Several student leaders said some of the fiercest critics advocating against the bill behind closed doors have been administrators within the University of California (UC) system.
Regardless of the national conversation around the removal of Confederate statues, Wells' great-granddaughter believes that the journalist deserves a statue in her own right.
Civil rights groups believe that the U.S. Senate version of the bill, which establishes crimes against law enforcement as hate crimes, is significantly worse.
A 2016 estimate by The Sentencing Project places the number of people in the United States disenfranchised due to a prior felony conviction at 6.1 million—or 2.5 percent of all people of voting age—a number that also includes 7.44 percent of Black people in the United States.
Police kill more people in California than in any other state. From 2013 to 2017, there were 929 cases of police killings in California—primarily Black or Latinx men.
In 2014, Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 420, which eliminated all willful defiance suspensions for grades K-3. But it is set to expire at the end of June unless new legislation re-establishes the same guidelines.