THE POWER OF YOUTH

While the act of young people speaking out may seem to be new, there’s a long history of Americans who were too young to vote shifting the national conversation on social and political issues.

The March of the Mill Children, the three-week trek from Philadelphia to New York by striking child and adult textile workers in 1903. which energized efforts to end it by law.

The Woolworth' Lunch Counter Sit-in

On February 1, 1960, four African American college students sat down at a lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and politely asked for service. Their request was refused. When asked to leave, they remained in their seats. Their passive resistance and peaceful sit-down demand helped ignite a youth-led movement to challenge racial inequality throughout the South.

Thousands of students left their classrooms and marched on downtown Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. Their Children’s Crusade changed a nation.

Vietnam War Protests

An antiwar demonstrator places flowers into the barrels of rifles while blocking the Pentagon on Oct. 21, 1967.

As many as 100,000 people, mostly young, mostly white, flooded the capital for a demonstration. Just one of countless across our nation, anticipating an injection of counterculture flair into the antiwar movement.

THE DREAMERS

Local and national immigrant rights groups protest in effort to pressure U.S. lawmakers to find a way to replace Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that allowed immigrants brought to this country as children to receive two-year renewal work permits and shielded them from deportation.

#neveragain

Protesters rally against gun violence on the steps of the old Florida Capitol in Tallahassee, Florida. To elevate the conversation of gun control and to instigate widespread changes, these students are leading the March For Our Lives on March 24 in Washington D.C. And their goal is to ban civilian ownership of semi-automatic and automatic weapons.

I think that while young protesters cannot always achieve what they demand, it gives them more courage to increase the number and size of their protests in the future. Young people oppose inequality and oppression like the rest of us even if less jaded. Increasingly, in reaction to the world around them they are not afraid to stand up for what they believe in. It is personally amazing to me that they are not just planning their future in a world that we hand down to them but instead actively motivated to change that future in real time to what world they want that to be.

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