Stories of Young People on the Frontlines
of U.S. Social Movements

Reading by Allison Fletcher Acosta, Allyson Criner Brown, and Deborah Menkart

Teaching for Change shares these examples of young people at the forefront of social movements throughout U.S. history. We first created this collection of stories in 2018 after the powerful young gun control activists from Parkland, Florida were portrayed by the media as being exceptional. As they themselves pointed out, the Parkland students were part of a long and ongoing tradition of youth activists. They critiqued the media that gave their largely white group more attention than young people of color who had organized for years against gun violence. Later in 2018, the media repeated the “single hero” narrative with Greta Thunberg. While brave and inspiring, she was by no means alone. This collection helps to place current and future activists in context.

These are just a few of the countless stories of youth on the frontlines of social change movements. We hope their stories can be useful in the classroom to inform and inspire this generation of activists.

18th and 19th Centuries: Abolitionists and the Underground Railroad

Many youth were among the 19th century abolitionists and the people who were active on the Underground Railroad. For example, Sarah Parker Remond, a member of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, gave her first abolitionist speech at the age of 16. Frederick Douglass fought his overseer for freedom at the age of 16. In 1834, Henry Highland Garnet and some of his classmates formed their own club, the Garrison Literary and Benevolent Association. More than 150 African Americans under age 20 attended the first meeting. It is estimated that 80% of those who bravely embarked on the Underground Railroad were in their teens or early 20s. Here is a lesson on a people’s history of the abolition movement.

1830s: The Factory Girls Association

In the 1820s, factory owners in Lowell, Massachusetts, began recruiting girls as young as 10 years old to work in their textile mills. In 1834, mill owners announced they would be cutting wages, and the girls began meeting to discuss how they should respond. When owners fired one of their leaders, 800 young women walked out on strike. Two years later, the owners announced another wage cut. In response, the young women walked out together and formed the Factory Girls Association and later, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. Teach about women in the labor movement with “Birth of a Rank-and-File Organizer” and find bios of women in the labor movement.

*Newark, New Jersey, 1909. By Lewis Hine.*

1899: The Newsies

During the summer of July 1899, the children who sold newspapers in New York City, known as “Newsies,” went on strike against millionaire newspaper publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer when they raised the wholesale prices of their newspapers but kept the price for their customers the same. After two tumultuous weeks, the strike was successful. The publishers agreed to roll back the price increases and to take back unsold papers at a full refund. Read more in the book Kid Blink Beats the World by Don Brown. Photograph by Lewis Hine.

1917: The Bath Riots

On January 28, 1917, 17-year-old Carmelita Torres led the Bath Riots at the Juarez/El Paso border, refusing the toxic “bath” of “disinfectant” imposed on all Mexican workers coming into the United States. Press accounts estimated that she was joined by several thousand demonstrators at the border bridge. Most who joined the protest were young domestic workers. The chemicals used for the “baths” were originally Zyklon B and later DDT. The protest lasted for three days and was not successful. Read more.

1942: Tule Lake Internment Dissidents

In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which ordered 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry to be forcefully removed and imprisoned in internment (concentration) camps. U.S. government officials also forced inmates to complete 28 surveys to determine how “American” they were. Many refused to answer the surveys, or only answered “no” on the questionnaires. At Tule Lake in California, 35 teenagers protested by refusing to turn in their surveys. They were arrested and taken to jail at gunpoint. Learn more from the film Conscience and the Constitution.

1951: Barbara Rose Johns and Students of Russa Moton High School

1960: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee(SNCC) was founded in April 1960 by young people who had emerged as leaders of the sit-in protest movement initiated on February 1 of that year. SNCC veteran Charlie Cobb Jr. explains:

No civil rights action in history had ever swept the South the way that the sit-in movement did; certainly no action driven and led by young people. SNCC’s youthfulness was important to what it was and what it became. The number and manner in which young people began emerging as leaders in the Civil Rights Movement in 1960 was unprecedented. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it at a Durham, North Carolina civil rights rally less than a month after sit-ins erupted in Greensboro, ‘What is new in your fight is the fact that it was initiated, fed, and sustained by students.’ An often-ignored effect of this student action was their making legitimate going to jail for a principle. And this changed the students, laying the foundation for everything they would do as SNCC organizers.

1963: Children’s March

In the spring of 1963, Birmingham, Alabama, was the “do-or-die” battleground for the Civil Rights Movement. Heavy intimidation by Birmingham authorities left the Movement floundering. Using word-of-mouth under a veil of secrecy, more than 4,000 African American schoolchildren organized to walk out of classrooms at exactly 11 a.m. on “D-Day,” May 2, 1963, touching off a week of mass demonstrations and rioting that shocked the nation. Police tried to stop them. Yet, the children prevailed. Read more.

Mary Beth and John Tinker in 1968. © Bettman/Corbis/AP

1965: Students Protest War at School

In 1965, Christopher Eckhardt (age 16), John F. Tinker (age 15), Mary Beth Tinker (age 13), Hope Tinker (age 11), and Paul Tinker (age 8) along with other students decided to wear black armbands to their schools in Des Moines, Iowa, to mourn the dead on both sides of the Vietnam War and to support a Christmas truce. The Des Moines school board tried to block them from wearing the armbands, and most of the students who wore them were suspended. The students argued that their right to free speech was being violated, and with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court in Tinker v. Des Moines. In 1969, they won. Their victory was based on the precedent of Burnside v. Byars, about the right of high school students in Mississippi to wear buttons advocating the right to vote. Read more.

1968: The Chicano Blowouts

In 1968, Mexican American students in East Los Angeles took action to protest Anglo-centric textbooks, poor funding for schools, and other racist policies toward Chicano students. In March 1968, students presented a list of 39 demands to the school district including bilingual and bicultural education, improvement of school libraries, an end to corporal punishment, and more. An estimated 15,000-20,000 students walked out of class at five Los Angeles high schools in what became known as the “blowouts.” Teach about the blowouts with the lesson “The History All Around Us: Roosevelt High School and the 1968 Eastside Blowouts.”

2010: The DREAMers

For more than a decade, their situation, staging demonstrations, holding hunger strikes, forming alliances with other movements, and more. In 2012, after DREAMers protested and lobbied against Pres. Obama’s aggressive deportation program, he issued an executive order creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program which now protects nearly 800,000 Dreamers from deportation. In September of 2017, when Pres. Trump announced he was canceling DACA, students walked out of high schools in Denver, Fort Worth, Phoenix, Washington, D.C., and Albuquerque, among others. Within hours of the announcement, the president backed down from his original position, yet their status remains unresolved. Learn more at United We Dream and Dream Action Coalition.

2012: Dream Defenders Seek Justice for Trayvon Martin

In February 2012, teenager Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. Initially no charges were filed against Zimmerman, and as the story spread, so did outrage. In March, thousands of students walked out of elementary, middle, and high schools across Miami, where Martin had attended high school. In April, young activists who would go on to found the Dream Defenders organized a march from Daytona to Sanford. The students walked for three days to Sanford and then blocked the doors to the police station until local officials and law enforcement agreed to meet with them to hear their demands. Martin’s killing and the Dream Defenders’ organizing efforts helped give rise to today’s ongoing #BlackLivesMatter movement. Learn more about Black Lives Matter and the Florida-based Dream Defenders. Here are teaching resources on #BlackLivesMatter.

2012: Eagle Scouts Resign

Eagle Scout is the highest rank that a Boy Scout can earn. In 2012, a Boy Scout troop leader refused to approve 17-year-old Ryan Andresen’s Eagle Scout badge project, a tile wall with an antibullying message, after he came out to his Boy Scout troop as gay. That same year, the Boy Scouts of America announced that they would continue to exclude openly gay participants from the organization as leaders or participants. Following the announcement, Eagle Scouts of all ages began to resign and return their medals to the BSA offices. Within a year, more than 200 posted letters online explaining why they resigned. In 2013, the BSA decided to allow openly gay youth into scouting, and two years later they decided to allow openly gay leaders. Read more.

2015: 21 Children File Suit Against U.S. Government

In 2015, 21 children from around the country filed suit against the U.S. government in a case called Juliana v. United States. They argued that by adopting policies that promote fossil fuel use, leading to the emission of carbon dioxide at rates that change the climate, despite knowing these energy sources are warming the planet, the federal government violates “the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property,” and fails to protect essential resources held in trust for the public. Read more in Teen Vogue.

2015: #AssaultAt Campaign

On October 26, 2015, Niya Kenny witnessed a violent altercation in her math classroom at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina. A school resource officer flipped a classmate over on her desk and dragged her across the room. Kenny spoke up against the officer’s actions. As a result, she was arrested along with her classmate. After widespread protest, the charges were dropped. Kenny has worked with the Alliance for Educational Justice to launch an #AssaultAt hashtag so that students can track and expose other examples of assaults on students by school police.

2016: Standing Rock #NoDAPL Protest

The protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock that made international news got its start with 13-year-old Tokata Iron Eyes and her friends. As described in this article, “when they heard about plans to reroute the Dakota Access Pipeline away from Bismarck and through sacred land, they took action. As part of the Standing Rock Youth, a group of about 30 young people from the Standing Rock Sioux community, they decided to go online, and make their issue known. Thirteen-year-old Anna Lee Rain Yellowhammer, also a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, spearheaded a Change.org petition in late April, simply called ‘Stop the Dakota Access Pipeline.’” Read more. Teach about this history with Standing with Standing Rock: A Role Play on the Dakota Access Pipeline.

2018: March for Our Lives

On March 24, 2018 hundreds of thousands of students filled the streets of Washington, D.C. to demand stricter gun laws. Students from across the country whose family members had suffered the impact of gun violence gave speeches. That same day, students also rallied in more than 750 communities across the country. While held in response to countless school shootings over the years, the March for Our Lives was galvanized by the student response to the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018. Refusing to be silenced by the argument that it is “too soon to bring politics into it,” students immediately began organizing to demand that lawmakers enact stricter gun laws, starting a Twitter account, @NeverAgainMSD, and giving interviews to the media. Student X González called out lawmakers who allow guns to be readily available, “To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you.” Over the summer, students from Parkland and other communities embarked on a national bus tour, asking for support for stricter gun laws and registering about 50,000 people to vote. In 2018, almost 50 new gun control laws were passed in 25 states. The movement continues, with hundreds of chapters fighting for change in their own states and the national level.

2020: Black Lives Matter Protests

In June of 2020, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the country, with thousands of people pouring into the streets. On June 6 alone, half a million people turned out in nearly 550 communities nationwide. Sparked most immediately by the public lynching of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 by Minneapolis police officers, they were also galvanized by the recent murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless Black people before them.

While focused on police brutality, the protests addressed all forms of systemic racism and they were widespread and continuous.

In Berkeley, California, a group of high school students organized a march to protest police murders of Black people and to advocate for course changes in the Berkeley school district that would train teachers in anti-racism, combat school segregation, and expand Black history courses. High school and college students — as well as adults — led similar marches in cities and towns across the country. The George Floyd protests became the broadest ever in U.S. history, leading to changes throughout the country. Some changes were specific to police departments, such as the banning of chokeholds. Other changes included several companies removing racist stereotypes from their products, such as “Aunt Jemima.” NASCAR banned the Confederate flag from its races. Many school administrators began to plan for ways to improve the ways they teach about race and racism.

Teaching Resources

Resistance 101

“Resistance 101” was posted by Teaching for Change to help students recognize their power to challenge injustice. The lesson introduces them to people throughout history, including many youth, who fought for social justice using a range of strategies.

Zinn Education Project

The Zinn Education Project (a collaborative project of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change) offers free lessons and a database of resources for teaching people’s history in middle and high school classrooms.

Youth Organizing

Here is a collection of youth organizations and teaching guides on organizing.

And the Youth Shall Lead Us

Stories of Young People on the Frontlines
of U.S. Social Movements

Reading by Allison Fletcher Acosta, Allyson Criner Brown, and Deborah Menkart