Instead of carrying books, students carried flowers, candles and signs. They walked out of their classrooms in protest of police encounters around the nation that have left young people dead.

"The message that I want to give out to people is justice for innocent Black people that have been shot by racist police officers,” Francheska Rodrigues said.

Francheska arrived at Washington Square Park with a crowd of her classmates and some staff from Hamilton Grange Middle School in Harlem.

She spoke to the crowd, not far from where a vigil was set up with photos of young people like Duante Wright, a 20-year-old Black man shot to death in a traffic stop when an officer said she mistook her gun for her Taser.

"Tell me, 27 years of training, how can you confuse a gun with a Taser?" she asked the crowd.

Students at her middle school spent the morning learning about some of the killings before taking a trip downtown to join the event.

"We actually learned about it today actually. In the classroom we made posters about how it happened. So I wrote: hear what we have to say, the kids who got killed didn't deserve to die,” Daman Gutierrez Soogrin, a sixth grader, said.

Eva Zapata said she was inspired by Greta Thunberg, a Swedish student whose activism around climate change sparked a worldwide movement.

"Even though we're young we can make a change in this world,” she said.

Betelhem Petersson came to the walk-out instead of attending her high school's afternoon classes.

"I thought that obviously this was a lot more important than missing a few classes, and it's really nice to see people out here supporting and rallying against the hate that's going on in the world,” she said.

Activists spoke about the deaths of children like Adam Toledo, a thirteen-year-old boy shot by Chicago police while body camera footage shows his hands were up. And sixteen-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant, shot to death by police om Columbus as she held a knife during an argument with another student. Speakers argued that didn't justify lethal force, especially when many young white men armed with guns have been arrested without incident.

"We cannot and will not allow the state to justify the murders of these young individuals,” one speaker said.