Dozens of demonstrators who say they are Stanford University students were arrested Monday evening, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, accused of disrupting traffic on California’s San Mateo-Hayward Bridge during a peaceful protest, the Los Angeles Times reports.
According to the report, at least 50 people lined up across the bridge—which has no pedestrian access—a little before 5 p.m. Protesters were dropped off by drivers, California Highway Patrol spokesman Peter Van Eckhardt told the news site.
The demonstrators identified themselves as being part of Silicon Shutdown, a group of Stanford students who protest police brutality and oppression. The Times reports that they disrupted traffic on the westbound side of the bridge for 28 minutes to represent that “every 28 hours, a black person is killed by law enforcement or vigilantes.”
“We chose to inconvenience the weekend commute because the status quo is deadly to the black and brown peoples of this country and can no longer be tolerated,” participant Maria Diaz, of the class of 2017, said in a publicly posted statement.
In total, the highway patrol arrested 68 people on suspicion of disorderly conduct and blocking access to public land, the Times notes.
Read more at the Los Angeles Times.