Chicago

African American Students From Parkland School Tragedy to Share Experiences

What to Know

  • The group of students will speak Wednesday in Coral Springs, detailing the incident which took the lives of 17 students and staff.
  • As of the last enrollment numbers released, the number of African-American students at Douglas is around 12 percent – or nearly one out of 8

Amid recent criticism over the lack of attention paid to minority students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the wake of last month’s deadly mass shooting, African American students will share their stories from the tragedy.

The group of students will speak Wednesday in Coral Springs, detailing the incident which took the lives of 17 students and staff at the Parkland school while injuring over a dozen more.

The issue was recently brought to light during an interview with David Hogg – one of the most vocal student survivors who has led the push for gun law reforms in the wake of the shootings – in which he said not giving black students a voice was the “biggest mistake” in the media’s coverage of the tragedy.

“Every single day, we have over 96 gun deaths and if you look at a place like Chicago, if you look at a place like Liberty City…the media does not cover it the same,” Hogg said during a debate with Axios co-founder Mike Allen. “If this happens in a place where people are in the upper middle class or a place where predominantly white people live, it gets covered for weeks if not years.”

As of the last enrollment numbers released from 2016, the number of African-American students at Douglas is around 12 percent – or nearly one out of every eight students – of the school’s nearly 3,200 students. White students make up just under 60 percent while Hispanics students equal about 20 percent of the enrollment.

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