15 Points of Youth Liberation (Part 2)
Youth in a SNCC freedom school talk, laugh, and play in the pews of their makeshift classroom.
Last month I introduced the Youth Liberation Organization, a multiracial coalition of 12-16 year olds in Ann Arbor, and the youth liberation platform that they developed in 1970. If you missed that post, I strongly recommend it- it’s got queer found family, 15 year olds running for office, and some brilliant grassroots organizing for Palestine in a New Jersey high school. Today I’m tackling a few more points from the YLO platform, and you’ll learn about more butt-kicking brilliant youth activists from the past century and those making waves today.
Burglund high school students protest
“Students and the community must have the right to use school facilities whenever they feel it is necessary.
4. THE RIGHT TO FORM OUR EDUCATION ACCORDING TO OUR NEEDS
In October, 1961, students at Burglund High School walked out. After two of their peers, Brenda Travis and Ike Lewis, were arrested and expelled for their sit-in activities, 115 high schoolers began their boycott.
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 project.
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.”
YLO Platform
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 have stopped 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
“Women’s liberation is a central pillar in tackling all structures of oppression. While we fight for the liberation of women, we also address all other forms of oppression, albeit based on grounds of gender, ethnicity, class, or religion.” Kongreya Star
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 depicts a woman with the Kongra 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.”
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
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
Read about your local student movements and then show up to a scheduled event and support them!