The funeral began with one voice, and then another, as students sang a mournful song while making their way to the Williamson House.
Covered in black from head to toe, students met at the Kiva on Wednesday as part of a statewide blackout response to Senate Bill 1’s effect on campus homes, identity centers, scholarship funds and majors.
“Something irreplaceable was stolen from us by people who will never understand what they have taken,” Nica Delgado, vice president of the Kent State Ohio Student Association and first-year grad student, said to the crowd. “We lost programs that saved lives, centers that we could lean on when we were afraid, people on this campus we knew loved us for what we were and not for what we could be.”
The purpose of the funeral was to show campus administrators how much students are mourning their losses under the legislation of SB 1, said Grace Goodin, president of the Kent State OSA and senior communication studies major.
In a speech about the loss of the LGBTQ+ center, Onyx Gaddis, OSA racial equity chair and junior music major, brought up that events facilitated by it have also been cut, one of which was the QTPOC, an event for queer and trans people of color to meet up.
“Now that the center is gone, it will be much harder for me to find people like me, especially as I already felt like an outsider in my classes — one of few Black students in the room, one of few queer students in the room and sometimes, the only student that held both identities in the room,” Gaddis said.
Part of the funeral’s events involved building community together by singing songs of mourning and having a series of speeches from speakers personally impacted by Kent’s identity centers. Some of these guest speakers were members from Kent’s OSA program, the NAACP and members of the former Women’s Center.
At the end of the night, students made their way to the Williamson House to either write anonymous happy memories with the former centers or their grievances with SB 1. Delgado said these letters will be posted on Kent OSA’s Instagram page or will be used to create a mural.
“To be in a higher education environment, and for that environment to not actually be ‘higher’ than anything, is quite the misnomer and the disappointment of a lifetime,” Isabelle Tooley, former treasurer of the Women’s Center and senior integrated language arts major, said in a speech. “Kent State has always been a university with teeth, and now we need dentures to chew applesauce.”
Due to the university being federally funded, anything relating to DEI might result in the university losing its funding, which might make it difficult to support the students, Delgado said.
“I feel like they did what they had to do, unfortunately,” Niko Yamamoto, a freshman biology major, said. “They’re still welcoming to people everywhere — they just had to shut down their centers because of the person currently in power and the people that voted for him.”
The OSA hopes to be able to get in contact with campus administration and work with them to figure out if they have any plans in place. For right now, they want to give them a little grace while they wait for their response, Goodin said.
“I think this funeral is the first place to start in building that community and giving people a place to go and express their frustrations,” Goodin said.
Future events have yet to be scheduled because of the uncertainty surrounding the bill. However, the OSA plans on holding more events in the future to give space to the communities that have been deeply affected by SB 1, Goodin said.
“Despite the fact that there’s people in this legislation and this general assembly that don’t want us to gather, don’t want us to be powerful, we will empower them and we will make sure every student in Ohio and on this campus is heard,” Delgado said.
Sascha Aleksich is a beat reporter. Contact her at [email protected].
Lex Radde is a reporter for KSTV. Contact her at [email protected].