Megan Boehnke

megan.boehnke@knoxnews.com

Chanting “not my president” and “America was never great,” hundreds of University of Tennessee students protested the election of Donald Trump for almost three hours on campus Thursday outside Hodges Library.

About a hundred students sat on the ground on the pedestrian walkway, and others stood around them, linking arms. They held signs that read “I will not stop speaking Spanish,” “Hate is not an opinion” and “Silence is violence.”

They passed a megaphone and repeated the messages for everyone to hear.

Dalton Teel, a sophomore from Lebanon, Tenn., took the mic and addressed them.

"This is to all the Trump supporters on the outskirts who say this protest is inconvenient. Do you know what's inconvenient? Being black on this campus." The crowd cheered.

He continued. "Do you know what's inconvenient? Being gay on this campus." The crowd repeated it back to him.

Teel went on: "Do you know what's inconvenient? Being Muslim on this campus." The group repeated it.

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Elizabeth Stanfield, a senior from Jackson, Tenn., who helped organize the protest late last night, said she wanted to create a space for people who are frustrated and struggling to gather.

"This campus is already incredibly violent to people of color, to LGBT people," she said. But after the election, "there was a shift in the atmosphere, and walking around campus, you could feel it in the air."

There was no advertising on social media and news of the plan spread by word of mouth, she said.

The protest, loosely comprised of the campus' Diversity Matters student coalition, started near the amphitheater outside the humanities building at 12:30 p.m. The group marched along around the building and up pedestrian walkway.

When classes let out, the crowd grew and attracted more like-minded protesters, she said.

It also drew a substantial, though greatly outnumbered, group of Trump supporters who mocked the protesters with sports chants like "scoreboard." They tried drowning out the protesters' chants with a speaker playing the national anthem and Queen's "We are the Champions."

They wore red "Make American Great Again" hats and draped Trump-Pence flags over their shoulders. One dressed as Trump in a suit and wig, carrying a "Hillary for Prison" sign and an American flag over his shoulder.

Stanfield said she discussed deescalation tactics with her group and at one point took the megaphone to urge their side not to engage in any violence.

Though there were a few pushing skirmishes, no fights broke out. The UT Police Department said no arrests were made at the protest.

Caroline Richmond, a senior for Lenoir City, said participating the protest was cathartic in some ways, but also found it discouraging that Trump advocates were “not here for support, but to silence people who are already marginalized.

“It was scary when we were sitting here and they’re surrounding us, trying to intimidate and silence us,” she said.

Alex Calleja, a Trump supporter from Louisville, Ky., said he simply wanted to exercise his free speech after he spotted the protest on his way back from class.

“I went around and people who were protesting the other side were being lashed out against, and they also deserve an equal voice,” he said.