Throughout history, students have played a crucial role in the progression of the Civil Rights Movement. Sit-ins, one of the most prominent forms of student protests, involved organized groups of people going to “White Only” spaces in order to call out the failed promises of equality.

Even though the students who participated in the sit-ins were young and still in school, their actions exemplify the fact that anyone can take part in protests to make a change, regardless of their age.

The most well-known of these sit-ins took place in Greensboro, North Carolina. In February 1960, four Black college freshmen entered a white-only lunch counter at Woolworth’s and endured the resulting harassment in protest. The sit-in movement inspired other Black college students across the American South to also take part, forcing over 100 lunch counters to desegregate by April.

With over 50,000 students taking part in these peaceful protests, communities and businesses were forced to confront the injustice, and contributed to the momentum in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The birth of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an organization that led fights against segregation through grassroots movements, is another testament to the role of student protests in the Civil Rights Movement.

Thousands of Black voters across Southern states were successfully registered through SNCC’s continuous organized protests, finally giving representation to citizens whose voices had long been forced shut.

Student campaigning has been invaluable to the Black Civil Rights movement, playing an important role in both current and future civil rights advocacy.

Student roles in the Civil Rights Movement

### Shaurya Ranjan ’27

**What watch do you wear, and why do you like to wear it?**  
I wear a Gucci watch ... I’m pretty sure it’s the Gucci Chrono. It was a gift from my parents when we went to Amsterdam.

**Are you an avid watch collector?**  
I’m not. I would like to be a collector one day, but I’m too broke for that. I have two watches in my collection currently. One is a Fastrack watch from India, which I’m not sure of the model, and the other one is my Gucci watch. I have several on my list that I want to get, which I don’t have on the top of my head right now, but I am a watch enthusiast to some extent.

**Why did you choose a mechanical watch over a smartwatch or digital one?**  
Digital watches are okay, but smartwatches ruin the fun of watches. The whole idea of a watch is to have a timepiece and not a mini smartphone. Having that timepiece on your wrist is the essence of watches. I don’t want an Apple Watch. I don’t want any sort of smart watch. [I favor] analog and digital [watches], and even then I prefer analog. I think some ... retro digital watches, are pretty cool. Smartwatches ruin it. You have your smartphone in your pocket in most scenarios, and there are not many reasons why you would exclusively need a smart watch besides the fitness tracking stuff. Aesthetically, if you’re looking for a watch, analog and digital are the only way to go.

### Aleric Deess ’28

**What watch do you wear, and why do you like to wear it?**  
I like Apple Watches because I do cross country, so it’s very important for tracking my mileage, my pace; I can also call people in emergencies if I’m out. I think it’s very versatile. Just smartwatches, generally, and ... the fitness tracking.

**Are you an avid watch collector?**  
I’m not a very crazy watch collector, but probably Timex or non-smartwatches. I feel like they look cool and they’re fun to just have. I don’t really collect though.

**Do you wear a watch daily or on some occasions?**  
I have an Apple Watch that I wear daily because I train daily. [I also use it] for the convenience of telling the time, [and for] calling people if I don’t have my phone on me.

**How did you get this watch in particular and why do you like it?**  
I’m not entirely sure about what exact model my watch is, but it is a larger screen Apple Watch, and I like it because it’s very convenient and it does what it needs to do very well. I think that it’s very good for what I do and my schedule and everything that I do, all the activities, etc.

### Charlotte Valvanis ’26

**What watch do you wear and why do you wear it?**  
I wear a Plein watch that I got ... from my dad for my birthday last year.

**Are you an avid watch collector?**  
I am not a watch collector. This is actually my first watch besides my Apple Watch, but I’ve been wanting ... a nicer watch that I can wear to Model UN conferences and fancier events for a while. So my dad got me this one.

**Do you prefer mechanical watches over smart watches or digital ones?**  
I prefer mechanical watches. I think there’s something about them that just looks timeless. It fits in a lot of spaces and ... I don’t have to take it off and put it in my backpack [during tests]. It’s not technology. It’s just easy to use.

**What’s your favorite part about the watch?**  
It’s very shiny, which I’ve gotten some hate for, but I kind of like the way it reflects the light. I think it’s gorgeous.

### Felix Yu ’27

**What watch do you wear, and why do you like to wear it?**  
I wear a Garmin Forunner 55, [and] I got it because I needed to track my runs. It’s also just really nice because it tracks a lot of stuff like heart rate, sleep, and like exercise data.

**Are you an avid watch collector?**  
I don’t really collect any watches, [and] my old watches I just give it to my parents and they do stuff with it. I also use my watches for [more practical purposes], so I don’t really see a point in collecting them if I’m not going to use them.

**Do you wear a watch daily or on some occasions?**  
I really like my watch and I wear it all the time, except for [maybe] an hour a week to charge.

**Is there a specific type of watch that you like? Mechanical? Digital?**  
I really like Garmins, or other good running watches that have a good GPS, a good battery life, and can show a lot of physical stats [like heartbeat].

Time to get a watch: PHS student interviews

While most languages have evolved within a family from a common ancestor, the Basque language stands alone. Classified as a language isolate, Basque is unique due to the fact that it is unrelated to any other language. Spoken primarily in southwestern Europe, Basque has around 1,000,000 current speakers.

Basque first appeared in Latin texts dating from the 11th century. However, it was not until the 20th century when the rise of the Basque language occurred. In 1918, the Society of Basque held its first congress to create the Basque Language Academy in the following year. There was no conventional spelling system in the Basque language due to the fact that it developed orally. Thus, reading and writing conventions were adopted from Spanish and French. By 1964, the Royal Basque Language Academy was able to develop a standardized spelling system, which paved the way for a unified language.

Basque in its glory

Stepping into the Art@Bainbridge exhibit from the busy Nassau Street sidewalks, we are immediately hit with the quiet but profound intensity of the exhibit. Inside the historic Bainbridge building sits Princeton University Art Museum’s “Roberto Lugo / Orange and Black” exhibit, curated by the Associate Curator of Ancient Mediterranean Art Dr. Carolyn Laferrière.

While ancient Greek ceramics, originating from over two thousand years ago, and 21st-century social oppression may seem to have little in common, Lugo’s work finds a way to blend these motifs together into pieces of art.

Based in Philadelphia, Lugo is an artist, ceramicist, and social activist, striving to portray communal stories of oppression and social injustices. The ceramics portray the daily lives of contemporary individuals in an ancient medium, fusing together the past, present, and future. Lugo believes that just as the daily life of ancient Greek civilizations has been crystallized in these ceramics, stories of contemporary injustice also deserve to be preserved in pottery.

“He really sees himself as tasked with archiving the stories of underrepresented peoples and to show his own lived experience and the lived experience of his communities,” said Laferrière. “To bring them into a museum … and to [show] Roberto Clemente or Harriet Tubman or Ruby Bridges, is significant because it’s giving them a place within the history of American art.”

The contrast between modern challenges and the ancient medium of classical Greek pottery is reflected in the arrangement of the “Orange and Black” exhibit. Lugo’s piece “Same Boy, Different Breakfast” is placed adjacent to an ancient Greek column krater from the 5th century B.C., attributed to the Hephaistos Painter.

“That vase then asks you, as the viewer, to walk around it or to manipulate it, and to have this embodied experience of it, where your act of looking is then activating the story,” said Laferrière.

Circling “Same Boy, Different Breakfast,” we see a young man in two starkly different settings: on one side, he sits at a desk, writing; on the other, he sits in a jail cell. The jarring contrast reminds the viewer of the divergent shapes our lives may take. The depiction of a moment of celebration and ritual for a young Greek boy compared to his somber duties of the state highlight how the expression of life’s dualities has evolved across the centuries.

Every vase in this exhibit tells a story of a struggle: a struggle for equality, justice, or just the bare minimum of respect. A particularly resonant example is Lugo’s “What Had Happened Was: Ruby Bridges.” Ruby Bridges, at the age of six, became the first Black American schoolchild to integrate into an all-white elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana. When her integration was met with violent backlash, she had to be escorted to school by U.S. Marshals. To be on the very same vessels as ancient Greek heroes — heroes revered to this day in grand myths — is to elevate her place in history.

“The visual arts can be such a powerful medium for telling stories and for reflecting on our lived experience, our communities, the issues that we are struggling with,” said Laferrière. “And I think this show, [is] collapsing the temporal distance between the fifth century B.C.E. and 2025, to show that artists across time and in very different spaces and different contexts are still … using this medium to tell these stories.”

Lugo’s exhibit at Art@Bainbridge is a space that invites even the casual viewer to go beyond passive observation and reflect on the state of contemporary America.

 Frozen in time: Roberto Lugo’s “Orange and Black” exhibit


# Janelle Wilkinson

Q: What inspired you to start raising chickens?
A: When we lived in Princeton we had between three and five chickens on a small quarter-acre lot. Now we have a farm, and there are two types of chickens: meat chickens and laying chickens. It was important [for us] to know where our food was coming from and it grew from the garden to chickens. We also had turkeys in Princeton.

Q: What kind of daily routine goes into taking care of your chickens?
A: You take the eggs out of the nesting box every day in the afternoon. [The chickens] lay in the morning, are very vocal about it, and wander around the grass and the farm. The rooster is the last one into the coop at night and makes sure that all the girls are back safe and then you lock the door once the sun goes down and it keeps them safe for the night.

Q: What advice would you give someone looking to start raising chickens?
A: The first thing I would say is they need to check the Princeton ordinances. For a while, chickens were not allowed in Princeton since they were considered farm animals. Princeton has evolved and realized that chickens are not necessarily farm animals and you can consider them pets and that is the loophole there. Just be sure to check the ordinance because they may allow only chickens as chickens, not as pets. [Besides that] they would need a waterer, a feeder, a small coop, and chickens.

# Nicholas Kopaliani

Q: How many chickens do you have and what kind of breeds are they?
A: We currently have 11 chickens, and they’re pretty much all different breeds. There’s usually two of the same breed, and there’s just a whole bunch of them. They do sometimes — they are chickens, so they are going to get hunted. Princeton has way too many foxes, so we’ve been buying new ones occasionally, which is why we currently have an odd number of chickens. There’s this one breed — the entire chicken is just black including the feathers which is really cool. They tend to have this blue shine in the sun which looks really nice.

Q: What were some of the biggest challenges raising your own chickens?
A: Keeping them safe has probably been the biggest challenge because foxes, raccoons, hawks. They all really want chicken. There are a lot of those in Princeton, so we put a lot of fences up. We also recently got a dog, because these animals kept trying to hunt them which was really annoying.

Q: What are some of the biggest benefits of raising your own chickens? What are your favorite parts?
A: We get a lot of eggs, but Princeton doesn’t let you sell eggs. So instead, we use them to make pasta or just give them away a lot. The chickens have been really productive because it’s been getting warmer. Typically we get around eight, but it tends to build up, so we make pasta a lot. It’s like four eggs a batch, and we just let it sit. In the end, you get great pasta, so I think that’s my favorite.

Jaisel Iyer's Work