Emma Gonzalez

Background

Emma González was born to a cybersecurity attorney father and a mathematics-tutor mother in Parkland, Florida, on November 11, 1999. Their parents were immigrants from Cuba who came to New York City in 1968. González graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 where they used to serve as the president of the students’ Gay-Straight Alliance (G.S.A.) They were also the leader of a tracking team in Project Aquila, a mission to send a student-made weather balloon to the space edge. Following their graduation, González continued their study at the New College of Florida.

On February 14, 2018, a former student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Nikolas Cruz, opened fire within the school vicinity, killing 17 people and injuring 17 others before he was arrested by the police about an hour later. To this day, it remains the deadliest high school shooting in the country’s history. González was among the students who took shelter in the auditorium when the incident happened, and they were held there for two hours until the police let them out. Following the shooting, González gave an 11-minute speech on February 17 at a gun control rally in front of the Broward County Courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Together with other survivors, they addressed state legislators of Florida on February 20 in Tallahassee in an internationally televised town hall. On February 21, they were hosted by C.N.N. González and their comrades criticized the National Rifle Association (N.R.A.) and politicians who accept money from the organization, citing them as being complicit in the shootings. At the town hall, González pressed the N.R.A. representatives, particularly the now-former spokesperson of N.R.A, Dana Loesch. Their question went viral: “Do you believe that it should be harder to obtain the semi-automatic and … the modifications for these weapons to make them fully automatic like bump stocks?” González joined Twitter after the speech and gained more than one million followers within less than 10 days.

Their dedicated efforts finally showed some results when the then governor of Florida, Rick Scott, signed the “Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act” on March 9, a bill that tightened gun control as well as school safety and security in the state. On March 24, 2018, González and fellow Parkland survivors organized the nationwide “March for Our Lives” protest in Washington, D.C. They made a six-minute speech exactly the length of time of the Parkland school shooting and paid tribute to all the victims, which was followed by several minutes of silence. They were named one of the “100 Most Influential People” by “Time” magazine, appearing on the cover with fellow activists David Hogg, Jaclyn Corin, Alex Wind, and Cameron Kasky. González and their comrades were also profiled by the French state-owned international news T.V. network, France 24. In May 2019, a recording of González delivering a line during their 11-minute speech on February 17, 2018, was sampled as the intro for ‘I Rise,’ a song in Madonna’s 14th studio album, “Madame X.”