From the SFLA Blog

More than One Year after Being Arrested in Washington D.C. for Attempting to CHALK, Pro-Life Students’ Cases Dropped 

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Kristi Hamrick - 13 Oct 2021

CASE CLOSED:  More than One Year after Being Arrested in Washington D.C. for Attempting to CHALK, Pro-Life Students’ Cases Dropped 

 But an Appeal of the Free Speech Issues in the Nation’s Capital Continues 

 

  • August 1, 2020: TWO students were arrested for trying to chalk BLACK PREBORN LIVES MATTER in Washington D.C. 
  • October 2021: Case closed!  

 

“Whether we say it in paint, chalk, print, billboards, social media, videos, or court, Black Preborn Lives Matter, and the Pro-Life Generation will continue to fight for the right to be heard,” said Students for Life of America’s Kristan Hawkins. 

 

WASHINGTON D.C. (10-14-2021) – Students for Life of America President Kristan Hawkins said that the Pro-Life Generation “is celebrating today, as finally two students are cleared of any penalties for the unlikely ‘crime’ of trying to chalk BLACK PREBORN LIVES MATTER in the nation’s capital. At a moment in time when across the country people were talking about issues impacting the Black community, Students for Life and the Frederick Douglass Foundation joined together to speak for the preborn, only to be told that our speech was not welcome and was even criminal.”

 

Click here for a video at Breitbart showing how Pro-Life Students with chalk were treated compared to Black Lives Matter activists in Washington D.C. in the same timeframe. 

 

Earlier in the case, the Rev. Dean Nelson, chairman of the Frederick Douglass Foundation and executive director of Human Coalition Action, who witnessed the arrests, observed: “The way these pro-life students were treated one year ago, one would think they attempted robbery. All they were doing is exercising their right to speak on behalf of the voiceless; the unborn and in particular, Black and Brown children who are the primary targets of Planned Parenthood.”

Agreeing, attorney Dennis Boyle who handled the matter for the two students observed, “The case never should have been filed as there were no laws broken.”

“It’s a relief to finally have this matter closed,” said Warner DePriest, a graduate student at the time of the arrest and a philanthropy adviser with SFLA. “As a student of our political system, I believed then and I believe now that all Americans should have the right to speak up for the preborn and their mothers. Almost every week, I pray outside the Planned Parenthood where I was arrested for the hope that lives will be saved and because I can’t be silent on the human rights atrocity of our day.”

 

Following those arrests with its intense media interest, Students for Life of America and the Frederick Douglass Foundation:  

Students for Life also launched an #SOS Campaign, (Strike Out Sanger),  an on-going effort to remove honors to the known racist and eugenics enthusiast who founded Planned Parenthood. Initial targets were the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and at Margaret Sanger Square in Manhattan as well as a Margaret Sanger statue stands in the Old South Meeting House in Boston, which ironically enough is on the Freedom Trail commemorating the Revolutionary War.

Students for Life of America and Human Coalition Action also filed an amicus brief noting that the social destruction of abortion has taken a huge toll on black lives.  

As noted in the announcement: The brief points out that Black and minority communities have paid a tremendous price in lives lost, a consequence of the racist agenda of U.S. abortion industry architects such as Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger. The amicus observes, “Justice Thomas’ devastating rendering of the history of eugenics and abortion aptly depicts abortion as a tool eugenicists utilized to extinguish minority populations whom they deemed ‘unfit’.” To access the brief, click here.

You can learn more about our efforts at BlackPrebornLivesMatter.

At Newsweek: Read more from Hawkins and Toni McFadden on why we must be free to speak in defense of minority lives. In USA Today, read more on Sanger’s racist past from Hawkins.

 

For interviews, contact Kristi Hamrick at [email protected].

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Students for Life Action (SFLAction), a 501c4, along with its 501c3 sister organization, Students for Life of America (SFLA), make up the nation’s largest pro-life youth organization and a political and policy operation engaging people of all ages. Together they work to end abortion — the human rights issue of our day — and provide political, legal, and community support for women and their children, born and preborn. Headquartered in Fredericksburg, VA, SFLA has more than 1,25groups on middlehigh school, college, university, medical, and law school campuses in all 50 states. SFLA creates strategy, policy, and programming to connect those most targeted for abortion with people ready to help and builds a framework for political engagement on their behalf. SFLA and SFLAction have more conversations with those most targeted by the abortion industry than any other pro-life outreach in the world, reaching more than 2 million people across social media platforms each week and engaging in approximately 100,000 digital conversations per month. Over the last 15 years, President Kristan Hawkins has grown SFLA into a $15 million organization preparing for a Post-Roe America.

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