incident calling the anonymous hate cowardly and bigoted wasn’t enough. Abraha said it wasn't until freshman Nomfundo Nondumiso Mcina half-jokingly suggested that they cancel class that the group conceived the idea of the assembly to take the place of the scheduled First Monday talk and some of class.

Organizing such a large scale event in just a few days proved to be a formidable challenge. “We spent all of block break pretty much trapped in a room together for six to ten hours a day working on this.” said Lucas, one of the student organizers. They pooled all of their resources in order to make the first Monday event happen.

 

Abraha decided to use a project he had worked on the previous year on his own time as part of the presentation. He had made several recordings of minority students recounting various experiences of microaggressions. Lucas talked about how they chose certain people to prepare speeches “to help people feel more comfortable speaking and opening up.” She explained that “between all of us we knew a fairly wide range of people around campus and so we tried to contact a couple of people each of us knew.”

Abraha stated that he was initially distrustful of how the administration would respond to their request and plans, but after working with them to make the event happen he believed they were truly doing all they could to help. Lucas described how the group emailed President Tiefenthaler with their request for an all school assembly on Friday, Nov. 13th. Tiefenthaler responded within a half hour, and the next day they found themselves with Tiefenthaler in her house along with the deans. The students and administrators spent three hours discussing how to most effectively execute their plan. Lucas recalled that before this exchange the group went in with outlooks “ranging from pessimistic to realistically optimistic.” She admitted that, “We were very surprised when the administration was very receptive.”

 

The assembly took place on Nov. 16th after a block break of hard work and coordination. It began with Abraha’s compilation of recordings playing throughout Reid Arena. The various anecdotes of microagressions highlighted the fact that microaggressive comments most often arise out of ignorance and insensitivity rather than a blatant act of hurtfulness or discrimination. Various students then stood up in the crowd and shared different perspectives and personal experiences.

Abraha and Lucas both stated that their group had selected certain people to prepare short speeches, who were carefully chosen to appeal to the broadest range of the student body as possible. In addition to students of minority groups, they asked white students, the hockey captain, and fraternity leaders to be prepared to share their thoughts. The presentation concluded with speeches from student government representative Mohammad Mia, and President Tiefenthaler. Their message was clear: the hatred will not be tolerated or ignored.