The Memorial at the Stanford Oval

By Cole Manley

Placards across the Stanford Oval

George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. Tanisha Anderson. For about two months, a memorial with the names and pictures of these people and many others has graced the main entrance to the Stanford University campus, the Oval. According to The Stanford Daily’s June 13th article, “[t]he memorial was organized by three Stanford students, who... hammered stakes into the grass and taped up more than 100 signs, protected from sprinklers by plastic sleeves.” Each placard has the name and picture of a Black person killed by police brutality and racial violence. One of the organizers of the memorial told The Daily that it “serves as a physical space to simultaneously celebrate Black lives, and mourn Black deaths, in a way that encourages our local community to continue to address the pervasiveness of racial violence.”

On my runs by the area, I’ve noticed many people also slowing down and noticing the rows of simple signs covering the grass in front of the Stanford Quad. The scale of the loss is enormous. Displayed in such a beautiful and manicured place as the Stanford Oval, the memorial creates a powerful contrast.

There’s no part of the United States, not even Stanford’s gorgeous campus with its sandstone and terra-cotta Quad, that is safe from the violence of white supremacy and police brutality. The memorial forces tourists and anyone entering the campus through its main artery to acknowledge that painful truth. There is a disjuncture created between Palm Drive and its ending point at the Memorial Church. In between, we can no longer just look up at the Church or towards the foothills at the Dish, basking in sun-dappled warmth. When you look towards the Church from the Oval, your eyes move upwards from the Quad and take in the golden foothills and the great blue sky. But it is impossible not to return to the memorial, to the sense that something’s wrong in paradise.

At least I hope it’s impossible. I wonder what people think about when they see the memorial. Do they avert their eyes, or do they take it in? Many of the placards have flowers beside them. I wonder, also, what if anything will structurally change on campus.

Students have long pointed out that campus police tend to cluster around West Campus near Ujamaa, a dorm where many Black students reside that focuses on “the histories, issues, and cultures of the Black Diaspora.” I noticed it as an undergrad. When I would bike along Santa Teresa Street, one of the main roads linking West Campus to the rest of the university, I often saw police cars stationed nearby. By contrast, I hardly ever saw police cars or police officers near the Wilbur or Stern dorms on the other side of campus. The Stanford Daily recently reported on this, as well. It’s not only in policing where Stanford’s campus politics reflect the inequalities and injustices in society as a whole.

Stanford students using the Instagram account @dearstanford_ have documented the many microaggressions and structural inequalities facing BIPOC students on campus, from racism in Greek life to faculty diversity (or lack thereof). For some time, ever since the Black Student Union took the mic in 1968 to demand Black Studies and institutional support for Black students, the University has seen generations of student movements challenge Stanford to live up to higher standards. These movements have won important victories, from ethnic community centers to new majors.

The latest Black Lives Matter protests at Stanford, following up on the 2014-15 student protests, build on legacies of student activism and mobilization, and point to new imperatives. The challenging and exhilarating and frustrating and dynamic part of student activism is that students graduate, and new movements emerge from new generations of students. Stanford admins know this, and so the task forces and committees that they set up to “investigate” racial bias or sexual assault are oftentimes paying lip service to demands, instead of putting money and resources into radical steps forward. The institution’s lifespan exceeds the student’s four-year tenure, which means that student movements must build power across generations of students, educating themselves as they go, and forever hold onto the demands they believe in.

As a student organizer, I remember feeling so disappointed when the institution I was a part of refused to change. I would always have older students telling me, when I was a freshman or sophomore, about the perils of burn-out and about the need for sustainable organizing. Sometimes I understood what they were saying, but oftentimes I just plowed ahead, until my energy was depleted and I had to take a step back. When I was a senior, I found myself saying the same things to younger students.

So there I was, five years after I graduated from Stanford, running by the Quad, when a simple and beautiful and devastating memorial stopped me once again and forced me to slow down. By slowing down, I remembered what it was like to organize at Stanford. I remembered being friends with so many brilliant and passionate people holding the university accountable, speaking truth to power. I remembered participating in Black Lives Matter marches in 2014 that shut down the campus and the streets of Palo Alto. Thousands of students, most of them 18 to 21 years old, showing the collective power of social movements.

Today, having recently turned 27, I return to those memories, seeking inspiration again, trying to remember that energy that sustained such creative and important action. I was reading Dr. Clayborne Carson’s recent interview in The Stanford Daily. Dr. Carson has dedicated his professional life as an historian to studying the Black freedom struggle in the United States and directing Stanford's Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. In response to a question about why the Black Lives Matter movement is so young, he first recalled how the sit-in movement in 1960 was started by eighteen year-olds. Social movements are often led by young people who see no option but to create a better world. The world we have right now is unsustainable and unbearable.

Dr. Carson then explained how desensitization takes place, saying, older generations “get desensitized… because you see [injustices] around you, but you don’t necessarily see what you can do about it.” Of course, it’s not only young people participating in these protests, and, given that the Black Lives Matter protests have mobilized more people than perhaps any other social movement in US history, I’m hopeful that new generations of people are waking up to the world around them and realizing the importance of protest.

Like the Black Lives Matter murals that many cities have painted on their streets, Palo Alto included, the memorial on the Oval is symbolic, and it remains to be seen how long it survives before Stanford tries to remove it. But I hope that it has led to some reflection, some self-awareness, and some new commitments for all who see it. I hope today’s Stanford students keep fighting for the university they want to create, and that tomorrow’s Stanford students are ready to keep the fight going.