Students hold up giant emoji fists during Apple CEO’s commencement speech

By Jorge Rivas  |  May 22, 2015 | 4:40pm
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Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered a speech to George Washington University graduates last Sunday encouraging them to fight injustice.

“The world needs you in the arena. There are problems that need to solved, injustices that need to be ended,” Cook told students.

The irony is that there were six black students actually engaging in activism while Cook was delivered his speech on activism.

The six students raised giant posters with emoji fists, each printed in a shade corresponding with the color of their skin, to call attention to the young black men who were killed by police in Ferguson and Baltimore.

“We wanted to pay our respect to those victims in our past year. It’s been difficult to watch,” Malcolm McNeil, one of the students who participated in the demonstration told Fusion.

“Being so close to the Baltimore riots was even more difficult,” McNeil said during the telephone interview. George Washington University is about an hour away from Baltimore.

McNeil, 21, said he and his friends had been talking about something to do at their graduation that would be meaningful and memorable. When they learned Cook would deliver the commencement speech, he said, the emoji fist idea synchronized perfectly.

“This [demonstration] was a modern day spawn of the 1968 Olympics when Tommie Smith raised his fists,” said McNeil, who graduated with a degree in criminal justice.

“We wanted to make this a memorable demonstration and it was our duty to do something for peace justice and equality,” McNeil said.

 
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