15 Points of Youth Liberation with Examples, Collected

Kids today are kicking butt. They are activists, community leaders, and educators. This is not purely theoretical- youth will tell me about their strategic action as often as their thoughtful refletions.

This is not the first generation of youth to lead in movements of their time. There's a long history of young people organizing across political movements. There is also a history of young people organizing specifically and intersectionally for their rights and against their marginalization as children.

Youth liberation is a distinct and unique movement, and youth liberation intersects with many other forms of movement building. No youth are free until Black youth are free. No youth are free until trans youth are free. No youth are free until disabled youth are free. And nobody is free until youth are free.

All liberation is connected. Youth through history have organized and moved towards freedom, written theory, demanded change, imagined and created radical futures. Youth today follow suit. I hope that all of us, youth and adults, will move and write and demand and create with them. May we inherit our movement from the legacy of children.

News clipping of Sonia Yaco’s School Board campaign (1972)

“We believe ideas should be judged on their merit and people on their wisdom or kindness…. If the human species is to survive, the young must take the lead.”

1. THE POWER TO DETERMINE OUR OWN DESTINY

These 15 demands are not universal across youth liberation movements. This platform was created in 1970s Ann Arbor, Michigan by the group “Youth Liberation Organization” (YLO). Leading up to the founding of the YLO, Ann Arbor was a hub of left-wing activism and anti-war organizing. The YLO fit right in and immediately got to work on youth self-determination; 15- year old Sonia Yaco ran in a public election for a seat on the school board. While she was supported by adults in her life and from the YLO-backer Human Rights Party, other adults were not so helpful. Her opponents called her names, kept her off of stages, and eventually brought her to the state supreme court, which prohibited her campaign.

In addition to electoral campaigns, the Youth Liberation Organization published an underground newspaper with comics, essays, and stories from kids across the country, released books and pamphlets, held rallies, and collaborated with other community organizations, Despite their disbandment in 1979, the YLO was a forerunner of the youth liberation movement and their message of youth self-determination resonated with a large audience. This principle guides much of our work at Solve for Why- I am candid with parents that my ultimate goal is to support students in identifying, pursuing, and actualizing their educational desires. Here, youth are in charge - always.

Aniyah Juicy performs at Christopher Street Pier

“Our lives are considered the property of various adults. We do not recognize their right to control us. We call this control Adult Chauvinism and we will fight it”.

2. THE IMMEDIATE END OF ALL ADULT CHAUVINISM

Chauvinism today usually refers to oppression of women. In its first recorded use (1840) it meant, more generally, "exaggerated, blind nationalism; patriotism degenerated into a vice." As a youth liberation concept, adult chauvinism refers to the structural restriction of the rights and options of children due to their perceived inability to exercise those rights and choose the “correct” options. Adults know best, and if children disagree, they are corrected- often by coercive, forceful, or downright violent means. Adults control or attempt to control whether, when, and how children eat, sleep, move, and socialize.

Historically, some of the youth most impacted by this structure of control are queer and trans people of color. Youth who are abused, ostracized, and unhoused find home and family with each other and with queer and trans adults. In New York City’s Kiki scene, youth can themselves become house parents and create cultures of love and care for themselves and each other. The Kiki scene is a youth-centered offshoot of the ball scene and is likewise a culture of creative expression, interdependence, and mutual solidarity. Kiki balls often include free STI testing, support services for unhoused kids, calls for political participation, and organic mutual aid. Adults in the community know that they are there to care for kids- to consistently and materially support youth in surviving and thriving.

Adults in Teaneck, NJ express support for protesting students.

“We believe young people are necessary participants in democracy. We must have complete freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, and the right to vote.”

3. FULL CIVIL AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Last month I wrote about how Palestine’s liberation is a youth rights issue. As an example, I shared how university students across the country continue to face criminal charges, suspensions, and expulsions for “incendiary comments”, “unauthorized use of amplified sound” (come on y’all, it’s a megaphone), and “trespassing” on their own campuses, among similarly thin charges. But younger students also face backlash, interpersonal violence, and institutional marginalization when they exercise free speech in Palestine, in the United States, and around the world.

In November of 2023, students from Teaneck High School in New Jersey organized a teach-in and walkout at their high school. Within a few weeks, a small group of high school girls received a deluge of violent threats, the full force of a Zionist lobbying agency, and (at their state representative’s request) an investigation from the federal Department of Education. Still, the students are committed and diligent, and have hosted several more walkouts and events over the past year. Now, they not only organize for the liberation of Palestine- they organize for their own right to free speech.

Burglund high school students protest

“Students and the community must have the right to use school facilities whenever they feel it is necessary.”

The students marched to city hall. They kneeled and prayed on the steps and one by one they were dragged off by the police. One student was arrested while reading a statement saying, “We are children of God, who makes the sun shine on the just and unjust. We petition all our fellow men to love rather than hate.”

At the end of the protest, Bob Zellner, SNCC’s sole white field secretary–an Alabamian–had been brutally beaten; Bob Moses and Chuck McDew were arrested for contributing to the delinquency of minors... The students refused to go back to school unless Travis was allowed to return with them. Principal Higgins agreed to let the students come back only if they signed a pledge promising to end their involvement in the Movement. The students refused and staged protests in front of the school in the days following their mass arrest. In reaction to the continuing protest, Principal Higgins threatened to expel anyone who didn’t return to school by October 16. On the 16th, the students went back to school, turned in their books and left.

Bob Moses (right) and others speak with a local Mississippian in 1963. Photograph by Danny Lyon.

Zellner, Moses, and McDew were staffers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and were themselves barely out of college. They had just gotten to McComb as part of SNCC’s voter registration campaign, and they were surprised to see the high school walkout outside of their office. They not only joined the protest, but recognized it for what it was; a rejection of a racist and violent education system, not a rejection of education as a whole. The SNCC workers created and staffed Nonviolent High, the new educational home for high school activists.

They learned chemistry, physics, math, English, French, singing, theater, and history. Nonviolent High ran for three weeks before the teachers were arrested. It became the first of 41 SNCC freedom schools. The buildings were bombed, set aflame, and evicted. Teachers were threatened, imprisoned, assaulted, and stalked. The violence did not stop teachers teaching or students learning. Freedom schools emphasized inter-generational exchanges of wisdom, vernacular language and skills, and the importance of “so-called ordinary people…as actors and thinkers, people who could contribute important insights” to the civil rights movement. Some freedom schoolers are still continuing to educate through speeches, print lessons, interviews, and community conversations at the SNCC legacy

Modern School students play on campus grounds, photographer unknown

“Young people are now considered property – to be molded in the image of their parents. In communal families children can grow up in the company of many people, both peers and adults.”

5. FREEDOM TO FORM INTO COMMUNAL FAMILIES

“Communal Families” as meant in the YLO platform are pretty specific- they refer to a New Age philosophy of child-rearing common in the communes and intentional living spaces of the 1970’s. But the practice of a larger community of adults sharing responsibility for the care and education of children is much much older and practiced across the globe. In the Escuela Moderna, or Modern School, students, parents, and faculty shared responsibility for the community’s maintenance, growth, and decision-making.

The Modern School was founded in 1901 by Francisco Ferrer in Barcelona on principles of secularism, cross-gender and cross-class schooling, and creative, practical education. The school was scandalous to mainstream philosophy due to its commitment to welcoming both girls and boys from all different sectors of society. The school (much like Solve for Why) operated on a sliding scale, and nobody was turned away for lack of funds. Parents had the opportunity to attend classes themselves on Sundays, part of Ferrer’s dedication to raising general literacy rates in Spain. Children and parents both participated in the administration of the school, with older children taking leadership roles and caring for younger children.

These practices helped attain the educational ideal that the modern school would “stimulate, develop, and direct the natural ability of each pupil, so that he or she will not only become a useful member of society, with his individual value fully developed, but will contribute, as a necessary consequence, to the uplifting of the whole community.” Classes were open to the public, and the pedagogy of the Modern School was so popular that it spawned hundreds of schools across the world - though the Spanish government shut down the original after only five years.

Flavio Costatini’s illustration of the Assassination of Francisco Ferrer

The closure of the school could not stop Ferrer from continuing to pursue his radical educational vision. Ferrer was a committed and passionate teacher, and nothing short of his eventual arrest and assassination halted his work. Emma Goldman, famed author and activist, wrote of his death: “On the thirteenth of October, after a mock trial, he was placed in the ditch at Montjuich prison, against the hideous wall of many sighs, and shot dead. Instantly Ferrer, the obscure teacher, became a universal figure, blazing forth the indignation and wrath of the whole civilized world against the wanton murder.” She quoted Ferrer as well, at the school opening: “I am not a speaker, not a propagandist, not a fighter. I am a teacher; I love children above everything. I think I understand them. I want my contribution to the cause of liberty to be a young generation ready to meet a new era.”

Women wave flags with Abdullah Öcalan’s face and the Rojavan flag

“We believe women must be free and equal. We recognize that sexism is all-pervasive and often subtle and demeans the humanity of everyone.”

6. THE END OF MALE CHAUVINISM AND SEXISM

Continuing the theme of “topics that fully deserve their own multi-part series”, the intersection of youth justice and women’s liberation takes us to the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), also known as Rojava. Women and girls’ rights and power have been centered and emphasized at every stage of Rojava’s revolution. The political system, democratic confederalism, was developed by Abdullah Öcalan, who held women’s rights and equality as a necessary component of any free society. He pioneered the science of Jineology, a feminist study specific to conditions in Syria and among the Kurds.

During the Syrian civil war, women made up 40% of Rojava’s armed forces, the YPG (in comparison, women today make up 17% of the US military). The women of the armed forces eventually split into a women-only brigade, the YPJ. Girls used enlistment as a chance to escape abusive marriages and homes and get educated, without the obligation of active duty. Girls are not accepted into the armed forces until they turn 18.

A mural memorializes Mahsa Amini alongside the phrase “Jin Jiyan Azadi”, translated as “Women, Life, Freedom”

Women hold significant political power under the Kongra star coalition. There are several women-run collectives, and all collectives must meet a 40% quota for both men and women in councils and municipalities. The women’s revolution “challenges all forms and expressions of patriarchy and misogyny, struggles against colonialist, assimilationist, genocidal and capitalist practices and policies. With this, it defends the peaceful coexistence and democratic participation and representation of different ethnic and religious communities in social, political and cultural life.”

According to the Yekîtiya Ciwanên Rojava (YCR), Rojava’s youth organization, the Kurdish movement “has always understood itself as a youth movement.” At the onset of the revolution, youth “questioned what we are actually studying at the universities, what we are being taught there, and analyzed that we are actually only trained as an extended arm of the regime, ultimately taking our place in the state to live our lives this way.” Youth organize bottom-up through local councils and committees, in true democratic confederalist fashion. They organize their own social activities, build youth advocacy committees within schools, and fight in defense of their home.

Rojavan girls argue that “it is still necessary to organise autonomously as women, to build up one’s own defence, one’s own representation, one’s own administration, one’s own autonomous organisation.” Young women select their own representatives, educate themselves and each other in both theory and skill, and contribute to the science of Jineology.

“In the phase of the revolution, the organisation of young women is most important to us. That is why we are continuing to educate ourselves ideologically, to build our next practical steps on that. For us, education means not only to read a book theoretically, but also to create awareness, to find strength and to improve oneself on every level.”

The Edelweiss Pirates, a coalition of rebellious youth in Nazi Germany, Universal History Archive

“We must be set free to begin living in the new age and begin to accept a responsibility for developing plans and examples of institutions that build joy, justice, and a respect for life.”

7. THE OPPORTUNITY TO CREATE AN AUTHENTIC CULTURE WITH INSTITUTIONS OF OUR OWN MAKING

Throughout history, youth are cultural workers. They bring different parts of the world and different parts of history together to create kaleidoscopic subcultures and countercultures. As a result, when fascist adults want to fix culture in a single traditional point, one of their first moves is to try and control youth. The Hitler Jugend, or Hitler Youth is not the only, the first, or the worst example of that control but it was remarkable in its totality. The program was compulsory for teens between 14-18 years old and had a 90% participation rate at its peak. The high rates were owed to the ban on any other youth groups and to campaigns threatening that non-compliant parents would be incarcerated and children would be taken to orphanages.

Still, the system never caught everybody. Bands of renegade working class youth cropped up across Germany and its occupations. The Swing Kids got their name from the music and dance forms they refused to abandon. The Zazous wore Zoot Suits and, with the Nuremberg laws, made solidarity armbands identifying themselves as “Goy”, “Buddhist”, and “Zazou”. The most explicit resisters were Edelweiss Pirates, small coed bands of working class youth across Germany. Though the Pirates started off as outdoor and music clubs that “”only wanted the Hitler Youth to leave us alone,” in the words of member Jean Jülich, they became increasingly politically active as the war continued.

The Edelweiss Pirates turned music into anti-fascist resistance

Just by creating alternative organizations, associating across gender lines, dressing unusually, and playing non-German music, the Edelweiss Pirates broke the law. They were regularly targeted by both adult Gestapo and Hitler Youth, and their early resistance was mostly vandalism and pranks. However, as the Holocaust intensified, Pirate activities escalated. Members “offered shelter to German army deserters, escaped prisoners from concentration camps and escapees from forced labor camps…made armed raids on military depots and deliberately sabotaged war production.” Pirates from different towns and different branches collaborated to share information and avoid Gestapo.

Captured pirates faced severe consequences- they were brutalized, humiliated, incarcerated, tortured, and killed. In 1944 a group of 12 teenage Edelweiss Pirates were publicly killed at the gallows after their plans to blow up the gestapo headquarters were discovered. Still, their words of ”Eternal War on the Hitler Youth”, ”Our song is freedom, love and life,” and “Down with Nazi Brutality” live on, alongside their legacy of courage, mutual aid, and resistance.

Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera other STAR members at the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, Leonard Fink

“We believe all people must have the unhindered right to be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or trans.”

8. SEXUAL SELF-DETERMINATION

† A note on language

Probably the single most famous event in queer history, the 1969 Stonewall Uprising is tidily enshrined in the American memory (despite recent attempts at erasure). The basics: during a violent police raid on New York’s Stonewall Inn, drag performer Stormé DeLarverie defended herself and other patrons soon followed suit in a highly publicized rebellion. At this time in history, police raids and police brutality in gay bars were a regular, all but nightly event. Resistance, while much less frequent, was not unheard of. Stonewall is the means by which most people learn the names of young activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha “Pay it no Mind” Johnson.

Marsha P Johnson, one of the founders of STAR, protested injustice all of her life. Photo by Diana Davies.

In 1969 Sylvia Rivera was an 18 year old Latinx drag queen and Marsha P Johnson was a 24 year old black drag queen. They were close friends who had both been unhoused and turned to survival sex work. They were also experienced activists and caretakers of their community. After a 1970 sit-in protesting NYU’s decision to disallow queer events from Weinstein Hall, they formalized their community work and founded STAR. STAR was a radical political and mutual aid organization that continued the work Rivera and Johnson were already doing. When they were able to rent apartments or stay in hotels, they snuck in other unhoused friends. As documented by Leslie Feinberg;

“‘STAR was for the street gay people, the street homeless people, and anybody that needed help at that time,’ Rivera said. Shelter was a big problem for trans street youth. ‘Marsha and I had always sneaked people into our hotel rooms. And you can sneak 50 people into two hotel rooms.’”

With the new STAR name, Rivera and Johnson created STAR homes out of trailers, squats, and buildings in New York, and later in Chicago, California, and England. Rivera recalls that ““We fed people and clothed people. We kept the building going. We went out and hustled the streets. We paid the rent. We didn’t want the kids out in the streets hustling. They would go out and rip off food. There was always food in the house and everyone had fun.” They turned the top floor of their first building into an educational space to teach younger kids to read and write. Sylvia Rivera joined the Young Lords and continued working with youth. Marsha P Johnson joined the Gay Liberation Front and ACT UP.

Columbia students led a successful divestment campaign

“We believe those in power cultivate elitism and class divisions among youth which only serve to weaken us.”

9. THE END OF CLASS ANTAGONISM AMONG YOUNG PEOPLE

You may have heard the word divest lately with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to end US funding of the occupation of Palestine. If you follow the news, you’ve heard it even more over the past few weeks following the ongoing incarceration of recent Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil. And the Columbia University Apartheid Divestment coalition is not unprecedented at Columbia.

In early 2014, over a decade ago, the black-led campus group Students Against Mass Incarceration (SAMI) launched the Columbia Prison Divest (CPD) campaign. In the months prior, SAMI member Asha Rosa Ransby-Sporn drew on old-school investigation tactics and the experience of Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and Columbia Divest for Climate Justice, to learn that at least $8 million of the Columbia endowment was invested in private prison operator Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic) and another $2 million was invested in the security contractor G4S. SAMI launched CPD and “conducted extensive research, and held two campus-wide weeks of engagement along with multiple rallies and direct actions.” They wrote letters to the administration, spoke to press, and mobilized the student body.

Columbia University students protest private prison funding

Then, in the summer of 2014, 43 year-old Eric Garner and 18 year-old Michael Brown were murdered by police. A wave of mass protests swept the country. Only a few blocks from the CU campus, 400 police raided the Ulysses S. Grant Houses and Manhattanville Houses. Columbia’s Public Safety sent out a campus-wide email congratulating them. Ransby-Sporn remembers that ““At some point, we all just started saying we were going to make it happen before we graduate. So we did.” They campaigned for over a year leading up to a 40 student sit-in in the Low Library.

When it came time for the Board of Trustees to vote on the issue of prison divestment, the students won. Columbia University became the first college to officially divest from Prisons. A CPD statement declared that “The racist, classist images of ‘criminals deserving of punishment’ are created in tandem with images of ‘hard-working college students deserving of opportunity,’ and each is defined in relation to the other. Through prison divestment, we have worked to challenge these narratives and structures.” Their success is not the end- several other movement victories followed after, and there is still so much work to do.

Students at Black Panther schools practiced a wide variety of skills

“Students must eliminate racism and stop fighting each other. We support the liberation struggles of colonized people of all colors everywhere.”

10. THE END OF RACISM AND COLONIALISM IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD

Finally we’re talking about the Black Panther Party! BPP membership included youth from the beginning, with a median member age of 19 years old. Lil’ Bobby Hutton was the first Black Panther recruit, joining up at 17 after reading and resonating with the 10-point program. Panther houses were welcoming to both kids and parents, with a commitment to offering childcare, education, and family support, creating a culture where youth were in collaboration, not competition, with political organizing.

BPP kids protest to “Free Bobby, Free Huey”

Panther chapters across the United States incorporated youth into many aspects of their work. The longstanding survival program of free breakfast for kids was the center of many BPP chapters, and the last running panther activity as other forms of protest died down. The Panthers prioritized education in both their ten point program and their regular activities. In this already abundant atmosphere, the Oakland Community School still stands out. Preceded by the Children’s Houses and the Intercommunal Youth Institute, OCS was an elementary school that put Panther Point #5 into action.

We Want Education for Our People That Exposes The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society. We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History And Our Role in the Present-Day Society.

OCS, though it did not foreground BPP ideology to the same degree as its predecessors, was a sanctuary for young, predominantly black and low-income kids. They received three meals a day, consistent care, and emotional support as well as chances to learn stretch their curiosity. Students were “encouraged to constantly ask questions and never accept what they hear as the full truth,” and maintained a group of student leaders that participated in curriculum planning, decision making, and running a radio station. The OCS instructional methodologies of experiential learning, care for the whole child, and respecting kids as equal humans are still on the cutting edge of pedagogy. Ericka Huggins and other BPP educators and youthworkers have been practicing these methods for decades.

In 2021, 17 year old Cedric Lofton died in police custody

“All young people in juvenile homes, training schools, detention centers, mental institutions and other penal institutions for minors must be set free. They did not receive a trial before a jury of their peers and the society they offended is itself criminal.”

11. FREEDOM FOR ALL UNJUSTLY IMPRISONED PEOPLE

On the average day in 2022 in the USA, 29,109 kids were incarcerated in juvenile detention facilities (awaiting a court date or pending permanent placement), youth prisons, residential treatment centers, group homes, or other placement facilities, and adult jails and prisons. In 2021, one of the kids in a Kansas juvenile detention facility, 17 year old Cedric Lofton died after being pinned to the floor for 30 minutes by multiple officers after his father called 911 to report a mental health crisis. His is one name on a long list of killed incarcerated kids. That should be a list of zero.

Cedric Lofton’s community fought to hold his murderers responsible

Cedric Lofton’s name was not left in silence though. Youth survivors of carceral violence got to work organizing. Youth leaders from the intergenerational partnership Progeny and the local community hosted rallies, spoke to press, and shared Cedric’s story widely. Although the officers who killed Cedric Lofton were never held accountable, Progeny’s campaigns to close the last youth prison in Kansas, eliminate anti-poor fines and fees for young people, and destroy prison pipelines are ongoing. Youth leaders hold visioning sessions with peers, support restorative justice processes, and create alternatives to incarceration. And, importantly, they are paid for this work.

Their work should be unnecessary because youth incarceration should not exist. Kids should not be locked into ICE facilities. Kids should not be locked into psychiatric wards. 29,000 kids daily should not be locked into prisons. The youth who work to change this reality deserve the support and solidarity of every adult. If you take nothing else from this series, take this- there is no such thing as youth liberation, for anybody, as long as kids can be incarcerated.

Young laborers in the Pennsylvania coal mines organized for their rights as workers Photo originally published in McClure’s

“We believe we are entitled to work or to unemployment benefits.”

12. THE RIGHT TO BE ECONOMICALLY INDEPENDENT OF ADULTS

The original youth liberation point for this platform pushed back against child labor laws. That’s not my take, but it is important to acknowledge that these laws are and have long been insufficient, ill-enforced, and incomplete. Take, for instance, the Pennsylvania coal mines. In the United States, mining communities were both a lab of new ways to exploit and abuse workers, and a major site for the development of the labor movement. Mines were situated in company towns where the mining company owned the land, the grocery stores, and everything else in sight. By paying workers too little to afford rent and food, bosses kept them in debt to the company and unable to leave.

A breaker boy plays the bugle

Because whole families lived in the company town, children were also under the boss’s thumb. Children frequently worked as breaker boys, mule drivers, and factory girls, among other jobs. There were laws to prevent the company from employing kids under 14 in the mine and under 12 outside the mine, but in practice parents got “age blanks” from mine inspectors which they could fill in with whatever date was needed to send kids to work. Relying, as now, on their parents for housing and food, kids had little say in the matter.

However, they did freely choose to organize. In a 1903 report from McClure’s Magazine, Francis Nichols describes youth organizing: “Almost as soon as the breaker boy’s [age] certificate is accepted… he makes application to become a member of the ‘Junior Local,’ the members of which are all boys under sixteen.” The Junior Local unions had full cadres of officers from the membership, elected semi-annually. Kids also joined their district Miners’ Unions, which sent adult silent representatives to the Junior Local meetings. Factory girls would join the Textile Workers’ Union of America or the United Powder and High Explosive Workers of America. In all of these spaces, youth debated, striked, marched, canvassed. They even won- wage advances, shortened hours, pay raises, and safer conditions for all or one member. They talked to each other, they uplifted each other, and, every once in a while, they saved each other.

Alaskans protest the proposed LNG pipeline (Maka Monture, Native Movement)

“Each person must learn to live a sound ecological life and all people together must change the economic structure of the world until the needs of the earth and its people are met.”

13. THE RIGHT TO LIVE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE

Climate activism is a particularly youth-heavy part of movement work. Because each generation exists in worse environmental conditions than the one prior, youth are disproportionately affected by ecological abuse and exploitation. For well over a century, youth have been involved in many different aspects of climate activism, including direct action, public education, mutual aid, and policy changes. Over the past several years, kids have been leveraging their legal rights to sue state governments and corporations for damages to their health and wellbeing. Currently, eight young people are suing the Alaska state government to prevent construction of the proposed Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) pipeline.

Defenders of the Arctic Refuge- Defend the Sacred AK

Plaintiffs range from 11-22 years old and argue that the law mandating pipeline development violates their rights to health and life. Two similar suits were dismissed in 2022 because the court could not order policy changes, but this case focuses specifically on an individual project. Alaskans are already experiencing negative consequences to fishing and hunting. Kids also say they experience more breathing issues due to increased wildfires.

The legal route is only one strategy to halt pipeline construction- earlier this month a coalition including Native Movement and Stand Up Alaska organized a rally to coincide with Trump’s fundraising tour for visiting ambassadors. Alaska continues to experience severe consequences of the climate crisis, and indigenous and youth activists remain on the front-lines of both environmental injustice and environmental defense.

Frank Collins confronts NAG protester Marvis Saunders (Glen Echo Park Photo Archives)

“We are the crown of creation and we announce that it is not our destiny to become robot parts of the Great Machine.”

14. TO RE-HUMANIZE EXISTENCE

Play is a humanizing force- when people of all ages play, we exercise imagination, creativity, compassion, and relationship skills. Everybody can and should play, but kids happen to be really good at it when adults aren’t getting in the way. The history of play in the US is tied to the history of segregation. Public pools and amusement parks were racially segregated from when they were first built in 1868 through the 1960’s. Black kids who wanted to play or swim instead met with exclusion, incarceration, and violence.

NAG organizers protest segregation at Glen Echo (Walter Oates, DC Public Library)

A Maryland amusement park, Glen Echo included The Crystal Pool, a merry-go-round, and a wooden roller coaster; all segregated. When local students, including Gwendolyn Greene and Laurence Henry, tried to ride the Merry-Go-Round, Glen Echo’s security guards arrested them. They were members of the newly formed Nonviolent Action Group, a student organization that also organized pickets of the white house, sit-ins at a Virginia drug store, and other desegregation actions.

They showed up every day through the hot DC summer in 1960, picketing, protesting, and recruiting neighbors. The American Nazi Party came and counter-protested. The leaders were arrested and held on fabricated charges without bail. The protestors kept showing up. Some days there were thirty picketers- some days there were hundreds. At the end of the summer, Glen Echo announced that it was closing early for the season. The NAG was ready to start back up the following summer, but they didn’t need to. When Glen Echo reopened in 1961, kids of all races were admitted.

Logan Rozos delivers the NYU graduation speech

“We believe national boundaries are artificial and must inevitably be abolished. In the new world, all resources and technology must be used for the benefit of all people.”

15. COMMUNICATION AND SOLIDARITY WITH THE YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE WORLD IN OUR COMMON STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM AND PEACE

Graduations lean heavily on ceremony, and this year’s traditions have been seized and disrupted by young activists who use their platforms as speakers and student leaders to demand solidarity with Palestinians surviving or being martyred by the Zionist genocide. Logan Rozos, a Black trans actor and activist delivered NYU’s graduation speech. His diploma is being withheld indefinitely.

“I do not wish to speak only to my own politics today, but to speak for all people of conscience, and all people who feel the moral injury of this atrocity. And I want to say that I condemn this genocide, and complicity in this genocide.”

-Logan Rozos

Megha Vemuri was banned from graduation for naming Palestine in her commencement speech

MIT’s class president, Megha Vemuri gave a speech at a commencement event and was banned from both graduation and campus.

“Right now, while we prepare to graduate and move forward with our lives, there are no universities left in Gaza. We are watching Israel try to wipe out Palestine off the face of the earth, and it is a shame that MIT is a part of it."

-Megha Vemuri

Cecilia Culver gave a speech at the George Washington University that got her banned from campus. Faith Wood urged students and alumni at Middlebury College to reconsider their donations, following the lead of last years commencement speaker, Adayliah Ley. Harvard professor Andrew Manuel Crespo used his graduation speech to acknowledge his university’s failings in response to student movements for Palestine. At the Harvard Divinity School commencement, Zehra Imam called youth to action.

“Class of 2025- Palestine is waiting for us to arrive and you must be courageous enough to rise to the call because Palestine will keep showing up in our living rooms until we are ready to meet its gaze.”

- Zehra Imam

Youth know that none of us are free until all of us are free. They show up for each other. They stand up for each other. By doing so, they send a clear message that kids will not stop shouting, fighting, unionizing, organizing, teaching, protesting until youth liberation is reality.

Discussion Questions

1. What roles do youth play in political and social movements? What can young people contribute that adults cannot?

2. What obstacles do kids face to full political participation? How can kids overcome these obstacles? How can adults support kids challenging these obstacles?

3. Who in your local community is working toward youth liberation? Who in your daily life? How can you participate?

4. Why do the kids in these examples persist in organizing, despite backlash?

5. What other historic or contemporary examples of youth liberation can you think of?

Further Learning:

• Lose an afternoon to the YLO archives and help out with the archival efforts!

• Watch the beautiful documentary Kiki and then fund Kikiers directly or through local orgs

• Check out the gorgeous toolkits and abundant primary sources from the SNCC legacy project

• Grab a book about the modern school or the educational projects it inspired

• Learn about Rojava’s revolution- starting with this interview of YCR members

• Grab a book about the Edelweiss Pirates and their allied youth groups

• Browse this stunning photo collection of Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and STAR’s early days

• Slot yourself in to the prison divestment movement

• Read about the Oakland Community School and its legacy

• Join your local bail fund, copwatch, jail support, or anti-carceral organization

• Check out this primary source about young people in the coal mines

• Read about the recent rally against the Liquified Natural Gas pipeline

• Catch a screening of “Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round” about the desegregation of Glen Echo

• Watch Logan Rozos’s and Megha Vemuri’s full speeches

• Research your local youth movements and show up to an event to support them!

This post omits the spellout of STAR, as it includes an outdated term for trans women. This spellout was not offensive in its time and is not offensive when used by individuals who experience this marginalization. Both Rivera and Johnson self-described as drag queens in their lifetime, but used she/her pronouns exclusively. The language of "trans woman" was not common during their lives.