15 Points of Youth Liberation (Part 3)
Photographs of Sylvia Rivera Seated and Surrounded by Protestors at the Weinstein Hall Demonstration- Diana Davies
Welcome back to part three of Solve for Why’s series on Youth Liberation! If you aren’t caught up, go read about the background of this framework in part one. There you can also read the stories of queer found family, 15 year olds running for office, and some brilliant grassroots organizing for Palestine in a New Jersey high school. Part two addressed YLO points 4-6 by way of SNCC freedom schools in Mississippi, anarchist educators in early 1900s Spain, and girls in leadership in Rojava. The kids are brave and interdependent and full of heart and chutzpah. Then come back here for even more tales of youth that change the world.
The Edelweiss Pirates were 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
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.
CU 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.
Discussion Questions
What roles do youth play in political and social movements? What can young people contribute that adults cannot?
What obstacles do kids face to full political participation? How can kids overcome these obstacles? How can adults support kids challenging these obstacles?
Who in your local community is working toward youth liberation? Who in your daily life? How can you participate?
Why do the kids in these examples persist in organizing, despite backlash?
What other historic or contemporary examples of youth liberation can you think of?
Further Learning
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 your local student movements and then show up to a scheduled event and support them!