Frederica Freyberg:

Finally, in continuing coverage of race issues in our communities, a protest over the police shooting death of 19-year-old Tony Robinson shutdown a main thoroughfare in Madison for more than seven hours Tuesday.

Frederica Freyberg:

High school students took to the street for the action. In the midst of protest of the officer-involved shooting of the young black man, we sat down with a group of high schoolers learning to be community leaders and educators themselves for their response and reaction, students involved through collaboration with the United Way of Dane County. None of those we spoke with took part in Tuesday’s protest, but they mostly commend the action, as the issue is close to home.

Kiarra Little:

A lot of times you feel no matter what they do, that they won’t be heard. I know that a lot of people went down there with the idea in their head that, “We’re going to be heard today. “

Skye Moss:

I didn’t personally know Tony, but I thought that it was amazing to see like these– like just these students just pop up. Like no one like ever thought of them as being leaders and then they popped up and used these very strong leadership roles and used media to grab people and spreaded the word to get like people to come and show up and let the city leaders know that this is a matter that they care about.

Henry Gaylord:

You know what I love about it is that it’s youth-ran, and it’s youth-organized. Unfortunately, as tragic as the event was, that youth have responded and taken advocacy roles and taken up leadership roles and saying, This is not the community that we want. This is not what we want for our future. “And I think that is terrific.

Marc Anthony Banaag:

We don’t know exactly what really happened yet. So that by going and protesting and saying that,”All cops are bad. . . generalizing them, but we don’t really know what happened.

Kiarra Little:

When it hits home in your city, it’s a whole ‘nother thing. Now you can understand how the people in Ferguson were feeling. I can see why they were rioting like that. That’s all you feel in your heart is hate towards the police but at the same time you gotta realize all police officers aren’t like that.

Marc Anthony Banaag:

You can’t generalize.

Kiarra Little:

You can’t generalize that, yeah.

[Chanting]

Marc Anthony Banaag:

No, but, either way the police are trained to catch people like this. But, I mean, like when they’re in danger, they feel in danger, they would kill– you know, the threat on their life.

Kiarra Little:

They have a whole belt designed to take people down, and deadly force should be the absolute last thing, last option.

Henry Gaylord:

We never imagined that this would happen in our community, especially for myself. I live five blocks away from where it happened. And I know a lot of the people who were friends with Tony Robinson. I didn’t know him personally, but. . . It’s just like you always have that feeling that this is our community. It’s not going to happen. But then it happened.

Frederica Freyberg:

The officer-involved shooting death of Tony Robinson remains under investigation by the Dane County District Attorney, who will decide whether charges will be filed.