USC students weighed in on what civil rights means to them as students and how they exercise these rights on campus and in their day-to-day lives.
"Civil rights is the right of each person to choose their own happiness without infringing upon the happiness of others.
"I vote. I teach. I pick up trash — nobody likes to see that, you know? And I treat people with respect."
— Justin Peterson, economics graduate student
"Civil rights is the ability of every individual to do as they please as long as it doesn't hurt themselves or someone else.
"I don' t worry about people and what they think about me being transgender."
— Katrina Nichols, second-year computer science student
"I thought I was born with freedom. Not like America, though. I think it was nothing for me until I came here and heard about what happened before [in history]. So, I think that freedom is something important for me. You have to have it.
"I like to choose what I want I want to do because I'm here, living alone ... I don't like to hear someone tell me to do something. I like to choose what I like to do."
— Kenan Aljohani, biomedical engineering student from Saudi Arabia
"I would define civil rights as my ability to be able to say and act how I feel.
"I feel like I exercise my civil rights everyday here at USC because here, unlike other schools, you can say what you want to say ... I think that's the beautiful thing about this school, you do get the opportunity to express yourself."
— Shante' Sumpter, third-year broadcast journalism
"Civil rights to me means equality not just between races but equality between genders, sexualities, classes — having equal access and equal opportunities in government policy, in social structures, in every day life, and I think that expands not just from policy or law but also to the ways that our daily culture plays out and daily life.
"The main part of [my participation] is through advocacy, especially as an historian -— being very conscious of how implications of the past have brought us to what's going on on campus now and in the world and being mindful of those intricacies and what we can do to correct them. That could be through things like voicing protest for what's been going on for the past two months, civil rights issues, such as the Black Lives Matter campaign ... I also think it's just being mindful of people's backgrounds. In class, knowing that not everyone is coming from the same educational background and being patient with everyone and giving everyone the same opportunities."
— Alyssa Constad, public history graduate student