Students Join North Country Peace Group on Setauket Corner
Local teens have been adding their voices to weekly rallies in Setauket.
Every Saturday morning, drivers can count on the grassroots activist North Country Peace Group on the corner of Route 25A and Bennetts Road and the North Country Patriots across the street. For three weeks now, Three Village school district students and their friends have joined the Peace Group to protest police brutality and call for justice and equality, joining forces with Black Lives Matter groups across
the country.
Myrna Gordon, of the North Country Peace Group, said she is proud of the young people and happy that they have joined them. She said one week more than a dozen joined them, but two weeks ago more than 250 protesters stood on the corner, and this past Saturday, there were more than 150 rallying. She said there was no advertising about any themed protests.
“I think they know that our corner is such an important part of our community, and they know that we have been there for issues of peace and justice, and all of a sudden said this is where we’re going.”
She called the students “truly inspirational and a credit to their generation.”
“They are amazing young people, and they are going to carry the baton through all of this,” she said.
During the teenagers’ visits to the corner, they crossed over to the Patriots’ side (upper left photo), Gordon said, and continued to display their Black Lives Matter signs.
Gordon has been part of protests since the 1960s, and she said sometimes movements die out quickly, but she had advice to the young people to stay the course.
“They need to be tenacious,” she said. “They need to be vigilant. They need
to vote.”
