COLLEGE STATION, Texas — A video from last Friday's protest at A&M is going viral on twitter.
It’s been viewed and shared hundreds of times.
Now, a few people that were at the protest and saw those events unfold are telling their story.
“What I saw was a natural reaction to someone calling you a racial slur. What I saw was a man who was exercising great restraint and was very upset that he heard something like that,” said Alexia Hernandez, an A&M student who participated in the protest on Friday, June 26, 2020.
At last Friday's Black Lives Matter Protest, students started their march at the admin building but ended at the statue of Lawrence Sullivan Ross.
Alexia said, “Sully has done awful awful things in a racial sense... and this was spurred out of emotional conflict between people who want to keep sully and who want to remove sully to another location.”
She said when demonstrators got to Sully, there were a few older Aggies standing around the statue, guarding it.
Soon after, a few student athletes, including track and fielder Infinite Tucker, tried explaining their point of view to them.
Part of the video showed student athlete Infinite Tucker asking a man, “you yourself, if you wanna feel equal if you had another stature to a black person. So why isn’t it the same here?”
Tucker said, “we were conversating. The one gentleman, he felt the need to you know, call me out my name, and ask me… 'are you an Aggie or a Blaggie?'”
“I felt like he was trying to belittle me you know? I felt disrespected," Tucker said.
He said he slapped pennies off of the bottom of the statue after that man’s remarks then said the man pushed his arm against him.
Tucker sent KAGS a statement about that on Tuesday, saying in part, “my actions this past Friday were emotional, and I will not apologize for standing my ground after being physically assaulted and verbally attacked.”
He said he would "talk back with a few organizations they have goals and stuff on what they want in the university to feel equal.”
Qynetta Caston worked with the organizations who planned the march on June 26. She says she was there watching what was said to tucker.
“[The man] didn’t say anything else to try to apologize for it. It’s almost like he was comfortable saying it,” she said.
She knows what her next steps are, too.
“Until Sullivan Ross is taken down and until a&m actually is hearing our voices, the marches and protests will not stop. I am not gonna let up until chancellor sharp president young, the board of regents take that statue down and stop making excuses,” Caston said.
As far as the man in the video, she said, “he needs to issue a public apology. And he needs to understand that it wasn’t okay to do that.”