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At the Lowell, Massachusetts textile mill, young girls worked up to 13-hour days with one girl remarking that she “hated the confinement, noise, and lint-filled air, and regretted the time lost to education.” These deplorable condition were made even worse in 1834 when supervisors decided to cut wages. In response, the laborers opted to go on strike to protest this decision. The girls marched and organized with other nearby mills to create a petition that stated, “we will not go back into the mills to work unless our wages are continued."

The laborers would have to go on strike at least twice more before any demands were met. After the defeats, the mill girls changed tactics towards political action in the 1840s. They organized the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association to press for reducing the workday to 10 hours.

They also created a large petition campaign amassing over 2,000 signers on the first year and more than double that on a petition the following year. Their petition included asks for the Massachusetts state legislature to cap the workday in the mills at 10 hours. They continued to organize with other mills in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, published “Factory Tracts" which detailed their detestable conditions, and testified before a state legislative committee.

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Executive Order 9066, ordered by Franklin D. Roosevelt, stated that  120,000 people of Japanese ancestry would be forcefully removed and imprisoned in internment (concentration) camps following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Two-thirds of the 120,000 persons incarcerated in American concentration camps were American citizens.

Tule Lake, originally a federal work facility, detained persons of Japanese descent removed from western Washington, Oregon and Northern California. With a peak population of 18,700, Tule Lake was the largest of these camps. It was the only camp converted into a maximum-security segregation center ruled under martial law and occupied by the Army.

U.S. government officials forced inmates to complete 28 surveys to determine how “American” they were or how loyal they were to the country. Many refused to answer the surveys, or only answered “no” on the questionnaires. Fed up with squalid living conditions and inadequate medical care in addition to the surveys, 35 teenagers protested by refusing to turn in their surveys. They were arrested and taken to jail at gunpoint.

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

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

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Born in New York, Barbara Rose Johns moved to Prince Edward County, Virginia as a teenager to live with her grandmother. However, Barbara soon found the poor facilities, shabby equipment and no science laboratories or separate gymnasium at her new school intolerable. She proceeded to lead her classmates in a strike to protest the substandard conditions at Robert Russa Moton High School.

Her activism soon caught the attention of NAACP lawyers Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson. After meeting with student organizers and others in the community, Hill and Robinson filed suit at the federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. This case became one of five cases that the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka when it declared segregation unconstitutional.

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Nine Black high school students enrolled in the all-white Little Rock Central High School. Their attendance at the school was a test of Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

The nine students, Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls, had been recruited by Daisy Gaston Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP and co-publisher of the Arkansas State Press, an influential African American newspaper.

In response, Arkansas' governor defied the court, and ordered the state national guard to block the Little Rock Nine, as the students became known, from entering the school. The student's perseverance in the face of rampant and violent racism and anti-blackness paved the way for the integration and progress in the Civil Rights Movement.

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Civil Rights Movement and the SNCC: 1965 

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Civil Rights Movement and the SNCC: 1965 

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The SNCC, or Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, was a civil rights group formed to give younger Black people more of a voice in the civil rights movement.  After attending the Greensboro sit-in and being a leader of the SLCC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), Ella Baker became concerned that the SLCC was out of touch with younger African-Americans who wanted the movement to make faster progress. Baker encouraged those who formed the SNCC to look beyond integration to broader social change and to view King’s principle of nonviolence more as a political tactic than a way of life.

The SNCC quickly became more radical than their founding organization and soon came to be known as the shock troop of the revolution. The SNCC organized freedom buses, voter registration tactics, and sit-ins.

Fueled by young people’s rejection of white supremacy, SNCC was once the nation’s largest and most well-organized civil rights group.

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The anti-war movement was by and large led by student activist. The student movement that helped turn the American public against the war began in the early 1960s with young activists being inspired by the civil rights movement, left-wing resistance to the Cold War, and radical ideas of participatory democracy.

One of these student organizations was the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) founded in Michigan. The SDS organized teach-ins and mobilized on their campus. Soon students across the country were protesting the war.

However, the student movement was not just limited to college campuses. In 196, 5 school-aged youth, 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 students were subsequently suspended after their school board tried to prevent them from wearing the armbands. With the support of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the young people took their case of violation of free speech to the Supreme Court and won in 1969.

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One of the largest student protests in US history occurred in March 1968, when over 15,000 students from all over East Los Angeles walked out of their classrooms in protest of Anglo-centric textbooks, poor funding for schools, and other racist policies toward Chicano students.

Organizers with the walkout presented a list of demands to the Los Angeles Board of Education, including recommendations for curriculum changes, bilingual education, and hiring of Mexican American administrators. Unfortunately, the demands were not fulfilled due to the Board claiming lack of funding. Nonetheless, this walkout demonstrated the ability for young people to mobilize across age and class lines and be empowered in their Chicano identity.

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In 1976 in South Africa, the apartheid regime had been official policy for 28 years. Black South Africans could not vote or own property and were forced to live in isolated, impoverished rural communities or shantytowns surrounding major cities. Two years prior, in 1974, the government mandated that all education be conducted in Afrikaans, a language unfamiliar to most Black South Africans and with strong associations to apartheid and the oppressive white government, and English, as opposed to students’ native indigenous languages.

On June 16, 1976, between 10,000 and 20,000 students left their schools and rallied in protest to this new legislation. The protesters were met by police violence and hundreds of deaths resulted from this brutality. But ultimately, the protest got the world’s attention and led to the international opposition that would eventually topple the racist regime.

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In the spring of 1989, young people from across China gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to demand political and economic reform. There were calls to end the ongoing corruption as many felt that change was occurring too slowly. Hundreds of thousands of activists, many of them university students, took to the streets with banners, speeches, and songs.

Student protesters went on to organize a hunger strike, with thousands in support, to push their way to talk with Communist Party leaders. Martial law was soon put into place by officials yet this did not deter the student protestors. Young people continued to gather as the government sought to "restore order" through the killing, arrest, and torture of protesters. The number of deaths is unknown yet what is remembered is the strength and resilience of the thousands of students.

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The pro-democracy protests and demonstrations that has come to be known as Arab Spring began with the death of 26 year old Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire outside a local government in protest of unfair regulations. Protests in solidarity began that day and quickly spread as videos were captured on cellphones and spread to the internet. As protests began to spread across the country, calls were made for the President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his regime to step down.

Through Facebook and Twitter, young people organized a revolution of unprecedented size and scope. Beginning in Tunisia, then spreading to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, and other Middle Eastern countries, the pro-democracy protests rallied against oppressive governments, police corruption, economic struggle, and widespread human rights violations.

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Over the past ten years undocumented youth from across the country have come together and organized against harmful immigration laws. This group of undocumented youth came to be known as the DREAMers (for the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors, or DREAM Act). Youth held demonstrations, hunger strikes, and formed coalitions with other similar groups.

In 2012, after the DREAMers lobbied and protested President Obama’s destructive deportation program, Obama responded by issuing an executive order that created DACA or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. DACA now protects nearly 800,00 Dreamers from deportation. However, when DACA was threatened under the Trump administration youth protested by staging walkouts in high schools across the country. Trump eventually retreated from this position but immigration laws and rights remain unresolved.

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In 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement was brought to national attention and mainstream media after the Ferguson Protest rallying against the murder of Michael Brown. The protests in Ferguson, Missouri were fueled by young people who took to the streets to demand an end to police brutality and the killing of Black people. Protestors were also calling for gun control and other accountability measures for police officers. Soon protests erupted across the country and galvanized the movement into something larger than it was before.

Today, Black Lives Matter is a world-renowned movement that continues to have young people at its forefront.

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In 2015, Standing Rock Sioux Reservation was under threat by Energy Transfer Partners, a company who was trying to build the Dakota Access Pipeline. This pipeline would move half a million barrels of oil a day beneath the Missouri River, the main source of drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux, which is one of the cousin bands to Cheyenne River, as well as for other downstream Sioux reservations.

Youth were integral from the beginning of the movement for water rights. Indigenous youth across the country mobilized via petitions, demonstrations, and sit-ins. Youth used the power of social media to spread their position and subsequent hashtag, #NODAPL, across the globe. They garnered support nationwide from politicians to celebrities.

Today, groups like the International Indigenous Youth Council continue to fight for Indigenous water rights across the country.

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The March for Our Lives movement began in 2018, after a school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Just weeks after the mass shootings, students from the school mobilized and organized the largest single day of protest of gun violence. Thousands gathered on the streets of Washington rallying for change.

The march and subsequent March for Our Lives organizing not only calls for gun control and an end to gun violence but also protesting police brutality, domestic abuse, and advocating for LGBTQ rights. The movement also mobilized for youth participation in the 2018 elections and in the political process in general.