A crowd of about 70 people wearing red and black gathered in Schenley Plaza on Monday evening for a protest demanding Pitt divest from fossil fuels. Speakers focused on the interconnection between theft of Indigenous land and the exploitation of the environment. The protest, titled “Reclaim Earth Day,” acted as one piece of a national.
Pitt has filed three summary charges and held eight conduct hearings against protestors who disrupted a Board of Trustees meeting in September. Most of the protesters were students, staff and unaffiliated supporters of Trans Action Building.
Standing outside of the Peoples Natural Gas building, protesters gave speeches, chanted and held cardboard signs expressing their frustration with the company and the fossil fuel industry. “We want people to understand that there is a better way,” Ilyas Khan, a sophomore linguistics major at Carnegie Mellon University, said. “We want Peoples Gas to understand.