Students gather around the Tiger statue in front of Stephens Hall as part of Tuesday afternoon’s Unity Rally
Hundreds of Towson University students, faculty, staff and supporters turned out on Tuesday afternoon to celebrate diversity and promote acceptance at a Unity Rally, hosted by the Student Government Association and Be The Change, a student group.
The crowd gathered around the Tiger statue in front of Stephens Hall at 2 p.m. to hear from event organizers who sought to battle recent negative media reports with a positive message.
From a story in the Baltimore Sun:
Student Stephen Middleton told the group he had seen the effect the negative media attention had on campus after a stranger who saw him wearing a Towson shirt warned him to be careful on campus.
‘Rather than thanking him for his concern, I was frustrated,’ Middleton said. ‘Frustrated because of the fact that it made me realize for some people, one bad thing can overshadow so much good.’
Students chanted “Be the change” as they marched across campus to Freedom Plaza, where they gathered to hear a poem written by Middleton. From there, the crowd continued the procession along the International Walkway, symbolizing the acceptance of students from all backgrounds across the world.
The Tiger statue outside of the College of Liberal Arts Building was the final destination for the rally, where speakers from several student organizations spoke to the crowd. To close the event, President Maravene Loeschke spoke to those in attendance.
“There is a very serious issue when one student or two students take a set of inaccurate facts and they go national,” she said before the event in an interview with the Baltimore Sun. “To have the students stand up and say ‘This isn’t what we stand for,’ it’s pretty intensely wonderful.”
For a week prior to the event, SGA and Be The Change encouraged students to post in social media using the tag #TUStands4. We’ve gathered some of the photos the students took as part of that campaign and posted them to our Facebook page. Like us on Facebook and see what our students had to say.
